"What was it, iron ore?--no, that mud that the river leaves when it
rises--'Gumbo' the people call it. Some fellow found by accident that
it became red flint when fired, and was making a fortune selling it to
the railroad." To burn it, he used the slack coal from the Jonesburg
mines nearby, which until then had also been waste. I put a handful of
the stuff in my pocket; and, after the conductor left us, I turned the
whole enterprise over to the Goodwin part. When the play ended, the
audience should feel sure that he and Kate need never want for a
dollar. I knew also where he had accidentally burnt his first sample,
and made his discovery; in the blacksmith shop.

But what accident brought the raw gumbo there? Perhaps the wheels of
the stage-coach; but that wasn't definitely Goodwin. The soft gumbo is
not unlike putty; it would make a fair cushion for a broken limb: but
I didn't want to halt my story with anybody crippled to that extent;
and then I remembered the yellow dog drinking from the blacksmith's
tub. I broke _his_ leg and had Goodwin carry him miles in the stage,
with his poor paw in a poultice of gumbo. It was a counter-pointing
touch to a sheriff with two guns; it gave him an effective entrance;
and it coupled in a continuous train, the sheriff, the bad man who
sneered at it, the blacksmith and his motherly wife who sympathized
and helped in a better dressing, the forge where a piece of the
discarded gumbo should fall amongst the coke, the helper who should
pump the bellows for another and verifying bake: and last, and best
of all, it gave me a "curtain" for a second act; when, perturbed and
adrift after being temporarily rejected by the girl, Goodwin should
turn in an undefined but natural sympathy to the crippled dog in his
box under the helper's bench.

That illustrates one of the dramatist's discovered rules: "If you use