I wanted to be the head of the hull Mormon kingdom, so I married right and left.  Every time I added to the available supply of Mrs. Scraggs, I went up a step in the government.  I ain’t all the persimmons for personal beauty, so I had to take what was willin’ to take me, and they turned out to be mostly black-eyed women with peculiar dispositions.  Gentlemen, I was once as lively and happy a little boy as ever did chores on a farm.  See me now!  This is the result of mixin’ women and politics.  If I should tell you all the kinds of particular and general devilment (to run ’em alphabetically, as I did to keep track of ’em) that Ann Eliza Scraggs, and Bridget Scraggs, and Belle Scraggs, and Fanny Scraggs, and Honoria and Helen Scraggs, and Isabelle Scraggs, and so on up to zed, raised with me, it would go through any little germs of joy you may have in your constitutions like Sittin’ Bull’s gang of dog-soldiers through an old ladies’ sewing bee.  Look at me!  For all them years that cussed ambition of mine held me in its deadly toils.  I never heard the sound of blessed silence.  Trouble!  I’m bald as a cake of ice; my nerves is ruined.  If the wind makes a noise in the grass like the swish of skirts, I’m a mile up the track before I get my wits back, sweatin’ coldly and profusely, like a water-cooler.

“’I ain’t got anything to tie to but all them women by the name of Scraggs, and them ties I cut by travelin’ fast between daylights.  Wisht I could introduce you to Mrs. Scraggs as she inhabits the territory of Utah—­you’d understand a power of things that may seem a little misty to you at present.  However, I can’t do that, nor I wouldn’t neither, if I was to be made general superintendent of the whole show for my pains.  I’ll leave the aggregated Mrs. Scraggs in the hands of Providence, as bein’ the only power capable of handling her.  Yet I don’t believe in Providence.  I don’t believe in no Hereafter, nor Heretofore, nor no Now; I don’t believe in no East nor West, nor Up nor Down, nor Sideways, Lengthways, ’Cross-the-center, Top, Bottom, or Middle.  I have lost my faith in every ram-butted thing a man can hear, see, or touch, includin’ everything I’ve left out.  That’s me, Joe Bush.’  He stopped a minute.  ‘Trouble—­’ says he.  ’Trouble—­I wisht nobody’d mention that word in my hearin’ again.’

“Well, he had us gummed fast, all right.  Nobody in our outfit could push up against such a world-without-end experience as that.

“But Scraggs was a gentleman; he didn’t crowd us because we broke.  In fact, now that he’d had his say, he loosened up considerable, and every now and then he’d even smile.

“Then come to us the queerest thing in that whole curiosity-shop of a ranch.  Its name was Alexander Fulton.  I reckon Aleck was about twenty-one by the almanac, and anywhere’s from three to ninety by the way you figure a man.  Aleck stood six foot high as he stood, but if you ran the tape along his curves he was about six-foot-four.