I have always had a horror of opiates of all kinds. They are so
seductive and so still in their operations. They steal through the blood
like a wolf on the trail, and they seize upon the heart at last with
their white fangs till it is still forever.
Up the Laramie there is a cluster of ranches at the base of the
Medicine Bow, near the north end of Sheep Mountain, and in sight of
the glittering, eternal frost of the snowy range. These ranches are the
homes of the young men from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and
now there are several "younger sons" of Old England, with herds of
horses, steers and sheep, worth millions of dollars. These young men
are not of the kind of whom the metropolitan ass writes as saying
"youbetcher-life," and calling everybody "pardner." They are many of
them college graduates, who can brand a wild Maverick or furnish the
easy gestures for a Strauss waltz.
They wear human clothes, talk in the United States language, and have a
bank account. This spring they may be wearing chaparajos and swinging a
quirt through the thin air, and in July they may be at Long Branch, or
coloring a meerschaum pipe among the Alps.
Well, a young man whom we will call Curtis lived at one of these ranches
years ago, and, though a quiet, mind-your-own-business fellow, who had
absolutely no enemies among his companions, he had the misfortune
to incur the wrath of a tramp sheep-herder, who waylaid Curtis one
afternoon and shot him dead as he sat in his buggy. Curtis wasn't armed.
He didn't dream of trouble till he drove home from town, and, as he
passed through the gates of a corral, saw the hairy face of the herder,
and at the same moment the flash of a Winchester rifle. That was all.
A rancher came into town and telegraphed to Curtis father, and then a
half dozen citizens went out to help capture the herder, who had fled to
the sage brush of the foot-hills.
They didn't get back till toward daybreak, but they brought the herder
with them. I saw him in the gray of the morning, lying in a coarse gray
blanket, on the floor of the engine house. He was dead.
I asked, as a reporter, how he came to his death, and they told me--
opium! I said, did I understand you to say "ropium?" They said no, it
was opium. The murderer had taken poison when he found that escape was
impossible.
I was present at the inquest, so that I could report the case. There was
very little testimony, but all the evidence seemed to point to the
fact that life was extinct, and a verdict of death by his own hand was
rendered.
It was the first opium work I had ever seen, and it aroused my
curiosity. Death by opium, it seems, leaves a dark purple ring around
the neck. I did not know this before. People who die by opium also tie
their hands together before they die. This is one of the eccentricities
of opium poisoning that I have never seen laid down in the books.
I bequeath it to medical science. Whenever I run up against a new
scientific discovery, I just hand it right over to the public without
cost.
Ever since the above incident, I have been very apprehensive about
people who seem to be likely to form the opium habit. It is one of the
most deadly of narcotics, especially in a new country. High up in
the pure mountain atmosphere, this man could not secure air enough
to prolong life, and he expired. In a land where clear, crisp air and
delightful scenery are abundant, he turned his back upon them both and
passed away. Is it not sad to contemplate?