“Haven’t you heard the news? Why, sir, the worst man in the penitentiary got away last night—Wyeth, the desperado. He—he had help. That’s why the warden’s away, why I’m in charge. My poor brother’s out with the posse trying to get trace of the scoundrel. I guess he’ll shoot him if he finds him.”
“But why is Mrs. Riddle absent at such a time?”
“Governor, that’s the worst part of it. She was the one that helped that devil to escape. And she—she went with him!”
To the end of his days Governor G. W. Blankenship was known as the man who never told a lie. When he died they carved something to that general effect upon his tombstone.
Good Sam
From the foot of the lake where most of the camps were, everybody had been driven out by the forest-fire. Among those who fled up to our end and took temporary quarters on the hotel reservation was my friend, the Native Genius.
My friend, the Native Genius, was a cowboy before he became a painter. He became a great man and was regarded in our Eastern art circles, but in his feelings and his language he remained a cowboy. He also was an historian of the folk-lore of the Old West that has ridden over the ultimate hill of the last free grazing and vanished forever and ever, alas! With none of the conscious effort which so often marks such an undertaking, he could twine a fragrant fictional boscage upon the solid trellis of remembered fact and make you like it. To my way of thinking, this was not the least of his gifts. Indeed not.