And so he did. By the time his father came home he was sitting up; and he ate breakfast the next morning as if nothing had happened. But he never tried to smoke any more as long as he lived. And he never lied, and he never swore any more.
Oh, no! this Jim that I have been telling you of is "Moral Jim," of the Sierras. The mine? Oh! I almost forgot. Well, that blue dirt was the old bed of the stream, and it was ten times richer than where the miners were all at work below. Struck it! I should say so! Ask any of the old Sierras miners about "The Children's Claim," if you want to hear just how rich they struck it.
A MODERN HERO
It was a very humble house. Only a flat of three rooms on the third floor of a tall tenement-house in a back street near the river. A bedroom, a tiny parlor and a kitchen, which was also an eating-room, made up the suite. The Briggses did all their daylight living in the last-named apartment. The floor was painted yellow; the walls were whitewashed; the furniture was homely, substantial and well-kept.
Everything was shining clean, and both windows were full of plants, many of them in flower. Mrs. Briggs was fully persuaded in her own mind that no other woman in the city had such a tale of daily mercies as herself. Among them were the southern exposure of those windows and the circumstance that a gap in the buildings back of them let in the sunshine freely. Her nasturtiums blossomed there all winter; from a pot she had suspended by strings from the top of the casing, sweet alysseum flowed downward like a fountain of soft green waters tipped with white; scarlet geraniums shot up rank shoots that had to be pruned into reasonableness, and as to Christmas roses—"But there!" the worthy soul would assure her acquaintances, "they do beat everything!"
This winter the calla was about to bloom. A kind lady had given the bulb to Mrs. Briggs's son, and there was no telling the store he set by it.
Topliffe Briggs—alias, Top, Senior—was an engineer on the great North, East, West and South Railway. He sat at the tea-table with his wife and son at five-thirty one cloudy February afternoon. His next train went out at six-forty-five. He had run "Her" into the station at four, and his house was but two blocks away. Mrs. Briggs could see from those unparalleled kitchen-windows the bridge by which the track crossed the river separating the town from the marshes, and could calculate to a minute when the familiar step would be heard on the stairs.
"You see we live by railroad time," was her modest boast. "And my husband always comes straight home." She did not emphasize the "my," knowing in her compassionate heart what other husbands were prone to lag by the way until they came home late and crookedly.
Top, Senior, was on time to-day. "I ken trust Her with Bartlett, you see," he remarked to his wife. "He won't leave tel she's all trig an' tidy for the next trip. I wisht I could be as sure o' Stokes!"