ast, lonely, perhaps grieved, walked
straight into the outstretched arms and straight into the heart of the
Littlest Girl from Kansas.

CHAPTER VII

TEMPTATION AT HEART'S DESIRE

_Showing how Paradise was lost through the Strange Performance of a
Craven Adam_

The hotel of Uncle Jim Brothers, to which Dan Anderson led Mr.
Ellsworth, was a long, low adobe, earthen roofed. The window-panes
were very small, where any still remained. The interior of the hotel
consisted of a long dining room, a kitchen, a room where Uncle Jim
slept, and a very few other rooms, guest chambers where any man might
rest if very weary from one cause or another. The front door was
always open. The hotel of Uncle Jim Brothers, not being civilized but
utterly barbaric, was anchorage for the Dead Broke, in a way both
hotel and bank.

There was in Heart's Desire, at least before this coming of Eastern
Capital, only three hundred dollars in the total and combined
circulating medium. That was all the money there was. No one could
be richer than three hundred dollars, for that was the limit of all
wealth, as was very well known. To many this may seem a restricting
and narrowing feature; but, as a matter of fact, three hundred dollars
is not only plenty of money for one man to have, but it is plenty for
a whole town to have, as any man of Heart's Desire could have told you.

A stranger dropping into that hostelry, and taking a glance behind the
front door, might have thought that he was in an armory or some place
devoted to the sale of firearms. There were many nails driven into
the wooden window-facings, the door-jambs, and elsewhere, and all
these nails held specimens of weapons. Excellent weapons they were,
too, as good and smooth-running six-shooters as ever came out of
Colt's factory; and Winchesters which, if they showed fore-ends
bruised by saddle-tree and stocks dented by rough use among the hills,
none the less were very clean about the barrels and the locks. At
times there were dozens of these guns and rifles to be seen on the
wall at Uncle Jim's hotel. The visible supply fluctuated somewhat.
Any observer of industrial economics might have discovered it to move
up or down in unison with the current amount visible of the
circulating medium.

Uncle Jim never asked cash or security of any man. If a man paid,
very well. If he did not pay, it would have been unkind to ask him,
for assuredly he would have paid if he could,