Here lies most of C. BLACKLOCK,
who died of a’ entangling alliance with
a stick of dynamite.
Moral: A hook and line is good enough
fish-tackle for any honest man.
“That there board lasted for two years, till
the freshet of ’82, when the American River—Hello,
there’s the sun!”
All in a minute the night seemed to have closed up
like a great book. The East flamed roseate.
The air was cold, nimble. Some of the sage-brush
bore a thin rim of frost. The herd, aroused, the
dew glistening on flank and horn, were chewing the
first cud of the day, and in twos and threes moving
toward the water-hole for the morning’s drink.
Far off toward the camp the breakfast fire sent a shaft
of blue smoke straight into the moveless air.
A jack-rabbit, with erect ears, limped from the sage-brush
just out of pistol-shot and regarded us a moment,
his nose wrinkling and trembling. By the time
that Bunt and I, putting our ponies to a canter, had
pulled up by the camp of the Bar-circle-Z outfit,
another day had begun in Idaho.
The manuscript of the account that follows belongs
to a harness-maker in Albuquerque, Juan Tejada by
name, and he is welcome to whatever of advertisement
this notice may bring him. He is a good fellow,
and his patented martingale for stage horses may be
recommended. I understand he got the manuscript
from a man named Bass, or possibly Bass left it with
him for safe-keeping. I know that Tejada has some
things of Bass’s now—things that
Bass left with him last November: a mess-kit,
a lantern and a broken theodolite—a whole
saddle-box full of contraptions. I forgot to
ask Tejada how Bass got the manuscript, and I wish
I had done so now, for the finding of it might be
a story itself. The probabilities are that Bass
simply picked it up page by page off the desert, blown
about the spot where the fight occurred and at some
little distance from the bodies. Bass, I am told,
is a bone-gatherer by profession, and one can easily
understand how he would come across the scene of the
encounter in one of his tours into western Arizona.
My interest in the affair is impersonal, but none
the less keen. Though I did not know young Karslake,
I knew his stuff—as everybody still does,
when you come to that. For the matter of that,
the mere mention of his pen-name, “Anson Qualtraugh,”
recalls at once to thousands of the readers of a certain
world-famous monthly magazine of New York articles
and stories he wrote for it while he was alive; as,
for instance, his admirable descriptive work called
“Traces of the Aztecs on the Mogolon Mesa,”
in the October number of 1890. Also, in the January
issue of 1892 there are two specimens of his work,
one signed Anson Qualtraugh and the other Justin Blisset.
Why he should have used the Blisset signature I do
not know. It occurs only this once in all his
writings. In this case it is signed to a very
