"Calamity," it appeared, had arrived from Bozeman that afternoon, taken a room over a saloon, gone out for a convivial evening and forgotten where she lived. She was only sure that the bar-keeper of the saloon was named Patsy, and that there was an outside stairway up to the second story. It was a long and devious search, not so much because there was any great number of saloons with outside stairways and mixologists called Patsy, as because every man in every saloon to which we went to inquire greeted "Calamity" as a long-lost mother and insisted on shouting the house. Then, to the last man, they attached themselves to the search-party. When we did locate the proper place, it was only to find that "Calamity" had lost her room-key. After a not-too-well-ordered consultation, we passed her unprotesting anatomy in through a window by means of a fire-ladder and reckoned our mission finished. That was the proudest night on which I am able to look back. When, agog with delicious excitement, I went to ask after Mrs. Burk's health the following morning. I found her smoking a cigar and cooking breakfast. She insisted on my sharing both, but I compromised on the ham and eggs. She had no recollection whatever of our meeting of the previous evening, yet greeted me as "Short Pants" as readily as ever. This name, later contracted to "Pants," was suggested by my omnipresent checkered knickers, the only nether garment I possessed at the time. The "once-and-never-again 'Calamity Jane,'" was about fifty-five years of age at this time, and looked it, or did not look it, according to where one looked. Her deeply-lined, scowling, sun-tanned face and the mouth with its missing teeth might have belonged to a hag of seventy. The rest of her-well, seeing those leather-clad legs swing by on the other side of a signboard that obscured the wrinkled phiz, one might well have thought they belonged to a thirty-year-old cow-puncher just coming into town for his night to howl. And younger even than her legs was "Calamity's" heart. Apropos of which I recall confiding to Patsy, the bar-keep, that she had the heart of a young god Pan. "Maybe so," grunted Patsy doubtfully (not having had a classical education he couldn't be quite sure, of course); "in any case she's got the voice of an old tin pan." Which was neither gallant nor quite fair to "Calamity." Her voice _was_ a bit cracked, but not so badly as Patsy had tried to make out. Another thing: that black scowl between her brows belied the dear old girl. There was really nothing saturnine about her. Hers was the sunniest of souls, and the most generous. She was poor all her life from giving away things, and I have heard that her last illness was contracted in nursing some poor sot she found in a gutter. [Illustration: "CALAMITY JANE" IN 1885] [Illustration: I FOUND "CALAMITY" SMOKING A CIGAR AND COOKING BREAKFAST]