ve us _John Forney_!"

With an air of infinite contempt the President exclaimed--

"I don't waste _my_ powder on dead ducks."

He had better have left that word unsaid, for it ruined him. It woke
Colonel John Forney up to the very highest pitch of his fighting "Injun,"
or, as they say in Pennsylvania, his "Dutch." He had always been to that
hour a genial man, like most politicians, a little too much given to the
social glass. But from that date of the dead duck he became "total
abstinence," and concentrated all his faculties and found all his
excitement in vengeance hot and strong, without a grain of sugar. In
which I gladly sympathised and aided, for I detested Johnson as a
renegade Copperhead, or rather venomous toad to the South, who wished
with all his soul to undo Lincoln's work and bring in the Confederacy.
And I believe, on my life and soul, that if John Forney had not defeated
him, we should have had such disasters as are now inconceivable, the
least of them being a renewal of the war. Johnson had renegaded from the
Confederacy because, being only a tailor, he had ranked as a "low white,"
or something despised even by "quality" negroes. The Southern
aristocracy humbugged him by promising that if he would betray the Union
he should be regarded as one of themselves, by which very shallow cheat
he was--as a snob would be--easily caught, and in due time cast off.

I had been but a few weeks on the _Press_, and all was going on well,
when one morning the Colonel abruptly asked me if I could start in the
morning for Fort Riley, of which all I knew was that it constituted an
extreme frontier station in Kansas. There was to be a Kansas Pacific
railway laid out, and a large party of railroad men intended to go as far
as the last surveyor's camp. Of course, a few editors had been invited
to write up the road, and these in turn sent some one in their place. I
knew at once that I should have something like the last year's wild life
over again, and I was delighted. I borrowed John Forney's revolver,
provided an agate-point and "manifold paper" for duplicate letters to our
"two papers, both daily," and at the appointed hour was at the railway
station. There had been provided for us the director's car, a very large
and extremely comfortable vehicle, with abundance of velvet "settees" or
divan sofas, with an immense stock of lobster-salad, cold croquettes,
game, with "wines of every fineness," and excellent waiters