In my capacity of justice of the peace and general wholesale and retail dealer in fresh, new-laid equity and evenhanded justice, I often meet with those who have seen better days, and who, through the ever-changing fortunes of the west, have fallen lower and lower in the social scale, until they stand up and are assessed as "common drunks," or "vags," or "assault and batteries," with that natural and easy grace which comes only to those who have been before the public in that capacity, so numerously, that it has ceased to indicate itself by the usual embarrassment of the amateur.
9145
Perhaps no surging sentiments of pity have stirred my very soul during my official career, like those that throbbed wildly athwart my system a few days ago.
It was a case of the most bitter disappointment of a young life. A youth from Chicago, came to me, near the close of day. I was just about to lock up the judicial scales for the evening, and secure the doors of the archives, preparatory to going out and "shaking" the mayor for the lemonade, after which I intended to breathe in a little fresh atmosphere and go home to dinner.
It had been a hard day in the temple of justice that day, and the court was weary.
It had dealt out even-handed justice at regular rates, since early morning, at so much per deal, till fatigue was beginning to show itself in the lines upon the broad, white brow.
Therefore, when a halting step was heard on the stair, there was a low murmur on the part of the court, and a half-surprised moan that sounded like the tail end of an affidavit.
The young man who entered the hallowed presence of eternal justice, and the all-pervading and dazzling beauty of the court in its shirt-sleeves, was of about medium stature, with shoes cut decollette, and Roman-striped socks clocked with brocaded straw-colored silk.
He wore an ecru colored straw hat, with navy-blue brocaded band, and necktie of old gold, with polka dots of humberta and cardinal, interspersed with embroidered horseshoe and stirrup in coucherde soleil and ultramarine.
His hair was dark and oleaginous, and his shirt was cream colored ground, with narrow baby-blue stripes, cutaway collar, and cuffs that extended out into space.
He also had some other clothes on.
But over all, and pervading the entire man, was the look of hopelessness and corroding grief. With all his good clothes on, he was a hollow mockery, for his eyes were heavy with woe.
The nose also was heavy with woe.
This feature in fact was more appropriately draped in token of its sadness than any of the rest. Few noses are so expressive of a general and incurable gloom as this one was. It had evidently at one time been a glad, joyous, and buoyant nose, but now it was despondent and low spirited.
There was a look of goneness and utter desolation about it that would stir the better impulses of the most heartless.
The feature had evidently tried to centralize itself, but had failed. Here and there narrow strips of court-plaster had gone out after it and tried to win it back, but they had not succeeded.
I said, "Mister, there seems to be a panic among your nose. It's none of my business, of course, but couldn't you get a brass band and call it together? Then you could hold a meeting and decide whether it had better resume or not."
The gentleman from Chicago went through the motions of wiping the wide waste and howling desolation where his once joyous nose had been, and then, putting away the plum-colored silk handkerchief with the orange border, he said "'Squire, I have been grossly deceived. You see in me the victim of a base misrepresentation. In Chicago this season of the year is extremely unhealthy. The intense hot weather carries away the innocent and the good, and I feared that my turn would come soon.
"I heard of the salubrious clime of your mountain city, where the days are filled with gladness and the burning heat of the mighty city by the inland sea never comes.
"I came here two brief days ago, and you can see with the naked eye what the result has been.
"It is not gratifying. The climate may in the abstract be all right, but there are certain sudden and wonderful atmospheric changes that I cannot account for, and they are very disastrous.
"I was sitting in a Second Street saloon to-day, talking about matters and things, when the conversation turned on physical strength. One thing led to another, and finally I made a little humorous remark to a young man there, which remark I have made in Chicago many times without disastrous results, but the air clouded up all of a sudden, and in the darkness I could see Roman candles going off and pin-wheels and high-priced rockets and blue-lights, etc.
"Shortly after that I gathered up what fragments of my face I could find and went down to the doctor's office.
"He held an inquest on my nose, and I paid for it.
"I shall go back to Chicago to-morrow. I shall not be as handsome as I was, but I have gained a good deal of information about the broad and beautiful west which is priceless in value to me.
"All I wished to say was this; if you see fit to mention this matter to the public, tone it down as much as possible, and say that for a bilious, nervous temperament, perhaps the air here is too bracing."
I have considered his sensitive feelings, and have tried to give the above account in fair and impartial terms.
Another class of those who frequent the temple of justice includes those who are in search of matrimony at reduced rates.
I remember one unostentatious little wedding which took place at the general headquarters of municipal jurisprudence, over which I preside, and during the earlier history of my reign.
It was quite a success in a small way.
I had just moved into the office, and had been engaged that morning in putting up a stove. The stove had seemed reluctant, and as my assistant was sociably drunk, I had not succeeded very well.
The pipe didn't seem to be harmonious, and the effort to bring about a union between the discordant elements, had not, up to the time of which I speak, produced any very gratifying results.
I had reached down into the elbow of the pipe several times, to see how it felt down there, and after satisfying my morbid curiosity in that respect, I had yielded to a wild and uncontrollable desire to scratch my nose with the same hand.
This had given me an air of intense sadness, and opaque gloom.
I stood on the top of a step-ladder trying to make the end of a six-inch joint of pipe go into the end of a five-inch joint, when the groom entered. He wanted to know if he could see the general manager, and I told him he could if he had a piece of smoked glass, and a $5 promissory note executed by old man Spinner.
Then he told me how he was fixed. He desired a small package of connubial bliss, and without delay.
The necessary preliminaries were arranged; the groom made an extempore effort to spit in the mosaic cuspidore, but was only partially successful, put on his hat and went out in search of Juliet.
She was very unique in her style, and entirely free from any effort to appear to the best advantage.
She wore her hair plain,a laSitting Bull. It had been banged, but not with any great degree of system or accuracy. Probably it had been done with the pinking-iron or a pair of ice-tongs by an amateur banger.
She looked some like Mrs. Bender, only younger and more queenly, perhaps.
She swept into the arena with the symmetrical movement and careless grace of a hired man—only her steps were longer and less methodical.
Both bride and groom had come through with a band of emigrants from Kansas, and, therefore, they were out of swallow-tail coats and orange blossoms.
There was no airy tulle and shimmering satin, or broadcloth and spike-tail coat in the procession; at least there was none visible to the court.
The groom was bronzed and bearded like a pard, whatever that is, and wore a pair of brown-duck overalls, caught back with copper rivets and held in place by a lonely suspender. He also wore a hickory shirt with stripes running vertically. His hair looked like burnished gold, only he hadn't burnished it much since he left Kansas.
The entire emigrant train dropped in one by one to witness the ceremony, and seemed impressed with the overshadowing and awe-inspiring nature of the surroundings.
One by one they filed in, and, making their little contribution to the mosaic cuspidore, they leaned themselves up against the wall and wrapped themselves in thought.
I bandaged my finger, which I had skinned some in putting the stove together, wiped off what soot and ashes I had about my person and thought I would not need, and boldly solidified these two young hearts.
The ceremony was not very impressive, but it did the required amount of damage. That was all that was necessary.
The applicants seemed to miss the wedding-march and some other little preparatory arrangements, which I had overlooked, but I apologized to them afterward, and told them that when times picked up a little, and I got established, and the new fee-bill went into operation, I would attend to these things.
The wedding presents were not numerous, but they were useful, and showed the good sense of the donors.
The bride's mother gave her one of the splint-bottom chairs that one always sees tied to the rear of every well regulated emigrant wagon, and her father gave her a cream-colored dog, with one eye knocked out.
With his overflowing wealth of flea-bitten dogs, he might have done much better by her than he did, but he said he would wait a few years and if she were poor enough to need more dogs, he would not be parsimonious.
The young couple went up on Coyote Creek and went to housekeeping, and years have gone by since without word from them.
In the turmoil and hurry of life, I had almost forgotten them until Cole's circus was in town the other day.
That brought them to light.
They had done well in the dog business, and had succeeded in promoting the growth of a new kind of meek and lowly dog, with sore places on him for homeless and orphan flies.
They also had several children with reddish hair and large, wilted ears.
The youngest one was quite young, and cried when the calliope burst into a wild rhapsody of Nancy Lee.
When I saw the family, the mother was eagerly watching the parade, and at the same time trying to broil the baby's nose in the sun. It was almost done, when I was called away by other business, so I cannot say positively whether the child was taken home rare or well-done.
Spring is the most joyful season of the year. The little brooklets are released from their icy fetters and go laughing and rippling along their winding way. The birds begin to sing in the budding branches, and the soft South wind calls forth the green grass.
The husbandman then goes forth to dig the horseradish for his frugal meal. He also jabs his finger into the rosebud mouth of the wild-eyed calf, and proceeds to wean him from the gentle cow. The cow-boy goes forth humming a jocund lay. So does the hen. Boys should not go near the hen while she is occupied with her tuneful lay. She might seize them by the off ear, and bear them away to her den, and feed them to her young. The hen rises early in the morning so as to catch the swift-footed angleworm as he flits from flower to flower. The angleworm cannot bite.
In the spring the young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. Love is a good thing.
The picnic plant will soon lift its little head to the sunshine, and the picnic manager will go out and survey the country, to find where the most God-forsaken places are, and then he will get up an excursion to some of these picturesque mud-holes and sand-piles; and the man who swore last year that he would never go to another picnic, will pack up some mustard, and bay rum, and pickles, and glycerine, and a lap-robe, and some camphor, and a spyglass, and some court-plaster; and he will heave a sigh and go out to the glens and rural retreats, and fill his skin full of Tolu, Rock and Rye, and hatred toward all mankind and womankind; and he will skin his hands, and try to rub the downy fluff and bloom from a cactus by sitting down on it.
I have attended picnics regularly for nearly ten years now, and I am a man of a good deal of firmness, too, but I cannot hold a cactus down on the ground with my entire weight, any better than when I first began; and I feel that I am getting farther and farther from redeeming grace.
With the approach of spring the correspondence between myself and Mr. Le Duc begins to get more brisk also. He writes me under date of March 20, saying that he is preparing for amore vigorous campaign this summer than ever before. He thinks the clip from his Cotswold hydraulic rams will exceed that of any previous year. He will also experiment in a scientific manner to perfect the laying of fancy Easter porcelain and decorated China eggs by Cochin China fowls. If they cannot manage it he will try some experiments on the egg plant. Mr. Le Duc is a man who is not easily discouraged by small obstacles. He will watch the habits of the grasshopper and curculio and bed-bug, also with great assiduity. I have begged him to transfer the bed-bug to the Indian Department. He always regards my suggestions very favorably, because, as he says, I am "so practical."
We are going to devote a part of the summer to grafting the saddle-rock oyster on the vegetable oyster-plant, and will spare no pains to secure an inland oyster that will stand this dry air and high, rigorous climate.
Recently I have had the pleasure of acting as chief mourner at a mountain picnic. This subject has been pretty well represented in romance and song already; but I venture to give my experience as being a little out of the ordinary.
The joy which is experienced in the glad, free life of the picnicker is always before the picnic. On the evening before he makes the excursion, he is too full of sacred pleasure and lavender-colored tranquillity for anything.
He glides about the house, softly warbling to himself the fragment of some tender love song, while he packs the corkscrews and matches, and other vegetables for the morrow.
I was placed in command of a party of ladies who had everything arranged so that all I needed to do would be to get into the buggy and drive to the mountains, eat my lunch, and drive back again.
I like to go with a party of ladies, because they never make suggestions about the route, or how to drive.
9154
They are just as full of gentle trust and child-like confidence and questions as they can be.
They get the lunch ready and get into the buggy, and keep thinking of things they have forgotten, till they get 400 miles from home, and they sing little pieces of old songs, and won't let the great, horrid man in charge of the excursion have any lunch when he gets hungry, because they are hunting for a romantic spot beneath the boughs of a magnificent elm, while every sane man in the Territory knows that there isn't an elm big or little, within 1,4321 1/2 miles.
We went up in the mountains, because we wanted to go where it would be cool. As a search for a cool resort, this picnic of ours was the most brilliant success. We kept going up at an angle of forty-five degrees from the time we left home until we had to get out and walk to keep warm. We got into one of the upper strata of clouds; and a cold mist mixed with fragments of ice-cream, and large chunks of hail and misery, about the size of a burglar-proof safe came gathering over us. Then we camped in the midst of the mountain storm, and the various ladies sat down on their feet, and put the lap-robes over them, and looked reproachfully at me. We hovered around under the buggy, and two or three little half-grown parasols, and watched the storm. It was a glorious spectacle to the thinking mind.
They began to abuse me because I did not make a circus of myself, and thus drive away the despair and misery of the occasion. They had brought me along, it seemed, because I was such an amusing little cuss. It made me a good deal sadder than I would have been otherwise. Here in the midst of a wild and bitter mountain storm, so thick that you couldn't see twenty yards away, with nothing to eat but some marble cake soaked in vinegar, and a piece of cold tongue with a red ant on it, I was expected to make a hippodrome and negro minstrel show of myself. I burst into tears, and tried to sit on my feet as the ladies did. I couldn't do it, so simultaneously and so extemporaneously, as it were, as they could. I had to take them by sections and sit on them. My feet are not large, but at the same time I cannot hover over them both at the same time.
Dear reader, did you ever sit amidst the silence and solitude of the mountains and feel the hailstones rolling down your back, melting and soothing you, and filling your heart with great surging thoughts of the sweet bye-and-bye, and death, and the grave, and other mirth-provoking topics? We had now been about two hundred years without food, it seemed to me, and I mildly suggested that I would like something to eat rather than die of starvation in the midst of plenty; but the ladies wouldn't give me so much as a ham handwich to preserve my life. They told me to smoke if I felt that I must have nourishment, and coldly refused to let me sample the pickled spiders and cold-pressed flies.
So in the midst of all this prepared food I had to go out into the sagebrush and eat raw grasshoppers and grease-wood.
Bye and bye, when we concluded that we had seen about all the mountain storm we needed in our business, and didn't pine for any more hail-stones and dampness, we hitched up again and started home. Then we got lost. The ladies felt indignant, but I was delighted. I never was so lost in all my life. When I was asked where I thought I was, I could cheerfully reply that I didn't know, and that would stop the conversation for as much as two minutes.
The beauty of being lost is that you are all the time seeing new objects. There is a charm of novelty about being lost that one does not fully understand until he has been there, so to speak.
When I would say that I didn't know where the road led to that we were traveling, one of the party would suggest with mingled bitterness and regret, that we had better turn back. Then I would turn back. I turned back seventeen times at the request of various members of the party for whom I had, and still have, the most unbounded respect.
Finally we got so accustomed to the various objects along this line of travel, that we pined for a change. Then we drove ahead a little farther and found the road. It had been there all the time. It is there yet.
I never had so much fun in all my life. It don't take much to please me, however. I'm of a cheerful disposition, anyhow.
Some of the ladies brought home columbines that had been drowned; others brought home beautiful green mosses with red bugs in them; and others brought home lichens and ferns and neuralgia.
I didn't bring anything home. I was glad to get home myself, and know that I was all there.
I took the lunch basket and examined it. It looked sick and unhappy. At first I thought I would pick the red ants out of the lunch; then I thought it would save time to pick the lunch out of the red ants; but finally I thought I would compromise, by throwing the whole thing into the alley.
I am now preparing a work to be called the "Pick Nicker's Guide; or Starvation Made Easy and Even Desirable!" It will supply a want long felt, and will be within the reach of all.
Many years ago, when business in my office was not very rushing, and time hung heavy on my hands, before I had attempted journalism, and no dream of my present dazzling literary success had entered my mind, I rashly offered to assist applicants for pensions in attracting the attention of the general government, at so much per head.
One hot day in July while I sat in my office killing flies with an elastic band and wondering if my mines would ever be quoted in the market, a middle-aged man came in and, spitting calmly into the porcelain cuspidore, began to tell me about his service as a soldier, and how he was wounded, and wished to secure a pension.
He said that several attorneys had already tried to procure one for him, but had failed to do so, giving up in despair. I examined the wound, which consisted of a large hole in the skull, caused by a gun-shot wound. He was almost entirely prevented by this wound from obtaining a livelihood, because he was liable at any moment to fall insensible to the ground, as the result of exercise or work. I told him that I would snatch a few moments from my arduous duties and proceed to do as he requested me.
Then I began a very brisk correspondence with the Interior Department. I would write to the Commissioner of Pensions in my vivacious but firm manner and he would send me back a humorous little circular showing me that I had been too hasty and premature. I never got mad or forgot myself but began a little farther back in the history of the world, and gradually led up to the war of the rebellion.
In reply the Commissioner would write back to me that my chronological table was at fault and I would cheerfully correct the error and proceed.
At this time, however, my client became a little despondent, several years having elapsed since we began our task. So to my other labors I had to add that of cheering up the applicant.
Time dragged its slow length along. Months succeeded months and the years sped on.
The Interior Department never forgot me. Every little while I would get a printed circular boiling over with mirth and filled with the most delightful conundrums relative to the late unpleasantness. These conundrums I would have my client answer and swear to every time, although I could see that he was failing mentally and physically. He would come into my office almost every day, and silently raise his right hand and with uncovered head stand there in a reverent attitude for me to swear him to something. Sometimes I had nothing for him to swear to, and then I would make him take the oath of allegiance and send him away. I wanted to keep him loyal if I could, whether he got his pension or not.
The last work had been nearly completed, and the claim had been turned over to the Surgeon-General's office, when the applicant yielded to the crumbling effect of relentless time, and took to his bed.
It was a sad moment for me. I could not keep back the silent tears when I saw the old man lying there so still and so helpless, and remembered how rosy, and strong, and happy he looked years and years ago, when he first asked me to apply for his pension.
I wrote the Department that if the claims could be passed upon soon, I would keep my client up on stimulants a short time, but that he was failing fast. Then I went to the bedside of the old man, and watched him tenderly.
When he saw me come into his room, although he could not talk any more, he would feebly raise his right hand, and I would swear him to support the Constitution of the United States, and then he would be easier. It seemed to me like a ghastly joke for the old man to swear he would support the Constitution of the United States, when he couldn't begin to support his own constitution; but I never mentioned it to him.
At last the blow fell. The Surgeon-General wrote me that owing to the lack of clerical aid in that office, and a failure of Congress to make any appropriation for that purpose, he was behind hand, and could not possibly reach the claim referred to before the close of the following year.
Then the old man passed into the great untried realm of the hereafter. But he was prepared.
With the aid of the government, I had given him an idea of Eternity and its vastness, which could not fail to be of priceless benefit to him.
After the government had used this pension money as long as it needed it, and was, so to speak, once more on its feet, the money was sent, and the old man's great-grand-children got it, and purchased a lawn-mower, a Mexican hairless dog, and some other necessaries of life with it.
I am now out of the pension business. It is a good thing, for I find that I am too impatient to attend to it. I am too anxious for tangible results in the near future. My desire to accomplish anything speedily is too violent and too previous.
In an old number ofHarper's Magazine, will be found a little poem upon the subject of Joseph, the chief of the Nez Perces. There is a kind of mellow and subdued heroic light cast over the final defeat of this great North American horse thief, which is in perfectly pleasing harniony with the New England idea of the noble unlettered relic of a defunct race. This soft-voiced poet, who probably knows about as much of the true occidental pig-stealer, as the latter does about the Electoral College, starts out this little brass-mounted epic in the following elegant style of prevarication:
From the northern desolation,
Comes the cry of exultation,
It has ended—he has yielded, and the stubborn fight won.
Let the nation in its glory,
Bow with shame before the story
Of the hero it has ruined, and the evil it has done.
It is too true that here in the wild West people haven't the advantages that are accorded to the East, and in our uncouth ignorance, and meager facilities for obtaining information, we are, no doubt, too prone to ascribe to the hostile inebriate of the plains a character which does not compare very favorably with the boss hero in the poem hereto attached, and marked "Exhibit A." But the people on the frontier should not set themselves up to judge what they know nothing of. Why should frontiersmen, without colleges, without observatories, without telescopes, or logarithms, or protoplasms, or spectroscopes, or heliotropes, how should they, I ask, who can lay no claim to anything but that they are poor, unsophisticated, grasshopper sufferers; with nothing to refer to but the naked facts—the ruins of their desolated homes, and the ghastly, mutilated corpses of their wives and children—try to compete with the venerable philosophers who live where the Patent Office reports are made, and within the shadow of the building in which theIllustrated Police Gazetteand other such reliable authorities have their birth, and in which are illustrated with graphic skill, the Indian raids of the border, using the same old cut which is taken from the "Death of Captain Cook," to illustrate every Indian outbreak from Nebraska to Oregon.
Is it nothing forsooth for a nomadic race of buffalo slayers and maple sugar makers and cranberry pickers to rise from the dust and learn to love the wise institutions of a free government? To lay aside the old hickory bow of the original red man and take up the improved breech-loader? To take kindly to mixed drinks and Sabbath school picnics and temperance lectures and base-ball matches? To live contentedly about the agencies, playing poker for the whiskies during the cold and cruel winter? Then when the glad song of the robin awakes the echoes in spring, and the air is filled with a thousand nameless odors, among which may be detected the balmy breath of the government sock, to hie him away to the valleys with his fishing rod and flies (and other curious insects), or to spend the glorious days of midsummer at the camp-meeting or the horse-race? We can never know how his poor heart must burn to kick off his box-toed boots and throw aside his dress coat and suspenders, and gallop over the green hills and kick up his heels and whoop and yell, and tear out the tongues of a few white women and be sociable.
They are indeed the nation's wards, a little frisky and playful at times, to be sure, but we must overlook that. There can be no reason nor justice in forbidding these freeborn descendants of these mighty races the inalienable right to lock up their front doors at the agency and put the key in their pockets, and light out, if they wish to, across the country, spreading gory desolation along their trail, eating the farmers' hard earned store, pillaging his home, murdering his household, burning his crops, riding their war horses over his watermelon vines, eating his winter preserves, scalping the hired man and wearing away the farmer's red-flannel undershirt wrong side to, and wrong side up if they want to. And if any ignorant upstart of the frontier, who feels a little sore over the loss of his family, undertakes to defraud these wild, free sons of the forest of any or all of their rights, let the lop-eared, slab-sided, knock-kneed, crosseyed, spavined, lantern-jawed, sway-backed, mangy, flannelmouthed poet of the educated and refined East write poetry about him till he is glad to apologize.
The following letter is from Captain Jack relative to the expedition under his charge, sent out for the purpose of bringing in the murdering group of Utes, against whom the government seems to maintain a feeling, it not of enmity, at least of coolness, and perhaps unfriendliness.
The Indian is not generally supposed to be a humorist, or inclined to be facetious; but the letter below would seem to indicate that there is, at the least, a kind of grim, rough, uncouth attempt on his part to make a paragrapher of himself.
I am not at liberty to give my reasons to the public for the publication of this letter; nor even the manner of securing it. Those to whom my word has been passed relative to a strict secrecy on my part in the above connection, shall not be betrayed. Friends who know me are aware that my word is as good as my bond, and even better than my promissory note.
On the Wing, February 1, 1880.
Dear Sir:—I have a little leisure in which to write of our journey, and will dictate this letter to an amanuensis. [Amanuensis is a Ute word; but you will understand it in this connection. It does not mean anything wrong.]
We find much snow through the mountains, which impedes our progress very materially. We crossed a canyon yesterday where there was a good deal. I should think there might be 1,500 feet in depth of it. It filled the canyon up full, and bulged up ten or fifteen feet above the sides. I composed a short poem about it. I knew that it was wrong to do so; but almost every one else has composed a poem on the beautiful snow, then why should I, although I have not taken out my naturalization papers, be denied the sweet solace of song? I said:
O drifted whiteness covering
The fair face of nature,
Pure as the sigh of a blessed spirit
On the eternal shores, you
Glitter in the summer sun
Considerable. My mortal
Ken seems weak and
Helpless in the midst of
Your dazzling splendor,
And I would hide my
Diminished head like
Serf unclothed in presence
Of his mighty King.
You lie engulphed
Within the cold embrace
Of rocky walls and giant
Cliffs. You spread out
Your white mantle and
Enwrap the whole broad
Universe, and a portion
Of York State.
You seem content,
Resting in silent whiteness
On the frozen breast of
The cold, dead earth. You
Think apparently that
You are middling white;
But once I was in the
Same condition. I was
Pure as the beautiful snow,
But I fell. It was a
Right smart fall, too.
It churned me up a
Good deal and nearly
Knocked the supreme
Duplex from its intellectual
Throne. It occurred in
Washington, D. C.
But thou
Snow, lying so spotless
On the frozen earth, as
I remarked before, thou
Hast indeed a soft,
Soft thing. Thou comest
Down like the silent
Movements of a specter,
And thy fall upon the
Earth is like the tread
Of those who walk the
Shores of immortality.
You lie around all
Winter drawing your
Annuities till spring,
And then the soft
Breath from the south with
Touch seductive bids you
Go, and you light out
With more or less alacrity.
Then rest, O snow,
Where thou hast settled
Down, secure in conscious
Purity. Avoid so far as
Possible the capital of
A republic, and the
Blessing of yours truly
Will settle down upon
You like—like—a
Hired man.
There are, no doubt, some little irregularities about this poem, but I scratched it off one night in camp when my chilblains were hurting me and itching so that I had to write a poem or swear a good deal.
We have not seen anything as yet to shoot at.
That is, of course, I refer to what we came here for. I shot at what I thought to be Douglas the other day, but it turned out to be an old Indian who was out skirmishing around after cotton-tails for his dinner. I snuffed his light out, however. By this time he is chasing cotton-tails in a better, brighter sphere, where the wicked cease from troubling and life is one prolonged Fourth of July. Occasionally we see a squaw and shoot her just for practice. I am getting so I'm pretty good on a wheel and fire.
Douglas ought to be easy to indentify, however, at a great distance, for his features are peculiar. He has a large nose. It is like a premium summer squash, only larger. I don't think I ever saw such a wealth of nose as his. Napoleon used to say that a large nose is indicative of strong character. According to this rule, Douglas must have a character stronger than an eight-mule team.
We start out early to-morrow and hope to bag something, but cannot tell how we will make it. I will report as soon as I get to where there is a telegraph. I do not allow any reporters along with me. A great many of them wanted to go along with me for the excitement. I told them, however, that I could furnish the press with such reports as I saw fit to furnish, and I did not want to take a young man away from the haunts of civilization and waltz him around among the hills of Colorado, for it isn't so much of a success as an editorial picnic after all. I often wish that I could run down to dinner as I did at Washington and eat all I need. I also yearn for the hot Scotch and the spiced rum of the pale-face, and the Scotch plaid lemon pie, and the indestructible blanc-mange, and the buckwheat cakes like door-mats that I got at Washington.
But I must attend to the business of the Great Father, and prepare the remains which he requires for his grand Indian funeral. Till then, adieu. Jack.