"'The first day I was there a State of Maine man cut the stomach out of a Texan.' "Marcus was with the boys during that first tough winter in Eureka. One fearfully cold day a man was telling about the cold he had experienced in Idaho. When the story was finished Marcus cast a look of sovereign contempt upon the man and said: "'You know nothing about cold weather, sir; you never saw any. You should go to Montana. In Montana I have seen plenty of mornings when were a man to have gone out of a warm room, crossed a street sixty feet wide and shaken his head, his ears would have snapped off like icicles.' "The stranger, overawed, retired." Alex spoke next: "The other day Dan Dennison asked me to go and look at a famous trotting horse that he has here. We went to the stable, and when the stepper was pointed out I started to go into the stall beside him, whereupon Dan caught me by the arm, drew me back, and said: "'Be careful! Sometimes he deals from the bottom.' "He stripped the covers from the horse and backed him out where I could look at him. The horse was not a beauty by any means and I intimated my belief of that fact to Dan. "'No,' said Dennison. The truth is--' He hesitated a moment and then the words came in a volley: "'He's deformed with speed.' "There is a lawyer down town, you all know him. He has a head as big as the old croppings of the Gould and Curry, but like some other lawyers that practice at the Virginia City bar (here he glanced significantly at the Colonel), he is not an exceedingly bright or profound man. He was passing a downtown office yesterday when a man, who chanced to be standing in the office, said to the bookkeeper of the establishment: "'Look at Judge ----. His head is bigger than Mount Davidson, but I am told that where his brains ought to be there is a howling wilderness.' "The bookkeeper stopped his writing, carefully wiped his pen, laid it down, came out from behind his desk, came close up to the man who had spoken to him, and said: "'Howling wilderness? I tell you, sir, that man's head is an unexplored mental Death Valley.'" "Yes," said the Colonel, "his is a queer family. He has a brother who is a journalist; he has made a fortune in the business. His great theme is sketching the lives and characters of people." "But has he made a fortune publishing sketches of that description?" asked Miller. "Oh, no," replied the Colonel; "he has made his money by refraining from publishing them. People have paid him to suppress them." "Colonel," asked Strong, "did it never occur to you that other fortunes might be made the same way by people just exactly adapted to that style of writing?" "If it had," was the reply. "I should have considered that the field here was fully occupied." "You might write a sketch of your own career," suggested the Professor. "Don't do it, Colonel," said Alex. "Why not?" asked Ashley.