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“The conductor started to move on. ‘Now, you just hold on a minute, sir,’ said Collins. ‘When this train stops you be right here– right here, I say –and go with me to the superintendent in the depot. If you don’t you won’t be wearing those brass buttons much longer. It’s your business, sir, to look after passengers in a fix like this and I’m going to make it my business to see that you attend to yours.’

“The conductor was lots bigger than my friend; but to a coward a mouse seems as big as an elephant and ‘brass buttons’ said: ‘All right, I’ll be here; but it won’t do no good.’

“As the conductor started down the aisle, Ferguson turned to the woman and said: ‘You shall go through all right, Madam; how much money did you have?’

“‘Three dollars and sixty-five cents,’ she answered–she knew what she had to a penny–three dollars and sixty-five cents; And I’ll bet she knew where every nickel of it came from! A cruel old world this to some people, for a while!

“The train had whistled for Lincoln. Ferguson took off his hat, dropped in a dollar, and passed it over to Billie and me. Then he went down the aisle, saying to the boys, ‘Poor woman, husband just died, left three children, going to hunt work in Colorado, lost her purse with ticket and all the money she had.’ He came back with nearly enough silver in his hat to break out the crown–eighteen dollars!

“‘Will you chip in, Colonel?’ said Ferguson to the old man who had been his traveling companion?

“‘No,’ answered the old skinflint, ‘I think the railroad company ought to look after cases of this kind. Ahem! Ahem!’

“‘Well,’ said Ferguson, snatching the valise out of his seat–I never saw a madder fellow–‘We’ve enough without yours even if you are worth more than all of us. You’re so stingy I won’t even let my grip stay near you.’ “When the train stopped at Lincoln, Billie and Ferguson took the conductor to the superintendent’s office. They sent me to the lunch counter. I got back first with a cup of coffee for the mother and a bag for the children. But pretty soon in bolted Billy and Ferguson. Billie handed the woman a pass to Denver, and Ferguson dumped the eighteen dollars into her lap.

“‘Oh, that’s too much! I’ll take just three dollars and give me your name so that I can send that back,’ said the woman, happier than any one I ever saw.

“But we all rushed away quickly, Billy saying: ‘Oh, never mind our names, madam. Buy something for the children; Good-bye, God bless you!'”

Not the poor widow, alone, but even the big, able-bodied, hungry tramp comes in often to share the drummer’s generosity. A friend once told me of a good turn he did for a “Weary Willie” in Butte.

Now if there is any place on earth where a man is justified in being mean, it is in Butte. It is a mining camp. It rests upon bleak, barren hills; the sulphuric fumes, arising from roasting ores, have long since killed out all vegetation. It has not even a sprig of grass. This smoke, also laden with arsenic, sometimes hovers over Butte like a London fog. More wealth is every year dug out of the earth in Butte, and more money is squandered there by more different kinds of people, than in any place of its size on earth. The dictionary needs one adjective which should qualify Butte and no other place. Many a time while there I’ve expected to see Satan rise up out of a hole. Whenever I start to leave I feel I am going away from the domain of the devil.

“One morning I went down to the depot before five o’clock,” said my friend. “I was to take a belated train. It was below zero, yet I paced up and down the platform outside breathing the sulphur smoke. I was anxious to catch sight of the train. Through the bluish haze, the lamp in the depot cast a light upon a man standing near the track. I went over to him, supposing he was a fellow traveling man. But he was only a tramp who had been fired out of the waiting room. I wore a warm chinchilla, but it made my teeth chatter to see this shivering ‘hobo’ –his hands in his pockets and his last summer’s light weight pinned close around his throat.