Page:Cy Warman--The express messenger and other tales of the rail.djvu/177

Rh cry when I'm tryin to laugh. I'm goin back home this fall," he added, after a pause, "to get my money,—I'm twenty-one now,—but I'm comin back out here; this country is all right."

Doc, who had earned his title by doctoring his uncle's horses, had inherited a little fortune of eighteen hundred dollars, and when the summer had come and gone, he went back home in a Pullman car, for he had saved fifty dollars out of his salary of sixty dollars and board every month.

Five years later, in the dawning of the morning, as I was climbing out of an upper berth at another mountain town, a man caught hold of my coat-tail, and I found that the "man under my bed" was Doc Pippin. He said he was living in Denver; so was I, and in a few days he came in to see me. He came often and told the best stories I had ever heard. He was thin and pale, and I noticed that he coughed and pounded his left lung when he did so. These stories were not told to me for publication, but I know he will not care, for he is careless now.

Doc went to Chicago after receiving his