Part 11

The proportion of young English gentlemen who are roughing it in the West far exceeds that of the young Americans. This is due to the fact that the former have never been taught a trade or profession, and in consequence, when they have been cheated of the money they brought with them to invest, have nothing but their hands to help them, and so take to driving horses or branding cattle or digging in the streets, as one graduate of Oxford, sooner than write home for money, did in Denver. He is now teaching Greek and Latin in one of our colleges. The manner in which visiting Englishmen are robbed in the West, and the quickness with which some of them take the lesson to heart, and practise it upon the next Englishman who comes out, or upon the prosperous Englishman already there, would furnish material for a book full of pitiful stories. And yet one cannot help smiling at the wickedness of some of these schemes. Three Englishmen, for example, bought, as they supposed, thirty thousand Texas steers; but the Texans who pretended to sell them the cattle drove the same three thousand head ten times around the mountain, as a dozen supers circle around the backdrop of a stage to make an army, and the Englishmen counted and paid for each steer ten times over. There was another Texan who made a great deal of money by advertising to teach young men how to become cowboys, and who charged them ten dollars a month tuition fee, and who set his pupils to work digging holes for fence-posts all over the ranch, until they grew wise in their generation, and left him for some other ranch, where they were paid thirty dollars per month for doing the same thing. But in many instances it is the tables of San Antonio which take the greater part of the visiting Englishman’s money. One gentleman, who for some time represented the Isle of Wight in the Lower House, spent three modest fortunes in the San Antonio gambling-houses, and then married his cook, which proved a most admirable speculation, as she had a frugal mind, and took entire control of his little income. And when the Marquis of Aylesford died in Colorado, the only friend in this country who could be found to take the body back to England was his first-cousin, who at that time was driving a hack around San Antonio. We heard stories of this sort on every side, and we met faro-dealers, cooks, and cowboys who have served through campaigns in India or Egypt, or who hold an Oxford degree. A private in G troop, Third Cavalry, who was my escort on several scouting expeditions in the Garza outfit, was kind enough and quite able to tell me which club in London had the oldest wine-cellar, where one could get the best visiting-cards engraved, and why the Professor of Ancient Languages at Oxford was the superior of the instructor in like studies at Cambridge. He did this quite unaffectedly, and in no way attempted to excuse his present position. Of course, the value of the greater part of these stories depends on the family and personality of the hero, and as I cannot give names, I have to omit the best of them.

There was a little English boy who left San Antonio before I had reached it, but whose name and fame remained behind him. He was eighteen years of age, and just out of Eton, where he had spent all his pocket-money in betting on the races through commissioners. Gambling was his ruling passion at an age when ginger-pop and sweets appealed more strongly to his contemporaries. His people sent him to Texas with four hundred pounds to buy an interest in a ranch, and furnished him with a complete outfit of London-made clothing. An Englishman who saw the boy’s box told me he had noted the different garments packed carefully away, just as his mother had placed them, and each marked with his name. The Eton boy lost the four hundred pounds at roulette in the first week after his arrival in San Antonio, and pawned his fine clothes in the next to “get back.” He lost all he ventured. At the end of ten days he was peddling fruit around the streets in his bare feet. He made twenty-five cents the first day, and carried it to the gambling-house where he had already lost his larger fortune, and told one of the dealers he would cut the cards with him for the money. The boy cut first, and the dealer won; but the other was enough of a gambler to see that the dealer had stooped to win his last few pennies unfairly. The boy’s eyes filled up with tears of indignation.

“You thief!” he cried, “you cheated me!”

The dealer took his revolver from the drawer of the table, and, pointing it at his head, said: “Do you know what we do to people who use that word in Texas? We kill them!”

The boy clutched the table with both hands and flung himself across it so that his forehead touched the barrel of the revolver. “You thief!” he repeated, and so shrilly that every one in the room heard him. “I say you cheated me!”

The gambler lowered the trigger slowly and tossed the pistol back in the drawer. Then he picked up a ten-dollar gold piece and shoved it towards him.

“Here,” he said, “that’ll help take you home. You’re too damned tough for Texas!”

The other Englishmen in San Antonio filled out the sum and sent him back to England. His people are well known in London; his father is a colonel in the Guards.

The most notable Englishman who ever came to Texas was Ben Thompson; but he arrived there at so early an age, and became so thoroughly Western in his mode of life, that Texans claim him as their own. I imagine, however, he always retained some of the traditions of his birthplace, as there is a story of his standing with his hat off to talk to an English nobleman, when Thompson at the time was the most feared and best known man in all Texas. The stories of his recklessness and ignorance of fear, and utter disregard of the value of others’ lives as well as his own, are innumerable. A few of them are interesting and worth keeping, as they show the typical bad man of the highest degree in his different humors, and also as I have not dared to say half as much about bad men as I should have liked to do. Thompson killed eighteen men in different parts of Texas, and was for this made marshal of Austin, on the principle that if he must kill somebody, it was better to give him authority to kill other desperadoes than reputable citizens. As marshal it was his pleasure to pull up his buggy across the railroad track just as the daily express train was about to start, and covering the engineer with his revolver, bid him hold the train until he was ready to move on. He would then call some trembling acquaintance from the crowd on the platform and talk with him leisurely, until he thought he had successfully awed the engineer and established his authority. Then he would pick up his reins and drive on, saying to the engineer, “You needn’t think, sir, any corporation can hurry me.” The position of the unfortunate man to whom he talked must have been most trying, with a locomotive on one side and a revolver on the other.

One day a cowboy, who was a well-known bully and a would-be desperado, shot several bullet-holes through the high hat of an Eastern traveller who was standing at the bar of an Austin hotel. Thompson heard of this, and, purchasing a high hat, entered the bar-room.

“I hear,” he said, facing the cowboy, “that you are shooting plug-hats here to-day; perhaps you would like to take a shot at mine.” He then raised his revolver and shot away the cowboy’s ear. “I meant,” he said, “to hit your ear; did I do it?” The bully showed proof that he had. “Well, then,” said the marshal, “get out of here;” and catching the man by his cartridge-belt, he threw him out into the street, and so put an end to his reputation as a desperate character forever.

Thompson was naturally unpopular with a certain class in the community. Two barkeepers who had a personal grudge against him, with no doubt excellent reason, lay in ambush for him behind the two bars of the saloon, which stretched along either wall. Thompson entered the room from the street in ignorance of any plot against him until the two men halted him with shot-guns. They had him so surely at their pleasure that he made no effort to reach his revolver, but stood looking from one to the other, and smiling grimly. But his reputation was so great, and their fear of him so actual, that both men missed him, although not twenty feet away, and with shot-guns in their hands. Then Thompson took out his pistol deliberately and killed them.

A few years ago he became involved in San Antonio with “Jack” Harris, the keeper of a gambling-house and variety theatre. Harris lay in wait for Thompson behind the swinging doors of his saloon, but Thompson, as he crossed the Military Plaza, was warned of Harris’s hiding-place, and shot him through the door. He was tried for the murder, and acquitted on the ground of self-defence; and on his return to Austin was met at the station by a brass band and all the fire companies. Perhaps inspired by this, he returned to San Antonio, and going to Harris’s theatre, then in the hands of his partner, Joe Foster, called from the gallery for Foster to come up and speak to him. Thompson had with him a desperado named King Fisher, and against him every man of his class in San Antonio, for Harris had been very popular. Foster sent his assistant, a very young man named Bill Sims, to ask Thompson to leave the place, as he did not want trouble.

“I have come to have a reconciliation,” said Thompson. “I want to shake hands with my old friend, Joe Foster. Tell him I won’t leave till I see him, and I won’t make a row.”

Sims returned with Foster, and Thompson held out his hand.

“Joe,” he said, “I have come all the way from Austin to shake hands with you. Let’s make up, and call it off.”

“I can’t shake hands with you, Ben,” Foster said. “You killed my partner, and you know well enough I am not the sort to forget it. Now go, won’t you, and don’t make trouble.”

Thompson said he would leave in a minute, but they must drink together first. There was a bar in the gallery, which was by this time packed with men who had learned of Thompson’s presence in the theatre, but Fisher and Thompson stood quite alone beside the bar. The marshal of Austin looked up and saw Foster’s glass untouched before him, and said,

“Aren’t you drinking with me, Joe?”

Foster shook his head.

“Well, then,” cried Thompson, “the man who won’t drink with me, nor shake hands with me, fights me.”

He reached back for his pistol, and some one--a jury of twelve intelligent citizens decided it was not young Bill Sims--shot him three times in the forehead. They say you could have covered the three bullet-holes with a half-dollar. But so great was the desperate courage of this ruffian that even as he fell he fired, holding his revolver at his hip, and killing Foster, and then, as he lay on his back, with every nerve jerking in agony, he emptied his revolver into the floor, ripping great gashes in the boards about him. And so he died, as he would have elected to die, with his boots on, and with the report of his pistol the last sound to ring in his ears. King Fisher was killed at the same moment; and the _Express_ spoke of it the next morning as “A Good Night’s Work.”

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Sims at the gambling palace, which was once Harris’s, then Foster’s, and which is now his, and found him a jolly, bright-eyed young man of about thirty, with very fine teeth, and a most contagious laugh. He was just back from Dwight, and told us of a man who had been cured there, and who had gone away with his mother leaning on his arm, and what this man had said to them of his hopes for the future when he left; and as he told it the tears came to his eyes, and he coughed, and began to laugh over a less serious story. I tried all the time to imagine him, somewhat profanely, I am afraid, as a young David standing up before this English giant, who had sent twoscore of other men out of the world, and to picture the glaring, crowded gallery, with the hot air and smoke, and the voice of the comic singer rising from the stage below, and this boy and the marshal of Austin facing one another with drawn revolvers; but it was quite impossible.

There are a great many things one only remembers to say as the train is drawing out of the station, and which have to be spoken from the car-window. And now that my train is so soon to start towards the East, I find there are many things which it seems most ungracious to leave unsaid. I should like to say much of the hospitality of the West. We do not know such hospitality in the East. A man brings us a letter of introduction there, and we put him up at the club we least frequently visit, and regret that he should have come at a time when ours is so particularly crowded with unbreakable engagements. It is not so here. One might imagine the Western man never worked at all, so entirely is his time yours, if you only please to claim it. And from the first few days of my trip to the last, this self-effacement of my hosts and eagerness to please accompanied me wherever I went. It was the same in every place, whether in army posts or ranches, or among that most delightful coterie of the Denver Club “who never sleep,” or on the border of Mexico, where “Bob” Haines, the sheriff of Zepata County, Texas, before he knew who I or my soldier escort might be, and while we were still but dust-covered figures in the night, rushed into the house and ordered a dinner and beds for us, and brought out his last two bottles of beer. The sheriff of Zepata County, “who can shoot with both hands,” need bring no letter of introduction with him if he will deign to visit me when he comes to New York. And as for that Denver Club coterie, they already know that the New York clubs are also supplied with electric buttons.

And now that it is at an end, I find it hard to believe that I am not to hear again the Indian girls laughing over their polo on the prairie, or the regimental band playing the men on to the parade, and that I am not to see the officers’ wives watching them from the line at sunset, as the cannon sounds its salute and the flag comes fluttering down.

And yet New York is not without its good points.

If any one doubts this, let him leave it for three months, and do one-night stands at fourth-rate hotels, or live on alkali water and bacon, and let him travel seven thousand miles over a country where a real-estate office, a Citizen’s Bank, and Quick Order Restaurant, with a few surrounding houses, make, as seen from the car-window, a booming city, where beautiful scenery and grand mountains are separated by miles of prairie and chaparral, and where there is no Diana of the Tower nor bronze Farragut to greet him daily as he comes back from work through Madison Square. He will then feel a love for New York equal to the Chicagoan’s love for _his_ city, and when he sees across the New Jersey flats the smoke and the tall buildings and the twin spires of the cathedral, he will wish to shout, as the cowboys do when they “come into town,” at being back again in the only place where one can both hear the Tough Girl of the East Side ask for her shoes, and the horn of the Country Club’s coach tooting above the roar of the Avenue.

The West is a very wonderful, large, unfinished, and out-of-doors portion of our country, and a most delightful place to _visit_. I would advise every one in the East to visit it, and I hope to revisit it myself. Some of those who go will not only visit it, but will make their homes there, and the course of empire will eventually Westward take its way. But when it does, it will leave one individual behind it clinging closely to the Atlantic seaboard.

Little old New York is good enough for him.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.