Thar! I told you so!--thar he is,--coming this way, too,--all by
himself, sober, and his face a-shining. Tennessee! Pardner!"

And so they met.




THE IDYL OF BED GULCH


Sandy was very drunk. He was lying under an azalea-bush, in pretty
much the same attitude in which he had fallen some hours before. How
long he had been lying there he could not tell, and didn't care; how
long he should lie there was a matter equally indefinite and
unconsidered. A tranquil philosophy, born of his physical condition,
suffused and saturated his moral being.

The spectacle of a drunken man, and of this drunken man in particular,
was not, I grieve to say, of sufficient novelty in Red Gulch to
attract attention. Earlier in the day some local satirist had erected
a temporary tombstone at Sandy's head, bearing the inscription,
"Effects of McCorkle's whiskey--kills at forty rods," with a hand
pointing to McCorkle's saloon. But this, I imagine, was, like most
local satire, personal; and was a reflection upon the unfairness of
the process rather than a commentary upon the impropriety of the
result. With this facetious exception, Sandy had been undisturbed. A
wandering mule, released from his pack, had cropped the scant herbage
beside him, and sniffed curiously at the prostrate man; a vagabond
dog, with that deep sympathy which the species have for drunken men,