About the time he shook the Abilene dust from his moccasins, there came to Mr. Hickok’s hand a proposal from Mr. Cody to join him in the production of a drama. It was to be a drama descriptive of an Arcadian West—one wherein stages were robbed, maidens rescued, Indians put to death. Mr. Hickok in real life had long been familiar with every fraction of the stage business; the lines he could learn in a night. Mr. Cody was confident that Mr. Hickok would take instant part in that drama without rehearsal. If Mr. Hickok accepted, the financial side was to be coloured to meet his taste. His social life, so Mr. Cody explained, should be one of splendour and Eastern luxury. Mr. Hickok, pausing only to break himself at faro-bank, took up the proffer of Mr. Cody. He journeyed to New York, and found that thorough-going scout sojourning at the Brevoort House. “Where’s your trunk?” asked Mr. Cody. “Haven’t any,” returned Mr. Hickok, whose trunk had been left to keep a boarding-house in countenance. “But I’ve brought my guns.” This last, hopefully. “That’s right,” observed Mr. Cody, whom nothing was ever known to daunt. “While a gentleman may be without a change of linen, he should never let his wardrobe sink so low as to leave him without a change of guns.” Mr. Hickok was not a permanency in the theatres. His was a serious nature, and there were many matters behind the footlights to irk the soul of him. For one stifling outrage he was allowed nothing lethal wherewith to feed his six-shooters. Blanks by the hundreds he might have; but no bullets. Now this, in a blind sort of way, told upon Mr. Hickok as something irreligious. A Colt’s-45 was not a joke; its mechanism had not been connived in any spirit of facetiousness. It was hardware for life and death; it owned a mission, and to make of it a bauble and a tinsel thing smote upon Mr. Hickok like sacrilege. And then, to shoot over the heads of folk shook one’s faith. It was as though one mocked the heavens! In good truth, Mr. Hickok never did this last. It was his wont to empty his weapons, right and left, at the shrinking legs of Indian-seeming supers. The practice was not lacking in elements of certain excellence. The powder burned the supers, and brought yells which were genuine from those adjuncts of the theatre. In that way was the public gratified, and the integrity of the stage upheld.