Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 86, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 April 1911 — Salt on the Bird’s Tail Story of a Mardi Gras Masquerade [ARTICLE]

Salt on the Bird’s Tail Story of a Mardi Gras Masquerade

By SAMUEL E. BRANT

"Who is the biggest fool you ever ftietr “Man or woman?" “Woman." “The girl I'm engaged to." “Well, I like that. What kind at wife do you expect her to make?’ “How should I know her qualifications for a wife? Marriage is a lottery. Other men may marry for qualifies-' tions, but we youngsters don’t pretend to forecast what a girl's going to be. And I don’t believe the old ones hit it any better than we." “What makes you set your fiancee down as a fool?” “I’ll tell you, but I must begin back a little way. She’s Madge Whitridge. only it should be Madge Wildfire instead. Not that she is so wild as she was. She’s been quieted down a bit by a certain little happening that came near resulting disastrously. She nearly caused my death.” “You don’t mean it! Not intentionally, I suppose." “Well, whether there was a spark of Intention in it I don’t know. You never can tell what a woman is going to do or why she does it. We can’t be sure she knows herself. If Madge had caused my death any prosecuting attorney might have made a very good case against, her of doing it with malice aforethought. And to tell the truth I’m not sure but she did." “And you’re going to marry her?’ “You bet—that is. If she doesn’t shake me for another fellow, though I don’t think she would do that now. She might have done it before this thing I’m going to tell you about happened; but, as I said, it sobered her, and she’s quite tame. That’s the time I chose for putting salt on the bird's tail. “There’s more appropriateness in this simile than you may imagine, as you’ll see in a moment. But for the incident. We ‘floor gliders,’ as one called our dancing club of young people—there was not one over twenty, and some of the girls weren’t over flfteen—concluded we’d celebrate the Mardl Gras with a masquerade ball. I’d been getting sweet on Madge—Wlldfire I may as well call her—and about the time the costumes were being arranged I was sitting up to her like a sick kitten to a warm brick. In fact, we arranged to have corresponding costumes for the ball. “This was after Rostand's play of ‘Chantecler’ came out, and everybody was talking about it. You know that the leading lady chicken in the play is the hen pheasant, the leading gentleman being the rooster chanticleer.. We concluded to get ourselves up as these two birds. I was a month arranging my outfit—l did it all myself, you know—but when I got it done it was a corker, I made the body of a rooster, which I strapped under my arms, with an elegant head and combin front and a fine display of cock’s tail behind, the tail being made of tissue pgper of different colors. You couldn’t have told it from the real thing. “I went to see Madge the afternoon before the ball. It so happened that we got to quarreling, and I went off in a huff. This was unfortunate, to say the least. We had spent a lot of time getting up our bird rigs and expected to make a lot of fun billing and cooing during the ball, and the worst of it was, now that we were in just the opposite condition from what we expected, we hadn’t time to get other rigs.” “What was the cause of the quarrel?:’

“We tried on our costumes In advance, and when she walked I told her she waddled like a duck. That made her mad, and she fired back, and we soon were In for it hot and heavy. “When the ball came off, Instead of walking about together, I strutting, she cuddling up bedide me, we were as far apart as possible and when we met glared at each other. After awhile I saw her sitting in a window with Ned Tucker. This made me all fired jealous as well as mad, and to show my spleen what did I do but go up near where they were sitting and whisk around with the intention- ' turning my back on Madge. I didn’t calculate how near my tail feathers were to them, but It seems they brushed their faces. This made Madge madder than ever. Ned bad just struck a match to light a cigarette. Madge jerked it out of his hand and held It under the tip of my tall. "In a second the whole of It was in flames. I tried to get the rooster part of me off, bnt it was tied on so well that I couldn’t do it. The flames ran from the tall to the wings and from the wings to the rest of the body. The whole roomful of people rushed toward me, scared out of their seven senses, every one crying, ‘Put him ontl’ Whether they meant to put out the flames or put me out to prevent my setting them all afire I don’t know. I was howling with the burns and with fear when a Roman senator took off his togs and wrapped It about me. “I was taken to a carriage and home. I wasn’t burned at all, bnt Just to punish the confounded girl that applied! the match I gave out that I might die. She was knocked clean out, and when I let np on her she wilted. Bhq had put a match to my tail; i put salt on hers and caught her.” "You mean she caught yon. There are lots of man who think they do the catching when they atq caught then* solvent