Dead Rights Party, XIII c

Slack II worked himself up from cave life to a sod hut, which in bygone days was considered the American equivalent of a castle. His calling was to further develop the art form he had learned from his father, the art that came to be called “begging off”—a set of techniques the candidate himself was later to perfect. After a down-on-his-luck builder had mounted a sod dwelling atop a sequestered cave strewn with ancient jawless fish from the mid-Ordovician period, Slack the Second refused payment. In fact, he threatened a lawsuit on the grounds that there were several discernible bits of cactus admixed with the sod. The builder, caught in his evil ways, folded and was run out of town, leaving Slack II to live mortgage-free for the remainder of his many years. Not much is known of his first wife, Marie Antoinette du Ojibway, of the Quebec Ojibways, except that she excelled in archery and had one helluva temper.