ome
East again. Anyway, he let him shift.

That was when Hammond came so near starvin'. But he didn't--quite. For a
year or more he managed to live somehow. Then one day he drove a team
of boneyard mules into Blue Dog with a wagonload of stuff that the
natives stared at. It was white, shiny stuff. Hammond said it was borax.
He'd discovered a big deposit of it out there in the blisterin' sand. He
was goin' to ship it back East and sell it. They thought he was nutty.
He wasn't, though. On East they was usin' a lot of borax and demandin'
more.

With a few thousand back of him Hammond might have got to be the Borax
King right then; but as it was he held onto an interest big enough to
make him quite a plute, and inside of a year he was located in Denver
and earnin' his nickname of Hungry Jim. His desert appetite had stayed
with him, you see, and such little whims as orderin' a three-inch
tenderloin steak frescoed with a pound of mushrooms and swimmin' in the
juice squeezed from a pair of canvasback ducks got to be a reg'lar thing
for him.

It was there he met and married the husky built head waitress and moved
into a double-breasted mansion up on Capitol Hill. Also he begun wearin'
diamond shirtstuds and givin' wine dinners.

"But, like others of his kind," goes on J. Bayard, "his luck didn't
last. Because he'd made one big strike, he thought he knew the mining
game from top to bottom. He lost hundreds of thousands on wild ventures.
His long drawn out suit against Pyramid was another expensive luxury;
for in the end Gordon beat him.

"It was Hammond's big appetite that finished him off, though,--acute
indigestion. So that is why Pyramid leaves us this item in his list:
'The widow or other survivor of James R. Hammond.' Well, I've found them
both, Mrs. Hammond and her son Royce. I haven't actually seen either of
'em as yet; but I have located Mrs. Hammond's attorney and had several
conferences with him. And what do you think? She won't take a dollar of
Gordon's money for herself; nor will Royce directly. There's one thing,
however, that she will probably not refuse,--any social assistance we
may give to her son. That's her chief ambition, it seems,--to see Royce
get into what she considers smart society. Well, what do you say,
McCabe? Can't we help?"

"Depends a good deal on Royce," says I. "Course, if he's too raw a
roughneck----"

"Precisely!" breaks in J. Bayard. "And as the son of such a man we must
look for rat