ot have to be reckoned
with.

In spite of the fact that she was generally known as "Mrs. Jim," many
people forgot that Marietta had a husband, for he was never visible
now-a-days. But Marietta never forgot, never for one single instant, the
wasted figure in the easy chair at the window above the shop, the pale
sunken face with the shining eyes, turned always toward the stairway the
instant her foot touched the lower step. The look of radiant welcome
that greeted her as often as her head appeared above the opening on a
level with the uneven deal floor, that look was always worth coming up
for.

She did not bring her work and sit upstairs with Jim, because there was
but one small window in the dingy, slant-roofed loft, that served as
bed-chamber, kitchen, and parlor, and she knew he liked to sit at the
window and watch the panorama of the street below. The broad, sunny
Springtown thoroughfare, with its low, irregular wooden structures,
likely, at any moment, to give place to ambitious business "blocks";
with its general air of incompleteness and transitoriness brought into
strong relief against the near background of the Rocky Mountains, was
alive with human interest. Yet, singularly enough, it was not the
cowboy, mounted on his half-broken bronco that interested Jim; not the
ranch wagon, piled high with farm produce, women, and children; not even
the Lame Gulch "stage,"--a four-seated wagon, so crowded with
rough-looking men that their legs dangled outside like fringe on a
cowboy's "shaps,"--none of these sights made much impression on the sick
man at his upper window. The work-a-day side of life was far too
familiar to Jim to impress him as being picturesque or dramatic. What he
did care for, what roused and satisfied his imagination, was what was
known in his vocabulary as "style." It was to the "gilded youth" of
Springtown that he looked for his entertainment. He liked the yellow
fore-and-aft buckboards, he enjoyed the shining buggies, especially
when their wheels were painted red; dog-carts and victorias ranked high
in his esteem. He knew, to be sure, very little about horses; their most
salient "points" escaped him: he gave indiscriminate approval to every
well-groomed animal attached to a "stylish" vehicle, and the more the
merrier! It is safe to declare that he was a distinctly happier man from
that day forward on which Mr. Richard Dayton first dazzled the eyes of
Springtown with his four-in-hand.

This happen