is so busy that he scarcely knows his own children when he meets them,
and almost requires an introduction to his wife when the door closes on
them at bedtime, people took a second look at him when he passed. Many
who came in much direct contact with him, as Augustus Burlingame the
lawyer had done, tried to draw from him all there was to tell about
himself; which is a friendly custom of the far West. The native-born
greatly desire to tell about themselves. They wear their hearts on their
sleeves, and are childlike in the frank recitals of all they were and are
and hope to be. This covers up also a good deal of business acumen,
shrewdness, and secretiveness which is not so childlike and bland.

In this they are in sharp contrast to those not native-born. These
come from many places on the earth, and they are seldom garrulously
historical. Some of them go to the prairie country to forget they ever
lived before, and to begin the world again, having been hurt in life
undeservingly; some go to bury their mistakes or worse in pioneer work
and adventure; some flee from a wrath that would devour them--the law,
society, or a woman.

This much must be said at once for Crozier, that he had no crime to
hide. It was not because of crime that "He buckles up his talk like the
bellyband on a broncho," as Malachi Deely, the exile from Tralee, said
of him; and Deely was a man of "horse-sense," no doubt because he was a
horse-doctor--"a veterenny surgeon," as his friends called him when they
wished to flatter him. Deely supplemented this chaste remark about the
broncho with the observation that, "Same as the broncho, you buckle him
tightest when you know the divil is stirring in his underbrush." And he
added further, "'Tis a woman that's put the mumplaster on his tongue,
Sibley, and I bet you a hundred it's another man's wife."