I look upon life insurance as a great comfort, not only to the beneficiary, but to the insured, who very rarely lives to realize anything pecuniarily from his venture. Twice I have almost raised my wife to affluence and cast a gloom over the community in which I lived, but something happened to the physician for a few days so that he could not attend to me, and I recovered. For nearly two years I was under the doctor"s care. He had his finger on my pulse or in my pocket all the time. He was a young western physician, who attended me on Tuesdays and Fridays. The rest of the week he devoted his medical skill to horses that were mentally broken down. He said he attended me largely for my society. I felt flattered to know that he enjoyed my society after he had been thrown among horses all the week that had much greater advantages than I.
My wife at first objected seriously to an insurance on my life, and said she would never, never touch a dollar of the money if I were to die, but after I had been sick nearly two years, and my disposition had suffered a good deal, she said that I need not delay the obsequies on that account. But the life insurance slipped through my fingers somehow, and I recovered.
In these days of dynamite and roller rinks, and the gory meat-ax of a new administration, we ought to make some provision for the future.
The Opium Habit.
I have always had a horror of opiates of all kinds. They are so seductive and so still in their operations. They steal through the blood like a wolf on the trail, and they seize upon the heart at last with their white fangs till it is still forever.
Up the Laramie there is a cl.u.s.ter of ranches at the base of the Medicine Bow, near the north end of Sheep Mountain, and in sight of the glittering, eternal frost of the snowy range. These ranches are the homes of the young men from Ma.s.sachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and now there are several "younger sons" of Old England, with herds of horses, steers and sheep, worth millions of dollars. These young men are not of the kind of whom the metropolitan a.s.s writes as saying "youbetcherlife," and calling everybody "pardner." They are many of them college graduates, who can brand a wild Maverick or furnish the easy gestures for a Strauss waltz.
They wear human clothes, talk in the United States language, and have a bank account. This spring they may be wearing chaparajos and swinging a quirt through the thin air, and in July they may be at Long Branch, or coloring a meerschaum pipe among the Alps.
Well, a young man whom we will call Curtis lived at one of these ranches 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 pa.s.sed 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 coa.r.s.e 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 medical science. Whenever I run up against a new scientific discovery, I just hand it right over to the public without cost.
Ever since the above incident, I have been very apprehensive about people who seem to be likely to form the opium habit. It is one of the most deadly of narcotics, especially in a new country. High up in the pure mountain atmosphere, this man could not secure enough air to prolong life, and he expired. In a land where clear, crisp air and delightful scenery are abundant, he turned his back upon them both and pa.s.sed away. Is it not sad to contemplate?
More Paternal Correspondence.
My dear son.-I tried to write to you last week, but didn"t get around to it, owing to circ.u.mstances. I went away on a little business tower for a few days on the cars, and then when I got home the sociable broke loose in our once happy home.
While on my commercial tower down the Omehaw railroad buying a new well-diggin" machine of which I had heard a good deal pro and con, I had the pleasure of riding on one of them sleeping-cars that we read so much about.
I am going on 50 years old, and that"s the first time I ever slumbered at the rate of forty-five miles per hour, including stops.
I got acquainted with the porter, and he blacked my boots in the night unbeknownst to me, while I was engaged in slumber. He must have thought that I was your father, and that we rolled in luxury at home all the time, and that it was a common thing for us to have our boots blacked by menials. When I left the car this porter brushed my clothes till the hot flashes ran up my spinal column, and I told him that he had treated me square, and I rung his hand when he held it out toards me, and I told him that at any time he wanted a good, cool drink of b.u.t.termilk, to just holler through our telephone. We had the sociable at our house last week, and when I got home your mother set me right to work borryin" chairs and dishes. She had solicited some cakes and other things. I don"t know whether you are on the skedjule by which these sociables are run or not. The idea is a novel one to me.
The sisters in our set, onct in so often, turn their houses wrong side out for the purpose of raising four dollars to apply on the church debt. When I was a boy we worshiped with less frills than they do now. Now it seems that the debt is a part of the worship.
Well, we had a good time and used up 150 cookies in a short time. Part of these cookies was devoured and the balance was trod into our all-wool carpet. Several of the young people got to playing Copenhagen in the setting-room and stepped on the old cat in such a way as to disfigure him for life. They also had a disturbance in the front room and knocked off some of the plastering.
So your mother is feeling slim and I am not very chipper myself. I hope that you are working hard at your books so that you will be an ornament to society. Society is needing some ornaments very much. I sincerely hope that you will not begin to monkey with rum. I should hate to have you with a felon"s doom or fill a drunkard"s grave. If anybody has got to fill a drunkard"s grave, let him do it himself. What has the drunkard ever done for you, that you should fill his grave for him?
[Ill.u.s.tration: ROUGH ON THE OLD CAT.]
I expect you to do right, as near as possible. You will not do exactly right all the time, but try to strike a good average. I do not expect you to let your studies encroach, too much on your polo, but try to unite the two so that you will not break down under the strain. I should feel sad and mortified to have you come home a physical wreck. I think one physical wreck in a family is enough, and I am rapidly getting where I can do the entire physical wreck business for our neighborhood.
I see by your picture that you have got one of them pleated coats with a belt around it, and short pants. They make you look as you did when I used to spank you in years gone by, and I feel the same old desire to do it now that I did then. Old and feeble as I am, it seems to me as though I could spank a boy that wears knickerbocker pants b.u.t.toned onto a Garabaldy waist and a pleated jacket. If it wasn"t for them cute little camel"s hair whiskers of yours I would not believe that you had grown to be a large, expensive boy, grown up with thoughts. Some of the thoughts you express in your letters are far beyond your years. Do you think them yourself, or is there some boy in the school that thinks all the thoughts for the rest?
Some of your letters are so deep that your mother and I can hardly grapple with them. One of them, especially, was so full of foreign stuff that you had got out of a bill of fare, that we will have to wait till you come home before we can take it in. I can talk a little Chippewa, but that is all the foreign language I am familiar with. When I was young we had to get our foreign languages the best we could, so I studied Chippewa without a master. A Chippewa chief took me into his camp and kept me there for some time while I acquired his language. He became so much attached to me that I had great difficulty in coming away. I wish you would write in the United States dialect as much as possible, and not try to paralize your parents with imported expressions that come too high for poor people.
Remember that you are the only boy we"ve got, and we are only going through the motions of living here for your sake. For us the day is wearing out, and it is now way long into the shank of the evening. All we ask of you is to improve on the old people. You can see where I fooled myself, and you can do better. Read and write, and sifer, and polo, and get nolledge, and try not to be ashamed of your uncultivated parents.
When you get that checkered little sawed-off coat on, and that pair of knee panties, and that poker-dot necktie, and the sa.s.sy little boys holler "rats" when you pa.s.s by, and your heart is bowed down, remember that, no matter how foolish you may look, your parents will never sour on you.
Your Father.
Twombley"s Tale.
My name is Twombley, G.O.P. Twombley is my full name and I have had a checkered career. I thought it would be best to have my career checked right through, so I did so.
My home is in the Wasatch Mountains. Far up, where I can see the long, green, winding valley of the Jordan, like a glorious panorama below me, I dwell. I keep a large herd of Angora goats. That is my business. The Angora goat is a beautiful animal-in a picture. But out of a picture he has a style of perspiration that invites adverse criticism.
Still, it is an independent life, and one that has its advantages, too.
When I first came to Utah, I saw one day, in Salt Lake City, a young girl arrive. She was in the heyday of life, but she couldn"t talk our language. Her face was oval; rather longer than it was wide, I noticed, and, though she was still young, there were traces of care and other foreign substances plainly written there.
She was an emigrant, about seventeen years of age, and, though she had been in Salt Lake City an hour and a half, she was still unmarried.
She was about the medium height, with blue eyes, that somehow, as you examined them carefully in the full, ruddy light of a glorious September afternoon, seemed to resemble each other. Both of them were that way,
I know not what gave me the courage, but I stepped to her side, and in a low voice told her of my love and asked her to be mine.
She looked askance at me. n.o.body ever did that to me before and lived to tell the tale. But her s.e.x made me overlook it. Had she been any other s.e.x that I can think of, I would have resented it. But I would not strike a woman, especially when I had not been married to her and had no right to do so.
I turned on my heel and I went away. I most always turn on my heel when I go away. If I did not turn on my own heel when I went away, whose heel would a lonely man like me turn upon?
Years rolled by. I did nothing to prevent it. Still that face came to me in my lonely hut far up in the mountains. That look still rankled in my memory. Before that my memory had been all right. Nothing had ever rankled in it very much. Let the careless reader who never had his memory rankle in hot weather, pa.s.s this by. This story is not for him.
After our first conversation we did not meet again for three years, and then by the merest accident. I had been out for a whole afternoon, hunting an elderly goat that had grown childish and irresponsible. He had wandered away, and for several days I had been unable to find him. So I sought for him till darkness found me several miles from my cabin. I realized at once that I must hurry back, or lose my way and spend the night in the mountains. The darkness became more rapidly obvious. My way became more and more uncertain.
Finally I fell down an old prospect shaft. I then resolved to remain where I was until I could decide what was best to be done. If I had known that the prospect shaft was there, I would have gone another way. There was another way that I could have gone, but it did not occur to me until too late.
I hated to spend the next few weeks in the shaft, for I had not locked up my cabin when I left it, and I feared that someone might get in while I was absent and play on the piano. I had also set a batch of bread and two hens that morning, and all of these would be in sad knead of me before I could get my business into such shape that I could return.
I could not tell accurately how long I had been in the shaft, for I had no matches by which to see my watch. I also had no watch.
All at once, someone fell down the shaft. I knew that it was a woman, because she did not swear when she landed at the bottom. Still, this could be accounted for in another way. She was unconscious when I picked her up.
I did not know what to do, I was perfectly beside myself, and so was she. I had read in novels that when a woman became unconscious people generally chafed her hands, but I did not know whether I ought to chafe the hands of a person to whom I had never been introduced.
I could have administered alcoholic stimulants to her but I had neglected to provide myself with them when I fell down the shaft. This should be a warning to people who habitually go around the country without alcoholic stimulants.
Finally she breathed a long sigh and murmured, "where am I?" I told her that I did not know, but wherever it might be, we were safe, and that whatever she might say to me, I would promise her, should go no farther.
Then there was a long pause.