"Don't shave me close," said I. "Close?" he repeated. "You'll be the luckiest victim I've slashed yet if I get off any of your beard at all. How's the razor?" "All right." "Oh no, it ain't," said he; "you're setting your nerves to stand it, so's not to be called a tender-foot. I'm no barber. I expected to 'tend bar when I bumped up agin this place. If you could see the blood streaming down your face you'd faint." In spite of his self-depreciation, he performed as artistic and painless an operation as I ever sat through. While I was being shaved the loungers in the barber-shop entered into a conversation that revealed, as nothing else could have disclosed it, the deadly monotony of life in that little town. A hen cackled out-of-doors, and the loungers fell to questioning one another as to which hen had laid an egg. "It must be the black one," said the barber. "Yet it don't exactly sound like old blacky's cackle," said a more deliberate and careful speaker. "'Pears to me 's though it might be the speckled un," ventured a third. "She ain't never laid no eggs," said the barber. "Could it be the bantam?" another inquired. Thus they discussed with earnestness this most interesting event of the morning, until a young man darted into the room with his eyes lighted by excitement. "Say, Bill," said he, almost breathlessly, "that's the speckled hen a-cackling, by thunder! She's laid an egg, I guess." [Illustration: "YOU'RE SETTING YOUR NERVES TO STAND IT"] In Sproat's Landing we saw the nucleus of a railroad terminal point. The queer hotel was but little more peculiar than many of the people who gathered on the single street on pay-day to spend their hard-earned money upon a great deal of illicit whiskey and a few rude necessaries from the limited stock on sale in the stores. There never had been any grave disorder there, yet the floating population was as motley a collection of the riffraff of the border as one could well imagine, and there was only one policeman to enforce the law in a territory the size of Rhode Island. He was quite as remarkable in his way as any other development of that embryotic civilization. His name was Jack Kirkup, and all who knew him spoke of him as being physically the most superb example of manhood in the Dominion. Six feet and three inches in height, with the chest, neck, and limbs of a giant, his three hundred pounds of weight were so exactly his complement as to give him the symmetry of an Apollo. He was good-looking, with the beauty of a round-faced, good-natured boy, and his thick hair fell in a cluster of ringlets over his forehead and upon his neck. No knight of Arthur's circle can have been more picturesque a figure in the forest than this "Jack." He was as neat as a dandy. He wore high boots and corduroy knickerbockers, a flannel shirt and a sack-coat, and rode his big bay horse with the ease and grace of a Skobeleff. He smoked like a fire of green brush, but had never tasted liquor in his life.