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Buffalo Bill in "The Red Right Hand," a play written expressly to display the Hon. Mr. Cody's prowess with knife and rifle, is the truly extraordinary attraction at Beethoven Hall this week. The drama is in five acts, founded on the contest between Black Hills miners and Indians, complicated as frontier romance ever is with outlawry and blackguardism. There are numberless combats, single-handed and en masse, in which the immense bowie knife, the short repeating rifle, and the big silver pistol of Buffalo Bill invariably do tremendous execution. The interest of the piece of course centres upon this character, who is also a character of some renown off the stage. As specimens of the Indian-slaying scouts of the plains, Buffalo Bill and his companion, Captain Jack Crawford, who is also a scout not unknown to fame among readers of "Dime" publications-- are studied with a good deal of curiosity. It must be said that the ideas obtained of these terrible fellows in this play make them out much less formidable characters than the sort of free-shooters with which city populations at the East are acquainted. Buffalo Bill has a pleasantly frank and open countenance and speaks very "bad grammar" in a high nasal key, while his long and curling locks and his somewhat unmasculine figure, gait and manner convey the notion rather of a "gentlemanly" hotel or dry-goods clerk than of the shooting, riding, scalping hero of a hundred fights. A tolerable dramatic support sufficed to keep up the rodomontade and fusillade of the play, so as to give "Bill" scope to display his best paces and poses. A farce precedes the melodrama. The attendance was very good last night.
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