74 ON THE FBONTIER, 



to assist them to buy horses and mules, waggons, camp 

 equipage, and commissary stores ; and to look up the 

 personnel required for their contemplated expedition in 

 any case, my best advice was theirs to command. 



Now what answer will the reader suppose I got ? 



" Thanks very much, ah ! very much obliged indeed 

 most disinterested of you but, ah ! we never take advice 

 from an entire stranger. We have letters to the first banker 

 here. We shall rely entirely upon him in the matter. He 

 will have our full confidence. Ah ! Good-morning. Ah ! " 



I bowed myself out of the room in silence. I did not 

 dare to open my mouth, for I did not want to laugh in 

 their faces. Then I entered the empty billiard-saloon, 

 threw myself into a settee, and roared aloud. I know it is 

 a very bad habit to laugh at one's own thoughts, but, bad 

 as it is, I have done it all my life. I have just as much 

 right to my bad habits as anyone else has to his, and I 

 am continually saying and doing things that are not appa- 

 rently a propos to the time and place. I believe that if I 

 were lying on my death-bed, awaiting dissolution, and the 

 undertaker came and began to measure me for my coffin, I 

 should say something that he would consider quite inappro- 

 priate to the solemnity of the occasion. 



"An entire stranger." I tried to contemplate myself 

 in the character of an entire stranger in Leavenworth, 

 where every man, woman, child and dog, knew me. Why, 

 they were the entire strangers. I had read their names and 

 titles, had seen their servants, had seen them. I was well 

 enough satisfied that they were what they professed to be, 

 but to everyone else in that community they were in the 



