is now Senator Jones of Nevada.

At nineteen Burnham decided that there were things in this world he
should know that could not be gleaned from the earth, trees, and sky;
and with the few dollars he had saved he came East. The visit apparently
was not a success. The atmosphere of the town in which he went to school
was strictly Puritanical, and the townspeople much given to religious
discussion. The son of the pioneer missionary found himself unable to
subscribe to the formulas which to the others seemed so essential, and
he returned to the West with the most bitter feelings, which lasted
until he was twenty-one.

"It seems strange now," he once said to me, "but in those times
religious questions were as much a part of our daily life as to-day are
automobiles, the Standard Oil, and the insurance scandals, and when I
went West I was in an unhappy, doubting frame of mind. The trouble was
I had no moral anchors; the old ones father had given me were gone, and
the time for acquiring new ones had not arrived." This bitterness of
heart, or this disappointment, or whatever the state of mind was that
the dogmas of the New England town had inspired in the boy from the
prairie, made him reckless. For the life he was to lead this was not a
handicap. Even as a lad, in a land-grant war in California, he had been
under gunfire, and for the next fifteen years he led a life of danger
and of daring; and studied in a school of experience than which, for a
scout, if his life be spared, there can be none better. Burnham came
out of it a quiet, manly, gentleman. In those fifteen years he roved the
West from the Great Divide to Mexico. He fought the Apache Indians for
the possession of waterholes, he guarded bullion on stage-coaches, for
days rode in pursuit of Mexican bandits and American horse thieves,
took part in county-seat fights, in rustler wars, in cattle wars; he was
cowboy, miner, deputy-sheriff, and in time throughout the the name of
"Fred" Burnham became significant and familiar.

During this period Burnham was true to his boyhood ideal of becoming a
scout. It was not enough that by merely living the life around him he
was being educated for it. He daily practised and rehearsed those things
which some day might mean to himself and others the difference between
life and death. To improve his sense of smell he gave up smoking, of
which he was extremely fond, nor, for the same reason, does he to this
day use tobacco. He accustome