Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John - The Villains

The Villains

The main villains in the book are the malicious cowboys who intercept the travelers in western Arizona. Their identity is surprising: they are not Americans but Englishmen, a crew of "remittance men." They are offspring of the English gentry and aristocracy, who are paid by their families to live away from home, either for their crimes and sins or simply because they are inconvenient younger sons in the system of primogeniture. Uncle John calls them "mollycoddles and social drones...." The leader of the group is Algernon Tobey, "the fourth son of old Lord Featherbone," who "got into a disgraceful mess in London some years ago." The travelers confront the remittance men about their dissolute and disorderly way of life. Patsy argues with one man named Tim, telling him that he should forget about his meagre allowance, leave his barren ranch, and head for the growing cities of the West to build a new life through honest work. Tim, however, rejects this advice; ambition bores him, and he is content with what little pleasure he can squeeze out of his situation. Patsy gives up on Tim; "His world was not their world."

(Perhaps coincidentally, Robert W. Service published his poem "The Rhyme of the Remittance Man" in his 1907 collection The Spell of the Yukon. Mark Twain also wrote about a remittance man in his 1897 book Following the Equator.)