Bill Nye and Boomerang. Or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary Gems

CHAPTER II. – GERALDINE CARBOLINE O'TOOLE

The melodious voice referred to in the preceding chapter was owned and operated by Geraldine Carboline O'Toole, the heroine of this classic tale.

Anon she came down the valley like a thing of life.

The limber sunbonnet which she wore had drifted to leeward and revealed her Grecian profile and peeled nose.

All at once her fawn-like eyes fell upon the prostrate figure, pale and still, and its toes turned toward the center of the zodiac.

A wild, frightened look came into her starry eyes, and a ghastly pallor overspread her young face, throwing her intellectual freckles into strong relief.

She stole forward and looked at the pale face of Pumpkin Jim as it lay upturned with the rosebud mouth slightly ajar, like the mouth of the Mississippi river.

Then she stooped, and, dipping up some of the clear, cold water in his hat, poured it into the rosy mouth. Slowly it trickled down his throat, and the wild panic and surprise created in his stomach by the novel fluid brought him speedily to consciousness.

"Where am I, and whence cometh this burning sensation in my liver?" faintly murmured Pumpkin Jim. "Methought some new and peculiar beverage didst cool my parching throat."

"Hist!" said Geraldine; "you must not excite yourself. You must brace up. Everything depends upon your keeping quiet instead of tearing up the ground with your broken rib."

"And whence comest thou, O beauteous vision, with the Aurora Borealis hair?"

"Didst I not tell thee," said Geraldine, "that thou mustest not converse, but remain quiet? Let it suffice, however, that I strayed away from a Sabbath school picnic at Cheyenne, and have wandered on carelessly for several hundred miles, wotting not whence I wist."

By this time the day god which we left gliding slowly adown the crimson west, had glode down the crimson west according to advertisement, and the solemn hush of night was coming on, broken anon by the long drawn shriek of the mountain lion, or the pealing of the thunder, which also reverberated anon through the otherwise solemn hush of night.

Darkness came on apace. It would be folly to attempt to prevent it, so we will let it come on apace.

CHAPTER III. – STARTLING REVELATIONS

We will now suppose twenty-four hours to have passed Since the scenes narrated in the last chapter.

The gloaming is beginning to gloam.

It began to look as though if something were not done for Pumpkin Jim pretty previously, he would pass with a gentle, gliding movement up the flume.

He was growing fainter hour by hour, and the extreme torpidity of his liver, gave rise to grave apprehensions on the part of his gentle guardian.

His leg also gave him extreme pain and cause for uneasiness, to say the least. It had swollen to about the size of a flour barrel, and was still swelling as we go to press.

He opened his eyes with a low moan, and looked up into the limber sun-bonnet.

"Beauteous one, with the ethereal brow!" he began, but Geraldine blushed and bade him let up.

"Gentle lady," he began again, "I am aware that the crisis is near. Unless I have help very soon, in some form or other, I shall have clomb the golden stair. Already the circulation is impaired, and the transverse duplex has ceased to vibrate. Dissolution is coming on. My pulse grows feebler hour by hour, and I feel that another morning sun will find only my earthly tenement here. My spirit will have wung its way to the realms of eternal day."

"O, do not talk that way," sobbed Geraldine, filling her apron full of large, irregular fragments of grief. "It cannot, must not be!"

"Do not be over confident," said Pumpkin Jim. "Few men would have lived as I have with a rib running through the centre of the liver, and into the ground for nine or ten inches without great difficulty. The secret of my power of endurance, I will, however, confide to you, as this may be positively my last appearance. My true name is not Pumpkin Jim; that is only a nom de plume. My sure enough name is Jesse James – that is the secret of my longevity. I have been killed a great deal. I have lost my life in almost every State in the Union. At first it used to make me gloomy and taciturn to be killed so much; but latterly I became very much pleased and flattered by this attention. It is sad to think, however, that after being killed by some of our most prominent men, I should at last yield up the ghost in a lonely canon, at the urgent solicitation of a narrow-guage mule. But enough; it is useless to repine. All that I am kicking about is, that after dying in so many different styles, and in such desirable conditions, surrounded by all the comforts of civilization, and getting a large amount of newspaper space, and having a patent medicine portrait of myself published in the papers, I should succumb to the death-dealing jackass, in the solitude of the mountains.

"I cannot die again, however, without telling you of my love. I might occupy your time by telling you of my long and glittering career of crime, but it would take too long. I have nothing to lay at your feet but my untarnished record as a highway robber, and my all consuming love.

"It would ease the pain of my dying hour if you were to say to me that you returned my love."

Our hero then fell back upon the mossy bank and gasped for breath, while to all appearances the last moments of Pumpkin Jim had come.

It was a trying time for a young thing like Geraldine to pass through. She stooped over him and fanned him with her sun bonnet and whispered a few low musical words in his ear.

That did the business.

CHAPTER IV. – ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

The magic words that Geraldine emptied into Pumpkin James' ear roused him, and his eyes opened with their old diabolical light. A slight grating sound was heard. It was the broken bone of our hero's off-limb coming back into its place and reuniting.

Then his rib came back out of the ground and waltzed into him, his liver healed up, and he arose and sat in the moonlight.

His first words were, "Ah, Geraldine, you have brought me back to life. Now would you please look around and see if there is any cold pie in the house, my very ownest own?"

This seemed to indicate that he had not fully recovered his mental faculties, as the most accessible cold pie was 327 miles from where they then were, and in a direct line.

Geraldine, however, set herself at once about procuring food for her soul's idol. Taking some salt she went out along the wooded slope to find a jack-rabbit on whose tail she could throw the salt, thus securing him as an easy prey.

She soon scared up one with a broken leg.

Most all of my gentle, refined, and intellectual readers of the Rocky mountains have frightened from his lair, at some time or other, a jack-rabbit with a broken leg. Jackrabbits with shattered limbs are very common in the West.

Geraldine followed hopefully on. Up hill and down, over low parks covered with hunch-grass, across little mountain streams, through long stretches of greasewood and sagebrush, starting the owl from some blasted pine tree, or frightening the smiling coyote from his course, onward and ever onward she flew like a hunted fawn.

Her every motion was grace and poetry itself. The limber sun bonnet flopped to and fro with a merry Runic flop, but the crippled John rabbit did not tarry. For an invalid, he seemed to make very fair time.

Occasionally he would look around over his shoulder, and laugh a merry, taunting laugh. Then he would give his attention to getting over the ground.

Geraldine got mad, and resolved to overtake her game and mete out to him a horrible death.

Now and then she would wildly throw a lump of salt in the direction of the fleeing rabbit; but it always failed to connect.

It was, indeed, an exciting chase, and, in fact, is yet, for as we go to press, Geraldine is still madly pursuing the ostensibly disabled jack-rabbit with a handful of common table salt poised in the air, ready to throw upon the tail of her rapidly retreating adversary.

Jesse James, alias Pumpkin Jim, waited a reasonable length of time for the return of Geraldine; but as she cometh not he said, he arose, and bestriding his narrow guage mule, he rode away.

He readily laid down his life again wherever he went, and although he died a miserable death in almost every corner of the earth, he never more met Geraldine Carboline O'Toole, the Italian Countess, to whom he was betrothed.

It is thought that she chased the crippled jack-rabbit into the realms of space.

WILLIAM NYE AND THE HEATHEN CHINEE

The subject of agriculture, which really lies nearest my heart of anything I can think of, naturally brings to the front the oriental buckwheater.

The Chinaman, as an agriculturalist, is generally successful in a small way, and I love to watch him work. Whenever I get bilious and need exercise, I go over to the southend of town and vicariously hoe radishes for an hour or two till the pores are open, and I feel that delightful languor and the chastened sense of hunger and honesty which comes to the man who is not afraid to toil.