Pelican Smith & The Smuggler King

ust to see him smile; and when he gits bit he goes off and writes a pome about it. I've been bit more'n onc't, sometimes foolin' with horses, sometimes with women, but I never took it poetical like Smuggler King Garcia, him bein' born to lisp in numbers, though he couldn't sign his Greaser name.

It was in the Fall o' Ninety-eight that I seen Garcia on the wharf at Enciñada squeezing a yeller demijohn between his knees. The jug was supplying the stuff that dreams is composed of and Garcia was a Poet. So he stopped me and poured Mexican sunshine into me with a tin cup.

Of all the gaudy, oncivilized outfit o' man-clothes I ever seen wore, I think the King's took the tart. He was a smallish, kind o' peanut-size man and more than half of him was mustache. Never seen anything like the way them woolly fringes stood out--like long, black wings--from the side of his face. He had on a pair o' brown velvet pants with a red sash as big--twic't as big--as a boarding-house table cloth twisted around his waist. In this he had stuck enough killing-tools to stock a carpenter's kit. All Garcia needed was a ch