To-day in the arena I killed a man in the Black Hills coach, and when I undid his cinch, behold! he was my friend. The same sweet smile was on his face that I had noted when I met him on my trip abroad. He knew me smiled faintly, made a few false motions and died. I begged that I might bear away the body to my tepee and express it to his country seat, near Limerick, and upon my bended knees, amid the dust and blood of the arena, I begged this pool favor, and a Roman prætor from St. George answered: "Let the carrion rot. There are no noble men but Romans and banana men. Let the show go on. Give us our money's worth. Bring out the bobtail lion from Abyssinia and the bucking bronco from Dead Man's Ranch." And the assembled maids and matrons and the rabble shouted in derision and told me to brace up, and bade Johnnie git his gun, git his gun, git his gun, and other vile flings which I do not now recall. And so must you, fellow warriors, and so must I, die like dogs. Ye stand here like giants (N. Y. Giants) as ye are, but to-morrow the fangs of the infuriated buffalo may sink into your quivering flesh. To-night ye stand here in the full flush of health and conscious rectitude, but to-morrow some crank may shoot you from the Deadwood coach. Hark! Hear ye yon buffalo roaring in her den? 'Tis three days since she tasted flesh, but to-morrow she will have warrior on toast, and don't you forget it. And she will fling your vertebrae about her cage like the costly Etruscan pitcher of a League nine. If ye are brutes, then stand here like fat oxen waiting for the butcher's knife. If ye are men, arise and follow me. We will beat down the guard, overpower the ticket-chopper and cut for the tall timber. We will go through Ellum Park, Port Richmond, Tower Hill, West Brighton, Sailors' Snug Harbor and New Brighton like a colored revival through a watermelon patch, beat down the walls of the Circus Maximus, tear the mosquito bars from the windows of Nero's palace, capture the Roman ballet and light out for Europe. O comrades! warriors!! gladiators!!! If we be men, let us die like men, beneath the blue sky, don't you know, and by the still waters, according to Gunter, in the presence of the nobility, rather than be stepped on by a spoiled bronco, surrounded by low tradesmen from New York. TO THE POOR SHINNECOCK |THERE can be nothing more pathetic than to watch the decay of a race, even though it be a scrub race. To watch the decay of the Indian race, has been with me, for many years a passion, and the more the Indian has decayed the more reckless I have been in studying his ways. The Indian race for over two hundred years has been a race against Time, and I need hardly add that Time is away ahead as I pen these lines.