A Railway Adventure out West.

Thames Star, Volume XVI, Issue 5089, 9 May 1885, Page 1

A Railway Adventure out West.

The story of cannibalism on the part of the Arctic explorers with Greely ought never to hare got into the papers, but now that the story has been told, people should not get mad and blame the men who were obliged to eat human flesh or die. Few people who have never been «n the verge of starvation can realise what the pangs of hunger will bring a man to. There are people who board at cheap boardinghouses who have some faint realisation of hunger, as is shown when they take a meal at a hotel. Then they reach for everything that is in their sight, and their eyes roll in frenzy, and you can watch them and imagine what they would do if bard pressed, and no food for ten days. Eight here at home there have been, narrow escapes from cannibalism, when trains have been snowed in for a week. Only a couple of years ago a train was snowed in west of St. Paul's, end for four days there was no food except the cotton waste that is used to oil the engines, and a barrel of shell oysters. After all the food was gone, and the travelling men had eaten all the leather fire buckets, and chewed the substance out of the plushed cushions, they held a consultation in the baggage-ear, and decided to kill and eat a girl in the rear coach. She was about twenty years old, a school-teacher by profession, rosy-cheeked, and just about the right age to eat. The boys appointed a young fellow, who was travelling for a Milwaukee tobacco house, to go to the girl and tell her that they decided to eat her, and to get her Consent. It is a delicate thing for a young man to do, to go and tell R girl he has been flirting with three days in a snowstorm that the boys have decided to eat her, but the law among travelling men is severe, and the young man had to obey. He went into the coach with a sinking heart and a smile, gat down beside her, and told her be had a proposal to make, and with a smile that was worth two in the bush, she told him she had mistrusted something of the kind ever since he squeezed her hand the evening before, when they were playing casino. He said the proposition he was was about to make was ihe harder from the fact that he had learned in the past few days to love her, but in times like these

Wa must stifle our feelings, and do our duty, and a tear came from his eye as he looked at the rich red cheek and the trueblue eyes. He said the proposal was one that might strike her as peculiar. She gaid that was all right, and if he wanted -her to marry him, she did not see any objection, and when they got back to St. Paul they would be married at once. The young man was slightly taken back, and he said that was all right, and ha was the happiest man on earth, and ho threw his arms round her neck and began biasing her. The travelling men in the baggagecar were looking through the door at the young fellow and the girl, end wondering if he was going to be all the winter about it, and when they saw him kissing her, they thought his hunger had overcome him, and he was taking a meal out of tbe best place, and it' made them mad, and they went in tbe car to remonstrate with him. When they got to the rear of the car he had quit kissing her, and Rho had opened a big basket filled with cold chicken, pfpkles, ham sandwiches, bottles of coffee, and. everything good, and had spread a lunch, and as they came along she said :—" Gentlemen, assist us at our wedding breakfast. Your friend and myself are to be married when we got to St. Paul." The boys took hold and helped eat the lunch, congratulating the young fellow, though they reprimanded him for turning traitor at a serious moment, but he pulled out a box of cigars, and they smoked for a little time, when a relief engine arrived, and tbe stalled train was hauled out of the snowdrift, and on the way to St. Paul, and that evening the cannibal and bis victim were married.— Atlantic Ocean.