|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."