“Well, for clean, cool, out-and-out cheek, if this don’t bang anything that ever I saw, I’m an Injun!” whispered Col.  Jack.

A Chinaman crowded his way in.

“I weaken!” said Col.  Jack.  “Hold on, driver!  Keep your seats, ladies, and gents.  Just make yourselves free—­everything’s paid for.  Driver, rustle these folks around as long as they’re a mind to go—­friends of ours, you know.  Take them everywheres—­and if you want more money, come to the St. Nicholas, and we’ll make it all right.  Pleasant journey to you, ladies and gents—­go it just as long as you please—­it shan’t cost you a cent!”

The two comrades got out, and Col.  Jack said: 

“Jimmy, it’s the sociablest place I ever saw.  The Chinaman waltzed in as comfortable as anybody.  If we’d staid awhile, I reckon we’d had some niggers.  B’ George, we’ll have to barricade our doors to-night, or some of these ducks will be trying to sleep with us.”

CHAPTER XLVII.

Somebody has said that in order to know a community, one must observe the style of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most ceremony.  I cannot say which class we buried with most eclat in our “flush times,” the distinguished public benefactor or the distinguished rough—­possibly the two chief grades or grand divisions of society honored their illustrious dead about equally; and hence, no doubt the philosopher I have quoted from would have needed to see two representative funerals in Virginia before forming his estimate of the people.

There was a grand time over Buck Fanshaw when he died.  He was a representative citizen.  He had “killed his man”—­not in his own quarrel, it is true, but in defence of a stranger unfairly beset by numbers.  He had kept a sumptuous saloon.  He had been the proprietor of a dashing helpmeet whom he could have discarded without the formality of a divorce.  He had held a high position in the fire department and been a very Warwick in politics.  When he died there was great lamentation throughout the town, but especially in the vast bottom-stratum of society.

On the inquest it was shown that Buck Fanshaw, in the delirium of a wasting typhoid fever, had taken arsenic, shot himself through the body, cut his throat, and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his neck—­and after due deliberation, the jury, sad and tearful, but with intelligence unblinded by its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death “by the visitation of God.”  What could the world do without juries?

Prodigious preparations were made for the funeral.  All the vehicles in town were hired, all the saloons put in mourning, all the municipal and fire-company flags hung at half-mast, and all the firemen ordered to muster in uniform and bring their machines duly draped in black.  Now —­let us remark in parenthesis—­as all the peoples of the earth had representative adventurers in the Silverland,