Rocky Mountain Sam — page 79: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

70 - ROCKY MOUNTAIN SAM. course adhered at once to the instrument, and the next in- stant their owner was hanging head downward, roaring for help, and in vain endeavoring to release his feet from their novel imprisonment. “Ballast out, Sam! chuck it out! Dve got the fellow deader’n pizon!” sung out the old man, at the same time lashing the pole fast. | But Sam had forgotten all about ballast, balloon, and pretty much everything else in the supreme excitement of the moment, and was leaning over the side of the car, with a grappling-iron hanging from each hand, upon one otf which he had just clawed up a young squaw, baby and all, by the nape of the neck, while with the other he was cautiously angling to catch Rube Tenyck by the seat of his buckskin breeches. At last he succeeded, jJustas the professor, aided by httle Fayaway, began to heave over the ballast, and the balloon trembled on the rise. : But ere they bade farewell to the earth, and while the savages were gazing in stupid terror and amazement at the captives thus made fast to the war-car of the Wind Specter, but more especially at the novel and inexplicable manner in which their luckless leader had been scooped up by the boot-soles, another phenomenon occurred, which astonished the aeronauts themselves almost as much as the Indians. All those steel and iron instruments within a circle of twenty-five or thirty feet of the great magnet began to feel the influence of its tremendous attraction. _ The few guns that were stancing near leaped from their places and froze to the sides of the magnet, as if by magic; hunting-knives leaped from their sheaths, and hatchets from their belts, and, flying through the air at the immi- nent peril of their owners’ heads, clustered around the giant horseshoe like wild bees on a hickory branch; and even a stew pan, that was slowly simmering over a neighboring fire, emptied its contents on the hissing coals and flew up s ee its dangling position above ‘the up-turned cavalry oots. Thus wonderfully laden, the balloon struggled aloft, Sam _ making the two grapnels fast to the side of the car, and the professor and Fayaway throwing out the ballast with all their might. | Jt would be next to impossible to describe the excitement fe cag oe *- *eomicbool S (eCo)