If there be one among you can say that ever at grub dance or scalp german or on the war-path my action did belie my tongue let him stand forth and say it and I will send him home with his daylights done up in the morning paper. If there be three in all your company dare face me on the bloody sands let them come on and I will bore holes in the arena with them and utilize them in fixing up a sickening spectacle.
And yet I was not alway thus, a hired butcher attacking a Deadwood coach, both afternoon and evening, the savage chief of still more savage men.
My ancestors came from Illinois. They dwelt there in the vine-clad hills and citron groves of the Sangamon at a time when the country was overrun with Indians. Instead of paying to see Indians, my ancestors would walk a long distance over a poor road in order to get a shot at a white man.
In Dakota my early life ran quiet as the clear brook by which I babbled, and my boyhood was one long, happy summer day. We bathed in the soiled waters of the upper Missouri and ate the luscious prickly pear in the land of the Dakotahs.
I did not then know what war was, but when Sitting Bull told me of Marathon and Leuctra and Bull Run, and how at a fortified railroad pass Imre Kiralfy had withstood the whole Roman army, my cheek burned, I knew not why, and I thought what a glorious thing it would be to leave the reservation and go upon the warpath. But my mother kissed my throbbing temples and bade me go soak my head and think no more of those old tales and savage wars.
That very night the entire regular army and wife landed on our coasts. They tore down our tepee, stampeded our stock, stole our grease paints and played a mean trick on our dog.
To-day in the arena I killed a man in the Black Hills coach, and when I undid his cinch, behold! he was my friend. The same sweet smile was on his face that I had noted when I met him on my trip abroad. He knew me smiled faintly, made a few false motions and died. I begged that I might bear away the body to my tepee and express it to his country seat, near Limerick, and upon my bended knees, amid the dust and blood of the arena, I begged this pool favor, and a Roman prætor from St. George answered: "Let the carrion rot. There are no noble men but Romans and banana men. Let the show go on. Give us our money's worth. Bring out the bobtail lion from Abyssinia and the bucking bronco from Dead Man's Ranch." And the assembled maids and matrons and the rabble shouted in derision and told me to brace up, and bade Johnnie git his gun, git his gun, git his gun, and other vile flings which I do not now recall. And so must you, fellow warriors, and so must I, die like dogs. Ye stand here like giants (N. Y. Giants) as ye are, but to-morrow the fangs of the infuriated buffalo may sink into your quivering flesh. To-night ye stand here in the full flush of health and conscious rectitude, but to-morrow some crank may shoot you from the Deadwood coach.
Hark! Hear ye yon buffalo roaring in her den? 'Tis three days since she tasted flesh, but to-morrow she will have warrior on toast, and don't you forget it. And she will fling your vertebrae about her cage like the costly Etruscan pitcher of a League nine.
If ye are brutes, then stand here like fat oxen waiting for the butcher's knife. If ye are men, arise and follow me. We will beat down the guard, overpower the ticket-chopper and cut for the tall timber. We will go through Ellum Park, Port Richmond, Tower Hill, West Brighton, Sailors' Snug Harbor and New Brighton like a colored revival through a watermelon patch, beat down the walls of the Circus Maximus, tear the mosquito bars from the windows of Nero's palace, capture the Roman ballet and light out for Europe.
O comrades! warriors!! gladiators!!!