"Marcus never took kindly to hard work. Indeed, he seems to have constitutional objections to it. As he tells the story, while crossing the plains he made up his mind that, upon reaching California, he would declare himself and speedily develop into a fighter. His words, when he told me the story, were: 'They knew me back in Missouri, and I was a good deal too smart to attempt to practice any such profession there, but my idea was that California was filled with Yankees, and in that kind of a community I would have an easy going thing. Well, I crossed the Sierras and landed at Diamond Springs, outside of Placerville a few miles, and when I had been there a short time I changed my mind.'
"Of course at this point some one asks him why he changed his mind, whereupon he answers solemnly:
"'The first day I was there a State of Maine man cut the stomach out of a Texan.'
"Marcus was with the boys during that first tough winter in Eureka. One fearfully cold day a man was telling about the cold he had experienced in Idaho. When the story was finished Marcus cast a look of sovereign contempt upon the man and said:
"'You know nothing about cold weather, sir; you never saw any. You should go to Montana. In Montana I have seen plenty of mornings when were a man to have gone out of a warm room, crossed a street sixty feet wide and shaken his head, his ears would have snapped off like icicles.'
"The stranger, overawed, retired."
Alex spoke next: "The other day Dan Dennison asked me to go and look at a famous trotting horse that he has here. We went to the stable, and when the stepper was pointed out I started to go into the stall beside him, whereupon Dan caught me by the arm, drew me back, and said:
"'Be careful! Sometimes he deals from the bottom.'
"He stripped the covers from the horse and backed him out where I could look at him. The horse was not a beauty by any means and I intimated my belief of that fact to Dan.
"'No,' said Dennison. The truth is—' He hesitated a moment and then the words came in a volley: