which the skin lay in little cobwebs, stumbled in under the lights of
Number One Commissary Tent.

"I want my time and I want my money. I ain't a-goin' tuh work _no
more!_ he announced with a displeased frown.

"Going back home tuh Coloraydo?" asked the youthful clerk.

"Back home?" repeated Cassidy mechanically. "How--how's that, young
feller?"

"I asked yuh if yuh were going tuh hit the grit fer home?" the boy
repeated.

"Aoh!" said Cassidy, and a blank look spread across his countenance.
He spoke as if he did not understand. For a while he stood quite
still, unknowingly twiddling the time-check in his thick,
fat-cushioned fingers into a moist pink ball. His face grew heavy and
dull. It seemed to have been robbed, with a surprising suddenness, of
all the good spirits, all the abounding, virile life, of the moment
before. It grew to look old and lined under the flickering lamplight,
and this was odd, because Cassidy was not by any means an old man.

For a time the only sound he made was a queer little ejaculation of
surprise, the only movement a bewildered stare at the boy. Together
they were the actions of a child who, in the first numbing moments of
a gashed finger, only gazes at the wound in round-eyed wonder. Cassidy
had begun to remember.

He remembered that "back home" a man didn't have to live _all_ the