one gent in a thousand who could make that trip but Tom. An' yet
this yere Tom is feared of a dark room. "Take Injuns;--give 'em
their doo, even if we ain't got room for them miscreants in our
hearts. On his lines an' at his games, a Injun is as clean strain as
they makes. He's got courage, an' can die without battin' an eye or
waggin' a y'ear, once it's come his turn. An' the squaws is as cold
a prop'sition as the bucks. After a fight with them savages, when
you goes 'round to count up an' skin the game, you finds most as
many squaws lyin' about, an' bullets through 'em, as you finds
bucks.

"Courage is sometimes knowledge, sometimes ignorance; sometimes
courage is desp'ration, an' then ag'in it's innocence. "Once, about
two miles off, when I'm on the Staked Plains, an' near the aige
where thar's pieces of broken rock, I observes a Mexican on foot,
frantically chunkin' up somethin'. He's left his pony standin' off a
little, an' has with him a mighty noisy form of some low kind of
mongrel dog, this latter standin' in to worry whatever it is the
Mexican's chunkin' at, that a-way. I rides over to investigate the
war-jig; an' I'm a mesquite digger! if this yere transplanted
Castillian ain't done up a full-grown wild cat! It's jest coughin'
its last when I arrives. Son, I wouldn't have opened a game on that
feline--the same bein' as big as a coyote, an' as thoroughly
organized for trouble as a gatling--with anythin' more puny than a
Winchester. An' yet that guileless Mexican lays him out with rocks,
and regyards sech feats as trivial. An American, too, by merely
growlin' towards this Mexican, would make him quit out like a jack
rabbit. "As I observes prior, courage is frequent the froots of what
a gent don't know. Take grizzly b'ars. Back fifty years, when them
squirrel rifles is preevalent; when a acorn shell holds a charge of