Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 282, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 November 1910 — Little “Cowboy” Meets Tragic Death [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Little “Cowboy” Meets Tragic Death

CHICAGO. —It was a game of “Indian.” In the fertile of four-year-old “Captain Jack” Sexton, the alley was peopled with hawkeyed savages and the red-skinned scouts looked down menacingly from the tops of the neighboring buildings. A war bonnet showed above an adjoining fence, but a well aimed shot from a wooden rifle laid its wearer in the dust. To the little band led by "Captain Jack” the scene was not in the rear of the Sexton home at 6455 Ingleside avenue, but was instead in the vague plains of the west, where once the Apache left his bones beside those of his pale-faced enemy. To thenrthe fire around which they romped was a camp fire, and beyond the circle of its light lay all the dangers of a trackless wilderness.

Clad in a yellow “cowboy” suit With a gaudy fringe of scarlet tassels, "Captain Jack” crouched with ready rifle, his face flushed with enthusiasm as he scanned,the landscape for a hostile face. But the enemy was nearer and more subtle than even his childish imagination had pietured, and fanned by a fatal gust of wind the “camp Are” stretched out a flaming tongue and touched the flimsy garment of the little Indian hunter. There was a shout of warning from the other children, and a scream of pain from “Captain Jack.” As the flames spread over him he started running for his mother, but was caught by James Bennet, who was passing the house, and who smothered the fire with his coat. But rescue came too late, though the child was hurried to the hospital and tender hands cut the charred cowboy suit from the senseless form and dressed the seared flesh. And while his broken hearted mother knelt weeping at his beside “Capain Jack” entered that uncharted land more vast than all the plains beneath the sun.