The audience listened to me with
rapt attention. At the end, with a pride in my rhetorical powers which
proceeded from a misunderstanding of the situation, I remarked to the
chairman: "I held that audience well; there wasn't an interruption." To
which the chairman replied: "Interruption? Well, I guess not! Seth had
sent round word that if any son of a gun peeped he'd kill him!"
There was one bit of frontier philosophy which I should like to see
imitated in more advanced communities. Certain crimes of revolting
baseness and cruelty were never forgiven. But in the case of ordinary
offenses, the man who had served his term and who then tried to make
good was given a fair chance; and of course this was equally true of
the women. Every one who has studied the subject at all is only too
well aware that the world offsets the readiness with which it condones
a crime for which a man escapes punishment, by its unforgiving
relentlessness to the often far less guilty man who _is_ punished,
and who therefore has made his atonement. On the frontier, if the man
honestly tried to behave himself there was generally a disposition to
give him fair play and a decent show. Several of the men I knew and whom
I particularly liked came in this class.
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