h, and
Jim was poor, and the whole world stood with its back to us, and Josie
held aloof. I was afraid he would speak of it, every time he tried to
talk.

That night when the evening papers came out with all their plenitude of
bad news (for we had pleased Watson by dying on the evening papers'
time), it was a dark moment for us. Jim lay silent and unmoving, as if
all his ebullient energy had gone forever. The physician omitted the
dressing of his wound, because, he said, he feared the patient was not
strong enough to bear it: and this, as well as the strange semi-stupor
of the sufferer, frightened me. Jim had said little, and most of his
words had been of the trivial things of the sick-room. Only once did he
refer to the great affairs in which we had been for so long engrossed.

"What day is this?" he asked.

"Friday," said I, "the twenty-first."

"By this time," said he feebly, "we must be pretty well shot to rags."

"Never mind about that," said I, holding his hands in mine. "Never mind,
Jim!"

"Some of those gophers," said he, after a while, "used to learn to ...
rub their noses ... in the dirt ... and always stick their heads
up--outside the snare!"

"Yes," said I, "I remember. Go to sleep, old man!"

I thought him delirious, and he knew and resented it; being evidently
convinced that he had just made a wise remark. It touched me to hear
him, even in his extremity, return to those boyhood days when we trapped
and hunted and fished together. He saw my pitying look.

"I'm all right," said he; but he said no more.

The nurse came in, and told me that Mrs. Barslow wished to see me in the
library. I went down, and found Josie and Alice together.

"I got a letter from--from Mr. Cornish," said she, "telling me that he
was returning from Chicago to-night, and was coming to see me. I ran
over, because--and told mamma to say that I couldn't see him."

"See him by all means," said I with some bitterness. "You should make
it a point to see him. Mr. Cornish is a success. He alone of us all has
shown real greatness."

And it dawned upon me, as I said it, what Jim had meant by his reference
to the gopher which learns to stick its head up "outside the snare."

"I want to ask you," said Josie, "is it all true--what was in the paper
to-night about all of you, Mr. Hinckley and yourself, and--all of you
having failed?"

"It is only a part of the truth," I replied. "We are ruined absolutely."

She said nothing by way