“There I’ll be sitting in Doc Martingale’s office waiting for him to kill me by inches, and I pick up a magazine to get my mind off my fate and find I’m reading a timely article, with illustrations, about Cervera’s fleet being bottled up in the Harbour of Santiago.  I bet he’s got Godey’s Lady’s Book for 1862 round there, if you looked for it.”

Now a brief interlude for the ingestion of malt liquor, followed by a pained recital of certain complications of the morning.

“That darned one-horse post-office down to Kulanche!  What do you think?  I wanted to send a postal card to the North American Cleaning and Dye Works, at Red Gap, for some stuff they been holding out on me a month, and that office didn’t have a single card in stock—­nothing but some of these fancy ones in a rack over on the grocery counter; horrible things with pictures of brides and grooms on ’em in coloured costumes, with sickening smiles on their faces, and others with wedding bells ringing out or two doves swinging in a wreath of flowers—­all of ’em having mushy messages underneath; and me having to send this card to the North American Cleaning and Dye Works, which is run by Otto Birdsall, a smirking old widower, that uses hair oil and perfumery, and imagines every woman in town is mad about him.

“The mildest card I could find was covered with red and purple cauliflowers or something, and it said in silver print:  ’With fondest remembrance!’ Think of that going through the Red Gap post-office to be read by old Mis’ Terwilliger, that some say will even open letters that look interesting—­to say nothing of its going to this fresh old Otto Birdsall, that tried to hold my hand once not so many years ago.

“You bet I made the written part strong enough not to give him or any other party a wrong notion of my sentiments toward him.  At that, I guess Otto wouldn’t make any mistake since the time I give him hell last summer for putting my evening gowns in his show window every time he’d clean one, just to show off his work.  It looked so kind of indelicate seeing an empty dress hung up there that every soul in town knew belonged to me.

“What’s that?  Oh, I wrote on the card that if this stuff of mine don’t come up on the next stage I’ll be right down there, and when I’m through handling him he’ll be able to say truthfully that he ain’t got a gray hair in his head.  I guess Otto will know my intentions are honest, in spite of that ‘fondest remembrance.’

“Then, on top of that, I had a run-in with the Swede for selling his rotten whiskey to them poor Injin boys that had a fight last night after they got tight on it.  The Swede laughs and says nobody can prove he sold ’em a drop, and I says that’s probably true.  I says it’s always hard to prove things.  ‘For instance,’ I says, ’if they’s another drop of liquor sold to an Injin during this haying time, and a couple or three nights after that your nasty dump here is set fire to in six places, and some cowardly assassin out in the brush picks you off with a rifle when you rush out—­it will be mighty hard to prove that anybody did that, too; and you not caring whether it’s proved or not, for that matter.