Mr. Scraggs | Page 2

a girl sometime durin' the Mexican war, and she'd borrowed Smith's roll and skipped with another man. So, if we crowded Smithy too hard in debate, he used to slip behind that girl and say, 'Oh, well! You fellers will know better when you've had more experience," although we might have been talkin' about what's best for frost-bite at the time.
"He noticed this new man Scraggs seemed to hold over him a trifle in sadness, and he thought he'd find out why.
"'You appear to me like a man that's seen trouble,' says he.
"'Trouble!' says Scraggs. 'Trouble!' Then he spit out of the door and turned his back deliberate, like there wasn't any use conversin' on the subject, unless in the presence of an equal.
"Scraggs was a hard man to break into, but Smithy scratched his head and took a brace.
"'I've met with misfortune myself,' says he.
"'Ah?' says Scraggs. 'What's happened to you?' He sounded as if he didn't believe it amounted to much, and Smithy warmed up. He ladled out his woes like a catalogue. How he'd been blew up in mines; squizzled down a mountain on a snow-slide; chawed by a bear; caught under a felled tree; sunk on a Missouri River steamboat, and her afire, so you couldn't tell whether to holler for the life-savers or the fire-engine; shot up by Injuns and personal friends; mistook for a horse-thief by the committee, and much else, closing the list with his right bower. 'And, Mr. Scraggs, I have put my faith in woman, and she done me to the tune of all I had.'
"'Have you?' says Scraggs, still perfectly polite and uninterested. "'Have you?' says he, removin' his pipe and spitting carefully outdoors again. And then he slid the joker a'top of Smithy's play. 'Well, I have been a Mormon,' says he.
"'What?' says all of us.
"'Yessir!' says Mr. Scraggs, getting his feet under him, and with a mournful pride I can't give you the least idea of. 'A Mormon; none of your tinkerin' little Mormonettes. I was ambitious; hence E. G. W. Scraggs as you now behold him. In most countries a man's standin' is regulated by the number of wives he ain't got; in Utah it's just the reverse--and a fair test, too, when you come to think of it. I wanted to be the head of the hull Mormon kingdom, so I married right and left. Every time I added to the available supply of Mrs. Scraggs, I went up a step in the government. I ain't all the persimmons for personal beauty, so I had to take what was willin' to take me, and they turned out to be mostly black-eyed women with peculiar dispositions. Gentlemen, I was once as lively and happy a little boy as ever did chores on a farm. See me now! This is the result of mixin' women and politics. If I should tell you all the kinds of particular and general devilment (to run 'em alphabetically, as I did to keep track of 'em) that Ann Eliza Scraggs, and Bridget Scraggs, and Belle Scraggs, and Fanny Scraggs, and Honoria and Helen Scraggs, and Isabelle Scraggs, and so on up to zed, raised with me, it would go through any little germs of joy you may have in your constitutions like Sittin' Bull's gang of dog-soldiers through an old ladies' sewing bee. Look at me! For all them years that cussed ambition of mine held me in its deadly toils. I never heard the sound of blessed silence. Trouble! I'm bald as a cake of ice; my nerves is ruined. If the wind makes a noise in the grass like the swish of skirts, I'm a mile up the track before I get my wits back, sweatin' coldly and profusely, like a water-cooler.
"'I ain't got anything to tie to but all them women by the name of Scraggs, and them ties I cut by travelin' fast between daylights. Wisht I could introduce you to Mrs. Scraggs as she inhabits the territory of Utah--you'd understand a power of things that may seem a little misty to you at present. However, I can't do that, nor I wouldn't neither, if I was to be made general superintendent of the whole show for my pains. I'll leave the aggregated Mrs. Scraggs in the hands of Providence, as bein' the only power capable of handling her. Yet I don't believe in Providence. I don't believe in no Hereafter, nor Heretofore, nor no Now; I don't believe in no East nor West, nor Up nor Down, nor Sideways, Lengthways, 'Cross-the-center, Top, Bottom, or Middle. I have lost my faith in every ram-butted thing a man can hear, see, or touch, includin' everything I've left out. That's me, Joe Bush.' He stopped a minute. 'Trouble--' says he.