Bill Nye's Cordwood

Next comes the front brakeman in a plug hat about two sizes too large for him. He also wears a long-waisted frock coat with a bustle to it and a tall shirt-collar with a table-spread tie, the ends of which flutter gayly in the morning breeze. As the train pauses at the first station he takes a hammer out of the tool-box and nails on the tire of the fore wheel of his coach. The engineer gets down with a long oil-can and puts a little sewing-machine oil on the pitman. He then wipes it off with his sleeve.

It is now discovered that the rear coach, containing a number of directors and the division superintendent, is missing. The conductor goes to the rear of the last coach, and finds that the string by which the directors' car was attached is broken, and that, the grade being pretty steep, the directors and one brakeman have no doubt gone back to the starting place.

But the conductor is cool. He removes his bell-crowned plug hat, and, taking out his orders and time-card, he finds that the track is clear, and, looking at a large, valuable Waterbury watch, presented to him by a widow whose husband was run over and killed by the train, he sees he can still make the next station in time for dinner. He hires a livery team to go back after the directors' coach, and, calling "All aboard," he swings lightly upon the moving train.

It is now 10 o'clock, and nineteen weary miles still stretch out between him and the dinner station. To add to the horrors of the situation, the front brakeman discovers that a very thirsty boy in the emigrant car has been drinking from the water-supply tank on the tender, and there is not enough left to carry the train through. Much time is consumed in filling the barrel again at a spring near the track, but the conductor finds a "spotter" on the train, and gets him to do it. He also induces him to cut some more wood and clean out the ashes.

The engineer then pulls out a draw-head and begins to make up time. In twenty minutes he has made up an hour's time, though two miles of hoop-iron are torn from the track behind him. He sails into the eating station on time, and, while the master mechanic takes several of the coach-wheels over to the machine-shop to soak, he eats a hurried lunch.

The brakeman here gets his tin lanterns ready for the night run and fills two of them with red oil to be used on the rear coach. The fireman puts a fresh bacon-rind on the eccentric, stuffs some more cotton batting around the axles, puts a new lynch-pin in the hind wheels, sweeps the apple-peelings out of the smoking car, and he is ready.

Then comes the conductor, with his plug hat full of excursion tickets, orders, passes, and timechecks; he looks at his Waterbury watch, waves his hand, and calls "All aboard" again. It is upgrade, however, and for two miles the "spotter" has to push behind with all his might before the conductor will allow him to get on and ride.

Thus began the history of a gigantic enterprise which has grown till it is a comfort, a convenience, a luxury, and yet a necessity. It has built up and beautified the desert. It has crept beneath the broad river, scaled the snowy mountain, and hung by iron arms from the canon and the precipice, carrying the young to new lands and reuniting those long separated. It has taken the hopeless to lands of new hope. It has evaded the solitude of the wilderness, spiked down valuable land-grants, killed cheap cattle and then paid a high price for them, whooped through valleys, snorted over lofty peaks, crept through long, dark tunnels, turning the bright glare of day suddenly upon those who thought the tunnel was two miles long, roared through the night and glittered through the day, bringing alike the groom to his beautiful bride and the weeping prodigal to the moss-grown grave of his mother.

You are indeed a heartless, soulless corporation, and yet you are very essential in our business.

Bill Nye's Letter

HOW OLD BRINDLE MET HER DEATH WITH A TRAINA QUAINT EPISTLE, IN WHICH THE HUMORIST GIVES HIS EXPERIENCE WITH RAILROAD OFFICIALS – HOW HE SECURED PAY FOR A COW

Dear Henry: Your letter stating that you had just succeeded in running your face for a new curriculum is at hand and contents noted, as the feller said when I wrote to him two years ago and told him that his cussed railroad had mashed old Brin. You remember that just as you entered on what you called your junior year, old Brin remained out all night, and your mother and me took our coffee milkless in the morning.

Well, I went down to the pound to see if she had registered there, but she hadn't been stopping there, the night clerk said. He maintained, however, that "number two-aught-eight" – as he called it – had come in half an hour late with a cow's head on the pilot and brindle hair on the runnin' gears of the tender.

So I went over to the station and found Brin's head there, whereupon I went down the track in search of her, though I feared it would be futile, as you once said about administering a half sole to your summer pantaloons. Well, I was right about it, Henry. If I'd been in the futile business for years I couldn't have been more so than I was on this occasion. The old cow was dead and so identified with the right of way, that her own mother would not have known her.

I spoke to the conductor about it and he said it wasn't on his run and for me to see the other conductor. Time I found him he was on another road and killed in a collision with a lumber train. Then I wrote to the general traffic manager, using great care to spell all the words as near right as possible, and he didn't reply at all. His hired man wrote me, however, with a printing press, that my letter had been received and contents duly noted. In reply would say that the general traffic manager was then attending a tripartite reunion at Chicago, at which meeting the subject of cows would come up. He said that there had been such competition between the Milwaukee, the Northwestern and the Rock Island in the matter of prices paid for shattered cows, that farmers got to dragging their debilitated stock on the track at night and selling it to the roads, after which they would retire from business on their ill-gotten gains.

When the general traffic manager got back I went in to see him. He was very pleasant with me, but said he had nothing to do with the dead cow industry. "Go to the auditor or the general solicitor," said he, "they run the morgue." But they were both away attending a large Eastern mass meeting of auditors and general solicitors, where they where discussing the practicability of a new garnishee-proof pay-car, that some party had patented, they said.

So I went home and wrote to the auditor a nice, long, fluent letter in relation to the cow and her merits. I told him that it wasn't the intrinsic value of the cow that I cared about. Intrinsic value is a term that I found in one of your letters and liked very much. I wrote him that old Brin was an heir-loom and a noble brute. I said among other things that she had never been antagonistic to railroads. She had rather favored them; also that her habits and tastes were simple and that she had never aspired to rise above her station in life, and why she should rise higher than the station when she was injured I could not understand. I told him what a good milkster she was, and also that she came up every night as regular as an emetic.

I then wrote my name with a little ornamental squirm to it, added a postscript in which I said that you was now in your junior year, and I thought that about seventy-five dollars would be a fair quotation on such a cow as I had feebly described, and said good-by to him, hoping he would remit at a prior date if possible.

I got a letter after awhile, stating that my favor of the 25th ult. or prox. or something of that nature, had been duly received and contents noted. This was no surprise to me, because that is too often the sad fate of a letter. In fact the same thing had happened to the other one I had previously sent.

I was mad, and wrote to the president of the company stating in crisp language that if his company would pay more cash for cows and do less in the noting and contents business, he would be more apt to endear himself to those who reside along his line and who had their horses scared to death twice a day by his arrogant and bellering besom of destruction. "If you will deal more in scads and less in stenography and monkey business," says I, in closing, "you will warm yourself into the hearts of the plain people. Otherwise," I says, "we will arise in our might and walk."

I then, in a humorsome way, marked it "dictated letter" and sent it away.

I got it back in the face by way of the dead-letter office where they know me. I'll bet they had a good laugh over it, for they opened it and read it while it was there. I wouldn't be surprised if every man in Congress had a good hearty laugh over that letter. Congressmen enjoy a good thing once in a while, Henry. They ain't so dumb as they look.

But I finally got my pay for old Brin, to make a long story short. They cut me down some on the price, but I finally got my money. No railroad company can run over a cow of mine and mix her up with a trestle three-quarters of a mile long, without paying for it, and favors received and contents duly noted don't go with

Your father,Bill Nye.

Bill Nye

ATTENDS A WESTERN THEATER AND SEES A REMARKABLE SHOOTING AFFRAY

Those were troublesome times, indeed, when we were trying to settle up the new world and a few other matters at the same time.

Little do the soft-eyed sons of prosperity understand to-day, as they walk the paved streets of the west under the cold glitter of the electric light, surrounded by all that can go to make life sweet and desirable, that not many years ago on that same ground their fathers fought the untutored savage by night and chased the bounding buffalo by day.

All, all is changed. Time in his restless and resistless flight has filed away those early years in the county clerk's office, and these times are not the old times. With the march of civilization I notice that it is safer for a man to attend a theatre than in the early days of the wild and wooly west. Time has made it easier for one to go to the opera and bring his daylights home with him than it used to be.

It seems but a few short years since my room-mate came home one night with a long red furrow plowed along the top of his head, where some gentleman at the theatre had shot him by mistake. My room-mate said that a tall man had objected to the pianist and suggested that he was playing pianissimo when he should have played fortissimo, and trouble grew out of this which had ended in the death of the pianist and the injury of several disinterested spectators.

And yet the excitement of knowing that you might be killed at any moment made the theatre more attractive, and instead of scaring men away it rather induced patronage. Of course it prevented the attendance of ladies who were at all timid, but it did not cause any falling off in the receipts. Some thought it aided a good deal, especially where the show itself didn't have much blood in it.

The Bella Union was a pretty fair sample of the theatre in those days. It was a low wooden structure with a perpetual band on the outside, that played gay and festive circus tunes early and often. Inside you could poison your soul at the bar and see the show at one and the same price of admission. In an adjoining room silent men joined the hosts of faro and the timid tenderfoot gamboled o'er the green.

I visited this place of amusement one evening in the capacity of a reporter for the paper. I would not admit this, even at this late day, only that it has been overlooked in Mr. Talmage since; and if he could go through such an ordeal in the interests of humanity, I might be forgiven for going there professionally to write up the show for our amusement column.

The programme was quite varied. Negro minstrelsy, sleight-of-hand, opera bouffe, high tragedy, and that oriental style of quadrille called the khan-khan, if my sluggish memory be not at fault, formed the principal attractions of the evening.

At about 10:30 or 11 o'clock the khan-khan was produced upon the stage. In the midst of it a tall man rose up at the back of the hall, and came firmly down the aisle with a large, earnest revolver in his right hand. He was a powerfully built man, with a dyed mustache and wicked eye on each side of his thin, red nose. He threw up the revolver with a little click that sounded very loud to me, for he had stopped right behind me and rested his left hand on my shoulder as he gazed over on the stage. I could distinctly hear his breath come and go, for it was a very loud breath, with the odor of onions and emigrant whisky upon it.

The orchestra paused in the middle of a snort, and the man whose duty it was to swallow the clarionet pulled seven or eight inches of the instrument out of his face and looked wildly around. The gentleman who had been agitating the feelings of the bass viol laid it down on the side, crawled in behind it, and spread a sheet of music over his head.

The stage manager came forward to the footlights and inquired what was wanted. The tall man with the self-cocking credentials answered simply:

"By Dashety Blank to Blank Blank and back again, I want my wife!"

The manager stepped back into the wings for a moment, and when he came forward he also had a large musical instrument such as Mr. Remington used to make before he went into the type-writer business. I can still remember how large the hole in the barrel looked to me, and how I wished that I had gone to the meeting of the Literary club that evening, as I had at first intended to do.

Literature was really more in my line than the drama. I still thought that it was not too late, perhaps, and so I rose and went out quietly so as not to disturb any one, and as I went down the aisle the tall man and stage manager exchanged regrets.

I looked back in time to see the tall man fall in the aisles with his face in the sawdust and his hand over his breast. Then I went out of the theatre in an aimless sort of way, taking a northeasterly direction as the crow flies. I do not think I ran over a mile or two in this way before I discovered that I was going directly away from home. I rested awhile and then returned.

On the street I met the stage manager and the tall, dark man just as they were coming out of the Moss Agate saloon. They said they were very sorry to notice that I got up and came away at a point in the programme where they had introduced what they had regarded as the best feature of the show.

This incident had a great deal to do with turning my attention in the direction of literature instead of the drama.

But I am glad to notice that many of the horrors of the drama are being gradually eliminated as the country gets more thickly settled, and the gory tragedy of a few years ago is gradually giving place to the refining influences of the "Tin Soldier" and "A Rag Baby."

Favored a Higher Fine

THE BOY WHO MADE A DOLLAR BY A WHIPPINGBILL NYE

Will Taylor, the son of the present American consul at Marseilles, was a good deal like other boys while at school in his old home in Hudson, Wis. One day he called his father into the library and said:

"Pa, I don't like to tell you, but the teacher and I have had trouble."

"What's the matter now?"

"Well, I cut one of the desks a little with my knife, and the teacher says I've got to pay $1 or take a lickin'!"

"Well, why don't you take the lickin' and say nothing more about it? I can stand considerable physical pain, so long as it visits our family in that form. Of course it is not pleasant to be flogged, but you have broken a rule of the school, and I guess you'll have to stand it. I presume that the teacher will in wrath remember mercy and avoid disabling you, so that you can't get your coat on any more."

"But, pa, I feel mighty bad over it, already, and if you would pay my fine, I'd never do it again. A dollar isn't much to you, pa, but it's a heap to a boy who hasn't a cent. If I could make a dollar as easy as you can, pa, I'd never let my little boy get flogged that way to save a dollar. If I had a little feller that got licked bekuz I didn't put up for him I'd hate the sight of money always. I'd feel as ef every dollar I had in my pocket had been taken out of my little kid's back."

"Well, now, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you a dollar to save you from punishment this time, but if anything of this kind ever occurs again I'll hold you while the teacher licks you and then I'll get the teacher to hold you while I lick you. That's the way I feel about that. If you want to go around whittling up our educational institutions you can do so; but you will have to purchase them afterward yourself. I don't propose to buy any more damaged furniture. You probably grasp my meaning, do you not? I send you to school to acquire an education, not to acquire liabilities, so that you can come around and make an assessment on me. I feel a great interest in you, Willie, but I do not feel as though it should be an assessable interest. I want to go on of course and improve the property, but when I pay my dues on it, I want to know that it goes toward development work. I don't want my assessments to go toward the purchase of a school-desk with American hieroglyphics carved on it. I hope you will bear this in mind, my son, and beware. It will be greatly to your interest to beware. If I were in your place I would put in a large portion of my time in the beware business."

The boy took the dollar and went thoughtfully away to school and no more was ever said about the matter until Mr. Taylor learned casually several months later that the Spartan youth had received the walloping and filed away the $1 for future reference. The boy was afterward heard to say that he favored a much higher fine in cases of that kind. One whipping was sufficient, he said, but he favored a fine of $5. It ought to be severe enough to make it an object.

How Bill Nye Failed to Make the Amende Honorable – A Pathetic Incident

It is rather interesting to watch the manner by which old customs have been slightly changed and handed down from age to age. Peculiarities of old traditions still linger among us, and are forked over to posterity like a wappy-jawed tea-pot or a long-time mortgage. No one can explain it, but the fact still remains patent that some of the oddities of our ancestors continue to appear from time to time clothed in the changing costumes of the prevailing fashions.

Along with these choice antiquities and carrying the nut-brown flavor of the dead and relentless original amende in which the offender appeared in public clothed only in a cotton flannel shirt and with a rope around his neck as an evidence of a former recantation down to this day when (sometimes) the pale editor in a stickfull of type admits that "his informant was in error," the amende honorable has marched along with the easy tread of time. The blue-eyed moulder of public opinion, with one suspender hanging down at his side and writing on a sheet of news-copy paper, has a more extensive costume perhaps than the old-time offender who bowed in the dust in the midst of the great populace and with a halter under his ear admitted his offense, but he does not feel any more cheerful over it.

I have been called upon several times to make the amende honorable, and I admit that it is not an occasion of much mirth and merriment. People who come into the editorial office to invest in a retraction are generally healthy, and have a stiff, reserved manner that no cheerfulness or hospitality can soften.

I remember an incident of this kind which occurred last summer in my office while I was writing something scathing. A large man with an air of profound perspiration about him and a plaid flannel shirt, stepped into the middle of the room and breathed in all the air that I was not using. He said he would give me four minutes in which to retract, and pulled out a watch by which to ascertain the exact time. I asked him if he would not allow me a moment or two to step over to a telegraph office to wire my parents of my awful death. He said I could walk out that door when I walked over his dead body. Then I waited a long time, till he told me my time was up, and asked me what I was waiting for. I told him I was waiting for him to die so that I could walk over his dead body. How could I walk over a corpse until life was extinct?

He stood and looked at me, at first in astonishment, afterward in pity. Finally tears welled up in his eyes and plowed their way down his broad and grimy face. Then he said I need not fear him.

"You are safe," said he. "A youth who is so patient and cheerful as you are, one who would wait for a healthy man to die so you could meander over his pulseless remnants, ought not to die a violent death. A soft-eyed seraph like you, who is no more conversant with the ways of the world than that, ought to be put in a glass vial of alcohol and preserved. I came up here to kill you and throw you into the rain-water barrel, but now that I know what a patient disposition you have, I shudder to think of the crime I was about to commit."

Seeing a Saw Mill

BILL NYE

I have just returned from a little trip up from the North Wisconsin Railway, where I went to catch a string of codfish and anything else that might be contagious.

Northern Wisconsin is the place where they yank a big wet log into a mill and turn it into cash as quick as a railroad man can draw his salary out of the pay-car. The log is held on a carriage by means of iron dogs while it is being worked into lumber. These iron dogs are not like those we see on the front steps of a brown stone front occasionally. They are another breed of dogs.

The managing editor of the mill lays out the log in his mind and works it into dimension stuff, shingles, bolts, slabs, edgings, two-by-fours, two-by-eights, two-by-sixes, etc., so as to use the goods to the best advantage, just as a woman takes a dress-pattern and cuts it so she won't have to piece the front breadths and will still have enough left to make a polonaise for last summer's gown.

I stood there for a long time watching the various saws and listening to the monstrous growl and wishing that I had been born a successful timber-thief instead of a poor boy without a rag to my back.

At one of these mills not long ago, a man backed up to get away from the carriage and thoughtlessly backed against a large saw that was revolving at the rate of about 200 times a minute. The saw took a large chew of tobacco from the plug he had in his pistol pocket and then began on him.

But there's no use going into the details. Such things are not cheerful. They gathered him up out of the saw-dust and put him in a nail keg and carried him away, but he did not speak again. Life was quite extinct. Whether it was the nervous shock that killed him, or the concussion of the cold saw against his liver that killed him no one ever knew.

The mill shut down a couple of hours so that the head sawyer could file his saw, and then work was resumed once more.

We should learn from this never to lean on the buzz-saw when it moveth itself aright.

How A Chinaman Rides the Untamed Broncho

BILL NYE

A Chinaman does not grab the bit of a broncho and yank it around till the noble beast can see thirteen new and peculiar kinds of fire-works, or kick him in the stomach, or knock his ribs loose, or swear at him until the firmament gets loose and begins to roll together like a scroll, but he gets on the wrong side and slides into the saddle and smiles and says something like what a guinea hen would say if she got excited and tried to repeat one of Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson's poems backward in his native tongue. At first the broncho seems temporarily rattled, but by-and-by he shoots athwart the sunny sky like a thing of life and comes down with his legs in a cluster like a bunch of asparagus.

This will throw a Chinaman's liver into the northwest corner of his throat, and his upper left hand duodessimo into the middle of next week, but he doesn't complain. He opens his mouth and breaths in all of the atmosphere the rest of the universe can spare, and tickles the broncho on the starboard quarter with his cork sole. The mirth-provoking movement throws the broncho into the wildest hysterics, and for some minutes the spectator doesn't see anything very distinctly. The autumnal twilight seems fraught with blonde broncho and pale-blue shirt tail and Chinaman moving in an irregular orbit, and occasionally throwing off meteoric articles of apparel and pre-historic chunks of ingenious profanity of the vintage of Confucius. When the sky clears up a little the Chinaman's hair is down and in wild profusion about his olive features. His shirt flap is very much frayed, like an American flag that has snapped in the breeze for thirteen weeks.