d the
finest dinner that could be prepared for a party of twelve, and set as
date the night preceding his departure for the West. The guests were
invited with genuine Western hospitality. His friends had been kind to
him, and he desired to show them that a man of the West could not only
appreciate such things, but return them.

The dinner was a thorough success. Not an invited guest was absent.
The conversation sparkled. Quip and repartee shot across the "festive
board," and all went merry as a dinner-bell. The host was satisfied, and
proud withal. The next morning he approached Delmonico's cashier with an
air of reckless prodigality.

"My bill, please," said he, and when he got it, he looked hard at it for
several minutes. It dawned on him gradually that his fifty dollars would
about pay for one plate. As he confided to us afterward, that little
slip of paper frightened him more than could the prospect of a combat
single-handed with a whole tribe of Sioux Indians.

Unsophisticated Will! There was, as he discovered, a wonderful
difference between a dinner at Delmonico's and a dinner on the plains.
For the one, the four corners of the earth are drawn upon to provide
the bill of fare; for the other, all one needs is an ounce of lead and a
charge of powder, a bundle of fagots and a match.

But it would never do to permit the restaurant cashier to suspect that
the royal entertainer of the night before was astonished at his bill; so
he requested that the account be forwarded to his hotel, and sought the
open air, where he might breathe more freely.

There was but one man in New York to whom he felt he could turn in
his dilemma, and that was Ned Buntline. One who could invent plots for
stories, and extricate his characters from all sorts of embarrassing
situations, should be able to invent a method of escape from so
comparatively simple a perplexity as a tavern bill. Will's confidence
in the wits of his friend was not unfounded. His first great financial
panic was safely weathered, but how it was done I do not know to this
day.

One of Will's main reasons for visiting the East was to look up our only
living relatives on mother's side--Colonel Henry R. Guss and family,
of Westchester, Pennsylvania. Mother's sister, who had married this
gentleman, was not living, and we had never met him or any of his
family. Ned Buntline accompanied Will on his trip to Westchester.

To those who have passed through the experience of wa