420 The Wilderness Hunter. 



himself been a road-agent, a professional gambler, and a 

 desperado at different stages of his career. On the other 

 hand, he did not in the least hold it against any one that 

 he had always acted within the law. At the time that I 

 knew him he had become a man of some substance, and 

 naturally a staunch upholder of the existing order of 

 things. But while he never boasted of his past deeds, he 

 never apologized for them, and evidently would have been 

 quite as incapable of understanding that they needed an 

 apology as he would have been incapable of being guilty 

 of mere vulgar boastfulness. He did not often allude to 

 his past career at all. When he did, he recited its inci- 

 dents perfectly naturally and simply, as events, without 

 any reference to or regard for their ethical significance. 

 It was this quality which made him at times a specially 

 pleasant companion, and always an agreeable narrator. 

 The point of his story, or what seemed to him the point, 

 was rarely that which struck me. It was the incidental 

 sidelights the story threw upon his own nature and the 

 somewhat lurid surroundings amid which he had moved. 



On one occasion when we were out together we killed 

 a bear, and after skinning it, took a bath in a lake. I 

 noticed he had a scar on the side of his foot and asked him 

 how he got it, to which he responded, with indifference : 



" Oh, that ? Why, a man shootin' at me to make me 

 dance, that was all." 



I expressed some curiosity in the matter, and he 

 went on : 



"Well, the way of it was this: It was when I was 

 keeping a saloon in New Mexico, and there w^as a man 



