pass his place you can see,
on a rocky knoll, the fortress of boulders which he built to hold his
lands against the renegades back in the seventies.

Not many years ago some Federal agents had Uncle Billy up in Tucson on
a charge of fencing government land, for according to the records he
had not gone through the formality of taking out some of the requisite
papers for proper possession. That case is one instance of a man
pleading guilty and getting acquittal.

For Uncle Billy Fourrs acknowledged the formal accusation and still
maintained the land was his own.

"How," asked the government prosecutor, "did you get it?"

"I took it away from the Indians," was the answer. And the jury, being
an Arizona jury, promptly acquitted him. Which, was, when you come to
think over such incidents as the foregoing, only simple justice.

THE OVERLAND MAIL

From the time when the first lean and bearded horsemen in their
garments of fringed buckskin rode out into the savage West, men gave
the same excuse for traveling that hard road toward the setting sun.

The early pathfinders maintained there must be all manner of
high-priced furs off there beyond the sky-line. The emigrants who
followed in the days of '49, informed their neighbors that they were
going to gather golden nuggets in California. The teamsters who drove
the heavy freight-wagons over the new trails a few years later told
their relatives and friends that they were going West to better their
fortunes. And when the Concord coaches came to carry the mail between
the frontier settlements and San Francisco, the men of wealth who
financed the different lines announced there was big money in the
ventures; the men of action who operated them claimed that high wages
brought them into it.

So now you see them all: pathfinder, argonaut, teamster, stage-driver,
pony-express rider, and capitalist, salving their consciences and
soothing away the trepidations of their women-folk with the good old
American excuse that they were going to make money.

As a matter of fact that excuse was only an excuse and nothing more.
In their inmost hearts all these men knew that they had other
motives.

There was one individual who did not try to hoodwink himself or others
about this Western business, and if you will but take the time to look
into his case you will be able easily to diagnose an itching which was
troubling all the rest of them.

That Individual was usually taken most