"'Now yere's Hoppin' Harry,' goes on the Colonel p'intin' to a thin, black little felon with long ha'r like a pony, who's strayed over from Tucson; 'I gives it out cold, meanin' tharby no offence to our Tucson friend--I gives it out cold that Hoppin' Harry used to be a t'rant'ler. First,' continyoos the Colonel, stackin' Harry up mighty scientific with his optic jest showin' over his glass, 'first I allows he's a toad. Not a horned toad, which is a valyooed beast an' has a mission; but one of these yere ornery forms of toads which infests the East. This last reptile is vulgar-sluggish, a anamile of few if any virchoos; while the horned toad, so called, come right down to cases, ain't no toad nohow. It's a false brand, an' he don't belong with the toad herd at all. The horned toad is a lizard--a broad kind o' lizard; an' as for bein' sluggish, you let him have something on his mind speshul, an' he'll shore go careerin' about plumb swift. Moreover, he don't hop, your horned toad don't, like them Eastern toads; he stands up on his toes an' paces--he's what we-all calls on the Ohio River back in my childhood's sunny hours, "a side-wheeler." Also, he's got a tail. An' as for sperit, let me tell you this:--I has a horned toad where I'm camped over by the Tres Hermanas, where I'm deer-huntin'. I wins that toad's love from the jump with hunks of bread an' salt hoss an' kindred del'cacies. He dotes on me. When time hangs heavy, I entertains myse'f with a dooel between Augustus--Augustus bein' the horned toad's name--, an' a empty sardine box for which he entertains resentments. "'"Lay for him, Augustus!" I'd say, at the same instant battin' him in the nose with the box. "'Of course, Augustus ain't got savey enough to realize I does it. He allows it's the box that a-way makin' malev'lent bluffs at him. An' say, pards, it would have made you proud of your country an' its starry flag to see Augustus arch himse'f for war on them o'casions. "'Not that Augustus is malignant or evil disposed, nacheral. No, sir; I've yet to meet up with the toad who has his simple, even, gen'rous temper or lovin' heart; as trustful too, Augustus is, as the babe jest born. But like all noble nachers, Augustus is sensitive, an' he regyards them bats in the nose as insults. As I says, you-all should have seen him! He'd poise himse'f on his toes, erect the horn on his nose, same as one of these yere rhinoceroses of holy writ, an' then the way Augustus hooks an' harasses that offensive sardine box about the camp is a lesson to folks.' "'Where's this yere Augustus now?' asks Dan Boggs, who's got all wropped up in the Colonel's narratifs.