ey. We have the skill. He comes in winter to play poker
at the military posts. We play poker--a few. When he's lost his money we
make him drunk and let him go. Sometimes we get the wrong man."

And he told me a tale of an innocent cow-boy who turned up, cleaned out,
at an army post, and played poker for thirty-six hours. But it was
the post that was cleaned out when that long-haired Caucasian removed
himself, heavy with everybody's pay and declining the proffered liquor.

"Noaw," said the historian, "I don't play with no cow-boy unless he's a
little bit drunk first."

Ere I departed I gathered from more than one man the significant fact
that up to one hundred yards he felt absolutely secure behind his
revolver.

"In England, I understand," quoth the limber youth from the South,--"in
England a man isn't allowed to play with no fire-arms. He's got to be
taught all that when he enlists. I didn't want much teaching how to
shoot straight 'fore I served Uncle Sam. And that's just where it is.
But you was talking about your Horse Guards now?"

I explained briefly some peculiarities of equipment connected with our
crackest crack cavalry. I grieve to say the camp roared.

"Take 'em over swampy ground. Let 'em run around a bit an' work the
starch out of 'em, an' then, Almighty, if we wouldn't plug 'em at ease
I'd eat their horses."

There was a maiden--a very little maiden--who had just stepped out of
one of James's novels. She owned a delightful mother and an equally
delightful father--a heavy-eyed, slow-voiced man of finance. The parents
thought that their daughter wanted change.

She lived in New Hampshire. Accordingly, she had dragged them up to
Alaska and to the Yosemite Valley, and was now returning leisurely, via
the Yellowstone, just in time for the tail-end of the summer season at
Saratoga.

We had met once or twice before in the park, and I had been amazed and
amused at her critical commendation of the wonders that she saw.
From that very resolute little mouth I received a lecture on American
literature, the nature and inwardness of Washington society, the precise
value of Cable's works as compared with Uncle Remus Harris, and a few
other things that had nothing whatever to do with geysers, but were
altogether pleasant.

Now, an English maiden who had stumbled on a dust-grimed, lime-washed,
sun-peeled, collarless wanderer come from and going to goodness knows
where, would, her mother inciting her and her fat