Mr. Ezekiel George Washington Scraggs, late of Missouri, later of Utah, and latest of North Dakota, stood an even six-foot unshod. He had an air of leanness, almost emaciation, not borne out by any fact of anatomy. We make our hasty estimates from the face. Brother Scraggs's face was gaunt. Misfortune had written there, in a large, angular hand, "It might have been"--those saddest words of tongue or pen. The pensive sorrow of E. G. W.'s countenance had misled many people--not but what the sorrow was genuine enough (Scraggsy explained it in four words, "I've been a Mormon"), but the expression of a blighted, helpless youth carried into early middle age was an appearance only: I mean it was nothing to bank on in dealing with Zeke. Still, if you could see those eyes, dimmed with a settled melancholy; those mustachios, which, absorbing all the capillary possibilities of his head, drooped like weeping willows from his upper lip; and above, the monumental nose--that springing prow that once so grandly parted the waves of adverse circumstance, until, blown by the winds of ambition, his bark was cast ruined on the shores of matrimony--you would not so much blame the man who mistook E. G. Washington Scraggs for a something not too difficult. Red Saunders said that Scraggsy looked like a forlorn hope lost in a fog, but when you came to cash in on that basis it was most astonishing. In general a man of few words, on occasions he would tip back his chair, insert the stem of his corncob pipe in an opening provided by nature at the cost of a tooth, and tell us about it. [Illustration: "Scraggsy looked like a forlorn hope lost in a fog."] "Why can't people be honest?" said Mr. Scraggs--_Silence_! "Charley!" cried Red, reproachfully, "why don't you tell the gentleman?" "No, no, no!" replied Charley. "You be older'n me, Red--you explain." "Well," said Red, "I suppose the loss of their hair kind of discourages 'em." "I had rather," meditated Mr. Scraggs, "I had much rather wear the top of my head a smooth white record of a well-spent life than go amblin' around the country like the Chicago fire out for a walk, and I repeat: Why can't people be honest?" "I begin to pity somebody an awful lot," said Red. "Did you send him home barefoot?" "You go on!" retorted Mr. Scraggs. "I fell into the hands of the Filly-steins oncet, and they put the trail of the serpent all over me. I run into the temple of them twin false gods, Mammon and Gammon, and I stood to draw one suit of sack-cloth and a four-mule wagon-load of ashes." "Is them the close you got on now?" said Charley. "And what did you get for the ashes?"