whilst I sized the newcomer up. He was my first specimen of real West-Missouri-country man; I liked the breed from that minute. He was a cuss, that Jimmy. When he looked at you with the twinkle in them blue eyes of his, you couldn't help but laugh. And if there wasn't a twinkle in those eyes, and you laughed, you made a mistake. Thunder! but he was a sight to take your eye—the reckless, handsome, long-legged scamp! With his yellow silk handkerchief around his neck, and his curls of yellow hair—pretty as a woman's—and his sombrero canted back—he looked as if he was made of mountain-top fresh air.

"Well, Jesse!" says he; "well, Jess, you durned old porpoise! You look as hearty as usual, and still wearing your legs cut short, I see; but what the devil have you been doing to your boat?"

"'Still wearing your legs cut short, I see'"

So then Jesse told him about the tornado.

Jimmy's eyes were taking the whole place in, although he listened with care.

"Well, what brings you aboard, Jim!" says Jesse.

"I'm looking for a man," says Jimmy. "I want a white man; a good, kind, orderly sort of white man that'll do what he's told without a word, and'll bust my head for me if I dast curse him the way I do the pups working for me now."

"H'm!" says Jesse, sliding me a kind of underneath-the-table glance. "What's the line of work?"

"Why, the main job is to be around and look and act white. I got too durned much to see to—there's the ranch and the mine and the store—that drunken ex-college professor I hired did me to the tune of fifteen hundred cold yellow disks and skipped. You see, I want somebody to tell, 'Here, you look after this,' and he won't tell me that ain't in the lesson. Ain't you got a young feller that'll grow to my ways? I'll pay him according to his size."

"H'm!" says Jesse again, jerking a thumb toward me. "There's a boy you might do business with."

Jim's head come around with the quickness that marked him. Looking into that blue eye of his was like looking into a mirror—you guessed all there was to you appeared in it. He had me estimated in three fifths of a second.

"Howdy, boy!" says he, coming toward me with his hand out. "My 

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