“Gentlemen, if I war to talk from now till next week I couldn’t[couldn’t] do full justice to what follered! Old Captain Crooks was just raisin’ a forkful of stew to his mouth, when he ketched sight of that air skin. The fork dropped from his hand; his eyes bugged out like the horns of a snail, and a sort of convulsive shudder shook his whole animal system as he yelled: ‘Skunk, by all that’s stinkin’ and nasty!’[nasty!’]
“‘Skunk, by thunder!’ howled all the rest in chorus.
“Sick! well, I needn’t[needn’t] mention what follered. But, fellers, that like ter cost me my life—that trick did. When them boys finally got convalescent and riz up and come for me, it was close papers for a time.
“Ole Captain Crooks picked one lock o’ hair out o’ my head before I had time to make the least explanation.[explanation.] It tuck awful hard swearin’ to make them fellers believe I had’nt never seed a skunk afore.”
Peter[Peter] O’Riley, in the early days, when mining on Gold Cañon and along Six-mile Cañon, was an honest, hard-working, good-natured, harmless kind of man, yet when aroused displayed a most fierce and ungovernable temper. When he flew into a passion he was ready to do anything or use any kind of weapon that first came to hand. Even then, he showed, in this, signs of that insanity in which he ended his days. Many instances of his exhibitions of blind and furious rage are related by the early miners.
During these early days a sham duel was got up at Johntown between O’Riley and a young man named Smith, a miner working in Gold Cañon. As in most real duels, there was a woman in the case, a girl living up in Carson Valley. Both O’Riley and Smith found pleasure in the smile of the young girl in question, and the light of her eyes was as sunshine to their hearts. O’Riley was so much smitten that he would sometimes go and work all day on the farm of the father without money and without reward of any kind, other than the pleasure of being near the daughter during the time he was taking his meals. Such hard-working love as this must have been strong and honest. As O’Riley could neither read nor write the “boys” fixed up letters purporting to come from the girl, in which she expressed unbounded[unbounded] love for both men, but the trouble was that for the life of her she could not say which she most loved. At last there came a letter in which she said she had thought of a way of deciding the matter. O’Riley and Smith were to fight a duel, and her hand was to be the prize of the victor.
O’Riley was ready for this at once, for, as I have said, he was a man who was quite desperate when the deeper feelings of his nature were aroused, and Smith, though he pretended to dislike the proposition, finally agreed to stand up to the rack; there appearing to be no other way in which the difficulty could be settled.
It was left to the friends of the principals to make the necessary arrangements. These decided that as but one of the men could have the girl, the duel should be to the death. They therefore announced that the fight must be with double-barrelled shotguns, at twenty paces.
The appointed time arrived, and the rival lovers were placed in position, each armed with a shotgun. The guns were heavily charged with powder and paper-wads, but O’Riley, who was in downright earnest and thirsted for blood, supposed that all was on the square and that each barrel of both guns contained not less than nine revolver-balls.
At the word, both men fired; but O’Riley, who was determined to put his rival out of the way, turned loose with both barrels of his gun, firing his second barrel almost before the smoke had drifted away from the muzzle of the first.