"Well, if you ever had, you'd notice that he always says or does something that you can remember him by. He either says, 'Oh, I am shot'! or 'You've killed me'! or something like that, in a reproachful way, that you can wake up in the night and hear most any time. If you kill him dead, and he don't say a word, he will fall hard on the ground, with a groan that will never stop. I can shut my eyes and hear one now. After you've done it, you always wish they'd showed a little more fight. You could forgive 'em if they'd cuss you, and holler, and have some style about 'em, but they won't. They just reel, and fall, and groan. Do you know I can't eat a meal unless my back is agin' the wall. I asked Wild Bill once how he could stand it to turn his back on the crowd and eat a big dinner. He said he generally got drunk just before dinner, and that helped him out.
"So you see, William, that if a man is a great scholar, he is generally dyspeptic; if he's a big preacher, they tie a scandal to his coat-tail, and if he's an eminent murderer, he has insomnia and loss of appetite. I almost wish sometimes that I had remained in obscurity. Its a big thing to be a public man, with your name in the papers and everybody afraid to collect a bill of you, for fear you'll let the glad sunlight into their thorax; but when you can't eat nor sleep, and you're liable to wake up with your bosom full of buckshot, or your neck pulled out like a turkey-gobler's, and your tongue hanging out of your mouth in a ludicrous manner, and your overshoes failing to touch the ground by about ten feet, you begin to look back on your childhood and wish you could again be put there, sleepy and sinless, hungry and happy."
SPEECH OF RED SHIRT, THE FIGHTING CHIEF OF THE SIOUX NATION
IT HAD been a day of triumph at Erastina. Buffalo Bill, returning from Marlborough House, had amused the populace with the sports of an amphitheatre to an extent hitherto unknown even in that luxurious city. A mighty multitude of people from Perth Amboy and New York had been present to watch the attack on the Dead wood coach and view with bated breath the conflict in the arena.
The shouts of revelry had died away. The last loiterer had retired from the bleaching boards and the lights in the palace of the cowboy band were extinguished. The moon piercing the tissue of fleecy clouds, tipped the dark waters about Constable Hook with a wavy, tremulous light. The dark-browed Roman soldier, wearing an umbrella belonging to Imre Kiralfy, wabbled slowly homeward, the proud possessor of a large rectangular "jag."
No sound was heard save the low sob of some retiring wave as it told its story to the smooth pebbles of the beach, or the lower sob of some gentleman who had just sought to bed down a brand-new bucking bronco from Ogallalla and decided to escape violently through the roof of the tent; then all was still as the breast when the spirit has departed. Anon the smoke-tanned Cheyenne snore would steal in upon the silence and then die away like the sough of a summer breeze. In the green-room of the amphitheatre a little band of warriors had assembled. The foam of conflict yet lingered on their lips, the scowl of battle yet hung upon their brows, and the large knobs on their classic profiles indicated that it had been a busy day with them. The night wynd blew chill and the warrior had added to his moss-agate ear-bobs a heavy coat of maroon-colored roof paint.
There was an embarrassing silence of a little spell and then Red Shirt, fighting chief of the Sioux Nation borrowed a chew of tobacco from Aurelius Poor Doe, stepped forth and thus addressed them:
Fellow-Citizens and Gentlemen of the Wild West: Ye call me chief, and ye do well to call him chief who for two long years has met in the arena every shape of man or beast that the broad empire of Nebraska could furnish, and yet has never lowered his arm.