|IT begins to look now as though Major F. G. Wilson, who stopped here a
short time last week and week before, might be a gentleman in disguise.
He has done several things since he left here, that look to a man up
a tree like something irregular and peculiar. The major has not only
prevaricated, but he has done so in such a way as to beat his friends
and to make them yearn for his person in order that they may kick
him over into the inky night of space. He has represented himself as
confidential adviser and literary tourist of several prominent New York,
Chicago, Omaha and Tie Siding dailies, and had such good documents to
show in proof of his identity in that capacity that he has received
many courtesies which, as an ordinary American dead-beat, he might have
experienced great difficulty in securing. We simply state this in order
to put our esteemed contemporaries on their guard, so that they will
not let him spit in their overshoes and enjoy himself as he did here. He
wears a white hat on his head and a crooked tooth in the piazza of his
mouth. This pearly fang he uses to masticate and reduce little delicate
irregular fragments of plug tobacco, which he borrows of people who have
time to listen to the silvery tinkle of his bazoo.
When last seen he was headed west, and will probably strike Eureka,
Nevada, in a week or two. His mission seems to be mainly to make people
feel a goneness in their exchequer, and to distribute tobacco dados over
the office stoves of our great land. He is a man who writes long letters
to the New York _Herald_ that are never printed. His freshly blown nose
is red, but his newspaper articles are not. He claims to represent the
Mutual Reserve Fund Life Association lately, too. The company represents
the Insurance and he attends to the Mutual Reserve Fund. He has mutually
reserved all the funds he could get hold of since he struck the west,
besides mutually reserving enough strong drink to eat a hole through the
Ames monument.
Such men as Major Wilson make us suspicious of humanity, and very likely
the next man who comes along here and represents that he is a great man,
and wants five dollars on his well-rounded figure and fair fame will
have to be identified. We have helped forty or fifty such men to make a
bridal tour of Wyoming and now we are going to saw off and quit. When a
great journalist comes into this office again with an internal revenue
tax on his breath and nineteen dollars back on his baggage, we will
probably pick up a fifty pound chunk of North Park quartz and spread
his intellectual faculties around this building till it looks like the
Custer massacre.