YOU think, no doubt, William, that I am happy, but I cannot say that I am. I will tell you my little reminiscence if you don't mind, and you can judge for yourself." These were the words of Big Steve, as we sat together one evening, watching the dealer slide the cards out of his little tin photograph album, while the crowd bought chips of the banker and corded them up out the green table.

"You look on me as a great man to inaugurate a funeral, and wish that you had a miscellaneous cemetery yourself to look back on; but greatness always has its drawbacks. We cannot be great unless we pay the price. What we call genius is after all only industry and perseverance. When my father undertook to clean me out, in our own St. Lawrence County home, I filed his coat-tails full of bird-shot and fled. Father afterwards said that he could have overlooked it so far as the coat was concerned, but he didn't want it shot to pieces while he had it on.

"Then I went to Kansas City and shot a colored man. That was a good many years ago, and you could kill a colored man then as you can a Chinaman now, with impunity, or any other weapon you can get your hands onto. Still the colored man had friends and I had to go further West. I went to Nevada then, and lived under a cloud and a nom de plume, as you fellers say.

"I really didn't want to thin out the population of Nevada, but I had to protect myself. They say that after a feller has killed his man, he has a thirst for blood and can't stop, but that ain't so. You 'justifiable-homicide' a man and get clear, and then you have to look out for friends of the late lamented. You see them everywhere. If your stomach gets out of order you see the air full of vengeance, and you drink too much and that don't help it. Then you kill a man on suspicion that he is follering you up, and after that you shoot in an extemporaneous, way, that makes life in your neighborhood a little uncertain.

"That's the way it was with me. I've got where I don't sleep good any more, and the fun of life has kind of pinched out, as we say in the mines. It's a big thing to run a school-meeting or an election, but it hardly pays me for the free spectacular show I see when I'm trying to sleep. You know if you've ever killed a man—"

"No, I never killed one right out," I said apologetically. "I shot one once, but he gained seventy-five pounds in less than six months."

"Well, if you ever had, you'd notice that he always says or does something that you can remember him by. He either says, 'Oh, I am shot'! or 'You've killed me'! or something like that, in a reproachful way, that you can wake up in the night and hear most any time. If you kill him dead, and he don't say a word, he will fall hard on the ground, with a groan that will never stop. I can shut my eyes and hear one now. After you've done it, you always wish they'd showed a little more fight. You could forgive 'em if they'd cuss you, and holler, and have some style about 'em, but they won't. They just reel, and fall, and groan. Do you know I can't eat a meal unless my back is agin' the wall. I asked Wild Bill once how he could stand it to turn his back on the crowd and eat a big dinner. He said he generally got drunk just before dinner, and that helped him out.

"So you see, William, that if a man is a great scholar, he is generally dyspeptic; if he's a big preacher, they tie a scandal to his coat-tail, and if he's an eminent murderer, he has insomnia and loss of appetite. I almost wish sometimes that I had remained in obscurity. Its a big thing to be a public man, with your name in the papers and everybody afraid to collect a bill of you, for fear you'll let the glad sunlight into their thorax; but when you can't eat nor sleep, and you're liable to wake up with your bosom full of buckshot, or your neck pulled out like a turkey-gobler's, and your tongue hanging out of your mouth in a ludicrous manner, and your overshoes failing to touch the ground by about ten feet, you begin to look back on your childhood and wish you could again be put there, sleepy and sinless, hungry and happy."