"Allen McKenzie, Miners’ Camp."
Ross pursed his thin lips, and nearly whistled aloud as he returned to his desk.
"It’s one of the McKenzies who are after our claims," he wrote at the end of a long letter to his uncle and aunt; "but he is a funny, good-natured fellow. I partly like him and partly don’t. He has no six-shooter in sight–in fact, I’m told that six-shooters have gone more or less out of fashion in Wyoming; and he doesn’t look a bit as I had imagined a ’claim-jumper’ would. But one thing he may reckon on; there will be no chance for him or any one else to jump the Weimer-Grant claims in a few months."
And, sealing this confident declaration, he slipped the letter into the mail-box, ate a hearty dinner, and went to bed.
The following morning at nine o’clock D. H. Leonard, his father’s old-time friend, appeared, and greeted the son most cordially. Mr. Leonard was a man of middle age, hale, red-faced, bald-headed, and wearing a "boiled" shirt and collar. He was a dealer in real estate, with offices in both Cody and Basin. It was to his office that he first took Ross.
"We’ll go for a drive by and by," he began, throwing himself back in his chair and tossing a cigar across the desk. "We have the country of the future here, and I want you to see it. Perfect gold-mine in this land once it’s irrigated."
Ross picked up the cigar, played with it a moment, and laid it again on the desk, listening attentively.
The older man drew a match across the woodwork beneath his chair, and lighted his cigar. "It’s the place for young men, Grant, a greater place than it was when Horace Greeley gave his advice to young men to go West–here’s a match," he interrupted himself to say.
Ross accepted the match, bit on the end of it a moment, and laid it beside the cigar.
"Don’t you smoke?" asked Leonard in some surprise.