from me.  I sold to them cheap, and they aint paid out yet, but part of them is, and if their land should be took from them I would die.  My grandfather was an honest man, and he helped to build up this state, and he taught his children to be honest, and how could I make it up to them who bought from me?  Mr. Commissioner, if you let them land-sharks take the roof from over my children and the little from them as they has to live on, whoever again calls this state great or its government just will have a lie in their mouths”

The Commissioner laid this letter aside with a sigh.  Many, many such letters he had received.  He had never been hurt by them, nor had he ever felt that they appealed to him personally.  He was but the state’s servant, and must follow its laws.  And yet, somehow, this reflection did not always eliminate a certain responsible feeling that hung upon him.  Of all the state’s officers he was supremest in his department, not even excepting the Governor.  Broad, general land laws he followed, it was true, but he had a wide latitude in particular ramifications.  Rather than law, what he followed was Rulings:  Office Rulings and precedents.  In the complicated and new questions that were being engendered by the state’s development the Commissioner’s ruling was rarely appealed from.  Even the courts sustained it when its equity was apparent.

The Commissioner stepped to the door and spoke to a clerk in the other room—­spoke as he always did, as if he were addressing a prince of the blood: 

“Mr. Weldon, will you be kind enough to ask Mr. Ashe, the state school-land appraiser, to please come to my office as soon as convenient?”

Ashe came quickly from the big table where he was arranging his reports.

“Mr. Ashe,” said the Commissioner, “you worked along the Chiquito River, in Salado County, during your last trip, I believe.  Do you remember anything of the Elias Denny three-league survey?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” the blunt, breezy, surveyor answered.  “I crossed it on my way to Block H, on the north side of it.  The road runs with the Chiquito River, along the valley.  The Denny survey fronts three miles on the Chiquito.”

“It is claimed,” continued the commissioner, “that it fails to reach the river by as much as a mile.”

The appraiser shrugged his shoulder.  He was by birth and instinct an Actual Settler, and the natural foe of the land-shark.

“It has always been considered to extend to the river,” he said, dryly.

“But that is not the point I desired to discuss,” said the Commissioner.  “What kind of country is this valley portion of (let us say, then) the Denny tract?”

The spirit of the Actual Settler beamed in Ashe’s face.

“Beautiful,” he said, with enthusiasm.  “Valley as level as this floor, with just a little swell on, like the sea, and rich as cream.  Just enough brakes to shelter the cattle in winter.  Black loamy soil for six feet, and then clay.  Holds water.  A dozen nice little houses on it, with windmills and gardens.  People pretty poor, I guess—­too far from market—­but comfortable.  Never saw so many kids in my life.”