Fluke MaGilder, an old Washington reporter, who afterward was well known among Western newspaper men, was one of the most tireless and persistent news-gatherers I ever knew. He used to tell with considerable apparent pleasure how he didn't obtain the points on a prominent military court martial which was held at Cheyenne in 1876. It happened on this wise:

When it was known for a dead certainty that the court-martial had closed, and that the result was sealed up in an envelope in the possession of General Pope, who roomed at the Inter-Ocean, Fluke got up an infernal lie to tell the General, and thus got him away from his room. He induced a little negro boy, by promising him an old pair of pants, to go up and deliver a note to General Pope, saying that General Merritt was out at Fort Russell, and that he wanted to see him immediately. After the General had gone Fluke crawled into the transom of his room, and began to ransack things. It turned out, however, that the documents were safe in the General's overcoat pocket, and MaGilder was baffled. He searched all the drawers in the room, looked under the bed, rummaged the pockets of all the extra clothes in the room, and the more he searched the madder he got, and when at last it dawned upon him that he was foiled, his wrath knew no bounds. He filled his pockets with the General's cigars, drank the General's wine, and wiped his nose on the General's best clean handkerchiefs. He spit tobacco juice in the General's slippers, wiped his feet on the pillow shams, dressed the coal-stove up in the General's night shirt, and spread a few spare hairpins which he had in his pockets, under the General's pillow. He was pretty mad. He took the spittoon and stood it on the center-table, with a tooth brush sticking in the middle, and wound up by trying on the General's underclothes and tearing the ruffles off. It is so well established that Fluke had a great deal of embonpoint, that it is unnecessary to say he had a good deal of trouble to get into General Pope's apparel, as the General is a slim man. However, as MaGilder stood in the position of a boy who is just on the point of going in swimming, and had the last garment drawn over his head, so that he could not see very well, General Pope slipped in with a large snow-shovel, which he applied with great vigor. When they offered Fluke a chair at a party after that he would murmur, "No, thank you, I prefer to stand up. I've been sitting down all day and wish a change." But everybody knew that he hadn't sat down for over a week.