"And Yet a Fool"
The exchanges that come to a country newspaper like ours become familiar friends as the years pass. One who reads these papers regularly comes to know them even in their wrappers, though to an unpracticed eye the wrappers seem much alike. But when he has been poking his thumb through the paper husks in a certain pile every morning for a score of years, he knows by some sort of prescience when a new paper appears; and, when the pile looks odd to him, he goes hunting for the stranger and is not happy until he has found it.
One morning this spring the stranger stuck its head from the bottom of the exchange pile, and when we had glanced at the handwriting of the address and at the one-cent stamp on the cover we knew it had been mailed to us by someone besides the publisher. For the newspaper "hand" is as definite a form of writing as the legal hand or the doctor's. The paper proved to be an Arizona newspaper full of saloon advertising, restaurant cards, church and school meeting notices, local items about the sawmill and the woman's club, land notices and paid items from wool dealers. On the local page in the midst of a circle of red ink was the announcement of the death of Horace P. Sampson. Every month we get notices like this, of the deaths of old settlers who have gone to the ends of the earth, but this notice was peculiar in that it said:
"One year ago our lamented townsman deposited with the firm of Cross & Kurtz, the popular undertakers and dealers in Indian goods and general merchandise, $100 to cover his funeral expenses, and another hundred to provide that a huge boulder be rolled over his grave on which he desired the following unusual inscription: 'Horace P. Sampson, Born Dec. 6, 1840, and died ——." And is not this a rare fellow, my lord? He's good at anything and yet a fool."'"
We handed the paper to Alphabetical Morrison, who happened to be in the office at the time, pawing through the discarded exchanges in the waste-basket, looking for his New York Sun, and, after Colonel Morrison had read the item, he began drumming with his finger-nails on the chair-seat between his knees. His eyes were full of dreams and no one disturbed him as he looked off into space. Finally he sighed:
"And yet a fool—a motley fool! Poor old Samp—kept it up to the end! I take it from the guarded way the paper refers to his faults, 'as who of us have not,' that he died of the tremens or something like that." The Colonel paused and smiled just perceptibly, and went on: "Yet I see that he was a good fellow to the end. I notice that the Shriners and the Elks and the Eagles and the Hoo-hoos buried him. Nary an insurance order in his! Poor old Samp; he certainly went all the gaits!"
We suggested that Colonel Morrison write something about the deceased for the paper, but though the Colonel admitted that he knew Sampson "like a book," there was no persuading Morrison to write the obituary.
"After some urging and by way of compromise," he said, "I'm perfectly willing to give you fellows the facts and let you fix up what you please."
Because the reporters were both busy we called the stenographer, and had the Colonel's story taken down as he told it—to be rewritten into an obituary later. And it is what he said and not what we printed about Sampson that is worth putting down here. The Colonel took the big leather chair, locked his hands behind his head, and began:
"Let me see. Samp was born, as he says, December 6, 1840, in Wisconsin, and came out to Kansas right after the war closed. He was going to college up there, and at the second call for troops he led the whole senior class into forming a company, and enlisted before graduation and fought from that time on till the close of the war. He was a captain, I think, but you never heard him called that. When he came here he'd been admitted to the bar and was a good lawyer—a mighty good lawyer for that time—and had more business 'n a bird pup with a gum-shoe. He was just a boy then, and, like all boys, he enjoyed a good time. He drank more or less in the army—they all did 's far as that goes—but he kept it up in a desultory way after he came here, as a sort of accessory to his main business of life, which was being a good fellow.
"And he was a good fellow—an awful good fellow. We were all young then; there wasn't an old man on the town-site as I remember it. We use to load up the whole bunch and go hunting—closing up the stores and taking the girls along—and did not show up till midnight. Samp would always have a little something to take under his buggy-seat, and we would wet up and sing coming home, with the beds of the spring-wagons so full of prairie chickens and quail that they jolted out at every rut. Samp would always lead the singing—being just a mite more lubricated than the rest of us, and the girls thought he was all hunkey dorey—as they used to say.
