He is glad to see the stranger, and he lets him know it.

He has a gruff, hearty, and not too servile manner, and a way of speaking of the men of the town and the farmers of the surrounding country as if he owned them.

Having bought horses of many of them, he knows their bad traits, and he has an air of knowing much more than he would willingly tell regarding them.

He is not inquisitive about the stranger's business, and is willing to give him information.
Probably it is his trade of buying and selling and renting horses that gives him such a flavor of his own, for he knows that the horses he lets out on livery are often as intelligent as the men who hire them.
He comes as near the chivalric model of the old Southern planter as a Northern business man can, but his slaves are horses, and his overseer the hostler.

He is a man in authority, even though is authority is over horses.
Modern civilization has few finer sights and sounds than the liveryman when he is asked if he has a horse he can let out for a ten-mile drive into the country.