Some of the oilmen were liberally endowed with the devotional sentiment. When the news of a blazing tank of oil at Mertina reached Edenburg, a jolly operator telegraphed the fact to Oil City, with the addendum: “Everything has gone hellward.” A half-hour later came his second dispatch: “The oil is blazing, with big flames going heavenward.” Such a happy blending of the infernal with the celestial is seldom witnessed in ordinary business.
The behavior of some people in a crisis is a wonderful puzzle, sometimes funnier than a pig-circus. At the St. Petersburg fire, which sent half the town up in smoke, an old woman rescued from the Adams House, with a bag of money containing four-hundred dollars, was indignant that her fifty-cent spectacles had been left to burn. A male guest stormed over the loss of his satchel, which a servant had carried into the street, and threatened a suit for damages. The satchel was found and opened. It had a pair of dirty socks, two dirty collars, a comb and a toothbrush! The man with presence of mind to throw his mother-in-law from the fourth-story window and carry a feather-pillow down stairs was not on hand. St. Petersburg had no four-story buildings.
John Kiley and “Ed.” Callaghan headed a circle of jolly jokers at Triangle City and Edenburg. Hatching practical sells was their meat and drink. One evening they employed a stranger to personate a constable from Clarion and arrest a pipe-line clerk for the paternity of a bogus offspring. In vain the astonished victim protested his innocence, although he acknowledged knowing the alleged mother of the alleged kid. The minion of the law turned a deaf ear to his prayers for release, but consented to let him go until morning upon paying a five-dollar note. The poor fellow thought of an everlasting flight from Oildom and was leaving the room to pack up his satchel when the “constable” appeared with a supply of fluids. The joke was explained and the crowd liquidated at the expense of the subject of their pleasantry. Kiley was an oilman and operated in the northern fields. Callaghan slung lightning in the telegraph-office. He married at Edenburg and went to Chicago. His wife procured a divorce and married a well-known Harrisburger.
A letter from his feminine sweetness, advising him to hurry up if he wished her not to marry his rival, so flustrated an Edenburg druggist that he imbibed a full tumbler of Jersey lightning. An irresistible longing to lie down seized him and he stretched himself for a nap on a lounge in a room back of the store. John Kiley discovered the sleeping beauty, spread a sheet over him and prepared for a little sport. He let down the blinds, hung a piece of crape on the door and rushed out to announce that “Jim” was dead. People flocked to learn the particulars. Entering the drug-store a placard met their gaze: “Walk lightly, not to disturb the corpse!” They were next taken to the door of the rear apartment, to see a pair of boots protruding from beneath a sheet. Nobody was permitted to touch the body, on a plea that it must await the coroner, but the friends were invited to drink to the memory of the deceased pill-dispenser and suggest the best time for his funeral. Thus matters continued two hours, when the “corpse” wakened up, kicked off the sheet and walked out! His friends at first refused to recognize him, declaring the apparition was a ghost, but finally consented to renew the acquaintance upon condition that he “set ’em up” for the thirsty multitude.
A Clarion operator, having to spend Sunday in New York, strayed into a fashionable church and was shown to a swell seat. Shortly after a gentleman walked down the aisle, glared at the stranger, drew a pencil from his pocket, wrote a moment and handed him a slip of paper inscribed, “This is my pew.” The unabashed Clarionite didn’t bluff a little bit. He wrote and handed back the paper: “It’s a darned nice pew. How much rent do you ante up for it?” The New-Yorker saw the joke, sat down quietly and when the service closed shook hands with the intruder and asked him to dinner. The acquaintance begun so oddly ripened into a poker-game next evening, at which the oilman won enough from the city clubman to pay ten years’ pew-rent. At parting he remarked: “Who’s in the wrong pew now?” Then he whistled softly: “Let me off at Buffalo!”
Clarion’s products were not confined to prize pumpkins, mammoth corn and oil-wells. The staunch county supplied the tallest member of the National Guard, in the person of Thomas Near, twenty-one years old, six feet eleven in altitudinous measurement and about twice the thickness of a fence-rail. The Clarion company was mustered in at Meadville. General Latta’s look of astonishment as he surveyed[surveyed] the latitude and longitude of the new recruit was exceedingly comical. He rushed to Governor Hartranft and whispered, “Where in the name of Goliath did you pick up that young Anak?” At the next annual review Near stood at the end of the Clarion column. A staff-officer, noticing a man towering a foot above his comrades, spurred his horse across the field and yelled: “Get down off that stump, you blankety-blank son of a gun!” The tall boy did not “get down” and the enraged officer did not discover how it was until within a rod of the line. His chagrin rivaled that of Moses Primrose with the shagreen spectacles. Poor Near, long in inches and short in years, was not long for this world and died in youthful manhood.
JAMES M. GUFFEY.
WESLEY S. GUFFEY.