gness the contents, money would have been the last thing he would have chanced. Nothing would have been farther from his own habits, or from the procedure of the well-regulated society in which those habits were formed, than the carrying of money around in any such loose and hazardous way. He was no more cognizant of the fact that he was adrift in the night with a fortune of thirty-five thousand dollars at his back, than he was that Sid Coburn was riding that hour in the frenzy of his loss, raising a posse comitatus to hasten in pursuit.
Whatever it was the brown bag contained—presents for missus and kids, or only the boss's extra shirt, shaving mug, razor and strop—Tom Simpson had no other thought in his entirely honest head than delivering it dry and safe into the hands to which it belonged. He believed the horse was a sensible creature; he was relying, with faith founded on experience, on its homing sense to carry him safely through that adventure which, to Tom Simpson, was rather a mild one, to be sure, and nothing to worry about at all.
Things with and appertaining to Tom Simpson were pretty much as Sid Coburn had guessed. It did not call for an expert in the national characteristics of men to classify him as he belonged. That he was an Englishman was as plain as apples in a schoolboy's pocket. As Coburn had reflected, the western cattle ranges were very well acquainted with Tom Simpson's type. Many young fellows came over in those times to try it out in the rough, some for the experience upon which they expected to build later, others for the adventure of it, but good sports
