Baled Hay: A Drier Book than Walt Whitman's "Leaves o' Grass"Nye, Bill
General
Baled Hay: A Drier Book than Walt Whitman's "Leaves o' Grass"
Nye, Bill
American wit and humor
At first everybody was a little nervous with the accumulating velocity
of the car, and the yawning abyss below us; but later we got more
accustomed to it, and the solemn grandeur of the green pine-covered
canons, the lofty snow-covered peaks, apparently so near us; and the
rushing, foaming torrent far below us, were all we saw. Like lightning
we rounded the sharp curves where the road seemed to hang over instant
destruction, and we held our breath as we thought that, like Dutch
Charlie and other great men, only a piece of two-by-four scantling stood
between us and death.
Again and again the abrupt curve loomed up ahead, and below us, while we
flew along the narrow gauge at such a pace that we were almost sure the
car would, leave the track before it would round such a point, and each
time the two-by-four went down on the drive wheel with a pressure that
sent up volumes of blue smoke.
It was a wild, grand ride--so wild and grand in fact that even yet we
wake up at night with a start from a dream in which the same party
is riding down that canon at lightning speed, and Mr. Wilbur, in a
thoughtless moment, has dropped his pine brake overboard!
Shades of Sam Patch, but wouldn't it scatter the average excurter over
southern Colorado if such a thing should happen some day! Why, the woods
would be full of them, and for years to come, the prospector along Chalk
Creek Canon would find pyrites of editorial poverty, and indications of
collar buttons, and fragments of Archimedean levers, and other mementoes
of the great editorial hegira of 1882.
CORRALED HIM.
|LAST May Sheriff Boswell received a postal card from a man up near
Fort McKinney, describing a pair of horses that had just been stolen
and asking that Mr. Boswell would keep his eye peeled for the thief and
arrest him on sight.
Last week the sheriff discovered the identical team with color, brands
and everything to correspond. He told the driver that he would have
to turn over that team and come along to the bastile. The man stoutly
protested his innocence and claimed that he owned the team, but Boswell
laughed him to scorn and said he often got such games of talk as that
when he arrested horse thieves.
Just as they were going down into the damp corridors, Judge Blair met
the criminal, recognized him at once and called him by name. It seems
that he was the man who had originally written Boswell, and having found
his horses he had neglected to inform him. Thus, when he came to town
four months afterward, he got snatched. You not only have to call the
officer's attention to a larceny in this country, but it is absolutely
necessary that you call off the sleuth hound of eternal justice when
you have found the property, or you will be gathered in unless you can
identify yourself. Boswell's initials are N. K., and now the boys call
him Nemesis K. Boswell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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