HANDLE

While his friends and neighbors called Jim Hastings "Big Jim," he was no
more than average size--compact, vigorous, reared in the Wyoming cattle
lands, and typical of the country. He was called Big Jim simply to
distinguish him from Little Jim, who was as well known in Laramie as his
father. Little Jim, when but five years of age, rode his own pony,
jogging alongside his father when they went to town, where he was
decidedly popular with the townsfolk because of his sturdy independence
and humorous grin.

Little Jim talked horses and cattle and ranching with the grown-ups and
took their good-natured joshing philosophically. He seldom retorted
hastily, but, rather, blinked his eyes and wrinkled his forehead as he
digested this or that pleasantry, and either gave it the indifferent
acknowledgment of "Shucks! Think you can josh _me_?" or, if the occasion
and the remark seemed to call for more serious consideration, he rose to
it manfully, and often to the embarrassment of the initial speaker.

Little Jim liked to go to town with his father, yet he considered town
really a sort of suburb to his real world, the homestead, which he had
seen change from a prairie level of unfenced space to a small--and to
him--complete kingdom of pasture lot, hayfield, garden, corrals, stable,
and house. Town was simply a place to which you went to buy things, get
the mail, exchange views on the weather and grazing, and occasionally
help the hands load a shipment of cattle. Little Jim helped by sitting
on the top rail of the pens and commenting on the individual
characteristics of the cattle, and, sometimes, of the men loading them.
In such instances he found opportunity to pay off old scores.
Incidentally he kept the men in good humor by his lively comment.

Little Jim was six years of age when his mother left to resume her
former occupation of waitress in the station restaurant of Laramie,
where she had been popular because of her golden hair, her blue eyes,
and her ability to "talk back" to the regular customers in a manner
which they seemed to enjoy. Big Jim married her when he was not much
more than a boy--twenty, in fact; and during the first few years they
were happy together. But homesteading failed to supply more than their
immediate needs.

Occasional trips to town at first satisfied the wife's craving for the
attention and admiration that most men paid to her rather superficial
good looks. But as the years slipped by,