One stormy day I came out of the post office and as usual handed up the paper to Tommy, whose habit it was to glance at the headlines and return it to me. This day, however, he found something that interested him. He put the horses’ lines between his legs and crossed his knees on them. I sat beside him on the box and shivered in the wind. He read on and on, column after column, then turned to an inner page, fighting the paper in the wind.

At last, and it seemed an hour, he folded it up carefully and returned it to me. “Good news to-day, Tommy?” “No, boy, no good news. Bad news, awful news, terrible news.” He spoke in an awed voice, a voice that carried reverence. “Terrible news—Jesse James has been murdered, murdered in cold blood and by a traitor.”

He fell silent and spoke to me no more that day. Later he told me many things about Jesse James. He worshiped him, and like many other good people of Missouri firmly believed that neither of the James boys ever fired a shot except in defense of their rights.

I delivered the mail and hastened to tell the other boys that Jesse James was dead, “murdered.” Many of the older boys knew all about him—he was their hero, too—and the things they told me made me decide to get the paper and read his story myself. The next day, strangely enough, I passed the Superior’s office when she was out to lunch. The paper was folded neatly, lying on some older papers on the corner of her neat desk. I walked in and took it. I put it away carefully, but many days passed before I got to the reading of it. I was so occupied with my duties as altar boy, and so busy with preparing for my first communion and learning new prayers, that the James boys and all other worldly things had no place in my mind.

Those were intense days. I lived in another world.

At last I found time to read my paper. On my way for the mail I slowly dug out the story of Jesse James’ life and death, word by word. How I studied the picture of this bearded and be-pistoled hero! And the sketches of his shooting and the house in which it was done. Then came the story of his bereaved mother. How my boyish sympathy went out to her, as she wept for her loss and told the story of the lifelong persecution of her boys, Jesse and Frank, and how she feared that the hunted fugitive, Frank James, would also be dealt with in the same traitorous fashion. How I loathed the traitor, Bob Ford, one of the James boys gang, who shot Jesse when his back was turned, for a reward! How I rejoiced to read that Ford was almost lynched by friends and admirers of Jesse, and had to be locked in the strongest jail in the state to protect him from a mobbing. I finished the story entirely and wholly in sympathy with the James boys, and all other hunted, outlawed, and outraged men.