in Portland with the sketches and game chickens, but no alligator. The alligator, when we got to Denver, where it was twenty below zero, refused to move even a toe, so thinking him frozen stiff and dead, I tried to bend him and he broke in two like a brittle stick, and I threw the pieces out the window. The truth is that had I put him in warm water, in five minutes he would have been swimming, but I wasn’t as much on alligators as I was on roosters.
I got home to Silverton and told my father of the great things I had seen, the glorious time I had had, but father seemed to be worried about something that didn’t please him; his face bore an expression of disappointment. I asked him what was the matter. He said he was disappointed to see me come home with only two roosters!
The roller-skate craze hit Silverton just as the spring-bottom pants fad was leaving town. It’s funny how fashions vary. I remember one spell in Silverton that we were having our trousers cut with so much spring on the bottom that only the end of our toes were exposed and six months after that high tide of spring-
