Indeed, he had lived a life that had left him scarce more than a boy, all these years alone on outskirts of the world.
He motioned to them to put the hat on the bed side him.

"I want it here," he said after a time, moving restlessly when they undertook to take it from him.
He touched it with his hand.

At length he reached out and dropped it on the chair at the head of his bed, now and again turning and looking at it the best he might, laboring as he did with his torn lungs; looking at it with some strange sort of reverence in his gaze, some tremendous significance.
"Ain't she _fine_ ?" he asked of his friend, again with his astonishingly winsome smile; a smile they found hard to look upon.
A half hour later some man down the road said to another that the sagebrusher had croaked too.
That is to say, Sim Gage, gentleman, soldier and patriot, had passed on to the place where men find reward for doing the very best they know with what God has seen fit to give them as their own..