Well, that was right into my hand; and I set my mind to strike at four p. m. I had been out riding once with the Chicago man, in a sledge, with three horses abreast, all runaway horses, and the driver was a Cossack who lashed the horses into a run every smooth place he found in the road, and it was like running to a fire, so I got the Chicago fellow to go with me and we found the Cossack, and he was drunker than usual. There is a kind of liquor here called vodka, which skins wood alcohol and carbolic acid to a finish, and when a man is full of it he is so mad he wants to cut his own throat. This driver had put up sideboards on his neck and had two jags in one, and we hired him by the hour.
I told the Chicago man the circumstances and that I had got to get dad out of his trance, and he said he would help me. When I was out riding the day before I noticed that the road was full of great dane dogs, wolf hounds and stag hounds, which followed their master's sledges out in the country, and the dogs loafed around, hungry, looking for bones, and fighting each other, so I decided to get the dogs to chase our sledge and make dad think we were chased by wolves. I thought that would make dad stand without hitching, and it did.
The Chicago man bought some cannon firecrackers, and I bought a cow's liver, and hitched it to a rope, and hid it in the back seat, and my Chicago friend and I took the back seat, and we got dad in the seat behind the driver, and started about an hour before dark out in the country, through a piece of woods that looked quite wolfy. On the way out the driver let his horses run away a few times, like you have seen in Russian pictures, and dad was beginning to sit up and take notice, and seemed to act like a man who expects every minute to be thrown over a precipice and mixed up with dead horses. Dad touched the driver once on the coat-tail and told him not to hurry so confounded fast, and the driver thought he was complaining because it was too slow, and he gave a Comanche yell and threw the lines into the air, and the horses just skedaddled, and run into a snow bank and tipped over the sledge, and piled us out on top of dad, but dad only said: “This is getting good.”
We righted up, and dad wanted to know where all the pups came from that we had passed. I had been throwing out pieces of meat into the road for a mile or so, and the dogs were having a picnic. It was getting pretty dark by this time, and we started back to town, and I threw out my liver, fastened to the rope, and the Chicago man, who had given the driver a drink of vodka when we tipped over, told him, in Russian, that when the dogs began to follow us, to get hold of the liver, to yell “wolves,” and give the team the rein, for a five-mile run, and yell all the time, because we wanted to give the old gentleman a good time.
Well, uncle, I would have given anything if you could have seen dad, when the dogs began to chase that liver, and bark and fight each other. The driver yelled something in Russian, and pointed back with his whip, the Chicago man said: “My God, we are pursued by a pack of ravenous wolves, and there is no hope for us,” and I began to cry, and implored dad, if he loved me, to save me.
