TWIN BABIES. 49

lingered all day to see these cunning and
intelligent creatures perform.

About this time Mountain Joe fought a
duel with another mountaineer down at
the trading post, and this duel, a bloodless
and foolish affair, was all the talk. Why
not have the little black fellows fight a
duel also? They were surely civilized
enough to fight now!

And so, with a very few days’ training,
they fought a duel exactly like the one in
which poor, drunken old Mountain Joe was
engaged; even to the detail of one of them
suddenly dropping his stick gun and run-
ning away and falling headlong in a pros-
pect hole.

When Joe came home and saw this duel
and saw what a fool he had made of him-
self, he at first was furiously angry. But
it made him sober, and he kept sober for
half a year. Meantime Reese was mad as
ever, more mad, in fact, than ever before.
For he could not endure to see the boy have
any friends of any kind. Above all, he did