I'm going out to Colorado to fight the Indians." She let the two-tined steel fork drop out of her hand.
"What will your ma say to that ?" she gasped.
"I tell you I am going," was my firm reply, and I went.
Yes, I had long sighed to be a Juan Fernandez, or a Mount Washington weatherologist, or something lonesome and sad, as my readers know.
Fighting Indians would be a terrible risky business; but compared to facing the "girls of the period" it would be the merest play.

I was weary of a life that was all mistakes.

"Better throw it away," I thought, bitterly, "and give my scalp to dangle at a redskin's belt, than make another one of my characteristic and preposterous blunders." I had heard that Buffalo Bill was about to start for the Rocky Mountains, and I wrote to New York asking permission to join him.

He answered that I could, if I was prepared to pay my own way.

I immediately bade my relatives farewell, went home, borrowed two hundred dollars of father, told mother she was the only woman I wasn't afraid of, kissed her good-bye, and met Buffalo Bill at the next large town by appointment, he being already on his way West.