Curb Stock Exchange, Broad Street, New York.
Thirty days satisfied me with New York. The fact was the crowds were so great that congestion of traffic always followed my presence, and I would be compelled to move. I went one day to the City Hall Park to get the Greeley statue photographed with my team, and could not get away without the help of the police, and even then with great difficulty.
A trip across Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn was made, but I found the congestion there almost as great as in the city proper. The month I was on the streets of New York was a month of anxiety, and I was glad enough to get out of the city on the 17th of October, just thirty days after the drive down Broadway, and sixty days after the holdup on 161st Street, and the very day the big run on the Knickerbocker Bank began.
I came near meeting a heavy loss two days before leaving the city. Somehow I got sandwiched in on the East Side above the Brooklyn bridge in the congested district of the foreign quarters and finally at nightfall drove into a stable, put the oxen in the stalls and, as usual, the dog Jim in the wagon. The next morning Jim was gone. The stablemen said he had left the wagon a few moments after I had and had been stolen. The police accused the stablemen of being a party to the theft, in which I think they were right. Anyway, the day wore off and no tidings. Money could not buy that dog. He was an integral part of the expedition; always on the alert; always watchful of the wagon during my absence and always willing to mind what I bid him to do. He had had more adventures than any other member of the work; first he had been tossed over a high brush by the ox Dave; then shortly after pitched headlong over a barbed wire fence by an irate cow; then came the fight with a wolf; following this came a narrow escape from the rattlesnake in the road; after this a trolley car run over him, rolling him over and over again until he came out as dizzy as a drunken man—I thought he was a "goner" that time sure, but he soon straightened up, and finally in the streets of Kansas City was run over by a heavy truck while fighting another dog. The other dog was killed outright, while Jim came near having his neck broken, lost one of his best fighting teeth and had several others broken. I sent him to a veterinary surgeon and curiously enough he made no protest while having the broken teeth repaired and extracted. He could eat nothing but soup and milk for several days, and that poured down him, as he could neither lap nor swallow liquids. It came very near being "all day" with Jim, but he is here with me all right and seemingly good for a new adventure.
Jim.
No other method could disclose where to find him than to offer a reward, which I did, and feel sure I paid the twenty dollars to one of the fellow-parties to the theft who was brazen faced enough to demand pay for keeping him. Then was when I got up and talked pointedly, and was glad enough to get out of that part of the city.