resent mood. Noon was the time fixed for
paying the Legislative Assembly the compensation due for its services
during this session; and the Governor and the Treasurer had put their
heads together and arranged a surprise for the Legislative Assembly.
They were not going to pay them.

A knock sounded at the door, and on seeing the waiter from the Overland
enter, the Governor was seized with an idea. Perhaps precaution could
be taken from the inside. "Take this pitcher," said he, "and have it
refilled with the same. Joseph knows my mixture." But Joseph was night
bar-tender, and now long in his happy bed, with a day successor in the
saloon, and this one did not know the mixture. Ballard had foreseen this
when he spoke, and that his writing a note of directions would seem
quite natural.

"The receipt is as long as the drink," said a legislator, watching the
Governor's pencil fly.

"He don't know where my private stock is located," explained Ballard.
The waiter departed with the breakfast things and the note, and while
the jack-pots continued the Governor's mind went carefully over the
situation.

Until lately the Western citizen has known one every-day experience that
no dweller in our thirteen original colonies has had for two hundred
years. In Massachusetts they have not seen it since 1641; in Virginia
not since 1628. It is that of belonging to a community of which every
adult was born somewhere else. When you come to think of this a little
it is dislocating to many of your conventions. Let a citizen of Salem,
for instance, or a well-established Philadelphia Quaker, try to imagine
his chief-justice fresh from Louisiana, his mayor from Arkansas, his
tax-collector from South Carolina, and himself recently arrived in a
wagon from a thousand-mile drive. To be governor of such a community
Ballard had travelled in a wagon from one quarter of the horizon; from
another quarter Wingo had arrived on a mule. People reached Boise in
three ways: by rail to a little west of the Missouri, after which it was
wagon, saddle, or walk for the remaining fifteen hundred miles; from
California it was shorter; and from Portland, Oregon, only about five
hundred miles, and some of these more agreeable, by water up the
Columbia. Thus it happened that salt often sold for its weight in
gold-dust. A miner in the Bannock Basin would meet a freight teamster
coming in with the staples of life, having journeyed perhaps sixty
consecutive days through t