and half a dozen other Springtown men, and they pounced
upon the new-comer with every flattering indication of delight.

Mr. Fetherbee had been but six months a resident of Springtown, but it
had hardly taken as many days for Springtown to make the discovery that
he was the king of story-tellers. He and his wife had taken up their
residence in that most delightful of health resorts, and, having
definitively closed up his affairs in the East, he had entered upon the
Western life with keen zest. In one particular only he was apparently
destined here as elsewhere to the disappointment which had dogged his
footsteps from childhood up. Fortune had treated him kindly in many
respects; she had given him health and prosperity, she had bestowed upon
him a host of friends, and the wife of his choice,--a choice which
fifteen years of rather exceptional happiness had amply justified,--best
of all, he was endowed with an unfailing relish for these blessings: yet
in the one burning desire of his heart he had been persistently
frustrated. He had never had an adventure.

Men he knew had found this crowning bliss ready to their hand. There was
his old chum, Jack Somers, who had been actually shipwrecked among the
Azores; there was Caleb Fitz who had once stopped a runaway horse and
saved the lives of two beauteous ladies, getting a corresponding number
of his own ribs broken into the bargain; lucky dog! There was that
miserable little cad, Sandy Seakum, who had been in Boston at the big
fire of '72, and had done something he was forever bragging about in the
way of saving a lot of bonds and other securities belonging to his
father-in-law. But for Mr. Fetherbee there had been no such honors. He
had never met so much as a savage dog; the very burglars had declined to
concern themselves with his house; and once when the top story of a
hotel he was sleeping in had caught fire, and prodigies of valor were
performed in the rescue of the inmates under the roof, he had disgraced
himself irretrievably in his own eyes by sleeping through the night
unconscious of any disturbance. It was perhaps this unsatisfied craving
for adventures of his own which gave such a vivid coloring to his
anecdotes of other men's exploits; possibly too, his sense of humor,
which had an entirely individual flavor, had been quickened by a sly
appreciation of his own oddities.

On the evening of his arrival at Lame Gulch, Mr. Fetherbee had outdone
himself. He had sat, t