stence this had been
thoughtfully laid out by a committee of citizens. The day after had been
signalized by a debate between two members of the committee, with
reference to a more eligible site, and on the third day the necropolis
was inaugurated by a double funeral. As the camp had waned the cemetery
had waxed; and long before the ultimate inhabitant, victorious alike
over the insidious malaria and the forthright revolver, had turned the
tail of his pack-ass upon Injun Creek the outlying settlement had become
a populous if not popular suburb. And now, when the town was fallen into
the sere and yellow leaf of an unlovely senility, the graveyard--though
somewhat marred by time and circumstance, and not altogether exempt from
innovations in grammar and experiments in orthography, to say nothing of
the devastating coyote--answered the humble needs of its denizens with
reasonable completeness. It comprised a generous two acres of ground,
which with commendable thrift but needless care had been selected for
its mineral unworth, contained two or three skeleton trees (one of which
had a stout lateral branch from which a weather-wasted rope still
significantly dangled), half a hundred gravelly mounds, a score of rude
headboards displaying the literary peculiarities above mentioned and a
struggling colony of prickly pears. Altogether, God's Location, as with
characteristic reverence it had been called, could justly boast of an
indubitably superior quality of desolation. It was in the most thickly
settled part of this interesting demesne that Mr. Jefferson Doman staked
off his claim. If in the prosecution of his design he should deem it
expedient to remove any of the dead they would have the right to be
suitably reinterred.

III

This Mr. Jefferson Doman was from Elizabethtown, New Jersey, where six
years before he had left his heart in the keeping of a golden-haired,
demure-mannered young woman named Mary Matthews, as collateral security
for his return to claim her hand.

"I just _know_ you'll never get back alive--you never do succeed in
anything," was the remark which illustrated Miss Matthews's notion of
what constituted success and, inferentially, her view of the nature of
encouragement. She added: "If you don't I'll go to California too. I can
put the coins in little bags as you dig them out."

This characteristically feminine theory of auriferous deposits did not
commend itself to the masculine intelligence: it was Mr.