Colorado Jim. George Goodchild
off-side mare’s like a sausage on four crooked sticks.”
“Jim! We want Colorado Jim!” was howled up from below.
The much desired went to the window. 10
“Boys,” he bawled, “you all run along home. I gotta catch a train.”
His voice was drowned by horrible threats of what they would do if he didn’t hike down immediately. He turned to Dan.
“They’re a darn fine lot of boys, but I wish they wouldn’t git so worked up. Where’s Emily?”
Emily, who was standing in the doorway, ogling him unseen, came forward.
“There’s something to buy a dress with, and see here, don’t get a draughtboard pattern. If there’s any money over, buy soap—scented soap.”
Emily’s eyes almost fell from her head at the sight of the fifty-dollar note. She rubbed her hands down her dress and took it. Jim had grabbed the heavy bag and was half-way down the stairs before she could summon enough breath to murmur the incessant refrain, “Ain’t he jest wonderful!”
At the door Jim was grabbed by a dozen hefty pairs of hands and hoisted on to shoulders. One man took the big bag, and with remarkable skill flung it clean on the top of the waiting coach, 11 much to Rob’s disgust. The hurtling missile came down like a thunderbolt, and nearly went through the roof.
“Don’t get fresh, boys,” pleaded Jim. “These are my Sunday clothes.”
They ran him twice up the main street, yelling and whooping like a pack of wild Indians. A queer awry figure stuck its head from the window of a tumble-down shop and, seeing the cause of the disturbance, shook his fist and yelled:
“The sheriff ought to be fired, to allow …”
A shot from a revolver shivered his shop-window to atoms, and a ten-dollar note was flung at him. He slammed down the window, realizing that discretion was the better part of valor. The high-spirited men went on their way, rousing the whole population as they progressed. After about twenty minutes of these capers they reached the hotel again. Jim was praying that the business was over. He fought his way to the ground, but was immediately hoisted on to the top of Rob’s coach.
“Give over, boys …”
“Who is the whitest man in Medicine Bow?” sang Ned Blossom. 12
“Colorado Jim!” howled the chorus.
“Who is the huskiest two-hundred-pounder in the hul of Ameriky?”
“Colorado Jim!”
“Who is it the gals all lu-huv?”
“Colorado Jim—sure!”
Jim swung his big figure over the side of the coach. He grabbed two of his tormentors by the scruffs of their necks and jerked them on to the ground.
“I’m through with all this,” he cried. “Rob, get that animated bunch of horse-hair going.”
Ned Blossom held up his hand.
“Cut it out, boys,” he ordered. “See here, Jim, we got wise to this absconsion of yours, and we thought we’d jest bunch in. The boys are feeling queer about it, though there ain’t much show of handkerchiefs. We—we thought mebbe you’d accept a little—kinder keepsake. It—it ain’t much, but—but—— Wal, here it is.”
He jerked something from his pocket and put it into Jim’s hand. It was a gold cigarette-case, with an inscription worked in small diamonds: “To Colorado Jim from his chums.” Jim stood gazing at this token of their regard. He hated 13 sentiment, and yet was as big a victim of it as anyone. When he spoke his great voice wavered.
“I’m going a hell of a distance before I find boys like you. I wish I wasn’t going. I—wish——”
He grabbed Ned’s hand quickly, and then that of each of the other men, and jumped into the coach. They understood the emotion in the big heart of him. Rob started the team and away went the coach in a cloud of dust. Hats went up in the air and revolvers barked.
“Good-bye, Colorado Jim! Good-bye!”
Emily at the door, clasping the fifty-dollar note in her grimy paw, waited until the coach was a mere dot in the distance. Then she rubbed a sorrowful eye.
“Gee, but he was jest wonderful!” she moaned.
14
CHAPTER II
THE BRIGHT LIGHTS
New York brought Jim Conlan up with a start. Everything was amazing; everything was bewildering. He felt like a lost soul, stunned with the noise, dazed by the sights. In the fastnesses of his beloved West he had never imagined that such a place existed on the face of the earth. He felt stifled and ill at ease. His clothes were different to those worn in this city. People gave him a quick passing glance, knowing him at once for a Westerner. Feeling a trifle embarrassed under their glances, he reflected upon the advisability of buying new and more appropriate garb. A tailor was requisitioned and, finding his client to be indifferent in the matter of costs, fixed him up with a fine wardrobe—and a fine bill.
Jim spent the best part of two hours trying on the new things. The long mirror in his bedroom 15 did its best, but it wasn’t good enough for Jim. He groaned as he saw this stranger staring at him from the mirror. He wasn’t built for that sort of garb. The hard hat looked perfectly idiotic and the starched collars nearly choked him. Eventually he tore the offending article from his sunscorched neck and flung it across the room. The other things followed. He stood once more in the rough gray clothes that served for “best” out West, and jammed the comfortable Stetson hat on his head.
“I’m darned if I’ll wear ’em!” he growled.
A few days of shopping and theaters, and he began to grow homesick. Thoughts of Colorado and the boys constantly flickered in his brain. Here he was an outcast—a nonentity. He was not good at making friends, and the New Yorkers were not falling head over heels to shake hands with him, though more than one pair of eyes looked admiringly at his magnificent physique.
The loneliness of big cities! How terrible a thing it was. Never at any time had Jim felt so lonely. The rolling wind-swept prairie had at least something to offer. In every manifestation 16 of nature he had found a friend. The wind, and the hills, and the wild animals seemed in some queer way sterling comrades; but here—— He began to hate it. It was one huge problem to him. How did it live? What did all the millions do for a subsistence? It was the first time he had seen the poor—the real, hopeless, inevitable poor. He had seen men “broke,” down to their last cent; men on the trail, starving, and lost to all sense of decency. But that was merely transitory. These people were different; they were born poor, and would be poor until their bones were laid in some miserable congested cemetery. He found them actually reconciled to it—unquestioningly accepting their fate and fighting to postpone the end for as long as possible. It sickened him.
Oh, Colorado! With your wide prairie and your eternal peaks, your carpeted valleys and your crystalline streams, your fragrant winds and your gift of God—good men!
He was sitting in the lounge of his hotel one evening, feeling more than usually homesick, when he noticed a beautiful woman sitting near him. Her evening dress was cut well away at 17 the shoulders, displaying a white neck around which a pearl necklace glowed in the light. A mass of auburn hair was coiled up neatly round her head, with a rebellious little curl streaming down one ear.
The curl