ain,
Pat Garrett had stronger intellectuality and broader sympathies than
any of his kind I ever met. He could no more do enough for a friend
than he could do enough to an outlaw. In his private affairs so
easy-going that he began and ended a ne'er-do-well, in his official
duties as a peace officer he was so exacting and painstaking that he
ne'er did ill. His many intrepid deeds are too well known to need
recounting here.

All his life an atheist, he was as stubbornly contentious for his
unbelief as any Scotch Covenanter for his best-loved tenets.

Now, laid for his last rest in the little burying-ground of Las Cruces,
a tiny, white-paled square of sandy, hummocky bench land where the pink
of fragile nopal petals brightens the graves in Spring and the mesquite
showers them with its golden pods in Summer; where the sweet scent of
the _juajilla_ loads the air, and the sun ever shines down out of a
bright and cloudless sky; where a diminutive forest of crosses of wood
and stone symbolize the faith he in life refused to accept--now,
perhaps, Pat Garrett has learned how widely he was wrong.

Peace to his ashes, and repose to his dauntless spirit!

[1] _Triggerfingeritis_ is an acute irritation of the sensory nerves of
the index finger of habitual gun-packers; usually fatal--to some one.

CHAPTER V

A JUGGLER WITH DEATH

This is the story of a man, a virile, strong, resourceful man, all of
whose history from his youth to his untimely death thrills one at the
reading and points lessons worth learning.

The most careful study and the most just comparison would doubtless
concede to Washington Harrison Donaldson the high rank--high, indeed,
in a double sense--of having been the greatest aeronaut the world has
ever known.

While a few men have done some great deeds in aeronautics which he did
not accomplish, nevertheless Donaldson did more things never even
undertaken by any other aeronaut that any man who has ever lived.
Indeed, much of his work would be deemed by mankind at large downright
absurd, hair-brained, foolhardy, and reckless to the point of actual
madness; and yet no man ever possessed a saner mind than Donaldson; no
man was ever more fond of family, friends, and life in general, or
normally more reluctant to undertake what he regarded as a needlessly
hazardous task. His boldest and most seemingly reckless feats were to
him no more than the every-day work of a man of a strong mind, of a
stout