pretty much everything you can do with two hands that will earn you a square meal.  I’ve cut corn and ploughed fields, and greased wheels, and chopped wood, and mended machinery, and cleaned the snow away, and once out in some little town in Arizona, I even dug a grave because the sexton was down with pneumonia.  I’ve been brakesman, and freightman, and, after that, freight agent.  That was just before I struck it rich in Colorado.  I was one of the first men at Bonanza City, and when I went there with the railroad—­I was on the very first train that ever ran there—­the whole town was just a row of miners’ shacks near the foot of old Bonanza.  It’s the richest mineral streak in the State, and yet twenty-five years ago, before the C.A. & F.W. tapped it, there wasn’t even a saloon out there at Bonanza.  City.  When you wanted a drink—­and that didn’t worry me, for I haven’t tasted anything but water since I was twenty-five—­you had to go all the way to Olympia to get it; and what was worse, all the ore had to go to Olympia, too, on a little no account branch road to be shipped over the main line.  Well, as soon as I discovered Bonanza City I said that had to change, and it did change.  I guess I did as much to make that town as any man out there, and to-day I own about two thirds of it.  I’ve got a house on Phoenix Avenue, and I gave the town a church and a theatre and the ground for a library.  We’ve got one of the handsomest churches in the State,” he proclaimed with his unconquerable optimism, “and we’ve just begun growing.  Why, in ten years more Bonanza City will be in the race with Denver.”

“And what about your friend?” she asked, finding it difficult to become enthusiastic over the most progressive town in Colorado, a State which she always pictured imaginatively as a kind of rocky desert, inhabited by tribes of gregarious invalids, which one visited for the sake of the scenery or the climate, when one had exhausted the civilized excitements of Europe.

“I am coming back to him,” he responded with a manner of genial remonstrance.  “You just give me time.  But I’d honestly like you to see Bonanza City.  Why, it would take your breath away if I told you it hadn’t even begun to grow twenty years ago.  You people in New York don’t know what progress means.  Why, out there in Bonanza City we do things while you’re thinking about doing them.  But to come back to Barney—­that was his name, Barney McGoldrick—­after I made my pile out of Bonanza, I used to strike here once in a while to see how he was getting along, and when he died I took these rooms just as he left ’em.  There wasn’t a chick or a child to come after him, but he had a string of pensioners as long as the C.A. & F.W.  His money—­it must have been half a million—­all went to charity, but I kept on in the rooms.”

“What kind of man was he?” she asked, sincerely interested.