How A Chinaman Rides the Untamed Broncho
Bill Nye
A Chinaman does not grab the bit of a broncho and yank it around till the noble beast can see thirteen new and peculiar kinds of fire-works, or kick him in the stomach, or knock his ribs loose, or swear at him until the firmament gets loose and begins to roll together like a scroll, but he gets on the wrong side and slides into the saddle and smiles and says something like what a guinea hen would say if she got excited and tried to repeat one of Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson’s poems backward in his native tongue. At first the broncho seems temporarily rattled, but by-and-by he shoots athwart the sunny sky like a thing of life and comes down with his legs in a cluster like a bunch of asparagus.
This will throw a Chinaman’s liver into the northwest corner of his throat, and his upper left hand duodessimo into the middle of next week, but he doesn’t complain. He opens his mouth and breaths in all of the atmosphere the rest of the universe can spare, and tickles the broncho on the starboard quarter with his cork sole. The mirth-provoking movement throws the broncho into the wildest hysterics, and for some minutes the spectator doesn’t see anything very distinctly. The autumnal twilight seems fraught with blonde broncho and pale-blue shirt tail and Chinaman moving in an irregular orbit, and occasionally throwing off meteoric articles of apparel and pre-historic chunks of ingenious profanity of the vintage of Confucius. When the sky clears up a little the Chinaman’s hair is down and in wild profusion about his olive features. His shirt flap is very much frayed, like an American flag that has snapped in the breeze for thirteen weeks.
He finds also that he has telescoped his spinal column and jammed two ribs through the right superior duplex, has two or three vertebræ floating about through his system that he doesn’t know what to do with. In fact, the Chinaman is a robust ruin, while the broncho is still in a good state of preservation. Now the broncho humps his back up into a circumambient atmosphere, and when he once bisects the earth’s orbit and jabs his feet into the trembling earth a shapeless mass of brocaded silk and coarse black hair and taper nails and celestial shirt-tails and oolong profanity and disorganized Chinese remains comes down apparently from the New Jerusalem, and the coroner goes out on the street to get six good men and a chemist, and they analyze the collection. They report that the deceased had come to his death by reasons of concussion, induced by a ride from the outer battlements of the sweet by-and-by.