The stage pulled up in front of a typical western saloon, post office and general store. There was the usual crowd of prospectors, gamblers, cow punchers and trappers assembled to meet the incoming stage. When I scrambled off the top of the old-fashioned coach, and before I had time to shake the alkali dust from my clothes, or moisten my dry and cracked lips, a typical western bully approached me roaring the verses of a song with which he evidently intended to terrify me,
“He blowed into Lanigan swinging a gun A new one, A blue one, A colt’s forty-one, An’ swearing Declaring Red Rivers ’ud run Down Alkali Valley, An’ oceans of gore ’ud wash sudden death On the sage brush shore, An’ he shot a big hole—”
He got no further with the song. Another man stepped out from the crowd, a very tall, powerful man who would have attracted attention in any garb in any place by his distinguished appearance, who with little ceremony rudely brushed the roughneck to one side, and my instinct told me the handsome stranger could be no other than Big Pete Darlinkel.
My! my! what a man he was! Looked as if he just stepped out of one of Fred Remington’s pictures, or Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, or slipped from between the leaves of a volume of Captain Mayne Reid’s “Scalp Hunters”—Big Pete was evidently a hold-over from another age. He would have fitted perfectly and with nicety in a picture of Davy Crockett’s men down in old Texas. He seemed, however, perfectly at home in this border town, and I noted that the most hard-boiled and toughest men in the crowd treated him with marked respect and deference.
Pete was a wilderness fop and a dandy, and evidently was as careful of his clothes as a West Point cadet. In dress he affected the old-fashioned picturesque garb of the mountains. His appearance filled me with wonder and admiration; he stood six feet two or three inches in his moccasins, straight as an arrow and lithe as a cat.
His costume consisted of a tunic of dressed deer skin, smoked to the softness of the finest flannels. He wore it belted in at the waist, but open at the breast and throat where it fell back like a sailor’s collar into a short cape covering the shoulders. Underneath was the undershirt of dressed fawn skin; his leggins and moccasins were of the same material as his hunting shirt, and on his head he wore a fox skin cap; the fox’s head adorned with glass eyes ornamented the front and the tail hung like a drooping plume over the left shoulder.