DEAR BROTHER: We have just heard that you were working in a mine down there and so I thought I would write and tell you that I hope you are well and make a lot of money. I hope you do and come home because we are awful poor and mother says if I don't marry well she don't know what we will do because there are mortgages on everything and we don't keep horses any more and only one servant which is pretty hard for mother. The girl is sassy sometimes but mother can't let her go because she can't pay her yet. Please, Freddie, come home and help us. Everything dreadful has happened to us since father died. Mother will forgive you for being bad and so do I although it was not nice to see our names and pictures in the papers all the time. Write to me, Freddie, as soon as you get this. Your loving sister, HELEN. P. S.--I am thirteen to-day and this is my picture. I wish I could go West too, but don't mention this when you write. Bruce wondered if Slim had answered. He would wager his buckskin bag of dust that he had not. The marvel was that he had even kept the letter. He looked again at the date line--twelve years--the mortgages had long since been foreclosed, if it had depended upon Slim to pay them--and she was twenty-five. He wondered if she'd "married well." Slim was a failure; he stood for nothing in the world of achievement; for all the difference that his going made, he might never have been born. Then a thought as startling as the tangible appearance of some ironic, grinning imp flashed to his mind. Who was he, Bruce Burt, to criticise his partner, Slim? What more had he accomplished? How much more difference would his own death make in anybody's life? His mother's labored words came back with painful distinctness: "I've had such hopes for you, my little boy. I've dreamed such dreams for you--I wanted to see them all come true." An inarticulate sound came from him that was both pain and self-disgust. He was close to twenty-eight--almost thirty--and he'd spent the precious years "just bumming round." Nothing to show for them but a little gold dust and the clothes he wore. He wondered if his mother knew. Her wedding ring was still in a faded velvet case that he kept among his treasures. He never had seen a woman who had suggested ever so faintly the thought that he should like to place it on her finger. There had been women, of a kind--"Peroxide Louise," in Meadows, with her bovine coquetry and loud-mouthed vivacity, yapping scandal up and down the town, the transplanted product of a city's slums, not even loyal to the man who had tried to raise her to his level.