Circumstances soon occurred which enabled Charley, without disputation, to assume the role of chief of the Walla Walla desperadoes. Cherokee Bob, heretofore mentioned as an associate of Plummer at Lewiston, was an uneducated Southerner. His mother was a half-blood Cherokee,—hence his name. With a hatred of the North and the Northern soldiery born of prejudice and ignorance, and a constitutional faith in the superior prowess of the Southern people, and with mercurial passions inflamed by the contest that was still raging, this ruffian was nearly a maniac in his adherence to the cause of Secession. He could talk or think of little else than the great inferiority of the Northern to the Southern soldiers, and was continually boasting of his own superior physical power. He would often taunt the soldiers of the garrison near Walla Walla. In ingenuity of vaunting expression, he far excelled Captain Bobadil himself;—but like that hero of dramatic fiction he was destined to experience a reverse more humiliating, if possible, than that of his great prototype. With shotgun in hand and revolver in his belt, it was his frequent boast that he could take a negro along with him, carrying two baskets loaded with pistols, and put to flight the bravest regiment of the Federal army. No person who has witnessed a theatrical performance in a mining camp can forget the general din and noise with which the audience fill up the intervals between the acts. Whistling, singing, hooting, yelling, and a general shuffling of feet and moving about are so invariable as to form, in fact, a feature of the performance. So long as they are unaccompanied by quarrelsome demonstrations, and do not become too boisterous, efforts are seldom made to suppress them. The boys are permitted to have a good time in their own way, and the lookers-on, accustomed to the scene, are often compensated for any annoyance that may be occasioned, by strokes of border humor more enjoyable than the play itself.