"What's the use of wasting harvest apples making dumplings, when you don't eat none, John?" asked my aunt, one day at dinner, after the hands had left the table.

"Aunt," replied I, solemnly, "don't mock me with apple dumplings; they may be light, but my heart is heavy."

"La, John, try a little east on your heart,"[108] said she, laughing—by "east" she meant yeast, I suppose.

[108]

"No, aunt, not 'east,' but west. My mind is made up. I'm going out to Colorado to fight the Indians."

She let the two-tined steel fork drop out of her hand.

"What will your ma say to that?" she gasped.

"I tell you I am going," was my firm reply, and I went.

Yes, I had long sighed to be a Juan Fernandez, or a Mount Washington weatherologist, or something lonesome and sad, as my readers know. Fighting Indians would be a terrible risky business; but compared to facing the "girls of the period" it would be the merest play. I was weary of a life that was all mistakes. "Better throw it away," I thought, bitterly, "and give my scalp to dangle at a redskin's belt, than make another one of my characteristic and preposterous blunders."

I had heard that Buffalo Bill was about to start for the Rocky Mountains, and I wrote to New York asking permission to join him. He answered that I could, if I was prepared to pay my own way. I immediately bade my relatives farewell, went home, borrowed two hundred dollars of father, told mother she was the only woman I wasn't afraid of, kissed her good-bye, and met Buffalo Bill at the next large town by appointment, he being already on his way West.[109] I came home after dark, and left again before daylight, and that was the last I saw of my native village for some time.

[109]

"You don't let on yer much of a fighter?" asked the great scout, as he saw me hunt all over six pockets and blush like a girl when the conductor came for our tickets, and finally hand him a postal-card instead of the bit of pasteboard he was impatiently waiting to punch.

"Oh, I guess I'll fight like a rat when it comes to that," I answered. "I'm brave as a lion—only I'm bashful."

"Great tomahawks! is that yer disease?" groaned Bill.

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