G 24 
FOREST AND STREAM 
May i8, 1912 
ning we brought the dangerous stuff up the little 
ladder, taking prodigious care not to jar or drop 
the terrible compound. I had previously demon¬ 
strated that it was not impaired by age or other 
causes by dipping a hammer head into a few 
drops of it and striking it on a rock with gun¬ 
like explosion. We succeeded in getting it safely 
to the level plateau on the summit of the ravine 
wall, at the spot where the wolves did mostly 
congregate. We then poured out perhaps two 
quarts of the stuff in the form of a circle, one 
arc of which came close to the edge of the chff 
diagonally across the gulch from the shack and 
twelve or fifteen rods away. I then removed 
the bullet from a cartridge without disturbing 
the powder, and inserted one end of a long strip 
of safety fuse in the place of the lead, thus 
forming a perfect detonator. This I placed in 
the edge of the glycerine circle nearest the cliff, 
running the fuse down through a seam in the 
face of the wall, where it was concealed from 
view to a point easily reached from the foot. 
The night was almost as light as day, with a full 
moon half way up the eastern sky, when shortly 
before midnight we heard the coyotes beginning 
their nocturnal divertisement. From the win¬ 
dow we could see that the animals were much 
attracted by the spread we had made for them, 
crowding around it, sniffing, and, as it appeared, 
licking it up. 
“That's right,” muttered John; “fill yourselves 
with the stuff and you’ll go off all the easier ” 
evidently unaware of the grim humor of his 
address. 
A great drove of the brutes had collected, and 
creeping quietly out of the house, keeping in the 
shadow, John sneaked over to the fuse. A 
moment later I could see a little sputtering spark 
creeping slowly up the face of the cliff. John 
retraced his steps to the house and took up a 
position beside me at the window. 
As the spark neared the top of the wall i*: 
occurred to me that if the glycerine did its duty 
our safety would be jeopardized. Communicat¬ 
ing my fears to John we moved down from the 
window just as there came a crash that caused 
the ground to reel, followed an instant later by 
a shower of stones upon the shack roof that 
made us cower in terror. The very softness of 
the limestone rock proved our salvation, for it 
crumbled into minute fragments which ra'tled 
down in a harmless shower. As soon as the 
pattering on the roof ceased, we ventured out. 
The ravine was thick with smoke and dust so that 
we could barely distinguish objects a few feet 
distant. But our ears told us tales of great 
suffering on the plain above, whence proceeded 
a perfect bedlam of shrieks and yells. 
As we had to walk a half mile ere we could 
make an ascent, when we reached the scene of 
the explosion the smoke and dust had cleared 
away so that the scene of devastation was un¬ 
obscured. And such a scene! At the top of the 
cliff where the glycerine was placed was an in¬ 
verted cone, eight feet in depth by twenty-five 
in diameter, at the bottom of which was, to the 
thickness of six inches, a bed of pulverized 
limestone, shaded red, as were its s’des also All 
around the edge of this pit extending back for 
many rods on the plain, the ground was covered 
with fragments of flesh and bunches of hair, 
while still further back was a semi-circle of 
mangled, half dead wolves. We had. brought 
along our revolvers and proceeded to put these 
brutes out of misery. Scill further away we 
could see, limping in the bright moonlight and 
yelling like fiends, the remnant of the great 
flock whose curiosity had led them to inspect 
the glycerine ring. 
We had no means of estimating exactly the 
number of animals killed by the explosion, but 
judging by the original drove and contrasting 
it with the straggling few that limped away, we 
came to the conclusion that not less than fifty 
coyotes departed this life on that occasion. But 
what caused us much greater satisfaction than 
the mere slaughter was the fact that no more 
coyotes trespassed upon our self-claimed preserve 
during our sojourn. It seemed probable that the 
survivors told their companions about the catas¬ 
trophe, unless, as John suggested, the entire 
coyote contingent of that section of Kansas was 
present on the fatal night. We often heard the 
howl of wolves afterward, but they were mostly 
of the timber species and were at a great dis¬ 
tance from our camp. But we still staked our 
ponies in the gulch. 
Here then at last was I, fairly installed in that 
sportsmen’s Mecca that had figured conspicu¬ 
ously in my dreams of an earthly paradise from 
the days of earliest boyhood. Located in a com¬ 
fortable shack; food in abundance for self and 
horse; a jolly companion, who entered heartily 
into the spirit of the situation; a vast forest 
spread out before me, filled with almost every 
variety of game, and yet, surrounded by a prodi¬ 
gality of means to enjoyment, I was forced to 
accept the truth of the old saying: “There’s no 
rose without its thorn.” 
On the very morning after our wholesale on¬ 
slaught upon the coyote legions there stole over 
my physical economy the preliminary symptoms 
of that scourge of the Southwest—fever and 
ague. Hot streaks would start somewhere about 
the base of my spine and shoot upward in tanta¬ 
lizing little spurts till they reached my head; 
then with the speed of lightning they resolved 
themselves into trickling rills of ice cold water, 
which meandered slowly down my back, filling 
me with shivers and shudders, accompanied by 
dull, heavy pains in my bones. I imagined that 
I had taken a little cold out in the dampness 
of the previous night, and tried to shake it off 
and pull myself together. My efforts were futile, 
and I confided in John, telling him my symptoms. 
“Why, man, you’ve got a case of ‘shakes’ com¬ 
ing on. Have you any quinine in your drug 
box ?” 
Unfortunately I had none. When making up 
the box I tried to think of such drugs as I would 
be most likely to require, overlooking the one 
almost indispensable in that country. 
“Ten grains of quinine in a glass of your corn 
whiskey would knock the ague all out of you 
now, in its first stages,” said John, but I failed 
to derive any comfort from his observation. 
However, I argued if whiskey mixed with 
quinine would effect a cure, a double dose of 
the whiskey straight ought to go a long way 
toward the same end, so I took the whiskey. I 
imagined it helped me; at all events I felt none 
of the shivers again that day nor on the one 
following. 
[to be concluded.] 
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THE TOP RAIL. 
Ambassador James Bryce, who is an ardent as 
well as an expert fisherman, could not be induced 
to shoot a gun at birds nor animal. He was being 
twitted about his eagerness to pull a hook into 
the helpless fish, which the twitter argued was 
just as cruel as killing with a gun. “Well,” said 
the ambassador, "it’s entirely different. The ani¬ 
mal or bird has no choice. You see him, pull 
the trigger and he is dead, but with a fish it is 
different. You cast the fly and—well the fish 
does not have to take the hook unless he wants 
to. So you see it is optional with the fish, while 
the animal shot at has no opportunity to refuse 
the shot. The shooting game is too one-sided.” 
But the fact is that Ambassador Bryce is too 
tender-hearted to become a shooting sportsman. 
He winces at having to bait with live bait for 
bass, because of the possible pain to the frog 
or whatever he may be baiting. 
^ Jfl 
One of the writers of so-called nature stories 
spins a yarn that, if it originated with him, 
should entitle him to entry into the ranks of 
great inventors. Someone said an Indian woman 
had exhibited a scar on one of her legs, saying 
that she had cut out a piece of flesh for bait 
with which to fish through the ice, and thus save 
her own and her infant’s lives at a time when 
everybody else in her village had starved to 
death. 
This smacks of one of Petroleum Y. Nasby’s 
stories, but while not so tall, is, no less easy to 
swallow. Nasby wrote in anti-bellum days of 
a concoction he planned to sell as a hair grower 
and which, he said, would make anything grow 
if properly applied. A poor woman who had 
only a cow on which to depend for a livelihood, 
he said, cut a steak from Bossy’s hams every 
day, applied the hair grower, and lo, next day 
there was enough fresh meat for another steak. 
But Nasby did not expect that anyone would 
believe his yarns, and besides, he lived at a 
time when writers did not label their inventions 
in any special way. but ground them out and let 
the reading public form its . own conclusions. 
^ ^ 
Out in Springfield, III, they have no Mayor 
Shanks to keep down the price of food, but they 
“raised” Indianapolis one—that is, of course, if 
our correspondent has not been careless in 
transcribing the following story: 
“Mrs. C. H. Cormeny, of Springfield, was sur¬ 
prised to see a fine specimen of the opossum 
walking in her back yard. Securing a dub, she 
speedily killed the animal, and being an expert 
cook, she served it for dinner with the traditional 
sweet potato trimmings. It is rare that these 
shy animals of the forest find their way into a 
city yard, and the presence of the marsupial was 
a surprise to all nimrods.” 
Grizzly King. 
