souls if any one of the gang is found in
Borealis!"

This was all there was, except for a fearful drawing of a coffin and a
skull. And such an array of inky names, scrawled with obvious pains
and distinctness, was on the paper that argument itself was plainly
hand in hand with a noose of rope.

Opposition to an army of forty wrathful and determined men would have
been but suicide. Parky nodded when he read the note. He knew the
game was closed. He sold all his interests in the camp for what they
would bring and bought a pair of horses and a carriage.

In groups and pairs his henchmen--suddenly thrown over by their leader
to hustle for themselves--sneaked away from the town, many of them
leaving immediately in their dread of the grim reign of law now come
upon the camp. Parky, for his part, waited in some deliberation, and
then drove away with a sneer upon his lips when at last his time was
growing uncomfortably short.

Decency had won--the moral slate of the camp was clean!

CHAPTER XXIII

A DAY OF JOY

There came a day--never to be forgotten in the annals of
Borealis--when, to the ringing of the bar of steel, Parson Stowe, with
his pretty little wife and the three little red-capped youngsters, rode
once more into town to make their home with their big, rough friends.

Fifty awkward men of the mines roared lustily with cheering. Fifty
great voices then combined in a sweet, old song that rang through the
snow-clad hills:

"Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on.
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on."

And the first official acts of the wholesome young parson were
conducted in the "church" that Bone had given to the town when the
happy little Skeezucks was christened "Carson Boone" and the drawling
old Jim and the fond Miss Doc were united as man and wife.

"If only I'd known what a heart she's got, I'd asked her before," the
miner drawled. "But, boys, it's never too late to pray for sense."

The moment of it all, however, which the men would remember till the
final call of the trumpet was that in which the three little girls, in
their bright-red caps, came in at the door of the Dennihan home. They
would never forget the look on the face of their motherless, quaint
little waif as he held forth both his tiny arms to the vision and cried
out:

"Bruvver Jim!"

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's Bruvver Jim's Baby, by Phil