Page:Olden Times in Colorado.djvu/45

 epaulettes, wore only the blouse of a private soldier, with evidence of rank almost concealed in the folds of its sleeves. Hence, if any one was impressed with his greatness and the majesty of his position, it was easily traceable to the quiet tips I gave to youthful acquaintances when he was not looking.

Furlough ended, Captain Murray S. Davis, 95th Ohio Volunteers, joined his regiment with the Army of the Cumberland, while "Captain" Carlyle C. Davis, late of the Anamosa Tigers, took up his duties with Mr. Parrott in the Illinois town.

My career at Morris was brief and uneventful. My employer's enterprise there early proved a failure, and his newspaper suspended before I had finished the term of my apprenticeship.

Thence I went directly to Chicago, a city at that time numbering less than a hundred thousand, and there met my first Waterloo. The wages of apprentices were hardly sufficient to sustain one, and because I had not served full time I was barred from the Union, membership in which was essential to employment. I was a phenomenal type-setter, later distinguishing myself as such in some of the larger newspaper offices of the country, and it struck me as peculiarly unjust that I should be shut out on so slight a technicality.

Defeated and crestfallen, I withdrew from a city in which, twenty-two years later, I participated, as delegate-at-large from the Centennial State to the National Republican Convention, in nominating for President of the United States that peerless statesman of the time, Hon. James G. Elaine, and went home to my mother.

I had saved a little money, and upon arrival at Iowa City I invested it in a modest little ice cream parlor and confectionery store. In that undertaking I would have