“I made that eighteen miles in eighty minutes. I never took the road, but crashed through the chaparral, jumped prickly pear and arroyo just as they come. When I got to the ranch I fell off my pony, and he leaned up against the fence streamin’ wet and lookin’ at me mighty reproachful. I never breathed in jumpin’ from the fence to the back door. I clattered up the steps and yelled for Sallie, but my voice sounded to me like somebody else’s, ’way off. The door opened and out tumbled the wife and the kid, all right, but scared as wild ducks. ‘Oh, Jim,’ says the wife, ‘where, oh where have you been? A drunken Mexican attacked the house this morning and tried to cut down the door with an ax.’ I tried to ask some questions, but I couldn’t. ‘Look,’ says Sallie.
“The other door was busted all to pieces and the ax was lyin’ on the step, and the Mexican was lyin’ on the ground and a Winchester ball had passed clear through his head.”
“Who shot him?” asked the lawyer.
“I’ve told you all I know,” said the sheep man. “Sallie said the man dropped all of a sudden while he was choppin’ at the door, and she never heard no gun shoot. I don’t pretend to explain nothin’, I’m telling you what happened. You might say somebody in the brush seen him breakin’ in the door and shot him, usin’ noiseless powder, and then slipped away without leavin’ his card, or you might say you don’t know nothin’ at all about it, as I do.”
“Do you think—” began the young man.
“No, I don’t think,” said the sheep man, rather shortly. “I said I’d tell you about the mi-ridge I seen, and I told you just as it happened. Is they any coffee left in that pot?”
(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, April 19, 1896.)
A Tragedy
“By the beard of the Prophet. Oh, Scheherezade, right well hast thou done,” said the Caliph, leaning back and biting off the end of a three-for.