n the West. People from our town, who seem
to swarm over the earth, wrote back that they had met Joe in Dodge
City, in Leoti, in No-Man's-Land, in Texas, in Arizona--wherever there
was trouble. Sometimes he was the hired bad man of a desert town, whose
business it was to shoot terror into the hearts of disturbers from rival
towns; sometimes he was a free lance--living the devil knows how--always
dressed like a fashion-plate of the plains in high-heeled boots, wide
felt hat, flowing necktie, flannel shirt and velvet trousers. They say
that he did not gamble more than was common among the sporting men of
his class, and that he never worked. Sometimes we heard of him
adventuring as a land dealer, sometimes as a cattleman, sometimes as a
mining promoter, sometimes as a horseman, but always as the sharper, who
rides on the crest of the forward wave of civilization, leaving a town
when it tears down its tents and puts up brick buildings, and then
appearing in the next canvas community, wherein the night is filled with
music, and the cares that infest the day are drowned in bad whiskey or
winked out with powder and shot. And thus Joe Nevison closed his
twenties--a desert scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it. As he
passed into his thirties he left the smoky human crystals that formed on
the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too
effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could
not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass,
seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote
and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided
ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a
lone highwayman. At least, so men said in the West, though no one could
prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band
of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States
marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was
established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better
and safer for them than ordinary highway faring. At Lawton our people
saw Joe and he asked about the home people, asked about the boys--the
old boys he called them--and becoming possessed of a post-office
address, Joe wrote a long letter to George Kirwin, the foreman of our
office. We call him old George, because he is still under forty. Joe
being in an expansive mood, a