ended
by her satellites. But her career was too terrific for these to hold to
their connection. The laws of the universe forbade it. Napoleon
Bonaparte de Neville lost his hold as she crashed into the sorghum
patch. George Washington Marlborough tripped over an irrigation ditch,
and soared away at a tangent, like a sputtering remnant of a burnt-out
world. Don Juan San Diego went the wrong side of a mulberry tree, and
the lasso parted with a snap. He never stopped until his momentum
carried him through the slats of the neighboring cow-pen. Only the
long-legged Michigander kept his hold, and he looked like a pair of
extended scissors. I stood aghast at the impending ruin of my hopes,
with my lower jaw dropped. The captain alone retained his presence of
mind. As the black unit of my last Texan speculation shot by him, with
Michigan, elongated like a peninsula, fastened to her tail, he rolled up
to his knees and roared:--

"'_Starboard your helm, boy!_ _Luff her up! Luff her up, for the love
of God, or the colonel is busted!_'

"It is doubtful if the Michigan man ever heard the stentorian call of
the captain, for sound travels only thirteen hundred feet to the second,
and the cow was certainly going considerably faster than that; and,
besides, he was himself engaged, with a terrific earnestness, in a vain
effort to extricate a word out of his throat, which stuck like a wad in
a smutty gun--a word of undoubted Saxon origin and of expressive force,
and which has saved more blood-vessels from bursting than the lancet of
the phlebotomist, for as he streamed past there was left floating upon
the air a long string of d's, thus: d----d----d--d--d--d-d-d...!

"No one who did not hear them could ever conceive of the awful
sputtering, hissing sound that they caused in the atmosphere as they
came out of the mouth of the mad and stuttering Michigander; and as he
and the cow bored a hole through the reeds on the bank of the river,
and, hitting a cypress stump, ricochetted into the water, that fiery
string of d's, still hot and sputtering, reached half across the field.

[Illustration: "LUFF HER UP! LUFF HER UP!"]

"The splash of the two as they struck the water brought the old captain
to his feet, and, in spite of his rheumatic leg, he rushed toward the
river, crying:--

"'_Man overboard! Man overboard! Gone clean over the forechains!
Life-floats to port and starboard!_'

"With such a frightful catastrophe, gentlemen, the rememb