_Barnum_ ended at 6.07 p.m.
on the farm of E. R. Young, nine miles north of Saratoga.

A year later the _Barnum_ rose for the last time--from Chicago--and to
this day the fate of the stanch craft and her brave captain remains an
unsolved mystery.

CHAPTER VII

THE EVOLUTION OF A TRAIN ROBBER

Life was never dull in Grant County, New Mexico, in the early eighties.
There was always something doing--usually something the average
law-abiding, peace-loving citizen would have been glad enough to dispense
with. To say that life then and there was insecure is to describe
altogether too feebly a state of society and an environment wherein
Death, in one violent form or another, was ever abroad, seldom long idle,
always alert for victims.

When the San Carlos Apaches, under Victoria, Ju, or Geronimo, were not
out gunning for the whites, the whites were usually out gunning for one
another over some trivial difference. Everybody carried a gun and was
more or less handy with it. Indeed, it was a downright bad plan to carry
one unless you were handy. For with gunning--the game most played, if
not precisely the most popular--every one was supposed to be familiar
with the rules and to know how to play; and in a game where every hand is
sure to be "called," no one ever suspected another of being out on a
sheer "bluff." Thus the coroner invariably declared it a case of suicide
where one man drew a gun on another and failed to use it.

This highly explosive state of society was not due to the fact that there
were few peaceable men in the country for there were many of them, men of
character and education, honest, and as law-abiding as their peculiar
environment would permit. Moreover, the percentage of professional "bad
men"--and this was a profession then--was comparatively small. It was
due rather to the fact that every one, no matter how peaceable his
inclinations, was compelled to carry arms habitually for self-defence,
for the Apaches were constantly raiding outside the towns, and white
outlaws inside. And with any class of men who constantly carry arms, it
always falls out that a weapon is the arbiter of even those minor
personal differences which in the older and more effete civilization of
the East are settled with fists or in a petty court.

The prevailing local contempt for any man who was too timid to "put up a
gun fight" when the etiquette of a situation demanded it, was expressed
locally in the phrase th