“As for the rest of us, we enjoyed ourselves figuring on just _what_ that rancher could explain. You can bring home a dog and say its tail has been cut off someway, but to bring home a tail and say the dog has been cut off someway is a hard proposition to work on the female mind that has lived on a ranch twenty years or so.” X THE FATAL GUM A SERIO-COMEDY OF LIGHT FINGERS AND HEAVY BOOTS Zeke Scraggs had been working out on the dry patch, where it was a long ways between drinks, and lukewarm water from a canteen no particular comfort. He complained, and I produced a discovery in the shape of a tin-foil-wrapped package of chewing-gum marked “Lily Sweet.” “If you chew a piece of that when you’re dry, Scraggy,” I said, “it will stave off thirst for some time.” Mr. Scraggs received the offering in his large palm, and poked it with the forefinger of his other hand. “Yaas,” he said; “y-a-a-s. But it’s dangerous.” “Dangerous?” “Horrible. You don’t ketch me minglin’ myself with no ‘Lily Sweets.’ _I_ consider the lily of the field how she grows. You wouldn’t believe that anything that sounds so innercent could be the tee-total ruin of a large, dark-complected tin-horn, with a pair of musstaches like Injun-polished buffler horns, would you?” Like almost anybody else would have done, I said I wouldn’t. “Well, it was,” said Zeke. “If you could see that gam, and compare him to this here package of choon’-gum, you wouldn’t ever guess that either one could do much of anything to t’other; yet I can a tale relate of that combination that would make each particler hair stand up-ended, like the squills of the frightful porkypine.” “Rats!” said I, being but a youth. “You got any hairs that’s particler by nature? No? Well, then, I’ll spread this terrific osculation of the connimgulated forces of Nature befo’ you, as Charley says. My kind of narrative is the plain, unvarnished tale. Folks that tell a varnished tale is apt to sit on the varnish before it’s dry, and they’ll stick to it, come cold fact or red-hot argyment; whilst I’m always willin’ to prune, cross-harrer, revise or alter accordin’ to my victim’s feelin’s. That is, of course, if they go to corner me, which, between gentlemen, is a low-cut outrage. But this business about the gam is dead straight. I had relinquished all amusements and was livin’ quiet in order to save money, before I got acquainted with the facts. “First place, comes a female missionary out to the ranch, and she was a corkin’ fine-lookin’ nice young woman, too, who tackled me on the subject of chewin’ terbackker. She had me all tangled up in my own rope and double left-sided front and back before the clock struck one. “I tried to arger that nobody wouldn’t care whether I chewed terbackker or grass, so long’s I was happy and doin’ no harm. But that turned out not to be true. She said so.