They Neither Know
How To Hold Their Tongues Or To Carry Their Personal Pretensions.
An American is nationally assumptive, an Englishman personally
so.
He took no notice of me till something passed which showed
him I was English, when his manner at once changed into courtesy,
and his drawl was shortened by a half. He took pains to let me
know that he was an officer in the Guards, of good family, on
four months' leave, which he was spending in slaying buffalo and
elk, and also that he had a profound contempt for everything
American. I cannot think why Englishmen put on these broad,
mouthing tones, and give so many personal details. They retired
to their camp, and the landlord having passed into the sodden,
sleepy stage of drunkenness, his wife asked if I should be afraid
to sleep in the large canvas-sided, unceiled, doorless shed, as
they could not move the sick miner. So, I slept there on a
shake-down, with the stars winking overhead through the roof, and
the mercury showing 30 degrees of frost.
I never told you that I once gave an unwary promise that I would
not travel alone in Colorado unarmed, and that in consequence I
left Estes Park with a Sharp's revolver loaded with ball
cartridge in my pocket, which has been the plague of my life.
Its bright ominous barrel peeped out in quiet Denver shops,
children pulled it out to play with, or when my riding dress hung
up with it in the pocket, pulled the whole from the peg to the
floor; and I cannot conceive of any circumstances in which I
could feel it right to make any use of it, or in which it could
do me any possible good. Last night, however, I took it out,
cleaned and oiled it, and laid it under my pillow, resolving to
keep awake all night. I slept as soon as I lay down, and never
woke till the bright morning sun shone through the roof, making
me ridicule my own fears and abjure pistols for ever.
I. L. B.
Letter XII
Deer Valley - Lynch law - Vigilance committees - The silver
spruce - Taste and abstinence - The whisky fiend - Smartness -
Turkey creek Canyon - The Indian problem - Public
rascality - Friendly meetings - The way to the Golden City - A
rising settlement - Clear Creek Canyon - Staging - Swearing - A
mountain town.
DEER VALLEY, November.
To-night I am in a beautiful place like a Dutch farm - large,
warm, bright, clean, with abundance of clean food, and a clean,
cold little bedroom to myself. But it is very hard to write, for
two free-tongued, noisy Irish women, who keep a miners'
boarding-house in South Park, and are going to winter quarters in
a freight wagon, are telling the most fearful stories of
violence, vigilance committees, Lynch law, and "stringing," that
I ever heard. It turns one's blood cold only to think that where
I travel in perfect security, only a short time ago men were
being shot like skunks.
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