Here,
strange to say, he had never been drunk but once; and that was the night
before he married the widow of a local publican, who had a nice little
block of stock in one of Ingolby's railways, which yielded her seven per
cent., and who knew how to handle the citizens of the City of Booze. When
she married Tom Straker, her first husband, he drank on an average twenty
whiskies a day. She got him down to one; and then he died and had as fine
a funeral as a judge. There were those who said that if Tom's whiskies
hadn't been cut down so--but there it was: Tom was in the bosom of
Abraham, and William Jones, who was never called anything else than Willy
Welsh, had been cut down from his unrecorded bibulations to none at all;
but he smoked twenty-cent cigars at the ex-widow's expense.
To-day Willy Welsh played with heart and courage, "I'm Going Home to
Glory," at the head of the Orange procession; for who that has faced such
a widow as was his for one whole year could fear the onset of faction
fighters! Besides, as the natives of the South Seas will never eat a
Chinaman, so a Western man will never kill a musician. Senators,
magistrates, sheriffs, police, gamblers, horse-stealers, bankers, and
broncho-riders all die unnatural deaths at times, but a musician in the
West is immune from all except the hand of Fate.
Pages:
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318