Peck's Bad Boy in an airship

by George W. Peck

When the animals saw us coming they started down the home stretch, and the auto gave chase, and we yelled and fired guns in the air, and the chauffeur put a charge of bird shot into the hind hams of a lion that didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry, and the lion turned on us, and Pa told the chauffeur to stop and he would settle with the lion.

Pa got out with a horse whip and started for the lion, which gave a roar like distant thunder, and as I looked at Pa with the frock coat and silk hat, walking towards the lion I thought that was the last of Pa, and begged him to come back, but he said, “Never you mind me, I have seen lions before,” and Pa walked up to the lion and gave him a cut with the whip, and yelled, “Get back into the jungle, you Tom Cat.”

Well, really, that lion ought to have turned and put his tail between his legs and galloped for the woods, but Pa had made a mistake in his lion, for the animal went up to Pa and took a mouthful of his pants, and shook him like a dog would shake a rat, and Pa yelled for them to take away their lion if they didn’t want the animal injured.

The animal rolled Pa over on the ground in the dust, chewed his silk hat, and Pa got loose and made a rush for the auto and crawled under it to fix something, and just then the cowboy came along on a pony and threw his lariat over the lion’s head and pulled him away across the track, and Pa came out from under the machine and took a big monkey-wrench and started again for the lion, bareheaded, and so mad he fairly frothed at the mouth, after he saw the lion was choked nearly to death, and then Pa mauled the apparently dead lion until the cowboy dismounted from the pony and gave his lariat rope back.

Pa gave the lion a couple of kicks, and got back into the auto, and the Michigan man patted him on the back and said, “Old man, you are a king of beasts, sure enough;” and Pa said, “O, I don’t know; I never did like a cowardly lion, no how.”

We chased some more animals around the track, and the Michigan man said he hoped the toothless old lion would not die, as he was saving him for Roosevelt to practice on when he came to the ranch after the 4th of March.

The cowboy went across the field where a tame giraffe was grazing in a tree top, and took the saddle off his pony and put it on the giraffe, and we run up to where he was, and the Michigan man asked him what he was going to do, and he said he was going to ride the giraffe, as he had ridden almost everything that walked on four legs except a giraffe.

The Michigan man told him he had better leave the giraffe out of his repertoire, because a giraffe was mighty uncertain, but the cowboy got the saddle on, and climbed into it, and then the trouble began.

The giraffe didn’t have any bridle on, and no mane to hold on to, and he was built so that the saddle slipped down by his rump, and when the animal turned around and saw he had the cowboy where he wanted him, he started off towards the forest on a hop, skip and a jump, kicking up his heels like a bucking broncho, and the last we saw of the expedition the giraffe had jumped over a wire fence and took to the woods, with the cowboy dangling by one stirrup, swearing in the Wyoming dialect.