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Hank's gaze drifted sadly to me and when the boss moved away he stood looking after him stupefied and then he said: "Well—by—God!" very slowly. He sighed. He looked out over Thompson River, brought his hands together in front of him and fumbled his fingers.

"Well—by—God!" he sighed again. "O the Yahoo!"

It was a word much in the currency—Yahoo—in the West in those days, the derivation, I suppose, from Swift's "Gulliver's Travels." Hank was one of the wildest looking men in the outfit, and as for his clothes, no pawn-broker would have considered them. But this heart-broken murmur of his over the boss's solecism in the matter of musical performance, as you will understand, drew me to him, whetted my interest. I had already heard him mutter "The King's fool!" and drop casually this or that remark that the others had not the knowledge to drop or, had they picked up the knowledge, might have paraded in the hope that you would think they had known better days—which they had not. Hank looked what is called tough, very tough, and when occasion demanded it he had the most appalling flow of profanity; and violent fits of temper too, he had, blazing and gone. But he had periods when his voice was quiet, and words dropped out in his speech that were good to hear, hinting of an extended vocabulary. At such times there was a graciousness in his attitude and movements that made his worn attire ridiculously anomalous.