|THE telephone line between Cheyenne and Laramie City will soon be in
operation. It won't work, however. It may be a success for a time, but
sooner or later Bill Nye will set his lopsided jaws at work in front
of the transmitter, and pour a few quarts of untutored lies into the
contribution box, which does service as a part of the telephone machine.
Then the wires will be yanked off the poles, a hissing torrent of
prevarication will blow the battery jars clean over into Utah, and the
listener at the Cheyenne end will be gathered up in a basket. Weeping
friends will hold a funeral over a pair of old boots and a fragment of
shoulder blade--the remains of the departed Cheyennese. It is a weird
and pixycal thing to be a natural born liar, but there are times when a
robust lie will successfully defy the unanimous inventive genius of the
age."--_Sun_.
Oh, do not say those cruel words, kind friend. Do not throw it up to
us that we are weird and pixycal. Oh, believe us, kind sir, we may have
done wrong, but we never did that. We know that election is approaching,
and all sorts of bygone crookedness is raked up at that time, even when
a man is not a candidate for office, but we ask the public to scan our
record and see if the charge made by the _Sun_ is true. It may be that
years ago we escaped justice and fled to the west under an assumed name,
but no man ever before charged us with being weird and pixycal. We have
been in all kinds of society, perhaps, and mingled with people who were
our inferiors, having been pulled by the police once while visiting a
Democratic caucus, but that was our misfortune, not our fault. We were
not a member of the caucus and were therefore discharged, but even
little things like that ought to be forgotten.
As for entering any one's apartments and committing a pixycal crime, we
state now without fear of successful contradiction, that it is not so.
It is no sign because a man in an unguarded moment entered the Rock
Creek eating house and gave way to his emotions, that he is a person to
be shunned. It was hunger, and not love for the questionable, that made
us go there. It is not because we are by nature weird or pixycal, for
we are not. We are not angry over this charge. It just simply hurts
and grieves us. It comes too, at a time when we are trying to lead a
different life, and while others are trying to lend us every aid and
encouragement. We have many friends in Cheyenne who want to see us come
up and take higher ground, but how can we do so if the press lends
its influence against us. That's just the way we feel about it. If the
public prints try to put us down and crush us in this manner, we will
probably get desperate and be just as weird and pixycal as we can be.