Jim was an old man, fifty of whose seventy years had been spent on the ranges and ranches of the Great West. He had grown with the country, moving westward as the tide moved, from Iowa to Kansas and Nebraska, Nebraska to the Dakotas, and from the Dakotas to Montana and Wyoming. No phase of the life West had escaped Jim. He had fought Indians and cattle-thieves, punched cattle and homesteaded, prospected and mined. Twenty years before, seeking more adventure, he had made his way on horseback through the mountains to Arizona. Whether he found what he sought, he never told, but five years later, he appeared again in Wyoming, and since that time he had been with Mr. Hunter, whom he had known when the country was new. Had his education equaled his honesty and foresight, Mr. Hunter would long ago have made him foreman, for he had no man whom he so fully trusted; but Jim’s limited knowledge of letters and figures prohibited that distinction, and he remained in one sense an ordinary ranch-hand, apparently content. Still, in another sense, there was something unique about his position. The younger men looked up to him, because of his wide experience and fund of practical knowledge; Mr. Hunter relied implicitly upon his honesty, and consulted him upon many matters of ranch management; and, next to her father, there was no one in all Wyoming whom Virginia so loved. Jim had taught her to ride when her short legs could hardly reach the stirrups; had told her the names of every tree, bush, and flower of the hills and plains; and had been her guard and companion on expeditions far and wide. As she grew older, he gave and taught her how to use her small rifle; and of late had even given her lessons in swinging the lasso in the corral, in which art he was dexterity itself. And last winter Virginia had been able to repay him,—though all through the years she had given him far more than she knew,—for in the autumn round-up, Jim, galloping over the range, had been thrown from his horse, when the animal stumbled into a prairie dog’s hole, and the fall had broken his leg. The chagrin of the old cow-puncher was more pitiable to witness than his pain, when the boys brought him in to the ranch. That he, the veteran of the range, should have behaved thus—“like the rankest tenderfoot”—was almost more than his proud spirit could withstand; and later, when the doctor said the leg below the knee must be sacrificed, the pain and loss, even the necessity of stumping about the rest of his days, seemed as nothing to him compared with the shame he felt over his “tenderfoot foolishness.”