m without endeavoring to undermine the
settlement in his frantic endeavors to dig them out, permitted squirrels
to flash their tails at him a hundred yards away, forgot his usual
caches, and left his favorite bones unburied and bleaching in the sun.
His eyes grew dull, his coat lusterless, in proportion as his companion
became blear-eyed and ragged; in running, his usual arrowlike directness
began to deviate, and it was not unusual to meet the pair together,
zigzagging up the hill. Indeed, Uncle Billy's condition could be
predetermined by Bones' appearance at times when his temporary master
was invisible. "The old man must have an awful jag on today," was
casually remarked when an extra fluffiness and imbecility was noticeable
in the passing Bones. At first it was believed that he drank also, but
when careful investigation proved this hypothesis untenable, he was
freely called a "derned time-servin', yaller hypocrite." Not a few
advanced the opinion that if Bones did not actually lead Uncle Billy
astray, he at least "slavered him over and coddled him until the old man
got conceited in his wickedness." This undoubtedly led to a compulsory
divorce between them, and Uncle Billy was happily dispatched to a
neighboring town and a doctor.

Bones seemed to miss him greatly, ran away for two days, and was
supposed to have visited him, to have been shocked at his convalescence,
and to have been "cut" by Uncle Billy in his reformed character; and
he returned to his old active life again, and buried his past with his
forgotten bones. It was said that he was afterward detected in trying
to lead an intoxicated tramp into camp after the methods employed by
a blind man's dog, but was discovered in time by the--of
course--uncorroborated narrator.

I should be tempted to leave him thus in his original and picturesque
sin, but the same veracity which compelled me to transcribe his
faults and iniquities obliges me to describe his ultimate and somewhat
monotonous reformation, which came from no fault of his own.

It was a joyous day at Rattlers Ridge that was equally the advent of
his change of heart and the first stagecoach that had been induced to
diverge from the highroad and stop regularly at our settlement. Flags
were flying from the post office and Polka saloon, and Bones was flying
before the brass band that he detested, when the sweetest girl in the
county--Pinkey Preston--daughter of the county judge and hopelessly
beloved by a