It was Buford, but a rejuvenated and prosperous Buford, the reflection of his good fortune shining from his beaming face and fashionable figure. The red rasped look had left his features and the hollows beneath his high cheek-bones were filled out. He was dressed in gray with an almost foppish nicety, a fedora hat of a paler tint on his head, and a cravat of a dull red rising in a rich puffed effect below his collar. His shoes shone with the glassy polish of new patent leather; the red-brown kid gloves that he carried exhaled an attractive odor of russia-leather. He held out his hand to Dominick, and the young man grasped it with real heartiness.
“Glad to see you, Buford,” he said, “and glad to hear you’ve made such a success of it. I haven’t seen it myself, but I hear it’s a great show.”
Buford, who had seen him buying the tickets, said blandly,
“But you’re going? You’ve been buying tickets, haven’t you? Oh, I’ve got to have your opinion—nobody’s I’d think more of than Mr. Dominick Ryan’s.”
Dominick, with the consciousness that he had just been planning not to go reddening his face, stammered with embarrassed evasiveness,
“I’ve just been buying tickets and couldn’t get them before the end of next week. You’re such a confounded success that everything’s sold out days ahead. My wife wants to see you, and that’s the best I could do for her. Her sister went on the second night and says you’re the hit of the program. And then the papers! You’ll soon be one of the stars of the nation.”
Buford acknowledged these compliments with cool, acquiescent complacence.
“I have struck my gait,” he said, nodding his head in condescending acceptance. “I have at last won my spurs.”
“But you didn’t expect to come down here when you were at Antelope. Didn’t you tell me your engagement was for two weeks in Sacramento, and that you were afraid you’d forfeited it by being snowed in there? How was it you came down after all?”
“The luck turned. The tide that comes in the affairs of men came in mine. I must say it had got down to about the lowest ebb. You’re right about forfeiting my engagement. Got to Sacramento three weeks behind time and found they’d procured a substitute, and all I had for my pains was a blackguarding because the Lord had seen fit to snow me in in the Sierras.”