This performance with an empty six-shooter is but a pale and spiritless form of the sport of high altitudes.  Instead there should be twelve reports, so closely sequent as to sound as one string of explosion.  Thus executed the game is a fine one, the finer for being risky.  So to stand erect, with an eight-inch Colt in either hand, each arm at full length, one gun shooting joyously down the centre of the street of your chosen town, the other shooting as cheerfully up the same street—­to do this actually, with bark of powder and attending puffs of dust cut—­this is indeed delightsome when the heart is full of red blood, and the chest swells with charged wine o’ life, and the eyes gleam and the muscles harden for very search of some endeavor immediate and difficult!  It is the more delightsome when this moment of man-frenzy finds one in such a town as was this of Heart’s Desire; where, indeed, a man could do precisely as he pleased; where it was not accounted wrong or ill-balanced to claim the whole street for a half moment or so of a cloudless morning, and so to ease one’s self of the pressure of the joy of living.  To own this little world, to live free of touch or taint of control or guidance, to be brother to the mountains, cousin of the free sky—­to live in Heart’s Desire and be a man—­ah! would that were possible for all of us to-day!  Were it so, then assuredly we should exult and take unto ourselves all the privileges of the domain, perhaps even to the extent of attempting the “double roll.”

Curly’s wooing of the Littlest Girl, sped apace by his unrighteous appropriation of our can of oysters, in which he had held no fee simple, but only an individual and indeterminate interest, had prospered beyond all just deserts of a red-headed cow puncher with a salary of forty-five dollars a month.  He had already, less than two months after the installation of the new postmaster, announced to his friends his forthcoming nuptials, and ever since the setting of the happy date had comported himself with an air of ownership of the town and a mere tolerance of its inhabitants.

Perhaps, if we were each and every one of us a prospective bridegroom, as was Curly upon this morning in question, we should be all the more persuaded to execute the “double roll” in mid-street, as proof to the public that all was well.  Perhaps, also, if there should thus appear to any of us, adown street upon either hand, an object moving slowly, pausing, resuming again across the line of gun-vision its slow advance—­ah! tell me, if that slow-moving object crossing the bridegroom’s joyous aim were a pig,—­a grunting, fat, conceited pig,—­arrogating to itself much of that street wherefrom one’s fellow-citizens had for a moment of grave courtesy withdrawn—­tell me, if you were a bridegroom, soon to be happy, and if you could do the “double roll” with loaded guns and no danger to your bowels, and if while so engaged you should see within easy range this black,