Another year passed without bringing any word from the runaway, and it finally got noised abroad in the settlement that he was dead. The old gentleman heard it, and he bent over a little at the shoulders and walked with a cane. It was plain that he loved Tom, and that nobody else could take his place. Six months more passed—Tom had now been gone two years and a half—when one morning I saw General Mason coming down the road faster than I had ever seen him ride before. He held an open letter in his hand, and beckoned me out to the bars. I had seldom seen a man so excited. He was laughing and crying, all at once, so that I could hardly understand him.
“That miserable Tom is alive and kicking,” said he. “Here’s a letter from him that tells me everything he has been through—six pages of it. You must answer it, for I won’t. Write to him that if I had him here with a rawhide in my hand, I would make him shed tears to pay for all the agony he caused me, I bet you. Tell him, too, that everything has been forgotten and forgiven, and that if he will come back I will receive him with open arms. I’ll teach the young scamp to run away from me!”
I wrote to Tom that night, away in some little town in Texas, and in due time he came home. I tell you, it would have bothered anybody in that settlement to take the rawhide to him. He was immense; the climate of Texas seemed to have agreed with him. He had been—but it is a long story, and there isn’ place for it in this book. Besides, I must bid you good-bye as a story-teller, for I am through writing about Tom. I will turn my history of him over to a cowboy who was with him on the Plains and who knows all about him. He promises me that he will soon begin the narrative of his wanderings in a book to be called “ELAM STORM THE WOLFER; or, THE LOST NUGGET.”
Studies in Human and Divine Inter-Relationship
_Professor of Philosophy in Haverford College, Pa._
This is a fresh interpretation of the deepest problems of life. It discusses the most interesting phases of recent psychological investigation into spiritual subjects.
“Professor Jones offers here a series of studies on the nature and meaning of Personality. He is at home in modern psychology and tells it effectively for his purpose in freedom from technicalities.”—_The Outlook._