The Man Made a Grab for the Greased Pole and down He Went.
In less than an hour every Indian lay motionless and the cow-boys went out to take possession of their arms and ponies. Suddenly Billy saw an Indian, supposed to be dead, stealthily rise and creep after one of the boys who was bending over a dead brave unstrapping his cartridge belt. For a second he saw a knife glisten in the sunlight and he knew that in another instant it would be buried in the unsuspecting boy’s back. With Billy, to see was to act, so without hesitation he rushed upon the treacherous Indian and tossed him aside as if he had been a paper ball. The knife dropped from his hand, for he had been killed instantly. One of Billy’s sharp horns had pierced his heart. All the cow-boy said, when he realized what Billy had done, was, “Billy, you have saved my life and for this you shall have a collar of gold, with your name and a record of your brave act engraved upon it.” The cow-boy kept his promise, so ever after Billy wore his collar of gold.
A few days after the siege, Billy felt that he had seen enough of ranch life and life on the plains, so he decided to return to town and from there go to some large city as fast as his legs would carry him. “For, if I stay here,” he mused, “other Indians may come to avenge those who have been poisoned. They may take a fancy to my horns to decorate one of their wigwams and may cut my head off, and then where would I be? Who knows but what they may come this very night? Anyhow I have seen enough of wild western life and I shall leave this country right now. There is no time like the present,” and with this soliloquy he started on a dead run for town by the same way he had come and he never stopped to say good-bye even to the Chinaman.
Billy Jr. and the Firemen.
THE next we hear of Billy Jr. he is in San Francisco living, as his father did before him, with an engine company near the outskirts of the city. When first we spy him, he and another goat are stealing vegetables out of the firemen’s garden. This other goat is an old fellow with a stubby tail and a single horn, and although he eats a great deal every day, anything and everything, from tin cans to rotten potatoes, and has a digestive apparatus like an ostrich, he still looks thin and shows every rib in his anatomy. Whether this lean, gaunt, hungry look is because of a guilty conscience or the result of ill-usage, I know not, but I do know that he is the homeliest goat any one ever looked at.
Bang! goes a gun and the next minute four pairs of legs are flying over the garden fence. “There, I told you we could not steal safely in broad daylight,” said Billy Jr.
“Oh! I hope you don’t mind a little scare like that,” answered the old goat. “Why, my sides are full of bullet holes. They are always firing at me, but I simply caper round and round until they pick the shot out, for it only goes in skin deep.”