did Whisky Jim, as he drew the lines over his four bay horses in the
streets of Red Owl Landing, a village two years old, boasting three
thousand inhabitants, and a certain prospect of having four thousand a
month later.

Even ministers, poets, and writers of unworldly romances are sometimes
influenced by mercenary considerations. But stage-drivers are entirely
consecrated to their high calling. Here was Whisky Jim, in the very
streets of Red Owl, in the spring of the year 1856, when money was worth
five and six per cent a month on bond and mortgage, when corner lots
doubled in value over night, when everybody was frantically trying to
swindle everybody else--here was Whisky Jim, with the infatuation of a
life-long devotion to horse-flesh, utterly oblivious to the chances of
robbing green emigrants which a season of speculation affords. He was
secure from the infection. You might have shown him a gold-mine under the
very feet of his wheel-horses, and he could not have worked it
twenty-four hours. He had an itching palm, which could be satisfied with
nothing but the "ribbons" drawn over the backs of a four-in-hand.

"_Git_ up!"

The coach moved away--slowly at first--from the front door of the large,
rectangular, unpainted Red Owl Hotel, dragging its wheels heavily through
the soft turf of a Main street from which the cotton-wood trees had been
cut down, but in which the stumps were still standing, and which remained
as innocent of all pavement as when, three years before, the chief whose
name it bore, loaded his worldly goods upon the back of his oldest and
ugliest wife, slung his gun over his shoulder, and started mournfully
away from the home of his fathers, which he, shiftless fellow, had
bargained away to the white man for an annuity of powder and blankets,