His little son, Lovey Dimple, was seated beside him during one of Mr. Armstrong's calls. He was allowed to visit his father, and waited upon him day by day, sometimes telling him of the pleasant times he had had at the seashore, and at others watching him quietly. His presence seemed to do his father good; and on this visit Mr. Armstrong was able to obtain much more information from Stephen Trimble than upon any previous occasion.
"You are quite sure," Mr. Armstrong asked, "that you never saw this check, which someone has cashed at the bank, and which is indorsed with your name?"
"Never, never!" replied the wounded man.
"I see it, though," Lovey Dimple spoke up, promptly. "Jim had come down to the court to see me, and I wanted to show him the machine in the Rooshans' room, and we follered him in there. Mr. Meyer dropped a piece of paper which looked like that, and Jim picked it up. He could tell you what was written on it."
"I must have Jim as a link in our chain of testimony," Mr. Armstrong replied. "Is he at the Home of the Elder Brother?"
"No, sir; Jim used to be there, but he had the luck to be adopted. He went away just for to be a tiger for some swells, and they liked him so much they permoted him. He's Jim Roservelt now."
So this was the lad of whom Adelaide had spoken to him. Mr. Armstrong wrote to his friend Mr. Roseveldt, requesting that Jim should be sent to the city. His testimony at the trial was so clear and concise, and his entire appearance so manly, that Mr. Armstrong was greatly drawn to him.
"If my own boy had lived," he said to Mr. Roseveldt, who had come to the city with Jim, "he would have been about the age of this little fellow. I am about to make a western trip of six or seven weeks, and would like to take him with me. Should the liking which I have taken to him grow upon acquaintance, I beg of you to relinquish him to me; I need him, for I am a stricken man, and you are a fortunate one, or I would not ask it."
Mr. Roseveldt replied that, though he was fond of Jim, he would willingly give him up to Mr. Armstrong for adoption after his return from the West, provided the boy's mother would consent to the transfer. Singularly enough, the name of that mother was not mentioned, and Mr. Armstrong took Jim with him to Colorado, little dreaming that the boy was his own son.
He had said that he needed Jim; and he needed him in more ways than he knew. He had grown world-soiled, as well as world-weary, and the companionship of a soul white and young was destined to exert upon him a purifying as well as rejuvenating influence. Before the grand mountain scenery Jim's fresh enthusiasm stimulated Mr. Armstrong's sated admiration, and the child's naive ideas of right and wrong were a rebuke to the man's sophistries. They journeyed together through the wild and beautiful cañons of the Rocky Mountains, and the boy was deeply impressed by the stupendous cliffs rising on each side—walls that were sometimes two thousand feet in height, and so close together that the narrow river, which had cut its way down from the surface, sometimes filled the entire space at the bottom of the gorge. But even here the ingenuity of man had surmounted the barriers of nature, and the observation-car on which they rode dashed along upon a shelf cut in the solid rock, with a sheer wall on one hand, and a dizzy precipice on the other. Such a cañon was the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas; in one portion an iron bridge hangs suspended from strong supports fixed in the solid walls, and the train glides along it, swaying as in a hammock, over the brawling river.