years ago, and, though a quiet, mind-your-own-business fellow, who had
absolutely no enemies among his companions, he had the misfortune to incur
the wrath of a tramp sheep-herder, who waylaid Curtis one afternoon and
shot him dead as he sat in his buggy. Curtis wasn't armed. He didn't dream
of trouble till he drove home from town, and, as he passed through the
gates of a corral, saw the hairy face of the herder, and at the same
moment the flash of a Winchester rifle. That was all.

A rancher came into town and telegraphed to Curtis' father, and then a
half dozen citizens went out to help capture the herder, who had fled to
the sage brush of the foot-hills.

They didn't get back till toward daybreak, but they brought the herder
with them, I saw him in the gray of the morning, lying in a coarse gray
blanket, on the floor of the engine house. He was dead.

I asked, as a reporter, how he came to his death, and they told me--opium!
I said, did I understand you to say "ropium?" They said no, it was opium.
The murderer had taken poison when he found that escape was impossible.

I was present at the inquest, so that I could report the case. There was
very little testimony, but all the evidence seemed to point to the fact
that life was extinct, and a verdict of death by his own hand was
rendered.

It was the first opium work I had ever seen, and it aroused my curiosity.
Death by opium, it seems, leaves a dark purple ring around the neck. I did
not know this before. People who die by opium also tie their hands
together before they die. This is one of the eccentricities of opium
poisoning that I have never seen laid down in the books. I bequeath it to