Mr. Hickok had not gone in ignorance of these slanders; he had heard them when as far away from Abilene and Hays as Boston Common. Now he would refute them; he would give all who desired it an opportunity to burn condemnatory powder in his case. He would pass through Hays and Abilene on his slow way to Cheyenne. These hamlets should be notified. Those who objected to Mr. Hickok’s past in any of its incidents might come down to the train and set forth their displeasure with their pistols. With this fair thought, Mr. Hickok addressed respectively and as follows the editors of Abilene and Hays: “I shall go through your prairie dog village Tuesday. I wear my hair long as usual.” This last to intimate a scalp unconquered. The press is a great and peccant engine; and who has public interest more at heart than your editor? Those of Abilene and Hays posted with all diligence the message of Mr. Hickok on their bulletin boards, adding thereunto the hour of the Hickok train, and then made preparations to give fullest details of the casualties. Mr. Hickok cleaned and oiled his guns. He looked forward carelessly to Hays and Abilene. Experience had taught him that the odds were that not a warlike soul would interrupt his progress. Humanity talks fifty times where once it shoots, and Mr. Hickok was not ignorant of the race in its verbal ferocities. Indeed, being a philosopher, he explained them. “A man,” observed Mr. Hickok, “nacherally does a heap more shootin’ with his mouth than with his gun. An’ for two reasons, to wit:” Here Mr. Hickok would raise an impressive trigger finger. “He’s a shorer, quicker shot with his mouth; and it costs less for ammunition. A gent can load and fire his mouth off fifty times with a ten-cent drink of licker, while cartridges, fifty in a box, are a dollar and four bits a box.” Still, some vigorous person, whether at Abilene or Hays, might appear in the path of Mr. Hickok on battle bent. Wherefore, as aforesaid, he oiled and loaded fully his Colt’s-45s. “Because,” said Mr. Hickok, “I wouldn’t want to be caught four-flushin’ if some gent did call my bluff.” It will seem strange that Mr. Hickok stood willing thus to invite hostilities. The wonder of it might be explained. Mr. Hickok was, like most folk who put in their lives upon the dreary, outstretched deserts of the West, a fatalist. He would live his days; until his time he was safe from halter, knife and gun. Mr. Hickok had all unconsciously become a fashion of white Cheyenne, and based existence on a fearlessness that never wavered, plus an indifference that never cared. He was what he was; he would be what he would be. Men were merest arrows in the air, shot by some sightless archery of nature, one to have a higher and one a lower flight, and each to come clattering back to earth and bury itself in the grave. That was the religious thought of Mr. Hickok, or rather Mr. Hickok’s religious instinct, for he never shaped it to an idea nor piled it up in words.