The stranger did not look round until Gideon was close up to him. Then he stood up from the table and turned.
"Well, Gid, old man," he said very quietly, "d'ye know me?"
Gideon drew back, staring into the stranger's handsome, clean-shaven face, trying to recognize it. His visitor smiled, showing his even white teeth. Then, dropping his hat on the floor, Gideon leapt forward with eager, outstretched hands.
"Kiddie!" he cried. "Kiddie!—you—back here! Here to th' old shack?"
Kiddie took the old man's head tenderly between his hands, drew it to him, and kissed the straggling grey hairs.
"Yes, Gid," he said. "It's me, sure; come back to the old shack and the old man—back like a wild coyote to its lair among the rocks."
"And it was you, then, as came gallopin' along the trail this mornin', time the Injuns crept up to the corral? It was you as fired all them shots from behind the willows? You that raced like mad inter One Tree Gulch an' dropped your lariat over Broken Feather? Oh, Kiddie, Kiddie, I might ha' known—I might ha' known. But I never thought, never guessed it c'd be you. My! how you've growed! how you've—improved! And you ain't wearin' your earl's coronet, nor your robe trimmed round with ermine skins? You've come just like one of ourselves."
"Yes," Kiddie laughed—"in the uniform of the plains, like a simple frontier scout, leaving all the useless fashionable fixings behind me in England."
"Didn't yer like it, then?" Gideon questioned. "Didn't yer cotton to it, bein' a English nobleman with a pile o' dollars an' vast estates? Didn't yer find that seat in the House of Lords altogether comfortable?"
Kiddie sipped at the cup of coffee.