d himself also to go with little sleep, and
to subsist on the least possible quantity of food. As a deputy-sheriff
this educated faculty of not requiring sleep aided him in many important
captures. Sometimes he would not strike the trail of the bandit or "bad
man" until the other had several days the start of him. But the end
was the same; for, while the murderer snatched a few hours' rest by the
trail, Burnham, awake and in the saddle, would be closing up the miles
between them.

That he is a good marksman goes without telling. At the age of eight his
father gave him a rifle of his own, and at twelve, with either a "gun"
or a Winchester, he was an expert. He taught himself to use a weapon
either in his left or right hand and to shoot, Indian fashion, hanging
by one leg from his pony and using it as a cover, and to turn in the
saddle and shoot behind him. I once asked him if he really could shoot
to the rear with a galloping horse under him and hit a man.

"Well," he said, "maybe not to hit him, but I can come near enough to
him to make him decide my pony's so much faster than his that it really
isn't worth while to follow me."

Besides perfecting himself in what he tolerantly calls "tricks" of
horsemanship and marksmanship, he studied the signs of the trail, forest
and prairie, as a sailing-master studies the waves and clouds. The
knowledge he gathers from inanimate objects and dumb animals seems
little less than miraculous. And when you ask him how he knows these
things he always gives you a reason founded on some fact or habit of
nature that shows him to be a naturalist, mineralogist, geologist, and
botanist, and not merely a seventh son of a seventh son.

In South Africa he would say to the officers: "There are a dozen Boers
five miles ahead of us riding Basuto ponies at a trot, and leading five
others. If we hurry we should be able to sight them in an hour." At
first the officers would smile, but not after a half-hour's gallop, when
they would see ahead of them a dozen Boers leading five ponies. In the
early days of Salem, Burnham would have been burned as a witch.

When twenty-three years of age he married Miss Blanche Blick, of Iowa.
They had known each other from childhood, and her brothers-in-law have
been Burnham's aids and companions in every part of Africa and the West.
Neither at the time of their marriage nor since did Mrs. Burnham "lay
a hand on the bridle rein," as is witnessed by the fact that for n