than the 'gray apes,'" I commented.

"Yes, that's about it. Old Colonel Zuigg was a judge fer a spell, till
some feller filled him with buckshot, and he had to resign; and I
remember he decided a case aginst me once. I was hot about it, and the
old colonel he saw I was. Says he, 'Now yer mad, ain't you?' And I
allowed I was. 'Well,' says he, 'you hain't got no call to get mad. I
have decided the last eight cases in yer favor, and you kain't have it
go yer way all the time; it wouldn't look right;' and I had to be
satisfied."

The courts in that locality were but the faint and sickly flame of a
taper offered at the shrine of a justice which was traditional only, it
seemed. Moral forces having ceased to operate, the large owners began to
brand everything in sight, never realizing that they were sowing the
wind. This action naturally demoralized the cowboys, who shortly began
to brand a little on their own account--and then the deluge. The rights
of property having been destroyed, the large owners put strong outfits
in the field, composed of desperate men armed to the teeth, and what
happens in the lonely pine woods no one knows but the desperadoes
themselves, albeit some of them never come back to the little fringe of
settlements. The winter visitor from the North kicks up the jack-snipe
along the beach or tarponizes in the estuaries of the Gulf, and when he
comes to the hotel for dinner he eats Chicago dressed beef, but out in
the wilderness low-browed cow-folks shoot and stab each other for the
possession of scrawny creatures not fit for a pointer-dog to mess on.
One cannot but feel the force of Buckle's law of "the physical aspects
of nature" in this sad country. Flat and sandy, with miles on miles of
straight pine timber, each tree an exact duplicate of its neighbor tree,
and underneath the scrub palmettoes, the twisted brakes and hammocks,