train was pulling from the St. Louis station, a forged order to carry
the bearer, dead-head, to a certain distant point on the run. The
messenger helped the dead-head into his car, and chummed with him,
until about an hour later, when, as he was on his knees arranging
some of his cargo, he found a pistol muzzle against his cheek, and his
smiling visitor prepared to bind and gag him. Having done this, the
stranger packed one hundred and twenty thousand dollars into a valise;
and dropped off into the dark, when the train made its accustomed
stop at a water-tank. The whole enterprise was so gentle, that the
messenger was arrested and held as an accomplice, while the Pinkertons
looked for the man with the money.

The robber was a kind-hearted person; and, being really grieved over
the detention of an innocent man, wrote several exculpating letters
to the papers, enclosing rifled express envelopes to prove his
peripatetic identity. These letters were signed "Jim Cummings," a _nom
de guerre_ borrowed from an older and an abler offender of the Jesse
James vintage.

After he was arrested and in his cell in the St. Louis jail, "Jim
Cummings" and I became friends, as criminals and newspaper men
sometimes do, and as criminals and I always have done, everywhere,
most easily. The details of his arrangements, both before and after
his draft on the company, were minutely in my mind, and were so very
vital that, with the first need for a drama criminal, I took him.
Goodwin's rival should be Jim Cummings; a glorified and beautiful and
matinée Cummings, but substantially he.

This adoption rescued the girl and the sheriff from the hazy geography
of the mining camps, and fixed the trio in Missouri.