One day, at a church strawberry festival, he was drawn into the vortex of that swirling passion, love, and married. The young wife importuned him to give up the dynamite business, as he had already laid up sufficient money to start him in another business. Yielding to her wishes, he gave notice that his resignation was to take effect at the end of two weeks.
On the third day of the period of his notice, on the advent of the noon hour, he was seized with an uncontrollable impulse to take his dinner-pail and himself out of the packing-house where he was working. He said afterward that he got to thinking, "Suppose this packing-house should blow up; what would become of Susie?"--to say nothing of his own dispersion.
He went to the top of an elevation to eat his dinner, in full view of the packing-house, continuing his pessimistic reflections.
The place began to look suspicious. For the first time in his life he felt fear. On a sudden, that packing-house became a white, dazzling ball of flame, and he was knocked down by the concussion.
He told the superintendent that the three days he had served on his notice must suffice--he had lost his nerve!
In the early days, when there was more individual and less corporate mining in the gold country of the West, a long and lean Yankee, Jim Evans, who was once a neighbor of mine in Maine, contracted the gold-fever, and went West.
Luckily, he almost immediately struck a pay streak high up the face of a cliff, where there was a wide shelf of rock that afforded a very convenient roadway for his use, as well as considerable area for the transaction of his operations.
Someone before him had started operations on the same site, but had become discouraged and quit, leaving a big steel tank, open at one end, lying upon its side, the open end pointing, like a huge cannon, over the mining settlement a thousand feet below. Jim used this tank to warehouse certain edibles, together with a keg of black gunpowder.
One day, on Jim's return from grubbing in the ground, he was amazed to find the entrance to his warehouse blocked by a huge grizzly bear that had crawled in to get at the edibles, and that fitted the big tube like a wad in a gun.
Jim was addicted to humor, and as there was a three-quarter-inch hole in the tank near the closed end right over the keg of gunpowder, the head of which had been removed, it occurred to him that he might make it somewhat interesting for the bear by lighting a piece of fuze and dropping it into the gunpowder. This he proceeded to do, and the bear proceeded to leave that tube after the manner of a cannon ball.