From the foot of the lake where most of the camps were, everybody had been driven out by the forest-fire. Among those who fled up to our end and took temporary quarters on the hotel reservation was my friend, the Native Genius.

My friend, the Native Genius, was a cowboy before he became a painter. He became a great man and was regarded in our Eastern art circles, but in his feelings and his language he remained a cowboy. He also was an historian of the folk-lore of the Old West that has ridden over the ultimate hill of the last free grazing and vanished forever and ever, alas! With none of the conscious effort which so often marks such an undertaking, he could twine a fragrant fictional boscage upon the solid trellis of remembered fact and make you like it. To my way of thinking, this was not the least of his gifts. Indeed not.

He joined us the evening before, bringing the tools of his trade and various finished or unfinished canvases. During the night my slumber was at intervals distracted by the far-off wails of a wind-instrument in travail. It was as though someone, enraged by its stubborn defiance, had put the thing to the torture. Distance muffled those moaning outcries but in them, piercing through the curtains of my sleepiness, were torment and anguish.

In the morning early, when I walked past the row of log houses at the farther side of the grounds, I came upon the author of this outrage. A male of the refugees sat at an open window and contended with a haunted saxophone for the lost soul of a ghostly tune.

He was young enough to have optimism. On the other hand, he was old enough to know better. He had the look about him—a wearied and red-eyed and a wannish look it was—of one who never knows when he is licked. Except among amateur musicians I would regard this as an admirable trait.

My friend was squatted on the top step of his cabin, two numbers on beyond. He greeted me and the new-born day with a wide yawn.

“Would you maybe like to buy a horn?” he asked, and flirted with his thumb toward the place next-door-but-one.

“I don’t think so,” I answered.

“I’m making a special inducement,” he said. “There’s a man’s hide goes with it.”

His mien changed then from the murderous to the resigned. “Lead me away from here,” he pleaded. “I don’t know which distresses me the most—the sight of so much suffering or the sound of it.”

We went by the scene of the unfinished crime and sat in the lee of the hotel veranda with the lake below us, blinking like a live turquoise in its rough matrix of gray mountains. The wind was in our favor there; to our ears reached only faint broken strains of that groaning and that bleating. But from other sources other interruptions ensued, all calculated to disturb the pious reflections of the elderly.

A domestic group, exercising rights of squatter sovereignty on the slope of the lawn in a tent, emerged therefrom and swarmed about us. Of parents there was but the customary pair, but of offspring there were seven or eight and although plainly of the same brood, a family resemblance marking each as brother or sister to the rest, these latter seemed miraculously all to be of substantially the same age or thereabouts. The father told a neighbor fifty yards away of their narrow escape; the mother joined in and was shrill in her lamentations for a threatened homestead over the hills across the water; the overalled little ones got underfoot and scuffled around and by their loud childish clamor still further interfered with our ruminations.

Then one of the big red busses hooted and drove up and disgorged upon us a locust plague of arriving tourists. The responsible strangers went within to claim reservations but the juveniles inundated the porches and the lawn, giving hearty indorsement to the scenery and taking snap-shots of it, and inquiring where souvenir postcards might be had and whether the fishing was any good here; and so on and so forth, according to their tribal habits. Hillocks of hand-baggage accumulated about us and trunks descended from a panting auto-truck in a thunderous cascade. A bobbed-haired camera bandit in search of picturesque local types came within easy shooting distance and aimed her weapon at us, asking no leave of her victims but shooting repeatedly at will; and she wore riding breeches and boots. Presumably she had been wearing them aboard the train. An oversized youth stumbled with his large undisciplined feet against an outlying suitcase and struck the wall and caromed off and almost upset us from our tilted chairs. Here plainly was an undergraduate—a perfect characteristic specimen. He was in the immature summer plumage.

“I always feel sorry for one of those college boys this season of the year in this climate,” said my friend as the gigantic fledgling lunged away toward the boat dock. “It’s too late for his coon-skin ulster and too early yet for him to tie a handkerchief around his scalp and go bareheaded.”

He arose, tagging me on the arm.

“Let’s ramble down the line a piece,” he suggested, “and maybe find us a hollow snag to hide in. After what I went through last night my nerves ain’t what they used to be, if they ever were.”

Below the creek we quit the paved highway and took the lower trail. Through the brush we could see where the vast blue eye of the lake had quit winking and was beginning to scowl. The wind must have changed quarters; it no longer brought us smells of ashes and char, but a fresher, sweeter smell as of rain gathering; and puffed clouds were forming over the range to the westward. The sunshine shut itself off with the quickness of a stage effect. Along the shore toward us limped a blackened smudge of a man, like a ranger turned chimney-sweep. For a fact, that precisely was what he was—Melber, assistant chief of the park forestry service. From tiredness he was crippled. He could shamble and that was about all.

“Well, we’ve got her whipped,” he told us, and leaned against a tree. He left smears like burnt cork on the bark where his shoulders rubbed. “This breeze hauling around ought to finish the job. She’ll burn herself out before dark, with or without showers. I’m on my way now to long-distance to notify the chief that we won’t need any reinforcements.”

“Much damage?”

“The colony is saved. By backfiring we held the flames on the upper edge of the road leading in from the station. But Ordman’s ranch is gone up in smoke, and the Colfax & Webster sawmill and eighteen thousand acres of the handsomest virgin pine on this side of the Divide. Man, you’d weep to see those raped woodlands—and all because some dam’-fool hiker didn’t have sense enough to put out his cigarette! Or hers, as the case may be!” He grinned through his mask and we were reminded of nigger minstrels.

“How close up did the burning get to my shebang?” inquired the Native Genius.

“Dog-gone close, Charley. But that wasn’t the big blaze—that was the other blaze which broke out soon after midnight. We got her—the second one, I mean—licked just over the rise behind your studio. My force fought till they dropped and even that bunch of I.W.W.’s that they rushed in on the special from Spokane did fairly well. I’ve revised some of my opinions about Wobblies. But there’s a million dead cinders in the grass around your cottage right now, Charley. And your back corral fence is all scorched.

“I leave it to you—wouldn’t you think with that first example before our eyes that everybody in both gangs would have sense enough not to be careless? But you never can tell, can you? When most of the crew knocked off late last night, seeing she was under control, one idiot builds a fire to heat himself up a pot of coffee. Would you believe it?—with the timber all just so much punk and tinder after this long dry spell, he kindles up a rousing big blaze right among the down-stuff and then drops off to sleep? I don’t much blame him for wanting to sleep—I’m dead on my own feet this minute—but to make a fire that size in such a place! He’s the kind that would call out the standing army to kill a cockroach! Well, when this poor half-wit wakes up, the fire is running through the tree-tops for a quarter of a mile south of him and we’ve got another battle on our hands that lasts until broad daybreak. It’s a God’s blessing we had the outfit and the emergency apparatus handy.”

“Who’s the guilty party?”

“Not one of my staff, you can gamble on that. And not one of the Spokane gang either. It was a green hand—fellow named Seymour working as a brakeman on the railroad and one of the few volunteers who refused to take any pay. And he was square enough to own up to what he’d done, too. Oh, I guess he had good intentions. But, thunderation, good intentions have ruined empires!

“Well, I’ve got to be getting along. I’m certainly going to put somebody’s nice clean bathroom on the bum as soon as I get through telephoning.”

Melber straightened himself and lurched off into the second-growth. He moved like a very old man, his blistered hands dangling.

“What he just now said about good intentions puts me in mind of Samson Goodhue,” said Charley. “There was one of the best paving contractors Hell ever had.” I knew what the expression on his face meant. It meant he was letting down a mental tentacle like a baited hook into the thronged private fish-pool of his early reminiscence. Scenting copy, I encouraged him.

“What about this Samson person?”

“I’m fixing to tell you,” he promised. “This looks to me like a good loafing place.”

We reposed side by side on a lichened log with our toes gouging the green moss, and he rolled a cigarette and proceeded:

Like I was just now telling you, his name was Samson Goodhue. So you can see how easy it was to twist that around into Good Samaritan and then to render that down for kitchen use into Good Sam. It was a regular trick name and highly suitable, seeing that he counted that day lost which, as the poet says, its low descending sun didn’t find him trying to help somebody out of a jam.

In fact, he really made a profession out of it. You might say he was an expert promoter. He wasn’t one of your meek and lowly ones, though.

They say the meek shall inherit the earth but I reckon not until everybody else is through with it.

Not Good Sam. He was just as pushing and determinated and persisting in his work as though he was taking orders for enlarging crayon portraits. And probably it wasn’t his fault that about every time he tackled a job of philanthropping the scheme seemed to go wrong. You had to give him credit for that. But after a while it got so that when the word spread that Good Sam was going around doing good, smart people ran for cover. They didn’t know but what it might be their turn next, and they figured they’d had enough hard luck already without calling in a specialist.

I remember like it was yesterday the first time I ever saw him operating—down in Triple Falls, this state. I hadn’t been there very long. Winter-time had driven a bunch of us beef-herders in off the range and we were encouraging the saloon industry—in fact, you might say we were practically supporting it. That was before I quit. I haven’t taken a drink for fifteen years now but, at that, I figure I’m even with the game. The day I quit I had enough to last me fifteen years.

Good Sam hadn’t been there much longer than we had. He blew in from somewhere back East and to look at him you’d have said offhand that here was just an average pilgrim, size sixteen-and-a-half collar, three-dollar pants, addicted to five-cent cigars and a drooping mustache; otherwise no distinguishing marks. He didn’t look a thing in the world like a genius. His gifts were hidden. But it didn’t take him long to begin showing them.

One bright cold morning Whiz Bollinger came in from his place proudly riding in a brand-new buckboard that had cost him thirty-two dollars, and right in front of Billy Grimm’s filling-station the cayuse he was driving balked on him. You understand I’m speaking of a filling-station in the old-fashioned sense. We’d read about automobiles and seen pictures of them but they hadn’t penetrated to our parts as yet. If a fellow was going somewhere by himself he generally rode a hoss and if he was moving his womenfolks he packed ’em in a prairie-schooner. Sometimes he’d let ’em live in one for a few years so they could have constant change of scene and air. I recall one day a bunch of old-timers were discussing the merits of different wagons—Old Hickory and South Bend and even Conestoga—and old Mar’m Whitaker spoke up and says: “Well, boys, I always have claimed and always will that the Murphey wagon is the best one they is for raisin’ a family in.”

So Billy Grimm’s sign was a pile of empty beer kegs racked up alongside the front door. Sometimes in mild weather he’d have another sign—some wayfarer that had been overtaken just as he got outside and was sleeping it off on the sidewalk. After the first of November all the flies in the state that didn’t have anywhere else to go went to Billy’s place and wintered there. He was Montana’s leading house-fly fancier. He was getting his share of my patronage and I happened to be on the spot when this Bollinger colt decided to stop right where he was and stay there until he froze solid.

You know how it is when a hoss goes balky. In less than no time at all the entire leisure class of Triple Falls were assembled, giving advice about how to get that hoss started again. They twisted his ear and they tried stoving in his ribs by kicking him in the side and they pushed against his hind quarters and dragged at the bit, and through it all that wall-eyed, Roman-nosed plug remained just as stationary as an Old Line Republican. Alongside of him, the Rock of Gibraltar would seem downright restless.

And then this Samson Goodhue comes bulging into the circle and takes charge. “Stand back, everybody, please,” he says, “while I show you how to unbalk a horse. Get me a few pieces of kindling wood, somebody,” he says, “and some paper or some straw or something.” Various persons hurry off in all directions, eager to obey. In every crowd there are plenty of suckers who’ll carry out any kind of orders if somebody who acts executive will give them. So when they’ve assembled his supplies for him he makes a little pile of ’em on the packed snow right under the cayuse’s belly and is preparing to scratch a match and telling Whiz Bollinger to climb back on his seat and take a strong grip on the reins, when Mrs. Oliver J. Doheny, who’s among the few ladies present, interferes with the proceedings.

Now this here Mrs. Oliver J. Doheny is at that remote period our principal reform element. She’s ’specially strong on cruelty to dumb beasts, being heartily against it. It’s only been a few weeks before this that a trapper trails down from across the international boundary with one of those big Canada bobcats that he’s caught in a trap and he’s got it on exhibition in a cage in Hyman Frieder’s Climax Clothing Store, when Mrs. Doheny happens along and sees how the thing sort of drags one foot where the trap pinched it and she begins tongue-lashing the Canuck for not having bound up its wounds.

When she’s slowed down for breath he says to her very politely: “Ma’am, in reply to same I would just state this: Ma’am, when my dear old mother was layin’ on her death-bed she called me to her side and she whispered to me, ‘My son, whatever else you do do, don’t you never try to nurse no sick lynxes.’ And, ma’am, I aim to keep that farewell promise to my dear dyin’ mother! But I ain’t no objections to your tryin’. Only, ma’am, I feels it my Christian duty to warn you right now that if you would get too close to this here unfortunate patient of mine he’s liable to turn you every way you can think of except loose.”

So on that occasion Mrs. Doheny thought better of her first impulse but now she is very harsh toward this stranger. “Do you mean to tell me,” she says, “that it is your deliberate intention to ignite a fire beneath this poor misguided animal’s—er—person?” Although a born reformer she was always very ladylike in her language.

“That, madam,” he says, “is the broad general idea.”

“How dare you!” she says. Then she says it again: “How dare you! Think of the poor brute’s agony!” she says.

“Madam,” he says right back at her, “you do me a grave injustice. Not for worlds would I inflict suffering upon any living creature. The point is, madam, that the instant this here chunk of obstinacy feels the heat singeing of him he will move. Observe, madam!” And before she can say anything more he has lighted the match and stuck it in the paper and the flames shoot up and, just as he’s predicted, Whiz Bollinger’s balked cayuse responds to the appeal to a dormant better nature.

You never saw a horse move forward more briskly or more willingly than that one did. There was just one drawback to the complete success of the plan and, as everybody agreed afterwards when the excitement had died down and there was time for sober reason, this Goodhue party as we called him then, or Good Sam as we took to calling him afterwards, couldn’t really be held responsible for that. The hoss moved forward but he stopped again when he’d gone just exactly far enough for the fire to get a good chance at Whiz’s shiny beautiful new buckboard, which it blazed up like a summer hotel, the paint being fresh and him having only that morning touched up the springs with coal-oil. A crate of celluloid hair combs burning up couldn’t have thrown off any prettier sparks or more of them. Before the volunteer fire department could put their uniforms on and get there that ill-fated buckboard was a total loss with no insurance.

This was Good Sam’s first appearance amongst us in, as you might say, a business capacity. It wasn’t long, though, before he was offering us more and more and still more evidences of his injurious good toward afflicted humanity. It was no trouble to show samples. With that misguided zealot it amounted to a positive passion.

For instance, one night in December little Al Wingate came into Billy Grimm’s where a gang of us were doing our Christmas shopping early and, as usual when he had a load aboard, he was leaking tears and lamentations with every faltering step he took. Talk about your crying jags, when this here Little Al got going he had riparian rights. It made you wonder where he kept his reservoirs hid at, him not weighing more than about ninety pounds and being short-waisted besides. Maybe he had hydraulic legs; I don’t know. Likewise always on such occasions, which they were frequent, he acted low and suicidal in his mind. He was our official melancholihic.

So he drifted in out of the starry night and leaned up against the bar, and between sobs he says to Billy Grimm, “Billy,” he says, “have you got any real deadly poison round here?”

“Only the regular staple brands,” says Billy. “What’ll it be—rye or Bourbon?”

“Billy,” he says, “don’t trifle with a man that’s already the same as dead. Licker has been my curse and downfall. It’s made me what I am tonight. Look at me—no good to myself or anybody else on this earth. Just a poor derelick without a true friend on this earth. But this is the finish with me. I’ve said that before but now I mean it. Before tomorrow morning I’m going to end everything. If one of you boys won’t kindly trust me with a pistol I’d be mighty much obliged to somebody for the loan of a piece of rope about six or seven or eight feet long. Just any little scrap of rope that you happen to have handy will do me,” he says.

I put in my oar. “Why, you poor little worthless sawed-off-and-hammered-down,” I says to him, “don’t try to hang yourself without you slip an anvil into the seat of your pants first.”

One of the other boys—Rawhide Rawlings, I think it was—speaks up also and says, “And don’t try jumping off a high roof, neither; you’d only go up!”

You see we were acquainted with Little Al’s peculiarities and we knew he didn’t mean a word he said, and so we were just aiming to cheer him up. But Good Sam, who’d joined our little group of intense drinkers only a few minutes before, he didn’t enter into the spirit of it at all. He motioned to us to come on down to the other end of the rail and he asks us haven’t we got any sympathy for a fellow being that’s sunk so deep in despondency he’s liable to drown himself in his own water-works plant any minute?

“You don’t want to be prodding him that-away,” he says; “what you want to do is humor him along. You want to lead him so close up to the Pearly Gates that he can hear the hinges creaking; that’ll make him see things different,” he says. “That’ll scare him out of this delusion of his that he wants to be a runt angel.”

“I suppose then you think you could cure him yourself?” asks one of the gang.

“In one easy lesson,” says Good Sam, speaking very confident. “All I ask from you gents is for one of you to let me borrow his six-gun off of him for a little while and then everybody agree to stand back and not interfere. If possible I’d like for it to be a big unhealthy-looking six-gun,” he says.

Well, that sounded plausible enough. So Rawhide passes over his belt, which it’s got an old-fashioned single-action Colt’s swinging in its holster, and Good Sam buckles this impressive chunk of hardware around him and meanders back to where Little Al is humped up with his shoulders heaving and his face in his hands and a little puddle forming on the bar from the salty tears oozing out of his system and running down his chin and falling off.

“My poor brother,” says Good Sam, in a very gentle way like a missionary speaking, “are you really in earnest about feeling a deep desire to quit this here vale of tears?”

“I sure am,” says Little Al; “it’s the one ambition I’ve got left.”

“And I don’t blame you none for it neither,” says Good Sam. “What’s life but a swindle anyhow—a brace game—that nobody ever has beaten yet? And look at the fix you’re in—too big for a midget in a side-show and too little for other laudable purposes. No sir, I don’t blame you a bit. And just to show you my heart’s in the right place I’m willing to accommodate you.”

“That’s all I’m craving,” says Little Al. “Just show me how—ars’nic or a gun or the noose or a good sharp butcher-knife, I ain’t particular. If it wasn’t for the river being frozen over solid I wouldn’t be worrying you for that much help,” he says.

“Now hold on, listen here,” says Good Sam, “you mustn’t do it that way—not with your own hands.”

“How else am I going to do it, then?” says Little Al, acting surprised.

“Why, I’m going to do it for you myself,” says Good Sam, “and don’t think I’m putting myself out on your account neither. Why, it won’t be any trouble—you might almost say it’ll be a pleasure to me. Because if you should go and commit suicide you’ll be committing a mortal sin that you won’t never get forgiveness for. But if I plug you, you ain’t responsible, are you? I’ve already had to kill seven or eight fellows in my time,” says this amiable liar of a Good Sam, “or maybe the correct count is nine; I forget sometimes. Anyhow, one more killin’ on my soul won’t make a particle of difference with me. And to bump off a party that’s actually aching to be done so, one that’ll thank me with his last expiring breath for the favor—why, brother,” he says, “it will be a pleasure! Just come on with me,” he says, “and we can get this little matter over and done with in no time at all.”

With that he leads the way to a little shack of a room that Billy Grimm’s got behind his saloon. Al follows along but I observe he’s quit weeping all of a sudden and likewise it looks to me like he’s lost or is losing considerable of his original enthusiasm. He’s beginning to sort of hang back and lag behind by the time they’ve got to the doorway, and he casts a sort of pitiful imploring look backwards over his shoulder; but Good Sam takes him by the arm and leads him on in and closes the door behind them. The rest of us wait a minute and then tiptoe up to the door and put our ears close to the crack and listen.

First we hear a match being struck. “Now then, that’s the ticket,” we hear Good Sam say very cheerfully; “we don’t want to take any chances on messing this job up by trying to do it in the dark.” So from that we know he’s lighted the coal-oil lamp that’s in there. Then he says: “Wait till I open this here back window, so’s to let the smoke out—these old black powder cartridges are a blamed nuisance, going off inside a house.” There’s a sound of a sash being raised. “Suppose you sit down here on this beer box and make yourself comfortable,” is what Good Sam says next. There’s a scuffling sound from Little Al’s feet dragging across the floor. “No, that won’t hardly do,” goes on Good Sam, “sitting down all caved in the way you are now, I’d only gut-shoot you and probably you’d linger and suffer and I’d have to plug you a second time. I’d hate to botch you all up, I would so.

“Tell you what, just stand up with your arms down at your sides.... There, that’s better, brother. No, it ain’t neither! I couldn’t bear afterwards to think of that forlorn look out of your eyes. The way they looked out of their eyes is the only thing that ever bothers me in connection with several of the fellows I’ve had to shoot heretofore. Maybe you’ll think I’m morbid but things like that certainly do prey on a fellow’s mind afterward—if he’s kind-hearted which, without any flattery, I may say I’m built that way. So while I hate to keep pestering you with orders when you’re hovering on the very brink of eternity, won’t you please just turn around so you’ll have your back to me? Thank you kindly, that’ll do splendid. Now you stay perfectly still and I’ll count three, kind of slow, and when I get to ‘three’ I’ll let you have it slick as a whistle right between the shoulders.... One!” And we can hear that old mule’s ear of a hammer on that six-gun go click, click. Then: “Two-o-o!... Steady, don’t wiggle or you’re liable to make me nervous.... Thr—”

Somebody lets out the most gosh-awful yell you ever heard and we shove the door open just in time to see Little Al sailing out of that window, head first, like a bird on the wing; and then we heard a hard thump on the frozen ground ’way down below, followed by low moaning sounds. In his hurry Little Al must have plumb forgot that while Billy Grimm’s saloon was flush with the street in front, at the far end it was scaffolded up over a hollow fifteen or twenty feet deep.

So we swarmed down the back steps and picked him up and you never saw a soberer party in your life than what that ex-suicider was, or one that was gladder to see a rescue party arrive. Soon as he got his wind back he clung to us, pleading with us to protect him from that murdering scoundrel of a man-killer and demanding to know what kind of a fellow he was not to be able to take a joke, and stating that he’d had a close call which it certainly was going to be a lesson to him, and so on. Pretty soon after that he began to take note that he was hurting all over. You wouldn’t have believed that a man who wasn’t over five-feet-two could be bunged up and bruised up in so many different localities as Little Al was. Even his hair was sore to the touch.

When he got so he could hobble around he joined an organization which up until then it’d only had one other charter member in good standing, the same being Whiz Bollinger, former owner and chief mourner of that there late-lamented buckboard. It was a club with just one by-law—which was entertaining a profound distrust for Samson Goodhue, Esquire—but there were quite a good many strong rich cuss-words in the ritual.

Still, any man who devotes himself to the public welfare is bound to accumulate a few detractors as he goes along. Good Sam went booming ahead like as if there wasn’t a private enemy on his list or a cloud in his sky. He’d do this or that or the other thing always, mind you, with the highest and the purest motives and every pop it would turn out wrong. Was he discouraged? Did he throw up his hands and quit in the face of accumulating ingratitude? Not so as to be visible to the naked eye. The milk of human kindness that was sloshing about inside of him appeared to be absolutely curdle-proof. I wish I knew his private formula—I could invent a dandy patent churn.

Let’s see, now, what was his next big outstanding failure? I’m passing over the little things such as him advising Timber-Line Hance about what was the best way to encourage a boil on his neck that wouldn’t come to a head and getting the medicines mixed in his mind and recommending turpentine instead of hog-lard. I’m trying to pick out the high points in his career. Let’s see? Now I’ve got it. Along toward spring, when the thaws set in, somebody told him how Boots Darnell and Babe Louder had been hived up all winter in a shanty up on the Blue Shell with nobody to keep them company except each other, and how Babe was laid up with a busted leg and Boots couldn’t leave him except to run their traps. So nothing would do Good Sam but what he must put out to stay a couple of days with that lonesome pair and give ’em the sunshine of his presence.

They welcomed him with open arms and made him right to home in their den, such as it was. I ought to tell you before we go any further that this here Babe and this here Boots were a couple of simple-minded, kind-hearted old coots that had been baching it together for going on fifteen or twenty years. It was share and share alike with those two. Living together so long, they got so they divided their thoughts. One would know what was on the other’s mind before he said it and would finish the sentence for him. They’d actually split a word when it was a word running into extra syllables. “Well, I’ll be dad—” Boots would say; “—gummed,” Babe would add, signifying that they were going partners even on the dad-gumming. Their conversation would put you in mind of one of these here anthems.

They certainly were glad to see Good Sam. In honor of the occasion Boots cooked up a muskrat stew and made a batch of sour-dough biscuits for supper and Babe sat up in his bunk and told his favorite story which Boots had already heard it probably two or three million times already but carried on like he enjoyed it. They showed him their catch of pelts and, taking turn and turn about, they told him how they’d been infested all winter by a worthless stray hound-dog. It seems this hound-dog happened along one day and adopted them and he’d been with ’em ever since and he’d just naturally made their life a burden to them—getting in the way and breeding twice as many fleas as he needed for his own use and letting them have the overflow; and so on.

But they said his worst habit was his appetite. He was organized inside like a bottomless pit, so they said. If they took him along with them he’d scare all the game out of the country by chasing it but never caught any; and if they left him behind locked up in the cabin he’d eat a side of meat or a pack-saddle or something before they got back. A set of rawhide harness was just a light snack to him, they said—sort of an appetizer. And his idea of a pleasant evening was to sit on his haunches and howl two or three hours on a stretch with a mournful enthusiasm and after he did go to sleep he’d have bad dreams and howl some more without waking up, but they did. Altogether, it seemed he had more things about him that you wouldn’t care for than a relative by marriage.

They said, speaking in that overlapping way of theirs, that they’d prayed to get shut of him but didn’t have any luck. So Good Sam asked them why somebody hadn’t just up and killed him. And they hastened to state that they were both too tender-hearted for that. But if he felt called upon to take the job of being executioner off their hands, the hound being a stranger to him and he not a member of the family as was the case with them, why, they’d be most everlastingly grateful. And he said he would do that very little trick first thing in the morning.

Now, of course, the simplest and the quickest and the easiest way would have been for Good Sam to toll the pup outdoors and bore him with Boots’ old rifle. But no, that wouldn’t do. As he explained to them, he was sort of tender himself when it came to taking life, but I judge the real underlying reason was that he liked to go to all sorts of pains and complicate the machinery when he was working at being a philanthropist. Soon as supper was over he reared back to figure on a plan and all at once his eye lit on a box of dynamite setting over in a corner. During the closed season on fur those two played at being miners.

“I’ve got it now,” he told them. “I’ll take a stick of that stuff there with me and I’ll lead this cussed dog along with me and take him half a mile up the bottoms and fasten him to a tree with a piece of line. Then I’ll hitch a time-fuse onto the dynamite and tie the dynamite around his neck with another piece of rope and leave him there. Pretty soon the fuse will burn down and the dynamite will go off—kerblooie!—and thus without pain or previous misgivings that unsuspecting canine will be totally abolished. But the most beautiful part of it is that nobody—you nor me neither—will be a witness to his last moments.”

So they complimented him on being so smart and so humane at the same time and said they ought to have thought up the idea themselves only they didn’t have the intellect for it—they admitted that, too—and after he’d sopped up their praise for a while and felt all warm and satisfied, they turned in, and peace and quiet reigned in that cabin until daylight, except for some far-and-wide snoring and the dog having a severe nightmare under the stove about two-thirty A.M.

Up to a certain point the scheme worked lovely. Having established the proper connections between the dog and the tree, the fuse and the dynamite, Good Sam is gamboling along through the slush on his way back and whistling a merry tune, when all of a sudden his guiding spirit makes him look back behind him—and here comes that pup! He’s either pulled loose from the rope or else he’s eaten it up—it would be more like him to eat it. But the stick of dynamite is dangling from his neck and the fuse is spitting little sparks.

Good Sam swings around and yells at the animal to go away and he grabs up a chunk of wood and heaves it at him. But the dog thinks that’s only play and he keeps right on coming, with his tail wagging in innocent amusement and his tongue hanging out like a pink plush necktie and his eyes shining with gratefulness for the kind gentleman who’s gone to all the trouble of thinking up this new kind of game especially on his account. So then Good Sam lights out, running for the cabin, and the dog, still entering heartily into the sport, takes after him and begins gaining at every jump. It’s a close race and getting closer all the time and no matter which one of ’em finishes first it looks like a mortal cinch that neither winner nor loser is going to be here to enjoy his little triumph afterwards.

Inside the cabin Boots and Babe hear the contestants drawing nearer. Mixed in with much happy frolicsome barking is a large volume of praying and yelling and calls for help, and along with all this a noise like a steam snow-plow being driven at a high rate of speed. Boots jumps for the door but before he can jerk it open, Good Sam busts in with his little playmate streaking along not ten feet behind him, and at that instant the blast goes off and the pup loses second money, as you might say, by about two lengths.

It’s a few minutes after that when Boots and Babe reach the unanimous conclusion that they’ve been pretty near ruined by too much benevolence. Boots is propping up the front side of the cabin, the explosion having jarred it loose, and Babe is still laying where he landed against the back wall and nursing his game leg. The visiting humanitarian has gone down the ridge to get his nerves ca’mmed.

“Babe,” says Boots, “you know what it looks like to me?”

“What it looks like to us two, you mean,” says Babe.

“Sure,” says Boots; “well, it looks like to both of us that we’ve been dern near killed with kindness.”

“As regards that there pup,” says Babe, continuing the clapboarded conversation, “we complained that he was all over the place and—”

“Now he’s all over us,” states Boots, combing a few more fine fragments of dog-hash out of his hair.

“I’d say we’ve had about enough of being helped by this here obliging well-wisher, wouldn’t you?” says Babe.

“Abso—” says Boots.

“—lutely!” says Babe.

“I’ve run plum out of hospi—” says Boots.

“—tality!” says Babe. “What we ought to do is take a gun and kill him good—”

“—and dead!” says Boots.

But they didn’t go that far. They make it plain to him though, when he gets back, that the welcome is all petered out and he takes the hint and pikes out for town, leaving those two still sorting what’s left of their house-keeping junk out of the wreckage.

So it went and so it kept on going. Every time Good Sam set his willing hands to lifting some unfortunate fellow citizen out of a difficulty he won himself at least one more sincere critic before he was through. Even so, as long as he stuck to retailing it wasn’t so bad. Certain parts of town he was invited to stay out of but there were other neighborhoods that he could still piroot around in without much danger of being assassinated. It was only when he branched out as a jobber that his waning popularity soured in a single hour. That was when the entire community clabbered on him, as you might say, by acclamation.

It happened this way: Other towns east and west of us were having booms, but our town, seemed like, was being left out in the cold. She wasn’t growing a particle. So some of the leading people got up a mass-meeting to decide on ways and means of putting Triple Falls on the map. One fellow would rise up and suggest doing this and another fellow would rise up and suggest doing that; but every proposition called for money and about that time money was kind of a scarce article amongst us. So far as I was concerned, it was practically extinct.

Along toward the shank of the evening Good Sam took the floor.

“Gents,” he said, “I craves your attention. There’s just one sure way of boosting a town and that’s by advertising it. Get its name in print on all the front pages over the country. Get it talked about; stir up curiosity; arouse public interest. That brings new people in and they bring their loose coinage with ’em and next thing you know you’ve got prosperity by the tail with a down-hill pull. Now, I’ve got a simple little scheme of my own. I love this fair young city of ours and I’m aiming to help her out of the kinks and I ain’t asking assistance from anybody else neither. Don’t ask me how I’m going about it because in advance it’s a secret. I ain’t telling. You just leave it to me and I’ll guarantee that inside of one week or less this’ll be the most talked-about town of its size in the whole United States; with folks swarming in here by every train—why, they’ll be running special excursions on the railroad. And it’s not going to cost a single one of you a single red cent, neither.”

Of course his past record should have been a plentiful warning. Somebody ought to have headed him off and bent a six-gun over his skull. But no, like the misguided suckers that we were, we let him go off and cook up his surprise.

I will say this: He kept his promise—he got us talked about and he brought strangers in. Inside of forty-eight hours special writers from newspapers all over the Rocky Mountains were pouring in and strangers were dropping off of through trains with pleased, expectant looks on their faces; and Father Staples was getting rush telegrams from his bishop asking how about it, and the Reverend Claypool—he was the Methodist minister—was hurrying back from conference all of a tremble, and various others who’d been away were lathering back home as fast as they could get here.

What’d happened? I’m coming to that now. All that happened was that Good Sam got the local correspondent for the press association stewed, and seduced him into sending out a dispatch that he’d written out himself, which it stated that an East Indian sun worshiper had lighted in Triple Falls and started up a revival meeting, and such was his hypnotic charm and such was the spell of his compelling fiery eloquence that almost overnight he’d converted practically the entire population—men, women, children, half-breeds, full-bloods, Chinks and Mexies—to the practice of his strange Oriental doctrines, with the result that pretty near everybody was engaged in dancing in the public street—without any clothes on!

So it was shortly after that, when cooler heads had discouraged talk of a lynching, that Good Sam left us—by request. And I haven’t seen him since.

The Native Genius pointed up the trail. Toward us came Eagle Ribs, titular head of the resident group of members of the Blackfeet Confederacy, now under special retainers by the hotel management to furnish touches of true Western color to the adjacent landscape. The chief was in civilian garb; he was eating peanut brittle from a small paper bag.

“You’ll observe that old Ribs has shucked his dance clothes,” said my friend, “which means the official morning reception is over and the latest batch of sight-seers from all points East have scattered off or something. I guess it’ll be safe for us to go back.”

We fell into step; the path was wide enough for two going abreast.

“So you never heard anything more of the Good Samaritan?” I prompted, being greedy for the last tidbitty bite of this narrative.

“Nope. I judge somebody who couldn’t appreciate his talents must have beefed him. But I’m reasonably certain he left descendants to carry on the family inheritance. One of ’em is in this vicinity now, I think.”

“You’re referring to what’s-his-name who started the second fire last night—aren’t you?” I asked.

“Not him. If he’d had a single drop of the real Good Sam blood in him his fire would be raging yet and my camp would be only a recent site.

“No, the one I’ve got in mind is the party with the saxophone. Did you get some faint feeble notion of the nature of the tune he was trying to force out of that reluctant horn of his? Well, it would be just like Good Sam’s grandson to practice up on some such an air as that—and then play it as a serenade at midnight under the window of a sick friend.”