Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 September 1883 — The Editor’s Indian Fight. [ARTICLE]

The Editor’s Indian Fight.

“Whoop!” sang out the boy, as he came bounding into the room, with his sun-kissed golden locks disheveled and a splash of mud on his nose. “Did you see the Sioux Indians in the circus parade ?” “Circus parade!” sneered the exchange editor. “Do you suppose that a Sioux brave would allow himself to be pulled around the country on a Dutch metal band wagon for the sake of a few dollers and an occasional drink of whisky? Those fellows you saw weren’t Indians.” “Well, I don’t know,” said the boy thoughtfully, the varying expressions of doubt, diffidence and a desire to drop a cockroach down the exchange editor’s neck chasing each other fitfully over his mosaic features. “They were the color of a half-burned brick, and they had hen’s feathers sticking in their ears, and they smelt like a cow-house. If they weren’t Indians they were a very good imitation, seems to me.” “Ah!” said the exchange editor, a faraway look in his eyes and his right hand unconsciously clutching the boy by one of his shell-like ears. “You should see the noble red man as I have seen him when I ran the Weekly Scalper in Wyoming Territory. There was no circus parade about him there. His splendid physical proportions, his graceful ways of stealing whisky and horses, and above all, the unerring certainty with which he would get drunk every time he showed up at the agency for supplies, were enough to make a man wish he was one of the tribe himself.” And the exchange editor shook his head until he loosened his store teeth, and knocked all the stiffening out of his stick-up collar. “Did you ever see the Indians fight?” asked the boy, as he pulled himself loose, and looked admiringly at the diamond in the bosom of the editor’s dirty shirt. “Did I? Well, I should say so. Look at this deep scar on my head.” “Do you mean tha; crack on the top, where all the dust has settled?” inquired the lad, innocently. “Never mind about the dust. That scar is a memento of a combat I had with Perspiring Horseshoe, a Sioux chief, who wouldn’t pay up his subscription for the Scalper. We fought for three hours,and 1 wore my bowie-knife down .nearly to the handle by hacking him in different parts of the body. Just as I gave the last stab that finished him he drove his tomahawk into my skull so that the two halves fell apart like leaves of a photograph album.” “lou got well, though, didn’t you?” “Oh„ yes; you couldn’t easily kill me,” assented the exchange editor, with a condescending simper. “No; I heard that the policeman who banged you over the head the night you went to the Press Club banquet was going to make you pay lor the splinters you knocked off his club. He said that }ou had a head like a leather-covered trunk, and if he hadn’t known you all your life, and th it you were never outside of Pittsburgh, he’d have taken you for a Mississsippi deck-hand. ” “ You young, scoundrel!” howled the exchange editor, sputtering around for something to tin ow at the evaporating lad. “Good-by,” chirped the boy through the chink of the door. “I shouldn’t wonder if some of the splinters from the hickory club was to take root in that crack in your head. There is plenty of real estate there, and if a tree was to spring up gocd and strong you wouldn’t have to use any more hair restorer. ” The exchange editor was so sardonically mad that his weird “Ha, ha!” pursued the boyJike an avenging spirit all the way down stairs to the front door and induced him to get into a fight with a bootblack before he was five minutes older. — Pittsburgh Sunday Traveler.