The lady slipper, that rare wild flower, grew unplucked beside the trails that he had made. The people interested in him, his relatives, had many children of their own ; he was as a fifth wheel to a wagon, and they thought that he might make a place for himself in the west. So, at the age of fifteen or sixteen years, they sent him out to the far wilderness of Cheyenne, "to find work upon a ranch."
By way of Denver, he reached Cheyenne in the middle of a dark and stormy night. He had no money, and his sole possession aside from the clothes he wore, was an old horse pistol which his uncle had given him, and who said at the time that he "might need it to fight Indians."
He crawled underneath the wooden platform that then served at the Union Pacific depot, and indulged in fitful slunlber until dawn. Then he sought for a pawn shop, that he might get rid of his antiquated gun to furnish money for food. He also sought at the restaurants, and offered to leave the gun as security for his breakfast. One of the old night women of Cheyenne, straggling along in the grey dawn of morning, saw him, and bought him his breakfast. Her motherly intuition had sensed his needs, and her ragged heart had pulsed for the moment with the eternal sensibility of charity. Thus even in the lowly and the sinful, the spark of eternity ever shines.