Walker Lake bulletin. (Hawthorne, Nev.) 1883-1926, 1923-01-06
And Yet |
a Fool t
s.-'-'-'~'-'~.~''-'-'B 3, .'-.~.-.~.~.-...-..--.,:
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE !!
.HE exchanges that come to
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Copyright, 1929. By the Macmillan Co.
country newspaper like ours be

"HE exchanges that come to a
country newspaper like ours be-
II come familiar friends as the
years pass. One who reads these pa
pers regularly comes to know them
even in their wrappers. though to an
Impractical eye the wrappers seem
much alike. But when he has been
poking his thumb through the paper
husks in a certain pile every morning
for a score of years, he knows by some
sort of prescience when a new paper
appears; and, when the pile looks odd
to him, he goes hunting for the stran-
ger and is not happy until he has
found it.
One morning this spring the strange
stuck its head from the bottom of the
exchange pile, and when we glanced mt
the handwriting of the address and at
the one-cent stamp on the cover we
knew it had been mailed to us by some
one besides the publisher For the
newspaper HAND is as definite form
of writing as the legal hand or the
Doctors. The paper proved to be an
vertising, restaurant cards. church and
school meeting notices, local itelus
about the sawmill and the woinan's
club, land notices and paid items from
wool dealers. On the local page in the
midst of q circle of red ink was the
p. Sampson. Every month we get no
tees like this, of the deaths of old
settlers who have gone to the ends of
the earth, but this notice was peculiar
in that it said:
"One year ago our lamented towns
man deposited with the firm of Cross
& Kurt2, the popular undertakers and
dealers in Indian goods and general
merchandise, 500 to cover his funeral
expenses, and another hundred to pro-
vide that huge boulder be rolled over
his grave on which he desired the fol-
p. Sampson, Born Dec. 6, 1910, and
died -. And is not this rare
fellow, my lord? He's good at any
thing and yet fool"
We handed the paper to Alphabet
cal Morrison, who happened to be in
the office at the time, paw 'ng through
the discarded exchanges In the waste
basket, looking for his New York Sun,
and, after Colonel Morrison had read
the item, he began drumming with his
fingernails on the chair seat between
his knees. His eyes were full of
dt-np 1iefn ,od h,
he looked off into space. Finally he
sighed:
And yet a fool-a motley fool
Poor old Samp-kept 1t up to the end !
take 1t from the guarded way the pa
per refers to his faults, as who of us
or something like that" The colonel
paused and smiled just perceptibly,
and went on: "Yet l see that he was
a good fellow to the end. | notice that
the Shriners and the Dks and the
Eagles and the Hoo-hoos buried him.
old Samp; he certainly went all the
gaits!'
We suggested that Colonel Morrison
write something about the deceased
for the paper, but though the colonel
admitted that he knew Sampson like
a book" there was no persuading Nor
rson to write the obituary.
After some urging and by way of
compromise" he said. I'm perfectly
willing to give you fellows the facts
and let you fix up what you please"
Because the reporters were both
busy We called the stenographer, and
had the colonel's story taken down as
he told ito be rewritten into an
obituary later. And II is what he said
and not what we printed about Samp-
son that is worth putting down here.
The colonel took the big leather chair,
locked his hands behind his head, and
began:
"lAt me see. Samp was born, ms
he says, December 9, 1910, In Wiscon-.
sin, and came. out to Kansas right af-
ter the war closed He was going to
college up there, and at the second call
for troops no led tho whole senior class
into forming a company, and enlisted
before graduation and fought from
that time on till the close Of the war.
He was Il captain, l think. but you
never heard him called that. When he
came here he'd been admitted to the
bar and was good lawyer-a mighty
good lawyer for that time and had
more business n bird pup with
gum-shoe. He was Just a boy then.
and, like all boys. he enjoyed good
time. He crank more or less In the
ariny--they all did 3 far as that goes,
but he kept II mp In desultory way
after he came here, as sort of ac-
cessory to his main business Of life.
which was being a good fellow.
"And he was a good fellow--an aw-
full good fellow. We were all young
then; there wasn't an old man on the
town site as remember Il, We used
to load up the whole bunch and 60
hunting--closing up. the stores and
tnking the girls along-and did mot
show up till midnight Samp would
always have little something to take