One Third Off | Page 4

the space
of a paragraph or so from the main theme, I am reminded of the
incident through which a certain picturesque gentleman of the early
days in California acquired a name which he was destined to wear
forever after, and under which his memory is still affectionately
encysted in the traditions of our great Far West. I refer to the late
Liver-Eating Watkins. Mr. Watkins entered into active life and passed
through a good part of it bearing the unilluminative and commonplace
first name of Elmer or Lemuel, or perhaps it was Jasper. Just which one
of these or some other I forgot now, but no matter; at least it was some
such. One evening a low-down terra-cotta-colored Piute swiped two of
Mr. Watkins' paint ponies and by stealth, under cover of the cloaking
twilight, went away with them into the far mysterious spaces of the
purpling sage.
To these ponies the owner was deeply attached, not alone on account of
the intrinsic value, but for sentimental reasons likewise. So
immediately on discovering the loss the next morning, Mr. Watkins
took steps. He saddled a third pony which the thief had somehow
overlooked in the haste of departure, and he girded on him both cutlery
and shootlery, and he mounted and soon was off and away across the
desert upon the trail of the vanished malefactor. Now when Mr.
Watkins fared forth thus accoutered it was a sign he was not out for his
health or anybody else's.

Friends and well-wishers volunteered to accompany him upon the
chase, for they foresaw brisk doings. But he declined their company.
Folklore, descending from his generation to ours, has it that he said this
was his own business and he preferred handling it alone in his own way.
He did add, however, that on overtaking the fugitive it was his intention,
as an earnest or token of his displeasure, to eat that Injun's liver raw.
Some versions say he mentioned liver rare, but the commonly accepted
legend has it that the word used was raw. With this he put the spur to
his steed's flank and was soon but a mere moving speck in the distance.
Now there was never offered any direct proof that our hero, in
pursuance of his plan for teaching the Indian a lesson, actually did do
with regard to the latter's liver what he had promised the bystanders he
would do; moreover, touching on this detail he ever thereafter
maintained a steadfast and unbreakable silence. In lieu of corroborative
testimony by unbiased witnesses as to the act itself, we have only these
two things to judge by: First, that when Mr. Watkins returned in the
dusk of the same day he was wearing upon his face a well-fed, not to
say satiated, expression, yet had started forth that morning with no
store of provisions; and second, that on being found in a deceased state
some days later, the Piute, who when last previously seen had with him
two of Mr. Watkin's pintos and one liver of his own, was now shy all
three. By these facts a strong presumptive case having been made out,
Mr. Watkins was thenceforth known not as Ezekiel or Emanuel, or
whatever his original first name had been, but as Liver-Eating, or
among friends by the affectionate diminutive of Liv for short.
This I would regard as a typical instance of the value of a chain of good
circumstantial evidence, with no essential link lacking. Direct
testimony could hardly have been more satisfactory, all things
considered; and yet direct testimony is the best sort there is, in the law
courts and out. On the other hand, hearsay evidence is viewed legally
and often by the layman with suspicion; in most causes of action being
barred out altogether. Nevertheless, it is a phase of the fattish man's
perversity that, rejecting the direct, the circumstantial and the
circumferential testimony which abounds about him, he too often
awaits confirmation of his growing suspicions at the hands of outsiders

and bystanders before he is willing openly to admit that condition of
fatness which for long has been patent to the most casual observer.
Women, as I have observed them, are even more disposed to avoid
confession on this point. A woman somehow figures that so long as she
refuses to acknowledge to herself or any other interested party that she
has progressed out of the ranks of the plumpened into the congested
and overflowing realms of the avowedly obese, why, for just so long
may she keep the rest of the world in ignorance too. I take it, the ostrich
which first set the example to all the other ostriches of trying to avoid
detection by the enemy through the simple expedient of sticking its
head in the sand