urn of mind. He had no prejudices. He never looked down, as
so many hard characters do, upon a person possessing a different code of
ethics. His attitude was one of broad, genial tolerance. He saw nothing
out of the way in the fact that he had himself been a road-agent, a
professional gambler, and a desperado at different stages of his career.
On the other hand, he did not in the least hold it against any one that
he had always acted within the law. At the time that I knew him he had
become a man of some substance, and naturally a staunch upholder of the
existing order of things. But while he never boasted of his past deeds,
he never apologized for them, and evidently would have been quite as
incapable of understanding that they needed an apology as he would have
been incapable of being guilty of mere vulgar boastfulness. He did not
often allude to his past career at all. When he did, he recited its
incidents perfectly naturally and simply, as events, without any
reference to or regard for their ethical significance. It was this
quality which made him at times a specially pleasant companion, and
always an agreeable narrator. The point of his story, or what seemed to
him the point, was rarely that which struck me. It was the incidental
sidelights the story threw upon his own nature and the somewhat lurid
surroundings amid which he had moved.

On one occasion when we were out together we killed a bear, and after
skinning it, took a bath in a lake. I noticed he had a scar on the side
of his foot and asked him how he got it, to which he responded with
indifference:

"Oh, that? Why, a man shootin' at me to make me dance, that was all."

I expressed some curiosity in that matter, and he went on:

"Well, the way of it was this: It was when I was keeping a saloon in New
Mexico, and there was a man there by the name of Fowler, and there was a
reward on him of three thousand dollars----"

"Put on him by the State?"

"No, put on by his wife," said my friend; "and there was this--"

"Hold on," I interrupted; "put on by his wife did you say?"

"Yes, by his wife. Him an her had been keepin' a faro bank, you see, and
they quarreled about it, so she just put a reward on him, and so--"

"Excuse me," I said, "but do you mean to say that this reward was put
on publicly?" to which my friend answered, with an air of gentlemanly
boredom at being interrupted to gratify my thirst for irrelevant detail:

"Oh, no, not publicly. She jus