“Soapy,” Jefferson Smith, was a colorful character of the West, the educated, refined, renegade son of a distinguished Southern family who turned his wits to crooked ways. When his luck at the faro tables switched and left him broke, he mounted his box on a corner and sold nickel bars of soap for fifty cents and one dollar. The fifty-cent bars were guaranteed to contain a five-dollar bill and the dollar ones a ten. The bills were wrapped with the soap in plain view of the prospective purchasers, and when he finished his “spiel” the rush was on. His “cappers,” “boosters,” and “shills” fought with the yokels for a chance to get something for nothing and always beat them to the pieces of soap containing the money. As a sleight-of-hand man Soapy had no equal off the stage. When the Gentiles wrested the Salt Lake City government from the Mormons, Soapy was brought out from Denver and sat as an election judge in the busiest polling booth in the city. Equipped with a poker player’s “sleeve holdout” he “went out” with enough Mormon ballots to swing a close election in favor of a “clean city administration.” Always a pioneer, he joined the gold rush to the Klondike. He was killed at Skagway, later, by a bully in the pay of the “Vigilance Committee.” After the robbery Sanc disappeared, and it was long till I saw him again. I decided to leave Denver. I owed them fifteen days on the chain gang, and had no wish to pay by shoveling snow in the streets. I bought a ticket to Butte, Montana, regretting the money but not caring to “hit the road” in the dead of winter across half a dozen of the coldest states in the Union. I did it in after years, but it was from necessity—not choice. Butte was never a “Wild West” town in the accepted sense. Cowboys were seldom seen. Miners and gamblers ruled the town. The miners were orderly, hard workers, deep drinkers, and fair fighters. They had none of the cheap, shouldering swagger of the “gold-rush” miner. Nearly everybody owned a gun, but the bullying, gun-toting, would-be bad men and killers never flourished in Butte. When one of them got peeved and started to lug out his “cannon” some hard-fisted miner beefed him like an ox with a fast one to the jaw, and kicked his “gat” out into the street where small boys scrambled for it.