FRONTIER TYPES 85 



bore an excellent reputation as being not only highly skilled in woodcraft 

 and the use of the rifle, but also men of tried courage and strict integrity, 

 whose word could be always implicitly trusted. 



I had with me at the time a hunter who, though their equal as marks- 

 man or woodsman, was their exact opposite morally. He was a pleasant 

 companion and useful assistant, being very hard-working, and possessing a 

 temper that never was ruffled by anything. He was also a good-looking fel- 

 low, with honest brown eyes ; but he no more knew the difference between 

 right and wrong than Adam did before the fall. Had he been at all con- 

 scious of his wickedness, or had he possessed the least sense of shame, he 

 would have been unbearable as a companion ; but he was so perfectly pleas- 

 ant and easy, so good-humoredly tolerant of virtue in others, and he so 

 wholly lacked even a glimmering suspicion that murder, theft, and adultery- 

 were matters of anything more than individual taste, that I actually grew 

 to be rather fond of him. He never related any of his past deeds of wicked- 

 ness as matters either for boastfulness or for regret; they were simply 

 repeated incidentally in the course of conversation. Thus once, in speak- 

 ing of the profits of his different enterprises, he casually mentioned making 

 a good deal of money as a Government scout in the South-west by buying 

 cartridges from some negro troops at a cent apiece and selling them to the 

 hostile Apaches for a dollar each. His conduct was not due to sympathy 

 with the Indians, for it appeared that later on he had taken part in mas- 

 sacring some of these same Apaches when they were prisoners. He 

 brushed aside as irrelevant one or two questions which I put to him : matters 

 of sentiment were not to be mixed up with a purely mercantile specula- 

 tion. Another time we were talking of the curious angles bullets sometimes 

 fly off at when they ricochet. To illustrate the matter he related an experi- 

 ence which I shall try to give in his own words. " One time, when I was 

 keeping a saloon down in New Mexico, there was a man owed me a grudge. 

 Well, he took sick of the small-pox, and the doctor told him he 'd sure die, 

 and he said if that was so he reckoned he 'd kill me first. So he come 

 a-riding in with his gun [in the West a revolver is generally called a 

 gun] and begun shooting; but I hit him first, and away he rode. I 

 started to get on my horse to follow him ; but there was a little Irishman 

 there who said he 'd never killed a man, and he begged hard for me to 

 give him my gun and let him go after the other man and finish him. So 

 I let him go ; and when he caught up, blamed if the little cuss did n't get 

 so nervous that he fired off into the ground, and the darned bullet struck a 

 crowbar, and glanced up, and hit the other man square in the head and 

 killed him ! Now, that was a funny shot, was n't it ? " 



