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Show A Feline Tale of Busted Hopes. Speaking about the feline disposition to sing, reminds re-minds me of a very curious and not altogether unsuccessful experiment made in Cheyenne not many years ago. There was a sort of musical genius at large there named Johnson a promising promis-ing young man, or perhaps he would have been promising had he let tarantula juice alone. He got to bending his elbow too often in the East, and his folks despairing of getting him away from dubious associations there, concluded it would be best to ship the convivialist out West, where in fact they were likely to be a dozen times worse, with a possible additional hempen noose association associ-ation in case he should get too much sulphate of zinc aboard and go to trifling with somebody's lie stock. Well, Johnson got a job as organist in one of the Cheyenne churches, and actually rose high enough in grace to wear a biled shirt and plaster his shock of hair with pomade on Sundays. But this spurt did not last very long, and one night a Rocky Mountain "Thomas and Jeremiah," taken as the windup of a spree, got the better of the erring musician and he laid out until morning in the cold and wet. The undertaker harvested Johnson that day, and the sky pilot later talked at the funeral of the mysterious ways of a divine ProUdence he didn't know anything about. But the gravedigger hit the target in saying he had "buried lots of them whisky pneumonias." This Johnson was a character. He had a theory in harmonics which he tried to put into practice that convulsed the entire town. He figured that bj hitting the tail of a cat at certain distances from "the socket of the candlestick," as he expressed ex-pressed it, notes of certain positions on the scale vould be produced. Then by striking the tails of seeral cats at once in previously ascertained locations the product would be a musical chord. So he tried it on several cats, and, as he claimed, succeeded, to their intense astonishment and his equally intense satisfaction. Then it was that Johnson's lofty genius rose to the exigencies of the occasion. He arranged a board with holes cut in it for the heads of his living feline musical mu-sical scale, as divers severe scratchings convinced him this would be the eminently proper procedure. Then he arranged a smaller board behind with smaller holes through which to run the cats' tails and the mechanism in the shape of a row of miniature pile drivers connected by strings Aith the action of a cabinet organ, and so placed as to fall on certain parts of the feline caudal ainttomy. Now the main "idee" of this beautiful scheme was that for every note or chord struck on the organ, a corresponding note or chord would be produced from the feline chorus by the dropping drop-ping of these pile drivers on the tails of the cats, and thus, as Johnson announced afterwards to an eagH and expectant audience, it was possible to Siu to a breathless musical world a feline con-" con-" tert . Th whole combination was placed on a stage in the rear of the largest saloon in Cheyenne, hc h Johnson took sixteen captured felines and final i got them fastened in their appropriate Plac s. Everything was then in readiness; the affau had been talked all over town, and the saloon sa-loon was crowded "clear across the street" when the urtain rose and Johnson was discovered seat 1 at the organ arrayed in the glories of a bile shirt with frills, while the cats sat on their ham hes in gala day attire and their eyes blink-tog blink-tog nd winking in the unsteady flickering of the tallo -dip footlights. Of course the boys whooped things up, ?s Johnson squared himself for the 8rea . st effort of his life. 'f Johnson maintained for the rest of his atmal born days that if the boys had only kept quiet an(j not g0l t0 yeiijng m, Comanches on a st dp-hunt, and let the cats alone, the concert mtmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm would not only have been the recherche-est blowout blow-out that ever struck Cheyenne this side of Mc-Ginty's Mc-Ginty's funeral, but would have proven an advance ad-vance in musical science calculated to place the name of Johnson in the same list with Bach, Sir Jsaac Newton, Steinway, and "all them 'ore other big bugs." But the crowd suddenly, as if inspired of the evil one, began firing onions, turnips, pretzels, pret-zels, cigar stumps and such things at the cats, and the poor things became terrified. This was intensified by the thumping of the clappers on their tails and the roar of the organ. Well, there was fun, and the Vokes family would have given the proceeds of a - year's engagements to have caught onto the performance. Things presently became worse and worse, as the cats got to yelling, yell-ing, tearing and scratching to fetch loose and escape, es-cape, while the crowd grew more uproarious than ever. Finally Johnson, seeing that "the jig was up," got mad and threw loose the neck frame on the cats, letting them all out. And, oh, my country! the racket was something tremendous, as the cats got out among the crowd, and everybody began tumbling over the benches and over one another to escape the feline onslaught. on-slaught. Then some one turned in a fire alarm, and the department responded with a promptness prompt-ness that astonished themselves also some other people. And the first thing the boys knew was a s-w-i-s-h and a s-w-a-s-h as a ninety-foot head of water from the city main came dashing, splashing, splash-ing, into the saloon. The crowd crushed and crashed through the windows, through trap doors in the roof, trap doorsin the floor, and all finally got away, with a varied and interesting assortment assort-ment of contusions, bruises and cuts, but I think this disapppointment was really the means of Johnson's acquiring the sunset-colored jag that ended his wild and checkered career. ROBT. J. JESSUP. |
