Part 2

SHOOTING IN ILLINOIS.

"_The days that are no more._"

The way you used to catch the wily muskrat years ago on the Calumet River was to set a tooth trap in the water, in one of his runs in summer; in winter you could skate or walk to their houses, built of reeds, three feet high, and dome shaped, and spear them with a three-foot spear on a pole. The skins, taken off and dried by being stretched on willow twigs, were worth seventeen cents a piece. Big ducks sold for two and a half to three dollars a dozen to the dealers--canvas back, red-heads, etc.--smaller ones, Teal, blue-bills, widgeon, butter balls, etc., for two dollars.

There were fellows there making a good living at hunting and trapping, and some owned farms on the river bank.

The duck-shooting was the best I have had in any country. Now I believe there is still some shooting held by clubs. The Pullman place is where we used to shoot hundreds of birds beyond where the best shooting house (Chittendens) used to be, where the river forks. Then you could shoot forty miles up to the Grand Calumet and there were lakes and swamps, flight shooting night and morning, and in the day one could pole through the wild rice; etc., or take a stand now and then, or land and try the ridges for prairie chicken. There were also woodcock and snipe. Further away the pineries for deer. Still hunting, because there were Indians who would shoot dogs; they do spoil still hunting. You would not see the Indian as the brush was very thick. If you do see him and shoot at him and miss him, as one of us did, it is better not to go again. We did, and a bullet came between us and stuck in a tree. The man I was with did not like Indians and shot at them when he got a chance.

AFTER OSTRICHES.

On the South American pampas you ride one horse and lead your fastest when you are after ostriches. The birds raise their wings and sail before the wind at an awful pace and if you do not get up to one soon after he starts you might as well give up. When you get near you change horses, and, taking your bolas (three balls as big as pigeon eggs of lead or brass, on a plaited rawhide thong) from around your middle, begin to swing them around in your right hand keeping your finger hooked through the fork of the thong, holding one ball in your hand. As you close up, you bring them over your head, letting your finger loose them to their six foot length. You send your gee along and, bending forward, loose them at your ostrich. If you hit him, the bolas tangle him up and down he comes. If there are holes and things, you come down instead. It is a fast thing and as often as not or oftener you are bareback. Sometimes fellows make a big circle and close in on the birds; then you have a lively time, particularly if you play at being an ostrich yourself.

A WHITLOW.

Pain! oh yes! Fourteen days in and out of bed alone in a shanty, forty miles from town. Whitlow they call it; an Indian woman advised a piece of willow burned and the powder mixed with the yolk of an egg in the shell; no good. Animals to feed, water to draw, etc., when one is so scared of one's own finger that one breaks a demijohn up and cuts a hole in the wicker cover in which to slip one's hand in bed. Not much to eat and one gets weaker, but has sense enough not to stay too long in a room with a gun. Got the old horse (Somerset) and saddle on someway and to town. Lot of English sailors off a gunboat in the hotel, dancing and singing. Two are interested and want to know if man will come aboard because they "have a sawbones who will take it off with a handsaw." Well, surgeon cuts the finger up both sides and later the other two sides; couldn't tell what it was; never be a success again. One can see what it was meant for. Another time diphtheria. Doctor came one hundred and thirty miles and found man with his head in a blanket on the table, no brush and made one out of prairie wolf hair; did his throat like cleaning a gun; man got well.

BUCHATON.

Three houses now in this colony, joining Indian Territory. Mine was first; then a Frenchman came and used my well and corral, etc., till he got settled half a mile away; and another is being put up for a store. One foggy night, or morning rather (1 A. M.), some one woke me, rapping on the door. As I was alone and one did not expect people, or open the door after dark without knowing what is on the other side, I asked and a woman's voice answered; opened and there was Buchaton's wife with two small children. They had found the house luckily after two hours in the fog. Her man had been doing something with the stove and had words with an Argentino and friend. The Argentino started for him with his knife but the wife got it and threw it away (man was a little drunk). He picked it up again and killed the Frenchman; then they tied him up with a lasso (the woman had run out with the children), got their horses, and left. Some of us got horses and went to the house but the man was dead; there was a trail in the wet grass in the moonlight but we never caught them as they changed horses and got over the line into another state.

FEVER.

In China and some other places one has a fever getting acclimated. One in Shanghai left man pretty weak when the usual plague of boils broke out. Then there was less rest for the wicked than ever, and he balanced himself on a boil and thought about Job. The doctor says that the man is better and that this is a crisis he wanted (man wishes doctor had it). But man does get well after many dawns, watching the bats come home to roost in the round tiles used in the roofs here. Then cats come along the edge and reaching paws over extract the bats and put them away and go after more. The man thinks he's glad he's not a bat and goes to sleep and wakes up better and forgets about it till some day years after he dreams dreams.

Talking of fevers, when the oil wells started in Canada it was rather rough living. The water to drink very bad, and so on. At all events we got a bad mixture of typhoid and smallpox and not much doctor. So a great many died. One of us had it and another nursed him till he got to his bed and forgot everything except sticking a favorite pin in a rafter overhead. The other was better and had sent a line to friends a hundred miles away; they came, and the two men were put on their mattresses on the bottom of a wagon and so over eighteen miles of corduroy road (which is trees laid alongside one another) and into the baggage car of a railroad train. The war was going on and sympathetic passengers came in: "Oh, poor fellows! where were they wounded?" Our friends said: "not wounded at all; typhoid," and the car was empty. Took us nine weeks to get around. H. McC. carried one along the railway platform and if you have ever been carried through a lot of people when you have sense enough to know that you are grown up and want to hit some one if you had the strength, you know what one felt like--Wonder who got that pin!

TO SLEEP, TO SLEEP.

We did not know this morning if we would stay the night and went out for a walk. While away twenty-seven geological students arrived and took everything and more in the shape of beds; so here we are in a big attic of a little house on top of the Grinsel Pass in Switzerland. The room is the cheese room surrounded by shelves on which immense gruyere cheeses are drying--all kinds of makeshift beds on the floor and for washing little basins and wine bottles on a bench; lovely! Went to bed midnight and as we leave at 4 a.m. and the interval is filled up by a number of peasants yodeling--below why "Happy, happy, happy be thy dreams."

HALF THE WORLD DON'T KNOW HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES OR DIES.

A small hut made of reeds, lost in an immense swamp--the home of a girl and an old gaucho. Man gone; don't know when or where, leaving the girl stripped and tied with a piece of a lasso to a post in the hut, stabbed and dead. She was quite young and rather pretty--poor thing.

At another place found the German girl who cooked for the S----s, stripped and tied down in the prairie just outside the village. Three natives (horseback of course) caught her and carried her off and staceared her. (I don't know how they spell it but that is what it's called in Spanish) means pegging your hands and feet with rawhide to the ground. Under her was a knife; suppose they meant to kill her but got scared away. She died; had been there all night.

HARD TIMES--AGAIN.

A man (in California) lying in bed dying; wife ill in bed in the next room watching him through the open door; third and last room divided by sheets into two, one-half with stove in it, the other used by anyone including seven children all under nine years old. No money. The man died; money was collected and he was buried; and family sent back to Europe. S. P. railway made a reduction on fares; train was to leave at 10 p.m., telegram to say it would be 11 p.m.

The woman, children, and man waited till eleven when another message came to say the cars would not be in till 2 a.m. So they went over to the hotel and got a sleep till a quarter to two when the man woke them up and the procession trailed back and got aboard. Trainman interested: "Where's she goin'?" "Europe," said the man.

"With all them kids! Never get there alive."

She did though; man nearly went also as he was inside the car putting a big roll of mattresses through the door and they jammed, cars were moving and man crawled over the top of the bundle and slid onto the platform and off the car saying to an astonished conductor who appeared from somewhere, "you get those mattresses in old man."

"THERE WAS A SHIP QUOTH HE."

Coming down the Plata River in the "Cisne" steamer a fellow passenger asked us to help him when we landed. We said we would. Well, it was very dark and raining; we landed under a wharf, arrangement on the other side of which was a ten-foot steep and slippery mud-bank on top of which were one or two wheel carts made with a pole with a hole in the far end. The carter slips a rawhide fast to his horse's cinch, through the pole hole and makes fast, he (riding the horse) can then pull, or if he wants to back, ride his horse around the pole and push backwards. To return to our mutton, what our man wanted was help to land a portmanteau and some heavy small boxes and we got them into a cart after a weary time sliding up and down that mud bank and much indifferent language. One native rode and two friends kept him company. We had to go two miles over a wicked road. The tall grass grows right up to it on both sides and there have been a lot of unpleasant things happening; so we had our guns in our hands. We had found out that our friend from Paraguay, one of his prisoners Lopez left alive, had been trading and the boxes, etc., were full of gold, and silver dollars. Got to the hotel all right and had a drink. There was a funny little old man with hair over his shoulders and white beard to his middle and very old clothes. He looked lonely so we asked him to drink. No, he did not drink. Smoke? No; he did not smoke but he put a cigar in his pocket. Felt curious about him and asked him and the capitalist to my room, also, drink and cigars. They came and oh, yes! I had struck it rich. The little man was I think doing penance. He would not say why he had tramped hundreds of leagues through the wildest parts of the country with some polenta to eat and no arms except a small pocket knife, or why he had not cut hair or beard for seven years; but the stories those men told each other, myself sitting listening till 4 a.m. with hardly a word; and they could have gone on for weeks. I said that queer things happened on the road we came here by, in the grass that borders the road back a little way are adobe huts and very queer people live there. Everyone carries a knife of course but the police had a very bad character for a time. At another men riding were lassoed from the grass and you are gone if a lasso gets you. At another the natives did not like it because a number of men were killed one by one and there were stories of a ghost. Soldiers hunted and some of us went out many nights. At last some one was stabbed but before he died shot a tall man dressed as a woman. What with the night, tall grass in which to slip out of sight, and dark dress, the ghost theory is easy. His trick had been to ask you for the time or for a light, and stab you as you got it. For some time after if one was asked for a light about there after dark, one threw a matchbox and said help yourself.

HEALTH AND APPETITE.

Sitting in a little park in Los Angeles some one sat down on the other end of the bench. Seeing a dilapidated pair of boots that did not match I went on reading. After a while the stillness was broken by: "Got ten cents pardner?"

"What do you want ten cents for?" said I.

"Well, pardner, I'm here from Milwaukee, was in the lumber trade there and got six dollars a day, my brother has a big place there; he sent me some money yesterday, I got broke, an' I went on a tear an' spent it all, an' my mouth's awful dry an' I want a drink." It sounded straight so we had a talk about the Keeley cure about which I told him, and about Florida and lumber about which he told me and compromised on twenty-five cents of which he agreed to spend fifteen on solid food; hope he did.

KNUCKLE-DUSTING.

Coming up from Aspinwall to New York, a second-class passenger came into the first-class saloon and a big steward objected. Man did not like it and when the steward swore at him, he struck the steward (much the biggest man) and knocked him down; the steward said the man used a knife; no one had seen a knife but over the Steward's heart was a little tear in his white duck. Captain took a hand, and steward, who had had a bad record was put in irons. Other man turned out to be an artist; had been through Borneo--of all places--and come out alive with a wonderful lot of pictures and photographs (burned later). Came into my cabin as he wanted to copy a little sketch of Panama. Showed me how that tear happened; he used a knuckle-duster that was in his pocket when he (the steward) came at him the second time. An ugly thing; iron ring with holes that your fingers go through, short spikes over your knuckles, and a longer one below your clenched hand.

WANDERERS.

Making a fire after a long day in the boat and not thinking there was anyone else for miles; rather there was not, as the nearest place is the line between two states where a number of "bad men" have settled. When the soldiers from one state come for any of them (if they ever do) the men can step over the line. Well, we were getting wood and one of us came out of the night with a fellow walking behind, knife in hand (such a foolish thing; why not in front?) A canoe slid out of the fog with two muffled women astern, and three more men who got out and stood round the fire. As they had their knives out, one of us left fishing in the boat and passed guns round to our side. Then we talked and ate. They were very free and easy villains but went off into the fog again all right. After keeping watch awhile we went to sleep.

"THE WEARY PLOUGHBOY."

"The weary ploughboy homeward bound," and not knowing one day from another here we were ploughing with bullocks when a man riding by said: "Thought you English did not work Sundays." My brother was wild; he threw the ear ropes down and wanted to know "If he'd lived all these years and traveled all these miles to plough Sundays with adjectived bullocks in a condemned country!" Bullocks are trying. The Reverend--looking out of the train at Frayle Muerto saw an Englishman swearing wonderfully at his bullocks. The Reverend told him to be gentle; the man being angry threw his ropes down, telling the Reverend to take them around himself. The Reverend did so; and it is said that by the time he got around--well you can guess. We got a little two-wheeled cart and with a broncho not used to driving. Some one behind him with his leather belt and buckle; and a peon on a horse in front to pull him along, and so across camp to a railway and my brother went back to England. The rest of the outfit got home somehow.

A QUARREL--CANDELARIA.

Swede playing billiards with an Italian in a cafe full of Italians; they quarrelled and the Swede used his cue and the Italian a small knife, as the manager came in the Swede went down and some men bolted.

Manager locked the doors with thirty or forty inside but the man had gone. Three of us went through houses where men were sleeping and then a mile into camp to a house where two Italians and a big dog lived; knocked; man appeared behind dog in doorway. H told him to call off his dog; would not; so H shot the dog and we went in. Found Ruffinelli in bed, pretending sleep; shirt covered with blood and head tied up; not pretty to look at. Put him on a horse and tied his feet together, brought him to the only brick building in town. Some got on top of it with guns while the manager did sentry; there are hundreds of Italians here. A stage starts for town at 8 A. M. and the manager suggested that if there were no passengers the stage should take the man in now before the other gentlemen woke up, and we could go to bed. It was done, and Ruffinelli went off and later got seven years on the frontier.

FIRE AGAIN.

A cold night on this big river though we are getting south now after our thousand miles in our little boat; so we got ashore and supped on grebe which reminded one of red herrings. Found a little grass hut built by a woodcutter possibly, and three of us snuggled up on the floor, just big enough, with a candle and part of a book. Heaven knows where the man got it. Well, we went to sleep and the bookman knocked the candle over and the fire ran up the hut luckily one of us woke and put it out and the others never knew and told the fireman next noon that "he had been dreaming"; is so, why that black streak? Another morning we found a big jaguar and cub had passed a yard from A's head. They were grunting all night close to us in the jungle, and could not have been hungry as there were five of us to choose from. Got aboard and got lost on the Chaco side of the river. This gran Chaco is an endless maze of creeks and little islands covered with trees and jungle, no birds or beasts seemingly and the fish won't bite often. There are some hostile Indians but the chances are greatly in favor of starving to death, a desolate place but the wind brought us to the river again and when the cox wanted to go about, it blew so fresh that mast and big lateèn sail went. Two of us jumped and held on to it but it was hard on finger nails and as there was quite a little sea our small boat was tumbling about. We all had our trousers rolled up to our knees except Maria, who was a Paraguayan woman and wife of Salvador, a Portuguese, who we called Joe. Fortunately there was a little island on to which we drifted. Maria was frightened and knelt down a few yards off, with her skirt over her head, for five minutes, like an image. Then she rose up and said: "It is a bad wind; we shall not get to Rosario alive," and set to work like a little man. We fixed our mast up with fish lines and whatever we had. Drifting again on the Chaco side where the jungle is not as thick as on the other, with more trees. We ran in to look at what turns out to be boughs bent over in a half-circle, once a tiny hut four feet high. Now the thatch is gone and there is two or three inches of water and rotten leaves, sitting in which and leaning against the boughs is a skeleton and a worm-eaten flint lock musket alongside, the skull has rolled or been blown off and lies there. What a death! miles of dark silent forest behind, in front the immense river, the wash of which is the only sound. Poor devil, wonder who it was once! We left it sitting there and I do not suppose anyone will come across it again.

TWO FALLS AND A COW.

Chasing a little cow bareback and riding loosely she made a quick turn and the mare stuck to her just where we had worn a track bringing the adobes for houses. Man's head struck the track and a native woman carried the remains into a house and doctored him. Another time, sitting on a blanket strapped around a tall black beast with a back like the roof of a church, and leading a mare, dogs came and scared the mare, man held but the rope was only around the mare's neck and, as she was faster than the horse, man was pulled forward over the horse's head, one hand full of reins, revolver, and mane, the other of the mare. Strap round the blanket loosened and away went man onto his back. Mare dragged him fifty yards over burned camp and the skin came off his arms and the black stuff rubbed in. Took some time to heal and he could not get up for a while because he thought his back was broke; also he had to swear at the dog owners when they ran up. One day, as we stood about among some piles of brick, a cow stood pawing the dust up near, suddenly she charged and all got on brick piles except one who thought it was all right because he was behind a heap; but the cow turned round the corner and came at him head down and tail up. Now would you think that that man stood perfectly still and watched the cow's shoulder wondering if he had a sword whether he could hit the right spot? We had been seeing a good many bull fights lately. Anyway when he jumped to one side he did it mechanically and the cow's horn tore his coat. She kept straight on though.

REAL GHOSTS.