Canada Bill was a character one might travel the length and breadth
of the land and never find his match, or run across his equal.
Imagine a medium-sized, chicken-headed, tow-haired sort of man with
mild blue eyes, and a mouth nearly from ear to ear, who walked with
a shuffling, half-apologetic sort of a gait, and who, when his
countenance was in repose, resembled an idiot. For hours he would
sit in his chair, twisting his hair in little ringlets. Then I
used to say, "Bill is studying up some new devilment." His clothes
were always several sizes too large, and his face was as smooth as
a woman's and never had a particle of hair on it. Canada was a
slick one. He had a squeaking, boyish voice, and awkward, gawky
manners, and a way of asking fool questions and putting on a good
natured sort of a grin, that led everybody to believe that he was
the rankest kind of a sucker--the greenest sort of a country jake.
Woe to the man who picked him up, though. Canada was, under all
his hypocritical appearance, a regular card shark, and could turn
monte with the best of them. He was my partner for a number of
years, and many are the suckers we roped in, and many the huge roll
of bills we corralled. He was an arrant coward, though, and would
not fight a woman if she said boo. His right name was Jones. When
Tom Brown and Holly Chappell traveled with me, the four of us made
a quartette that could give most any crowd any sort of monte they
wanted. Brown got $240,000 for his share of the profit, and Chappell
went North with his portion, and is to-day as poor as myself. Bill
never weighed over 130 pounds, and was always complaining of pains
in his head. I always found him honest to a fault; and when the
poor fellow died, I felt that I had lost one of my truest friends.