Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 September 1883 — THEY CUT HIS ROPE. [ARTICLE]

THEY CUT HIS ROPE.

The Wonderful AdvMtarM of an Artist Who Points on Precipice*. “Give me a good silk rope—silk because a very small silk rope will carry a man, and a painter don’t want to lug a heavy rope around with him—and Pll paint your name on the steepest precipice that ever was. “When I’m sitting down my brush has got a seven-foot swing, and I set out to paint the words ‘Love’s Lung Lozenges’ in seven-foot letters. I didn’t care if it took me a week, I wasn’t going to be bluffed by them Tombstoners. “Well, sir, I was brushing away and singing to myself like a mocking-bird, when a stone came down and lit fair in the paint-pot, splashing paint all over my sign. I looked up madder’n a hornet, and there I see two dirty Apache heads grinning at me. “I didn’t say anything, but the sight of them took the life out of me sp that I dropped my brush, and I could hear it bounding along from rock to rock until finally it struck bottom. It seemed to me ten minutes from the time that brush left my hand until it struck the ground. Every time it bounced from one rock to another I seemed to say to myself, ‘You’ll strike there and there and there.’ “I knew the Indians were Apaches the minute I saw their heads, and I knew, too, that the Apache is the bloodthirstieth animal on earth. “They grinned at me, with their heads stuck over the precipice, and then one of* them swung out his right arm and began making passes at the taut rope with a butcher-knife in his hand. “I watched that knife flying around up there with its sharp edge always turned toward the rope, until it made me sick, and I looked down for relief. Below me there was nothing but little mesquit bush growing out of the precipice about half way down, and under that bowlders. “Suddenly I thought of something, and whipping my whisky flask out of my breast pocket, I held it up toward them. They stopped grinning, the knife stopped wheeling around, and I saw in a minute that they were two thirsty Indians, and that I had a chance yet. •But like a blamed fool I was too sure, and didn’t take enough care of the bottle, and the first thing I knew it slipped from my hand and smashed to flinders on the rocks below. “The Indians gave one howl and then zip went the knife across the rope, and I followed the whisky bottle. “Did I get killed! Well, not hardly. You remember that mesquit bush? Well, the end of the rope managed to get wrapped around that bush in the fall, and it brought me up so sudden that the shock broke out four of my front teeth.” “But you were still a hundred feet above ground, and your rope only fifty feet long.” “To be sure; but everything was plain sailing now. I just shinned up the rope to the bush, got the rope out of snarl and unraveled it so as to make two ropes, only half as thick each as the other was. See? The rope was plenty strong enough to bear me, thin as it was, and down I came like greased lightning, and then footed it back to Benson, where I bought a new outfi and went on ahead to ’Frisco.”