here and was not making ghost
stories in order to impress us. Yet if the Lord spares him thirty-two
years more, at the end of that time he will probably still be carrying
his gun upside down, turning his horse into a bog-hole, and blundering
through the country by main strength and awkwardness. He was a
beautiful type of the tenderfoot.

The redeeming point of the tenderfoot is his humbleness of spirit and
his extreme good nature. He exasperates you with his fool performances
to the point of dancing cursing wild crying rage, and then accepts
your--well, reproofs--so meekly that you come off the boil as though
some one had removed you from the fire, and you feel like a low-browed
thug.

Suppose your particular tenderfoot to be named Algernon. Suppose him
to have packed his horse loosely--they always do--so that the pack has
slipped, the horse has bucked over three square miles of assorted
mountains, and the rest of the train is scattered over identically that
area. You have run your saddle-horse to a lather heading the outfit.
You have sworn and dodged and scrambled and yelled, even fired your
six-shooter, to turn them and bunch them. In the mean time Algernon
has either sat his horse like a park policeman in his leisure hours, or
has ambled directly into your path of pursuit on an average of five
times a minute. Then the trouble dies from the landscape and the baby
bewilderment from his eyes. You slip from your winded horse and
address Algernon with elaborate courtesy.

"My dear fellow," you remark, "did you not see that the thing for you
to do was to head them down by the bottom of that little gulch there?
Don't you really think ANYBODY would have seen it? What in hades do
you think I wanted to run my horse all through those boulders for? Do
you think I want to get him lame 'way up here in the hills? I don't
mind telling a man a thing once, but to tell it to him fifty-eight
times and then have it do no good-- Have you the faintest recollection
of my instructing you to turn the bight OVER instead of UNDER when you
throw that pack-hitch? If you'd remember that, we shouldn't have had
all this trouble."

"You didn't tell me to head them by the little gulch," babbles Algernon.

This is just the utterly fool reply that upsets your artificial and
elaborate courtesy. You probably foam at the mouth, and dance on your
hat, and shriek wild imploring imprecations to the astonished hills.
This is not because you