They were a singular people, the Papagoes; honest, laborious, docile, sober, and pure—not an improper character among them. Only one white man had ever been allowed to marry into the tribe—Buckskin Aleck Stevens, of Cambridge, Mass., and that had to be a marriage with bell, book, and candle and every formality to protect the bride.
I do not know anything about the Papagoes of to-day, and am prepared to hear that they have sadly degenerated. The Americans have had twenty years in which to corrupt them, and the intimacy can hardly have been to the advantage of the red man.
CHAPTER IV.
SOME OF THE FRIENDS MET IN OLD TUCSON—JACK LONG—HIS DIVORCE—MARSHAL DUFFIELD AND “WACO BILL”—“THEM ’ERE’S MEE VISITIN’ KEE-YARD”—JUDGE TITUS AND CHARLES O. BROWN—HOW DUFFIELD WAS KILLED—UNCLE BILLY N—— AND HIS THREE GLASS EYES—AL. GARRETT—DOCTOR SEMIG AND LIEUTENANT SHERWOOD—DON ESTEVAN OCHOA—BISHOP SALPOINTE—PETE KITCHEN AND HIS RANCH.
“See yar, muchacho, move roun’ lively now, ’n’ git me a Jinny Lin’ steak.” It was a strong, hearty voice which sounded in my ears from the table just behind me in the “Shoo Fly,” and made me mechanically turn about, almost as much perplexed as was the waiter-boy, Miguel, by the strange request.
“Would you have any objection, sir, to letting me know what you mean by a Jenny Lind steak?”
“A Jinny Lin’ steak, mee son, ’s a steak cut from off a hoss’s upper lip. I makes it a rule allers to git what I orders; ’n’ ez far’s I kin see, I’ll get a Jinny Lin’ steak anyhow in this yere outfit, so I’m kinder takin’ time by the fetlock, ’n’ orderin’ jes’ what I want. My name’s Jack Long; what mout your’n be?”
It was apparent, at half a glance, that Jack Long was not “in sassiety,” unless it might be a “sassiety” decidedly addicted to tobacco, given to the use of flannel instead of “b’iled” shirts, never without six-shooter on hip, and indulging in profanity by the wholesale.
A better acquaintance with old Jack showed that, like the chestnut, his roughest part was on the outside. Courage, tenderness, truth, and other manly attributes peered out from under roughness of garb and speech. He was one of Gray’s “gems of purest ray serene,” born in “the dark, unfathomed caves” of frontier isolation.
Jack Long had not always been “Jack” Long. Once, way back in the early fifties, he and his “podners” had struck it rich on some “placer” diggings which they had preëmpted on the Yuba, and in less than no time my friend was heralded to the mountain communities as “Jedge” Long. This title had never been sought, and, in justice to the recipient, it should be made known that he discarded it at once, and would none of it. The title “Jedge” on the frontier does not always imply respect, and Jack would tolerate nothing ambiguous.