When creditors in a town get too mad and threaten to attach things, we invite them to go along with us for a few days, and get their money when we strike a paying stand, and we agree to furnish them a Pullman car and all they can eat.  That is rather tempting to country people, so we had a full car load of creditors with us for a week, and we gave them plenty to drink, so they had the time of their lives, but they didn’t get their money.  After going with us all through Georgia, they held an indignation meeting in the car, and between high balls and cheese sandwiches they got sleepy, and we side tracked their car in the woods at a station in Mississippi, where there was a post office, saw mill and a cotton gin.  I guess they are there yet unless Mr. Pullman’s lost car experts have found the car and driven them out with fire extinguishers.

Pa came pretty near being left in that car with the creditors in Mississippi.  He was helping to entertain the guests, and jollying them up to believe they would get their money when we got to Memphis the next day, when he noticed the car had been sidetracked, and he knew that was the way we were going to dispose of the creditors.  He thought some one would tell him when to get off, but he was sitting up with a landlady from some place in Georgia that we owed a lot of money for feeding the freaks, and she was threatening that if she didn’t get her money she would have the heart’s blood of some one.  So pa was afraid to leave for fear she would stab him.

But when the car stopped on the siding, pa took off his coat and hat and yawned, and said he guessed he would turn in, and she let him go to his berth, and he got out on the platform, and just then the second section of our train came along, and stopped for water, and pa crawled into an animal car and laid down in the straw with the sacred cow.  She bellowed all night ’cause the sacred bull, her husband, had been attached for debt at Vicksburg, but when pa got in the car in his shirt sleeves and humped his shoulders up on account of the cold, the cow thought maybe she had been unnecessarily alarmed, and maybe pa was her husband.

So she quit bellowing, and laid down and chewed her cud till daylight.  Then when she saw that pa was another person she got mad and chased him up into the rafters of the car, and he had to ride there until the train got to Memphis.  The hands rescued pa, but he got away from the creditors all right.

[Illustration:  The Sacred Cow Chased Pa Up Into the Rafters of the Car.]

We made a new lot of creditors at Memphis, and they proposed to go along with us, but we shook them off.

Gee, but we made a killing in Memphis, and don’t you forget it.  We had handbills on all the wagons in the parade, telling the people that the proceeds of the afternoon and evening performance would be given to deserving persons, in charity, and the intention was to use the money to pay off the hands.  My, but how the people turned out.  The tents were all full, and we had more money than we have had in a month before, and after the performance at night the mayor and some prominent citizens waited on the management and asked when and where we were going to distribute the money to the deserving persons.