Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MAKING HIS MARK. BLACK HAT was, in 1851, about as peaceful and well- regulated a village as could be found in the "United States. It was not on the road to any place, so it grew but little ; the. dirt paid steadily and well, so but few of the original settlers went away. The march of civilization, with its churches and circuses, had not yet reached Black Hat; marriages never convulsed the settlement with the pet excitement of villages generally, and the inhabitants were never arrayed at swords' point by either religion, politics or newspapers. To be sure, the boys gambled every evening and all day Sunday; but a famous player, who once passed that way on a prospecting-trip, declared that even a preacher would get sick of such playing; for, as everybody knew everybody else's game, and as all men who played other than squarely hacl long since been required to leave, there was an utter absence of pistols at the tables. Occasional disagreements took place, to be sure—they have been taking place, oven among the best people, since the days of Cain and Abel; but all difficulties at Black Hat which did not succumb to force of jaw were quietly locked in the bosoms of the disputants until the first Sunday. Sunday, at Black Hat, orthodoxically commenced at sunset on Saturday, and was piously extended through to working-time on Monday morning, and during this period o£ SUNDAY AT BLACK HAT. 45 thirty-six hours there was submitted to arbitrament, by knife or pistol, all unfinished rows of the week. On Sunday was also performed all of the hard drinking at Black Hat; but through the week the inhabitants worked as steadily and lived as peacefully as if surrounded by church-steeples, court-houses and jails. Whether owing to the inevitable visitations of the great distur...