his humorous, mock-serious style of
conversation, and that his hand-to-hand battle with the world had made
him good-humoredly cynical. He evinced a knowledge of more things than I
should have expected; and had somehow acquired an imposing manner, in
spite of his rather slangy, if expressive, vocabulary. He had the power
of making statements of mere opinion, which, from some vibration of
voice or trick of expression, struck the hearer as solid facts, thrice
buttressed by evidence. He bore no marks of dissipation, unless the
occasional use of terms traceable to the turf or the gaming-table might
be considered such; but these expressions, I considered, are so
constantly before every reader of the newspapers that the language of
the pulpit, even, is infected by them. Their evidential value being thus
destroyed, they ought not to be weighed at all, as against firm,
wholesome flesh, a good complexion, and a clear eye, all of which Mr.
Elkins possessed.

"It's funny," said I, "how seldom I meet any of the old neighbor-boys.
Do you see any of them in your travels?"

"Not often," he answered, "but you remember little Ed Smith, who lived
on the Hayes place for a while, and brought the streaked snake into the
schoolhouse while Julia Fanning was teaching? Well, he was an architect
at Garden City, and lives in Chicago now. We sort of chum together: saw
him yesterday. He left Garden City when the land company went up. I tell
you, that was a hot town for a while! Railroads, and factories, and
irrigation schemes, and prices scooting toward the zenith, till you
couldn't rest. If I'd got into that push soon enough, I shouldn't have
made a thing but money; as it was, I didn't lose only what I had. A good
many of the boys lost a lot more. But I tell you, Al, a boom properly
boomed is a sure thing."

"You're a constant source of surprise to me, Jim," said I. "I should
have thought them sure to lose."

"They're sure to win," said he earnestly.

I demurred. "I don't see how that can possibly be," said I, "for of all
things, booms seem to me the most fickle and incalculable."

"They seem so," said he, smiling, but still in earnest, "to your rustic
and untaught mind, and to most others, because they haven't been
studied. The comet, likewise, doesn't seem very stable or dependable;
but to the eye of the astronomer its orbit is plain, and the time of its
return engagement pretty certain. It's the same with seventeen-year
locusts--and boom