cher said to me
was, "Never mind, you old spoon, you'll get over this attack in a very
short while."

I landed in St. Louis one bright morning and went up to the office of
the chief despatcher of the Q. M. & S., and applied for an office on his
division. He had none to give me but wired the chief despatcher at Big
Rock, and in answer thereto I was sent the next morning to Healyville.
And what a place I found! The town was down in the swamps of southeast
Missouri, four miles north of the Arkansas line, and consisted of the
depot and twenty or twenty-five houses, five of which were saloons.
There was a branch road running from here to Honiton, quite a settlement
on the Mississippi river, and that was the only possible excuse for an
officer at this point. The atmosphere was so full of malaria, that you
could almost cut it with an axe. I stayed there just three days, and
then, fortunately, the chief despatcher ordered me to come to his
office. He wanted me to take the office at Boling Cross, near the Texas
line, but I had the traveling fever and wanted to go further south, and
he sent me down on the I. & G. N., and the chief there sent me to
Herron, Texas. There wasn't much sickness in the air around Herron, but
there were just a million fleas to every square inch of sand in the
place. Herron was one of the few towns in a very extensive cattle belt,
and a few days after I had arrived I noticed the town had filled up with
"cow punchers." They had just had their semi-annual round up, and were
in town spending their money and having a whooping big time. You
probably know what that means to a cow-boy. I was a tenderfoot of the
worst kind, and every one at the boarding-house and depot seemed to take
particular delight in telling me of the shooting scrapes and rackets of
these cow-boys, and how they delighted in making it warm for a
tenderfoot. Bob Wolfe, the day man at the depot, told me how at times
they had come up and raised particular Cain at the station, especially
when there was a new operator on hand. I didn't half believe all their
stories, but I will confess that I had a few misgivings the first night
when I went to work. One night passed safely enough, but the second was
a hummer from the word go. The office was somewhat larger than the
telegraph offices usually are in small towns. The table was in the
recess of a big bay window, giving me a clear view of the I. & G. N.
tracks, while along the front ran the usual long