those of his fellow townsmen who did not wholly approve Warry Raridan, admitted his entertaining qualities; and Saxton, who was painfully conscious of his own shortcomings and knew that he had not usually been considered worth cultivating, found himself responding with unwonted lightness to Raridan's inconsequential talk. Few people had ever thought it necessary to take pains with John Saxton, and he greatly enjoyed the novelty of this intercourse with a man of his own age who was not a bore. The bores, as Saxton remembered from his college days, had taken advantage of his good nature and marked him for their own; and with a keen realization of this he had often wondered in bitterness whether they did not classify him correctly.

"I'll wager that if you stay here a year you'll never leave," said Raridan, as they went downstairs together. "I've been about a good deal, and know that we who live here miss a lot of comfort and amusement which go as a matter of course in older towns. But there's a roominess and expansiveness about things out here that I like, and I believe most men who strike it early enough like it, and are lonesome for it if they go away. These people here think I stay because my few business interests are here. The truth is that I've tried [Pg 19]running away, but after I've spent a week east of the Alleghanies, I'm sated with the fleshpots and pine for the wilderness. Why, I go to the stockyards now and then just to see the train-loads of steers come in. I get sensations out of the rush and drive of all this that I wouldn't take a good deal for."

[Pg 19]

"I think I understand how you feel about it," said Saxton, looking more closely at this young man, who was not ashamed to mention his sensations of sentiment to a stranger. "There were times in Wyoming when Western life seemed pretty arid, but when I went back to Boston I was homesick for Cheyenne."

"That's a far cry, from Boston to Cheyenne," said Raridan, laughing. He began again volubly: "A good deal depends, I suppose, on which end you cry from. There's a lot of talk these days about the nouveaux riches by people who haven't any more French than that. We are advised by a fairly competent poet that men may climb on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things; but if they climb on the pickled remains of the common or garden pig I don't see anything ignoble about it. I'd a lot rather ascend on a pyramid of Minnehaha Hams than on my dead self, which I hope to avoid using for step-ladder purposes as long as possible. The people here are human beings, and they're all good enough to suit 

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