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About The Hesperian / (Lincoln, Neb.) 1885-1899 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 16, 1894)
THE HESPERIAN blamed scoundrel fur all his pcrlitcncss. I come down in the country an' got me a farm an' left Sam there alone, but he got some of his brothers out afore long to help him run things. But it weren't only a few years after he'd boughten the hole an' made it jest what he'd figured on, a reg'lar salt garden, when that skulkin' agent come round an' gave the real truth to them lies what he'd told afore. An' ho were as perlite as ever. But Sam he were put out'n house an' money an' everything he had, hope, too, fur he never lift his head since them days. He were a fool 1 He wern't no foolor'n you be. He were jest took in. It were alius his luck. He were the best man what ever lived, jest so good an' cheerful an' alius so hopeful too, but ho never had any luck. There be folks that way ye know. THE POLITICIAN'S STORY. There goes Old Bradford. You've heard of him. No I "Why, he's the biggest fool in the state and cracked, too. He's been loafing round hero every session I can re member. Been trying to get the state to pay him for letting a certain statesman swindle him out of every red cent he had way long back in the early days. The ras cal, who was a land agent, actually made a pretense of selling old Bradford that salt basin over yonder and took his Yankee cash for it, too. Bradford was bound to have it. He had some big financial scheme in his head. He wasn't anybody's fool, exactly, but he never know the hole was state prop erty, and the agent was too much of a scoun drel to tell him. Then he went to work like a slave and blew in all his own money and some fifty thousand of an eastern capitalist's too. The capitalist came out hero in Octo ber, just our finest weather, you kuow. Sara got him out to the salt basin one day when the weather was very Italian, as they say, arid the fellow was just captured com pletely. Then Sam showed him the salt he'd made, and built up some of his air castles ho was a master hand at that I've heard about what he could make if he just had the cash. Maybe you believe ho didn't make it. Well, ho just did. Ho made as good salt as I ever ate or saw and lots of it, too. It was a mighty pretty sight to go out there on a hot July day and see the salt just grow ing in the big long vats. Sam was quite a genius in his way and he had things rigged up so as to get all the salt there was in the brifte. Well, he had good prospects ahead of him, was working like a slave, but as cheerful and hopeful as ever, when up bobs the land agent, who wasn't a land agent any longer, but a rascally state officer, and he, with more or less right of course, but with devilish meanness, nevertheless, took all Sam Bradford had and made a beggar of him. It fairly staggered him for a while, and he wasn't enough used to the ways of the world to have the fellow put in the Pen where he belonged. They patched it up by giving Sam a lease of the land, but he'd better have let it go, for it wasn't more than two or three years when one of those pesky floods crept up from Salt Creek like a thief and scooped up Sam's vats and kettles and salt, about two thousand dollars worth, almost ready for market, and carried them off into nowhere . It was an awful shock to Sam. He had just bound up his life in that salt basin. Somehow he got it into his poor crazy head that the state was responsible for it, and so he has put in his claim against it and has been waiting all these years to have the claim paid. I declare I'd like to see it paid, for the fallow's just steeped in poverty and 1 guess he's always been more, or loss unlucky, born so perhaps. There don't seem to be any idea in his brain exceptthat claim now. He goes along the street mumbling to himself. Sometimes ho looks up at me when I pass him with such a pitiablo, dog like oxpression, but ho does not recognize me. Every day in the year, the janitor says, he's there in the capitol, roaming around the halls, and always coming back to the doors of the legislative chambers. During sessions, he is always there in the House, always in the same seat in the gallery. I
