This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

ing saw him on the road, driving two pairs of fairly willing and tractable horses as if he had been brought up to the trade.

Adventure does not always dog a man, although he may be especially painted to attract its notice, as Tom Simpson sometimes believed he was. He drove into Drumwell on the morning of his second day on the road, having made the trip without incident, and in remarkably good time. The horses had buckled down to the job as if they had a proprietory interest in the great bone enterprise.

Not so bad, Tom thought. With the freight out, that cargo of bones represented not less than twelve or fifteen dollars. He could make two trips a week, counting every day as a working day, and Waco was already hobbling around with a crutch, against Mrs. Ellison's grave advice. Waco said he healed up from that kind of punctures like a fishin' worm. He had been shot up so much that he rather resented being shot merely in the thigh. It was almost too trifling to lay a man up at all. So Waco would be able to take the road in a week or two more, when the revenues would double, to leave out of the computation entirely the profit arising from the bones they would buy.

Tom was in pretty high spirits, therefore, when he pulled up near the railroad station and asked the agent where it would be agreeable to him and his company to have the bones unloaded, to repose there until the heap grew big enough to fill a car. The agent appeared to be somewhat distant and cold. He seemed to recall only with a great effort their previous talk on that subject, and then to doubt whether he had gone so far as to say Simpson might use the company's right-of-way as a repository for