"Aunt," replied I, solemnly, "don't mock me with apple dumplings; they may be light, but my heart is heavy."
"La, John, try a little east on your heart," said she, laughing—by "east" she meant yeast, I suppose.
"No, aunt, not 'east,' but west. My mind is made up. I'm going out to Colorado to fight the Indians."
She let the two-tined steel fork drop out of her hand.
"What will your ma say to that?" she gasped.
"I tell you I am going," was my firm reply, and I went.
Yes, I had long sighed to be a Juan Fernandez, or a Mount Washington weatherologist, or something lonesome and sad, as my readers know. Fighting Indians would be a terrible risky business; but compared to facing the "girls of the period" it would be the merest play. I was weary of a life that was all mistakes. "Better throw it away," I thought, bitterly, "and give my scalp to dangle at a redskin's belt, than make another one of my characteristic and preposterous blunders."
I had heard that Buffalo Bill was about to start for the Rocky Mountains, and I wrote to New York asking permission to join him. He answered that I could, if I was prepared to pay my own way. I immediately bade my relatives farewell, went home, borrowed two hundred dollars of father, told mother she was the only woman I wasn't afraid of, kissed her good-bye, and met Buffalo Bill at the next large town by appointment, he being already on his way West. I came home after dark, and left again before daylight, and that was the last I saw of my native village for some time.
"You don't let on yer much of a fighter?" asked the great scout, as he saw me hunt all over six pockets and blush like a girl when the conductor came for our tickets, and finally hand him a postal-card instead of the bit of pasteboard he was impatiently waiting to punch.
"Oh, I guess I'll fight like a rat when it comes to that," I answered. "I'm brave as a lion—only I'm bashful."