After school, having no chores to do, I loitered around the hotel office. One day I found a dime novel entitled, “The James Boys.” I seized upon it and devoured it. After that I was always on the lookout for dime novels. I found a place where they were sold. I would buy one and trade with some other boy when it was read. If I could not trade it, I took it back to the store and the woman gave me a five-cent one for it. The nickel one was just as thrilling, but shorter. I read them all. “Old Sleuth,” “Cap Collier,” “Frank Reade,” “Kit Carson.” Father saw me with them, but never bothered me. One day he brought me one of Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. I read it and was cured of the five- and ten-cent novels. Between going to school and to the depot in the evening to see the train come in, and hanging around the hotel bar watching the town’s celebrated ones, especially the “bad men” who had killed or shot somebody somewhere some time, I put in fairly busy days. The time flew. I got to be quite looked up to by the other boys of my age. I “lived at the hotel,” had “nobody to boss me around,” didn’t have to “run errands and chop kindling and go after the groceries and carry milk.” When a new boy showed up, I was the one to show him around. I remember distinctly, now, that in less than a year after I left the Sisters, I was going down the street with a new boy when we came upon one of the town drunkards and bad men. I pointed him out with pride. “See that old fellow? That’s old Beverly Shannon. He’s been out to Leadville. He killed a man out there and nearly got hung. You ought to hear him swear when he gets drunk and falls down and nobody will help him up.” There was admiration in my voice. Our town was full of bad men. All had been in the war on one side or the other. Everybody had a pistol or two, and a shotgun or a rifle. Everybody knew how to use them. No small boy’s outfit was complete without a pistol. Usually it was a rusty old “horse pistol,” a cap-and-ball affair, some old relic of the Civil War. By a great stroke of fortune I got two of them. I was helping an old lady to move some things out of her cellar when we ran across them in a trunk. “Lord, Lord,” she said, “are those awful things here yet? I thought they had been thrown away years ago. Johnnie, take them out and bury them somewhere. Throw them away so I will never see them again.”