message was written and paid for and
comfortably despatched. The agent was an honest creature, but of tame
habits, sent for the sake of his imperfect lungs to this otherwise
inappropriate air. He had lived chiefly in mid-West towns, a serious
reader of our comic weeklies; hence the apparition of Wiggin and the
Virginian had reminded him sickeningly of bandits. He had express money
in the safe, he explained to them, and this was a hard old country,
wasn't it? and did they like good whiskey?

They drank his whiskey, but it was not well to have mentioned that
about the bandits. Both were aware that when shaved and washed of their
round-up grime they could look very engaging. The two cow-punchers rode
out, not angry, but grieved that a man come here to dwell among them
should be so tactless.

"If we don't get him used to us," observed the Virginian, "he and his
pop-gun will be guttin' some blameless man."

Forthwith the cattle country proceeded to get the agent used to it.
The news went over the sage-brush from Belle Fourche to Sweetwater,
and playful, howling horsemen made it their custom to go rioting
with pistols round the ticket office, educating the agent. His lungs
improved, and he came dimly to smile at this life which he did not
understand. But the company discerned no humor whatever in having its
water-tank perforated, which happened twice; and sheriffs and deputies
and other symptoms of authority began to invest Separ. Now what
should authority do upon these free plains, this wilderness of
do-as-you-please, where mere breathing the air was like inebriation? The
large, headlong children who swept in from the sage-brush and out
again meant nothing that they called harm until they found themselves
resisted. Then presently happened that affair of the cow-catcher; and
later a too-zealous marshal, come about a mail-car they had
side-tracked and held with fiddles, drink, and petticoats, met his death
accidentally, at which they were sincerely sorry for about five minutes.
They valued their own lives as little, and that lifts them forever
from baseness at least. So the company, concluding such things must be
endured for a while yet, wrote their letter, and you have seen how wrong
the letter went. All it would do would be from now on to fasten upon
Separ its code of recklessness; to make shooting the water-tank (for
example) part of a gentleman's deportment when he showed himself in
town.

It was not now the season o