Five minutes later Captain Richard Saxon Clancy, paymaster (?) for the M. K. & T. Railway Company, and member (?) of the Dallas Young Men’s Christian Association, alias “Jimmy,” stood at a corner bar and said: “Whiskey, old man, and—say get a bigger glass than that, will you? I need it.”
(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, April 12, 1896.)
An Unknown Romance
The first pale star peeped down the gorge. Above, to illimitable heights reached the Alps, snow-white above, shadowy around, and black in the depths of the gorge.
A young and stalwart man, clad in the garb of a chamois hunter, passed up the path. His face was bronzed with sun and wind, his eye was frank and clear, his step agile and firm. He was singing fragments of a Bavarian hunting song, and in his hand he held a white blossom of the edelweiss he had plucked from the cliff. Suddenly he paused, and the song broke, and dropped from his lips. A girl, costumed as the Swiss peasants are, crossed the path along one that bisected his, carrying a small stone pitcher full of water. Her hair was of the lightest gold and hung far below her trim waist in a heavy braid. Her eyes shone through the gathering twilight, and her lips, slightly parted, showed a faint gleam of the whitest teeth.
As if impelled by a common impulse, the hunter and the maiden paused, each with their eyes fixed upon the other. Then the man advanced, and doffing his feathered hat, bowed low and spake some words in the German language. The maiden answered, speaking haltingly and low.
Then a door opened in a cottage almost hidden among the trees, and a babble of voices was heard. The maiden’s cheeks turned crimson, and she started to go, but as she went, she turned her eyes and looked at the hunter still. He took a step after her, and stretched out his hand as if to stay her. She tore a bunch of blue gentians from her bosom and threw them towards him. He caught them as they fell, then ran lightly and gave into her hand the edelweiss bloom that he carried. She thrust it into her bosom, then ran like a mountain sprite into the cottage, where the voices were.
The hunter stopped for a while, then went his way more slowly up the mountain path, and he sang no more. As he went he pressed the flowers frequently to his lips.
The wedding was to be one of the showiest, and the society of the metropolis was almost begging for invitations.