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Show : TALES OF THE OLD i : FRONTIER j J By ELMO SCOTT WATSON J l 4 19-3, Westorn Newspaper Union.) "HE DIED GAME" WHEN a man of the old frontier came to the end of the trail there was but one valedictory for hlui If he was one of the true border breed "Ha died game." A party of buffalo hunters was surrounded sur-rounded by hostile Indians in the Yellowstone country of Montana. The bullets of the savages had shattered the leg of one of the hunters so badly that he could not ride. If his companions com-panions stayed with him, as they offered of-fered to do, it meant the death of them all. He asked for his revolver and, although al-though they knew- why he wanted it, they brought It to him. He put the muzzle to his temple and pulled tha trigger. The cartridge did not explode. ex-plode. The hunter looked at tha weapon curiously. "That was the first time it ever failed me" he said quietly. Then he rolled the cylinder one notch and this time It did not fall him. Once some Texas cowboys who had made a semi-official punitive expedition expedi-tion across the Rio Grande were captured cap-tured by the Mexicans. General Santa Ana ordered that they should draw from a Jar filled with black beans and white beans to determine who of their number should face a firing squad. Major Cook, who had Just passed his thirtieth birthday, plunged hia hand Into the Jar and drew oot a black bean. "Well," he said with a smile, "they rob me of only 40 years." Another Texan, named Henry Whaling, Whal-ing, looked at the death sentence which he held in his hand. "They don't make much off of me. I've killed more than 25 of their yellow-bellies" yellow-bellies" he said with a touch of pride In his voice. Upon a Michigan river a crew of lumber jacks were trying to break a log jam. They were "dry-picking," slow, laborious work under the jumbled jum-bled mass of timber that towered 40 feet In the air. Under the very face of the mass was a young fellow named Jimmy Powers. Suddenly there was a roar and the mass of logs lurched forward. A dam upstream had broken. In a flash Jimmy Powers realized that he was trapped. So he jerked off his battered bat-tered old felt hat and hurled it defiantly de-fiantly in the very face of the solid wall of logs and water that poised over him for a second. "So long, fellows fel-lows !" spectators on the banks above heard the voice of Jimmy Powers. Then the logs crashed down. Montana buffalo hunter, Texas cowboy, cow-boy, Michigan lumber Jack frontiersmen frontiers-men all they died game. |