[Illustration:  Made any other human countenance I ever see look like a nigger-minstrel show.]

“We was short-handed, as the old man had begun to put up hay and work some of the stock in corrals for the winter, so we took our new brother on.  His name was Ezekiel George Washington Scraggs—­tuneful number for a cow-outfit!—­and his name didn’t come anywhere near doin’ him justice at that.  Ezekiel knew his biz and turned in a day’s work right straight along, but when you’d say, ‘Nice day, Scraggs?’ he’d heave such a sigh you could feel the draft all the way acrost the bull-pen, and only shake his head.

“Up to this time Wind-river had enjoyed a cinch on the mournful act.  He’d had a girl sometime durin’ the Mexican war, and she’d borrowed Smith’s roll and skipped with another man.  So, if we crowded Smithy too hard in debate, he used to slip behind that girl and say, ’Oh, well!  You fellers will know better when you’ve had more experience,” although we might have been talkin’ about what’s best for frost-bite at the time.

“He noticed this new man Scraggs seemed to hold over him a trifle in sadness, and he thought he’d find out why.

“‘You appear to me like a man that’s seen trouble,’ says he.

“‘Trouble!’ says Scraggs.  ‘Trouble!’ Then he spit out of the door and turned his back deliberate, like there wasn’t any use conversin’ on the subject, unless in the presence of an equal.

“Scraggs was a hard man to break into, but Smithy scratched his head and took a brace.

“‘I’ve met with misfortune myself,’ says he.

“‘Ah?’ says Scraggs.  ‘What’s happened to you?’ He sounded as if he didn’t believe it amounted to much, and Smithy warmed up.  He ladled out his woes like a catalogue.  How he’d been blew up in mines; squizzled down a mountain on a snow-slide; chawed by a bear; caught under a felled tree; sunk on a Missouri River steamboat, and her afire, so you couldn’t tell whether to holler for the life-savers or the fire-engine; shot up by Injuns and personal friends; mistook for a horse-thief by the committee, and much else, closing the list with his right bower.  ’And, Mr. Scraggs, I have put my faith in woman, and she done me to the tune of all I had.’

“‘Have you?’ says Scraggs, still perfectly polite and uninterested. “‘Have you?’ says he, removin’ his pipe and spitting carefully outdoors again.  And then he slid the joker a’top of Smithy’s play.  ‘Well, I have been a Mormon,’ says he.

“‘What?’ says all of us.

“‘Yessir!’ says Mr. Scraggs, getting his feet under him, and with a mournful pride I can’t give you the least idea of.  ’A Mormon; none of your tinkerin’ little Mormonettes.  I was ambitious; hence E. G. W. Scraggs as you now behold him.  In most countries a man’s standin’ is regulated by the number of wives he ain’t got; in Utah it’s just the reverse—­and a fair test, too, when you come to think of it.