ference. Some of them
said that after all he couldn't have been very ambitious. He didn't seem
to take his failure much to heart. Every one was concentrating attention
on the cookingstove, when Jim leaned forward, quickly, over a little
wicker work-stand.

There was a bit of unfinished sewing there, and it fell out as he lifted
the cover. It was a baby's linen shirt. Jim let it lie, and then lifted
from its receptacle a silver thimble. He put it in his vest-pocket.

The campaign came on shortly after this, and Jim Lancy was defeated.
"I'm going to Omaha," said he to the station-master, "and I've got just
enough to buy a ticket with. There's a kind of satisfaction in giving
the last cent I have to the railroads."

Two months later, a "plain drunk" was registered at the station in
Nebraska's metropolis. When they searched him they found nothing in
his pockets but a silver thimble, and Joe Benson, the policeman who had
brought in the "drunk," gave it to the matron, with his compliments. But
she, when no one noticed, went softly to where the man was sleeping, and
slipped it back into his pocket, with a sigh. For she knew somehow--as
women do know things--that he had not stolen that thimble.

THE equinoctial line itself is not more imaginary than the line which
divided the estates of the three Johns. The herds of the three Johns
roamed at will, and nibbled the short grass far and near without let or
hindrance; and the three Johns themselves were utterly indifferent as to
boundary lines. Each of them had filed his application at the office
of the government land-agent; each was engaged in the tedious task of
"proving up;" and each owned one-third of the L-shaped cabin which stood
at the point where the three ranches touched. The hundred and sixty
acres which would have completed this quadrangle had not yet been "taken
up."

The three Johns were not anxious to have a neighbor. Indeed, they had
made up their minds that if one appeared on that adjoining "hun'erd an'
sixty," it would go hard with him. For they did not deal in justice very
much--the three Johns. They considered it effete. It belonged in the
East along with other outgrown superstitions. And they had given it
out widely that it would be healthier for land applicants to give them
elbow-room. It took a good many miles of sunburnt prairie to afford
elbow-room for the three Johns.

They met by accident in Hamilton at the land-office. John Henderson,
fresh fro