ly enough, men of this type were not so frequently local
products as immigrants. The "bootblack bad man" was a character
recognized on the frontier--the city tough gone West with ambitions to
achieve a bad eminence. Some of these men were partially bad for a
while. Some of them, no doubt, even left behind them, after their sudden
funerals, the impression that they had been wholly bad. You cannot
detect all the counterfeit currency in the world, severe as the test for
counterfeits was in the old West. There is, of course, no great amount
of difference between the West and the East. All America, as well as the
West, demanded of its citizens nothing so much as genuineness. Yet the
Western phrase, to "stand the acid," was not surpassed in graphic
descriptiveness. When an imitation bad man came into a town of the old
frontier, he had to "stand the acid" or get out. His hand would be
called by some one. "My friend," said old Bob Bobo, the famous
Mississippi bear hunter, to a man who was doing some pretty loud
talking, "I have always noticed that when a man goes out hunting for
trouble in these bottoms, he almost always finds it." Two weeks later,
this same loud talker threatened a calm man in simple jeans pants, who
took a shotgun and slew him impulsively. Now, the West got its hot blood
largely from the South, and the dogma of the Southern town was the same
in the Western mining town or cow camp--the bad man or the would-be bad
man had to declare himself before long, and the acid bottle was always
close at hand.

That there were grades in counterfeit bad men was accepted as a truth on
the frontier. A man might be known as dangerous, as a murderer at heart,
and yet be despised. The imitation bad man discovered that it is
comparatively easy to terrify a good part of the population of a
community. Sometimes a base imitation of a desperado is exalted in the
public eye as the real article. A few years ago four misled hoodlums of
Chicago held up a street-car barn, killed two men, stole a sum of money,
killed a policeman and another man, and took refuge in a dugout in the
sand hills below the city, comporting themselves according to the most
accepted dime-novel standards. Clumsily arrested by one hundred men or
so, instead of being tidily killed by three or four, as would have been
the case on the frontier, they were put in jail, given columns of
newspaper notice, and worshiped by large crowds of maudlin individuals.
These men prob