y, and strange forebodings seemed to have
told him that all was not well, as Kansas Shorty during their
conversation had contradicted himself in many statements, and too, they
had passed farm house after farm house and many people in the public
highway during the last two hours without his trying to apply to them
for a job.

When they reached the oak and Jim found that neither Slippery nor Joe
had put in an appearance, he began to lament, and when Kansas Shorty
assured him that he could only account for their absence by believing
they had been jailed on a "suspicious character" charge, the frightened
lad commenced to sob.

Kansas Shorty feeling in need of a night's rest, climbed across fences
into a nearby field and gathered some new-mown hay from which he
fashioned beneath the protecting branches of the oak a comfortable
resting place for himself and Jim. But before he went to sleep, to
prevent Jim from taking French leave, he induced the boy to take off his
shoes and his coat out of which he made for himself a pillow, and after
he had assured the lad that Slippery and Joe would certainly find them
should they arrive during the night, he turned over on to his side and
was soon soundly sleeping.

On the morning of the fourth day they struck a railroad for the first
time since they left it. It proved to be the St. Paul-Omaha main line
of the Chicago and Northwestern System, and as luck would have it, while
they were walking up a steep grade a stock train loaded with sheep
passed them so slowly that they found it an easy matter to swing
themselves onto it and they climbed through an open end-door into one of
the stock cars, in which, hidden amongst the sheep, they managed to hobo
unmolested through many division points where they bought provisions
while the sheep were being fed and watered. On the morning of the third
day they landed, not at Chicago, as Kansas Shorty had until now made Jim
believe, but at Denver, the beautiful capital city of Colorado.

While they walked about the streets of the city, Kansas Shorty met a
friend whom he addressed as "Nevada Bill," and who as soon as the former
told him that Jim was "his road kid", placed his hand under the boy's
chin and after sizing the lad up just as a butcher would a beef, he
whispered: "Well, well, Kansas Shorty, I see you have brought a fine
'broncho' to town with you. I hope that you will be able to make a
first-class road kid of him." To which coarse remarks Kan