“Ike was mopping the sweat from his brow with his old red bandanna one sultry August noon, when a bee lit on his left hand and crawled up his sleeve. An expression of agony stole into Ike’s one bleary eye. He squeezed the bee through his coat sleeve, but it only stung harder.
“I couldn’t tell you what he said. Nobody but an old-time miner would be qualified to pass on Ike’s language. Finally he could stand the torment of that stinging bee no longer. He tore off his coat, revealing the tube, and ran for the creek, tearing his shirt to ribbons on the low-hanging branches of the pines and spruces. The smelter man noticed the tube when Ike took off his coat, and his little game was over. But he had got away with $50,000 or $100,000, which the smelter people were never able to get back.”
Brace of Big Birds are Slain.
C. H. Lewis, a prominent merchant of Randolph, La., saw two large birds light in the mill pond here. Securing a gun, he succeeded in killing them. The birds are of an unknown kind, but they resemble huge white cranes. They measure over five feet from tip to tip, have web feet like a duck, and are almost snow white except a little dark blue on their backs.
A Notorious Bandit’s End.
The body of Frank James, the former outlaw, who died on his farm near Excelsior Springs, Mo., has been cremated at St. Louis. The ashes have been returned to a safe-deposit vault in this city, in accordance with the last wish of James. The ex-bandit said he did not wish his grave to be a mecca for sightseers.
Whatever may have been the faults of Frank James, he kept his word and was a respected citizen when death summoned him. In the thirty years since he surrendered to the Governor of Missouri at Jefferson City, James clung to his determination to live an upright life. The latter part of his career furnished a good illustration of the doctrine that a man can quit if he wants to and stay quit if he wills to. James knew what a man could do if he only made up his mind to do it. That is the real moral of his story. Supporting himself and his family by honest work, he won a good place in public opinion and made friends wherever he went.
A writer, long a friend of the former bandit, visited James several years ago to get information to be used in a proposed book.
“I promised the governor, when I surrendered, that I would never write a book about myself or permit one to be written,” said James. Though he was offered $10,000, he kept his promise, dying without having told the details of his seventeen years of wild life. It has been his wish to live down his former reputation, and he died with the satisfaction that he had done so.
James was seventy-one years old. Apoplexy caused his death; he had been ill for many months.