s an accomplice, while the Pinkertons
looked for the man with the money.

The robber was a kind-hearted person; and, being really grieved over
the detention of an innocent man, wrote several exculpating letters
to the papers, enclosing rifled express envelopes to prove his
peripatetic identity. These letters were signed "Jim Cummings," a _nom
de guerre_ borrowed from an older and an abler offender of the Jesse
James vintage.

After he was arrested and in his cell in the St. Louis jail, "Jim
Cummings" and I became friends, as criminals and newspaper men
sometimes do, and as criminals and I always have done, everywhere,
most easily. The details of his arrangements, both before and after
his draft on the company, were minutely in my mind, and were so very
vital that, with the first need for a drama criminal, I took him.
Goodwin's rival should be Jim Cummings; a glorified and beautiful and
matinee Cummings, but substantially he.

This adoption rescued the girl and the sheriff from the hazy geography
of the mining camps, and fixed the trio in Missouri.

After Cummings had dropped from the express car, he had walked some
fifteen miles to the Missouri River, near St. Charles, and had then
gone north on a train through Pike County. I had more than once made
the same trip on freight trains; and I had a liking for the county
as the home district of Champ Clark, a politico-newspaper comrade of
several legislative sessions and conventions. Newspaper experience
in those days, before the "flimsy" and the "rewrite," emphasized the
value of going to the place in order to report the occurrence; and I
knew that, aside from these three characters and their official and
sentimental relationships, the rest of my people and my play were
waiting for me in Bowling Green.

In those days, Mrs. Thomas and I used to hold hands on our evening
promenades; but I think it was really our foolish New York clothes
that made the blacksmith smile. At any rate, we stopped at his door
and talked with him. He knew Champ Clark and Dave Ball--another
Missouri statesman--and had the keenest interest in the coming
convention for the legislative nomination. It was fine to hear him
pronounce the state name, _Mizzoura_, as it was originally spelt on
many territorial charts, and as we were permitted to call it in the
public schools until we reached the grades where imported culture
ruled. The blacksmith's helper, who was finishing a wagon shaft with a
draw kni