There was
always at least one big dance at the hotel. There were few dress suits,
but there was perfect decorum at the dance, and in the square dances
most of the men knew the figures far better than I did. With such a
crowd in town, sleeping accommodations of any sort were at a premium,
and in the hotel there were two men in every bed. On one occasion I had
a roommate whom I never saw, because he always went to bed much later
than I did and I always got up much earlier than he did. On the last
day, however, he rose at the same time and I saw that he was a man I
knew named Carter, and nicknamed "Modesty" Carter. He was a stalwart,
good-looking fellow, and I was sorry when later I heard that he had been
killed in a shooting row.
When I went West, the last great Indian wars had just come to an end,
but there were still sporadic outbreaks here and there, and occasionally
bands of marauding young braves were a menace to outlying and lonely
settlements. Many of the white men were themselves lawless and brutal,
and prone to commit outrages on the Indians. Unfortunately, each race
tended to hold all the members of the other race responsible for the
misdeeds of a few, so that the crime of the miscreant, red or white,
who committed the original outrage too often invited retaliation upon
entirely innocent people, and this action would in its turn arouse
bitter feeling which found vent in still more indiscriminate
retaliation.
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