st go right ahead and protect him.'"

So Simpson "protected" the Turk from the imaginary danger of Fowler, for
about a week, at twenty-five dollars a day. Then one evening he happened
to go out and met Fowler, "and," said he, "the moment I saw him I knowed
he felt mean, for he begun to shoot at my feet," which certainly did
seem to offer presumptive evidence of meanness. Simpson continued:

"I didn't have no gun, so I just had to stand there and take it util
something distracted his attention, and I went off home to get my gun
and kill him, but I wanted to do it perfectly lawful; so I went up to
the mayor (he was playin' poker with one of the judges), and says I to
him, 'Mr. Mayor,' says I, 'I am goin' to shoot Fowler. And the mayor
he riz out of his chair and he took me by the hand, and says he, 'Mr.
Simpson, if you do I will stand by you;' and the judge, he says, 'I'll
go on your bond.'"

Fortified by this cordial approval of the executive and judicial
branches of the government, Mr. Simpson started on his quest. Meanwhile,
however, Fowler had cut up another prominent citizen, and they already
had him in jail. The friends of law and order feeling some little
distrust as to the permanency of their own zeal for righteousness,
thought it best to settle the matter before there was time for cooling,
and accordingly, headed by Simpson, the mayor, the judge, the Turk,
and other prominent citizens of the town, they broke into the jail and
hanged Fowler. The point in the hanging which especially tickled my
friend's fancy, as he lingered over the reminiscence, was one that was
rather too ghastly to appeal to our own sense of humor. In the Turk's
mind there still rankled the memory of Fowler's very unprofessional
conduct while figuring before him as a criminal. Said Simpson, with a
merry twinkle of the eye: "Do you know that Turk, he was a right funny
fellow too after all. Just as the boys were going to string up Fowler,
says he, 'Boys, stop; one moment, gentlemen,--Mr. Fowler, good-by,' and
he blew a kiss to him!"

In the cow-country, and elsewhere on the wild borderland between
savagery and civilization, men go quite as often by nicknames as by
those to which they are lawfully entitled. Half the cowboys and hunters
of my acquaintance are known by names entirely unconnected with those
they inherited or received when they were christened. Occasionally some
would-be desperado or make-believe mighty hunter tries to adopt what