{9480}
I said if I could get time I would go over and talk with her and see what she said. So I did. I got along pretty well, too. I found the young woman at home, and told her the legal aspects of the case. She wouldn't admit any of the charges, but after a long parley agreed to execute the deed and save trouble. She came to my office an hour later, and signed the instrument I got two witnesses to the signature and had just put the notarial seal on it when the girl's mother came in. She asked her daughter if she had signed the deed and was told that she had. She said nothing, but smiled in a way that made my blood run cold. If a woman were to smile on me that way every day, I should certainly commit some great crime.
I was just congratulating myself on the success of the business, and was looking at the two $20 gold pieces and trying to get acquainted with them, as it were, after the two women had gone away; when they returned with the husband and son-in-law at the head of the procession. He looked pale and careworn to me. He asked me in a low voice if I had a deed there, executed by his wife. I said yes. He then asked me if I would kindly destroy it. I said I would. I would make deeds and tear them up all day at $40 apiece. I said I liked the conveyancing business very much, and if a client felt like having a grand, warranty deed debauch, I was there to furnish the raw material.
I then tore up the deed and the two women went quietly away. After they had gone, my client, in an absent-minded way, took out a large quid that had outlived its usefulness, laid it tenderly on the open page of Estey's Pleadings, and said:
“You doubtless think I am a singular organization, and that my ways are past finding out. I wish to ask you if I did right a moment ago?” Here he took out another $20 and put it under the paper weight. “When I went down stairs I met my mother-in-law. She always looked to me like a firm woman, but I did not think she was so unswerving as she really was. She asked me in a low, musical voice to please destroy the deed, and then she took one of them Smith & Wesson automatic advance agents of death out from under her apron and kind of wheedled me into saying I would. Now, did I do right? I want a candid, legal opinion, and I'm ready to pay for it.”
I said he did perfectly right.
Hudson, Wis., January 19, 1886.
Dear friend.—I have just received your kind and cordial invitation to come to Washington and spend several weeks there among the eminent men of our proud land. I would be glad to go as you suggest, but I cannot do so at this time. I am passionately fond of mingling with the giddy whirl of good society. I hope you will not feel that my reason for declining your kind invitation is that I feel myself above good society. I assure you I do not.
Nothing pleases me better than to dress up and mingle among my fellow-men, with a sprinkling here and there of the other sex. It is true that the most profitable study for mankind is man, but we should not overlook woman. Woman is now seeking to be emancipated. Let us put our great, strong arms around her and emancipate her. Even if we cannot emancipate but one, we shall not have lived entirely for naught.
I am told by those upon whom I can rely that there are hundreds of attractive young women throughout our joyous land who have arrived at years of discretion and yet who have never been emancipated. I met a woman on the cars last week who is lecturing on this subject, and she told me all about it. Now, the question at once presents itself, how shall we emancipate woman unless we go where she is? We must go right into society and take her by the hand and never let go of her hand till she is properly emancipated. Not only must she be emancipated, but she must be emancipated from her present thralldom. Thralldom of this kind is liable to break out in any community, and those who are now in perfect health may pine away in a short time and flicker.
My course, while mingling in society's mad whirl, is to first open the conversation with a young lady by leading her away to the conservatory, where I ask her if she has ever been the victim of thralldom and whether or not she has ever been ground under the heel of the tyrant man. I then time her pulse for thirty minutes, so as to strike a good average. The emancipation of woman is destined at some day to become one of our leading industries.
You also ask me to kindly lead the German while there. I would cheerfully do so, but owing to the wobbly eccentricity of my cyclone leg, it would be sort of a broken German. But I could sit near by and watch the game with a furtive glance, and fan the young ladies between the acts, and converse with them in low, earnest, passionate tones. I like to converse with people in whom I take an interest. I was conversing with a young lady one evening at a recherche ball in my far away home in the free and unfettered West, a very brilliant affair, I remember, under the auspices of Hose Company No. 2, I was talking in a loud and earnest way to this liquid-eyed creature, a little louder than usual, because the music was rather forte just then, and the base viol virtuoso was bearing on rather hard at that moment. The music ceased with a sudden snort. And so did my wife, who was just waltzing past us. If I had ceased to converse at the same time that the music shut off, all might have been well, but I did not.
Your remark that the president and cabinet would be glad to see me this winter is ill-timed.
There have been times when it would have given me much pleasure to visit Washington, but I did not vote for Mr. Cleveland, to tell the truth, and I know that if I were to go to the White House and visit even for a few days, he would reproach me and throw it up to me. It is true I did not pledge myself to vote for him, but still I would hate to go to a man's house and eat his popcorn and use his smoking tobacco after I had voted against him and talked about him as I have about Cleveland.
No, I can't be a hypocrite. I am right out, open and above board. If I talk about a man behind his back, I won't go and gorge myself with his victuals. I was assured by parties in whom I felt perfect confidence that Mr. Cleveland was a “moral leper,” and relying on such assurances from men in whom I felt that I could trust, and not being at that time where I could ask Mr. Cleveland in person whether he was or was not a moral leper as aforesaid, I assisted in spreading the report that he had been exposed to moral leprosy, and as near as I could learn, he was liable to come down with it at any time.
So that even if I go to Washington I shall put up at a hotel and pay my bills just as any other American citizen would. I know how it is with Mr. Cleveland at this time. When the legislature is in session there, people come in from around Buffalo with their butter and eggs to sell, and stay overnight with the president. But they should not ride a free horse to death. I may not be well educated, but I am high strung till you can't rest Groceries are just as high in Washington as they are in Philadelphia.
I hope that you will not glean from the foregoing that I have lost my interest in national affairs. God forbid. Though not in the political arena myself, my sympathies are with those who are. I am willing to assist the families of those who are in the political arena trying to obtain a precarious livelihood thereby. I was once an official under the Federal government myself, as the curious student of national affairs may learn if he will go to the Treasury Department at Washington, D.C., and ask to see my voucher for $9.85, covering salary as United States commissioner for the Second Judicial District of Wyoming for the year 1882. It was at that time that a vile contemporary characterized me as “a corrupt and venal Federal official who had fattened upon the hard-wrung taxes of my fellow citizens and gorged myself for years at the public crib.” This was unjust I was not corrupt I was not venal. I was only hungry!
There is an institution in Boston which the Pilgrim Fathers did not originate. That is the street car. There is a street car parade all day on Washington street, and a red-light procession most of the night.
People told me that I could get into a car and go anywhere I wanted to. I tried it. There was a point in Boston, I learned, where there were some more relics that I hadn't seen. Parties told me where I could find some more fragments of the Mayflower, and an old chair in which Josiah Quincy had sat down to think. There were also a few more low price flint-lock guns and tomahawks that no man who visited Boston could afford to miss. Besides, there was said to be the lock that used to be on the door of a room in which General Washington had a good notion to write his farewell address. All these things were in the collection which I started out to find, and there were others, also.
For instance, there was a specimen of the lightning that Franklin caught in his demijohn out of the sky, and still in a good state of preservation; also some more clothes in which he was baptized, more swords of Bunker Hill, and a little shirt which John Hancock put on as soon as he was born. Hancock was a perfect gentleman from his birth, and it is said that the first thing he did was to excuse himself for a moment and then put on this shirt. His manners were certainly very agreeable, and he was very much polished.
I heard, too, that there was an acorn from the tree in which Benedict Arnold had his nest while he was hatching treason. I did not believe it, but I had an idea I could readily discover the fraud if I could only see the acorn, for I am a great historian and researcher from away back. I was told that in this collection there was a suspender button shed by Patrick Henry during his memorable speech in which he raised up to his full height on his hind feet and permitted the war to come initalics, also in SMALL CAPS and in LARGE CAPS!!! with three astonishers on the end.
So I wanted to find this place, and as I had plenty of means I decided to ride in a street car. Therefore, I aimed my panic price cane at the driver of a cream-colored car with a blue stomach, and remarked, “Hi, there!” Before I go any further, and in order to avoid ambiguity, let me say that it was the car that had the blue stomach. He (the driver) twisted the brake and I went inside, clear to the further end, and sat down by the side of a young woman who filled the whole car with sunshine. I was so happy that I gave the conductor half a dollar and told him to keep the change. If by chance she sees this, I hope she still remembers me. Pretty soon a very fat woman came into the car and aimed for our quarter. She evidently intended to squat between this fair girl and myself. But ah, thought I to myself in a low tone of voice, I will fool thee. So I shoved my person along in the seat toward the sweet girl of the Bay State. The corpulent party, whose name I did not learn, had in the meantime backed up to where she had detected a slight vacancy, and where I had seen fit to place myself. At that moment she heaved a sigh of relief, and, assisted by the motion of the car, which just then turned a corner, she sat down in my lap and nestled in my bosom like a tired baby elephant.
{Illustration: PATRICK HENRY.}
{9486}
Dear reader, if I were to tell you that the crystal of my watch was picked out from under my shoulder blades the next day, you would not believe it, would you? I will not strain your faith in me by making the statement, but that was the heaviest woman I ever held.
While all this was going on I lost track of my location. The car began to squirm around all over Boston, and finally the conductor came back and wanted more money. I said no, I would get off and try a dark red car with a green stomach for a while. So I did I rode on that till I had seen a great deal of new scenery, and then I asked the conductor if he passed Number Clankety Clank, Blank street. He said he did not, but if I would go down two blocks further and take a maroon car with a plaid stomach it would take me to the corner of “What-do-you-call-it and What's-his-name streets,” where, if I took a seal brown car with squshed huckleberry trimmings it would take me to where I wanted to go. So I tried it. I do not know just where I missed my train, but when I found the seal brown car with scrunched huckleberry trimmings it was going the other way, and as it was late I went into a cafe and refreshed myself. When I came out I discovered that it was too late to see the collection, even if I could find it, for at 6 o'clock they take the relics in and put them into a refrigerator till morning.
{Illustration: TAKING A PRIZE.}
{8487}
I was now weary and somewhat disappointed, so I desired to get back to my headquarters, wherein I could rest and where I could lock myself up in my room, so no prize fat woman could enter. I hailed one of those sawed-off landaus, consisting of two wheels, one door behind, and a bill for two bits. I told the college graduate on the box where I wanted to go, gave him a quarter and got in. I sat down and heaved a chaste sigh. The sigh was only half hove when the herdic backed up to my destination, which was about 300 feet from where I got in, as the crow flies.
When I go to Boston again, I am going in charge of the police.
The street railway system of Boston is remarkably perfect. Fifty cars pass a given point on Washington street in an hour, and yet there are no blockades. You can take one of those cars, if you are a stranger, and you can get so mixed up that you will never get back, and all for five cents. I felt a good deal like the man who was full and who stepped on a man who was not full. The sober man was mad, and yelled out: “See here; condemn it, can't you look where you're walking?” “Betcher life,” says the inebriate, “but trouble is to walk where I'm lookin'.”
I have just been over to the Falls of Minnehaha. In fact I have been quite a tourist and summer resorter this season, having saturated my system with nineteen different styles of mineral water in Wisconsin alone, and tried to win the attention of nineteen different styles of head waiters at these summer hotels. I may add in passing that the summer hotels of Wisconsin and Minnesota have been crowded full the past season and more room will have to be added before another season comes around.
The motto of the summer hotel seems to be, “Unless ye shall have feed the waiter, behold ye shall in no wise be fed.” Many waiters at these places, by a judicious system of blackmail and starvation, have reduced the guest to a sad state.
{Illustration: THE MAN WHO FEES THE WAITER.}
{9488}
The mineral water of Wisconsin ranks high as a beverage. Many persons are using it during the entire summer in place of rum.
The water of Waukesha does not appear to taste of any mineral, although an analysis shows the presence of several kinds of groceries in solution. The water at Palmyra Springs also tastes like any other pure water, but at Kankanna, on the Fox River, they have a style of mineral water which is different. Almost as soon as you taste it you discover that it is extremely different. Colonel Watrous, of the MilwaukeeSunday Telegraph, took some of it. I saw him afterward. He looked depressed, and told me that he had been deceived. Several Kankanna people had told him that this was living water, He had discovered otherwise. He hated to place his confidence in people and then find it misplaced.
A favorite style of Kankanna revenge is to drink a quart of this water, and then, on meeting an enemy, to breathe on him and wither him. One breath produces syncope and blind staggers. Two breaths induce coma and metallic casket for one.
Minnehaha is not mineral water. It is just plain water, giving itself away day after day like a fresh young man in society. If you want pure water you get it at the spring near the foot of the fall, and if you want it flavored, with something that will leave a blazed road the whole length of your alimentary canal, you go to the “blind pig,” a few rods away from the falls.
The blind pig draws many people toward the falls through sympathy. To be blind must indeed be a sad plight. Let us pause and reflect on this proposition.
By good fortune I have had a chance to watch the rum problem in all its phases this summer. Beginning in Maine, where the most ingenious methods of whipping the devil around the stump are adopted, then going through northern Iowa and tasting her exhilarating pop, and at last paying ten cents to see the blind pig at Minnehaha, I feel like one who has wrestled with the temperance problem in a practical way, and I have about decided that a high license is about the only way to make the sale of whisky odious. Prohibition is too abrupt in its methods, and one generation can hardly wipe out the appetite for liquor that has been planted and fostered by fifty preceding generations.
For fear that a few of my lady readers do not know what the Minnehaha blind pig looks like, and that they may be curious about it, I will just say that it is a method of evading the law, and consists of a dumb waiter, wherein, if you pay ten cents, you get a glass of stimulants without the annoyance of conversation. Many ladies who visit the falls, and who have heard incidentally about the blind pig, express a desire to see the poor little thing, but their husbands generally persuade them to refrain.
Minnehaha is a beautiful waterfall. It is not so frightfully large and grand as Niagara, but it is very fine, and if the State of Minnesota would catch the man who nails his signs on the trees around there, and choke him to death near the falls on a pleasant day, a large audience wold attend with much pleasure, I believe that the fence-board advertiser is not only, as a rule, wicked, but he also lacks common sense. Who ever bought a liver pad or a corset because he read about it on a high board fence? No one. Who ever purchased a certain kind of pill or poultice because the name of that pill or poultice was nailed on a tree to disfigure a beautiful landscape? I do not believe that any sane human being ever did so. If everyone feels as I do about it, people would rather starve to death for pills and freeze to death in a perfect wilderness of liver pads than buy of the man who daubs the fair face of nature with names of his alleged goods.
I saw a squaw who seemed to belong in the picture of the poetic little waterfall. I did not learn her name. It was one of these long, corduroy Sioux names, that hang together with hyphens like a lot of sausage. The salaried humorist of the party said he never sausage a name before.
Translated into our tongue it meant The-swift-daughter-of-the-prairie-blizzard-that-gathers-the-huckleberry-on -the-run-and-don't-you-forget-it.
I presume that Daniel Webster was as good an off-hand speaker as this country has ever produced. Massachusetts has been well represented in Congress since that time, but she has had few who could successfully compete with D. Webster, Esq., attorney and counsellor-at-law, Boston, Mass.
I have never met Mr. Webster, but I have seen a cane that he used to wear, and since that time I have felt a great interest in him. It was a heavy winter cane, and was presented to him as a token of respect.
This reminds me of the inscription on a grave stone in the 280-year-old churchyard at LaPointe, on Lake Superior, where I was last week. It shows what punctuation has done for a lost and undone race. I copy the inscription exactly as it appears:
{Illustration:LOUIS ROC DE DEAUSHOT——AS A MARK OFESTEEM BY HISBROTHER}
{0491}
Daniel Webster had one of the largest and most robust brains that ever flourished in our fair land. It was what we frequently call a teeming brain, one of those four-horse teeming brains, as it were. Mr. Webster wore the largest hat of any man then in Congress, and other senators and representatives used to frequently borrow it to wear on the 2nd of January, the 5th of July, and after other special occasions, when they had been in executive session most all night and endured great mental strain. This hat matter reminds me of an incident in the life of Benjamin F. Butler, a man well known in Massachusetts even at the present time.
One evening, at a kind of reception or some such dissipation as that, while Jim Nye was in the Senate, the latter left his silk hat on the lounge with the opening turned up, and while he was talking with someone else, Mr. Butler sat down in the hat with so much expression that it was a wreck. Everyone expected to see James W. Nye walk up and smite Benjamin F. Butler, but he did not do so. He looked at the chaotic hat for a minute, more in sorrow than in anger, and then he said:
“Benjamin, I could have told you that hat wouldn't fit you before you tried it on.”
Daniel Webster's brain was not only very large, but it was in good order all the time. Sometimes Nature bestows large brains on men who do not rise to great prominence. Large brains do not always indicate great intellectual power. These brains are large but of an inferior quality. A schoolmate of mine used to wear a hat that I could put my head and both feet into with perfect ease. I remember that he tied my shirt one day while I was laying my well-rounded limbs in the mill pond near my childhood's home.
I was mad at the time, but I could not lick him, for he was too large. All I could do was to patiently untie my shirt while my teeth chattered, then fling a large, three-cornered taunt in his teeth and run. He kept on poking fun at me, I remember, till I got dressed, and alluded incidentally, to my small brain and abnormal feet. This stung my sensitive nature, and I told him that if I had such a wealth of brain as he had, and it was of no use to think with, I would take it to a restaurant and have it breaded. Then I went away.
But we were speaking of Webster. Many lawyers of our day would do well to read and study the illustrious example of Daniel Webster. He did not sit in court all day with his feet on the table and howl, “We object,” and then down his client for $50, just because he had made a noise. I employed a lawyer once to bring suit for me to recover quite a sum of money due me. After years of assessments and toilsome litigation, we got a judgment. He said to me that he was anxious to succeed with the case mainly because he knew I Wanted to vindicate myself. I said yes, that was the idea exactly. I wanted to be vindicated.
So he gave me the vindication and took the judgment as a slight testimonial of his own sterling worth. When I want to be vindicated again I will do it with one of those self-cocking vindicators that you can carry in a pocket.
Looking over this letter, I am amazed to see the amount of valuable information relative to the life of Mr. Webster that I have succeeded in using. There are, of course, some minor details of Mr. Webster's life which I have omitted, but nothing of real importance. The true history of Mr. Webster is epitomized here, and told in a pleasing and graceful manner, a style that is at once accurate and just and still elegant, chaste and thoroughly refined, while at the same time there are little gobs of sly humor in it that are real cute.
{Illustration}
{0493}
I remember one sunny day in summer, we were sitting in the Boomerang office, I and the city editor, and he was speaking enviously of my salary of $150 per month as compared with his of $80, and I had just given him the venerable minstrel witticism that of course my salary was much larger than his, but he ought not to forget that he got his.
Just then there was a revolver shot at the foot of our stairs, and then another. The printers rushed into the stairway from the composing room, and to save time I ran out on the balcony that hung over the sidewalk and which gave me a bird's-eye view of the murder. The next issue of the paper contained an account about like this:
Cold-Blooded Murder.—Yesterday, between 12 and 1 o'clock, in front of this office on Second street, James McKeon, in a manner almost wholly unprovoked, shot James Smith, commonly known as Windy Smith. Smith died at 2 o'clock this morning of his wounds. Windy Smith was not a bad man, but, as his nickname would imply, he was a kind of noisy, harmless fellow, and McKeon, who is a gambler and professional bad man, can give no good reason for the killing. There is a determined effort on foot to lynch the murderer.
This account was brief, but it seemed to set forth the facts pretty clearly, I thought, and I felt considerably chagrined when I saw an account of the matter latter on, as written up by the prosecuting attorney. I may be inaccurate as to dates and some other points of detail, but, as nearly as I can remember, his version of the matter was like this:
THE TERRITORY OF WYOMING, }COUNTY OF ALBANY. } ss.
In Justice's Court, before E.W. Nye, Esq., Justice of the Peace.
The Territory of Wyoming, plt'ff.}vs. } Complaint.James McKeon, def't. }
The above named defendant, James McKeon, is accused of the crime of murder, for that he, the said defendant, James McKeon, at the town of Laramie City, in the County of Albany and Territory of Wyoming, and on the 13th day of July, Anno Domini 1880, then and there being, he, the said defendant, James McKeon, did wilfully, maliciously, feloniously, wickedly, unlawfully, criminally, illegally, unjustly, premeditatedly, coolly and murderously, by means of a certain deadly weapon commonly called a Smith & Wesson revolver, or revolving pistol, so constructed as to revolve upon itself and to be discharged by means of a spring and hammer, and with six chambers thereto, and known commonly as a self-cocker, the same loaded with gun-powder and leaden bullets, and in the hands of him, the said defendant, James McKeon, level at, to, upon, by, contiguous to and against the body of one James Smith, commonly called Windy Smith, in the peace of the commonwealth then and there being, and that by means of said deadly weapon commonly called a Smith & Wesson revolver, or revolving pistol, so constructed as to revolve upon itself and to be discharged by means of a spring or hammer, and with six chambers thereto and known commonly as a self-cocker, the same loaded with gunpowder and leaden bullets and in the hands of him the said defendant, James McKeon, held at, to, upon, by, contiguous to and against the body of him, the said James Smith, commonly called Windy Smith, he, the said James McKeon, did wilfully, maliciously, feloniously, wickedly, fraudulently, virulently, unlawfully, criminally, illegally, brutally, unjustly, premeditatedly, coolly and murderously, of his malice aforethought with the deadly weapon aforesaid held in the right hand of him, the said defendant, James McKeon, to, at, against, etc., the body of him, the said James Smith, commonly called Windy Smith, he, the said defendant, James McKeon, at the said town of Laramie City, in the said County of Albany, and in the heretofore enumerated Territory of Wyoming, and on the hereinbefore mentioned 13th day of July, Anno Domini 1880, did inflict to, at, upon, by, contiguous to, adjacent to, adjoining, over and against the body of him, the said James Smith, commonly called Windy Smith, one certain deadly, mortal, dangerous and painful wound, to-wit: Over, against, to, at, by, upon, contiguous to, near, adjacent to and bisecting the intestines of him, the said James Smith, commonly called Windy Smith, by reason of which he, the said James Smith, commonly called Windy Smith, did in great agony linger, and lingering did die, on the 14th day of July, Anno Domini 1880, at 2 o'clock in the forenoon of said day, contrary to the statutes in such case made and provided, and against the peace and dignity of the Territory of Wyoming.
I am now convinced that although the published account was correct, it was not as full as it might have been. Perhaps the tendency of modern journalism is to epitomize too much. In the hurry of daily newspaper work and the press of matter upon our pages, very likely we are fatally brief, and sacrifice rhetorical beauty to naked and goose-pimply facts.
The subject of meals, lunch-counters, dining-cars and buffet-cars came up the other day, incidentally. I had ordered a little breakfast in the buffet-car, not so much because I expected to get anything, but because I liked to eat in a car and have all the other passengers glaring at me. I do not know which affords me the most pleasure—to sit for a photograph and be stabbed in the cerebellum with a cast-iron prong, to be fed in the presence of a mixed company of strangers, or to be called on without any preparation to make a farewell speech on the gallows.
However, I got my breakfast after awhile. The waiter was certainly the most worthless, trifling, half-asleep combination of Senegambian stupidity and poor white trash indolence and awkwardness that I ever saw. He brought in everything except what I wanted, and then wound up by upsetting the little cream pitcher in my lap. He did not charge for the cream. He threw that in.
So all the rest of the journey I was trying to eradicate a cream dado from my pantaloons. It made me mad, because those pantaloons were made for me by request Besides, I haven't got pantaloons to squander in that way. To some a pair of pantaloons, more or less, is nothing, but it is much to me.
{Illustration: SHOWING HIS INMOST THOUGHT.}
{9497}
There was a porter on the same train who was much the same kind of furniture as the waiter. He slept days and made up berths all night. Truly, he began making up berths at Jersey City, and when he got through, about daylight, it was time to begin to unmake them again. All night long I could hear him opening and shutting the berths like a concertina. He sang softly to himself all night long:
“You must camp a little in the wildernessAnd then we'll all go home.”
He played his own accompaniment on the berths.
When in repose he was generally asleep with a whisk broom in one hand and the other hand extended with the palm up, waiting for a dividend to be declared.
He generally slept with his mouth open, so that you could read his inmost thoughts, and when I complained to him about the way my bunk felt, he said he was sorry, and wanted to know which cell I was in.
I rode, years ago, over a new stage line for several days. It was through an almost trackless wilderness, and the service hadn't been “expedited” then. It was not a star route, anyhow. The government seemed to think that the man who managed the thing ought not to expect help so long as he had been such a fool asterisk it.
(Five minutes intermission for those who wish to be chloroformed.)
The stage consisted of a buckboard. It was one of the first buckboards ever made, and the horse was among the first turned out, also. The driver and myself were the passengers.
When it got to be about dinner time, I asked him if we were not pretty near the dinner station. He grunted. He hadn't said a word since we started. He was a surly, morose and taciturn man. I was told that he had been disappointed in love. A half-breed woman named No-Wayno had led him to believe that she loved him, and that if it had not been for her husband she would gladly have been the driver's bride. So the driver assassinated the disagreeable husband of No-Wayno. Then he went to the ranch to claim his bride, but she was not there. She had changed her mind, and married a cattle man, who had just moved on to the range with a government mule and a branding iron, intending to slowly work himself into the stock business.
So this driver was a melancholy man. He only made one remark to me during that long forty-mile drive through the wilderness. About dinner time he drove the horse under a quaking asp tree, tied a nose bag of oats over its head and took a wad of bread and bacon from his greasy pocket. The bacon and bread had little flakes of smoking tobacco all over it, because he carried his grub and tobacco in the same pocket. For a moment he introduced one corner of the bacon and bread in among his whiskers. Then he made the only remark that he uttered while we were together. He said:
“Pardner, dinner is now ready in the dining-car.”
I once knew a man who was nominated by his fellow citizens for a certain office and finally elected without having expended a cent for that purpose. He was very eccentric, but he made a good officer. When he heard that he was nominated, he went up, as he said, into the mountains to do some assessment work on a couple of claims. He got lost and didn't get his bearings until a day or two after election. Then he came into town hungry, greasy and ragged, but unpledged.
He found that he was elected, and in answer to a telegram started off for 'Frisco to see a dying relative. He did not get back till the first of January. Then he filed his bond and sailed into the office. He fired several sedentary deputies who had been in the place twenty years just because they were good “workers.” That is, they were good workers at the polls. They saved all their energies for the campaign, and so they only had vitality enough left to draw their salaries during the balance of the two years.
This man raised the county scrip from sixty to ninety-five in less than two years, and still they busted him in the next convention. He was too eccentric. One delegate asked what in Sam Hill would become of the country if every candidate should skin out during the campaign and rusticate in the mountains while the battle was being fought.
Says he, “I am a delegate from the precinct of Rawhide Buttes, and I calklate I know what I am talkin' about. Gentlemen of the convention, just suppose that everybody, from the President of the United States down, was to git the nomination and then light out like a house afire and never come back till it was time to file his bond; what's going to become of us common drunkards to whom election is a noasis in the bad lands, an orange grove in the alkali flats?
“Mr. Chairman, there's millions of dollars in this broad land waiting for the high tide of election day to come and float 'em down to where you and I, Mr. Chairman, as well as other parched and patriotic inebriates, can git a hold of 'em.
“Gentlemen, we talk about stringency and shrinkage of values, and all such funny business as that; but that's something I don't know a blamed thing about. What I can grapple with is this: If our county offices are worth $30,000, and there are other little after-claps and soft snaps, and walk-overs, worth, say $10,000, and the boys, say, are willing to do the fair thing, say, blow in fifteen per cent, to the central committee, and what they feel like on the outside, then politics, instead of a burden and a reproach, becomes a pleasing duty, a joyous occasion and a picnic to those whose lives might otherwise be a dreary monotone.
“Mr. Chairman, the past two years has wrecked four campaign saloons, and a tinner who socked his wife's fortune into campaign torches is now in a land where torchlights is no good. Overcome by a dull market, a financial depression and a reserved central committee, he ate a package of Rough on Rats, and passed up the flume. He is now at rest over yonder.
“Such instances would be common if we encouraged the eccentric economy of official cranks. It is an evil that is gnawing at the vitals of the republic. We must squench it or get left. There are millions of dollars in this country, Mr. Chairman, that, if we keep it out of the campaign, will get into the hands of the working classes, and then you and I, Mr. Chairman, and gentlemen of the convention, can starve to death. Keep the campaign money away from the soulless hired man, gentlemen, or good-bye John.
“Mr. Chairman, excuse my emotion! It is almighty seldom that I make a speech, but when I do, I strive to get there with both feet. We must either work the campaign funds into their legitimate channels, or every blamed patriot within the sound of my voice will have to fasten on a tin bill and rustle for angle-worms amongst the hens. You hear me?”
{Terrific applause, during which the delicate odor of enthusiasm was noticed on the breath of the entire delegation.}
Laramie has a seal brown goat, with iron gray chin whiskers and a breath like new mown hay.
He has not had as hard a winter as the majority of stock on the Rocky mountains, because he is of a domestic turn of mind and tries to make man his friend. Though social in his nature, he never intrudes himself on people after they have intimated with a shotgun that they are weary of him.
When the world seems cold and dark to him, and everybody turns coldly away from him, he does not steal away by himself and die of corroding grief; he just lies down on the sidewalk in the sun and fills the air with the seductive fragrance of which he is the sole proprietor.
One day, just as he had eaten his midday meal of boot heels and cold sliced atmosphere and kerosene barrel staves, he saw a man going along the street with a large looking glass under his arm.
The goat watched the man, and saw him set the mirror down by a gate and go inside the house after some more things that he was moving. Then the goat stammered with his tail a few times and went up to see if he could eat the mirror.
When he got pretty close to it, he saw a hungry-looking goat apparently coming toward him, so he backed off a few yards and went for him. There was a loud crash, and when the man came out he saw a full length portrait of a goat with a heavy, black walnut frame around it, going down the street with a great deal of apparent relish.
Then the man said something derogatory about the goat, and seemed offended about something.
Goats are not timid in their nature and are easily domesticated.
There are two kinds of goat—the cashmere goat and the plain goat. The former is worked up into cashmere shawls and cashmere bouquet. The latter is not.
The cashmere bouquet of commerce is not made of the common goat. It is a good thing that it is not.
A goat that has always been treated with uniform kindness and never betrayed, may be taught to eat out of the hand. Also out of the flour barrel or the ice-cream freezer.