And when he rejected a mount that tangled its legs in quick action and
stumbled, it was not because he feared to be cracked, but because,
when he took a chance on being cracked, he wanted, as he told John
Chisum himself, "an even break for his money."

It was while at the Jingle-bob, but mailed by a cattleman from
Chicago, that Young Dick wrote a letter to his guardians. Even then,
so careful was he, that the envelope was addressed to Ah Sing. Though
unburdened by his twenty millions, Young Dick never forgot them, and,
fearing his estate might be distributed among remote relatives who
might possibly inhabit New England, he warned his guardians that he
was still alive and that he would return home in several years. Also,
he ordered them to keep Mrs. Summerstone on at her regular salary.

But Young Dick's feet itched. Half a year, he felt, was really more
than he should have spent at the Jingle-bob. As a boy hobo, or road-
kid, he drifted on across the United States, getting acquainted with
its peace officers, police judges, vagrancy laws, and jails. And he
learned vagrants themselves at first hand, and floating laborers and
petty criminals. Among other things, he got acquainted with farms and
farmers, and, in New York State, once picked berries for a week with a
Dutch farmer who was experimenting with one of the first silos erected
in the United States. Nothing of what he learned came to him in the
spirit of research. He had merely the human boy's curiosity about all
things, and he gained merely a huge mass of data concerning human
nature and social conditions that was to stand him in good stead in
later years, when, with the aid of the books, he digested and
classified it.

His adventures did not harm him. Even when he consorted with jail-