because of the deviltry it
never failed to inspire in certain leading citizens of Medora.

For Medora had a regular reception committee, whose membership varied,
but included always the most intoxicated cowpunchers who happened to
be in town. Its leading spirits were Bill Williams, the saloon-keeper,
Van Zander, the wayward but attractive son of a Dutch patrician, and
his bosom friend, Hell-Roaring Bill Jones; and if they were fertile in
invention, they were no less energetic in carrying their inventions
into execution. To shoot over the roofs of the cars was a regular
pastime, to shoot through the windows was not unusual, but it was a
genius who thought of the notion of crawling under the dining-car and
shooting through the floor. He scattered the scrambled eggs which the
negro waiter was carrying, but did no other damage. These general
salvos of greeting, Bill Jones, Bill Williams, and the millionaire's
son from Rotterdam were accustomed to vary by specific attention to
passengers walking up and down the platform.

It happened one day that an old man in a derby hat stepped off the
train for a bit of an airing while the engine was taking water. Bill
Jones, spying the hat, gave an indignant exclamation and promptly shot
it off the man's head. The terrified owner hurried into the train,
leaving the brim behind.

"Come back, come back!" shouted Bill Jones, "we don't want the
blinkety-blank thing in Medora."

The old man, terrified, looked into Bill Jones's sinister face. He
found no relenting there. Deeply humiliated, he walked over to where
the battered brim lay, picked it up, and reentered the train.

Medora, meanwhile, was acquiring a reputation for iniquity with
overland tourists which the cowboys felt in duty bound to live up to.
For a time the trains stopped both at Medora and Little Missouri. On
one occasion, as the engine was taking water at the wicked little
hamlet on the west bank, the passengers in the sleeping-car, which was
standing opposite the Pyramid Park Hotel, heard shots, evidently fired
in the hotel. They were horrified a minute later to see a man,
apparently dead, being carried out of the front door and around the
side of the hotel to the rear. A minute later another volley was
heard, and another "dead" man was seen being carried out. It was a
holocaust before the train finally drew out of the station, bearing
away a car-full of gasping "dudes."

They did not know that it was the same man who