initiative and good judgment combined and personified. I never

have beheld a more dynamic young man. He handled lawyers, courts

and executors as a sculptor handles his modeling clay. He formed,

fashioned and forced them to his will. He had been a classmate of

Bowen Tyler at college, and a fraternity brother, and before, that

he had been an impoverished and improvident cow-puncher on one of the

great Tyler ranches. Tyler, Sr., had picked him out of thousands

of employees and made him; or rather Tyler had given him the

opportunity, and then Billings had made himself. Tyler, Jr., as

good a judge of men as his father, had taken him into his friendship,

and between the two of them they had turned out a man who would

have died for a Tyler as quickly as he would have for his flag. Yet

there was none of the sycophant or fawner in Billings; ordinarily

I do not wax enthusiastic about men, but this man Billings comes

as close to my conception of what a regular man should be as any

I have ever met. I venture to say that before Bowen J. Tyler sent

him to college he had never heard the word _ethics_, and yet I am

equally sure that in all his life he never has transgressed a single

tenet of the code of ethics of an American gentleman.

Ten days after they brought Mr. Tyler's body off the _Toreador_,

we steamed out into the Pacific in search of Caprona. There were

forty in the party, including the master and crew of the _Toreador_;

and Billings the indomitable was in command. We had a long and

uninteresting search for Caprona, for the old map upon which the

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