now what is best for you; you shall blow out this
bubble from your own breath.

You could never get into any proper relation to Jimville unless you
could slough off and swallow your acquired prejudices as a lizard does
his skin. Once wanting some womanly attentions, the stage-driver assured
me I might have them at the Nine-Mile House from the lady barkeeper. The
phrase tickled all my after-dinner-coffee sense of humor into an
anticipation of Poker Flat. The stage-driver proved himself really
right, though you are not to suppose from this that Jimville had no
conventions and no caste. They work out these things in the personal
equation largely. Almost every latitude of behavior is allowed a good
fellow, one no liar, a free spender, and a backer of his friends'
quarrels. You are respected in as much ground as you can shoot over, in
as many pretensions as you can make good.

That probably explains Mr. Fanshawe, the gentlemanly faro dealer of
those parts, built for the role of Oakhurst, going white-shirted and
frock-coated in a community of overalls; and persuading you that
whatever shifts and tricks of the game were laid to his deal, he could
not practice them on a person of your penetration. But he does. By his
own account and the evidence of his manners he had been bred for a
clergyman, and he certainly has gifts for the part. You find him always
in possession of your point of view, and with an evident though not
obtrusive desire to stand well with you. For an account of his killings,
for his way with women and the way of women with him, I refer you to
Brown of Calaveras and some others of that stripe. His improprieties had
a certain sanction of long standing not accorded to the gay ladies who
wore Mr. Fanshawe's favors. There were perhaps too many of them. On the
whole, the point of the moral distinctions of Jimville appears to be a
point of honor, with an absence of humorous appreciation that strangers
mistake for dullness. At Jimville they see behavior as history and judge
it by facts, untroubled by invention and the dramatic sense. You glimpse
a crude equity in their dealings with Wilkins, who had shot a man at
Lone Tree, fairly, in an open quarrel. Rumor of it reached Jimville
before Wilkins rested there in flight. I saw Wilkins, all Jimville saw
him; in fact, he came into the Silver Dollar when we were holding a
church fair and bought a pink silk pincushion. I have often wondered
what became of it. Some of us shoo