"So we figured out a proposition which seems to be as honorable as a
gold mine prospectus and as profitable as a church raffle. And inside
of thirty days you find us swarming into Kansas with a pair of fluent
horses and a red camping wagon on the European plan. John Tom is Chief
Wish-Heap-Dough, the famous Indian medicine man and Samaritan Sachem
of the Seven Tribes. Mr. Peters is business manager and half owner. We
needed a third man, so we looked around and found J. Conyngham Binkly
leaning against the want column of a newspaper. This Binkly has a
disease for Shakespearian rôles, and an hallucination about a 200
nights' run on the New York stage. But he confesses that he never could
earn the butter to spread on his William S. rôles, so he is willing to
drop to the ordinary baker's kind, and be satisfied with a 200-mile
run behind the medicine ponies. Besides Richard III, he could do
twenty-seven coon songs and banjo specialties, and was willing to cook,
and curry the horses. We carried a fine line of excuses for taking
money. One was a magic soap for removing grease spots and quarters from
clothes. One was a Sum-wah-tah, the great Indian Remedy made from a
prairie herb revealed by the Great Spirit in a dream to his favorite
medicine men, the great chiefs McGarrity and Siberstein, bottlers,
Chicago. And the other was a frivolous system of pick-pocketing the
Kansasters that had the department stores reduced to a decimal fraction.
Look ye! A pair of silk garters, a dream book, one dozen clothespins,
a gold tooth, and 'When Knighthood Was in Flower' all wrapped up in a
genuine Japanese silkarina handkerchief and handed to the handsome lady
by Mr. Peters for the trivial sum of fifty cents, while Professor Binkly
entertains us in a three-minute round with the banjo.
"'Twas an eminent graft we had. We ravaged peacefully through the State,
determined to remove all doubt as to why 'twas called bleeding Kansas.
John Tom Little Bear, in full Indian chief's costume, drew crowds away
from the parchesi sociables and government ownership conversaziones.
While at the football college in the East he had acquired quantities
of rhetoric and the art of calisthenics and sophistry in his classes,
and when he stood up in the red wagon and explained to the farmers,
eloquent, about chilblains and hyperÊsthesia of the cranium, Jeff
couldn't hand out the Indian Remedy fast enough for 'em.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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