March 23, 1912 
FOREST AND STREAM 
3G3 
There are just two occasions upon which I 
envy the Eskimo. One is when I have 
flushed a large covey of quail, and before I have 
had sufficient time to work up the single birds, 
the short fall afternoon is lost in the twilight of 
the early evening, and the other is when trout 
are rising, breaking all about me, and taking 
the fly voraciously, hardly waiting for it to 
strike the w'ater, and darkness comes, slowly 
but surely, until your flies are indistinguish¬ 
able and the fish have ceased rising. Those 
are the times wdien I long for the endless days 
of the Arctic and think of the possibilities in 
the way of game and fish were one able to take 
■—to-morrer I'll show you somethin' better.’' 
Which it was, and I was protesting against 
business cares that would not allow me to go 
trout fishing. Trout fishing. I did not know 
the meaning of the words until Zimmy illus¬ 
trated to me wdiat trout fishing really was. 
THE TOP RAIL. 
The papers recently printed the remarkable 
story of an express messenger who actually 
bested two train robbers, saved the sleeping 
passengers’ purses, and earned an increase in 
sengers of the mid-eighties when they appeared, 
armed with the then new-fangled small caliber 
pocket revolvers in holsters strapped up tightly 
around their waists. “What kin ye do wdth 
them there toys?’’ asked the men who came daily 
to “see the train come in.’’ And the sawed-off 
shotguns loaded with buckshot—weapons of 
frightful possibilities at short range—were sub¬ 
jects of heated arguments, the six-shooter men 
holding that they were too cumbersome for 
quick work and likely to be out of reach when 
needed. 
To me one of the funniest things of the old 
days was the effect of the civilizing influences on 
two’s company on a trout stream. 
From a photograph by T. E. Marr. 
advantage of the chances that are lost with the 
setting sun. I expressed myself in some such 
manner to Zimmy as .we trudged across the 
fields to where the horse was waiting, but he 
declared against it. 
“Man—man!’’ he ejaculated; “don’t you ever 
know when you’ve got enough? You’ve brook 
fished an’ pond fished an’ got ’em both ways, 
twenty-five or six trout, an’ now you’re kickin' 
’cause it’s’ gittin’ dark an’ you’ve got to quit. 
We’re goin’ to-morrer, an’ I guess you can 
manage to wait till then.” 
“But maybe the fishing won’t be as good,” I 
protested. 
“You jest leave that to me,” answered Zimmy, 
confidently. “I’ve showed you fishin’ to-day, 
that s what you might call good, but to-morrer 
salary—of probably fifty cents a month—^from 
his grateful employer, the express company. 
Everybody said it was fine. Perhaps it was, but 
the method employed grates on the sensibilities 
of those who remember the romance of the old 
West, when express messengers were walking 
arsenals. 
This messenger was not a two-gun man, nor 
even a one-gun man; he killed the first robber 
with a common every-day implement of peace, 
a wood mallet. Then—luckily for him—he took 
the dead man’s gun and popped the second 
bandit over. And this occurred in Texas. How 
has the old West degenerated, to arm men re¬ 
sponsible for large sums of money with mallets! 
I remember the sneers of derision with which 
the gun-toting station loafers greeted the mes- 
police chiefs and marshals in growing towns that 
had begun to “put on airs.’’ Some of these men 
had been lured away from their old-time flannel 
shirts by fashion, and they perspired in dire dis¬ 
comfort in tight-fitting cutaway coats and white 
collars. Those fetters marked the passing of 
“man-size’’ frontier six-shooters, for a coat 
argued concealment of artillery, and to try to 
conceal a huge six-shooter, a belt of cartridges 
and a holster under a cutaway coat was an ab¬ 
surd impossibility, though the struggle was as 
long-drawn out as it was ludicrous. 
To see these men going into a fight on the 
double-quick, as though they loved it, with coat¬ 
tails flapping and guns jerking about under¬ 
neath, was a treat, at least to 
Grizzly King. 
