“Nice night!”

“Why, yes,” said Bud, “as nice as any night could be that ain’t received the Broadway stamp of approval.”

Now, the young man was from New York, but the rest of us wondered how Bud guessed it.  So, when the steaks were done, we besought him to lay bare his system of ratiocination.  And as Bud was something of a Territorial talking machine he made oration as follows: 

“How did I know he was from New York?  Well, I figured it out as soon as he sprung them two words on me.  I was in New York myself a couple of years ago, and I noticed some of the earmarks and hoof tracks of the Rancho Manhattan.”

“Found New York rather different from the Panhandle, didn’t you, Bud?” asked one of the hunters.

“Can’t say that I did,” answered Bud; “anyways, not more than some.  The main trail in that town which they call Broadway is plenty travelled, but they’re about the same brand of bipeds that tramp around in Cheyenne and Amarillo, At first I was sort of rattled by the crowds, but I soon says to myself, ’Here, now, Bud; they’re just plain folks like you and Geronimo and Grover Cleveland and the Watson boys, so don’t get all flustered up with consternation under your saddle blanket,’ and then I feels calm and peaceful, like I was back in the Nation again at a ghost dance or a green corn pow-wow.

“I’d been saving up for a year to give this New York a whirl.  I knew a man named Summers that lived there, but I couldn’t find him; so I played a lone hand at enjoying the intoxicating pleasures of the corn-fed metropolis.

“For a while I was so frivolous and locoed by the electric lights and the noises of the phonographs and the second-story railroads that I forgot one of the crying needs of my Western system of natural requirements.  I never was no hand to deny myself the pleasures of sociable vocal intercourse with friends and strangers.  Out in the Territories when I meet a man I never saw before, inside of nine minutes I know his income, religion, size of collar, and his wife’s temper, and how much he pays for clothes, alimony, and chewing tobacco.  It’s a gift with me not to be penurious with my conversation.

“But this here New York was inaugurated on the idea of abstemiousness in regard to the parts of speech.  At the end of three weeks nobody in the city had fired even a blank syllable in my direction except the waiter in the grub emporium where I fed.  And as his outpourings of syntax wasn’t nothing but plagiarisms from the bill of fare, he never satisfied my yearnings, which was to have somebody hit.  If I stood next to a man at a bar he’d edge off and give a Baldwin-Ziegler look as if he suspected me of having the North Pole concealed on my person.  I began to wish that I’d gone to Abilene or Waco for my paseado; for the mayor of them places will drink with you, and the first citizen you meet will tell you his middle name and ask you to take a chance in a raffle for a music box.