For nearly an hour Selzer and Gunther continued to pull in the big pikes, and when they decided the afternoon’s sport was over, they had gathered a larger mess than they had ever caught before. That night they placed their trained minnows in a perforated can and hung it over the side of the wharf. Gunther, who attended to this duty, accidentally failed to lock the can. During the night, in some manner, the lid was raised, and the next morning it was discovered that the minnows had disappeared.
Both men firmly believe that some pickerel, piqued because of a failure in the afternoon to secure one of the[Pg 66] minnows, followed the boat and negotiated the raising of the lid, and had successfully satisfied an aching appetite.
The incident cut the trip short, but the theory was proved, and Selzer and Gunther are now busy training another dozen minnows for future excursions.
Cow Puzzles Kentucky.
What is the State of Kentucky going to do with Alex Steve and his cow Fanny?
Steve is up against it. He was planning to make Fanny help him earn a living. He intended to start an ice-cream business, with her aid, up in Cannonsburg, Pa., where his daughter and four grandchildren live. And now the law says he must either sell Fanny or stay right where he is with the cow—that is, in a box car.
Steve was a miner in Dobra, W. Va., and one day, not long ago, he had one of his feet crushed in an accident and had to give up mining. So Steve decided to go to Cannonsburg to his daughter. He loaded his household goods into a box car, built Fanny a stall in one end, and set up his bed in the other end of the car. Besides Fanny, he had seven chickens in a box as traveling companions. He paid seventy-five dollars and sixty cents for transportation. That was nearly two weeks ago.
The C. & O. Railroad landed Steve and his outfit in Covington, Ky., and tried to turn over the car to the Pennsylvania line for the rest of the journey. The Pennsylvania Railroad officials refused to accept it, because Fanny was barred from entering the State of Pennsylvania by the foot-and-mouth-disease quarantine. No cow, no matter how healthy, can be taken in until the quarantine is lifted.
Steve and his outfit can’t go on and can’t go back to Dobra. They can’t stay in Covington, because Steve has only thirteen cents to his name. The car contains a little feed for Fanny and a little cracked corn for the chickens. Steve has been living chiefly on the milk Fanny gave him and the schmierkäse he made from it, and occasionally some eggs from the chickens. Outside of that, he hasn’t had much else to eat for several days.
Steve doesn’t want to sell Fanny, for, if he does, the ice-cream business will be impossible, but if he must, he wants one hundred dollars for her. He says he paid seventy-five dollars for her six months ago and she now represents his only means of livelihood. He claims the railroad only wants to give him thirty dollars for Fanny. In the meantime he is still stranded with his cow and chickens in his freight-car home in the railroad yards in Covington, Ky.