216 HUNTING THE GRISLY. 



had cut the court-house up into pants." It 

 was true. The cowboys were in need of 

 snaps, and with an admirable mixture of ad- 

 venturousness, frugality, and ready adapta- 

 bility to circumstances, had made substitutes 

 therefor in the shape of canvas overalls, cut 

 from the roof and walls of the shaky temple 

 of justice. 



One of my valued friends in the mountains, 

 and one of the best hunters with whom I ever 

 travelled, was a man who had a peculiarly 

 light-hearted way of looking at conventional 

 social obligations. Though in some ways a 

 true backwoods Donatello, he was a man of 

 much shrewdness and of great courage and 

 resolution. Moreover, he possessed what 

 only a few men do possess, the capacity to 

 tell the truth. He saw facts as they were, 

 and could tell them as they were, and he never 

 told an untruth unless for very weighty 

 reasons. He was pre-eminently a philoso- 

 pher, of a happy, sceptical turn of mind. He 

 had no prejudices. He never looked down, 

 as so many hard characters do, upon a per- 

 son possessing a different code of ethics. 

 His attitude was one of broad, genial toler- 

 ance. He saw nothing out of the way in the 

 fact that he had 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 



