nd with more money on his clothes than he
cared for, sent old George ten dollars to pay for a dollar Joe had
borrowed the day he left town in the eighties. We printed Joe's letter
in our paper, and it pleased his mother. That was the beginning of a
regular correspondence between the rover and the home-stayer. George
Kirwin, gaunt, taciturn, and hard-working, had grown out of the dreamy,
story-loving boy who had been one of the Slaves of the Magic Tree and
into a shy old bachelor who wept over "East Lynne" whenever it came to
the town opera house, and asked for a lay-off only when Modjeska
appeared in Topeka, or when there was grand opera at Kansas City. But he
ruled the back office with an iron hand and superintended the Mission
Sunday-School across the track, putting all his spare money into
Christmas presents for his pupils. After that first letter that came
from Joe Nevison, no one had a hint of what passed between the two men.
But a month never went by that Joe's letter missed. When Lawton began
to wane, Joe Nevison seemed to mend his wayward course. He moved to
South McAlester and opened a faro game--a square game they said it
was--for the Territory! This meant that unless Joe was hard up every man
had his chance before the wheel. Old George took the longest trip of his
life, when we got him a pass to South McAlester and he put on his black
frock coat and went to visit Joe. All that we learned from him was that
Joe "had changed a good deal," and that he was "taking everything in the
drug store, from the big green bottle at the right of the front door
clear around past the red prescription case, and back to the big blue
bottle at the left of the door." But after George came home the Mission
Sunday-School began to thrive. George was not afraid of tainted money,
and the school got a new library, which included "Tom Sawyer" and
"Huckleberry Finn," as well as "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates" for
the boys, and all the "Pansy" books for the girls. It was a quaint old
lot of books, and George Kirwin was nearly a year getting it together.
Also he bought a new stove for his Sunday-School room, and a lot of
pictures for the church walls, among others "Wide Awake and Fast
Asleep," "Simply to Thy Cross," and "The Old Oaken Bucket." He gave to
the school a cabinet organ with more stops than most of the children
could count.

[Illustration: A desert Scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it]

A year ago a new reporter bro