“Never mind. You look honest. I’ll take a chance.”
A red-faced man was holding the attention of a little group with some wonderful recitals.
“The most exciting chase I ever had,” he said, “happened a few years ago in Russia. One night, when sleighing about ten miles from my destination I discovered, to my intense horror, that I was being followed by a pack of wolves. I fired blindly into the pack, killing one of the brutes, and to my delight saw the others stop to devour it. After doing this, however, they still came on. I kept on repeating the dose, with the same result, and each occasion gave me an opportunity to whip up my horse. Finally there was only one wolf left, yet on it came, with its fierce eyes glowing in anticipation of a good, hot supper.”
Here the man who had been sitting in the corner burst forth into a fit of laughter.
“Why, man,” said he, “by your way of reckoning that last wolf must have had the rest of the pack inside him!”
“Ah!” said the red-faced man without a tremor, “now I remember, it did wobble a bit.”
Frederic Remington, the illustrator, fresh from a Western trip on which he had been making studies of Indians and cowpunchers and things outdoors, met an art editor who insisted upon dragging him up to an exhibition of very impressionistic pictures.