“Well, for clean, cool, out-and-out cheek, if
this don’t bang anything that ever I saw, I’m
an Injun!” whispered Col. Jack.
A Chinaman crowded his way in.
“I weaken!” said Col. Jack.
“Hold on, driver! Keep your seats, ladies,
and gents. Just make yourselves free—everything’s
paid for. Driver, rustle these folks around
as long as they’re a mind to go—friends
of ours, you know. Take them everywheres—and
if you want more money, come to the St. Nicholas,
and we’ll make it all right. Pleasant journey
to you, ladies and gents—go it just as
long as you please—it shan’t cost
you a cent!”
The two comrades got out, and Col. Jack said:
“Jimmy, it’s the sociablest place I ever
saw. The Chinaman waltzed in as comfortable
as anybody. If we’d staid awhile, I reckon
we’d had some niggers. B’ George,
we’ll have to barricade our doors to-night, or
some of these ducks will be trying to sleep with us.”
Somebody has said that in order to know a community,
one must observe the style of its funerals and know
what manner of men they bury with most ceremony.
I cannot say which class we buried with most eclat
in our “flush times,” the distinguished
public benefactor or the distinguished rough—possibly
the two chief grades or grand divisions of society
honored their illustrious dead about equally; and hence,
no doubt the philosopher I have quoted from would
have needed to see two representative funerals in
Virginia before forming his estimate of the people.
There was a grand time over Buck Fanshaw when he died.
He was a representative citizen. He had “killed
his man”—not in his own quarrel,
it is true, but in defence of a stranger unfairly beset
by numbers. He had kept a sumptuous saloon.
He had been the proprietor of a dashing helpmeet
whom he could have discarded without the formality
of a divorce. He had held a high position in
the fire department and been a very Warwick in politics.
When he died there was great lamentation throughout
the town, but especially in the vast bottom-stratum
of society.
On the inquest it was shown that Buck Fanshaw, in
the delirium of a wasting typhoid fever, had taken
arsenic, shot himself through the body, cut his throat,
and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his
neck—and after due deliberation, the jury,
sad and tearful, but with intelligence unblinded by
its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death “by
the visitation of God.” What could the
world do without juries?
Prodigious preparations were made for the funeral.
All the vehicles in town were hired, all the saloons
put in mourning, all the municipal and fire-company
flags hung at half-mast, and all the firemen ordered
to muster in uniform and bring their machines duly
draped in black. Now —let us remark
in parenthesis—as all the peoples of the
earth had representative adventurers in the Silverland,
