iate garb. A tailor
was requisitioned and, finding his client to be indifferent in the matter
of costs, fixed him up with a fine wardrobe--and a fine bill.

Jim spent the best part of two hours trying on the new things. The long
mirror in his bedroom did its best, but it wasn't good enough for Jim. He
groaned as he saw this stranger staring at him from the mirror. He wasn't
built for that sort of garb. The hard hat looked perfectly idiotic and the
starched collars nearly choked him. Eventually he tore the offending
article from his sunscorched neck and flung it across the room. The other
things followed. He stood once more in the rough gray clothes that served
for "best" out West, and jammed the comfortable Stetson hat on his head.

"I'm darned if I'll wear 'em!" he growled.

A few days of shopping and theaters, and he began to grow homesick.
Thoughts of Colorado and the boys constantly flickered in his brain. Here
he was an outcast--a nonentity. He was not good at making friends, and the
New Yorkers were not falling head over heels to shake hands with him,
though more than one pair of eyes looked admiringly at his magnificent
physique.

The loneliness of big cities! How terrible a thing it was. Never at any
time had Jim felt so lonely. The rolling wind-swept prairie had at
least something to offer. In every manifestation of nature he had found a
friend. The wind, and the hills, and the wild animals seemed in some
queer way sterling comrades; but here---- He began to hate it. It was
one huge problem to him. How did it live? What did all the millions do for
a subsistence? It was the first time he had seen the poor--the real,
hopeless, inevitable poor. He had seen men "broke," down to their last
cent; men on the trail, starving, and lost to all sense of decency.
But that was merely transitory. These people were different; they were
born poor, and would be poor until their bones were laid in some
miserable congested cemetery. He found them actually reconciled to
it--unquestioningly accepting their fate and fighting to postpone the
end for as long as possible. It sickened him.

Oh, Colorado! With your wide prairie and your eternal peaks, your carpeted
valleys and your crystalline streams, your fragrant winds and your gift of
God--good men!

He was sitting in the lounge of his hotel one evening, feeling more than
usually homesick, when he noticed a beautiful woman sitting near him. Her
evening dress was cut well away a