32

BUFFALO BILL IN A FIX.
Saves the Reputations of Heroes.

A little chat with Buffalo Bill the other writes Townsend Percy, elicted the following bit of his experience in London among some lordly liars. " I thought," said Bill, "that I had killed a few bear and buffalo and mountain sheep and antelope, and had a few interesting scuffles with man and beast in my time; but the accounts of wholesale slaughter and Indian fights I find I'm expected to indorse as having taken place under my eyes are just enough to take the sand out of the biggest liar between Omaha and 'Frisco. Before I got into the show business, as you must have suspected, I conducted- that's the word now- a great many parties of noble young Englishment all through the Black Hills, the Yellowstone country, the Little Missouri and Little Big Horn countries. Well, they were mostly quiet, good- natured fellows that kept me shooting to get skins, antlers, and such like for them, and I prided myself on keepin' them out of trouble with Injuns and grislies and such. I find these quiet chaps have come home and figured as heroes of every kind of scrimmage; every skin was the natural focus of a stack of lies, and every horn is hung with a dime novel of the most sensational kind. And I'm expected to back 'em all up and add more gory particulars. It's rough on an honest frontierman, but I do it." " What, sustain wholesale lies?" "Wal, this way," said Bill with a faint blush. "It's mostly a young gal with glowin; eyes who's been lied to that asks me, and I ain't got it in me to take her vision away from her, and then," he added in a dreamy way, "It's all goin' to help the show."