We knew that Joe Nevison was in the West. People from our town, who seem to swarm over the earth, wrote back that they had met Joe in Dodge City, in Leoti, in No-Man's-Land, in Texas, in Arizona--wherever there was trouble. Sometimes he was the hired bad man of a desert town, whose business it was to shoot terror into the hearts of disturbers from rival towns; sometimes he was a free lance--living the devil knows how--always dressed like a fashion-plate of the plains in high-heeled boots, wide felt hat, flowing necktie, flannel shirt and velvet trousers. They say that he did not gamble more than was common among the sporting men of his class, and that he never worked. Sometimes we heard of him adventuring as a land dealer, sometimes as a cattleman, sometimes as a mining promoter, sometimes as a horseman, but always as the sharper, who rides on the crest of the forward wave of civilization, leaving a town when it tears down its tents and puts up brick buildings, and then appearing in the next canvas community, wherein the night is filled with music, and the cares that infest the day are drowned in bad whiskey or winked out with powder and shot. And thus Joe Nevison closed his twenties--a desert scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it. As he passed into his thirties he left the smoky human crystals that formed on the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass, seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a lone highwayman. At least, so men said in the West, though no one could prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better and safer for them than ordinary highway faring. At Lawton our people saw Joe and he asked about the home people, asked about the boys--the old boys he called them--and becoming possessed of a post-office address, Joe wrote a long letter to George Kirwin, the foreman of our office. We call him old George, because he is still under forty. Joe being in an expansive mood, and with more money on his clothes than he cared for, sent old George ten dollars to pay for a dollar Joe had borrowed the day he left town in the eighties. We printed Joe's letter in our paper, and it pleased his mother. That was the beginning of a regular correspondence between the rover and the home-stayer. George Kirwin, gaunt, taciturn, and hard-working, had grown out of the dreamy, story-loving boy who had been one of the Slaves of the Magic Tree and