The young Major drew his three companies up into battalion formation on the sidewalk then, and one of the trustees stood on the steps of the church and made what the Adjutant afterward characterized as a "regular spread-eagle, star-spangled-banner, Fourth-of-July speech." He ended by inviting the battalion to a near-by restaurant, where he ordered served for them just exactly the kind of an evening feast they would have ordered if they had had the doing of it themselves. Old Tom (with a black eye) sat at the head of the table, and after the cakes and the ice-cream had been slaughtered even worse than the Poles, he told stories of his own fighting days, and as he closed he said he had seen many battles, but none he cared more to remember than the "Battle of Brick Church."
[A PLUCKY YOUNG TENDERFOOT.]
BY PAUL HULL.
Harry Brown had the cowboy fever, and this is the way that the disease originated. During the early spring Harry's uncle had been a guest with the Brown family for several weeks, during which time the boy had been regaled with stories of wild Western life and adventure until his dreams suggested a panorama of prairie-land, cowboys, a whole menagerie of savage animals, and an endless procession of gayly bedecked and hideously painted Indians galloping furiously across the plains.
Uncle Joel had taken a great fancy to his sister's child, and having a boy of his own about the same age, he proposed to the somewhat startled parents to carry the lad away with him for the summer, and give him an outing on his ranch, where he would have the companionship of his sixteen-year-old cousin Frank, whom he had placed at school in Chicago for the winter, and for whom he intended to call when on his way back to Wyoming.
After considerable pleading and argument, Harry's mother at length allowed herself to be almost persuaded that if he went he would not be converted into a long-haired, swaggering, pistol-shooting citizen, and that hostile bands of redskins were not in the habit of lying in ambush around the ranch for the purpose of scalping its inmates several times a day; so at last she hesitatingly added her consent to that of her husband's.
During the remaining week of Uncle Joel's stay in New York the poor man was subjected by the anxious mother to such a running fire of cross-questioning, and so made to feel the awful responsibility that he was incurring by taking Harry away from his comfortable home, where he was tenderly cared for, to place him among strangers and savage beasts and wild and uncouth cowboys, as well as blood-thirsty Indians, that he would have gladly gone back on his contract, even if it was calculated to cost him a dozen of his best steers.
The time set for the departure arrived, and, being a Saturday, Harry was escorted to the depot by a large delegation of his school-mates, who gazed enviously at their companion striding along at the side of his rich cowboy uncle, who had been elevated into a hero in their minds by reason of the startling tales of Indian adventure in which, according to his nephew's account, he had been a most prominent actor. It is safe to say that Harry's imagination was responsible for the gaudy coloring of some of the stories, and that the rate at which his uncle was reputed to have cleaned out the red men whenever an uprising took place proved conclusively that the savages were either so thick in Wyoming that they interfered with one another's walking, or that they were wise enough not to go upon the warpath very often—otherwise that territory would have been depopulated of its natives long before.