Farmer's Garments and Veracity Badly Strained.
BELIEVES IN THE AIRSHIP.
Its Anchor Rope Hooks the Frightened Man.
A Sioux City Yarn.
Sioux City, Iowa, March 29 - It will not be long before the airship will be as serious a menace to life and limb as the bicycle. Robert Hibbard, a farmer living fifteen miles north of here, thinks that it is nothing less than criminal recklessness on the part of skippers of such craft to permit a drag rope with a grapnel attached to dangle from the rear of their cars. He asserts that the anchor of one of them caught in the slack of his trousers a few nights ago and dragged him several rods before the seat of the tortured garment gave way and dropped him into a dry run on the border of his "cow lot." Hibbard's reputation for truth telling has never been bad and the general opinion is that he either "had em" or dreamed his remarkable experience.
What the residents of Sioux City and vicinity supposed to be an airship has been seen in this vicinity several times within the past month. Hibbard is one of those who have been eagerly watching for a glimpse of it. On the night in question he says he was tramping about his farm in the moonlight praying for a sight of the nocturnal visitor, when suddenly a dark body, lighted on each side by rows of what looked like incandescent lamps, loomed up some distance south of him. He watched it intently until it was directly over his head. At this point the skipper evidently decided to turn around. In accomplishing this maneuver the machine sank considerably.
Hibbard did not notice the grapnel dangling from the car until suddenly, as the machine rose again, it hooked itself firmly in the seat of his trousers and shot away to the south. Had the car risen to any considerable height the result, Hibbard thinks, would have been disastrous. Either his weight was sufficient to keep it near terra firma, however, or the operator of the machine did not care to ascend to a higher level. On the banks of the dry run where it shook him off grows a small sapling. Hibbard passed near it in his flight and with the grip of a drowning man, grasped it with both hands. Instantly there was a sound of tearing cloth and the machine went on with a section of the farmer's trousers, while Hibbard himself tumbled into the run. He related his experience to several neighbors and, despite their incredulous grins, firmly maintains the truth of the story.