I should be tempted to leave him thus in his original and picturesque sin, but the same veracity which compelled me to transcribe his faults and iniquities obliges me to describe his ultimate and somewhat monotonous reformation, which came from no fault of his own.

It was a joyous day at Rattlers Ridge that was equally the advent of his change of heart and the first stagecoach that had been induced to diverge from the highroad and stop regularly at our settlement.  Flags were flying from the post office and Polka saloon, and Bones was flying before the brass band that he detested, when the sweetest girl in the county—­Pinkey Preston—­daughter of the county judge and hopelessly beloved by all Rattlers Ridge, stepped from the coach which she had glorified by occupying as an invited guest.

“What makes him run away?” she asked quickly, opening her lovely eyes in a possibly innocent wonder that anything could be found to run away from her.

“He don’t like the brass band,” we explained eagerly.

“How funny,” murmured the girl; “is it as out of tune as all that?”

This irresistible witticism alone would have been enough to satisfy us—­we did nothing but repeat it to each other all the next day—­but we were positively transported when we saw her suddenly gather her dainty skirts in one hand and trip off through the red dust toward Bones, who, with his eyes over his yellow shoulder, had halted in the road, and half-turned in mingled disgust and rage at the spectacle of the descending trombone.  We held our breath as she approached him.  Would Bones evade her as he did us at such moments, or would he save our reputation, and consent, for the moment, to accept her as a new kind of inebriate?  She came nearer; he saw her; he began to slowly quiver with excitement—­his stump of a tail vibrating with such rapidity that the loss of the missing portion was scarcely noticeable.  Suddenly she stopped before him, took his yellow head between her little hands, lifted it, and looked down in his handsome brown eyes with her two lovely blue ones.  What passed between them in that magnetic glance no one ever knew.  She returned with him; said to him casually:  “We’re not afraid of brass bands, are we?” to which he apparently acquiesced, at least stifling his disgust of them while he was near her—­which was nearly all the time.

During the speechmaking her gloved hand and his yellow head were always near together, and at the crowning ceremony—­her public checking of Yuba Bill’s “waybill” on behalf of the township, with a gold pencil presented to her by the Stage Company—­Bones’ joy, far from knowing no bounds, seemed to know nothing but them, and he witnessed it apparently in the air.  No one dared to interfere.  For the first time a local pride in Bones sprang up in our hearts—­and we lied to each other in his praises openly and shamelessly.