“I will have to go by some other route than either,” was the reply. “I cannot cross the State of Missouri; I am honorably dead there.”
“Honorably dead?”
“Yes, sir. It was this way: I lived at Atchison for a while when I was a young fellow, and Abe Simmons and me were always at outs about something, and at last we quarreled in dead earnest about a girl, and he sent me a challenge to fight a duel. I always held that dueling was a fool way to settle things, but I wasn’t going to take water for no Missourian, and so I placed myself in the hands of my second, as they call it among the chivs.
“Well, Abe’s second and my second were good friends of both of us, and they were in for a sort of a lark, and they fixed it up to paint two life-sized pictures, one of Abe and one of me, on the door of an old stable, and we was each to fire at the picture of the other at the word. They had three doctors to examine the wounds on the paintings, and if they decided that the wound was mortal, then the fellow whose picture was killed had to consider himself honorably dead, and was to leave Missouri and never return. If the wound was not mortal, he had to lay up and keep his bed for such time as the doctors agreed would be necessary.
“Well, sir, they made a circus of us, that’s a fact. We both signed a paper agreeing on honor to carry out the arrangement, and we went out one broiling afternoon in August in pursuit of each other’s gore. The boys had passed the word, and we played to a bigger audience than was ever at a Democratic barbecue. I was the best shot, but I was getting ashamed of the whole business, and I fired in a hurry, and only plugged Abe’s picture through its gambrel joint. He took a dead sight and shot my picture plumb through the heart. I wanted three days to settle my business, but the doctors decided that the weather was so hot I wouldn’t keep more than twelve hours, and accordingly I lit out for Pike’s Peak—as it was then called—the next morning, and I have never touched the soil of Missouri since.”
“How about Abe?”
“The doctors agreed that he had to go on crutches for three months, and the boys laughed at him—so I heard—so much that at the end of the second week he limped out to his father’s ranch, and stayed there until his time was up, when he went to St. Louis.”
“And the girl?”
“Well, of course I was a corpse, and she had no use for me, and Abe had, before the duel, invited her to a dance, and, naturally, being a cripple, he couldn’t go, and she allowed that she would neither go to a dance or tie herself for life to a man with a lame leg, and she married another fellow altogether. But you see I cannot honorably go into Missouri unless I can travel on a corpse ticket.”
“Well, Bob, your remains shall not violate your pledge. We will keep out of Missouri this trip.”