lot, an’ then, while she’s melted that a-way, he pours it into these yere auger holes an’ lets it cool.  It gets good an’ hard, this arsenic-tallow does, an’ then Coyote drags the timber thus reg’lated out onto the plains to what he regyards as a elegible local’ty an’ leaves it for the wolves to come an’ batten on.  Old Coyote will have as many as a dozen of these sticks of timber, all bored an’ framed up with arsenic-tallow, scattered about.  Each mornin’ while he’s wolfin’, Coyote makes a round-up an’ skins an’ counts up his prey.  An’ son, you hear me! he does a flourishin’ trade.

“Why don’t Coyote p’isen hunks of meat you asks?  For obvious reasons.  In sech events the victim bolts the piece of beef an’ lopes off mebby five miles before ever he succumbs.  With this yere augur hole play it’s different.  The wolf has to lick the arsenic-tallow out with his tongue an’ the p’isen has time an’ gets in its work.  That wolf sort o’ withers right thar in his tracks.  At the most he ain’t further away than the nearest water; arsenic makin’ ’em plenty thirsty, as you-all most likely knows.

“Old Coyote shows up in Wolfville about once a month, packin’ in his pelts an’ freightin’ over to his wickeyup whatever in the way of grub he reckons he needs.  Which, if you was ever to see Coyote once, you would remember him.  He’s shore the most egreegious person, an’ in appearance is a cross between a joke, a disaster an’ a cur’osity.  I don’t reckon now pore Coyote ever sees the time when he weighs a hundred pound; an’ he’s grizzled an’ dried an’ lame of one laig, while his face is like a squinch owl’s face—­kind o’ wide-eyed an’ with a expression of ignorant wonder, as if life is a never-endin’ surprise party.

“Most likely now what fixes him firmest in your mind is, he don’t drink none.  He declines nosepaint in every form; an’ this yere abstinence, the same bein’ yoonique in Wolfville, together with Coyote conductin’ himse’f as the p’litest an’ best-mannered gent to be met with in all of Arizona, is apt to introode on your attention.  Colonel Sterett once mentions Coyote’s manners.

“‘Which he could give Chesterfield, Coyote could, kyards an’ spades,’ observes the Colonel.  I don’t, myse’f, know this Chesterfield none, but I can see by the fashion in which Colonel Sterett alloodes to him that he’s a Kaintuckian an’ a jo-darter on manners an’ etiquette.

“As I says, a pecooliar trait of Coyote is that he won’t drink nothin’ but water.  Despite this blemish, however, when the camp gets so it knows him it can’t he’p but like him a heap.  He’s so quiet an’ honest an’ ignorant an’ little an’ lame, an’ so plumb p’lite besides, he grows on you.  I can almost see the weasened old outlaw now as he comes rockin’ into town with his six or seven burros packed to their y’ears with pelts!

“This time when Coyote puts Doc Peets in a toomult is when he’s first pitched his dug-out camp an’ begins to honour Wolfville with his visits.  As yet none of us appreciates pore Coyote at his troo worth, an’ on account of them guileless looks of his sech humourists as Dan Boggs an’ Texas Thompson seizes on him as a source of merriment.