.

The Colonel.
When Eliph' Hewlitt stepped out of the hotel the next morning, after he had eaten his breakfast, and stood, with a wooden toothpick between his lips, looking up and down the street, he felt a sense of exultation.
If he had been a victorious general, and Kilo a captured city of great importance, he would have had a similar feeling.

Already he felt that, if he was not the captor of the town, he was one of its important citizens, and practically the husband of an attractive woman whose father owned sufficient property to be one of those who grumble about taxes.
To a man who had been a wanderer all his life it was pleasant to feel that he was soon to be kin to all the things he saw on Main Street, brother to the town-pump and cousin to the flag pole, and to consider that even the well-gnawed hitching rails were to be part of his future years.

He nodded across the street to Billings, the grocer and general store man, as if he was an old acquaintance, and he watched Skinner, the butcher, sweeping the walk, with a pleasant smile, for he saw in him a future friend.

He loved Kilo, and he was ready to like everything, from the post office to the creamery.