Joe was wheeled outside and a moment later was dead.
George Williams, a Spanish American war veteran, retired to Shoshone on a pension of $50. Since food was cheap, George had more money than he knew what to do with. He kept five burros. He never prospected, but roamed the country and thought nothing of taking a 300 mile trip across the roughest terrain in the region. After spending his summers in the high country, he would return to Shoshone in winter. There he had a five acre ranch fenced in and a neat cabin.
Every day George would come to the store and buy a pound of chocolates. “I’ve got a sweet tooth,” he would explain.
Charlie, sure that no one could eat as much chocolate as George bought, was a bit curious as to what George did with it and trailed him one day through the mesquite to find George feeding the candy to his burros.
George was not a drinker, but on one occasion he joined a party and went on a bender. He awoke next morning with a horrible hangover and was so humiliated that he left Shoshone and never returned. He went over to Sandy and died in the ’30s.
One day George started to tell me a story as we sat on the bench. His burros were grazing in the nearby salt grass. Every time he reached the climax of his yarn, he would jump up to go after a straying burro. When he retrieved that one, another would wander off and George would leave me again.
For one entire summer I listened to the beginning of that yarn and every morning would remind him of it.
“Where was I?” he’d say. “Oh, yes, I was telling you about the girl climbing out of the fellow’s window just before daylight. Well, she went—”
Then George would jump up and start for a burro, and I never learned what happened to the torrid romance after the girl crawled out of her lover’s window.