“The old man stared at me and asked me if I had wheels in my head too. Everybody had been saying the old governor had wheels in his head until I believe he was afraid to pick his ears lest a cog clip the end of his finger off.
“I had recently been on Zack Mulhall’s ranch in Oklahoma, where the Reverend Buchanan used to come and talk Populism to the boys until I got tired of it one night and stole his false teeth where he put them to soak in a tin cup. There was a lot of socialism too, in his talk that didn’t go down, for on that ranch the first fellow up of a morning got the best socks, and that made me fall out with the idea of community of interests. But to humor the governor I spoke of the widespreading revolutionary sentiment in Texas and Oklahoma and hinted that they had their eyes turned eagerly on his movements, as it was their hope he might devise some way to lead the country out of the silver difficulty. He then showed me a letter from President Diaz, of Mexico. It suggested another pan-American congress in the interests of silver. “It’s no use, though,” he said, “the last assembly of the kind amounted to nothing. Eastern influences would soon retard any movement of the sort.’
“‘If we are to continually be the back dooryard of the east,’ I replied, ‘the sooner we secede from it the better.’
“Here was a long pause, the old man looking at me intently to see if the wheels in my head were working, and I tried at the same time to discover if the machinery in his was all right.
“Seeing the point of vantage I continued: ‘Divide the country from the Mississippi River, establish a new republic with our own capital, make Galveston our New York, with a national railroad to that point; coin our gold and silver, make banks a public trust, with any betrayal of it punishable as high treason. If we are going into revolution we must have something like this for our object, otherwise we will only terminate in anarchy. As governor of Colorado call for a delegation of representative citizens from other states to meet here in convention and start the ball rolling.’
“I delivered this sentiment in round, strong terms, while the governor listened, apparently pleased.
“You will see all you want to of revolution before two years,’ he quietly said, ‘it is coming sure as fate and were I your age I would win fame and fortune by—’
“At this moment an unfortunate affair happened. An Indian had given me a white bulldog. That dog had more sense than half the people and I loved him like a brother. One day the dog got too close to the heels of a heifer and she kicked one eye out. He felt so bad over it that I wrote to an eye doctor to send me a glass eye for my dog. He wrote back that he did not deal in dogs’ eyes, but sent me a bright blue human eye. One of the boys and I managed to fix it in and the dog was very proud of it, only it fit so tight he could not wink. He would lay for hours asleep with the glass eye staring with an expression of strangled innocence confronting the murderer. Where I went that dog went also, and all through the conversation with Governor Waite my dog lay on the floor asleep, but that glass eye kept staring at the governor’s dog until he took it for an insult and came over to our part of the room for a scrap.
“In the melee of separating the dogs the governor jabbed his thumb in that glass eye and nearly cut it off. That made him so mad he would not talk any more and I may have to wander on through eternity guessing what he would have said. My dog felt so humiliated that he went home by the back alleys.”
Other stories followed, relating to horses and daring deeds of their riders. It seemed like we had only slept a few moments when we were awakened by the call of the boss, “roll out,” “roll out.” In a short time every man of the twenty-five was on his feet, rolling up his bed and throwing it in a pile ready to be loaded on the wagon. All gladly answered to the call, “Chuck’s ready!”