The gulch ran in a trough of beauty to the foot of Jones’s Hill, which rose in a sweeping curve into the clouds.

Wild flowers, trees in profuse leaf, and mats of vines covered the scarred earth, and the sky was as limpid as spring water; the air carried a weight of heart-stirring odors, yet Jim Felton, sitting on the door-step of his cabin in the brilliant sunshine, was not a happy man.

He looked at the hollow of the gulch and cursed it manfully and bitterly. The gold should be there—Jim had figured it all out. The old wash cut at right angles to the creek, and at the turn was where its freight of yellow metal should have been deposited, but when you got down to the bed-rock, the blasted stuff was either slanted so nothing could stay on it, or was rotten—crumbling in your fingers, and that kind of bed will hold nothing.

Therefore Jim had sunk about fifty prospect holes; got colors under the grass-roots, as evidence that pay should be there—and nothing but ashy wash beneath it.

When a man is alone, and thinks things are wrong, optimism comes down on the run, the shades of pessimism gather fast and furious—more especially if a man does his own cooking, and the raw material is limited, at that.

The sun had not moved the shadows three inches before Jim had reached the conclusion that this world was all a practical joke, of so low an order that no sensible man would even laugh at it, and he drew a letter from his pocket in proof thereof. It was a thin letter, written on delicate paper in a delicate hand, and it showed much wear. He read for the thousandth time:

Jim dropped the letter, and his lips trembled a little. Parts of it touched him deeply, and he was the more enraged and hurt at the rest because of that.

He could not call her mercenary. He knew better. More than one very comfortable income was at her disposal.

Poor fellow! He could only grind his teeth and curse Sweet Briar gulch from the deepest pot-hole in the bed-rock to the top of its loftiest pine. He drew out her photograph, and obtained much sweet consolation by thinking how happy they two would be in Sweet Briar gulch together, even if there wasn’t a cent of pay in the gravel.

Sick of this ingenious torture, he lit his pipe and drew savagely upon it. With a mocking gurgle, about a dram of “slumgullion” passed into his mouth. It was the last touch. He spat out the biting, nauseating stuff, hurled the pipe upon the rocks and danced on it.

And yet the colors frolicked in the gulch; the pines toned the air with healthy breath.

From afar came the th-r-r-up! th-r-r-up! th-r-r-up of a galloping horse. It was Bud, the mail-carrier, coming, modestly and quietly, at a decent gait, down a trail where most would prefer to walk, and to “hang on” to something at that.

At first Jim felt irritated by the interruption. He wanted to luxuriate in misery: still he was a vigorous, healthy man, and the cheery good-fellowship of Bud soon made away with that feeling.

“Well, how they coming, Jimmy?” queried the young giant. “Hit her yet?”

“Hit—well, much caloric,”—replied Jim. “I’ve begun to believe there ain’t a durned thing here.”

“You’re looking kind of owly, old man—what’s up? Don’t you feel well?”

“Oh, Bud I I’m sick of everything this day—I don’t believe in the constitution of the United States, including the thirteenth amendment, nor the ten commandments, nor the attraction of gravitation, nor anything else—it’s all a damned lie.”

“No wonder you get like that, mousing around here without a chance to yappi with a feller critter. ’Nough to make you locoed.

“Jump it for a spell. Go up town. Get loaded. Get horribly loaded. Break somebody’s window, and tell the folks you’re a Sweet Briar zephyr come to blow out their lights. Go ahead and do it. When your hair stops pulling you’ll feel like a new man.”

Jim thought the advice sound, yet a strange feeling had developed in him, in his isolation; it was that the eye of Anne was always on him. He had fallen into a habit, which becomes a superstition when a man is alone, of acting as though she were there in person.

However, he didn’t feel called upon to offer Bud that explanation of his refusal. He conveyed the idea in one brief word.

“Busted,” said he.

“Busted?” retorted Bud warmly. “Busted? Not much, you ain’t busted whilst that little package is there, bet cher life! You call for what you want, and the cashier will make good.”

“Ah, Bud! How’ll I ever pay you back? Keep it, man, keep it,” replied Jim in a disheartened voice.

“Say, you ain’t got no call to worry about that part of it—there’s where my troubles begin,” returned Bud. “Now, you take these two bucks and jab ’em in your jeans—Go on, now! Do as I tell you, or damned if I don’t lick you and make you take ’em! What’s the good of money if it ain’t to help a friend out with? I don’t care who gets drunk on it, just so long as they have a good time.

“Boy, you’ll be sailing up the track regardless of orders, with your boiler full of suds, if you don’t get out in the scramble for a while.”

“Lord! I’d like to see a railroad train! Haven’t heard a whistle for two years! How far is it to the nearest station, Bud?”

“Plattsburg—fifty mile—due south.”

“Christmas! Little far to walk.”

“Say, you take this horse, Jim,—go ahead! I can walk just as well as not, I’m getting too fat, anyhow. Go on, you take the horse and have a ride to Plattsburg!”

“Yes, take the shirt off your back, and never mind if a bit of the skin goes with it. I’ll see you far away first. Tell you what you could do for me, Buddy; the herd of burros is around now, if you’d round up one of them for me?”

“Sure thing! You sit on the mail sack till I come back. There’s a heap of registered stuff in it this trip. Oh say! What do you think? I was held up t’other side of the Bulldog. Bang! Zipp! says a little popper from the bushes. I climbed for them bushes, and out goes a beggar like a rabbit. I was after him like a coyote, bet cher life. Who do you suppose it was, Jim?”

“Hang it, how should I know?”

“That little down-east cuss with the crook in his back. He begged hard. Poor devil, he was up against the sandpaper side, all right. He heard from the postmaster that there was a lot of valuable mail going out, so he thought he’d make a try for it. Then what do you think he had the cold, cold nerve to do?”

“Pass it up—’most anything, I reckon.”

“Worse’n that. Struck me for fifty!”

“And got it.”

“Got it? No, not much he didn’t, sonny! He drew just ten, and he was lucky to get that. I’ve done a favor or two for that feller, first and last, and to have him shoot at me made me sore—although he missed me by several locations, I’ll say that for him—so I gave him the ten and told him I’d kick the hump on his back so high up on his shoulders he could wear it for a hat, if he ever shoved into my daylight again. And you never in your life saw a humpback make better time than he did.

“Well here’s for your jack-ass—which way’s the herd?”

“Right up over the hill.”

Jim sat patiently on the sack until Bud returned with the burro.

“Here’s your thoroughbred!” holloed Bud. “Get ap, there, Mary. Look at the knowing ears of him, will you? You bet cher life, you’ve got an animile there that’ll go when he gets ready, and as fast as he pretty well damn pleases—nail him!”

Jim tied a gunny sack on his noble mount, and the two rode on together to the fork in the trail. Jim tried to thank his friend, who knocked his hat over his eyes, and said, “Aw, write it down when you’ve got more time. Never see a feller in my life I cottoned to more’n you, Jim. First I thought you was too smooth for my kind of traveling, but later, I see it was only the grain of the wood. I believe in my friends, I do. Here we go hopping around this little world for a small time, and then that’s done. S’pose you ain’t got any real friends for the trip? Rotten, I say. You go ahead and rip Plattsburg up the back. Wisht I could be there with you. Don’t you mind consequences. So long, old man! Hike! You beggar!” The buckskin pony was off with a snort and a splashing of gravel as the irons touched his sides, and Bud vanished down the road without a look behind him.

The next day Jim was in Plattsburg. One does not know what an alluring quality, what a hazy enchantment can linger around even a small town, until an absence in a real wilderness has given man’s work a new flavor.

The people coming and going, the traffic of the stores, the dwellings with small cultivated plots around them warmed Jim like a fire. He had been very lonely, without knowing it. In the afternoon he went down to the depot to see the eastern train come in.

Here again absence played a part, and restored the locomotive to its proper proportions of a miracle.

As the engine glided in, shaking the ground beneath it, it seemed impossible to Jim that man really made it. What! Bend those mighty rods of steel to his will? Twist and shape those others? Cast those great drivers? And after, to drive the monster with a hand?

He drew back as the buzzing engine passed him, with something like awe. Then the moving village came to a stop and the passengers sallied forth to test their legs, wearied with long sitting.

There was humanity of all shades, from the haughty aristocrat of the Pullman, to the peasant of the immigrant car.

Jim had a sense of pleasure in beholding well-dressed folk again; yet it was merely an Æsthetic pleasure, for he found, when he began to speculate on the possibilities of the throng before him, that he was more interested in those whose all was staked on the trip, than in those to whom it was only an excursion.

People of widely differing nationalities occupied the immigrant car. Jim wondered whether they would ever become Americans, according to his ideas of Americans, a people in which he had great pride and delight; and he shook his head doubtfully as he took them in.

Suddenly a small boy darted out of a car; an exceedingly small boy, thin to emaciation, who made his way through the crowd with that sprawling, active, dancing manner peculiar to thin small boys and spiders.

Jim half laughed at the little chap until he saw his face; then he realized at a glance that the matter was no laughing one for the boy.

At the same time he saw the shocking thinness of the little face, made into a wolf’s face by hunger; the mingled horror and desperation of the eyes; the big man would not have believed a child’s face could express emotions of such magnitude. He was wonder-stricken at the sight, and felt an instinctive sympathy for the fugitive.

It is a strange thing how fortune will sometimes guide with certainty, when reason shows no path.

The boy came unerringly toward Jim; Jim had a sort of prophetic insight that he would. Back behind him the urchin ran. “Don’t cher give me away, Mister!” he pleaded. Jim flapped a hand in answer.

At the time he was leaning against a corner of the station; a little back of him was a small lean-to shed where various truck was stored.

Out of the car came a burly brute of a man, who stared about him rapidly.

“Dat’s der ol’ man,” whispered the boy. “If he gits holt of me, there won’t be a hull bone left in me body.”

The man walked up to the conductor and spoke to him.

“Aggh!” said the boy. “Now dey’ll get me sure—der jig is up—dey’ll have der hull gang ertop o’ me!” the voice trailed off into a strangled sob, and then continued in a fierce whisper: “Aggh! If I had me growth, I’d show ’em! I’d show ’em!” and then a burst of hair-raising profanity.

The argument was growing loud between the man, who was urging something, and the conductor, who was declining; others were walking toward the moderate excitement.

Jim wheeled and caught the boy in his arms. “Up you go!” he said, and tossed him on top of the shed. “Lie low behind the wood there, and you are all right.”

Then came the conductor’s voice: “Say, my friend, if you think I’m going to hold my train while you hunt up a lost kid, there’s something in you that don’t work right! Why didn’t you take care of him while you had him? Now you’ve got just four minutes by the watch; either hustle around and hunt, or drop off the train and hunt—what’s that? Now don’t you give me any slack, you black-muzzled tarrier, or I’ll have the fear of God thrown into you too quick. Get out of here now! Get out of my way!”

The man slouched off, and made a hasty search around the station. A woman’s face—scarcely an improvement on the man’s—leaned out of the car window and jeered at the hunter, who cursed her back savagely.

The man walked up to Jim. “Say, did yer see a kid go by here, Mister?”

With a shrug of his shoulders, Jim asked him that question in Mr. Ollendorf’s French method, about the pink-and-green overcoat of the shoemaker’s wife’s sister.

The man showered low abuse on what he supposed was a foreigner, until Jim’s ribs rose with the desire to kill him.

“Ayr, wot are yer wastin’ time wid th’ Dago fur?” called the woman. “Th’ kid’s on the roof!” Jim’s heart almost stopped, so thoroughly had he identified himself with this quarrel. He made up his mind to fight for the boy, right or wrong.

But he was saved the trouble. It was only a jest of the woman’s, for she suddenly called, so earnestly that even Jim was fooled. “No he ain’t neither; I see him! I see him! There he is.” It was the perfection of acting, voice and gesture.

The man ran out to see where she was pointing. “Where is he?” he asked, looking wildly around.

“On top der flag-pole, like er monkey! You’re it!” she cried, with a shriek of laughter at the black brows of her dupe.

“I’ll show yer der joke, when I git in dere!” he threatened.

The woman leaned her chin on her hands and smiled. Jim never forgot the utter undauntedness, impudence and malice of that face. “Yer allus goin’ to do sumpin’, Pete!” she retorted. “Yer’ll be a man yet.”

A more amiable man than “Pete” might have been provoked by such conduct. He strode forward with white-knuckled fists and a very unpleasant expression on his face. Several men started to interfere, but it wasn’t necessary.

The woman quietly looked at her bully, chewing a straw with the utmost nonchalance. “Give us a kiss,” said she. The man’s crest dropped. He said something in an undertone, and got on the car.

Jim needed no further knowledge of this delightful couple to be thoroughly on the boy’s side. It seemed to him that the man was quite capable of keeping a small animal at hand, for the fun of torturing it, and as for the woman—well, if there was her like in hell, Jim determined to be good for the rest of his days.

“All aboard!” cried the conductor, and with a few mighty breaths the iron giant whisked its load out in the open again.

“Stay where you are, son, till I see whether that fellow is playing a trick,” said Jim, and not until he had looked under the platform, up and down the track, and in the waiting rooms, did he give the command, “Come down!”