Baled Hay. A Drier Book than Walt Whitman's «Leaves o' Grass»

Spotted Tail had never won much distinction up to that time, except as the owner of an appetite, in the presence of which his tribe stood in dumb and terrible awe.

During the early days of what is now the great throbbing and ambitious west, the tribe camped near Fort Sedgwick, and Big Mouth, a chief of some importance, used to go over to the post regularly for the purpose of filling his brindle hide full of "Fort Sedgwick Bloom of Youth."

As a consequence of Big Mouth's fatal yearning for liquid damnation, he generally got impudent, and openly announced on the parade ground that he could lick the entire regular army. This used to offend some of the blood-scarred heroes who had just arrived from West Point, and in the heat of debate they would warm the venerable warrior about two feet below the back of his neck with the fiat of their sabers.

This was a gross insult to Big Mouth, and he went back to the camp, where he found Spotted Tail eating a mule that had died of inflammatory rheumatism. Big Mouth tearfully told the wild epicure of the way he had been treated, and asked for a council of war. Spot picked his teeth with a tent pin, and then told the defeated relic of a mighty race that if he would quit strong drink, he would be subjected to fewer insults.

Big Mouth then got irritated, and told S. Tail that his remarks showed that he was standing, in with the aggressor, and was no friend to his people.

Spotted Tail said that Mr. B. Mouth was a liar, by yon high heaven, and before there was time to think it over, he took a butcher knife, about four feet long, from its scabbard and cut Mr. Big Mouth plumb in two just between the umbilicus and the watch pocket.

As the reader who is familiar with anatomy has already surmised, Big Mouth died from the effects of this wound, and Spotted Tail was at once looked upon as the Moses of his tribe. He readily rose to prominence, and by his strict attention to the duties of his office, made for himself a name as a warrior and a pie biter, at which the world turned pale.

This should teach us the importance of taking the tide at its flood, which leads on to fortune, and to lay low when there is a hen on, as Benjamin Franklin has so truly said.

THE ZEALOUS VOTER

SPEAKING of New York politics," said Judge Hildreth, of Cummings, the other day, "they have a cheerful way of doing business in Gotham, and at first it rather surprised me. I went into New York a short time before election, and a Democratic friend told me I had better go and get registered so I could 'wote.' I did so, for I hate to lose the divine right of suffrage, even when I'm a good way from home.

"When election day came around, I went over to the polls in a body, in the afternoon, but they wouldn't let me vote. I told them I was registered all right, and that I had a right and must exercise it the same as any other Democrat in this enlightened land, but they swore at me and entreated me roughly, and told me to go there myself, and that I had already voted once and couldn't do it any more. I had always thought that New York was prone to vigilance and industry in the suffrage business, and early and often was what I supposed was the grand hailing sign. It made me mad, therefore, to have the city get so virtuous all at once that it couldn't even let me vote once.

"I was irritated and extremely ill-natured when I went back to Mr. McGinnis, and told him. of the great trouble I had had with the judges of election, and I denounced New York politics with a great deal of fervor.

"Mr. McGinnis said it was all right.

"'That's aizy enough to me, George. Give me something difficult. Sit down and rist yoursilf. Don't get excited and talk so loud. I know'd yez was out lasht night wid the byes and you didn't feel like gettin' up airly to go to the polls, so I got wan av the byes to go over and wote your name. That's all roight, come here 'nd have someding.'

"I saw at a glance that New York people were attending to these things thoroughly and carefully, and since that when I hear that 'a full vote hasn't been polled in New York city' for some unknown cause, I do not think it is true. I look upon the statement with great reserve, for I believe they vote people there who have been dead for centuries, and people who have not yet arrived in this country, nor even expressed a desire to come over. I am almost positive that they are still voting the bones of old A. T. Stewart up in the doubtful wards, and as soon as Charlie Ross is entitled to vote, he will most assuredly be permitted to represent.

"Why, there's one ward there where they vote the theatre ghosts and the spirit of Hamlet's father hasn't missed an election for a hundred years."

HOW TO PRESERVE TEETH

I FIND," said an old man to a Boomerang reporter, yesterday, "that there is absolutely no limit to the durability of the teeth, if they are properly taken care of. I never drink hot drinks, always brush my teeth morning and evening, avoid all acids whatever, and although I am 65 years old, my teeth are as good as ever they were."

"And that is all you do to preserve your teeth, is it?"

"Yes, sir; that's all – barring, perhaps, the fact that I put them in a glass of soft water nights."

MR. BEECHER'S BRAIN

MR. BEECHER, has raked in $2,000,000 with his brain. A good, tall, bulging brow, and a brain that will give down like that, are rather to be chosen than a blind lead, and an easy running cerebellum, than a stone quarry with a silent but firm skunk in it.

OH, NO!

THE telephone line between Cheyenne and Laramie City will soon be in operation. It won't work, however. It may be a success for a time, but sooner or later Bill Nye will set his lopsided jaws at work in front of the transmitter, and pour a few quarts of untutored lies into the contribution box, which does service as a part of the telephone machine. Then the wires will be yanked off the poles, a hissing torrent of prevarication will blow the battery jars clean over into Utah, and the listener at the Cheyenne end will be gathered up in a basket. Weeping friends will hold a funeral over a pair of old boots and a fragment of shoulder blade – the remains of the departed Cheyennese. It is a weird and pixycal thing to be a natural born liar, but there are times when a robust lie will successfully defy the unanimous inventive genius of the age." —Sun.

Oh, do not say those cruel words, kind friend. Do not throw it up to us that we are weird and pixycal. Oh, believe us, kind sir, we may have done wrong, but we never did that. We know that election is approaching, and all sorts of bygone crookedness is raked up at that time, even when a man is not a candidate for office, but we ask the public to scan our record and see if the charge made by the Sun is true. It may be that years ago we escaped justice and fled to the west under an assumed name, but no man ever before charged us with being weird and pixycal. We have been in all kinds of society, perhaps, and mingled with people who were our inferiors, having been pulled by the police once while visiting a Democratic caucus, but that was our misfortune, not our fault. We were not a member of the caucus and were therefore discharged, but even little things like that ought to be forgotten.

As for entering any one's apartments and committing a pixycal crime, we state now without fear of successful contradiction, that it is not so. It is no sign because a man in an unguarded moment entered the Rock Creek eating house and gave way to his emotions, that he is a person to be shunned. It was hunger, and not love for the questionable, that made us go there. It is not because we are by nature weird or pixycal, for we are not. We are not angry over this charge. It just simply hurts and grieves us. It comes too, at a time when we are trying to lead a different life, and while others are trying to lend us every aid and encouragement. We have many friends in Cheyenne who want to see us come up and take higher ground, but how can we do so if the press lends its influence against us. That's just the way we feel about it. If the public prints try to put us down and crush us in this manner, we will probably get desperate and be just as weird and pixycal as we can be.

THE MARCH OF CIVILIZATION

SPOKANE IKE," the Indian who killed a doctor last summer for failing to cure his child, has been hanged. This shows the onward march of civilization, and vouchsafes to us the time when a doctor's life will be in less danger than that of his patient.

AN UNCLOUDED WELCOME

N.P. WILLIS once said: "The sweetest thing in life is the unclouded welcome of a wife." This is true, indeed, but when her welcome is clouded with an atmosphere of angry words and coal scuttles, there is something about it that makes a man want to go out in the woodshed and sleep on the ice-chest.

THE PILLOW-SHAM HOLDER

SOME enemy to mankind has recently invented an infernal machine known as the pillow-sham holder, which is attached to the head of the bedstead and works with a spiral spring. It is a kind of refined towel-rack on which you hang your pillow-shams at night so they wont get busted by the man of the house. The man of the house generally gets the pillow-shams down under his feet when he undresses and polishes off his cunning little toes on the lace poultice on which his wife prides herself. This pillow-sham holder saves all this. You just yank your pillow-sham off the bed and hang it on this high-toned sham holder, where it rests all night. At least that's the intention. After a little while, however, the spring gets weak, and the holder buckles to, or caves in, or whatever you may call it, at the most unexpected moment. The slightest movement on the part of the occupant of the bed, turns loose the pillow-sham holder, and the slumberer gets it across the bridge of his or her nose, as the case may be. Sometimes the vibration caused by a midnight snore, will unhinge this weapon of the devil, and it will whack the sleeper across the features in a way that scares him almost to death. If you think it is a glad surprise to get a lick across the perceptive faculties in the middle of a sound slumber, when you are dreaming of elysium and high-priced peris and such things as that, just try the death-dealing pillow-sham holder, and then report in writing to the chairman of the executive committee. It is well calculated to fill the soul with horror and amaze. A raven-black Saratoga wave, hanging on the back of a chair, has been known to turn white in a single night as the result of the sudden kerflummix of one of these cheerful articles of furniture.

SOMETHING FRESH

OUR Saturday dispatches announce that an infernal machine had just been received at the office of Chief Justice Field, and later on, Justice Field, who was in Wyoming Saturday, said to a reporter that the machine was one that was sent to him in 1866, and that last week he sent it down to a gun factory to have the powder taken out, as he wished to stuff it and preserve it among the archives.

With the aid of the telegraph and the facilities of the Associated Press, it does seem as though we were living in an age of almost miraculous possibilities. Here is an instance where an infernal machine is sent to a prominent man, and in less than sixteen years the news is flashed to the four quarters of the globe like lightning. How long will it be before the whole bloody history of the war of the rebellion will be sent to every hamlet in the land? How long before the safe arrival of the ark, and the losses occasioned by the deluge, will be given to us in dollars and cents?

People don't fully realize the advantages we possess in this glorious nineteenth century. They take all these things as a matter of course, and forget how the palpitating brain palps for them, and how the quivering nerve quivs on and on through the silent night in order that humanity may keep informed in relation to ancient history.

A BAKEFOOTED GODDESS

THERE'S one little national matter that has been neglected about long enough, it seems to us. If the goddess of liberty is allowed to go barefoot for another century, her delicate toes will spread out over this nation like the shadow of a great woe.

YANKED TO ETERNITY

ONCE, when a section-crew came down the mountain on the South Park road, from Alpine Tunnel to Buena Vista, a very singular thing occurred, which has never been given to the public. Every one who knows anything at all, knows that riding down that mountain on a push-car, descending at the rate of over 200 feet to the mile, means utter destruction, unless the brake is on. This brake is nothing more nor less then a piece of scantling, which is applied between one of the wheels and the car-bed, in such a way as to produce great friction.

The section-crew referred to, got on at Hancock with their bronzed and glowing hides as full of arsenic and rain-water as they could possibly hold. Being recklessly drunk, they enjoyed the accumulated velocity of the car wonderfully, until the section boss lost the break off the car, and then there was a slight feeling of anxiety. The car at last acquired a velocity like that of a young and frolicsome bob-tailed comet turned loose in space. The boys began to get nervous at last, and asked each other what should be done.

There seemed to be absolutely nothing to do but to shoot onward into the golden presently.

All at once the section boss thought of something. He was drunk, but the deadly peril of the moment suggested an idea. There was a rope on the car which would do to tie to something heavy and cast off for an anchor. The idea was only partially successful, however, for there was nothing to tie to but a spike hammer. This was tried but it wouldn't work. Then it was decided to tie it to some one of the crew and cast him loose in order to save the lives of those who remained. It was a glorious opportunity. It was a heroic thing to do. It was like Arnold Winklered's great sacrifice, by which victory was gained by filling his own system full of lances and making a toothpick holder of himself, in order that his comrades might break through the ranks of their foes.

George O'Malley, the section boss, said that he was willing that Patsy McBride should snatch the laurels from outrageous fortune and bind them on his brow, but Mr. McBride said he didn't care much for the encomiums of the world. He hadn't lost any encomiums, and didn't want to trade his liver for two dollars' worth of damaged laurels.

Everyone declined. All seemed willing to go down into history without any ten-line pay-local, and wanted someone else to get the effulgence. Finally, it was decided that a man by the name of Christian Christianson was the man to tie to. He had the asthma anyhow, and life wasn't much of an object to him, so they said that, although he declined, he must take the nomination, as he was in the hands of his friends.

So they tied the rope around Christian and cast anchor.

******

The car slowed up and at last stopped still. The plan had succeeded. Five happy wives greeted their husbands that night as they returned from the jaws of destruction. Christian Christianson did not return. The days may come and the days may go, but Christian's wife will look up toward the summit' of the snow-crowned mountains in vain.

He will never entirely return. He has done so partially, of course, but there are still missing fragments of him, and it looks as though he must have lost his life.

WHY WE SHED THE SCALDING