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Show 188 WESTERN WILDS. with himself about breakin' the rules and fightin' that he took to his bed, and his new store went all to shacks; an' all the abolishnists left, too, and the Virginny people swore the place had no style about it anyhow, and they moved, and some o' the houses was hauled off into the country, and the rest was took by a big fresh, and you won't find any thing there now but a corn- crib or two. And all that from one dog- fight. " But so ' twas nobody from that town ever had any luck, ' cept that same little splintery Si Duvall. He went off to Oregon and got to be a lawyer, and went to the legislator, an' was in the big land commis-sion, and jest coined money; but, after all, the luck o' Union Flats overtook him at last. He up an' married one o' them school- marms sent out from Boston, and when they took their tower down to Frisco, she got sea- sick and th rowed up all her teeth, that Si thought was so pretty an' regular ; and Si tried for a divorce, and said it was failure o' consideration an' fraud in the contract, an' not the goods he bar-gained for at all, but the judga differed with him, an' he had to sup-port her. So you see, boys, my luck's bound to foller me, and until I leave the outfit you'll strike no horn silver on this hill." The whisky being exhausted, the conversation now took a more serious turn. There were accounts of the great " Frazer River Ex-citement," when the miners rushed off to British Columbia, and most of them came back minus ; of the stampede into Sun River Gulch ; of the Calaveras frauds, and the mob that hanged the perpetrators for our miners were men who had tempted fortune in many fields. There were blood- curdling tales of Indian massacres ; sad narrations of toil and exposure on the cold mountain- side or the wind- swept desert; and depressing stories of the long, long search for gold which had still evaded the prospector. I was particularly struck by one ac-count, given by a weather- beaten mountaineer of sixty years, whose memory ran back to the time when trappers and hunters constituted the sole white population west of the Missouri. As his style was obscure, I venture to give the story in my own language : It was the good old time the grand, good old time when buffalo by thousands came within two days' ride of the Missouri ; when beaver dams adorned every stream in the mountains ; when the wild horse ranged from Laramie Plains to the Rio Grande ; when the Indians welcomed the trapper and trader, though they still fought the soldier and emigrant; and the nomadic plainsman could ride two thousand miles in a right line without sight of a human habitation. Then Clear Creek, Colorado, was lively with beaver; then the mountain |