"My friend," says he, "when you go to the home of them ladies, drive straight acrost the open range to the back door, be thar befo' midnight, and if you love yo' life, don't stray out on the waggon road between the Jim Crow Mine and Grave City. If you do you'll get killed for sure."
"Lose it somewheres whar it ain't apt to be found. Turn them team hawsses loose and let them break for their home, as they shorely will."
"Then Jim will join you, and you'll take them children to some safe country, so that they get mar'ied and forget this life. We planned all that befo'."
"It looks that way, my friend, and I don't trust by halves."
He gripped my hand, and went loping away into the night.
In those days of our little unpleasantness in Arizona there was another discussion proceeding along in South Africa. The Boers had their tail up, and the British Army was indulging itself in "regrettable incidents" about once a week. Which I allude to here because the word "regrettable incident" is good; it's soothing, and it illustrates exactly what happened on the night when I delivered Curly, damaged but cheerful, among my cousins, the Misses Jameson.
Just to the east of the home inhabited by these ladies occurs the Jim Crow Mine, the same being the very place where the robbers once had breakfast with old man Ryan, making him pay the bill, as aforesaid, which was seventy-five thousand dollars, and annoying.
On this further occasion which I now unfold, there were only four men working the Jim Crow claim. It seems they were in the bunk house playing poker until eleven p. m., when their foreman uprose with regrets to surrender his hat, boots, and pants to an avaricious person holding three aces and a pair of jacks. The foreman's warm communications on the subject of cheating were then cut off short by a masked robber standing in the doorway with guns. This robber proposed that all gentlemen present should throw up their hands, and allowed they had a fervent invitation to die unless they stepped out pretty soon to the head of the Jim Crow shaft. Accordingly the sad procession trailed away to the shaft, and one by one the mourners went down in a bucket to a total depth of one hundred and four feet. Then the robber hauled up the bucket to keep them from straying out, and promised faithful that if he heard any noise he would just drop in a few sticks of dynamite. There was not much noise.