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CURTIS AT HEADQUARTERS
Curtis was frankly exclamatory at the size and splendor of Lawson's apartments. He had accepted the invitation to take breakfast with him without much thought as to the quality of the breakfast or where it would be eaten, until he found himself entering the hall of a superb apartment hotel.
"Why, see here, Lawson," he exclaimed, as he looked about his friend's suite, "this is too much for any bachelor—it's baronial! I must revise my judgments. I had a notion you were a hard-working ethnologic sharp."
"So I am," replied Lawson, smiling with frank enjoyment of his visitor's amazement. "I've been at work two hours at my desk. If you don't believe it, there's the desk."
The room was filled with books, cases of antique pottery, paintings of Indians, models of Pueblo dwellings, and other things in keeping, and was made rich in color by a half-dozen very choice Navajo blankets in the fine old weaves with the vegetable dyes so dear to the collector. The long table was heaped with current issues of the latest magazines, and dozens of books, with markers set to guard some valuable passages, were piled within reach. It was plainly the library of a student and man of letters.
Lawson's lean, brown face at once assumed a different aspect to Curtis. It became more refined, more scholarly, and distinctly less shrewd and quizzical, and the soldier began to understand the writer's smiling defiance of Western politicians and millionaire cattle-owners. Plainly a man of large fortune, with high social connections, what had Lawson to fear of the mountain West? The menace of the greedy cattlemen troubled him no more than the howl of the blizzard.
In the same measure that Lawson's power was revealed to him the heart of the agent sank. He could not but acknowledge that here was the fitting husband and proper home for Elsie—"while I," he thought, "have only a barrack in a desolate Indian country to offer her," and he swung deep in the trough of his sea of doubt.
A map on the wall, lined with red, caught his eye, and he seized upon it for diversion.