We still had ballast enough left to assure ten or twelve hours more travel. But we did not like our course. The prospects were that we would end our voyage in the wilderness two hundred or more miles north of Ottawa. So we rose to 12,500 feet, seeking an easterly or westerly current, but without avail. We could not escape the southerly gale. Prudence, therefore, dictated a landing before nightfall. Landing in the high gale was both difficult and dangerous, and was not accomplished until we were all much bruised and scratched in the oak thicket Donaldson chose for our descent.
Thus the first voyage of the good airship Barnum ended at 6.07 p.m. on the farm of E. R. Young, nine miles north of Saratoga.
A year later the Barnum rose for the last time—from Chicago—and to this day the fate of the stanch craft and her brave captain remains an unsolved mystery.
CHAPTER VII
THE EVOLUTION OF A TRAIN ROBBER
Life was never dull in Grant County, New Mexico, in the early eighties. There was always something doing—usually something the average law-abiding, peace-loving citizen would have been glad enough to dispense with. To say that life then and there was insecure is to describe altogether too feebly a state of society and an environment wherein Death, in one violent form or another, was ever abroad, seldom long idle, always alert for victims.
When the San Carlos Apaches, under Victoria, Ju, or Geronimo, were not out gunning for the whites, the whites were usually out gunning for one another over some trivial difference. Everybody carried a gun and was more or less handy with it. Indeed, it was a downright bad plan to carry one unless you were handy. For with gunning—the game most played, if not precisely the most popular—every one was supposed to be familiar with the rules and to know how to play; and in a game where every hand is sure to be "called," no one ever suspected another of being out on a sheer "bluff." Thus the coroner invariably declared it a case of suicide where one man drew a gun on another and failed to use it.
This highly explosive state of society was not due to the fact that there were few peaceable men in the country for there were many of them, men of character and education, honest, and as law-abiding as their peculiar environment would permit. Moreover, the percentage of professional "bad men"—and this was a profession then—was comparatively small. It was due rather to the fact that every one, no matter how peaceable his inclinations, was compelled to carry arms habitually for self-defence, for the Apaches were constantly raiding outside the towns, and white outlaws inside. And with any class of men who constantly carry arms, it always falls out that a weapon is the arbiter of even those minor personal differences which in the older and more effete civilization of the East are settled with fists or in a petty court.
The prevailing local contempt for any man who was too timid to "put up a gun fight" when the etiquette of a situation demanded it, was expressed locally in the phrase that one "could take a corncob and a lightning bug and make him run himself to death trying to get away." It is clearly unnecessary to explain why the few men of this sort in the community did not occupy positions of any particular prominence. Their opinions did not seem to carry as much weight as those of other gentlemen who were known to be notably quick to draw and shoot.
I even recall many instances where the pistol entered into the pastimes of the community. One instance will stand telling: