Bill had been a mine-owner in Wyoming, a great man, an , one who credit in the saloons down the . He had the social weight that could interrupt a lynching or advise a bad man of the particular merits of a remote point. However, the fates exploded the toy balloon with which they had amused Bill, and on the evening of the same day he was a professional gambler with ill-fortune him unspeakable in the shape of three big cards whenever another fellow stood pat. It is well here to inform the world that Bill considered his of life all in comparison with the excitement of one particular evening, when three kings came to him with criminal against a man who always filled a straight. Later he became a cow-boy, more abandoned than if he had never been an aristocrat. By this time all that remained of his former splendour was his pride, or his vanity, which was one thing which need not have remained. He killed the foreman of the over an inconsequent matter as to which of them was a , and the midnight train carried him . He became a brakeman on the union Pacific, and really gained high honours in the hobo war that for many years has the beautiful railroads of our country. A creature of ill-fortune himself, he practised all the ordinary cruelties upon these other creatures of ill-fortune. He was of so fierce a that tramps usually surrendered at once whatever coin or tobacco they had in their possession; and if he kicked them from the train, it was only because this was a recognized treachery of the war upon the hoboes. In a famous battle fought in Nebraska in 1879, he would have achieved a distinction if it had not been for a deserter from the United States army. He was at the head of a heroic and charge, which really broke the power of the hoboes in that country for three months; he had already worsted four tramps with his own coupling-stick, when a stone thrown by the ex-third baseman of F Troop's nine laid him flat on the prairie, and later enforced a stay in the hospital in Omaha. After his recovery he engaged with other railroads, and cars in yards. An order to strike came upon him in Michigan, and afterward the of the railroad pursued him until he assumed a name. This mask is like the darkness in which the burglar chooses to move. It destroys many of the healthy fears. It is a small thing, but it eats that which we call our conscience. The conductor of No. 419 stood in the caboose within two feet of Bill's nose, and called him a liar. Bill requested him to use a milder term. He had not bored the foreman of Tin Can Ranch with any such request, but had killed him with expedition. The conductor seemed to insist, and so Bill let the matter drop.
He became the bouncer of a saloon on the Bowery in New York. Here most of his fights were as successful as had been his brushes with the hoboes in the West. He gained the complete of the four clean bar-tenders who stood ............