ed for a time, trying his versatile hand at
everything that offered itself. He went to sea and sailed around the
Horn before the mast, he enlisted in the army and saw active service in
the Philippines. He was cowboy for a Western cattle king, and there he
learned to break wild bronchos without a saddle and split apples with a
revolver bullet at a hundred yards. He was among the pioneers in the
gold rush to Alaska and played faro in all the tough mining towns.
Sworn in as sheriff, he one day apprehended single-handed, a gang of
desperate outlaws, who attempted to hold up a train.

It was a rough and dangerous life. He was thrown in with all sorts of
men, most of them with criminal records. He loved the excitement, yet
he never allowed his tough associates to drag him down to their own
level. He drank with them, gambled with them, but he never made a beast
of himself, as did some of the others. He always managed to keep his
own hands clean, he never lost his own self regard. He was quick on the
trigger and in time of overheated argument could go some distance with
his fists. Utterly fearless, powerful in physique, he was at all times
able to command respect. Above all, he was a respecter of women. He
never forgot what his mother once said to him. He was only a lad at the
time, but her words had never faded from his memory: "Sonny," she said,
"never forget that your mother was a woman." And he never had. In all
his relations with women in later life, he had remembered the
injunction of the mother he loved. When other men spoke lightly of
women in his presence he showed disapproval, if their character was
attacked he championed their cause, if confronted with proofs, he
flatly refused to consider them. Yet he was neither a prig nor a prude.
He enjoyed a joke as well as any one, but at the same time he did not
let his mind run in only one channel, as some men do. He pitied rather
than blamed the wretched females who frequented the miners' camps. More
sinned against than sinning, was his humane judgment of these unhappy
outcasts, and when he could, he helped them. Many a besotted creature
had him to thank when the end came and short shrift little better then
that accorded a dead dog awaited her--that at least she got a decent
burial. The boys knew his attitude on the woman question, and it was a
tribute to the regard in which they held him that, in his hearing at
least, they were decent.

Meantime, John Madison was educating