For a good half hour "The Minute Man" retched and coughed in desperate efforts to spew forth the nauseous mess that had been poured down its throat. Then its efforts became scattering and spasmodic, finally ceasing entirely. For an hour longer a diminuendo of gasps and gurgles rattled in its racked throat. At last even these ceased, and a death-bed silence fell upon the formation. There has not been the flutter of a pulse since. It really looks as though "The Minute Man," his innermost vitals torn asunder by the terrific expansion of boiling water acting upon soft soap, is dead for good and all. I only hope I am not going to be mixed up in the inquest. Crystal Springs Emergency Cabin, April 20. Wade and I had a long and heated session of religious argument at Norris last night, of which I am inclined to think I had a shade the best. A half hour ago, however, he pulled off a coup which he seems to feel has about evened the score. At least I just overheard him telling Carr that, while that "dern'd reporter was a mighty slippery cuss," he reckoned that he finally got the pesky dude where he didn't have nothing more to say. This was something the way of it: Wade is a sort of amateur agnostic, and, next to swearing, his favourite pastime is arguing "agin the church." He has read Voltaire and Bob Ingersoll in a haphazard way, and also sopped up some queer odds and ends from works on metaphysics and philosophy. These give him his basic ideas which, alchemized in the wonderworking laboratory of his mind, produce some golden theories. He holds, for instance, that no wise and beneficent being would cast a devil out of a woman and into a drove of hogs, because hogs were good to eat and women wasn't. Making the hogs run off a cut-bank into the sea meant spoiling good meat, and no wise and beneficent being would do that. He reckoned the whole yarn was just a bit of bull anyhow, and if it really did happen, wasn't modern science able to account for it by the fact that the girl was plain daffy and the hogs had "trichiny" worms and stampeded? Little touches like that go a long way toward brightening the gloom of a winter evening, and for that reason I have done what I could to keep Wade on production. Unfortunately, my knowledge of theology is not profound, while Wade, with his wits sharpened on every itinerant sky-pilot who has ever endeavoured to herd in the black sheep of the Yellowstone, has all his guns ready to bear at a moment's notice. Naturally, therefore, in a matter of straight argument, he has had me on the run from his opening salvo. But always at the last I have robbed his victories of all sweetness by ducking back into the citadel of dogma, and telling him that I can't consent to argue with him unless he sticks to premises--that the Church cannot eliminate the element of faith, which he persists in ignoring. Then, leaving him fuming, I turn in and muffle my exposed ear with a pillow.