Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 March 1880 — Saturday Right in a Kansas Cattle Town. [ARTICLE]

Saturday Right in a Kansas Cattle Town.

The dullness which had so weighed upon us through the long, uneventful afternoon was but a lull, we soon learned, and not a stagnation. With the first approach of darkness the lethargic town rubbed its eyes, so to speak, and leaped to its feet; and in a twinkling, it seemed (like aa incantation, Eastman said). Grand avenue was a carnival of light and motion and music. The broad board sidewalks were crowded with promenaders; smiling groups passed in and out of the drinking saloons and gambling places: in every quarter glasses clinked ana dice rattled (is there another sound in the world like that of shaken dice?); violins, flutes and cornets sent out eager, inviting strains of waltz and polka from a score or more establishments, and a brass band was playing patriotic airs in front of the theater, where, oddly enough, the crude morality of “Ten Nighte m a Bar-Room” was about to be presented, “with the full strength of the Company in the oast.” Everywhere the cow-boys made themselves manifest, clad now in the soiled and dingy jeans of the trail, then in a suit of manybuttoned corduroy, and again in affluence of broadcloth, silk hat, gloves, cane and sometimes a clerical white neck-tie. And everywhere, also, stared and shone the Lone Star of Texas—for the cow-boy, wherever he may wander, and however he may change, never forgets to be a Texan, and never spends his money or lends his presence to a concern that does not in some way recognize the emblem of his native State; so you will see in towns like New Sharon a general pandering to this sentiment, and lone stars abound of all sizes and hues, from the big disfiguring white one painted on the hotel-front down to the little pink one stitched in silk on the cow-boy’s shilling handkerchief. Barring these numerous stars, the rich lights, and the music, wo missed sight of any special efforts to beguile or entrap passers-by—perhaps because we were not looking for them; nor was there for some hours a sound to reveal the spirit of coiled and utter vileness which tho. cheerful outside so well belied. It was in the main much the kind of scene one would be apt to conjecture for an Oriental holiday. But as the night sped on, the festivities deepened, and the iovial aspect of tbe picture began to be touched and tainted with a subtle, rebuking something, which gradually disclosed the passion, the crime, the depravity, that really vivified and swayed it all, and made it infernal. The saloons became clamorous with profanity and ribald songs and laughter. There were no longer any promenaders on the sidewalks, save once in a while a single bleared and staggering fellow, with a difficulty in his clumsy lips over some such -thing as “ The Girl I Left Behind Me.” An inflamed and quivering fierceness crept into the busy music. The lights paled, flickered, and here and there went out. Doors were stealthily closed, window-shutters slammed to with angry creaks. And at length, as we looked and listened, the sharp, significant report of a pistol, with a shriek behind it, was borne toward us from a turbulent dancing-hall to certify its tale of combat and probable homicide, and to be succeeded by a close but brief halt in the noisy quadrille—presumably for the removal of the victim.— Henry King, in Scribner's Monthly.