it a point to see Tom anyhow, and maybe we can work out something." He shoved the pearls toward her. "You'd better put those on again."
"Aren't you going to keep them?"
"I don't run a pawnbroker's shop. But I'd be right careful of them around the hotel. That nigger there may be light-fingered."
After she had gone he leaned back in his chair, maybe to remind himself of the bullet under his shoulder blade. But if he did he dismissed it. He was going back, a very long time back, to the time when he had stood at the cross-roads of life. On the one hand had been the open range and the great herds—they had been great in those days. He had owned a horse and saddle then and not much else; where he had unrolled his bed had been home. When he wanted money in the winter he had gone wolfing; he had killed one big gray with his hands once, and got a hundred and fifty dollars for it from the stockmen around. And when he had time off he had ridden into town like the rest and got drunk at Hamel's Last Chance saloon, and ridden howling and shouting out of town, firing his revolver into the air.
Then one day they began to survey for the railroad. He had stopped his horse on a hill and watched the men at work, and he got off then and there, sat down and watched them. Ursula was going to be quite a town some day. Cass Woodson, the trader, wouldn't be able to supply it. The place was a shame anyhow, with its stinking sheepskins and cowhides piled up to be freighted out, its cheap canned goods and calicoes, its fraudulent scales and the odor of blood from the shed in the back where he killed his beef. No. Stores would come in, and money, and somebody would have to take care of that money.
The bank down at Easton had flourished. Cattlemen, pocketing their big checks in the fall from Chicago or Omaha were taking them there for deposit. It came in in bulk, was parceled out in loans, and paid interest. High interest. But why should they go to Easton? There would have been no answer perhaps had he not met Jennie. But Jennie had ten thousand dollars, and here he was.
