“Red and me differs there, I know, but his idees gets sifted through that crop of red alfalfa he wears, whilest I present a clean proposition to any idee that comes boundin’ o’er the lee, or to wind’ard, or any direction she chooses to bound.  Yessir; when I begin to feel that life ain’t worth livin’ give me an enemy or a friend like Pete Douglass.

“It ain’t for me to poke no fun at Pete’s looks.  There’s a place where a humarious turn of mind orter stop.  Pete’s looks was too serious for any man to get comic about.  It appeared as if his features had been blowed on to his face by a gale of wind; his whiskers had a horrified expression, like they’d made their escape if they hadn’t been fastened on, and he was double-jointed in every point of the compass.  When he stood up straight he give you more the impression of sittin’ down then a man sick a-bed could.  I dunno how it come, but everything old Pete looked like, seemed precisely the reverse.

“The way I got acquainted with Pete was when he put his hard coin agin a French tin-horn’s race-track game.  There was little horses running around a board, and you put your money where you thought it would win, but you never thought right, because the Dago had a stick under the table that pulled them races to suit his fancy.

“It stood to reason that taking money off’n a man who’d play such a game was inhumanity in the first degree, so when Pete’s last dollar departed I entered that horse-race with a gun, just as I had no business to, and I says to the tin-horn, ’Look-a-here, you put that money across the board, or I’ll play a tune on you,’ and so he shouldn’t think I was interferin’ out of an idle curiosity, I pointed the weapon at him.

“‘O-rrr righ’!’ says he; ‘Tooty-sweet.’  I lost a good deal of patience on the spot.  You see, it seemed like he was tryin’ to be entertaining.  I say, by way of an amoosin’ remark, that I’m goin’ to play a tune on that tin-horn, and he gayly tells me to toot sweet!  Well, I don’t want to harrow your feelin’s.  Anyway, Pete got his money and Frenchy returned to the land where his style of remarks was more appreciated, a little later.

“So Pete, he grasps my hand with tears in his eyes and considerable blood on his nose, where I’d accidently hit him with the Dago, and he says I’m his friend forever, and he’ll show me what friendship really means.  That’s why I’m inclined to say that for rest and recreation I’ll take an enemy.  Whether our friend and brother, Mr. Douglass, was the luckiest or unluckiest man on earth, I’ve never been able to figger out.  He personally explored the bottom of every old prospeck hole in the country.  He was romantic by disposition, Pete was, and loved to go for walks at night.  If he didn’t turn up for breakfast I took down the coil of rope and proceeded until I found the right hole, because you could bet as safe that he was at the bottom of one of ’em as you could that the bottom itself was there.