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He gets a drink at the bar, and stands back and yells:

“God bless the Irish and let the Dutch rustle!”

Now, this was none of my town, so I just stepped back of the end of the bar quick where I wouldn’t stop no lead. The shootin’ didn’t begin.

“Probably Dutchy didn’t take no note of what the locoed little dogie DID say,” thinks I to myself.

The Irishman bellied up to the bar again, and pounded on it with his fist.

“Look here!” he yells. “Listen to what I’m tellin’ ye! God bless the Irish and let the Dutch rustle! Do ye hear me?”

“Sure, I hear ye,” says Dutchy, and goes on swabbin’ his bar with a towel.

At that my soul just grew sick. I asked the man next to me why Dutchy didn’t kill the little fellow.

“Kill him!” says this man. “What for?”

“For insultin’ of him, of course.”

“Oh, he’s drunk,” says the man, as if that explained anythin’.

That settled it with me. I left that place, and went home, and it wasn’t more than four o’clock, neither. No, I don’t call four o’clock late. It may be a little late for night before last, but it’s just the shank of the evenin’ for to-night.

Well, it took me six weeks and two days to go broke. I didn’t know sic em, about minin’; and before long I KNEW that I didn’t ‘know sic ’em. Most all day I poked around them mountains—not like our’n–too much timber to be comfortable. At night I got to droppin’ in at Dutchy’s. He had a couple of quiet games goin’, and they was one fellow among that lot of grubbin’ prairie dogs that had heerd tell that cows had horns. He was the wisest of the bunch on the cattle business. So I stowed away my consolation, and made out to forget comparing Colorado with God’s country.

About three times a week this Irishman I told you of–name O’Toole–comes bulgin’ in. When he was sober he talked minin’ high, wide, and handsome. When he was drunk he pounded both fists on the bar and yelled for action, tryin’ to get Dutchy on the peck.

“God bless the Irish and let the Dutch rustle!” he yells about six times. “Say, do you hear?”

“Sure,” says Dutchy, calm as a milk cow, “sure, I hears ye!”

I was plumb sorry for O’Toole. I’d like to have given him a run; but, of course, I couldn’t take it up without makin’ myself out a friend of this Dutchy party, and I couldn’t stand for that. But I did tackle Dutchy about it one night when they wasn’t nobody else there.

“Dutchy,” says I, “what makes you let that bow-legged cross between a bulldog and a flamin’ red sunset tromp on you so? It looks to me like you’re plumb spiritless.”

Dutchy stopped wiping glasses for a minute.

“Just you hold on” says he. “I ain’t ready yet. Bimeby I make him sick; also those others who laugh with him.”

He had a little grey flicker in his eye, and I thinks to myself that maybe they’d get Dutchy on the peck yet.

As I said, I went broke in just six weeks and two days. And I was broke a plenty. No hold-outs anywhere. It was a heap long ways to cows; and I’d be teetotally chawed up and spit out if I was goin’ to join these minin’ terrapins defacin’ the bosom of nature. It sure looked to me like hard work.

While I was figurin’ what next, Dutchy came in. Which I was tur’ble surprised at that, but I said good-mornin’ and would he rest his poor feet.

“You like to make some money?” he asks.

“That depends,” says I, “on how easy it is.”

“It is easy,” says he. “I want you to buy hosses for me.”