Bruvver Jim's Baby

Produced by Al Haines
HARPER & BROTHERS
Copyright, 1904, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
All rights reserved.
Published May, 1904.
This Volume is
Dedicated, with much affection, to
My Mother
It all commenced that bright November day of the Indian rabbit drive and hunt. The motley army of the Piute tribe was sweeping tremendously across a sage-brush valley of Nevada, their force two hundred braves in number. They marched abreast, some thirty yards apart, and formed a line that was more than two miles long.
The spectacle presented was wonderful to see. Red, yellow, and indigo in their blankets and trappings, the hunters dotted out a line of color as far as sight could reach. Through the knee-high brush they swept ahead like a firing-line of battle, their guns incessantly booming, their advance never halted, their purpose as grim and inexorable as fate itself. Indeed, Death, the Reaper, multiplied two-hundred-fold and mowing a swath of incredible proportions, could scarcely have pillaged the land of its conies more thoroughly.
Before the on-press of the two-mile wall of red men with their smoking weapons, the panic-stricken rabbits scurried helplessly. Soon or late they must double back to their burrows, soon or late they must therefore die.
Behind the army, fully twenty Indian ponies, ridden by the youngster-braves of the cavalcade, were bearing great white burdens of the slaughtered hares.