Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 57, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 March 1899 — Bruce Porter’s Sad Experience. [ARTICLE]

Bruce Porter’s Sad Experience.

Messrs. R. B. Porter, F. B. Meyer, andJEd Peck, the latter of Remington, returned Friday from a duck hunting expedition, up on the Kankakee marshes, north of DeMotte, and the erstwhile reddish aspect of our excellent recorder takes on a more firy hue, as he relates the grevious story of his experiences. Porter and Meyer went in one boat and Peck and Punter, the latter a resident of the region, in another. Bruce’s experienced eye picked out a good place in the water to plant the decoys, and another near by in the bull rushes, to conceal themselves and their boat. Meyer would not have it that way, and insisted in getting into the edge of a 500 acre tract of pucker brush. In trying to get the boat into it, they ran over a clump of the pucker and there it stuoker. Bruce wanted to back off but Frank took his official oath that he’ed go over the pucker or be a sucker, and bracing himself for a mighty push, he stepped off the end of the boat into the water. The water wasn’t necessarily deep, but still it came up to Frank’s neck all right. Bruce helped him back into the boat, and it being a cold raw evening, they struck back for shore, a half mile distant. There Frank broke for their boarding house, and after waiting a long time for him to return Bruce went back to the duck shooting, and found the other two men in the very place he wanted to stop in, at the first place. They got twelve fine mallards, and Bruce managed, in the time that was left him, to get two. Bruce didn’t swear any, because he always takes some of his religion with him, even when he goes hunting, but what he felt like doing can be easily surmised. Of course, after Bruce had suffered all this grevious ill-fortune on account of Frank’s headstrong impetuosity, the evening’s experience ended, as might have been expected in Bruce contracting a fearful bad cold, and Frank coming out fresher than from a Turkish bath.