the two outcasts made an enemy of the Law and the Gospel as represented in Trinidad County.  It is to be feared also that the ordinary emotional instinct of a frontier community, to which they were now simply abandoned, was as little to be trusted.  In this dilemma they disappeared from the town the next day—­no one knew where.  A pale blue smoke rising from a lonely island in the bay for some days afterwards suggested their possible refuge.  But nobody greatly cared.  The sympathetic mediation of the Editor was characteristically opposed by Mr. Parkin Skinner, a prominent citizen:—­

“It’s all very well for you to talk sentiment about niggers, Chinamen, and Injins, and you fellers can laugh about the Deacon being snatched up to heaven like Elijah in that blamed Chinese chariot of a kite—­but I kin tell you, gentlemen, that this is a white man’s country!  Yes, sir, you can’t get over it!  The nigger of every description—­yeller, brown, or black, call him ‘Chinese,’ ‘Injin,’ or ‘Kanaka,’ or what you like—­hez to clar off of God’s footstool when the Anglo-Saxon gets started!  It stands to reason that they can’t live alongside o’ printin’ presses, M’Cormick’s reapers, and the Bible!  Yes, sir! the Bible; and Deacon Hornblower kin prove it to you.  It’s our manifest destiny to clar them out—­that’s what we was put here for—­and it’s just the work we’ve got to do!”

I have ventured to quote Mr. Skinner’s stirring remarks to show that probably Jim and Li Tee ran away only in anticipation of a possible lynching, and to prove that advanced sentiments of this high and ennobling nature really obtained forty years ago in an ordinary American frontier town which did not then dream of Expansion and Empire!

Howbeit, Mr. Skinner did not make allowance for mere human nature.  One morning Master Bob Skinner, his son, aged twelve, evaded the schoolhouse, and started in an old Indian “dug-out” to invade the island of the miserable refugees.  His purpose was not clearly defined to himself, but was to be modified by circumstances.  He would either capture Li Tee and Jim, or join them in their lawless existence.  He had prepared himself for either event by surreptitiously borrowing his father’s gun.  He also carried victuals, having heard that Jim ate grasshoppers and Li Tee rats, and misdoubting his own capacity for either diet.  He paddled slowly, well in shore, to be secure from observation at home, and then struck out boldly in his leaky canoe for the island—­a tufted, tussocky shred of the marshy promontory torn off in some tidal storm.  It was a lovely day, the bay being barely ruffled by the afternoon “trades;” but as he neared the island he came upon the swell from the bar and the thunders of the distant Pacific, and grew a little frightened.  The canoe, losing way, fell into the trough of the swell, shipping salt water, still more alarming to the prairie-bred boy.  Forgetting his plan of a stealthy invasion, he shouted lustily as the helpless and water-logged boat began to drift past the island; at which a lithe figure emerged from the reeds, threw off a tattered blanket, and slipped noiselessly, like some animal, into the water.  It was Jim, who, half wading, half swimming, brought the canoe and boy ashore.  Master Skinner at once gave up the idea of invasion, and concluded to join the refugees.