“It was a terrible night outside—­one of those nights when you can hear things; and with the vivid imagination I was enjoying then, I was almost afraid to try to sleep.  But just as I was going into a doze, I raised up my head, and there was my cat walking up and down my frame, his back arched and his tail flirting with the slow sinuous movement of a snake.  I reached for my gun, and as it clicked in cocking, he began raking my legs, sharpening his claws and growling like a tiger.  I gave a yell and kicked him off, when he sprang up on the old table and I could see his eyes glaring at me.  I emptied my gun at him a second time, and at every shot he crouched lower and crept forward as if getting ready to spring.  When I had fired the last shot I jumped up and ran out into the rain, and hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards before I fell into a dry wash.  When I crawled out there was that d——­d cat rubbing himself against my boot leg.  I stood breathless for a minute, thinking what next to do, and the cat remarked:  ‘Wasn’t that a peach of a race we just had!’

“I made one or two vicious kicks at him and he again vanished.  Well, fellows, in that dream I walked around that old jacal all night in my shirt sleeves, and it raining pitchforks.  A number of times I peeped in through the window or door, and there sat the cat on the hearth, in full possession of the shack, and me out in the weather.  Once when I looked in he was missing, but while I was watching he sprang through a hole in the roof, alighting in the fire, from which he walked out gingerly, shaking his feet as if he had just been out in the wet.  I shot away every cartridge I had at him, but in the middle of the shooting he would just coil up before the fire and snooze away.

“That night was an eternity of torment to me, and I was relieved when some one knocked on the door, and I awoke to find myself in a good bed and pounding my ear on a goose-hair pillow in a hotel in Oakville.  Why, I wouldn’t have another dream like that for a half interest in the Las Palomas brand.  No, honest, if I thought drinking gave me that hideous dream, here would be one lad ripe for reform.”

“It strikes me,” said Uncle Lance, rising and lifting a pot lid, “that these birds are parboiled by this time.  Bring me a fork, Enrique.  Well, I should say they were.  I hope hell ain’t any hotter than that fire.  Now, Tiburcio, if you have everything ready, we’ll put them in the oven, and bake them a couple of hours.”

Several of us assisted in fixing the fire and properly coaling the ovens.  When this had been attended to, and we had again resumed our easy positions around the fire, Trotter remarked:  “Aaron, you ought to cut drinking out of your amusements; you haven’t the constitution to stand it.  Now with me it’s different.  I can drink a week and never sleep; that’s the kind of a build to have if you expect to travel and meet all comers.  Last year I was working for a Kansas City man on the