Indeed, the Department of Insurance, Statistics, and History carried no great heft of the burden of state.  Its main work was the regulating of the business done in the state by foreign insurance companies, and the letter of the law was its guide.  As for statistics—­well, you wrote letters to county officers, and scissored other people’s reports, and each year you got out a report of your own about the corn crop and the cotton crop and pecans and pigs and black and white population, and a great many columns of figures headed “bushels” and “acres” and “square miles,” etc.—­and there you were.  History?  The branch was purely a receptive one.  Old ladies interested in the science bothered you some with long reports of proceedings of their historical societies.  Some twenty or thirty people would write you each year that they had secured Sam Houston’s pocket-knife or Santa Ana’s whisky-flask or Davy Crockett’s rifle—­all absolutely authenticated—­and demanded legislative appropriation to purchase.  Most of the work in the history branch went into pigeon-holes.

One sizzling August afternoon the commissioner reclined in his office chair, with his feet upon the long, official table covered with green billiard cloth.  The commissioner was smoking a cigar, and dreamily regarding the quivering landscape framed by the window that looked upon the treeless capitol grounds.  Perhaps he was thinking of the rough and ready life he had led, of the old days of breathless adventure and movement, of the comrades who now trod other paths or had ceased to tread any, of the changes civilization and peace had brought, and, maybe, complacently, of the snug and comfortable camp pitched for him under the dome of the capitol of the state that had not forgotten his services.

The business of the department was lax.  Insurance was easy.  Statistics were not in demand.  History was dead.  Old Kauffman, the efficient and perpetual clerk, had requested an infrequent half-holiday, incited to the unusual dissipation by the joy of having successfully twisted the tail of a Connecticut insurance company that was trying to do business contrary to the edicts of the great Lone Star State.

The office was very still.  A few subdued noises trickled in through the open door from the other departments—­a dull tinkling crash from the treasurer’s office adjoining, as a clerk tossed a bag of silver to the floor of the vault—­the vague, intermittent clatter of a dilatory typewriter—­a dull tapping from the state geologist’s quarters as if some woodpecker had flown in to bore for his prey in the cool of the massive building—­and then a faint rustle and the light shuffling of the well-worn shoes along the hall, the sounds ceasing at the door toward which the commissioner’s lethargic back was presented.  Following this, the sound of a gentle voice speaking words unintelligible to the commissioner’s somewhat dormant comprehension, but giving evidence of bewilderment and hesitation.