after lie had been telling his six-shooter adventures,
with great delight, by the cabin fire, u Look here,
Dan, some of these days you will die with your
boots on. Now see if you don t, if you keep on
slinging your six-shooter around loose in this sort of
a way, you will go up the flume as slick as a salmon
die with your boots on before you know it."
Dan smiled blandly as he tapped his ivory pistol- butt, and said, " Bet you the cigars, I don t! When ever my man comes to the centre, I will call him, see if I don t, and get away with it, too."
Now to understand the pith of the grim joke which Dan played in the last act, you must know that u dying with the boots on " meant a great deal in the mines. It is the poetical way of expressing the result of a bar-room or street-battle.
Let me here state that while the wild, semi-savage life of the mines and mountains has brought forth no dialect to speak of, it has produced many forms of expression that are to be found nowhere else.
These sharp sword-cuts are sometimes coarse, sometimes wicked, but always forcible and driven to the hilt. They are even sometimes strangely poetical, and when you know their origin, they carry with them a touch of tenderness beyond the reach of song.
Take, for example, the last words of the old Sierra Nevada stage-driver, who, for a dozen years, had sat up on his box in storm or sun, and dashed down the rocky roads, with his hat on his nose, his foot on the break, and the four lines threaded through his
