“One day this chap gets on a pitching pony, and the pony kind of sidled up his back and went to eating grass while the New Yorker was coming down.

“He come down on his head on a chunk of mesquit wood, and he didn’t show any designs toward getting up again.  We laid him out in a tent, and he begun to look pretty dead.  So Gideon Pease saddles up and burns the wind for old Doc Sleeper’s residence in Dogtown, thirty miles away.

“The doctor comes over and he investigates the patient.

“‘Boys,’ says he, ’you might as well go to playing seven-up for his saddle and clothes, for his head’s fractured and if he lives ten minutes it will be a remarkable case of longevity.’

“Of course we didn’t gamble for the poor rooster’s saddle—­that was one of Doc’s jokes.  But we stood around feeling solemn, and all of us forgive him for having talked us to death about New York.

“I never saw anybody about to hand in his checks act more peaceful than this fellow.  His eyes were fixed ’way up in the air, and he was using rambling words to himself all about sweet music and beautiful streets and white-robed forms, and he was smiling like dying was a pleasure.

“‘He’s about gone now,’ said Doc.  ’Whenever they begin to think they see heaven it’s all off.’

“Blamed if that New York man didn’t sit right up when he heard the Doc say that.

“‘Say,’ says he, kind of disappointed, ’was that heaven?  Confound it all, I thought it was Broadway.  Some of you fellows get my clothes.  I’m going to get up.’

“And I’ll be blamed,” concluded Bud, “if he wasn’t on the train with a ticket for New York in his pocket four days afterward!”

XVIII

THE ADVENTURES OF SHAMROCK JOLNES

I am so fortunate as to count Shamrock Jolnes, the great New York detective, among my muster of friends.  Jolnes is what is called the “inside man” of the city detective force.  He is an expert in the use of the typewriter, and it is his duty, whenever there is a “murder mystery” to be solved, to sit at a desk telephone at headquarters and take down the messages of “cranks” who ’phone in their confessions to having committed the crime.

But on certain “off” days when confessions are coming in slowly and three or four newspapers have run to earth as many different guilty persons, Jolnes will knock about the town with me, exhibiting, to my great delight and instruction, his marvellous powers of observation and deduction.

The other day I dropped in at Headquarters and found the great detective gazing thoughtfully at a string that was tied tightly around his little finger.

“Good morning, Whatsup,” he said, without turning his head.  “I’m glad to notice that you’ve had your house fitted up with electric lights at last.”

“Will you please tell me,” I said, in surprise, “how you knew that?  I am sure that I never mentioned the fact to any one, and the wiring was a rush order not completed until this morning.”