onstable was severely shaken. By that one
infelicitous stroke the two outcasts made an enemy of the Law and the
Gospel as represented in Trinidad County. It is to be feared also that
the ordinary emotional instinct of a frontier community, to which they
were now simply abandoned, was as little to be trusted. In this dilemma
they disappeared from the town the next day--no one knew where. A
pale blue smoke rising from a lonely island in the bay for some days
afterwards suggested their possible refuge. But nobody greatly cared.
The sympathetic mediation of the Editor was characteristically opposed
by Mr. Parkin Skinner, a prominent citizen:--

"It's all very well for you to talk sentiment about niggers, Chinamen,
and Injins, and you fellers can laugh about the Deacon being snatched
up to heaven like Elijah in that blamed Chinese chariot of a kite--but
I kin tell you, gentlemen, that this is a white man's country! Yes, sir,
you can't get over it! The nigger of every description--yeller,
brown, or black, call him 'Chinese,' 'Injin,' or 'Kanaka,' or what
you like--hez to clar off of God's footstool when the Anglo-Saxon gets
started! It stands to reason that they can't live alongside o' printin'
presses, M'Cormick's reapers, and the Bible! Yes, sir! the Bible; and
Deacon Hornblower kin prove it to you. It's our manifest destiny to clar
them out--that's what we was put here for--and it's just the work we've
got to do!"

I have ventured to quote Mr. Skinner's stirring remarks to show that
probably Jim and Li Tee ran away only in anticipation of a possible
lynching, and to prove that advanced sentiments of this high and
ennobling nature really obtained forty years ago in an ordinary American
frontier town which did not then dream of Expansion and Empire!

Howbeit, Mr. Skinner did not make allowance for mere human nature.
One morning Master Bob Skinner, his son, aged twelve, evaded the
schoolhouse, and started in an old Indian "dug-out" to invade the
island of the miserable refugees. His purpose was not clearly defined
to himself, but was to be modified by circumstances. He would either
capture Li Tee and Jim, or join them in their lawless existence. He
had prepared himself for either event by surreptitiously borrowing
his father's gun. He also carried victuals, having heard that Jim ate
grasshoppers and Li Tee rats, and misdoubting his own capacity for
either diet. He paddled slowly, well in shore, to be secure from
observatio