, "A Phyllis of the Sierras" in 1888.

I

PEGGY MOFFAT'S INHERITANCE[63]

The first intimation given of the eccentricity of the testator was, I
think, in the spring of 1854. He was at that time in possession of a
considerable property, heavily mortgaged to one friend, and a wife of
some attraction, on whose affections another friend held an
encumbering lien. One day it was found that he had secretly dug, or
caused to be dug, a deep trap before the front door of his dwelling,
into which a few friends in the course of the evening casually and
familiarly dropt. This circumstance, slight in itself, seemed to point
to the existence of a certain humor in the man, which might eventually
get into literature; altho his wife's lover--a man of quick
discernment, whose leg was broken by the fall--took other views. It
was some weeks later that while dining with certain other friends of
his wife, he excused himself from the table, to quietly reappear at
the front window with a three-quarter-inch hydraulic pipe, and a
stream of water projected at the assembled company. An attempt was
made to take public cognizance of this; but a majority of the citizens
of Red Dog who were not at dinner decided that a man had a right to
choose his own methods of diverting his company. Nevertheless, there
were some hints of his insanity: his wife recalled other acts clearly
attributable to dementia; the crippled lover argued from his own
experience that the integrity of her limbs could only be secured by
leaving her husband's house; and the mortgagee, fearing a further
damage to his property, foreclosed. But here the cause of all this
anxiety took matters into his own hands and disappeared.

[Footnote 63: From "The Twins of Table Mountain." Copyright, 1879, by
Houghton, Mifflin Company.]

When we next heard from him, he had in some mysterious way been
relieved alike of his wife and property and was living alone at
Rockville, fifty miles away, and editing a newspaper. But that
originality he had displayed when dealing with the problems of his own
private life, when applied to politics in the columns of _The
Rockville Vanguard_ was singularly unsuccessful. An amusing
exaggeration, purporting to be an exact account of the manner in which
the opposing candidate had murdered his Chinese laundryman, was, I
regret to say, answered only by assault and battery. A gratuitous and
purely imaginative description of a great religious revival in
Calave