 This book is merely a personal narrative and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away in idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics or goad him with science. Still, there is information in the volume, information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in person and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude to the rise, growth, and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada. A curious episode, in some respects, the only one of its peculiar kind that has occurred in the land, and the only one indeed that is likely to occur in it. Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much. But really it could not be helped. Information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious otter of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts, but it cannot be. The more I caulk up the sources and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification. THE AUTHOR CHAPTER I My brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory, an office of such majesty that had concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of treasurer, controller, Secretary of State, and acting Governor, in the Governor's absence. A salary of $1800 a year and the title of Mr. Secretary gave to the great position and heir of wild and imposing grandeur. I was young and ignorant and I envied my brother. I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore. He was going to travel. I never had been away from home, and that word travel had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts and among the mountains of the far west, and would see buffaloes and Indians and prairie dogs and antelopes and have all kinds of adventures and maybe get hanged or scalped and have ever such a fine time and write home and tell us all about it and be a hero. And he would see the gold mines and the silver mines and maybe go about an afternoon when his work was done and pick up two or three palefuls of shining slugs and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside, and by and by he would become very rich and return home by sea and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and the ocean and the Isthmus as if it was nothing of any consequence to have seen those marvels face to face. What I suffered in contemplating his happiness Penn cannot describe, and so when he offered me, in cold blood, the sublime position of private secretary under him, it appeared to me that the heavens and the earth passed away and the firmament was rolled together as a scroll. I had nothing more to desire. My contentment was complete. At the end of an hour or two I was ready for the journey. Not much packing up was necessary because we were going in the overland stage from the Missouri frontier to Nevada, and passengers were only allowed a small quantity of baggage apiece. There was no Pacific Railroad in those fine times of ten or twelve years ago, not a single rail of it. I only proposed to stay in Nevada three months. I had no thought of staying longer than that. I meant to see all I could that was new and strange, and then hurry home to business. I little thought that I would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or seven uncommonly long years. I dreamed all night about Indians, deserts, and silver bars, and in due time, next day, we took shipping at the St. Louis Wharf on board a steamboat bound up the Missouri River. We were six days going from St. Louis to St. Joe, a trip that was so dull and sleepy and eventless that it has left no more impression on my memory than if its duration had been six minutes instead of that many days. No record is left in my mind now concerning it, but a confused jumble of savage-looking snags which we deliberately walked over with one wheel or the other, and of reefs which we butted and butted, and then retired from and climbed over in some softer place, and of sandbars which we roosted on occasionally, and rested, and then got out our crutches and sparred over. In fact the boat might almost as well have gone to St. Joe by land, for she was walking most of the time anyhow, climbing over reefs and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long. The captain said she was a bully boat, and all she wanted was more sheer and a bigger wheel. I thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but I had the deep sagacity not to say so. CHAPTER II The first thing we did on that glad evening that landed us at St. Joseph was to hunt up the stage-office and pay $150 apiece for tickets per overland coach to Carson City, Nevada. The next morning, bright and early, we took a hasty breakfast and hurried to the starting-place. Then an inconvenience presented itself which we had not properly appreciated before, namely that one cannot make a heavy-traveling trunk stand for twenty-five pounds of baggage, because it weighs a good deal more. But that was all we could take, twenty-five pounds each, so we had to snatch our trunk open and make a selection in a good deal of a hurry. We put our lawful twenty-five pounds apiece all in one release, and shipped the trunks back to St. Louis again. It was a sad parting. For now we had no swallow-tail coats and white kid gloves to wear at Pawnee receptions in the Rocky Mountains, and no stove-pipe hats, nor patent leather boots, nor anything else necessary to make life calm and peaceful. We were reduced to a war-footing. Each of us put on a rough, heavy suit of clothing, woolen army shirt, and stogie boots included. And into the valise we crowded a few white shirts, some under-clothing, and such things. My brother, the secretary, took along about four pounds of United States statutes and six pounds of unabridged dictionary, for we did not know, poor innocence, that such things could be bought in San Francisco on one day and received in Carson City the next. I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith and Wesson Seven shooter, which carried a ball like a homeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. But I thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It only had one fault. You could not hit anything with it. One of our conductors practiced while on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and behaved herself she was safe. But as soon as she went to moving about and he got to shooting at other things she came to grief. The secretary had a small-sized Colts revolver strapped around him for protection against the Indians, and to guard against accidents he carried it uncapped. Mr. George Bemis was dismally formidable. George Bemis was our fellow-traveller. We had never seen him before. He wore in his belt an old original Allen revolver such as irreverent people called a pepper-box. Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the trigger came back the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer and away would speed the ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an Allen in the world. But George's was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because as one of the stage-drivers afterwards said, if she didn't get what she went after she would fetch something else. And so she did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree once and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did not want the mule, but the owner came out with a double-barrel shotgun and persuaded him to buy it anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon, the Allen. Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it. We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the mountains. In the matter of luxuries we were modest. We took none along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco. We had two large canteens to carry water in, between stations on the plains, and we also took with us a little shock bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the way of breakfasts and dinners. By eight o'clock everything was ready and we were on the other side of the river. We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and we bowled away and left the states behind us. It was a superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine. There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities that almost made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city toiling and slaving had been wasted and thrown away. We were spinning along through Kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly abroad on the great plains. Just here the land was rolling a grand sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach, like the stately heave and swell of the ocean's bosom after a storm. And everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green this limitless expanse of grassy land. But presently this sea upon dry ground was to lose its rolling character and stretch away for seven hundred miles as level as a floor. Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage of the most sumptuous description, an imposing cradle on wheels. It was drawn by six handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the conductor, the legitimate captain of the craft, for it was his business to take charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers. We three were the only passengers this trip. We sat on the back seat inside. About all the rest of the coach was full of mailbags, for we had three days delayed mails with us. Almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof. There was a great pile of it strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots were full. We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard. The driver said, a little for Brigham and Carson and Frisco, but the heft of it for the engines, which is powerful troublesome. Thou, they get plenty of truck to read. But as he just then got up a fearful convulsion of his countenance, which was suggestive of a wink being swallowed by an earthquake, we guessed that his remark was intended to be facetious, and to mean that we would unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the planes and leave it to the Indians or whoever wanted it. We changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the hard, level road. We jumped out and stretched our legs every time the coach stopped, and so the night found us still vivacious and unfatigued. After supper a woman got in who lived about fifty miles further on, and we three had to take turns at sitting outside with the driver and conductor. Apparently she was not a talkative woman. She would sit there in the gathering twilight and fasten her steadfast eyes on a mosquito rooting into her arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand till she had got his range, and then she would launch a slap at him that would have jolted a cow. And after that she would sit and contemplate the corpse with tranquil satisfaction, for she never missed her mosquito. She was a dead shot at short range. She never removed a carcass, but left them there for bait. I sat by this grim sphinx and watched her kill thirty or forty mosquitoes, watched her, and waited for her to say something. But she never did. So I finally opened the conversation myself. I said, The mosquitoes are pretty bad about here, you bet! What did I understand you to say, madam? You bet! Then she cheered up and faced round and said, Dang'd, if I didn't begin to think you fellas were deep and dumb, I did. But gosh, here I've sought and sought and sought, busting musketeers and wondering what was ailing you. First I thought you was deep and dumb, then I thought you was sick or crazy or something, then by and by I begin to reckon you as a parcel of sickly fools that couldn't think of nothing to say. Where'd you come from? The sphinx was a sphinx no more. The fountains of her great deep were broken up, and she reigned the nine parts of speech forty days and forty nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation. How we suffered, suffered, suffered! She went on, hour after hour, till I was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start. She never did stop again until she got to her journey's end toward daylight, and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage, for we were nodding by that time, and said, Now you get out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple days, and I'll be along some time tonight, and if I can do you any good by edging in the word now and then, I'm right there. Folks will tell you, I've always been kind of offish and particular for a gal that's raised in the woods, and I am. With a rag-tag and bob-tail and a gal has to be, if she wants to be anything. But when people comes along, which is my equals, I reckon I'm a pretty sociable heifer after all. We resolved not to lay by at Cottonwood. CHAPTER 3 About an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly over the road, so smoothly that our cradle only rocked in a gentle lulling way that was gradually soothing us to sleep and dulling our consciousness when something gave away under us. We were dimly aware of it, but indifferent to it. The coach stopped. We heard the driver and conductor talking together outside and rummaging for a lantern, and swearing because they could not find it. But we had no interest in whatever had happened, and it only added to our comfort to think of those people out there at work in the murky night, and we snug in our nest with the curtains drawn. But presently by the sounds there seemed to be an examination going on, and then the driver's voice said, By George the thoroughbrace is broke! This startled me broad awake, as an undefined sense of calamity is always apt to do. I said to myself, Now a thoroughbrace is probably part of a horse, and doubtless of vital part, too, from the dismay in the driver's voice. Leg, maybe! And yet how could he break his leg waltzing along such a road as this? No, it can't be his leg. That is impossible unless he was reaching for the driver. Now, what can be the thoroughbrace of a horse, I wonder? Well, whatever comes, I shall not air my ignorance in this crowd, anyway. Just then the conductor's face appeared at a lifted curtain, and his lantern glared in on us, and our wall of male matter. He said, Gents, you'll have to turn out a spell, thoroughbraces broke. We climbed out into a chilled drizzle, and felt ever so homeless and dreary. When I found that the thing they called a thoroughbrace was the massive combination of belts and springs which the coach rocks itself in, I said to the driver, I never saw a thoroughbrace used like that before, then I can remember. How did it happen? Why, it happened by trying to make one coach carry three days' mail. That's how it happened, said he. And right here is the very direction which is wrote on all the newspaper bags which was to be put out for the engines for to keep them quiet. It's most uncommon lucky, because it's so nation-dark I should have gone by unbeknownst if that aired thoroughbrace hadn't broke. I knew that he was in labor with another of those winks of his, though I could not see his face, because he was bent down at work, and wishing him a safe delivery I turned to and helped the rest get out the mail sacks. It made a great pyramid by the roadside when it was all out. When they had mended the thoroughbrace we filled the two boots again but put no mail on top and only half as much inside as there was before. The conductor bent all the seat-backs down and then filled the coach just half full of mail bags from end to end. We objected loudly to this, for it left us no seats. But the conductor was wiser than we, and said a bed was better than seats, and moreover, this plan would protect his thoroughbraces. We never wanted any seats after that. The lazy bed was infinitely preferable. I had many an exciting day subsequently lying on it, reading the statutes and the dictionary, and wondering how the characters would turn out. The conductor said he would send back a guard from the next station to take charge of the abandoned mail bags, and we drove on. It was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full length on the mail sacks, and gazed out through the window across the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist, to where there was an expectant look in the eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The stage whirled along at a spanking gate, the breeze flapping curtains and suspended coats in the most exhilarating way. The cradles swayed and swung luxuriously. The pattering of the horse's hoofs, the cracking of the driver's whip and his ha-ee-glang were music. The spinning ground and the walsing trees appeared to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us with interest or envy or something. And as we lay and smoke the pipe of peace and compared all this luxury with the years of tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt there was only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had found it. After breakfast at some station whose name I have forgotten, we three climbed up on the seat behind the driver and let the conductor have our bed for a nap, and by and by when the sun made me drowsy I lay down on my face, on top of the coach, grasping the slender iron railing and slept for an hour or more. That will give one an appreciable idea of those matchless roads. Instinct will make a sleeping man grip a fast hold of the railing when the stage jolts, but when it only swings and sways, no grip is necessary. Overland drivers and conductors used to sit in their places and sleep thirty or forty minutes at a time on good roads, while spinning along at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour. I saw them do it often. There was no danger about it. A sleeping man will seize the irons in time when the coach jolts. These men were hard-worked, and it was not possible for them to stay awake all the time. By and by we passed through Marysville, and over the big blue and little sandy, thence about a mile and entered Nebraska. About a mile further on we came to the big sandy, one hundred and eighty miles from St. Joseph. As the sun was going down we saw the first specimen of an animal known familiarly over two thousand miles of mountain and desert from Kansas clear to the Pacific Ocean as the Jackass Rabbit. He is well named. He's just like any other rabbit, except that he is from one-third to twice as large, has longer legs in proportion to his size, and has the most preposterous ears that ever were mounted on any creature but a Jackass. When he is sitting quiet, thinking about his sins or his absent-minded or unapprehensive of danger, his majestic ears project above him conspicuously. But the breaking of a twig will scare him nearly to death, and then he tilts his ears back gently and starts for home. All you can see then, for the next minute, is his long gray form stretched out straight and streaking it through the low sagebrush, head erect, eyes right, and ears just canted little to the rear, but showing you where the animal is all the time the same as if he carried a jib. Now and then he makes a marvelous spring with his long legs high over the stunted sagebrush and scores a leap that would make a horse envious. Shortly he comes down to a long graceful lope, and shortly he mysteriously disappears. He has crouched behind a sagebrush and will sit there and listen and tremble until you get within six feet of him when he will get under way again. But one must shoot at this creature once if he wishes to see him throw his heart into his heels and do the best he knows how. He is frightened clear through now, and he lays his long ears down on his back, straightens himself out like a yardstick every spring he makes and scatters miles behind him with an easy indifference that is enchanting. Our party made this specimen hump himself, as the conductor said. The secretary started him with a shot from the colt, I commenced spitting at him with my weapon, and all in the same instant the old Alan's whole broadside let go with a rattling crash, and it is not putting it too strong to say that the rabbit was frantic. He dropped his ears, set up his tail, and left for San Francisco at a speed which can only be described as a flash and a vanish. Long after he was out of sight we could hear him whiz. I do not remember where we first came across sagebrush, but as I have been speaking of it I may as well describe it. This is easily done for if the reader can imagine a gnarled and venerable live oak tree reduced to a little shrub two feet high, with its rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs all complete, he can picture the sagebrush exactly. Often on lazy afternoons in the mountains I have lain on the ground with my face under a sagebrush, and entertained myself with fancing that the gnats among its foliage were lily-puttyan birds, and that the ants marching and counter-marching about its base were lily-puttyan flocks and herds, and myself some vast loafer from Brabdagnag waiting to catch a little citizen and eat him. It is an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature, is the sagebrush. Its foliage is a grayish green and gives that tint to desert and mountain. It smells like our domestic sage, and sage-tea made from it tastes like the sage-tea which all boys are so well acquainted with. The sagebrush is a singularly hardy-plant and grows right in the midst of deep sand and among barren rocks where nothing else in the vegetable world would try to grow except bunch grass. Bunch grass grows on the bleak mountain sides of Nevada and neighboring territories and offers excellent feed for stock, even in the dead of winter, wherever the snow is blown aside and exposes it. Notwithstanding its unpromising home, bunch grass is a better and more nutritious diet for cattle and horses than almost any other hay or grass that is known, so stock men say. The sage-bushes grow from three to six or seven feet apart all over the mountains and deserts of the far west, clear to the borders of California. There is not a tree of any kind in the deserts for hundreds of miles. There is no vegetation at all in a regular desert except the sagebrush and its cousin the greasewood, which is so much like the sagebrush that the difference amounts to little. Campfires and hot suppers in the deserts would be impossible but for the friendly sagebrush. Its trunk is as large as a boy's wrist and from that up to a man's arm, and its crooked branches are half as large as its trunk, all good sound, hard wood, very like oak. When a party camps the first thing to be done is to cut sagebrush and in a few minutes there is an opulent pile of it ready for use, a hole a foot wide two feet deep and two feet long as dug and sagebrush chopped up and burned in it till it is full to the brim with glowing coals. Then the cooking begins and there is no smoke and consequently no swearing. Such a fire will keep all night with very little replenishing and it makes a very sociable campfire and one around which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive and profoundly entertaining. Sagebrush is very fair fuel but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule. But their testimony to its nutritiousness is worth nothing for they will eat pine-knots or anthracite coal or brass filings or lead pipe or old bottles or anything that comes handy and then go off looking as grateful as if they had oysters for dinner. Mules and donkeys and camels have appetites that anything will relieve temporarily but nothing satisfy. In Syria once at the headwaters of the Jordan a camel took charge of my overcoat while the tents were being pitched and examined it with a critical eye all over with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it and then after he'd done figuring on it as an article of apparel he began to contemplate it as an article of diet. He put his foot on it and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth and chewed and chewed at it and gradually taking it in and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before in his life. Then he smacked his lips once or twice and reached after the other sleeve. Next he tried the velvet collar and smiled a smile of such contentment that it was plain to see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing about an overcoat. The tails went next along with some percussion caps and cough candy and some fig paste from Constantinople. Then my newspaper correspondence dropped out and he took a chance in that. Manuscript letters written for the home papers. But he was treading on dangerous ground now. He began to come across solid wisdom in those documents that was rather weighty on his stomach. And occasionally he would take a joke that would shake him up till it loosened his teeth. It was getting to be perilous times with him. But he held his grip with good courage and, hopefully, till at last he began to stumble on statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity. He began to gag and gasp and his eyes to stand out and his forelegs to spread. And in about a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a carpenter's workbench and died a death of indescribable agony. I went and pulled the manuscript out of his mouth and found that the sensitive creature had choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact that I ever laid before a trusting public. I was about to say, when diverted from my subject, that occasionally one finds sage bushes five or six feet high and with a spread of branch and foliage in proportion. But two or two and a half feet is the usual height. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Roughing It by Mark Twain Chapter 4 As the sun went down and the evening chill came on, we made preparation for bed. We stirred up the hard leather letter-sacks and the naughty canvas bags of printed matter, naughty and uneven, because of projecting ends and corners of magazines, boxes, and books. We stirred them up and redisposed them in such a way as to make our bed as level as possible. And we did improve it too, though after all our work it had an upheaved and billowy look about it, like a little piece of a stormy sea. Next we hunted up our boots from odd nooks among the mail bags where they had settled and put them on. Then we got down our coats, vests, pantaloons, and heavy woolen shirts from the arm loops where they had been swinging all day, and closed ourselves in them, for there being no ladies either at the stations or in the coach, and the weather being hot, we had looked to our comfort by stripping to our under-clothing at nine o'clock in the morning. All things being now ready we stowed the uneasy dictionary where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water canteens and pistols where we could find them in the dark. Then we smoked a final pipe and swapped a final yarn, after which we put the pipes, tobacco, and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail bags, and then fastened down the coach curtains all around, and made the place as dark as the inside of a cow, as the conductor phrase did in his picturesque way. It was certainly as dark as any place could be, nothing was even dimly visible in it, and finally we rolled ourselves up like silkworms, each person in his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep. Whenever the stage stopped to change horses we would wake up and try to recollect where we were, and succeed, and in a minute or two the stage would be off again, and we likewise. We began to get into country now, threaded here and there with little streams. These had high, steep banks on each side, and every time we flew down one bank and scrambled up the other our party inside got mixed somewhat. First we would all be down in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture, and in a second we would shoot to the other end and stand on our heads, and we would sprawl and kick too, and ward off ends and corners of mail bags that came lumbering over us and about us, and as the dust rose from the tumult we would all sneeze in chorus, and the majority of us would grumble and probably say some hasty thing like, Take your elbow out of my ribs! Can't you quit crowding? Every time we avalanche from one end of the stage to the other the inner-bridge dictionary would come too, and every time it came it damaged somebody. One trip it barked the secretary's elbow, the next trip it hurt me in the stomach, and the third it tilted Bemis' nose up till he could look down his nostrils, he said. The pistols and coins soon settled to the bottom, but the pipes, pipe stems, tobacco and canteens clattered and floundered after the dictionary every time it made an assault on us, and ate it in a bed of the book by spilling tobacco in our eyes and water down our backs. Still, all things considered, it was a very comfortable night. It wore gradually away, and when it last a cold gray light was visible through the puckers and chinks in the curtains, we yawned and stretched with satisfaction, shed our cocoons, and felt that we had slept as much as was necessary. By and by as the sun rose up and warmed the world, we pulled off our clothes and got ready for breakfast. We were just pleasantly in time, for five minutes afterward the driver sent the weird music of his bugle winding over the grassy solitudes, and presently we detected a low hut or two in the distance. Then the rattling of the coach, the clatter of our six horses' hoofs, and the driver's crisp commands awoke to a louder and stronger emphasis, and we went sweeping down on the station at our smartest speed. It was fascinating, that old overland stagecoaching. We jumped out in undress uniform. The driver tossed his gathered reins out on the ground, gaped and stretched complacently, drew off his heavy buckskin gloves with great deliberation and insufferable dignity, taking not the slightest notice of a dozen solicitous inquiries after his health, and humbly facetious and flattering accostings, and obsequious tenders of service, from five or six hairy and half-civilized stationkeepers and hostilers who were nimbly unhitching our steeds and bringing the fresh team out of the stables. Or in the eyes of the stage-driver of that day, stationkeepers and hostilers were a sort of good enough low-creatures useful in their place and helping to make up a world, but not the kind of beings which a person of distinction could afford to concern himself with. While on the contrary, in the eyes of the stationkeeper and the hostler, the stage-driver was a hero, a great and shining dignitary, the world's favorite son, the envy of the people, the observed of the nations. When they spoke to him they received his insolent silence meekly, and as being the natural and proper conduct of so great a man, when he opened his lips they all hung on his words with admiration. He never honored a particular individual with a remark, but addressed it with a broad generality to the horses, the stables, the surrounding country, and the human underlings. When he discharged a facetious, insulting personality at a hostler, that hostler was happy for the day. When he uttered his one jest, old as the hills, coarse, profane, witless, and inflicted on the same audience, in the same language, every time his coach drove up there, the violets roared and slapped their thighs and swore it was the best thing they'd ever heard in all their lives, and how they would fly round when he wanted a basin of water, a gourd of the same, or a light for his pipe, but they would instantly insult a passenger if he so far forgot himself as to crave a favor at their hands. They could do that sort of insolence as well as the driver they copied it from, for, let it be borne in mind, the overland driver had but little less contempt for his passengers than he had for his hostlers. The hostlers and the stationkeepers treated the really powerful conductor of the coach merely with the best of what was their idea of civility, but the driver was the only being they bowed down to and worshiped. How admiringly they would gaze up at him in his high seat as he gloved himself with lingering deliberation while some happy hostler held the bunch of reins aloft and waited patiently for him to take it, and how they would bombard him with glorifying ejaculations as he cracked his long whip and went careening away. The station's buildings were long, low huts made of sun-dried, mud-colored bricks laid up without mortar. Adobe's the Spaniards call these bricks, and Americans shorten it to Dobie's. The roofs, which had no slant to them, worth speaking of, were thatched and then sodded or covered with a thick layer of earth, and from this sprung a pretty rank growth of weeds and grass. It was the first time we had ever seen a man's front yard on top of his house. The building consisted of barns, stable room for twelve or fifteen horses, and a hut for an eating room for passengers. This latter had bunks in it for the station-keeper and a hostler or two. You could rest your elbow on its eaves, and you had to bend in order to get in at the door. In place of a window there was a square hole about large enough for a man to crawl through, but this had no glass in it. There was no flooring, but the ground was packed hard. There was no stove, but the fireplace served all needful purposes. There were no shelves, no cupboards, no closets. In a corner stood an open sack of flour, and nestling against its base were a couple of black and venerable tin coffee-pots, a tin teapot, a little bag of salt, and a side of bacon. By the door of the station-keeper's den outside was a tin wash basin on the ground. Near it was a pail of water and a piece of yellow bar soap, and from the eaves hung a hoary blue woolen shirt significantly, but this latter was the station-keeper's private towel, and only two persons in all party might venture to use it, the stage-driver and the conductor. The latter would not, from a sense of decency, the former would not because he did not choose to encourage the advances of a station-keeper. We had towels in the valise. They might as well have been in Sodom and Gomorrah. We and the conductor used our handkerchiefs and the driver his pantaloons and sleeves. By the door inside was fastened a small old-fashioned looking-glass frame with two little fragments of the original mirror lodged down in one corner of it. This arrangement afforded a pleasant double-barreled portrait of you when you looked into it, with one half of your head set up a couple of inches above the other half. From the glass frame hung the half of a comb by a string, but if I had to describe that patriarch or die, I believe I would order some sample coffins. It had come down from Esau and Samson, and had been accumulating hair ever since, along with certain impurities. In one corner of the room stood three or four rifles and muskets together with horns and pouches of ammunition. The station men wore pantaloons of course, country-woven stuff, and into the seat and the inside of the legs were sewed ample additions of buckskin to do duty in place of leggings when the man rode horseback. So the pants were half-doll blue and half-yellow and unspeakably picturesque. The pants were stuffed into the tops of high boots. The heels were of were armed with great Spanish spurs, whose little iron clogs and chains jingled with every step. The man wore a huge beard and mustachios, an old slouch hat, a blue woollen shirt, no suspenders, no vest, no coat. In the leathern sheath in his belt a great long navy revolver slung on right side hammer to the front and projecting from his boot a horn-handled bowy-knife. The furniture of the hut was neither gorgeous nor much in the way. The rocking chairs and sofas were not present, never had been, but they were represented by two three-legged stools, a pine-board bench four feet long and two empty candle-boxes. The table was a greasy board on stilts, and the tablecloth and napkins had not come, and they were not looking for them, either. A battered tin platter, a knife and fork, and a tin-pint cup, were at each man's place, and the driver had a queen's-wear saucer that had seen better days. Of course this duke sat at the head of the table. There was one isolated piece of table furniture that bore about it with a touching air of grandeur in misfortune. This was the castor. It was German silver and crippled and rusty, but it was so preposterously out of place there that it was suggestive of a tattered exiled king among barbarians, and the majesty of its native position compelled respect even in its degradation. There was only one crew at left, and that was a stopperless fly-spect broken-necked thing with two inches of vinegar in it, and a dozen preserved flies with their heels up and looking sorry they had invested there. The station-keeper upended a disc of last week's bread, of the shape and size of an old-time cheese, and carved some slabs from it which were as good as Nicholson's pavement, and tenderer. He sliced off a piece of bacon for each man, but only the experienced old hands made out to eat it, for it was condemned army-bacon, which the United States would not feed to its soldiers in the forts, and the stage-company had bought it cheap for the sustenance of their passengers and employees. We may have found this condemned army-bacon further out on the plains than the section I am locating it in, but we found it. There is no gain saying that. Then he poured for us a beverage which he called slum-gullion, and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag and sand, an old bacon-rind in it, to deceive the intelligent traveller. He had no sugar and no milk, not even a spoon to stir the ingredients with. We could not eat the bread or the meat nor drink the slum-gullion. And when I looked at that melancholy vinegar-cruet, I thought of the anecdote, a very, very old one, at that day, of the traveller who sat down to a table which had nothing on it but a mackerel and a pot of mustard. He asked the landlord if this was all, and the landlord said, all! Why, thunder and lightning, I should think there was a mackerel enough there for six! But I don't like mackerel. Oh! Then help yourself to the mustard! In other days I had considered it a good, very good anecdote, but there was a dismal plausibility about it here that took all the humour out of it. Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle. I tasted and smelt and said I would take coffee, I believed. The station-boss stopped dead still and glared at me speechless. At last, when he came to, he turned away and said, as one who communes with himself upon a mat or two vast to grasp, Coffee! Well, if that don't go clean ahead of me, I'm ding-ding! We could not eat, and there was no conversation among the hostlers and herdsmen. We all sat at the same board. At least there was no conversation further than a single hurried request now and then from one employee to another. It was always in the same form and always gruffly friendly. Its Western freshness and novelty startled me at first and interested me, but it presently grew monotonous and lost its charm. It was, Pass the bread, you son of a skunk! No, I forget, skunk was not the word. It seems to me it was still stronger than that. I know it was, in fact, but it has gone from my memory, apparently. However, it is no matter. Probably it was too strong for print, anyway. It is the landmark in my memory which tells me where I first encountered the vigorous new vernacular of the Occidental Plains and Mountains. We gave up the breakfast, and paid our dollar apiece, and went back to our mailbag bed in the coach, and found comfort in our pipes. Right here we suffered the first diminution of our princely state. We left our six fine horses and took six mules in their place. But they were wild Mexican fellows, and a man had to stand at the head of each of them and hold him fast while the driver gloved and got himself ready. And when at last he grasped the reins and gave the word, the men sprung suddenly away from the mules' heads, and the coach shot from the station as if it had issued from a cannon. How the frantic animals did scamper! It was a fierce and furious gallop, and the gate never altered for a moment till we reeled off ten or twelve miles and swept up to the next collection of little station huts and stables. So we flew along all day. At two p.m. the belt of timber that fringes the north-plat and marks its windings through the vast level floor of the plains came in sight. At four p.m. we crossed a branch of the river, and at five p.m. we crossed the plat itself, and landed at Fort Kearney, fifty-six hours out from St. Joe, three hundred miles. Now that was stagecoaching on the great overland, ten or twelve years ago, when perhaps not more than ten men in America all told expected to live to see a railroad follow that route to the Pacific. But the railroad is there now, and it pictures a thousand odd comparisons and contrasts in my mind to read the following sketch in the New York Times of a recent trip over almost the very ground I have been describing. I can scarcely comprehend the new state of things. The Continent At four p.m. Sunday we rolled out of the station at Omaha and started westward on our long jaunt. A couple of hours out dinner was announced, an event to those of us who had yet to experience what it is to eat in one of Pullman's hotels on wheels. So stepping into the car next forward of our sleeping palace we found ourselves in the dining-car. It was a revelation to us that first dinner on Sunday, and though we continued to dine for four days and had as many breakfasts and suppers, our whole party never ceased to admire the perfection of the arrangements and the marvelous results achieved. Upon tables covered with snowy linen and garnished with services of solid silver, Ethiope waiters, flitting about in spotless white, placed as by magic a repast at which Delmonico himself could have had no occasion to blush. And indeed in some respects it would be hard for that distinguished chef to match our menu. For in addition to all that ordinarily makes up a first-chop dinner, had we not our antelope steak, the Guamon who has not experienced this, wow, what does he know of the feast of fat things, our delicious mountain brook trout, and choice fruits and berries, and sauce pecan and unpurchasable, our sweet-scented, appetite-compelling air of the prairies? You may depend upon it. We all did justice to the good things, and as we washed them down with bumpers of sparkling krug, whilst we sped along at the rate of thirty miles an hour, agreed it was the fastest living we had ever experienced. We beat that, however, two days afterward, when we made twenty-seven miles in twenty-seven minutes, while our champagne glasses filled to the brim spilled not a drop. After dinner we repaired to our drawing-room car, and as it was Sabbath Eve, intoned some of the grand old hymns, Praise God from above, et cetera, shining shore, coronation, et cetera, the voices of the men-singers and of the women-singers blending sweetly in the evening air, while our train, with its great, glaring, polyphemous eye, lighting up long vistas of prairie, rushed into the night and the wild. Then to bed in luxurious coaches, where we slept the sleep of the just, and only awoke the next morning, Monday at eight o'clock, to find ourselves at the crossing of the North Platte, three hundred miles from Omaha, fifteen hours and forty minutes out. CHAPTER V Another night of alternate tranquility and turmoil. But morning came by and by. It was another glad awakening to fresh breezes, vast expanses of level green-swored, bright sunlight, an impressive solitude utterly without visible human beings or human habitations, and an atmosphere of such amazing, magnifying properties that trees that seemed close at hand were more than three miles away. We resumed undress uniform, climbed atop of the flying coach, dangled our legs over the side, shouted occasionally at our frantic mules, nearly to see them lay their ears back and scamper faster, tied our hats on to keep our hair from blowing away, and levelled an outlook over the world-wide carpet about us for things new and strange to gaze at. Even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings. A long about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie dog villages, the first antelope and the first wolf. If I remember rightly this latter was the regular coyote, pronounced coyote, of the farther deserts. And if it was he was not a pretty creature or respectable either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward and can speak with confidence. The coyote is a long slim stick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely, so scrawny and ribby and coarse-haired and pitiful. When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head a bit and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage-brush, glancing over his shoulder at you from time to time till he is about out of easy pistol range. And then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you. He will trot fifty yards and stop again. Another fifty and stop again. And finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sage-brush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no demonstration against him. But if you do, he develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon that by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a mini-rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you have drawn a bead on him you see well enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is now. But if you start a swift-footed dog after him you will enjoy it ever so much, especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. The coyote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground and stretch his neck further to the front and pant more fiercely and stick his tail out straighter behind and move his furious legs with the yet wilder frenzy and leave a broader and broader and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind and marking his long wake across the level plain. And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the coyote and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptively closer, and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the coyote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile, and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is, and next he notices that he is getting fagged and that the coyote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him. And then that town dog is mad and earnest and he begins to strain and weep and swear and paw the sand higher than ever and reach for the coyote with concentrated and desperate energy. This spurt finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy and two miles from his friends and then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the coyote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more and with a something about it which seems to say, Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub. Business is business and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day. And forthwith there is a rushing sound and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude. It makes his head swim. He stops and looks all around, climbs the nearest sand mound and gazes into the distance, shakes his head reflectively and then without a word he turns and jogs along back to his train and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon and feels unspeakably mean and looks ashamed and hangs his tail at half-mast for a week. And for as much as a year after that whenever there is a great hue and cry after a coyote that dog will merely glance in that direction without emotion and apparently observe to himself, I believe I do not wish any of the pie. The coyote lives chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding desert, along with the lizard, the jackass rabbit and the raven, and gets an uncertain and precarious living and earns it. He seems to subsist almost wholly on the carcasses of oxen, mules, and horses that have dropped out of emigrant trains and died and upon windfalls of carrion and occasional legacies of awful bequeath to him by white men who have been opulent enough to have something better to butcher than condemned army bacon. He will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the desert-frequenting tribes of Indians, will and they will eat anything they can bite. It is a curious fact that these latter are the only creatures known to history who will eat nitroglycerin and ask for more if they survive. The coyote of the deserts beyond the Rocky Mountains has a peculiarly hard time of it owing to the fact that his relations, the Indians, are just as apt to be the first to detect a seductive scent on the desert breeze and follow the fragrance to the late ox it emanated from as he is himself, and when this occurs he has to content himself with sitting off at a little distance, watching those people strip off and dig out everything edible, and walk off with it. Then he and the waiting ravens explore the skeleton and polish the bones. It is considered that the coyote and the obscene bird and the Indian of the desert testify their blood kinship with each other in that they live together in the waste places of the earth on terms of perfect confidence and friendship while hating all other creature and yearning to assist at their funerals. He does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast and a hundred and fifty to dinner because he is sure to have three or four days between meals and he can just as well be traveling and looking at the scenery as lying around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of his parents. We soon learn to recognize the sharp vicious bark of the coyote as it came across the murky plain at night to disturb our dreams among the male sacks, and remembering his forlorn aspect and his hard fortune made shift to wish him the blessed novelty of a long day's good luck and a limitless larder the morrow. CHAPTER VI Our new conductor, just shipped, had been without sleep for twenty hours. Such a thing was very frequent. From St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California by stagecoach, was nearly nineteen hundred miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days. The cars do it in four-and-a-half now. But the time specified in the mail contracts and required by the schedule was eighteen or nineteen days, if I remember rightly. This was to make fair allowance for winter storms and snows and other unavoidable causes of detention. The stage company had everything under strict discipline and good system. Over each two hundred and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent and invested him with great authority. His beat, or jurisdiction, of two hundred and fifty miles was called a division. He purchased horses, mules, harness, and food for men and beasts, and distributed these things among his stage stations from time to time, according to his judgment of what each station needed. He erected station buildings and dug wells. He attended to the paying of the station keepers, hostlers, drivers, and blacksmiths, and discharged them whenever he chose. He was a very, very great man in his division, a kind of grand mogul, a sultan of the indies in whose presence common men were modest of speech and manner, and in the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling stage-driver dwindled to a penny-dip. There were about eight of these kings all told on the overland route. Next in rank and importance to the division agent came the conductor. His beat was the same length as the agent's, two hundred and fifty miles. He sat with the driver, and when necessary rode that fearful distance night and day without other rest or sleep than what he could get perched thus on top of the flying vehicle. Think of it! He had absolute charge of the males, express matter, passengers, and stage-coach until he delivered them to the next conductor and got his receipt for them. Consequently he had to be a man of intelligence, decision, and considerable executive ability. He was usually a quiet, pleasant man who attended closely to his duties, and was a good deal of a gentleman. It was not absolutely necessary that the division agent should be a gentleman, and occasionally he wasn't. But he was always a general in administrative ability, and a bulldog in courage and determination. Otherwise the chieftainship over the lawless underlings of the overland service would never in any instance have been to him anything but an equivalent for a month of insolence and distress and a bullet and a coffin at the end of it. There were about sixteen or eighteen conductors on the overland, for there was a daily stage each way and a conductor on every stage. Next in real and official rank and importance after the conductor came my delight, the driver, next in real but not in apparent importance, for we have seen that in the eyes of the common herd the driver was to the conductor as an admiral is to the captain of the flagship. The driver's beat was pretty long, and his sleeping time at the stations pretty short sometimes, and so, but for the grandeur of his position his would have been a sorry life as well as a hard and wearing one. We took a new driver every day or every night for they drove backward and forward over the same piece of road all the time, and therefore we never got as well acquainted with them as we did with the conductors, and besides they would have been above being familiar with such rubbish as passengers anyhow as a general thing. Still, we were always eager to get a sight of each and every new driver as soon as the watch changed. For each and every day we were either anxious to get rid of an unpleasant one or loathed apart with a driver we had learned to like and had come to be sociable and friendly with, and so the first question we asked the conductor whenever we got to where we were to exchange drivers was always, which is him. The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know then that it would go into a book some day. As long as everything went smoothly the overland driver was well enough situated, but if a fellow driver got sick suddenly it made trouble, for the coach must go on, and so the potentate who was about to climb down and take a luxurious rest after his long night's siege in the midst of wind and rain and darkness had to stay where he was and do the sick man's work. Once in the Rocky Mountains when I found a driver sound asleep on the box and the mules going at the usual break neck pace the conductor said never mind him, there was no danger, and he was doing double duty, had driven seventy-five miles on one coach and was now going back over it on this without rest or sleep. A hundred and fifty miles of holding back of six vindictive mules and keeping them from climbing the trees. It sounds incredible, but I remember the statement well enough. The station keepers, hostlers, etc., were low, rough characters, as already described, and from western Nebraska to Nevada a considerable sprinkling of them might be fairly set down as outlaws, fugitives from justice, criminals whose best security was a section of country which was without law and without even the pretense of it. When the division agent issued an order to one of these parties he did it with a full understanding that he might have to enforce it with a Navy 6 shooter and so he always went fixed to make things go along smoothly. Now and then a division agent was really obliged to shoot a hostler through the head to teach him some simple matter that he could have taught him with a club if his circumstances and surroundings had been different, but they were snappy, able men, those division agents, and when they tried to teach a subordinate anything that subordinate generally got it through his head. A great portion of this vast machinery, these hundreds of men and coaches and thousands of mules and horses, was in the hands of Mr. Ben Holiday. All the western half of the business was in his hands. This reminds me of an incident of Palestine travel which is pertinent here, so I will transfer it just in the language in which I find it set down in my Holy Land Notebook. No doubt everybody has heard of Ben Holiday, a man of prodigious energy, who used to send males and passengers flying across the continent in his overland stagecoaches like a very whirlwind, two thousand long miles in fifteen days and a half by the watch. But this fragment of history is not about Ben Holiday but about a young New York boy by the name of Jack who traveled with our small party of pilgrims in the Holy Land, and who had traveled to California in Mr. Holiday's overland coaches three years before, and had by no means forgotten it or lost his gushing admiration of Mr. H. Aged 19, Jack was a good boy, a good-hearted and always well meaning boy who had been reared in the city of New York, and although he was bright and knew a great many useful things, his scriptural education had been a good deal neglected to such a degree indeed that all Holy Land history was fresh and new to him, and all Bible names, mysteries that had never disturbed his virgin ear. Also in our party was an elderly pilgrim who was the reverse of Jack, in that he was learned in the scriptures, and an enthusiast concerning them. He was our encyclopedia, and we were never tired of listening to his speeches nor he of making them. He never passed a celebrated locality from Bashan to Bethlehem without illuminating it with an oration. One day, when camped near the ruins of Jericho, he burst forth with something like this. Jack, do you see that range of mountains over yonder that bounds the Jordan Valley? The mountains of Moab, Jack. Think of it, my boy. The actual mountains of Moab. Renowned in scripture history. We are actually standing face to face with those illustrious crags and peaks, and for all we know, dropping his voice impressively, our eyes may be resting at this very moment upon the spot where lies the mysterious grave of Moses. Think of it, Jack. Moses who? Falling inflection. Moses who? Jack, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You ought to be ashamed of such criminal ignorance. Why, Moses, the great guide, soldier, poet, law-giver of ancient Israel. Jack, from this spot where we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred miles in extent, and across that desert that wonderful man brought the children of Israel, guiding them with unfailing sagacity for forty years over the sandy desolation and among the obstructing rocks and hills, and landed them at last safe and sound within sight of this very spot, and where we now stand they entered the promised land with anthems of rejoicing. It was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do, Jack. Think of it. Forty years? Only three hundred miles? Oomph! Ben Holiday would have fetched them through in thirty-six hours. The boy meant no harm. He did not know that he had said anything that was wrong or irreverent, and so no one scolded him or felt offended with him, and nobody could but some ungenerous spirit incapable of excusing the heedless blunders of a boy. At noon on the fifth day out we arrived at the crossing of the south-plat, alias Julesburg, alias Overland City, four hundred and seventy miles from St. Joseph, the strangest, quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with. CHAPTER VII It did seem strange enough to see a town again after what appeared to us such a long acquaintance with deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless solitude. We tumbled out into the busy street, feeling like meteoric people crumbled off the corner of some other world and wakened up suddenly in this. For an hour we took as much interest in Overland City as if we had never seen a town before. The reason we had an hour to spare was because we had to change our stage for a less sumptuous affair called a mud-wagon and transfer our freight of mails. Presently we got under way again. We came to the shallow, yellow, muddy south-plat with its low banks and its scattering flat sandbars and pygmy islands, a melancholy stream straggling through the center of the enormous flat plain and only saved from being impossible to find with a naked eye by its sentinel rank of scattering trees standing on either bank. The plat was up, they said, which made me wish I could see it when it was down, if it could look any sicker and sorrier. They said it was a dangerous stream to cross now because its quicksands were liable to swallow up horses, coach, and passengers if an attempt was made to for it. But the mails had to go and we made the attempt. Once or twice in midstream the wheels sunk into the yielding sand so threateningly that we half believed we had dreaded and avoided the sea all our lives to be shipwrecked in a mud-wagon in the middle of a desert at last, but we dragged through and sped away toward the setting sun. Next morning, just before dawn, when about 550 miles from St. Joseph, our mud-wagon broke down. We were to be delayed five or six hours and therefore we took horses by invitation and joined a party who were just starting on a buffalo hunt. It was noble sport galloping over the plain in the dewy freshness of the morning, but our part of the hunt ended in disaster and disgrace, for a wounded buffalo bull chased the passenger beamous nearly two miles, and then he forsook his horse and took to a lone tree. He was very sullen about the matter for some twenty-four hours, but at last he began to soften little by little, and finally he said, Well, it was not funny, and there was no sense in those gawks making themselves so facetious over it. I tell you, I was angry and earnest for a while. I should have shot that long gangly lubber they called Hank, if I could have done it without crippling six or seven other people. But of course I couldn't. The old Allens, so confounded comprehensive. I wish those loafers had been up in the tree. They wouldn't have wanted to laugh, so if I had had a horse worth a cent, but no, the minute he saw that buffalo bull wheel on him and give a bellow, he raised straight up in the air and stood on his heels. The saddle began to slip, and I took him round the neck and laid close to him and began to pray. Then he came down and stood up on the other end a while, and the bull actually stopped pawing sand and bellowing to contemplate the inhuman spectacle. Then the bull made a pass at him and uttered a bellow that sounded perfectly frightful. It was so close to me, and that seemed to literally prostrate my horse's reason and make a raving, distracted maniac of him, and I wish I may die if he didn't stand on his head for a quarter of a minute and shed tears. He was absolutely out of his mind. He was, as sure as truth itself, and he really didn't know what he was doing. Then the bull came charging at us, and my horse dropped down on all fours and took a fresh start, and then for the next ten minutes he would actually throw one hand spring after another so fast that the bull began to get unsettled too, and didn't know where to start in. So he stood there sneezing and shoveling dust over his back and bellowing every now and then, and thinking he had got a fifteen hundred dollar circus horse for breakfast certain. Well, I was first out on his neck, the horses, not the bulls, and then underneath, and next on his rump, and sometimes head up, and sometimes heels. But I tell you, it seemed solemn and awful to be ripping and tearing and carrying on so in the presence of death, as you might say. Pretty soon the bull made a snatch for us and brought away some of my horse's tail, I suppose, but do not know, being pretty busy at the time. But something made him hungry for solitude and suggested to him to get up and hunt for it. And then you ought to have seen that spider-legged old skeleton go, and you ought to have seen the bull cut out after him too, head down, tongue out, tail up, bellowing like everything, and actually mowing down the weeds, and tearing up the earth, and boosting up the sand like a whirlwind. By George it was a hot race. I and the saddle were back on the rump, and I had the bridle in my teeth and holding on to the pummel with both hands. First we left the dogs behind, then we passed a jackass rabbit, then we overtook a coyote, and were gaining on an antelope when the rotten girth let go and threw me about 30 yards off to the left. And as the saddle went down over the horse's rump, he gave it a lift with his heels that scented more than 400 yards up in the air. I wish I may die in a minute if he didn't. I fell at the foot of the only solitary tree there was in nine counties adjacent as any creature could see with a naked eye. And the next second I had hold of the bark with four sets of nails and my teeth, and the next second after that I was a straddle of the main limb and blaspheming my luck in a way that made my breath smell of brimstone. I had the bull now if he did not think of one thing. But that one thing I dreaded. I dreaded it very seriously. There was a possibility that the bull might not think of it. But there were greater chances that he would. I made up my mind what I would do and in case he did. It was a little over 40 feet to the ground from where I sat. I cautiously unwound a lariat from the pommel of my saddle. Your saddle? Did you take your saddle up in the tree with you? Take it up in the tree with me. Why, how you talk? Of course I didn't. No man could do that. It fell in the tree when it came down. Oh, exactly. Certainly. I unwound the lariat and fastened one end of it to the limb. It was the very best green raw hide and capable of sustaining tons. I made a slip-nose in the other end and then hung it down to see the length. It reached down 22 feet, halfway to the ground. I then loaded every barrel of the allen with a double charge. I felt satisfied. I said to myself, if he never thinks of that one thing that I dread, all right. But if he does, all right anyhow. I am fixed for him. But don't you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that always happens? Indeed it is so. I watched the bull now with anxiety. Anxiety which no one can conceive of who has not been in such a situation and felt that any moment death might come. Presently a thought came into the bull's eye. I knew it, said I. If my nerve fails now, I am lost. Sure enough, it was just as I had dreaded he started in to climb the tree. What, the bull? Of course. Who else? But a bull can't climb a tree. He can't, can't he? Since you know so much about it, did you ever see a bull try? No, I never dreamed of such a thing. Well, then, what is the use of your talking that way, then? Because you never saw a thing done. Is that any reason why it can't be done? Well, all right, go on. What did he do? The bull started up and got along well for about ten feet, then slipped and slid back. I breathed easier. He tried it again, got up a little higher, slipped again. But he came at it once more, and this time he was careful. He got gradually higher and higher, and my spirit went down more and more. Up he came an inch at a time with his eyes hot and his tongue hanging out higher and higher, hitched his foot over the stump of a limb and looked up. As much as to say, you are my meat, friend. Up again, higher and higher. I'm getting more excited the closer he got. He was within ten feet of me. I took a long breath, and then I said, it is now or never. I had the coil of the lariat all ready. I paid it out slowly till it hung right over his head. All of a sudden I let go of the slack, and the slipped noose fell fairly round his neck. Quicker than lightning I out with the Allen and let him have it in the face. It was an awful roar, and must have scared the bull out of his senses. When the smoke cleared away, there he was, dangling in the air, twenty foot from the ground, and going out of one convulsion into another faster than you could count. I didn't stop to count, anyhow. I shinned down the tree and shot for home. Beemas is all that true, just as you have stated it. I wish I may rot in my tracks and die the death of a dog, if it isn't. Well, we can't refuse to believe it, and we don't. But if there were some proofs. Proofs? Did I bring back my lariat? No. Did I bring back my horse? No. Did you ever see the bull again? No. Well, then what more do you want? I never saw anybody as particular as you are about a little thing like that. I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar, he only missed it by the skin of his teeth. This episode reminds me of an incident of my brief sojourn in Siam years afterward. The European citizens of a town in the neighborhood of Bangkok had a prodigy among them by the name of Eckert, an Englishman, a person famous for the number, ingenuity, and imposing magnitude of his lies. They were always repeating his most celebrated falsehoods, and always trying to draw him out before strangers, but they seldom succeeded. Twice he was invited to the house where I was visiting, but nothing could seduce him into a specimen lie. One day a planter named Baskham, an influential man and a proud and sometimes erasable one, invited me to ride over with him and call on Eckert. As we jogged along, said he, Now, do you know where the fault lies? It lies in putting Eckert on his guard. The minute the boys go to pumping at Eckert, he knows perfectly well what they are after, and of course he shuts up his shell. Anybody might know that he would, but when we get there we must play him finer than that. Let him shape the conversation to suit himself. Let him drop it or change it whenever he wants to. Let him see that nobody is trying to draw him out. Just let him have his own way. He will soon forget himself and begin to grind out lies like a mill. Don't get impatient. Just keep quiet and let me play him. I will make him lie. It does seem to me that the boys must be blind to overlook such an obvious and simple trick as that. Eckert received us heartily, a pleasant-spoken, gentle-mannered creature. We sat in the veranda an hour, sipping English ale, and talking about the king, and the sacred white elephant, the sleeping idol, and all manner of things. And I noticed that my comrade never led the conversation himself or shaped it, but simply followed Eckert's lead, and betrayed no solicitude and no anxiety about anything. The effect was shortly perceptible. Eckert began to grow communicative. He grew more and more at his ease, and more and more talkative and sociable. Another hour passed in the same way, and then all of a sudden Eckert said, Oh, by the way! I came near forgetting. I have got a thing here to astonish you. Such a thing as neither you nor any other man ever heard of. I've got a cat that will eat coconut. Common green coconut. And not only eat the meat, but drink the milk. It is so. I'll swear to it. A quick glance from Baskham, a glance that I understood, then, Why, bless my soul, I never heard of such a thing. Man, it is impossible. I knew you would say it. I'll fetch the cat. He went in the house. Baskham said, There, what did I tell you? Now that is the way to handle Eckert. You see, I have petted him along patiently, and put his suspicions to sleep. I'm glad we came. You tell the boys about it when you go back. Cat eat a coconut. Oh, my. Now, that is just his way exactly. He will tell the absurdist lie and trust to luck to get out of it again. Cat eat a coconut. The innocent fool. Eckert approached with his cat, sure enough. Baskham smiled, said he I'll hold the cat. You bring a coconut. Eckert split one open and chopped up some pieces. Baskham smuggled a wink to me and proffered a slice of the fruit to puss. She snatched it, swallowed it ravenously, and asked for more. We rode our two miles in silence and wide apart. At least I was silent, though Baskham cuffed his horse and cursed him a good deal, notwithstanding the horse was behaving well enough. When I branched off homeward, Baskham said, Keep the horse till morning. And you need not speak of this, foolishness to the boys. In a little while all interest was taken up in stretching our necks and watching for the pony rider, the fleet messenger who sped across the continent from St. Joe to Sacramento, carrying letters nineteen hundred miles in eight days. Think of that for perishable horse and human flesh and blood to do. The pony rider was usually a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit and endurance. No matter what time of the day or night his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing or sleeting, or whether his beat was a level straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, or whether it led through peaceful regions or regions that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind. There was no idling time for a pony rider on duty. He rode fifty miles without stopping by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness, just as it happened. He rode a splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman, kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mailbag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the spectator could get hardly the ghost of a look. Both rider and horse went flying light, the rider's dress was thin and fitted close. He wore a roundabout and a skullcap, and tucked his pantaloons into his boot-tops like a race rider. He carried no arms, he carried nothing that was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage on his literary freight was worth five dollars a letter. He got but little frivolous correspondence to carry, his bag had business letters in it mostly, his horse was stripped of all unnecessary weight, too. He wore a little wafer of a racing saddle and no visible blanket. He wore light shoes, or none at all. The little flat mail-pockets strapped under the rider's thighs would each hold about the bulk of a child's primer. They held many and many an important business chapter and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as gold leaf nearly, and thus bulk and weight were economized. The stagecoach traveled about a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five miles a day, twenty-four hours. The pony rider about two hundred and fifty. There were about eighty pony riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching in a long, scattering procession from Missouri to California, forty flying eastward and forty toward the west, and among them making four hundred gallant horses earn a stirring livelihood and see a deal of scenery every single day in the year. We had had a consuming desire from the beginning to see a pony rider, but somehow or other all that had passed us and all that met us managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows. But now we were expecting one along every moment and would see him in broad daylight. Presently the driver exclaims, Here he comes! Every neck is stretched further and every eye strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well, I should think so. In a second or two it becomes a horse and a rider, rising and falling, rising and falling, sweeping toward us nearer and nearer, growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined, nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear. Another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and a man and a horse burst past our excited faces and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm. So sudden is it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man at all maybe. We rattled through Scott's Bluffs Pass, by and by. It was long here somewhere that we first came across genuine and unmistakable alkali water in the road, and we cordially hailed it as a first-class curiosity and a thing to be mentioned with a clout in letters to the ignorant at home. This water gave the road a soapy appearance, and in many places the ground looked as if it had been whitewashed. I think the strange alkali water excited us as much as any wonder we had come upon yet, and I know we felt very complacent and conceited and better satisfied with life after we had added it to our list of things which we had seen and some other people had not. In a small way we were the same sort of simpletons as those who climb unnecessarily the perilous peaks of Mont Blanc in the Matterhorn and derive no pleasure from it except the reflection that it isn't a common experience. But once in a while one of those parties trips and comes darting down the long mountain crags in a sitting posture, making the crusted snow smoke behind him, flitting from bench to bench and from terrace to terrace, jarring the earth where he strikes and still glancing and flitting on again, sticking an iceberg into himself every now and then, and tearing his clothes, snatching at things to save himself, taking hold of trees and fetching them along with him, roots and all, starting little rocks now and then, then big boulders, then acres of ice and snow and patches of forest, gathering and still gathering as he goes, adding and still adding to his mast and sweeping grandeur as he nears the three thousand foot precipice till at last he waves his hat magnificently and rides into eternity on the back of a raging and tossing avalanche. This is all very fine, but let us not be carried away by excitement, but ask calmly, how does this person feel about it in his cooler moments next day with six or seven thousand feet of snow and stuff on top of him? We crossed the sand hills near the scene of the Indian mail robbery and massacre of 1856, wherein the driver and conductor perished and also all the passengers but one, it was supposed. But this must have been a mistake. For at different times afterward, on the Pacific Coast, I was personally acquainted with 133 or four people who were wounded during that massacre and barely escaped with their lives. There was no doubt of the truth of it. I had it from their own lips. One of these parties told me that he kept coming across arrowheads in his system for nearly seven years after the massacre. And another of them told me that he was struck so literally full of arrows that after the Indians were gone and he could raise up and examine himself, he could not restrain his tears, for his clothes were completely ruined. The most trustworthy tradition avers, however, that only one man, a person named Babbit, survived the massacre and he was desperately wounded. He dragged himself on his hands and knee, for one leg was broken, to a station several miles away. He did it during portions of two nights, lying concealed one day and part of another, and for more than forty hours suffering unimaginable anguish from hunger, thirst, and bodily pain. The Indians robbed the coach of everything it contained, including quite an amount of treasure. End of Chapter 8 This is Chapter 9 of Roughing It This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org Roughing It by Mark Twain Chapter 9 We passed Fort Laramie in the night, and on the seventh morning out, we found ourselves in the Black Hills, with Laramie Peak at our elbow, apparently, looming vast and solitary, a deep, dark, rich indigo blue in hue. So portentiously did the old Colossus frown under his beatling brows of storm cloud. He was thirty or forty miles away in reality, but he only seemed removed a little beyond the low ridge at our right. We breakfast at Horseshoe Station, six hundred and seventy-six miles out from St. Joseph. We had now reached a hostile Indian country, and during the afternoon we passed Leporelle Station, and enjoyed great discomfort all the time we were in the neighborhood, being aware that many of the trees we dashed by at arm's length concealed a lurking Indian or two. During the preceding night, an ambushed savage had sent a bullet through the pony rider's jacket, but he had ridden on just the same because pony riders were not allowed to stop and inquire into such things except when killed. As long as they had life enough left in them, they had to stick to the horse and ride, even if the Indians had been waiting for them a week, and were entirely out of patience. About two hours and a half before we arrived at Leporelle Station, the keeper in charge of it had fired four times at an Indian, but he said with an injured air that the Indian had skipped round soles to spiral everything, and ammunitions blamed scarce too. The most natural inference conveyed by his manner of speaking was that, in skipping around, the Indian had taken an unfair advantage. The coach we were in had a neat hole through its front, a reminiscence of its last trip through this region. The bullet that made it wounded the driver slightly, but he did not mind it much. He said the place to keep a man huffy was down on the southern overland among the Apaches, before the company moved the stage line up on the northern route. He said the Apaches used to annoy him all the time down there, and that he came as near as anything to starving to death in the midst of abundance, because they kept him so leaky with bullet holes that he couldn't hold his vitals. This person's statement were not generally believed. We shut the blinds down very tightly that first night in the hostile Indian country, and lay on our arms. We slept on them some, but most of the time we only lay on them. We did not talk much, but kept quiet and listened. It was an inky black night and occasionally rainy. We were among woods and rocks, hills and gorges, so shut in in fact that when we peeped through a chink in a curtain we could discern nothing. The driver and conductor on top were still, too, or only spoke at long intervals in low tones, as in the way of men in the midst of invisible dangers. We listened to raindrops pattering on the roof, and the grinding of the wheels through the muddy gravel, and the low wailing of the wind. And all the time we had that absurd sense upon us, inseparable from travel at night in close curtained vehicle, the sense of remaining perfectly still in one place notwithstanding the jolting and swaying of the vehicle, the trampling of the horses, and the grinding of the wheels. We listened a long time, with intent faculties and baited breath. Every time one of us would relax and draw a long sigh of relief and start to say something, a comrade would be sure to utter a sudden hark, and instantly the experimenter was rigid and listening again. So the tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged by, until at last our tense forms filmed over with a dulled consciousness, and we slept, if one might call such a condition by so strong a name, for it was a sleep set with a hair-trigger. It was a sleep, seething and teeming, with a weird and distressful confusion of shreds and faggands of dreams, a sleep that was a chaos. Presently dreams and sleep and the sullen hush of the night were startled by a ringing report, and cloven by such a long, wild, agonizing shriek. Then we heard ten steps from the stage. Help! Help! Help! It was our driver's voice. Kill him! Kill him like a dog! I'm being murdered! Will no man lend me a pistol? Look out! Head him off! Head him off!" Two pistol shots, a confusion of voices and the trampling of many feet as if a crowd were closing and surging together round some object. Several heavy dull blows as with a club, a voice that said appealingly, Don't, gentlemen, please, don't, I'm a dead man! Then the fainter groan and another blow and away sped the stage into the darkness and left the grisly mystery behind us. What a startle it was! Eight seconds would amply cover the time it occupied. Maybe even five would do it. We only had time to plunge at a curtain and unbuckle and unbutton part of it in an awkward and hindering flurry when our whip cracked sharply overhead and we went rumbling and thundering away down a mountain grade. We fed on that mystery the rest of the night, what was left of it, for it was waning fast. It had to remain a present mystery for all we could get from the conductor in answer to our hails was something that sounded through the clatter of the wheels like, Tell you in the morning! So we lit our pipes and opened the corner of a curtain for a chimney and lay there in the dark, listening to each other's story of how he first felt and how many thousand Indians he first thought had hurled themselves upon us and what his remembrance of the subsequent sounds was and the order of their occurrence. And we theorized, too, but there was never a theory that would account for our driver's voice being out there, nor yet account for his Indian murderers talking such good English, if they were Indians. So we chatted and smoked the rest of the night comfortably away, our boating anxiety being somehow marvelously dissipated by the real presence of something to be anxious about. We never did get much satisfaction about that dark occurrence. All that we could make out of the odds and ends of the information we gathered in the morning was that the disturbance occurred at a station, that we changed drivers there, and that the driver that got off there had been talking roughly about some of the outlaws that infested the region, for there wasn't a man around there but had a price on his head and didn't dare show himself in the settlements, the conductor said. He had talked roughly about these characters and ought to have drove up there with his pistol cocked and ready on the seat alongside of him and begun business himself because any softie would know they would be laying for him. That was all we could gather, and we could see that neither the conductor nor the new driver were much concerned about the matter. They plainly had little respect for a man who would deliver offensive opinions of people and then be so simple as to come into their presence unprepared to back his judgment, as they pleasantly phrased the killing of any fellow being who did not like said opinions. And likewise they plainly had a contempt for the man's poor discretion in venturing to rouse the wrath of such utterly reckless wild beasts as those outlaws, and the conductor added, I tell you it's as much as Slade himself want to do. This remark created an entire revolution in my curiosity. I cared nothing now about the Indians and even lost interest in the murdered driver. There was such magic in that name, Slade. Day or night now I stood always ready to drop any subject in hand to listen to something new about Slade and his ghastly exploits. Even before we got to Overland City we had begun to hear about Slade and his division, for he was a division agent on the Overland, and from the hour we had left Overland City we had heard drivers and conductors talk about only three things. California, the Nevada Silver Mines, and this Desperado Slade. And a deal the most of the talk was about Slade. We had gradually come to have a realizing sense of the fact that Slade was a man whose heart and hands and soul were steeped in the blood of offenders against his dignity. A man who awfully avenged all injuries, affront, insults, or slights of whatever kind, on the spot if he could, years afterward, if lack of earlier opportunity compelled it. A man whose hate tortured him day and night till vengeance appeased it, and not an ordinary vengeance either, but his enemy's absolute death, nothing less. A man whose face would light up with a terrible joy when he surprised a foe and had him at a disadvantage. A high and efficient servant of the Overland, an outlaw among outlaws, and yet their relentless scourge. Slade was at once the most bloody, the most dangerous, and the most valuable citizen that inhabited the savage fastnesses of the mountains. CHAPTER X Really and truly two-thirds of the talk of drivers and conductors had been about this man's Slade ever since the day before we reached Julesburg. In order that the Eastern reader may have a clear conception of what a rocky mountain desperado is in his highest state of development, I will reduce all this mass of Overland gossip to one straightforward narrative and present it in the following shape. Slade was born in Illinois of good parentage. At about 26 years of age he killed a man in a quarrel and fled the country. At St. Joseph, Missouri, he joined one of the early California-bound emigrant trains and was given the post of train master. One day on the plains he had an angry dispute with one of his wagon-drivers, and both drew their revolvers. But the driver was the quicker artist and had his weapon cocked first, so Slade said it was a pity to waste life on so small a matter and proposed that the pistols be thrown on the ground and the quarrel settled by a fist-fight. The unsuspecting driver agreed and threw down his pistol, whereupon Slade laughed at his simplicity and shot him dead. He made his escape and lived a wild life for a while, dividing his time between fighting Indians and avoiding an Illinois sheriff who had been sent to arrest him for his first murder. It is said that in one Indian battle he killed three savages with his own hand and afterward cut their ears off and sent them with his compliments to the chief of the tribe. Slade soon gained a name for fearless resolution, and this was sufficient merit to procure for him the important post of Overland Division Agent at Julesburg in place of Mr. Jules removed. For some time previously the company's horses had been frequently stolen and the coaches delayed by gangs of outlaws who were want to laugh at the idea of any man's having the temerity to resent such outrages. Slade resented them promptly. The outlaws soon found that the new agent was a man who did not fear anything that breathed the breath of life. He made short work of all offenders. The result was that delays ceased, the company's property was let alone, and no matter what happened or who suffered Slade's coaches went through every time. True, in order to bring about this wholesome change Slade had to kill several men, some say three, others say four, and others six, but the world was the richer for their loss. The first prominent difficulty he had was with the ex-agent Jules, who bore the reputation of being a reckless and desperate man himself. Jules hated Slade for supplanting him and a good fair occasion for a fight was all he was waiting for. By and by Slade dared to employ a man whom Jules had once discharged. Next Slade seized a team of stage horses, which he accused Jules of having driven off and hidden somewhere for his own use. War was declared. And for a day or two the two men walked warily about the streets seeking each other. Jules armed with a double barrel shotgun and Slade with his history-creating revolver. Finally as Slade stepped into a store Jules poured the contents of his gun into him from behind the door. Slade was plucky and Jules got several bad pistol wounds in return. Then both men fell and were carried to their respective lodgings, both swearing that better aim should do deadlier work next time. Both were bedridden a long time, but Jules got to his feet first and, gathering his possessions together, packed them on a couple of mules and fled to the Rocky Mountains to gather strength and safety against the day of reckoning. For many months he was not seen or heard of and was gradually dropped out of the remembrance of all, save Slade himself. But Slade was not the man to forget him. On the contrary, Common Report said that Slade kept a reward standing for his capture dead or alive. After a while, seeing that Slade's energetic administration had restored peace in order to one of the worst divisions of the road, the Overland Stage Company transferred him to the Rocky Ridge Division in the Rocky Mountains to see if he could perform a like-miracle there. It was the very paradise of outlaws and desperados. There was absolutely no semblance of law there. Violence was the rule. Force was the only recognized authority. The commonest misunderstandings were settled on the spot with the revolver or the knife. Murders were done in open day and with sparkling frequency, and nobody thought of inquiring into them. It was considered that the parties who did the killing had their private reasons for it, for other people to meddle would have been looked upon as indelicate. After a murder all that Rocky Mountain etiquette required of a spectator was that he should help the gentleman bury his game. Otherwise his cherlishness would surely be remembered against him the first time he killed a man himself and needed a neighborly turn in interning him. Slade took up his residence sweetly and peacefully in the midst of this hive of horse thieves and assassins, and the very first time one of them aired his insolent swaggerings in his presence he shot him dead. He began a raid on the outlaws, and in a singularly short space of time he had completely stopped their depredations on the staged stock, recovered a large number of stolen horses, killed several of the worst desperados of the district, and gained such a dread ascendancy over the rest that they respected him, admired him, feared him, obeyed him. He wrought the same marvelous change in the ways of the community that had marked his administration at Overland City. He captured two men who had stolen Overland stock, and with his own hands he hanged them. He was supreme judge in his district, and he was jury and executioner likewise, and not only in the case of offenses against his employers, but against passing emigrants as well. On one occasion some emigrants had their stock lost or stolen and told Slade who chanced to visit their camp. With a single companion he rode to a ranch, the owners of which he suspected, and, opening the door, missed firing, killing three and wounding the fourth. From a bloodthirstily interesting little Montana book, The Vigilantes of Montana by Professor Thomas J. Dimmesdale, I take this paragraph. While on the road Slade held absolute sway. He would ride down to a station, get into a quarrel, turn the house out of windows, and maltreat the occupants most cruelly. The unfortunate had no means of redress, and were compelled to recuperate as best they could. On one of these occasions it is said he killed the father of the fine little half-breed boy, Jemmy, whom he adopted, and who lived with his widow after his execution. Stories of Slade's hanging men and of innumerable assaults, shootings, stabbings, and beatings, in which he was a principal actor, form part of the legends of the stage line. As for minor quarrels and shootings it is absolutely certain that a minute history of Slade's life would be one long record of such practices. The Vigilantes of Montana by Professor Thomas J. Dimmesdale. Slade was a matchless marksman with a navy revolver. The legends say that one morning at Rocky Ridge, when he was feeling comfortable, he saw a man approaching who had offended him some days before. Observe the fine memory he had for matters like that. And, gentlemen, said Slade drawing, it is a good twenty-yard shot. I'll clip the third button on his coat, which he did. The bystanders all admired it, and they all attended the funeral too. On one occasion a man who kept a little whiskey shelf at the station did something which angered Slade and went and made his will. A day or two afterwards Slade came in and called for some brandy. The man reached under the counter, ostensibly to get a bottle, possibly to get something else, but Slade smiled upon him, that peculiarly bland and satisfied smile of his, which the neighbors had long ago learned to recognize as a death warrant in disguise, and told him to, none of that, pass out the high-priced article. So the poor barkeeper had to turn his back and get the high-priced brandy from the shelf. And when he faced around again he was looking into the muzzle of Slade's pistol. And the next instant added my informant impressively. He was one of the deadest men that ever lived. The stage-drivers and conductors told us that sometimes Slade would leave a hated enemy wholly unmolested, unnoticed, and unmentioned for weeks together. Had done it once or twice at any rate. And some said they believed he did it in order to lull the victims into unwatchfulness so that he could get the advantage of them. And others said they believed he saved up an enemy that way, just as a schoolboy saves up a cake, and made the pleasure go as far as it would by gloating over the anticipation. One of these cases was that of a Frenchman who had offended Slade. To the surprise of everybody, Slade did not kill him on the spot, but let him alone for a considerable time. Finally, however, he went to the Frenchman's house very late one night, knocked, and when his enemy opened the door, shot him dead. Pushed the corpse inside the door with his foot, set the house on fire, and burned up the dead man, his widow, and three children. I heard this story from several different people, and they evidently believed what they were saying. It may be true, and it may not. Give a dog a bad name, et cetera. Slade was captured once by a party of men who intended to lynch him. They disarmed him, and shut him up in a strong log house, and placed a guard over him. He prevailed on his captors to send for his wife so that he might have a last interview with her. She was a brave, loving, spirited woman. She jumped on a horse and rode for life and death. When she arrived, they let her in without searching her, and before the door could be closed, she whipped out a couple of revolvers, and she and her lord marched forth defying the party. And then, under a brisk fire, they mounted double and galloped away unharmed. In the fullness of time, Slade's murmidons captured his ancient enemy, Jules, whom they found in a well-chosen hiding place in the remote fastnesses of the mountains, gaining a precarious livelihood with his rifle. They brought him to Rocky Ridge, bound hand and foot, and deposited him in the middle of the cattle yard with his back against the post. It is said that the pleasure that Lid Slade's face when he heard of it was something fearful to contemplate. He examined his enemy to see that he was securely tied, and then he went to bed, content to wait till morning before enjoying the luxury of killing him. Jules spent the night in the cattle yard, and it is a region where warm nights are never known. In the morning, Slade practiced on him with his revolver, nipping the flesh here and there, and occasionally clipping off a finger, while Jules begged him to kill him outright and put him out of his misery. Finally, Slade reloaded and, walking up close to his victim, made some characteristic remarks and then dispatched him. The body lay there half a day, nobody venturing to touch it without orders, and then Slade detailed a party and assisted at the burial himself. But he first cut off the dead man's ears and put them in his vest pocket, where he carried them for some time with great satisfaction. That is the story, as I have frequently heard it told, and seen it in print in California newspapers. It is doubtless correct in all essential particulars. In due time we rattled up to a stage station and sat down to breakfast with a half-savage, half-civilized company of armed and bearded mountaineers, ranchmen, and station employees. The most gentlemanly appearing, quiet and affable officer we had yet found along the road in the Overland Company's service was the person who sat at the head of the table at my elbow. Never youth stared and shivered as I did when I heard them call him Slade. Here was romance and I sitting face to face with it, looking upon it, touching it, hobnobbing with it as it were. Here, right by my side was the actual ogre who in fights and brawls in various ways had taken the lives of twenty-six human beings, or all men lied about him. I suppose I was the proudest stripling that ever travelled to see strange lands and wonderful people. He was so friendly and so gentle-spoken that I warmed to him in spite of his awful history. It was hardly possible to realize that this pleasant person was the pitiless scourge of the outlaws. The raw head and bloody bones, the nursing mothers of the mountains, terrified their children with. And to this day I can remember nothing remarkable about Slade except that his face was rather broad across the cheekbones, and that the cheekbones were low and the lips peculiarly thin and straight. But that was enough to leave something of an effect upon me, for since then I seldom see a face possessing those characteristics without fancying that the owner of it is a dangerous man. The coffee ran out, at least it was reduced to one tin cupful, and Slade was about to take it when he saw that my cup was empty. He politely offered to fill it, but although I wanted it, I politely declined. I was afraid he had not killed anybody that morning and might be needing diversion. But still, with firm politeness, he insisted on filling my cup, and said I had travelled all night and better deserved it than he. And while he talked he placidly poured the fluid to the last drop. I thanked him and drank it, but it gave me no comfort, for I could not feel sure that he would not be sorry presently that he had given it away, and proceeded to kill me to distract his thoughts from the loss. But nothing of the kind occurred. We left him with only twenty-six dead people to account for, and I felt a tranquil satisfaction in the thought that, in so judiciously taking care of number one at that breakfast-table, I had pleasantly escaped being number twenty-seven. Slade came out to the coach and saw us off, first ordering certain rearrangements of the mail bags for our comfort, and then we took leave of him, satisfied that we should hear of him again, some day, and wondering in what connection.