RECREATION 



Volume XVIU. APRIL, J 903. Number 4. 



G. 0. SHIELDS (COQUINA,) Editor and Manager 



A TALE OF A TRAIL. 



VICTOR SCHOOLMAN. 



Recreation is a veritable store- taste for aught in civilization but its 



house of veritable tales. Some of the whiskey. For that, and certain other 



stories of prowess, luck and skill are necessaries, as shells, tobacco, bacon, 



enough to drive us of less experience, etc., he emerged from his haunts in 



or poorer imaginations, to seek some the mountains of Northern New Mex- 



spot in the remote recesses of darkest ico, as the meagerness of his supplies 



limbo where we could sit down in eter- or the largeness of his thirst demand- 



nal silence and seclusion. While we ed. It is needless to say this thirst 



of this brotherhood can not boast of was seldom quenched, 



the skill that enables the modern mir- It was toward the close of his 



acle-maker to kill grouse, sheep, deer, month's spree that I found him. He 



elk and the roaring grizzly with his had just shot a brakeman and was pre- 



terrible .22, nor of the kind fate that paring to wipe out a ranchman, when 



brought the Indian and the white man Jim Harris, the marshal, hove in sight, 



safely out of the jaws of the white Joe promptly hoisted the flag of truce 



wolf of the North, yet the jovial god- when he saw Harris. He knew Har- 



dess of the rocks and wilds has some- ris always meant business. Harris also 



times mounted her moon-car for the knew that Joe was old business him- 



delectation of some of us ; and that we self when occasion demanded ; so the 



might not go down to our last level only further matter transacted at that 



wholly without experience has brought time was to call me to place Joe in 



confusion to the wisest of the killers, the tender care of Dr. Smith. After a 



that we in turn might smile. week's work the doctor got the snakes 



Back in the 8o's the possession of a chased out of Joe's system sufficiently 



little cash had put me as far away to start him home in my company as 



from Chicago as Trinidad, Colo., and official druggist. In that capacity I 



the subsequent absence of that same administered to him the proper pow- 



useful source of many evils bade fair ders and doled out the fixed quantities 



to keep me thereabout. After a week of fluid said by Smith to be essential 



or 2 of tips and a month or so of to Joe's well-being. About 9 o'clock 



downs, I finally fell in with Joe. in the morning of the third day out, 



Driven from his Kentucky home in shortly after we had left a mining 



'61 because of his Southern sympa- camp along the Chicorica, a little, 



thies, under suspicion by his Southern noisy stream that tumbled about and 



companions because he was the son of sassed the trout that essayed to keep it 



an abolitionist family, he was natur- company, a rabbit crossed the trail 



ally forced into companionships of his ahead and broke for the rocks. I 



own forming. A guerilla during the quickly unslung a .44 Winchester 



war, an outcast after it, he drifted into from the saddle, and remarking that a 



the Rockies and became a hunter. He little rabbit broth would be a good 



lived not in the cities, neither loved he thing for a certain stomach I knew of, 



their ways. In fact, he had but little I banged away at Mr. Rabbit and 



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