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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Options, by O. Henry
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Options
+       "The Rose of Dixie"; The Third Ingredient; The Hiding of Black Bill; Schools and Schools; Thimble, Thimble; Supply and Demand; Buried Treasure; To Him Who Waits; He Also Serves; The Moment of Victory; The Head-Hunter; No Story; The Higher Pragmatism; Best-Seller; Rus in Urbe; A Poor Rule
+
+
+Author: O. Henry
+
+
+
+Release Date: December, 1998  [eBook #1583]
+[Most recently updated: October 14, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OPTIONS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Tim O'Connell and revised by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.
+
+
+
+Note: Many of the author's spellings follow older, obsolete, or
+      intentionally incorrect practice.
+
+
+
+
+
+OPTIONS
+
+by
+
+O. HENRY
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   "The Rose of Dixie"
+   The Third Ingredient
+   The Hiding of Black Bill
+   Schools and Schools
+   Thimble, Thimble
+   Supply and Demand
+   Buried Treasure
+   To Him Who Waits
+   He Also Serves
+   The Moment of Victory
+   The Head-Hunter
+   No Story
+   The Higher Pragmatism
+   Best-Seller
+   Rus in Urbe
+   A Poor Rule
+
+
+
+
+
+"THE ROSE OF DIXIE"
+
+
+When _The Rose of Dixie_ magazine was started by a stock company in
+Toombs City, Georgia, there was never but one candidate for its chief
+editorial position in the minds of its owners. Col. Aquila Telfair
+was the man for the place. By all the rights of learning, family,
+reputation, and Southern traditions, he was its foreordained, fit,
+and logical editor. So, a committee of the patriotic Georgia citizens
+who had subscribed the founding fund of $100,000 called upon Colonel
+Telfair at his residence, Cedar Heights, fearful lest the enterprise
+and the South should suffer by his possible refusal.
+
+The colonel received them in his great library, where he spent most
+of his days. The library had descended to him from his father. It
+contained ten thousand volumes, some of which had been published as
+late as the year 1861. When the deputation arrived, Colonel Telfair
+was seated at his massive white-pine centre-table, reading Burton's
+"Anatomy of Melancholy." He arose and shook hands punctiliously with
+each member of the committee. If you were familiar with _The Rose of
+Dixie_ you will remember the colonel's portrait, which appeared in it
+from time to time. You could not forget the long, carefully brushed
+white hair; the hooked, high-bridged nose, slightly twisted to the
+left; the keen eyes under the still black eyebrows; the classic mouth
+beneath the drooping white mustache, slightly frazzled at the ends.
+
+The committee solicitously offered him the position of managing editor,
+humbly presenting an outline of the field that the publication was
+designed to cover and mentioning a comfortable salary. The colonel's
+lands were growing poorer each year and were much cut up by red
+gullies. Besides, the honor was not one to be refused.
+
+In a forty-minute speech of acceptance, Colonel Telfair gave an
+outline of English literature from Chaucer to Macaulay, re-fought the
+battle of Chancellorsville, and said that, God helping him, he would
+so conduct _The Rose of Dixie_ that its fragrance and beauty would
+permeate the entire world, hurling back into the teeth of the Northern
+minions their belief that no genius or good could exist in the brains
+and hearts of the people whose property they had destroyed and whose
+rights they had curtailed.
+
+Offices for the magazine were partitioned off and furnished in the
+second floor of the First National Bank building; and it was for the
+colonel to cause _The Rose of Dixie_ to blossom and flourish or to
+wilt in the balmy air of the land of flowers.
+
+The staff of assistants and contributors that Editor-Colonel Telfair
+drew about him was a peach. It was a whole crate of Georgia peaches.
+The first assistant editor, Tolliver Lee Fairfax, had had a father
+killed during Pickett's charge. The second assistant, Keats Unthank,
+was the nephew of one of Morgan's Raiders. The book reviewer, Jackson
+Rockingham, had been the youngest soldier in the Confederate army,
+having appeared on the field of battle with a sword in one hand and a
+milk-bottle in the other. The art editor, Roncesvalles Sykes, was a
+third cousin to a nephew of Jefferson Davis. Miss Lavinia Terhune, the
+colonel's stenographer and typewriter, had an aunt who had once been
+kissed by Stonewall Jackson. Tommy Webster, the head office-boy,
+got his job by having recited Father Ryan's poems, complete, at the
+commencement exercises of the Toombs City High School. The girls who
+wrapped and addressed the magazines were members of old Southern
+families in Reduced Circumstances. The cashier was a scrub named
+Hawkins, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had recommendations and a bond
+from a guarantee company filed with the owners. Even Georgia stock
+companies sometimes realize that it takes live ones to bury the dead.
+
+Well, sir, if you believe me, _The Rose of Dixie_ blossomed five times
+before anybody heard of it except the people who buy their hooks and
+eyes in Toombs City. Then Hawkins climbed off his stool and told on
+'em to the stock company. Even in Ann Arbor he had been used to having
+his business propositions heard of at least as far away as Detroit. So
+an advertising manager was engaged--Beauregard Fitzhugh Banks, a young
+man in a lavender necktie, whose grandfather had been the Exalted High
+Pillow-slip of the Kuklux Klan.
+
+In spite of which _The Rose of Dixie_ kept coming out every month.
+Although in every issue it ran photos of either the Taj Mahal or
+the Luxembourg Gardens, or Carmencita or La Follette, a certain
+number of people bought it and subscribed for it. As a boom for it,
+Editor-Colonel Telfair ran three different views of Andrew Jackson's
+old home, "The Hermitage," a full-page engraving of the second battle
+of Manassas, entitled "Lee to the Rear!" and a five-thousand-word
+biography of Belle Boyd in the same number. The subscription list that
+month advanced 118. Also there were poems in the same issue by Leonina
+Vashti Haricot (pen-name), related to the Haricots of Charleston,
+South Carolina, and Bill Thompson, nephew of one of the stockholders.
+And an article from a special society correspondent describing a
+tea-party given by the swell Boston and English set, where a lot of
+tea was spilled overboard by some of the guests masquerading as
+Indians.
+
+One day a person whose breath would easily cloud a mirror, he was so
+much alive, entered the office of _The Rose of Dixie_. He was a man
+about the size of a real-estate agent, with a self-tied tie and a
+manner that he must have borrowed conjointly from W. J. Bryan,
+Hackenschmidt, and Hetty Green. He was shown into the editor-colonel's
+_pons asinorum_. Colonel Telfair rose and began a Prince Albert bow.
+
+"I'm Thacker," said the intruder, taking the editor's chair--"T. T.
+Thacker, of New York."
+
+He dribbled hastily upon the colonel's desk some cards, a bulky manila
+envelope, and a letter from the owners of _The Rose of Dixie_. This
+letter introduced Mr. Thacker, and politely requested Colonel Telfair
+to give him a conference and whatever information about the magazine
+he might desire.
+
+"I've been corresponding with the secretary of the magazine owners
+for some time," said Thacker, briskly. "I'm a practical magazine man
+myself, and a circulation booster as good as any, if I do say it.
+I'll guarantee an increase of anywhere from ten thousand to a hundred
+thousand a year for any publication that isn't printed in a dead
+language. I've had my eye on _The Rose of Dixie_ ever since it
+started. I know every end of the business from editing to setting up
+the classified ads. Now, I've come down here to put a good bunch of
+money in the magazine, if I can see my way clear. It ought to be made
+to pay. The secretary tells me it's losing money. I don't see why a
+magazine in the South, if it's properly handled, shouldn't get a good
+circulation in the North, too."
+
+Colonel Telfair leaned back in his chair and polished his gold-rimmed
+glasses.
+
+"Mr. Thacker," said he, courteously but firmly, "_The Rose of Dixie_
+is a publication devoted to the fostering and the voicing of Southern
+genius. Its watchword, which you may have seen on the cover, is 'Of,
+For, and By the South.'"
+
+"But you wouldn't object to a Northern circulation, would you?" asked
+Thacker.
+
+"I suppose," said the editor-colonel, "that it is customary to open
+the circulation lists to all. I do not know. I have nothing to do with
+the business affairs of the magazine. I was called upon to assume
+editorial control of it, and I have devoted to its conduct such poor
+literary talents as I may possess and whatever store of erudition I
+may have acquired."
+
+"Sure," said Thacker. "But a dollar is a dollar anywhere, North,
+South, or West--whether you're buying codfish, goober peas, or Rocky
+Ford cantaloupes. Now, I've been looking over your November number. I
+see one here on your desk. You don't mind running over it with me?
+
+"Well, your leading article is all right. A good write-up of the
+cotton-belt with plenty of photographs is a winner any time. New York
+is always interested in the cotton crop. And this sensational account
+of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, by a schoolmate of a niece of the Governor
+of Kentucky, isn't such a bad idea. It happened so long ago that most
+people have forgotten it. Now, here's a poem three pages long called
+'The Tyrant's Foot,' by Lorella Lascelles. I've pawed around a good
+deal over manuscripts, but I never saw her name on a rejection slip."
+
+"Miss Lascelles," said the editor, "is one of our most widely
+recognized Southern poetesses. She is closely related to the Alabama
+Lascelles family, and made with her own hands the silken Confederate
+banner that was presented to the governor of that state at his
+inauguration."
+
+"But why," persisted Thacker, "is the poem illustrated with a view of
+the M. & O. Railroad freight depot at Tuscaloosa?"
+
+"The illustration," said the colonel, with dignity, "shows a corner
+of the fence surrounding the old homestead where Miss Lascelles was
+born."
+
+"All right," said Thacker. "I read the poem, but I couldn't tell
+whether it was about the depot of the battle of Bull Run. Now, here's
+a short story called 'Rosies' Temptation,' by Fosdyke Piggott. It's
+rotten. What is a Piggott, anyway?"
+
+"Mr. Piggott," said the editor, "is a brother of the principal
+stockholder of the magazine."
+
+"All's right with the world--Piggott passes," said Thacker. "Well this
+article on Arctic exploration and the one on tarpon fishing might go.
+But how about this write-up of the Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville,
+and Savannah breweries? It seems to consist mainly of statistics about
+their output and the quality of their beer. What's the chip over the
+bug?"
+
+"If I understand your figurative language," answered Colonel Telfair,
+"it is this: the article you refer to was handed to me by the owners
+of the magazine with instructions to publish it. The literary quality
+of it did not appeal to me. But, in a measure, I feel impelled to
+conform, in certain matters, to the wishes of the gentlemen who are
+interested in the financial side of _The Rose_."
+
+"I see," said Thacker. "Next we have two pages of selections from
+'Lalla Rookh,' by Thomas Moore. Now, what Federal prison did Moore
+escape from, or what's the name of the F.F.V. family that he carries
+as a handicap?"
+
+"Moore was an Irish poet who died in 1852," said Colonel Telfair,
+pityingly. "He is a classic. I have been thinking of reprinting his
+translation of Anacreon serially in the magazine."
+
+"Look out for the copyright laws," said Thacker, flippantly. Who's
+Bessie Belleclair, who contributes the essay on the newly completed
+water-works plant in Milledgeville?"
+
+"The name, sir," said Colonel Telfair, "is the _nom de guerre_ of
+Miss Elvira Simpkins. I have not the honor of knowing the lady; but
+her contribution was sent to us by Congressman Brower, of her native
+state. Congressman Brower's mother was related to the Polks of
+Tennessee.
+
+"Now, see here, Colonel," said Thacker, throwing down the magazine,
+"this won't do. You can't successfully run a magazine for one
+particular section of the country. You've got to make a universal
+appeal. Look how the Northern publications have catered to the South
+and encouraged the Southern writers. And you've got to go far and
+wide for your contributors. You've got to buy stuff according to its
+quality without any regard to the pedigree of the author. Now, I'll
+bet a quart of ink that this Southern parlor organ you've been running
+has never played a note that originated above Mason & Hamlin's line.
+Am I right?"
+
+"I have carefully and conscientiously rejected all contributions from
+that section of the country--if I understand your figurative language
+aright," replied the colonel.
+
+"All right. Now I'll show you something."
+
+Thacker reached for his thick manila envelope and dumped a mass of
+typewritten manuscript on the editors desk.
+
+"Here's some truck," said he, "that I paid cash for, and brought along
+with me."
+
+One by one he folded back the manuscripts and showed their first pages
+to the colonel.
+
+Here are four short stories by four of the highest priced authors in
+the United States--three of 'em living in New York, and one commuting.
+There's a special article on Vienna-bred society by Tom Vampson.
+Here's an Italian serial by Captain Jack--no--it's the other Crawford.
+Here are three separate exposés of city governments by Sniffings, and
+here's a dandy entitled 'What Women Carry in Dress-Suit Cases'--a
+Chicago newspaper woman hired herself out for five years as a lady's
+maid to get that information. And here's a Synopsis of Preceding
+Chapters of Hall Caine's new serial to appear next June. And here's a
+couple of pounds of _vers de société_ that I got at a rate from the
+clever magazines. That's the stuff that people everywhere want. And
+now here's a write-up with photographs at the ages of four, twelve,
+twenty-two, and thirty of George B. McClellan. It's a prognostication.
+He's bound to be elected Mayor of New York. It'll make a big hit all
+over the country. He--"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Colonel Telfair, stiffening in his chair.
+"What was the name?"
+
+"Oh, I see," said Thacker, with half a grin. Yes, he's a son of the
+General. We'll pass that manuscript up. But, if you'll excuse me,
+Colonel, it's a magazine we're trying to make go off--not the first
+gun at Fort Sumter. Now, here's a thing that's bound to get next to
+you. It's an original poem by James Whitcomb Riley. J. W. himself.
+You know what that means to a magazine. I won't tell you what I had
+to pay for that poem; but I'll tell you this--Riley can make more
+money writing with a fountain-pen than you or I can with one that lets
+the ink run. I'll read you the last two stanzas:
+
+   "'Pa lays around 'n' loafs all day,
+      'N' reads and makes us leave him be.
+   He lets me do just like I please,
+      'N' when I'm bad he laughs at me,
+   'N' when I holler loud 'n' say
+      Bad words 'n' then begin to tease
+   The cat, 'n' pa just smiles, ma's mad
+      'N' gives me Jesse crost her knees.
+         I always wondered why that wuz--
+         I guess it's cause
+            Pa never does.
+
+   "''N' after all the lights are out
+      I'm sorry 'bout it; so I creep
+   Out of my trundle bed to ma's
+      'N' say I love her a whole heap,
+   'N' kiss her, 'n' I hug her tight.
+      'N' it's too dark to see her eyes,
+   But every time I do I know
+      She cries 'n' cries 'n' cries 'n' cries.
+         I always wondered why that wuz--
+         I guess it's 'cause
+            Pa never does.'
+
+"That's the stuff," continued Thacker. "What do you think of that?"
+
+"I am not unfamiliar with the works of Mr. Riley," said the colonel,
+deliberately. "I believe he lives in Indiana. For the last ten years I
+have been somewhat of a literary recluse, and am familiar with nearly
+all the books in the Cedar Heights library. I am also of the opinion
+that a magazine should contain a certain amount of poetry. Many of the
+sweetest singers of the South have already contributed to the pages of
+_The Rose of Dixie_. I, myself, have thought of translating from the
+original for publication in its pages the works of the great Italian
+poet Tasso. Have you ever drunk from the fountain of this immortal
+poet's lines, Mr. Thacker?"
+
+"Not even a demi-Tasso," said Thacker. Now, let's come to the point,
+Colonel Telfair. I've already invested some money in this as a flyer.
+That bunch of manuscripts cost me $4,000. My object was to try a
+number of them in the next issue--I believe you make up less than a
+month ahead--and see what effect it has on the circulation. I believe
+that by printing the best stuff we can get in the North, South, East,
+or West we can make the magazine go. You have there the letter from
+the owning company asking you to co-operate with me in the plan. Let's
+chuck out some of this slush that you've been publishing just because
+the writers are related to the Skoopdoodles of Skoopdoodle County. Are
+you with me?"
+
+"As long as I continue to be the editor of The Rose," said Colonel
+Telfair, with dignity, "I shall be its editor. But I desire also to
+conform to the wishes of its owners if I can do so conscientiously."
+
+"That's the talk," said Thacker, briskly. "Now, how much of this stuff
+I've brought can we get into the January number? We want to begin
+right away."
+
+"There is yet space in the January number," said the editor, "for
+about eight thousand words, roughly estimated."
+
+"Great!" said Thacker. "It isn't much, but it'll give the readers
+some change from goobers, governors, and Gettysburg. I'll leave the
+selection of the stuff I brought to fill the space to you, as it's all
+good. I've got to run back to New York, and I'll be down again in a
+couple of weeks."
+
+Colonel Telfair slowly swung his eye-glasses by their broad, black
+ribbon.
+
+"The space in the January number that I referred to," said he,
+measuredly, "has been held open purposely, pending a decision that
+I have not yet made. A short time ago a contribution was submitted
+to _The Rose of Dixie_ that is one of the most remarkable literary
+efforts that has ever come under my observation. None but a master
+mind and talent could have produced it. It would just fill the space
+that I have reserved for its possible use."
+
+Thacker looked anxious.
+
+"What kind of stuff is it?" he asked. "Eight thousand words sounds
+suspicious. The oldest families must have been collaborating. Is there
+going to be another secession?"
+
+"The author of the article," continued the colonel, ignoring Thacker's
+allusions, "is a writer of some reputation. He has also distinguished
+himself in other ways. I do not feel at liberty to reveal to you his
+name--at least not until I have decided whether or not to accept his
+contribution."
+
+"Well," said Thacker, nervously, "is it a continued story, or an
+account of the unveiling of the new town pump in Whitmire, South
+Carolina, or a revised list of General Lee's body-servants, or what?"
+
+"You are disposed to be facetious," said Colonel Telfair, calmly.
+"The article is from the pen of a thinker, a philosopher, a lover of
+mankind, a student, and a rhetorician of high degree."
+
+"It must have been written by a syndicate," said Thacker. "But,
+honestly, Colonel, you want to go slow. I don't know of any
+eight-thousand-word single doses of written matter that are read by
+anybody these days, except Supreme Court briefs and reports of murder
+trials. You haven't by any accident gotten hold of a copy of one of
+Daniel Webster's speeches, have you?"
+
+Colonel Telfair swung a little in his chair and looked steadily from
+under his bushy eyebrows at the magazine promoter.
+
+"Mr. Thacker," he said, gravely, "I am willing to segregate the
+somewhat crude expression of your sense of humor from the solicitude
+that your business investments undoubtedly have conferred upon you.
+But I must ask you to cease your jibes and derogatory comments upon
+the South and the Southern people. They, sir, will not be tolerated
+in the office of _The Rose of Dixie_ for one moment. And before you
+proceed with more of your covert insinuations that I, the editor of
+this magazine, am not a competent judge of the merits of the matter
+submitted to its consideration, I beg that you will first present some
+evidence or proof that you are my superior in any way, shape, or form
+relative to the question in hand."
+
+"Oh, come, Colonel," said Thacker, good-naturedly. "I didn't do
+anything like that to you. It sounds like an indictment by the fourth
+assistant attorney-general. Let's get back to business. What's this
+8,000 to 1 shot about?"
+
+"The article," said Colonel Telfair, acknowledging the apology by a
+slight bow, "covers a wide area of knowledge. It takes up theories
+and questions that have puzzled the world for centuries, and disposes
+of them logically and concisely. One by one it holds up to view the
+evils of the world, points out the way of eradicating them, and then
+conscientiously and in detail commends the good. There is hardly a
+phase of human life that it does not discuss wisely, calmly, and
+equitably. The great policies of governments, the duties of private
+citizens, the obligations of home life, law, ethics, morality--all
+these important subjects are handled with a calm wisdom and confidence
+that I must confess has captured my admiration."
+
+"It must be a crackerjack," said Thacker, impressed.
+
+"It is a great contribution to the world's wisdom," said the colonel.
+"The only doubt remaining in my mind as to the tremendous advantage it
+would be to us to give it publication in _The Rose of Dixie_ is that I
+have not yet sufficient information about the author to give his work
+publicity in our magazine.
+
+"I thought you said he is a distinguished man," said Thacker.
+
+"He is," replied the colonel, "both in literary and in other more
+diversified and extraneous fields. But I am extremely careful about
+the matter that I accept for publication. My contributors are people
+of unquestionable repute and connections, which fact can be verified
+at any time. As I said, I am holding this article until I can acquire
+more information about its author. I do not know whether I will
+publish it or not. If I decide against it, I shall be much pleased,
+Mr. Thacker, to substitute the matter that you are leaving with me in
+its place."
+
+Thacker was somewhat at sea.
+
+"I don't seem to gather," said he, "much about the gist of this
+inspired piece of literature. It sounds more like a dark horse than
+Pegasus to me."
+
+"It is a human document," said the colonel-editor, confidently, "from
+a man of great accomplishments who, in my opinion, has obtained a
+stronger grasp on the world and its outcomes than that of any man
+living to-day."
+
+Thacker rose to his feet excitedly.
+
+"Say!" he said. "It isn't possible that you've cornered John D.
+Rockefeller's memoirs, is it? Don't tell me that all at once."
+
+"No, sir," said Colonel Telfair. "I am speaking of mentality and
+literature, not of the less worthy intricacies of trade."
+
+"Well, what's the trouble about running the article," asked Thacker, a
+little impatiently, "if the man's well known and has got the stuff?"
+
+Colonel Telfair sighed.
+
+"Mr. Thacker," said he, "for once I have been tempted. Nothing has
+yet appeared in _The Rose of Dixie_ that has not been from the pen of
+one of its sons or daughters. I know little about the author of this
+article except that he has acquired prominence in a section of the
+country that has always been inimical to my heart and mind. But I
+recognize his genius; and, as I have told you, I have instituted an
+investigation of his personality. Perhaps it will be futile. But I
+shall pursue the inquiry. Until that is finished, I must leave open
+the question of filling the vacant space in our January number."
+
+Thacker arose to leave.
+
+"All right, Colonel," he said, as cordially as he could. "You use your
+own judgment. If you've really got a scoop or something that will make
+'em sit up, run it instead of my stuff. I'll drop in again in about
+two weeks. Good luck!"
+
+Colonel Telfair and the magazine promoter shook hands.
+
+Returning a fortnight later, Thacker dropped off a very rocky Pullman
+at Toombs City. He found the January number of the magazine made up
+and the forms closed.
+
+The vacant space that had been yawning for type was filled by an
+article that was headed thus:
+
+
+                    SECOND MESSAGE TO CONGRESS
+
+                            Written for
+
+                         THE ROSE OF DIXIE
+
+                                 BY
+
+                    A Member of the Well-known
+
+                    BULLOCH FAMILY, OF GEORGIA
+
+                            T. Roosevelt
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE THIRD INGREDIENT
+
+
+The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an apartment-house.
+It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences
+welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the
+wraps and head-gear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the
+sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You
+may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for
+twenty dollars. Among the Vallambrosa's roomers are stenographers,
+musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students,
+wire-tappers, and other people who lean far over the banister-rail
+when the door-bell rings.
+
+This treatise shall have to do with but two of the Vallambrosians--
+though meaning no disrespect to the others.
+
+At six o'clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her third-floor
+rear $3.50 room in the Vallambrosa with her nose and chin more sharply
+pointed than usual. To be discharged from the department store where
+you have been working four years, and with only fifteen cents in your
+purse, does have a tendency to make your features appear more finely
+chiselled.
+
+And now for Hetty's thumb-nail biography while she climbs the two
+flights of stairs.
+
+She walked into the Biggest Store one morning four years before
+with seventy-five other girls, applying for a job behind the waist
+department counter. The phalanx of wage-earners formed a bewildering
+scene of beauty, carrying a total mass of blond hair sufficient to
+have justified the horseback gallops of a hundred Lady Godivas.
+
+The capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man whose task
+it was to engage six of the contestants, was aware of a feeling of
+suffocation as if he were drowning in a sea of frangipanni, while
+white clouds, hand-embroidered, floated about him. And then a sail
+hove in sight. Hetty Pepper, homely of countenance, with small,
+contemptuous, green eyes and chocolate-colored hair, dressed in a suit
+of plain burlap and a common-sense hat, stood before him with every
+one of her twenty-nine years of life unmistakably in sight.
+
+"You're on!" shouted the bald-headed young man, and was saved. And
+that is how Hetty came to be employed in the Biggest Store. The story
+of her rise to an eight-dollar-a-week salary is the combined stories
+of Hercules, Joan of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood. You
+shall not learn from me the salary that was paid her as a beginner.
+There is a sentiment growing about such things, and I want no
+millionaire store-proprietors climbing the fire-escape of my
+tenement-house to throw dynamite bombs into my skylight boudoir.
+
+The story of Hetty's discharge from the Biggest Store is so nearly a
+repetition of her engagement as to be monotonous.
+
+In each department of the store there is an omniscient, omnipresent,
+and omnivorous person carrying always a mileage book and a red
+necktie, and referred to as a "buyer." The destinies of the girls in
+his department who live on (see Bureau of Victual Statistics)--so much
+per week are in his hands.
+
+This particular buyer was a capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young,
+bald-headed man. As he walked along the aisles of his department he
+seemed to be sailing on a sea of frangipanni, while white clouds,
+machine-embroidered, floated around him. Too many sweets bring
+surfeit. He looked upon Hetty Pepper's homely countenance, emerald
+eyes, and chocolate-colored hair as a welcome oasis of green in a
+desert of cloying beauty. In a quiet angle of a counter he pinched her
+arm kindly, three inches above the elbow. She slapped him three feet
+away with one good blow of her muscular and not especially lily-white
+right. So, now you know why Hetty Pepper came to leave the Biggest
+Store at thirty minutes' notice, with one dime and a nickel in her
+purse.
+
+This morning's quotations list the price of rib beef at six cents per
+(butcher's) pound. But on the day that Hetty was "released" by the B.
+S. the price was seven and one-half cents. That fact is what makes
+this story possible. Otherwise, the extra four cents would have--
+
+But the plot of nearly all the good stories in the world is concerned
+with shorts who were unable to cover; so you can find no fault with
+this one.
+
+Hetty mounted with her rib beef to her $3.50 third-floor back. One
+hot, savory beef-stew for supper, a night's good sleep, and she would
+be fit in the morning to apply again for the tasks of Hercules, Joan
+of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood.
+
+In her room she got the granite-ware stew-pan out of the 2x4-foot
+china--er--I mean earthenware closet, and began to dig down in a
+rat's-nest of paper bags for the potatoes and onions. She came out
+with her nose and chin just a little sharper pointed.
+
+There was neither a potato nor an onion. Now, what kind of a beef-stew
+can you make out of simply beef? You can make oyster-soup without
+oysters, turtle-soup without turtles, coffee-cake without coffee, but
+you can't make beef-stew without potatoes and onions.
+
+But rib beef alone, in an emergency, can make an ordinary pine door
+look like a wrought-iron gambling-house portal to the wolf. With salt
+and pepper and a tablespoonful of flour (first well stirred in a
+little cold water) 'twill serve--'tis not so deep as a lobster à la
+Newburg nor so wide as a church festival doughnut; but 'twill serve.
+
+Hetty took her stew-pan to the rear of the third-floor hall. According
+to the advertisements of the Vallambrosa there was running water to be
+found there. Between you and me and the water-meter, it only ambled
+or walked through the faucets; but technicalities have no place here.
+There was also a sink where housekeeping roomers often met to dump
+their coffee grounds and glare at one another's kimonos.
+
+At this sink Hetty found a girl with heavy, gold-brown, artistic hair
+and plaintive eyes, washing two large "Irish" potatoes. Hetty knew the
+Vallambrosa as well as any one not owning "double hextra-magnifying
+eyes" could compass its mysteries. The kimonos were her encyclopedia,
+her "Who's What?" her clearinghouse of news, of goers and comers. From
+a rose-pink kimono edged with Nile green she had learned that the
+girl with the potatoes was a miniature-painter living in a kind of
+attic--or "studio," as they prefer to call it--on the top floor. Hetty
+was not certain in her mind what a miniature was; but it certainly
+wasn't a house; because house-painters, although they wear splashy
+overalls and poke ladders in your face on the street, are known to
+indulge in a riotous profusion of food at home.
+
+The potato girl was quite slim and small, and handled her potatoes as
+an old bachelor uncle handles a baby who is cutting teeth. She had a
+dull shoemaker's knife in her right hand, and she had begun to peel
+one of the potatoes with it.
+
+Hetty addressed her in the punctiliously formal tone of one who
+intends to be cheerfully familiar with you in the second round.
+
+"Beg pardon," she said, "for butting into what's not my business, but
+if you peel them potatoes you lose out. They're new Bermudas. You want
+to scrape 'em. Lemme show you."
+
+She took a potato and the knife, and began to demonstrate.
+
+"Oh, thank you," breathed the artist. "I didn't know. And I _did_ hate
+to see the thick peeling go; it seemed such a waste. But I thought
+they always had to be peeled. When you've got only potatoes to eat,
+the peelings count, you know."
+
+"Say, kid," said Hetty, staying her knife, "you ain't up against it,
+too, are you?"
+
+The miniature artist smiled starvedly.
+
+"I suppose I am. Art--or, at least, the way I interpret it--doesn't
+seem to be much in demand. I have only these potatoes for my dinner.
+But they aren't so bad boiled and hot, with a little butter and salt."
+
+"Child," said Hetty, letting a brief smile soften her rigid features,
+"Fate has sent me and you together. I've had it handed to me in the
+neck, too; but I've got a chunk of meat in my, room as big as a
+lap-dog. And I've done everything to get potatoes except pray for 'em.
+Let's me and you bunch our commissary departments and make a stew of
+'em. We'll cook it in my room. If we only had an onion to go in it!
+Say, kid, you haven't got a couple of pennies that've slipped down
+into the lining of your last winter's sealskin, have you? I could step
+down to the corner and get one at old Giuseppe's stand. A stew without
+an onion is worse'n a matinée without candy."
+
+"You may call me Cecilia," said the artist. "No; I spent my last penny
+three days ago."
+
+"Then we'll have to cut the onion out instead of slicing it in," said
+Hetty. "I'd ask the janitress for one, but I don't want 'em hep just
+yet to the fact that I'm pounding the asphalt for another job. But I
+wish we did have an onion."
+
+In the shop-girl's room the two began to prepare their supper.
+Cecilia's part was to sit on the couch helplessly and beg to be
+allowed to do something, in the voice of a cooing ring-dove. Hetty
+prepared the rib beef, putting it in cold salted water in the stew-pan
+and setting it on the one-burner gas-stove.
+
+"I wish we had an onion," said Hetty, as she scraped the two potatoes.
+
+On the wall opposite the couch was pinned a flaming, gorgeous
+advertising picture of one of the new ferry-boats of the P. U. F. F.
+Railroad that had been built to cut down the time between Los Angeles
+and New York City one-eighth of a minute.
+
+Hetty, turning her head during her continuous monologue, saw
+tears running from her guest's eyes as she gazed on the idealized
+presentment of the speeding, foam-girdled transport.
+
+"Why, say, Cecilia, kid," said Hetty, poising her knife, "is it as bad
+art as that? I ain't a critic; but I thought it kind of brightened
+up the room. Of course, a manicure-painter could tell it was a bum
+picture in a minute. I'll take it down if you say so. I wish to the
+holy Saint Potluck we had an onion."
+
+But the miniature miniature-painter had tumbled down, sobbing, with
+her nose indenting the hard-woven drapery of the couch. Something
+was here deeper than the artistic temperament offended at crude
+lithography.
+
+Hetty knew. She had accepted her rôle long ago. How scant the words
+with which we try to describe a single quality of a human being! When
+we reach the abstract we are lost. The nearer to Nature that the
+babbling of our lips comes, the better do we understand. Figuratively
+(let us say), some people are Bosoms, some are Hands, some are Heads,
+some are Muscles, some are Feet, some are Backs for burdens.
+
+Hetty was a Shoulder. Hers was a sharp, sinewy shoulder; but all her
+life people had laid their heads upon it, metaphorically or actually,
+and had left there all or half their troubles. Looking at Life
+anatomically, which is as good a way as any, she was preordained to
+be a Shoulder. There were few truer collar-bones anywhere than hers.
+
+Hetty was only thirty-three, and she had not yet outlived the little
+pang that visited her whenever the head of youth and beauty leaned
+upon her for consolation. But one glance in her mirror always served
+as an instantaneous pain-killer. So she gave one pale look into the
+crinkly old looking-glass on the wall above the gas-stove, turned down
+the flame a little lower from the bubbling beef and potatoes, went
+over to the couch, and lifted Cecilia's head to its confessional.
+
+"Go on and tell me, honey," she said. "I know now that it ain't art
+that's worrying you. You met him on a ferry-boat, didn't you? Go on,
+Cecilia, kid, and tell your--your Aunt Hetty about it."
+
+But youth and melancholy must first spend the surplus of sighs and
+tears that waft and float the barque of romance to its harbor in the
+delectable isles. Presently, through the stringy tendons that formed
+the bars of the confessional, the penitent--or was it the glorified
+communicant of the sacred flame--told her story without art or
+illumination.
+
+"It was only three days ago. I was coming back on the ferry from
+Jersey City. Old Mr. Schrum, an art dealer, told me of a rich man in
+Newark who wanted a miniature of his daughter painted. I went to see
+him and showed him some of my work. When I told him the price would
+be fifty dollars he laughed at me like a hyena. He said an enlarged
+crayon twenty times the size would cost him only eight dollars.
+
+"I had just enough money to buy my ferry ticket back to New York. I
+felt as if I didn't want to live another day. I must have looked as I
+felt, for I saw _him_ on the row of seats opposite me, looking at me
+as if he understood. He was nice-looking, but oh, above everything
+else, he looked kind. When one is tired or unhappy or hopeless,
+kindness counts more than anything else.
+
+"When I got so miserable that I couldn't fight against it any longer,
+I got up and walked slowly out the rear door of the ferry-boat cabin.
+No one was there, and I slipped quickly over the rail and dropped into
+the water. Oh, friend Hetty, it was cold, cold!
+
+"For just one moment I wished I was back in the old Vallambrosa,
+starving and hoping. And then I got numb, and didn't care. And then I
+felt that somebody else was in the water close by me, holding me up.
+_He_ had followed me, and jumped in to save me.
+
+"Somebody threw a thing like a big, white doughnut at us, and he made
+me put my arms through the hole. Then the ferry-boat backed, and they
+pulled us on board. Oh, Hetty, I was so ashamed of my wickedness in
+trying to drown myself; and, besides, my hair had all tumbled down and
+was sopping wet, and I was such a sight.
+
+"And then some men in blue clothes came around; and he gave them his
+card, and I heard him tell them he had seen me drop my purse on the
+edge of the boat outside the rail, and in leaning over to get it I had
+fallen overboard. And then I remembered having read in the papers that
+people who try to kill themselves are locked up in cells with people
+who try to kill other people, and I was afraid.
+
+"But some ladies on the boat took me downstairs to the furnace-room
+and got me nearly dry and did up my hair. When the boat landed, _he_
+came and put me in a cab. He was all dripping himself, but laughed as
+if he thought it was all a joke. He begged me, but I wouldn't tell him
+my name nor where I lived, I was so ashamed."
+
+"You were a fool, child," said Hetty, kindly. "Wait till I turn the
+light up a bit. I wish to Heaven we had an onion."
+
+"Then he raised his hat," went on Cecilia, "and said: 'Very well. But
+I'll find you, anyhow. I'm going to claim my rights of salvage.' Then
+he gave money to the cab-driver and told him to take me where I wanted
+to go, and walked away. What is 'salvage,' Hetty?"
+
+"The edge of a piece of goods that ain't hemmed," said the shop-girl.
+"You must have looked pretty well frazzled out to the little hero
+boy."
+
+"It's been three days," moaned the miniature-painter, "and he hasn't
+found me yet."
+
+"Extend the time," said Hetty. "This is a big town. Think of how many
+girls he might have to see soaked in water with their hair down before
+he would recognize you. The stew's getting on fine--but oh, for an
+onion! I'd even use a piece of garlic if I had it."
+
+The beef and potatoes bubbled merrily, exhaling a mouth-watering savor
+that yet lacked something, leaving a hunger on the palate, a haunting,
+wistful desire for some lost and needful ingredient.
+
+"I came near drowning in that awful river," said Cecilia, shuddering.
+
+"It ought to have more water in it," said Hetty; "the stew, I mean.
+I'll go get some at the sink."
+
+"It smells good," said the artist.
+
+"That nasty old North River?" objected Hetty. "It smells to me like
+soap factories and wet setter-dogs--oh, you mean the stew. Well, I
+wish we had an onion for it. Did he look like he had money?"
+
+"First, he looked kind," said Cecilia. "I'm sure he was rich; but that
+matters so little. When he drew out his bill-folder to pay the cab-man
+you couldn't help seeing hundreds and thousands of dollars in it. And
+I looked over the cab doors and saw him leave the ferry station in a
+motor-car; and the chauffeur gave him his bearskin to put on, for he
+was sopping wet. And it was only three days ago."
+
+"What a fool!" said Hetty, shortly.
+
+"Oh, the chauffeur wasn't wet," breathed Cecilia. "And he drove the
+car away very nicely."
+
+"I mean _you_," said Hetty. "For not giving him your address."
+
+"I never give my address to chauffeurs," said Cecilia, haughtily.
+
+"I wish we had one," said Hetty, disconsolately.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"For the stew, of course--oh, I mean an onion."
+
+Hetty took a pitcher and started to the sink at the end of the hall.
+
+A young man came down the stairs from above just as she was opposite
+the lower step. He was decently dressed, but pale and haggard. His
+eyes were dull with the stress of some burden of physical or mental
+woe. In his hand he bore an onion--a pink, smooth, solid, shining
+onion as large around as a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock.
+
+Hetty stopped. So did the young man. There was something
+Joan of Arc-ish, Herculean, and Una-ish in the look and pose
+of the shop-lady--she had cast off the rôles of Job and
+Little-Red-Riding-Hood. The young man stopped at the foot of the
+stairs and coughed distractedly. He felt marooned, held up, attacked,
+assailed, levied upon, sacked, assessed, panhandled, browbeaten,
+though he knew not why. It was the look in Hetty's eyes that did it.
+In them he saw the Jolly Roger fly to the masthead and an able seaman
+with a dirk between his teeth scurry up the ratlines and nail it
+there. But as yet he did not know that the cargo he carried was the
+thing that had caused him to be so nearly blown out of the water
+without even a parley.
+
+"_Beg_ your pardon," said Hetty, as sweetly as her dilute acetic acid
+tones permitted, "but did you find that onion on the stairs? There was
+a hole in the paper bag; and I've just come out to look for it."
+
+The young man coughed for half a minute. The interval may have given
+him the courage to defend his own property. Also, he clutched his
+pungent prize greedily, and, with a show of spirit, faced his grim
+waylayer.
+
+"No," he said huskily, "I didn't find it on the stairs. It was given
+to me by Jack Bevens, on the top floor. If you don't believe it, ask
+him. I'll wait until you do."
+
+"I know about Bevens," said Hetty, sourly. "He writes books and things
+up there for the paper-and-rags man. We can hear the postman guy him
+all over the house when he brings them thick envelopes back. Say--do
+you live in the Vallambrosa?"
+
+"I do not," said the young man. "I come to see Bevens sometimes. He's
+my friend. I live two blocks west."
+
+"What are you going to do with the onion?--_begging_ your pardon,"
+said Hetty.
+
+"I'm going to eat it."
+
+"Raw?"
+
+"Yes: as soon as I get home."
+
+"Haven't you got anything else to eat with it?"
+
+The young man considered briefly.
+
+"No," he confessed; "there's not another scrap of anything in my
+diggings to eat. I think old Jack is pretty hard up for grub in his
+shack, too. He hated to give up the onion, but I worried him into
+parting with it."
+
+"Man," said Hetty, fixing him with her world-sapient eyes, and laying
+a bony but impressive finger on his sleeve, "you've known trouble, too,
+haven't you?"
+
+"Lots," said the onion owner, promptly. "But this onion is my own
+property, honestly come by. If you will excuse me, I must be going."
+
+"Listen," said Hetty, paling a little with anxiety. "Raw onion is a
+mighty poor diet. And so is a beef-stew without one. Now, if you're Jack
+Bevens' friend, I guess you're nearly right. There's a little lady--a
+friend of mine--in my room there at the end of the hall. Both of us
+are out of luck; and we had just potatoes and meat between us. They're
+stewing now. But it ain't got any soul. There's something lacking to it.
+There's certain things in life that are naturally intended to fit and
+belong together. One is pink cheese-cloth and green roses, and one is
+ham and eggs, and one is Irish and trouble. And the other one is beef
+and potatoes _with_ onions. And still another one is people who are up
+against it and other people in the same fix."
+
+The young man went into a protracted paroxysm of coughing. With one
+hand he hugged his onion to his bosom.
+
+"No doubt; no doubt," said he, at length. "But, as I said, I must be
+going, because--"
+
+Hetty clutched his sleeve firmly.
+
+"Don't be a Dago, Little Brother. Don't eat raw onions. Chip it in
+toward the dinner and line yourself inside with the best stew you ever
+licked a spoon over. Must two ladies knock a young gentleman down and
+drag him inside for the honor of dining with 'em? No harm shall befall
+you, Little Brother. Loosen up and fall into line."
+
+The young man's pale face relaxed into a grin.
+
+"Believe I'll go you," he said, brightening. "If my onion is good as
+a credential, I'll accept the invitation gladly."
+
+"It's good as that, but better as seasoning," said Hetty. "You come
+and stand outside the door till I ask my lady friend if she has any
+objections. And don't run away with that letter of recommendation
+before I come out."
+
+Hetty went into her room and closed the door. The young man waited
+outside.
+
+"Cecilia, kid," said the shop-girl, oiling the sharp saw of her voice
+as well as she could, "there's an onion outside. With a young man
+attached. I've asked him in to dinner. You ain't going to kick, are
+you?"
+
+"Oh, dear!" said Cecilia, sitting up and patting her artistic hair. She
+cast a mournful glance at the ferry-boat poster on the wall.
+
+"Nit," said Hetty. "It ain't him. You're up against real life now. I
+believe you said your hero friend had money and automobiles. This is
+a poor skeezicks that's got nothing to eat but an onion. But he's
+easy-spoken and not a freshy. I imagine he's been a gentleman, he's
+so low down now. And we need the onion. Shall I bring him in? I'll
+guarantee his behavior."
+
+"Hetty, dear," sighed Cecilia, "I'm so hungry. What difference does it
+make whether he's a prince or a burglar? I don't care. Bring him in if
+he's got anything to eat with him."
+
+Hetty went back into the hall. The onion man was gone. Her heart missed
+a beat, and a gray look settled over her face except on her nose and
+cheek-bones. And then the tides of life flowed in again, for she saw
+him leaning out of the front window at the other end of the hall. She
+hurried there. He was shouting to some one below. The noise of the
+street overpowered the sound of her footsteps. She looked down over his
+shoulder, saw whom he was speaking to, and heard his words. He pulled
+himself in from the window-sill and saw her standing over him.
+
+Hetty's eyes bored into him like two steel gimlets.
+
+"Don't lie to me," she said, calmly. "What were you going to do with
+that onion?"
+
+The young man suppressed a cough and faced her resolutely. His manner
+was that of one who had been bearded sufficiently.
+
+"I was going to eat it," said he, with emphatic slowness; "just as I
+told you before."
+
+"And you have nothing else to eat at home?"
+
+"Not a thing."
+
+"What kind of work do you do?"
+
+"I am not working at anything just now."
+
+"Then why," said Hetty, with her voice set on its sharpest edge, "do you
+lean out of windows and give orders to chauffeurs in green automobiles
+in the street below?"
+
+The young man flushed, and his dull eyes began to sparkle.
+
+"Because, madam," said he, in _accelerando_ tones, "I pay the
+chauffeur's wages and I own the automobile--and also this onion--this
+onion, madam."
+
+He flourished the onion within an inch of Hetty's nose. The shop-lady
+did not retreat a hair's-breadth.
+
+"Then why do you eat onions," she said, with biting contempt, "and
+nothing else?"
+
+"I never said I did," retorted the young man, heatedly. "I said I had
+nothing else to eat where I live. I am not a delicatessen store-keeper."
+
+"Then why," pursued Hetty, inflexibly, "were you going to eat a raw
+onion?"
+
+"My mother," said the young man, "always made me eat one for a cold.
+Pardon my referring to a physical infirmity; but you may have noticed
+that I have a very, very severe cold. I was going to eat the onion and
+go to bed. I wonder why I am standing here and apologizing to you for
+it."
+
+"How did you catch this cold?" went on Hetty, suspiciously.
+
+The young man seemed to have arrived at some extreme height of feeling.
+There were two modes of descent open to him--a burst of rage or a
+surrender to the ridiculous. He chose wisely; and the empty hall echoed
+his hoarse laughter.
+
+"You're a dandy," said he. "And I don't blame you for being careful. I
+don't mind telling you. I got wet. I was on a North River ferry a few
+days ago when a girl jumped overboard. Of course, I--"
+
+Hetty extended her hand, interrupting his story.
+
+"Give me the onion," she said.
+
+The young man set his jaw a trifle harder.
+
+"Give me the onion," she repeated.
+
+He grinned, and laid it in her hand.
+
+Then Hetty's infrequent, grim, melancholy smile showed itself. She took
+the young man's arm and pointed with her other hand to the door of her
+room.
+
+"Little Brother," she said, "go in there. The little fool you fished out
+of the river is there waiting for you. Go on in. I'll give you three
+minutes before I come. Potatoes is in there, waiting. Go on in, Onions."
+
+After he had tapped at the door and entered, Hetty began to peel and
+wash the onion at the sink. She gave a gray look at the gray roofs
+outside, and the smile on her face vanished by little jerks and
+twitches.
+
+"But it's us," she said, grimly, to herself, "it's _us_ that furnished
+the beef."
+
+
+
+
+THE HIDING OF BLACK BILL
+
+
+A lank, strong, red-faced man with a Wellington beak and small, fiery
+eyes tempered by flaxen lashes, sat on the station platform at Los
+Pinos swinging his legs to and fro. At his side sat another man, fat,
+melancholy, and seedy, who seemed to be his friend. They had the
+appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat--seamy
+on both sides.
+
+"Ain't seen you in about four years, Ham," said the seedy man. "Which
+way you been travelling?"
+
+"Texas," said the red-faced man. "It was too cold in Alaska for me.
+And I found it warm in Texas. I'll tell you about one hot spell I went
+through there.
+
+"One morning I steps off the International at a water-tank and lets it
+go on without me. 'Twas a ranch country, and fuller of spite-houses than
+New York City. Only out there they build 'em twenty miles away so you
+can't smell what they've got for dinner, instead of running 'em up two
+inches from their neighbors' windows.
+
+"There wasn't any roads in sight, so I footed it 'cross country. The
+grass was shoe-top deep, and the mesquite timber looked just like a
+peach orchard. It was so much like a gentleman's private estate that
+every minute you expected a kennelful of bulldogs to run out and bite
+you. But I must have walked twenty miles before I came in sight of a
+ranch-house. It was a little one, about as big as an elevated-railroad
+station.
+
+"There was a little man in a white shirt and brown overalls and a pink
+handkerchief around his neck rolling cigarettes under a tree in front
+of the door.
+
+"'Greetings,' says I. 'Any refreshment, welcome, emoluments, or even
+work for a comparative stranger?'
+
+"'Oh, come in,' says he, in a refined tone. 'Sit down on that stool,
+please. I didn't hear your horse coming.'
+
+"'He isn't near enough yet,' says I. 'I walked. I don't want to be
+a burden, but I wonder if you have three or four gallons of water
+handy.'
+
+"'You do look pretty dusty,' says he; 'but our bathing arrangements--'
+
+"'It's a drink I want,' says I. 'Never mind the dust that's on the
+outside.'
+
+"He gets me a dipper of water out of a red jar hanging up, and then
+goes on:
+
+"'Do you want work?'
+
+"'For a time,' says I. 'This is a rather quiet section of the country,
+isn't it?'
+
+"'It is,' says he. 'Sometimes--so I have been told--one sees no human
+being pass for weeks at a time. I've been here only a month. I bought
+the ranch from an old settler who wanted to move farther west.'
+
+"'It suits me,' says I. 'Quiet and retirement are good for a man
+sometimes. And I need a job. I can tend bar, salt mines, lecture, float
+stock, do a little middle-weight slugging, and play the piano.'
+
+"'Can you herd sheep?' asks the little ranchman.
+
+"'Do you mean _have_ I heard sheep?' says I.
+
+"'Can you herd 'em--take charge of a flock of 'em?' says he.
+
+"'Oh,' says I, 'now I understand. You mean chase 'em around and bark at
+'em like collie dogs. Well, I might,' says I. 'I've never exactly done
+any sheep-herding, but I've often seen 'em from car windows masticating
+daisies, and they don't look dangerous.'
+
+"'I'm short a herder,' says the ranchman. 'You never can depend on
+the Mexicans. I've only got two flocks. You may take out my bunch of
+muttons--there are only eight hundred of 'em--in the morning, if you
+like. The pay is twelve dollars a month and your rations furnished. You
+camp in a tent on the prairie with your sheep. You do your own cooking,
+but wood and water are brought to your camp. It's an easy job.'
+
+"'I'm on,' says I. 'I'll take the job even if I have to garland my brow
+and hold on to a crook and wear a loose-effect and play on a pipe like
+the shepherds do in pictures.'
+
+"So the next morning the little ranchman helps me drive the flock of
+muttons from the corral to about two miles out and let 'em graze on a
+little hillside on the prairie. He gives me a lot of instructions about
+not letting bunches of them stray off from the herd, and driving 'em
+down to a water-hole to drink at noon.
+
+"'I'll bring out your tent and camping outfit and rations in the
+buckboard before night,' says he.
+
+"'Fine,' says I. 'And don't forget the rations. Nor the camping outfit.
+And be sure to bring the tent. Your name's Zollicoffer, ain't it?"
+
+"'My name,' says he, 'is Henry Ogden.'
+
+"'All right, Mr. Ogden,' says I. 'Mine is Mr. Percival Saint Clair.'
+
+"I herded sheep for five days on the Rancho Chiquito; and then the wool
+entered my soul. That getting next to Nature certainly got next to me.
+I was lonesomer than Crusoe's goat. I've seen a lot of persons more
+entertaining as companions than those sheep were. I'd drive 'em to the
+corral and pen 'em every evening, and then cook my corn-bread and mutton
+and coffee, and lie down in a tent the size of a table-cloth, and listen
+to the coyotes and whip-poor-wills singing around the camp.
+
+"The fifth evening, after I had corralled my costly but uncongenial
+muttons, I walked over to the ranch-house and stepped in the door.
+
+"'Mr. Ogden,' says I, 'you and me have got to get sociable. Sheep are
+all very well to dot the landscape and furnish eight-dollar cotton
+suitings for man, but for table-talk and fireside companions they rank
+along with five-o'clock teazers. If you've got a deck of cards, or a
+parcheesi outfit, or a game of authors, get 'em out, and let's get on a
+mental basis. I've got to do something in an intellectual line, if it's
+only to knock somebody's brains out.'
+
+"This Henry Ogden was a peculiar kind of ranchman. He wore finger-rings
+and a big gold watch and careful neckties. And his face was calm, and
+his nose-spectacles was kept very shiny. I saw once, in Muscogee, an
+outlaw hung for murdering six men, who was a dead ringer for him. But I
+knew a preacher in Arkansas that you would have taken to be his brother.
+I didn't care much for him either way; what I wanted was some fellowship
+and communion with holy saints or lost sinners--anything sheepless would
+do.
+
+"'Well, Saint Clair,' says he, laying down the book he was reading, 'I
+guess it must be pretty lonesome for you at first. And I don't deny that
+it's monotonous for me. Are you sure you corralled your sheep so they
+won't stray out?'
+
+"'They're shut up as tight as the jury of a millionaire murderer,' says
+I. 'And I'll be back with them long before they'll need their trained
+nurse.'
+
+"So Ogden digs up a deck of cards, and we play casino. After five
+days and nights of my sheep-camp it was like a toot on Broadway. When
+I caught big casino I felt as excited as if I had made a million in
+Trinity. And when H. O. loosened up a little and told the story about
+the lady in the Pullman car I laughed for five minutes.
+
+"That showed what a comparative thing life is. A man may see so much
+that he'd be bored to turn his head to look at a $3,000,000 fire or
+Joe Weber or the Adriatic Sea. But let him herd sheep for a spell, and
+you'll see him splitting his ribs laughing at 'Curfew Shall Not Ring
+To-night,' or really enjoying himself playing cards with ladies.
+
+"By-and-by Ogden gets out a decanter of Bourbon, and then there is a
+total eclipse of sheep.
+
+"'Do you remember reading in the papers, about a month ago,' says he,
+'about a train hold-up on the M. K. & T.? The express agent was shot
+through the shoulder and about $15,000 in currency taken. And it's said
+that only one man did the job.'
+
+"'Seems to me I do,' says I. 'But such things happen so often they don't
+linger long in the human Texas mind. Did they overtake, overhaul, seize,
+or lay hands upon the despoiler?'
+
+"'He escaped,' says Ogden. 'And I was just reading in a paper to-day
+that the officers have tracked him down into this part of the country.
+It seems the bills the robber got were all the first issue of currency
+to the Second National Bank of Espinosa City. And so they've followed
+the trail where they've been spent, and it leads this way.'
+
+"Ogden pours out some more Bourbon, and shoves me the bottle.
+
+"'I imagine,' says I, after ingurgitating another modicum of the royal
+booze, 'that it wouldn't be at all a disingenuous idea for a train
+robber to run down into this part of the country to hide for a spell. A
+sheep-ranch, now,' says I, 'would be the finest kind of a place. Who'd
+ever expect to find such a desperate character among these song-birds
+and muttons and wild flowers? And, by the way,' says I, kind of
+looking H. Ogden over, 'was there any description mentioned of this
+single-handed terror? Was his lineaments or height and thickness or
+teeth fillings or style of habiliments set forth in print?'
+
+"'Why, no,' says Ogden; 'they say nobody got a good sight of him because
+he wore a mask. But they know it was a train-robber called Black Bill,
+because he always works alone and because he dropped a handkerchief in
+the express-car that had his name on it.'
+
+"'All right,' says I. 'I approve of Black Bill's retreat to the
+sheep-ranges. I guess they won't find him.'
+
+"'There's one thousand dollars reward for his capture,' says Ogden.
+
+"'I don't need that kind of money,' says I, looking Mr. Sheepman
+straight in the eye. 'The twelve dollars a month you pay me is enough.
+I need a rest, and I can save up until I get enough to pay my fare to
+Texarkana, where my widowed mother lives. If Black Bill,' I goes on,
+looking significantly at Ogden, 'was to have come down this way--say,
+a month ago--and bought a little sheep-ranch and--'
+
+"'Stop,' says Ogden, getting out of his chair and looking pretty
+vicious. 'Do you mean to insinuate--'
+
+"'Nothing,' says I; 'no insinuations. I'm stating a hypodermical case.
+I say, if Black Bill had come down here and bought a sheep-ranch and
+hired me to Little-Boy-Blue 'em and treated me square and friendly, as
+you've done, he'd never have anything to fear from me. A man is a man,
+regardless of any complications he may have with sheep or railroad
+trains. Now you know where I stand.'
+
+"Ogden looks black as camp-coffee for nine seconds, and then he laughs,
+amused.
+
+"'You'll do, Saint Clair,' says he. 'If I _was_ Black Bill I wouldn't
+be afraid to trust you. Let's have a game or two of seven-up to-night.
+That is, if you don't mind playing with a train-robber.'
+
+"'I've told you,' says I, 'my oral sentiments, and there's no strings
+to 'em.'
+
+"While I was shuffling after the first hand, I asks Ogden, as if the
+idea was a kind of a casualty, where he was from.
+
+"'Oh,' says he, 'from the Mississippi Valley.'
+
+"'That's a nice little place,' says I. 'I've often stopped over there.
+But didn't you find the sheets a little damp and the food poor? Now, I
+hail,' says I, 'from the Pacific Slope. Ever put up there?'
+
+"'Too draughty,' says Ogden. 'But if you're ever in the Middle West just
+mention my name, and you'll get foot-warmers and dripped coffee.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'I wasn't exactly fishing for your private telephone
+number and the middle name of your aunt that carried off the Cumberland
+Presbyterian minister. It don't matter. I just want you to know you are
+safe in the hands of your shepherd. Now, don't play hearts on spades,
+and don't get nervous.'
+
+"'Still harping,' says Ogden, laughing again. 'Don't you suppose that
+if I was Black Bill and thought you suspected me, I'd put a Winchester
+bullet into you and stop my nervousness, if I had any?'
+
+"'Not any,' says I. 'A man who's got the nerve to hold up a train
+single-handed wouldn't do a trick like that. I've knocked about enough
+to know that them are the kind of men who put a value on a friend. Not
+that I can claim being a friend of yours, Mr. Ogden,' says I, 'being
+only your sheep-herder; but under more expeditious circumstances we
+might have been.'
+
+"'Forget the sheep temporarily, I beg,' says Ogden, 'and cut for deal.'
+
+"About four days afterward, while my muttons was nooning on the
+water-hole and I deep in the interstices of making a pot of coffee, up
+rides softly on the grass a mysterious person in the garb of the being
+he wished to represent. He was dressed somewhere between a Kansas City
+detective, Buffalo Bill, and the town dog-catcher of Baton Rouge. His
+chin and eye wasn't molded on fighting lines, so I knew he was only a
+scout.
+
+"'Herdin' sheep?' he asks me.
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'to a man of your evident gumptional endowments, I
+wouldn't have the nerve to state that I am engaged in decorating old
+bronzes or oiling bicycle sprockets.'
+
+"'You don't talk or look like a sheep-herder to me,' says he.
+
+"'But you talk like what you look like to me,' says I.
+
+"And then he asks me who I was working for, and I shows him Rancho
+Chiquito, two miles away, in the shadow of a low hill, and he tells
+me he's a deputy sheriff.
+
+"'There's a train-robber called Black Bill supposed to be somewhere in
+these parts,' says the scout. 'He's been traced as far as San Antonio,
+and maybe farther. Have you seen or heard of any strangers around here
+during the past month?'
+
+"'I have not,' says I, 'except a report of one over at the Mexican
+quarters of Loomis' ranch, on the Frio.'
+
+"'What do you know about him?' asks the deputy.
+
+"'He's three days old,' says I.
+
+"'What kind of a looking man is the man you work for?' he asks. 'Does
+old George Ramey own this place yet? He's run sheep here for the last
+ten years, but never had no success.'
+
+"'The old man has sold out and gone West,' I tells him. 'Another
+sheep-fancier bought him out about a month ago.'
+
+"'What kind of a looking man is he?' asks the deputy again.
+
+"'Oh,' says I, 'a big, fat kind of a Dutchman with long whiskers and
+blue specs. I don't think he knows a sheep from a ground-squirrel. I
+guess old George soaked him pretty well on the deal,' says I.
+
+"After indulging himself in a lot more non-communicative information
+and two-thirds of my dinner, the deputy rides away.
+
+"That night I mentions the matter to Ogden.
+
+"'They're drawing the tendrils of the octopus around Black Bill,' says
+I. And then I told him about the deputy sheriff, and how I'd described
+him to the deputy, and what the deputy said about the matter.
+
+"'Oh, well,' says Ogden, 'let's don't borrow any of Black Bill's
+troubles. We've a few of our own. Get the Bourbon out of the cupboard
+and we'll drink to his health--unless,' says he, with his little
+cackling laugh, 'you're prejudiced against train-robbers.'
+
+"'I'll drink,' says I, 'to any man who's a friend to a friend. And I
+believe that Black Bill,' I goes on, 'would be that. So here's to Black
+Bill, and may he have good luck.'
+
+"And both of us drank.
+
+"About two weeks later comes shearing-time. The sheep had to be driven
+up to the ranch, and a lot of frowzy-headed Mexicans would snip the
+fur off of them with back-action scissors. So the afternoon before the
+barbers were to come I hustled my underdone muttons over the hill,
+across the dell, down by the winding brook, and up to the ranch-house,
+where I penned 'em in a corral and bade 'em my nightly adieus.
+
+"I went from there to the ranch-house. I find H. Ogden, Esquire,
+lying asleep on his little cot bed. I guess he had been overcome by
+anti-insomnia or diswakefulness or some of the diseases peculiar to the
+sheep business. His mouth and vest were open, and he breathed like a
+second-hand bicycle pump. I looked at him and gave vent to just a few
+musings. 'Imperial Cæsar,' says I, 'asleep in such a way, might shut
+his mouth and keep the wind away.'
+
+"A man asleep is certainly a sight to make angels weep. What good is all
+his brain, muscle, backing, nerve, influence, and family connections?
+He's at the mercy of his enemies, and more so of his friends. And he's
+about as beautiful as a cab-horse leaning against the Metropolitan Opera
+House at 12.30 A.M. dreaming of the plains of Arabia. Now, a woman
+asleep you regard as different. No matter how she looks, you know it's
+better for all hands for her to be that way.
+
+"Well, I took a drink of Bourbon and one for Ogden, and started in to
+be comfortable while he was taking his nap. He had some books on his
+table on indigenous subjects, such as Japan and drainage and physical
+culture--and some tobacco, which seemed more to the point.
+
+"After I'd smoked a few, and listened to the sartorial breathing of H.
+O., I happened to look out the window toward the shearing-pens, where
+there was a kind of a road coming up from a kind of a road across a
+kind of a creek farther away.
+
+"I saw five men riding up to the house. All of 'em carried guns across
+their saddles, and among 'em was the deputy that had talked to me at my
+camp.
+
+"They rode up careful, in open formation, with their guns ready. I set
+apart with my eye the one I opinionated to be the boss muck-raker of
+this law-and-order cavalry.
+
+"'Good-evening, gents,' says I. 'Won't you 'light, and tie your horses?'
+
+"The boss rides up close, and swings his gun over till the opening in
+it seems to cover my whole front elevation.
+
+"'Don't you move your hands none,' says he, 'till you and me indulge in
+a adequate amount of necessary conversation.'
+
+"'I will not,' says I. 'I am no deaf-mute, and therefore will not have
+to disobey your injunctions in replying.'
+
+"'We are on the lookout,' says he, 'for Black Bill, the man that held up
+the Katy for $15,000 in May. We are searching the ranches and everybody
+on 'em. What is your name, and what do you do on this ranch?'
+
+"'Captain,' says I, 'Percival Saint Clair is my occupation, and my name
+is sheep-herder. I've got my flock of veals--no, muttons--penned here
+to-night. The shearers are coming to-morrow to give them a haircut--with
+baa-a-rum, I suppose.'
+
+"'Where's the boss of this ranch?' the captain of the gang asks me.
+
+"'Wait just a minute, cap'n,' says I. 'Wasn't there a kind of a reward
+offered for the capture of this desperate character you have referred
+to in your preamble?'
+
+"'There's a thousand dollars reward offered,' says the captain, 'but
+it's for his capture and conviction. There don't seem to be no provision
+made for an informer.'
+
+"'It looks like it might rain in a day or so,' says I, in a tired way,
+looking up at the cerulean blue sky.
+
+"'If you know anything about the locality, disposition, or secretiveness
+of this here Black Bill,' says he, in a severe dialect, 'you are amiable
+to the law in not reporting it.'
+
+"'I heard a fence-rider say,' says I, in a desultory kind of voice,
+'that a Mexican told a cowboy named Jake over at Pidgin's store on the
+Nueces that he heard that Black Bill had been seen in Matamoras by a
+sheepman's cousin two weeks ago.'
+
+"'Tell you what I'll do, Tight Mouth,' says the captain, after looking
+me over for bargains. 'If you put us on so we can scoop Black Bill, I'll
+pay you a hundred dollars out of my own--out of our own--pockets. That's
+liberal,' says he. 'You ain't entitled to anything. Now, what do you
+say?'
+
+"'Cash down now?' I asks.
+
+"The captain has a sort of discussion with his helpmates, and they all
+produce the contents of their pockets for analysis. Out of the general
+results they figured up $102.30 in cash and $31 worth of plug tobacco.
+
+"'Come nearer, capitan meeo,' says I, 'and listen.' He so did.
+
+"'I am mighty poor and low down in the world,' says I. 'I am working for
+twelve dollars a month trying to keep a lot of animals together whose
+only thought seems to be to get asunder. Although,' says I, 'I regard
+myself as some better than the State of South Dakota, it's a come-down
+to a man who has heretofore regarded sheep only in the form of chops.
+I'm pretty far reduced in the world on account of foiled ambitions and
+rum and a kind of cocktail they make along the P. R. R. all the way from
+Scranton to Cincinnati--dry gin, French vermouth, one squeeze of a lime,
+and a good dash of orange bitters. If you're ever up that way, don't
+fail to let one try you. And, again,' says I, 'I have never yet went
+back on a friend. I've stayed by 'em when they had plenty, and when
+adversity's overtaken me I've never forsook 'em.
+
+"'But,' I goes on, 'this is not exactly the case of a friend. Twelve
+dollars a month is only bowing-acquaintance money. And I do not consider
+brown beans and corn-bread the food of friendship. I am a poor man,'
+says I, 'and I have a widowed mother in Texarkana. You will find Black
+Bill,' says I, 'lying asleep in this house on a cot in the room to your
+right. He's the man you want, as I know from his words and conversation.
+He was in a way a friend,' I explains, 'and if I was the man I once was
+the entire product of the mines of Gondola would not have tempted me to
+betray him. But,' says I, 'every week half of the beans was wormy, and
+not nigh enough wood in camp.
+
+"'Better go in careful, gentlemen,' says I. 'He seems impatient at
+times, and when you think of his late professional pursuits one would
+look for abrupt actions if he was come upon sudden.'
+
+"So the whole posse unmounts and ties their horses, and unlimbers their
+ammunition and equipments, and tiptoes into the house. And I follows,
+like Delilah when she set the Philip Steins on to Samson.
+
+"The leader of the posse shakes Ogden and wakes him up. And then he
+jumps up, and two more of the reward-hunters grab him. Ogden was mighty
+tough with all his slimness, and he gives 'em as neat a single-footed
+tussle against odds as I ever see.
+
+"'What does this mean?' he says, after they had him down.
+
+"'You're scooped in, Mr. Black Bill,' says the captain. 'That's all.'
+
+"'It's an outrage,' says H. Ogden, madder yet.
+
+"'It was,' says the peace-and-good-will man. 'The Katy wasn't bothering
+you, and there's a law against monkeying with express packages.'
+
+"And he sits on H. Ogden's stomach and goes through his pockets
+symptomatically and careful.
+
+"'I'll make you perspire for this,' says Ogden, perspiring some himself.
+'I can prove who I am.'
+
+"'So can I,' says the captain, as he draws from H. Ogden's inside
+coat-pocket a handful of new bills of the Second National Bank
+of Espinosa City. 'Your regular engraved Tuesdays-and-Fridays
+visiting-card wouldn't have a louder voice in proclaiming your indemnity
+than this here currency. You can get up now and prepare to go with us
+and expatriate your sins.'
+
+"H. Ogden gets up and fixes his necktie. He says no more after they
+have taken the money off of him.
+
+"'A well-greased idea,' says the sheriff captain, admiring, 'to slip off
+down here and buy a little sheep-ranch where the hand of man is seldom
+heard. It was the slickest hide-out I ever see,' says the captain.
+
+"So one of the men goes to the shearing-pen and hunts up the other
+herder, a Mexican they call John Sallies, and he saddles Ogden's horse,
+and the sheriffs all ride up close around him with their guns in hand,
+ready to take their prisoner to town.
+
+"Before starting, Ogden puts the ranch in John Sallies' hands and gives
+him orders about the shearing and where to graze the sheep, just as if
+he intended to be back in a few days. And a couple of hours afterward
+one Percival Saint Clair, an ex-sheep-herder of the Rancho Chiquito,
+might have been seen, with a hundred and nine dollars--wages and
+blood-money--in his pocket, riding south on another horse belonging to
+said ranch."
+
+The red-faced man paused and listened. The whistle of a coming
+freight-train sounded far away among the low hills.
+
+The fat, seedy man at his side sniffed, and shook his frowzy head slowly
+and disparagingly.
+
+"What is it, Snipy?" asked the other. "Got the blues again?"
+
+"No, I ain't" said the seedy one, sniffing again. "But I don't like your
+talk. You and me have been friends, off and on, for fifteen year; and I
+never yet knew or heard of you giving anybody up to the law--not no one.
+And here was a man whose saleratus you had et and at whose table you had
+played games of cards--if casino can be so called. And yet you inform
+him to the law and take money for it. It never was like you, I say."
+
+"This H. Ogden," resumed the red-faced man, "through a lawyer, proved
+himself free by alibis and other legal terminalities, as I so heard
+afterward. He never suffered no harm. He did me favors, and I hated to
+hand him over."
+
+"How about the bills they found in his pocket?" asked the seedy man.
+
+"I put 'em there," said the red-faced man, "while he was asleep, when I
+saw the posse riding up. I was Black Bill. Look out, Snipy, here she
+comes! We'll board her on the bumpers when she takes water at the tank."
+
+
+
+
+SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLS
+
+
+I
+
+
+Old Jerome Warren lived in a hundred-thousand-dollar house at 35 East
+Fifty-Soforth Street. He was a downtown broker, so rich that he could
+afford to walk--for his health--a few blocks in the direction of his
+office every morning, and then call a cab.
+
+He had an adopted son, the son of an old friend named Gilbert--Cyril
+Scott could play him nicely--who was becoming a successful painter as
+fast as he could squeeze the paint out of his tubes. Another member of
+the household was Barbara Ross, a step-niece. Man is born to trouble;
+so, as old Jerome had no family of his own, he took up the burdens of
+others.
+
+Gilbert and Barbara got along swimmingly. There was a tacit and tactical
+understanding all round that the two would stand up under a floral bell
+some high noon, and promise the minister to keep old Jerome's money
+in a state of high commotion. But at this point complications must be
+introduced.
+
+Thirty years before, when old Jerome was young Jerome, there was a
+brother of his named Dick. Dick went West to seek his or somebody else's
+fortune. Nothing was heard of him until one day old Jerome had a letter
+from his brother. It was badly written on ruled paper that smelled
+of salt bacon and coffee-grounds. The writing was asthmatic and the
+spelling St. Vitusy.
+
+It appeared that instead of Dick having forced Fortune to stand and
+deliver, he had been held up himself, and made to give hostages to the
+enemy. That is, as his letter disclosed, he was on the point of pegging
+out with a complication of disorders that even whiskey had failed to
+check. All that his thirty years of prospecting had netted him was one
+daughter, nineteen years old, as per invoice, whom he was shipping East,
+charges prepaid, for Jerome to clothe, feed, educate, comfort, and
+cherish for the rest of her natural life or until matrimony should them
+part.
+
+Old Jerome was a board-walk. Everybody knows that the world is supported
+by the shoulders of Atlas; and that Atlas stands on a rail-fence; and
+that the rail-fence is built on a turtle's back. Now, the turtle has
+to stand on something; and that is a board-walk made of men like old
+Jerome.
+
+I do not know whether immortality shall accrue to man; but if not so,
+I would like to know when men like old Jerome get what is due them?
+
+They met Nevada Warren at the station. She was a little girl, deeply
+sunburned and wholesomely good-looking, with a manner that was frankly
+unsophisticated, yet one that not even a cigar-drummer would intrude
+upon without thinking twice. Looking at her, somehow you would expect
+to see her in a short skirt and leather leggings, shooting glass balls
+or taming mustangs. But in her plain white waist and black skirt she
+sent you guessing again. With an easy exhibition of strength she swung
+along a heavy valise, which the uniformed porters tried in vain to wrest
+from her.
+
+"I am sure we shall be the best of friends," said Barbara, pecking at
+the firm, sunburned cheek.
+
+"I hope so," said Nevada.
+
+"Dear little niece," said old Jerome, "you are as welcome to my home as
+if it were your father's own."
+
+"Thanks," said Nevada.
+
+"And I am going to call you 'cousin,'" said Gilbert, with his charming
+smile.
+
+"Take the valise, please," said Nevada. "It weighs a million pounds.
+It's got samples from six of dad's old mines in it," she explained to
+Barbara. "I calculate they'd assay about nine cents to the thousand
+tons, but I promised him to bring them along."
+
+
+II
+
+
+It is a common custom to refer to the usual complication between one
+man and two ladies, or one lady and two men, or a lady and a man and
+a nobleman, or--well, any of those problems--as the triangle. But
+they are never unqualified triangles. They are always isosceles--never
+equilateral. So, upon the coming of Nevada Warren, she and Gilbert and
+Barbara Ross lined up into such a figurative triangle; and of that
+triangle Barbara formed the hypotenuse.
+
+One morning old Jerome was lingering long after breakfast over the
+dullest morning paper in the city before setting forth to his down-town
+fly-trap. He had become quite fond of Nevada, finding in her much of
+his dead brother's quiet independence and unsuspicious frankness.
+
+A maid brought in a note for Miss Nevada Warren.
+
+"A messenger-boy delivered it at the door, please," she said. "He's
+waiting for an answer."
+
+Nevada, who was whistling a Spanish waltz between her teeth, and
+watching the carriages and autos roll by in the street, took the
+envelope. She knew it was from Gilbert, before she opened it, by the
+little gold palette in the upper left-hand corner.
+
+After tearing it open she pored over the contents for a while,
+absorbedly. Then, with a serious face, she went and stood at her uncle's
+elbow.
+
+"Uncle Jerome, Gilbert is a nice boy, isn't he?"
+
+"Why, bless the child!" said old Jerome, crackling his paper loudly; "of
+course he is. I raised him myself."
+
+"He wouldn't write anything to anybody that wasn't exactly--I mean that
+everybody couldn't know and read, would he?"
+
+"I'd just like to see him try it," said uncle, tearing a handful from
+his newspaper. "Why, what--"
+
+"Read this note he just sent me, uncle, and see if you think it's all
+right and proper. You see, I don't know much about city people and their
+ways."
+
+Old Jerome threw his paper down and set both his feet upon it. He took
+Gilbert's note and fiercely perused it twice, and then a third time.
+
+"Why, child," said he, "you had me almost excited, although I was sure
+of that boy. He's a duplicate of his father, and he was a gilt-edged
+diamond. He only asks if you and Barbara will be ready at four o'clock
+this afternoon for an automobile drive over to Long Island. I don't see
+anything to criticise in it except the stationery. I always did hate
+that shade of blue."
+
+"Would it be all right to go?" asked Nevada, eagerly.
+
+"Yes, yes, yes, child; of course. Why not? Still, it pleases me to see
+you so careful and candid. Go, by all means."
+
+"I didn't know," said Nevada, demurely. "I thought I'd ask you. Couldn't
+you go with us, uncle?"
+
+"I? No, no, no, no! I've ridden once in a car that boy was driving.
+Never again! But it's entirely proper for you and Barbara to go. Yes,
+yes. But I will not. No, no, no, no!"
+
+Nevada flew to the door, and said to the maid:
+
+"You bet we'll go. I'll answer for Miss Barbara. Tell the boy to say
+to Mr. Warren, 'You bet we'll go.'"
+
+"Nevada," called old Jerome, "pardon me, my dear, but wouldn't it be
+as well to send him a note in reply? Just a line would do."
+
+"No, I won't bother about that," said Nevada, gayly. "Gilbert will
+understand--he always does. I never rode in an automobile in my life;
+but I've paddled a canoe down Little Devil River through the Lost Horse
+Cañon, and if it's any livelier than that I'd like to know!"
+
+
+III
+
+
+Two months are supposed to have elapsed.
+
+Barbara sat in the study of the hundred-thousand-dollar house. It was a
+good place for her. Many places are provided in the world where men and
+women may repair for the purpose of extricating themselves from divers
+difficulties. There are cloisters, wailing-places, watering-places,
+confessionals, hermitages, lawyer's offices, beauty parlors, air-ships,
+and studies; and the greatest of these are studies.
+
+It usually takes a hypotenuse a long time to discover that it is the
+longest side of a triangle. But it's a long line that has no turning.
+
+Barbara was alone. Uncle Jerome and Nevada had gone to the theatre.
+Barbara had not cared to go. She wanted to stay at home and study in
+the study. If you, miss, were a stunning New York girl, and saw every
+day that a brown, ingenuous Western witch was getting hobbles and a
+lasso on the young man you wanted for yourself, you, too, would lose
+taste for the oxidized-silver setting of a musical comedy.
+
+Barbara sat by the quartered-oak library table. Her right arm rested
+upon the table, and her dextral fingers nervously manipulated a sealed
+letter. The letter was addressed to Nevada Warren; and in the upper
+left-hand corner of the envelope was Gilbert's little gold palette.
+It had been delivered at nine o'clock, after Nevada had left.
+
+Barbara would have given her pearl necklace to know what the letter
+contained; but she could not open and read it by the aid of steam, or
+a pen-handle, or a hair-pin, or any of the generally approved methods,
+because her position in society forbade such an act. She had tried to
+read some of the lines of the letter by holding the envelope up to a
+strong light and pressing it hard against the paper, but Gilbert had
+too good a taste in stationery to make that possible.
+
+At eleven-thirty the theatre-goers returned. It was a delicious winter
+night. Even so far as from the cab to the door they were powdered
+thickly with the big flakes downpouring diagonally from the east. Old
+Jerome growled good-naturedly about villainous cab service and blockaded
+streets. Nevada, colored like a rose, with sapphire eyes, babbled of
+the stormy nights in the mountains around dad's cabin. During all
+these wintry apostrophes, Barbara, cold at heart, sawed wood--the only
+appropriate thing she could think of to do.
+
+Old Jerome went immediately up-stairs to hot-water-bottles and quinine.
+Nevada fluttered into the study, the only cheerfully lighted room,
+subsided into an arm-chair, and, while at the interminable task of
+unbuttoning her elbow gloves, gave oral testimony as to the demerits
+of the "show."
+
+"Yes, I think Mr. Fields is really amusing--sometimes," said Barbara.
+"Here is a letter for you, dear, that came by special delivery just
+after you had gone."
+
+"Who is it from?" asked Nevada, tugging at a button.
+
+"Well, really," said Barbara, with a smile, "I can only guess. The
+envelope has that queer little thing in one corner that Gilbert
+calls a palette, but which looks to me rather like a gilt heart on a
+school-girl's valentine."
+
+"I wonder what he's writing to me about" remarked Nevada, listlessly.
+
+"We're all alike," said Barbara; "all women. We try to find out what is
+in a letter by studying the postmark. As a last resort we use scissors,
+and read it from the bottom upward. Here it is."
+
+She made a motion as if to toss the letter across the table to Nevada.
+
+"Great catamounts!" exclaimed Nevada. "These centre-fire buttons are a
+nuisance. I'd rather wear buckskins. Oh, Barbara, please shuck the hide
+off that letter and read it. It'll be midnight before I get these gloves
+off!"
+
+"Why, dear, you don't want me to open Gilbert's letter to you? It's for
+you, and you wouldn't wish any one else to read it, of course!"
+
+Nevada raised her steady, calm, sapphire eyes from her gloves.
+
+"Nobody writes me anything that everybody mightn't read," she said.
+"Go on, Barbara. Maybe Gilbert wants us to go out in his car again
+to-morrow."
+
+Curiosity can do more things than kill a cat; and if emotions, well
+recognized as feminine, are inimical to feline life, then jealousy would
+soon leave the whole world catless. Barbara opened the letter, with an
+indulgent, slightly bored air.
+
+"Well, dear," said she, "I'll read it if you want me to."
+
+She slit the envelope, and read the missive with swift-travelling eyes;
+read it again, and cast a quick, shrewd glance at Nevada, who, for
+the time, seemed to consider gloves as the world of her interest, and
+letters from rising artists as no more than messages from Mars.
+
+For a quarter of a minute Barbara looked at Nevada with a strange
+steadfastness; and then a smile so small that it widened her mouth only
+the sixteenth part of an inch, and narrowed her eyes no more than a
+twentieth, flashed like an inspired thought across her face.
+
+Since the beginning no woman has been a mystery to another woman. Swift
+as light travels, each penetrates the heart and mind of another, sifts
+her sister's words of their cunningest disguises, reads her most hidden
+desires, and plucks the sophistry from her wiliest talk like hairs from
+a comb, twiddling them sardonically between her thumb and fingers before
+letting them float away on the breezes of fundamental doubt. Long ago
+Eve's son rang the door-bell of the family residence in Paradise Park,
+bearing a strange lady on his arm, whom he introduced. Eve took her
+daughter-in-law aside and lifted a classic eyebrow.
+
+"The Land of Nod," said the bride, languidly flirting the leaf of a
+palm. "I suppose you've been there, of course?"
+
+"Not lately," said Eve, absolutely unstaggered. "Don't you think the
+apple-sauce they serve over there is execrable? I rather like that
+mulberry-leaf tunic effect, dear; but, of course, the real fig goods
+are not to be had over there. Come over behind this lilac-bush while
+the gentlemen split a celery tonic. I think the caterpillar-holes have
+made your dress open a little in the back."
+
+So, then and there--according to the records--was the alliance formed
+by the only two who's-who ladies in the world. Then it was agreed that
+woman should forever remain as clear as a pane of glass--though glass
+was yet to be discovered--to other women, and that she should palm
+herself off on man as a mystery.
+
+Barbara seemed to hesitate.
+
+"Really, Nevada," she said, with a little show of embarrassment, "you
+shouldn't have insisted on my opening this. I--I'm sure it wasn't meant
+for any one else to know."
+
+Nevada forgot her gloves for a moment.
+
+"Then read it aloud," she said. "Since you've already read it, what's
+the difference? If Mr. Warren has written to me something that any one
+else oughtn't to know, that is all the more reason why everybody should
+know it."
+
+"Well," said Barbara, "this is what it says: 'Dearest Nevada--Come to
+my studio at twelve o'clock to-night. Do not fail.'" Barbara rose and
+dropped the note in Nevada's lap. "I'm awfully sorry," she said, "that
+I knew. It isn't like Gilbert. There must be some mistake. Just consider
+that I am ignorant of it, will you, dear? I must go up-stairs now, I
+have such a headache. I'm sure I don't understand the note. Perhaps
+Gilbert has been dining too well, and will explain. Good night!"
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Nevada tiptoed to the hall, and heard Barbara's door close upstairs.
+The bronze clock in the study told the hour of twelve was fifteen
+minutes away. She ran swiftly to the front door, and let herself out
+into the snow-storm. Gilbert Warren's studio was six squares away.
+
+By aerial ferry the white, silent forces of the storm attacked the city
+from beyond the sullen East River. Already the snow lay a foot deep
+on the pavements, the drifts heaping themselves like scaling-ladders
+against the walls of the besieged town. The Avenue was as quiet as a
+street in Pompeii. Cabs now and then skimmed past like white-winged
+gulls over a moonlit ocean; and less frequent motor-cars--sustaining the
+comparison--hissed through the foaming waves like submarine boats on
+their jocund, perilous journeys.
+
+Nevada plunged like a wind-driven storm-petrel on her way. She looked
+up at the ragged sierras of cloud-capped buildings that rose above the
+streets, shaded by the night lights and the congealed vapors to gray,
+drab, ashen, lavender, dun, and cerulean tints. They were so like the
+wintry mountains of her Western home that she felt a satisfaction such
+as the hundred-thousand-dollar house had seldom brought her.
+
+A policeman caused her to waver on a corner, just by his eye and weight.
+
+"Hello, Mabel!" said he. "Kind of late for you to be out, ain't it?"
+
+"I--I am just going to the drug store," said Nevada, hurrying past him.
+
+The excuse serves as a passport for the most sophisticated. Does it
+prove that woman never progresses, or that she sprang from Adam's rib,
+full-fledged in intellect and wiles?
+
+Turning eastward, the direct blast cut down Nevada's speed one-half. She
+made zigzag tracks in the snow; but she was as tough as a piñon sapling,
+and bowed to it as gracefully. Suddenly the studio-building loomed
+before her, a familiar landmark, like a cliff above some well-remembered
+cañon. The haunt of business and its hostile neighbor, art, was darkened
+and silent. The elevator stopped at ten.
+
+Up eight flights of Stygian stairs Nevada climbed, and rapped firmly
+at the door numbered "89." She had been there many times before, with
+Barbara and Uncle Jerome.
+
+Gilbert opened the door. He had a crayon pencil in one hand, a green
+shade over his eyes, and a pipe in his mouth. The pipe dropped to the
+floor.
+
+"Am I late?" asked Nevada. "I came as quick as I could. Uncle and me
+were at the theatre this evening. Here I am, Gilbert!"
+
+Gilbert did a Pygmalion-and-Galatea act. He changed from a statue of
+stupefaction to a young man with a problem to tackle. He admitted
+Nevada, got a whisk-broom, and began to brush the snow from her clothes.
+A great lamp, with a green shade, hung over an easel, where the artist
+had been sketching in crayon.
+
+"You wanted me," said Nevada simply, "and I came. You said so in your
+letter. What did you send for me for?"
+
+"You read my letter?" inquired Gilbert, sparring for wind.
+
+"Barbara read it to me. I saw it afterward. It said: 'Come to my studio
+at twelve to-night, and do not fail.' I thought you were sick, of
+course, but you don't seem to be."
+
+"Aha!" said Gilbert irrelevantly. "I'll tell you why I asked you to
+come, Nevada. I want you to marry me immediately--to-night. What's a
+little snow-storm? Will you do it?"
+
+"You might have noticed that I would, long ago," said Nevada. "And I'm
+rather stuck on the snow-storm idea, myself. I surely would hate one of
+these flowery church noon-weddings. Gilbert, I didn't know you had grit
+enough to propose it this way. Let's shock 'em--it's our funeral, ain't
+it?"
+
+"You bet!" said Gilbert. "Where did I hear that expression?" he added
+to himself. "Wait a minute, Nevada; I want to do a little 'phoning."
+
+He shut himself in a little dressing-room, and called upon the
+lightnings of the heavens--condensed into unromantic numbers and
+districts.
+
+"That you, Jack? You confounded sleepyhead! Yes, wake up; this is me--or
+I--oh, bother the difference in grammar! I'm going to be married right
+away. Yes! Wake up your sister--don't answer me back; bring her along,
+too--you _must_! Remind Agnes of the time I saved her from drowning in
+Lake Ronkonkoma--I know it's caddish to refer to it, but she must come
+with you. Yes. Nevada is here, waiting. We've been engaged quite a
+while. Some opposition among the relatives, you know, and we have to
+pull it off this way. We're waiting here for you. Don't let Agnes
+out-talk you--bring her! You will? Good old boy! I'll order a carriage
+to call for you, double-quick time. Confound you, Jack, you're all
+right!"
+
+Gilbert returned to the room where Nevada waited.
+
+"My old friend, Jack Peyton, and his sister were to have been here at
+a quarter to twelve," he explained; "but Jack is so confoundedly slow.
+I've just 'phoned them to hurry. They'll be here in a few minutes. I'm
+the happiest man in the world, Nevada! What did you do with the letter
+I sent you to-day?"
+
+"I've got it cinched here," said Nevada, pulling it out from beneath
+her opera-cloak.
+
+Gilbert drew the letter from the envelope and looked it over carefully.
+Then he looked at Nevada thoughtfully.
+
+"Didn't you think it rather queer that I should ask you to come to my
+studio at midnight?" he asked.
+
+"Why, no," said Nevada, rounding her eyes. "Not if you needed me.
+Out West, when a pal sends you a hurry call--ain't that what you say
+here?--we get there first and talk about it after the row is over. And
+it's usually snowing there, too, when things happen. So I didn't mind."
+
+Gilbert rushed into another room, and came back burdened with overcoats
+warranted to turn wind, rain, or snow.
+
+"Put this raincoat on," he said, holding it for her. "We have a quarter
+of a mile to go. Old Jack and his sister will be here in a few minutes."
+He began to struggle into a heavy coat. "Oh, Nevada," he said, "just
+look at the headlines on the front page of that evening paper on the
+table, will you? It's about your section of the West, and I know it will
+interest you."
+
+He waited a full minute, pretending to find trouble in the getting on of
+his overcoat, and then turned. Nevada had not moved. She was looking at
+him with strange and pensive directness. Her cheeks had a flush on them
+beyond the color that had been contributed by the wind and snow; but her
+eyes were steady.
+
+"I was going to tell you," she said, "anyhow, before you--before
+we--before--well, before anything. Dad never gave me a day of schooling.
+I never learned to read or write a darned word. Now if--"
+
+Pounding their uncertain way up-stairs, the feet of Jack, the somnolent,
+and Agnes, the grateful, were heard.
+
+
+V
+
+
+When Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Warren were spinning softly homeward in a
+closed carriage, after the ceremony, Gilbert said:
+
+"Nevada, would you really like to know what I wrote you in the letter
+that you received to-night?"
+
+"Fire away!" said his bride.
+
+"Word for word," said Gilbert, "it was this: 'My dear Miss Warren--You
+were right about the flower. It was a hydrangea, and not a lilac.'"
+
+"All right," said Nevada. "But let's forget it. The joke's on Barbara,
+anyway!"
+
+
+
+
+THIMBLE, THIMBLE
+
+
+These are the directions for finding the office of Carteret & Carteret,
+Mill Supplies and Leather Belting:
+
+You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line,
+the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Cañons of the
+Moneygrubber Tribe. Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a
+push-cart and the tongue of a two-ton four-horse dray and hop, skip,
+and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one-story synthetic
+mountain of stone and iron. In the twelfth story is the office of
+Carteret & Carteret. The factory where they make the mill supplies and
+leather belting is in Brooklyn. Those commodities--to say nothing of
+Brooklyn--not being of interest to you, let us hold the incidents within
+the confines of a one-act, one-scene play, thereby lessening the toil
+of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher. So, if you have the
+courage to face four pages of type and Carteret & Carteret's office boy,
+Percival, you shall sit on a varnished chair in the inner office and
+peep at the little comedy of the Old Nigger Man, the Hunting-Case Watch,
+and the Open-Faced Question--mostly borrowed from the late Mr. Frank
+Stockton, as you will conclude.
+
+First, biography (but pared to the quick) must intervene. I am for the
+inverted sugar-coated quinine pill--the bitter on the outside.
+
+The Carterets were, or was (Columbia College professors please rule), an
+old Virginia family. Long time ago the gentlemen of the family had worn
+lace ruffles and carried tinless foils and owned plantations and had
+slaves to burn. But the war had greatly reduced their holdings. (Of
+course you can perceive at once that this flavor has been shoplifted
+from Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, in spite of the "et" after "Carter.") Well,
+anyhow:
+
+In digging up the Carteret history I shall not take you farther back
+than the year 1620. The two original American Carterets came over in
+that year, but by different means of transportation. One brother, named
+John, came in the _Mayflower_ and became a Pilgrim Father. You've seen his
+picture on the covers of the Thanksgiving magazines, hunting turkeys in
+the deep snow with a blunderbuss. Blandford Carteret, the other brother,
+crossed the pond in his own brigantine, landed on the Virginia coast,
+and became an F.F.V. John became distinguished for piety and shrewdness
+in business; Blandford for his pride, juleps; marksmanship, and vast
+slave-cultivated plantations.
+
+Then came the Civil War. (I must condense this historical
+interpolation.) Stonewall Jackson was shot; Lee surrendered; Grant
+toured the world; cotton went to nine cents; Old Crow whiskey and Jim
+Crow cars were invented; the Seventy-ninth Massachusetts Volunteers
+returned to the Ninety-seventh Alabama Zouaves the battle flag of
+Lundy's Lane which they bought at a second-hand store in Chelsea, kept
+by a man named Skzchnzski; Georgia sent the President a sixty-pound
+watermelon--and that brings us up to the time when the story begins.
+My! but that was sparring for an opening! I really must brush op on my
+Aristotle.
+
+The Yankee Carterets went into business in New York long before the war.
+Their house, as far as Leather Belting and Mill Supplies was concerned,
+was as musty and arrogant and solid as one of those old East India
+tea-importing concerns that you read about in Dickens. There were some
+rumors of a war behind its counters, but not enough to affect the
+business.
+
+During and after the war, Blandford Carteret, F.F.V., lost his
+plantations, juleps, marksmanship, and life. He bequeathed little
+more than his pride to his surviving family. So it came to pass that
+Blandford Carteret, the Fifth, aged fifteen, was invited by the
+leather-and-mill-supplies branch of that name to come North and learn
+business instead of hunting foxes and boasting of the glory of his
+fathers on the reduced acres of his impoverished family. The boy jumped
+at the chance; and, at the age of twenty-five, sat in the office of the
+firm equal partner with John, the Fifth, of the blunderbuss-and-turkey
+branch. Here the story begins again.
+
+The young men were about the same age, smooth of face, alert, easy of
+manner, and with an air that promised mental and physical quickness.
+They were razored, blue-serged, straw-hatted, and pearl stick-pinned
+like other young New Yorkers who might be millionaires or bill clerks.
+
+One afternoon at four o'clock, in the private office of the firm,
+Blandford Carteret opened a letter that a clerk had just brought to his
+desk. After reading it, he chuckled audibly for nearly a minute. John
+looked around from his desk inquiringly.
+
+"It's from mother," said Blandford. "I'll read you the funny part of
+it. She tells me all the neighborhood news first, of course, and then
+cautions me against getting my feet wet and musical comedies. After that
+come vital statistics about calves and pigs and an estimate of the wheat
+crop. And now I'll quote some:
+
+"'And what do you think! Old Uncle Jake, who was seventy-six last
+Wednesday, must go travelling. Nothing would do but he must go to New
+York and see his "young Marster Blandford." Old as he is, he has a deal
+of common sense, so I've let him go. I couldn't refuse him--he seemed to
+have concentrated all his hopes and desires into this one adventure into
+the wide world. You know he was born on the plantation, and has never
+been ten miles away from it in his life. And he was your father's body
+servant during the war, and has been always a faithful vassal and
+servant of the family. He has often seen the gold watch--the watch that
+was your father's and your father's father's. I told him it was to be
+yours, And he begged me to allow him to take it to you and to put it
+into your hands himself.
+
+"'So he has it, carefully enclosed in a buck-skin case, and is bringing
+it to you with all the pride and importance of a king's messenger. I
+gave him money for the round trip and for a two weeks' stay in the city.
+I wish you would see to it that he gets comfortable quarters--Jake
+won't need much looking after--he's able to take care of himself. But
+I have read in the papers that African bishops and colored potentates
+generally have much trouble in obtaining food and lodging in the Yankee
+metropolis. That may be all right; but I don't see why the best hotel
+there shouldn't take Jake in. Still, I suppose it's a rule.
+
+"'I gave him full directions about finding you, and packed his valise
+myself. You won't have to bother with him; but I do hope you'll see that
+he is made comfortable. Take the watch that he brings you--it's almost a
+decoration. It has been worn by true Carterets, and there isn't a stain
+upon it nor a false movement of the wheels. Bringing it to you is the
+crowning joy of old Jake's life. I wanted him to have that little outing
+and that happiness before it is too late. You have often heard us talk
+about how Jake, pretty badly wounded himself, crawled through the
+reddened grass at Chancellorsville to where your father lay with the
+bullet in his dear heart, and took the watch from his pocket to keep it
+from the "Yanks."
+
+"'So, my son, when the old man comes consider him as a frail but worthy
+messenger from the old-time life and home.
+
+"'You have been so long away from home and so long among the people
+that we have always regarded as aliens that I'm not sure that Jake will
+know you when he sees you. But Jake has a keen perception, and I rather
+believe that he will know a Virginia Carteret at sight. I can't conceive
+that even ten years in Yankee-land could change a boy of mine. Anyhow,
+I'm sure you will know Jake. I put eighteen collars in his valise. If
+he should have to buy others, he wears a number 15½. Please see that he
+gets the right ones. He will be no trouble to you at all.
+
+"'If you are not too busy, I'd like for you to find him a place to board
+where they have white-meal corn-bread, and try to keep him from taking
+his shoes off in your office or on the street. His right foot swells a
+little, and he likes to be comfortable.
+
+"'If you can spare the time, count his handkerchiefs when they come back
+from the wash. I bought him a dozen new ones before he left. He should
+be there about the time this letter reaches you. I told him to go
+straight to your office when he arrives.'"
+
+As soon as Blandford had finished the reading of this, something
+happened (as there should happen in stories and must happen on the
+stage).
+
+Percival, the office boy, with his air of despising the world's output
+of mill supplies and leather belting, came in to announce that a colored
+gentleman was outside to see Mr. Blandford Carteret.
+
+"Bring him in," said Blandford, rising.
+
+John Carteret swung around in his chair and said to Percival: "Ask him
+to wait a few minutes outside. We'll let you know when to bring him in."
+
+Then he turned to his cousin with one of those broad, slow smiles that
+was an inheritance of all the Carterets, and said:
+
+"Bland, I've always had a consuming curiosity to understand the
+differences that you haughty Southerners believe to exist between 'you
+all' and the people of the North. Of course, I know that you consider
+yourselves made out of finer clay and look upon Adam as only a
+collateral branch of your ancestry; but I don't know why. I never could
+understand the differences between us."
+
+"Well, John," said Blandford, laughing, "what you don't understand about
+it is just the difference, of course. I suppose it was the feudal way
+in which we lived that gave us our lordly baronial airs and feeling of
+superiority."
+
+"But you are not feudal, now," went on John. "Since we licked you
+and stole your cotton and mules you've had to go to work just as we
+'damyankees,' as you call us, have always been doing. And you're just as
+proud and exclusive and upper-classy as you were before the war. So it
+wasn't your money that caused it."
+
+"Maybe it was the climate," said Blandford, lightly, "or maybe our
+negroes spoiled us. I'll call old Jake in, now. I'll be glad to see the
+old villain again."
+
+"Wait just a moment," said John. "I've got a little theory I want to
+test. You and I are pretty much alike in our general appearance. Old
+Jake hasn't seen you since you were fifteen. Let's have him in and play
+fair and see which of us gets the watch. The old darky surely ought to
+be able to pick out his 'young marster' without any trouble. The alleged
+aristocratic superiority of a 'reb' ought to be visible to him at once.
+He couldn't make the mistake of handing over the timepiece to a Yankee,
+of course. The loser buys the dinner this evening and two dozen 15½
+collars for Jake. Is it a go?"
+
+Blandford agreed heartily. Percival was summoned, and told to usher the
+"colored gentleman" in.
+
+Uncle Jake stepped inside the private office cautiously. He was a little
+old man, as black as soot, wrinkled and bald except for a fringe of
+white wool, cut decorously short, that ran over his ears and around his
+head. There was nothing of the stage "uncle" about him: his black suit
+nearly fitted him; his shoes shone, and his straw hat was banded with a
+gaudy ribbon. In his right hand he carried something carefully concealed
+by his closed fingers.
+
+Uncle Jake stopped a few steps from the door. Two young men sat in their
+revolving desk-chairs ten feet apart and looked at him in friendly
+silence. His gaze slowly shifted many times from one to the other. He
+felt sure that he was in the presence of one, at least, of the revered
+family among whose fortunes his life had begun and was to end.
+
+One had the pleasing but haughty Carteret air; the other had the
+unmistakable straight, long family nose. Both had the keen black eyes,
+horizontal brows, and thin, smiling lips that had distinguished both
+the Carteret of the _Mayflower_ and him of the brigantine. Old Jake had
+thought that he could have picked out his young master instantly from a
+thousand Northerners; but he found himself in difficulties. The best he
+could do was to use strategy.
+
+"Howdy, Marse Blandford--howdy, suh?" he said, looking midway between
+the two young men.
+
+"Howdy, Uncle Jake?" they both answered pleasantly and in unison. "Sit
+down. Have you brought the watch?"
+
+Uncle Jake chose a hard-bottom chair at a respectful distance, sat on
+the edge of it, and laid his hat carefully on the floor. The watch in
+its buckskin case he gripped tightly. He had not risked his life on the
+battle-field to rescue that watch from his "old marster's" foes to hand
+it over again to the enemy without a struggle.
+
+"Yes, suh; I got it in my hand, suh. I'm gwine give it to you right
+away in jus' a minute. Old Missus told me to put it in young Marse
+Blandford's hand and tell him to wear it for the family pride and
+honor. It was a mighty longsome trip for an old nigger man to make--ten
+thousand miles, it must be, back to old Vi'ginia, suh. You've growed
+mightily, young marster. I wouldn't have reconnized you but for yo'
+powerful resemblance to old marster."
+
+With admirable diplomacy the old man kept his eyes roaming in the space
+between the two men. His words might have been addressed to either.
+Though neither wicked nor perverse, he was seeking for a sign.
+
+Blandford and John exchanged winks.
+
+"I reckon you done got you ma's letter," went on Uncle Jake. "She said
+she was gwine to write to you 'bout my comin' along up this er-way.
+
+"Yes, yes, Uncle Jake," said John briskly. "My cousin and I have just
+been notified to expect you. We are both Carterets, you know."
+
+"Although one of us," said Blandford, "was born and raised in the
+North."
+
+"So if you will hand over the watch--" said John.
+
+"My cousin and I--" said Blandford.
+
+"Will then see to it--" said John.
+
+"That comfortable quarters are found for you," said Blandford.
+
+With creditable ingenuity, old Jake set up a cackling, high-pitched,
+protracted laugh. He beat his knee, picked up his hat and bent the brim
+in an apparent paroxysm of humorous appreciation. The seizure afforded
+him a mask behind which he could roll his eyes impartially between,
+above, and beyond his two tormentors.
+
+"I sees what!" he chuckled, after a while. "You gen'lemen is tryin' to
+have fun with the po' old nigger. But you can't fool old Jake. I knowed
+you, Marse Blandford, the minute I sot eyes on you. You was a po' skimpy
+little boy no mo' than about fo'teen when you lef' home to come No'th;
+but I knowed you the minute I sot eyes on you. You is the mawtal image
+of old marster. The other gen'leman resembles you mightily, suh; but you
+can't fool old Jake on a member of the old Vi'ginia family. No suh."
+
+At exactly the same time both Carterets smiled and extended a hand for
+the watch.
+
+Uncle Jake's wrinkled, black face lost the expression of amusement to
+which he had vainly twisted it. He knew that he was being teased, and
+that it made little real difference, as far as its safety went, into
+which of those outstretched hands he placed the family treasure. But it
+seemed to him that not only his own pride and loyalty but much of the
+Virginia Carterets' was at stake. He had heard down South during the war
+about that other branch of the family that lived in the North and fought
+on "the yuther side," and it had always grieved him. He had followed
+his "old marster's" fortunes from stately luxury through war to almost
+poverty. And now, with the last relic and reminder of him, blessed by
+"old missus," and intrusted implicitly to his care, he had come ten
+thousand miles (as it seemed) to deliver it into the hands of the one
+who was to wear it and wind it and cherish it and listen to it tick off
+the unsullied hours that marked the lives of the Carterets--of Virginia.
+
+His experience and conception of the Yankees had been an impression of
+tyrants--"low-down, common trash"--in blue, laying waste with fire and
+sword. He had seen the smoke of many burning homesteads almost as grand
+as Carteret Hall ascending to the drowsy Southern skies. And now he was
+face to face with one of them--and he could not distinguish him from his
+"young marster" whom he had come to find and bestow upon him the emblem
+of his kingship--even as the arm "clothed in white samite, mystic,
+wonderful" laid Excalibur in the right hand of Arthur. He saw before him
+two young men, easy, kind, courteous, welcoming, either of whom might
+have been the one he sought. Troubled, bewildered, sorely grieved at
+his weakness of judgment, old Jake abandoned his loyal subterfuges.
+His right hand sweated against the buckskin cover of the watch. He
+was deeply humiliated and chastened. Seriously, now, his prominent,
+yellow-white eyes closely scanned the two young men. At the end of his
+scrutiny he was conscious of but one difference between them. One wore a
+narrow black tie with a white pearl stickpin. The other's "four-in-hand"
+was a narrow blue one pinned with a black pearl.
+
+And then, to old Jake's relief, there came a sudden distraction. Drama
+knocked at the door with imperious knuckles, and forced Comedy to the
+wings, and Drama peeped with a smiling but set face over the footlights.
+
+Percival, the hater of mill supplies, brought in a card, which he
+handed, with the manner of one bearing a cartel, to Blue-Tie.
+
+"Olivia De Ormond," read Blue-Tie from the card. He looked inquiringly
+at his cousin.
+
+"Why not have her in," said Black-Tie, "and bring matters to a
+conclusion?"
+
+"Uncle Jake," said one of the young men, "would you mind taking that
+chair over there in the corner for a while? A lady is coming in--on some
+business. We'll take up your case afterward."
+
+The lady whom Percival ushered in was young and petulantly, decidedly,
+freshly, consciously, and intentionally pretty. She was dressed with
+such expensive plainness that she made you consider lace and ruffles as
+mere tatters and rags. But one great ostrich plume that she wore would
+have marked her anywhere in the army of beauty as the wearer of the
+merry helmet of Navarre.
+
+Miss De Ormond accepted the swivel chair at Blue-Tie's desk. Then the
+gentlemen drew leather-upholstered seats conveniently near, and spoke
+of the weather.
+
+"Yes," said she, "I noticed it was warmer. But I mustn't take up too
+much of your time during business hours. That is," she continued,
+"unless we talk business."
+
+She addressed her words to Blue-Tie, with a charming smile.
+
+"Very well," said he. "You don't mind my cousin being present, do you?
+We are generally rather confidential with each other--especially in
+business matters."
+
+"Oh no," caroled Miss De Ormond. "I'd rather he did hear. He knows all
+about it, anyhow. In fact, he's quite a material witness because he was
+present when you--when it happened. I thought you might want to talk
+things over before--well, before any action is taken, as I believe the
+lawyers say."
+
+"Have you anything in the way of a proposition to make?" asked
+Black-Tie.
+
+Miss De Ormond looked reflectively at the neat toe of one of her dull
+kid-pumps.
+
+"I had a proposal made to me," she said. "If the proposal sticks it cuts
+out the proposition. Let's have that settled first."
+
+"Well, as far as--" began Blue-Tie.
+
+"Excuse me, cousin," interrupted Black-Tie, "if you don't mind my
+cutting in." And then he turned, with a good-natured air, toward the
+lady.
+
+"Now, let's recapitulate a bit," he said cheerfully. "All three of us,
+besides other mutual acquaintances, have been out on a good many larks
+together."
+
+"I'm afraid I'll have to call the birds by another name," said Miss De
+Ormond.
+
+"All right," responded Black-Tie, with unimpaired cheerfulness; "suppose
+we say 'squabs' when we talk about the 'proposal' and 'larks' when we
+discuss the 'proposition.' You have a quick mind, Miss De Ormond. Two
+months ago some half-dozen of us went in a motor-car for a day's run
+into the country. We stopped at a road-house for dinner. My cousin
+proposed marriage to you then and there. He was influenced to do so, of
+course, by the beauty and charm which no one can deny that you possess."
+
+"I wish I had you for a press agent, Mr. Carteret," said the beauty,
+with a dazzling smile.
+
+"You are on the stage, Miss De Ormond," went on Black-Tie. "You have
+had, doubtless, many admirers, and perhaps other proposals. You must
+remember, too, that we were a party of merrymakers on that occasion.
+There were a good many corks pulled. That the proposal of marriage
+was made to you by my cousin we cannot deny. But hasn't it been your
+experience that, by common consent, such things lose their seriousness
+when viewed in the next day's sunlight? Isn't there something of a
+'code' among good 'sports'--I use the word in its best sense--that
+wipes out each day the follies of the evening previous?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Miss De Ormond. "I know that very well. And I've always
+played up to it. But as you seem to be conducting the case--with the
+silent consent of the defendant--I'll tell you something more. I've got
+letters from him repeating the proposal. And they're signed, too."
+
+"I understand," said Black-Tie gravely. "What's your price for the
+letters?"
+
+"I'm not a cheap one," said Miss De Ormond. "But I had decided to make
+you a rate. You both belong to a swell family. Well, if I _am_ on the
+stage nobody can say a word against me truthfully. And the money is only
+a secondary consideration. It isn't the money I was after. I--I believed
+him--and--and I liked him."
+
+She cast a soft, entrancing glance at Blue-Tie from under her long
+eyelashes.
+
+"And the price?" went on Black-Tie, inexorably.
+
+"Ten thousand dollars," said the lady, sweetly.
+
+"Or--"
+
+"Or the fulfillment of the engagement to marry."
+
+"I think it is time," interrupted Blue-Tie, "for me to be allowed to say
+a word or two. You and I, cousin, belong to a family that has held its
+head pretty high. You have been brought up in a section of the country
+very different from the one where our branch of the family lived. Yet
+both of us are Carterets, even if some of our ways and theories differ.
+You remember, it is a tradition of the family, that no Carteret ever
+failed in chivalry to a lady or failed to keep his word when it was
+given."
+
+Then Blue-Tie, with frank decision showing on his countenance, turned
+to Miss De Ormond.
+
+"Olivia," said he, "on what date will you marry me?"
+
+Before she could answer, Black-Tie again interposed.
+
+"It is a long journey," said he, "from Plymouth rock to Norfolk Bay.
+Between the two points we find the changes that nearly three centuries
+have brought. In that time the old order has changed. We no longer burn
+witches or torture slaves. And to-day we neither spread our cloaks on
+the mud for ladies to walk over nor treat them to the ducking-stool.
+It is the age of common sense, adjustment, and proportion. All of
+us--ladies, gentlemen, women, men, Northerners, Southerners, lords,
+caitiffs, actors, hardware-drummers, senators, hod-carriers, and
+politicians--are coming to a better understanding. Chivalry is one of
+our words that changes its meaning every day. Family pride is a thing
+of many constructions--it may show itself by maintaining a moth-eaten
+arrogance in a cobwebbed Colonial mansion or by the prompt paying of
+one's debts.
+
+"Now, I suppose you've had enough of my monologue. I've learned
+something of business and a little of life; and I somehow believe,
+cousin, that our great-great-grandfathers, the original Carterets,
+would indorse my view of this matter."
+
+Black-Tie wheeled around to his desk, wrote in a check-book and tore out
+the check, the sharp rasp of the perforated leaf making the only sound
+in the room. He laid the check within easy reach of Miss De Ormond's
+hand.
+
+"Business is business," said he. "We live in a business age. There is my
+personal check for $10,000. What do you say, Miss De Ormond--will it he
+orange blossoms or cash?"
+
+Miss De Ormond picked up the cheek carelessly, folded it indifferently,
+and stuffed it into her glove.
+
+"Oh, this'll do," she said, calmly. "I just thought I'd call and put it
+up to you. I guess you people are all right. But a girl has feelings,
+you know. I've heard one of you was a Southerner--I wonder which one of
+you it is?"
+
+She arose, smiled sweetly, and walked to the door. There, with a flash
+of white teeth and a dip of the heavy plume, she disappeared.
+
+Both of the cousins had forgotten Uncle Jake for the time. But now they
+heard the shuffling of his shoes as he came across the rug toward them
+from his seat in the corner.
+
+"Young marster," he said, "take yo' watch."
+
+And without hesitation he laid the ancient timepiece in the hand of its
+rightful owner.
+
+
+
+
+SUPPLY AND DEMAND
+
+
+Finch keeps a hats-cleaned-by-electricity-while-you-wait establishment,
+nine feet by twelve, in Third Avenue. Once a customer, you are always
+his. I do not know his secret process, but every four days your hat
+needs to be cleaned again.
+
+Finch is a leathern, sallow, slow-footed man, between twenty and forty.
+You would say he had been brought up a bushelman in Essex Street. When
+business is slack he likes to talk, so I had my hat cleaned even oftener
+than it deserved, hoping Finch might let me into some of the secrets of
+the sweatshops.
+
+One afternoon I dropped in and found Finch alone. He began to anoint my
+headpiece de Panama with his mysterious fluid that attracted dust and
+dirt like a magnet.
+
+"They say the Indians weave 'em under water," said I, for a leader.
+
+"Don't you believe it," said Finch. "No Indian or white man could stay
+under water that long. Say, do you pay much attention to politics? I see
+in the paper something about a law they've passed called 'the law of
+supply and demand.'"
+
+I explained to him as well as I could that the reference was to a
+politico-economical law, and not to a legal statute.
+
+"I didn't know," said Finch. "I heard a good deal about it a year or so
+ago, but in a one-sided way."
+
+"Yes," said I, "political orators use it a great deal. In fact, they
+never give it a rest. I suppose you heard some of those cart-tail
+fellows spouting on the subject over here on the east side."
+
+"I heard it from a king," said Finch--"the white king of a tribe of
+Indians in South America."
+
+I was interested but not surprised. The big city is like a mother's knee
+to many who have strayed far and found the roads rough beneath their
+uncertain feet. At dusk they come home and sit upon the door-step.
+I know a piano player in a cheap café who has shot lions in Africa,
+a bell-boy who fought in the British army against the Zulus, an
+express-driver whose left arm had been cracked like a lobster's claw for
+a stew-pot of Patagonian cannibals when the boat of his rescuers hove in
+sight. So a hat-cleaner who had been a friend of a king did not oppress
+me.
+
+"A new band?" asked Finch, with his dry, barren smile.
+
+"Yes," said I, "and half an inch wider." I had had a new band five days
+before.
+
+"I meets a man one night," said Finch, beginning his story--"a man
+brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating schweinerknuckel in
+Schlagel's. That was two years ago, when I was a hose-cart driver for
+No. 98. His discourse runs to the subject of gold. He says that certain
+mountains in a country down South that he calls Gaudymala is full of it.
+He says the Indians wash it out of the streams in plural quantities.
+
+"'Oh, Geronimo!' says I. 'Indians! There's no Indians in the South,' I
+tell him, 'except Elks, Maccabees, and the buyers for the fall dry-goods
+trade. The Indians are all on the reservations,' says I.
+
+"'I'm telling you this with reservations,' says he. 'They ain't Buffalo
+Bill Indians; they're squattier and more pedigreed. They call 'em Inkers
+and Aspics, and they was old inhabitants when Mazuma was King of Mexico.
+They wash the gold out of the mountain streams,' says the brown man,
+'and fill quills with it; and then they empty 'em into red jars till
+they are full; and then they pack it in buckskin sacks of one arroba
+each--an arroba is twenty-five pounds--and store it in a stone house,
+with an engraving of a idol with marcelled hair, playing a flute, over
+the door.'
+
+"'How do they work off this unearth increment?' I asks.
+
+"'They don't,' says the man. 'It's a case of "Ill fares the land with
+the great deal of velocity where wealth accumulates and there ain't any
+reciprocity."'
+
+"After this man and me got through our conversation, which left him
+dry of information, I shook hands with him and told him I was sorry I
+couldn't believe him. And a month afterward I landed on the coast of
+this Gaudymala with $1,300 that I had been saving up for five years. I
+thought I knew what Indians liked, and I fixed myself accordingly. I
+loaded down four pack-mules with red woollen blankets, wrought-iron
+pails, jewelled side-combs for the ladies, glass necklaces, and
+safety-razors. I hired a black mozo, who was supposed to be a
+mule-driver and an interpreter too. It turned out that he could
+interpret mules all right, but he drove the English language much too
+hard. His name sounded like a Yale key when you push it in wrong side
+up, but I called him McClintock, which was close to the noise.
+
+"Well, this gold village was forty miles up in the mountains, and it
+took us nine days to find it. But one afternoon McClintock led the other
+mules and myself over a rawhide bridge stretched across a precipice five
+thousand feet deep, it seemed to me. The hoofs of the beasts drummed
+on it just like before George M. Cohan makes his first entrance on the
+stage.
+
+"This village was built of mud and stone, and had no streets. Some few
+yellow-and-brown persons popped their heads out-of-doors, looking about
+like Welsh rabbits with Worcester sauce on em. Out of the biggest house,
+that had a kind of a porch around it, steps a big white man, red as a
+beet in color, dressed in fine tanned deerskin clothes, with a gold
+chain around his neck, smoking a cigar. I've seen United States Senators
+of his style of features and build, also head-waiters and cops.
+
+"He walks up and takes a look at us, while McClintock disembarks and
+begins to interpret to the lead mule while he smokes a cigarette.
+
+"'Hello, Buttinsky,' says the fine man to me. 'How did you get in the
+game? I didn't see you buy any chips. Who gave you the keys of the
+city?'
+
+"'I'm a poor traveller,' says I. 'Especially mule-back. You'll excuse
+me. Do you run a hack line or only a bluff?'
+
+"'Segregate yourself from your pseudo-equine quadruped,' says he, 'and
+come inside.'
+
+"He raises a finger, and a villager runs up.
+
+"'This man will take care of your outfit,' says he, 'and I'll take care
+of you.'
+
+"He leads me into the biggest house, and sets out the chairs and a kind
+of a drink the color of milk. It was the finest room I ever saw. The
+stone walls was hung all over with silk shawls, and there was red and
+yellow rugs on the floor, and jars of red pottery and Angora goat skins,
+and enough bamboo furniture to misfurnish half a dozen seaside cottages.
+
+"'In the first place,' says the man, 'you want to know who I am. I'm
+sole lessee and proprietor of this tribe of Indians. They call me the
+Grand Yacuma, which is to say King or Main Finger of the bunch. I've
+got more power here than a chargé d'affaires, a charge of dynamite, and
+a charge account at Tiffany's combined. In fact, I'm the Big Stick,
+with as many extra knots on it as there is on the record run of the
+Lusitania. Oh, I read the papers now and then,' says he. 'Now, let's
+hear your entitlements,' he goes on, 'and the meeting will be open.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'I am known as one W. D. Finch. Occupation, capitalist.
+Address, 541 East Thirty-second--'
+
+"'New York,' chips in the Noble Grand. 'I know,' says he, grinning. 'It
+ain't the first time you've seen it go down on the blotter. I can tell
+by the way you hand it out. Well, explain "capitalist."'
+
+"I tells this boss plain what I come for and how I come to came.
+
+"'Gold-dust?' says he, looking as puzzled as a baby that's got a feather
+stuck on its molasses finger. 'That's funny. This ain't a gold-mining
+country. And you invested all your capital on a stranger's story?
+Well, well! These Indians of mine--they are the last of the tribe of
+Peches--are simple as children. They know nothing of the purchasing
+power of gold. I'm afraid you've been imposed on,' says he.
+
+"'Maybe so,' says I, 'but it sounded pretty straight to me.'
+
+"'W. D.,' says the King, all of a sudden, 'I'll give you a square deal.
+It ain't often I get to talk to a white man, and I'll give you a show
+for your money. It may be these constituents of mine have a few grains
+of gold-dust hid away in their clothes. To-morrow you may get out these
+goods you've brought up and see if you can make any sales. Now, I'm
+going to introduce myself unofficially. My name is Shane--Patrick Shane.
+I own this tribe of Peche Indians by right of conquest--single handed
+and unafraid. I drifted up here four years ago, and won 'em by my size
+and complexion and nerve. I learned their language in six weeks--it's
+easy: you simply emit a string of consonants as long as your breath
+holds out and then point at what you're asking for.
+
+"'I conquered 'em, spectacularly,' goes on King Shane, 'and then I went
+at 'em with economical politics, law, sleight-of-hand, and a kind of New
+England ethics and parsimony. Every Sunday, or as near as I can guess at
+it, I preach to 'em in the council-house (I'm the council) on the law of
+supply and demand. I praise supply and knock demand. I use the same text
+every time. You wouldn't think, W. D.,' says Shane, 'that I had poetry
+in me, would you?'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'I wouldn't know whether to call it poetry or not.'
+
+"'Tennyson,' says Shane, 'furnishes the poetic gospel I preach. I always
+considered him the boss poet. Here's the way the text goes:
+
+
+   "'"For, not to admire, if a man could learn it, were more
+   Than to walk all day like a Sultan of old in a garden of spice."
+
+
+"'You see, I teach 'em to cut out demand--that supply is the main
+thing. I teach 'em not to desire anything beyond their simplest needs.
+A little mutton, a little cocoa, and a little fruit brought up from
+the coast--that's all they want to make 'em happy. I've got 'em well
+trained. They make their own clothes and hats out of a vegetable fibre
+and straw, and they're a contented lot. It's a great thing,' winds up
+Shane, 'to have made a people happy by the incultivation of such simple
+institutions.'
+
+"Well, the next day, with the King's permission, I has the McClintock
+open up a couple of sacks of my goods in the little plaza of the
+village. The Indians swarmed around by the hundred and looked the
+bargain-counter over. I shook red blankets at 'em, flashed finger-rings
+and ear-bobs, tried pearl necklaces and side-combs on the women, and a
+line of red hosiery on the men. 'Twas no use. They looked on like hungry
+graven images, but I never made a sale. I asked McClintock what was the
+trouble. Mac yawned three or four times, rolled a cigarette, made one or
+two confidential side remarks to a mule, and then condescended to inform
+me that the people had no money.
+
+"Just then up strolls King Patrick, big and red 'and royal as usual,
+with the gold chain over his chest and his cigar in front of him.
+
+"'How's business, W. D.?' he asks.
+
+"'Fine,' says I. 'It's a bargain-day rush. I've got one more line of
+goods to offer before I shut up shop. I'll try 'em with safety-razors.
+I've got two gross that I bought at a fire sale.'
+
+"Shane laughs till some kind of mameluke or private secretary he carries
+with him has to hold him up.
+
+"'O my sainted Aunt Jerusha!' says he, 'ain't you one of the Babes in
+the Goods, W. D.? Don't you know that no Indians ever shave? They pull
+out their whiskers instead.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'that's just what these razors would do for 'em--they
+wouldn't have any kick coming if they used 'em once.'
+
+"Shane went away, and I could hear him laughing a block, if there had
+been any block.
+
+"'Tell 'em,' says I to McClintock, 'it ain't money I want--tell 'em I'll
+take gold-dust. Tell 'em I'll allow 'em sixteen dollars an ounce for it
+in trade. That's what I'm out for--the dust.'
+
+"Mac interprets, and you'd have thought a squadron of cops had charged
+the crowd to disperse it. Every uncle's nephew and aunt's niece of 'em
+faded away inside of two minutes.
+
+"At the royal palace that night me and the King talked it over.
+
+"'They've got the dust hid out somewhere,' says I, 'or they wouldn't
+have been so sensitive about it.'
+
+"'They haven't,' says Shane. 'What's this gag you've got about gold?
+You been reading Edward Allen Poe? They ain't got any gold.'
+
+"'They put it in quills,' says I, 'and then they empty it in jars, and
+then into sacks of twenty-five pounds each. I got it straight.'
+
+"'W. D.,' says Shane, laughing and chewing his cigar, 'I don't often see
+a white man, and I feel like putting you on. I don't think you'll get
+away from here alive, anyhow, so I'm going to tell you. Come over here.'
+
+"He draws aside a silk fibre curtain in a corner of the room and shows
+me a pile of buckskin sacks.
+
+"'Forty of 'em,' says Shane. 'One arroba in each one. In round numbers,
+$220,000 worth of gold-dust you see there. It's all mine. It belongs
+to the Grand Yacuma. They bring it all to me. Two hundred and twenty
+thousand dollars--think of that, you glass-bead peddler,' says
+Shane--'and all mine.'
+
+"'Little good it does you,' says I, contemptuously and hatefully.
+'And so you are the government depository of this gang of moneyless
+money-makers? Don't you pay enough interest on it to enable one of your
+depositors to buy an Augusta (Maine) Pullman carbon diamond worth $200
+for $4.85?'
+
+"'Listen,' says Patrick Shane, with the sweat coming out on his brow.
+'I'm confidant with you, as you have, somehow, enlisted my regards. Did
+you ever,' he says, 'feel the avoirdupois power of gold--not the troy
+weight of it, but the sixteen-ounces-to-the-pound force of it?'
+
+"'Never,' says I. 'I never take in any bad money.'
+
+"Shane drops down on the floor and throws his arms over the sacks of
+gold-dust.
+
+"'I love it,' says he. 'I want to feel the touch of it day and night.
+It's my pleasure in life. I come in this room, and I'm a king and a rich
+man. I'll be a millionaire in another year. The pile's getting bigger
+every month. I've got the whole tribe washing out the sands in the
+creeks. I'm the happiest man in the world, W. D. I just want to be near
+this gold, and know it's mine and it's increasing every day. Now, you
+know,' says he, 'why my Indians wouldn't buy your goods. They can't.
+They bring all the dust to me. I'm their king. I've taught 'em not to
+desire or admire. You might as well shut up shop.'
+
+"'I'll tell you what you are,' says I. 'You're a plain, contemptible
+miser. You preach supply and you forget demand. Now, supply,' I goes
+on, 'is never anything but supply. On the contrary,' says I, 'demand is
+a much broader syllogism and assertion. Demand includes the rights of
+our women and children, and charity and friendship, and even a little
+begging on the street corners. They've both got to harmonize equally.
+And I've got a few things up my commercial sleeve yet,' says I, 'that
+may jostle your preconceived ideas of politics and economy.
+
+"The next morning I had McClintock bring up another mule-load of goods
+to the plaza and open it up. The people gathered around the same as
+before.
+
+"I got out the finest line of necklaces, bracelets, hair-combs, and
+earrings that I carried, and had the women put 'em on. And then I played
+trumps.
+
+"Out of my last pack I opened up a half gross of hand-mirrors, with
+solid tinfoil backs, and passed 'em around among the ladies. That was
+the first introduction of looking-glasses among the Peche Indians.
+
+"Shane walks by with his big laugh.
+
+"'Business looking up any?' he asks.
+
+"'It's looking at itself right now,' says I.
+
+"By-and-by a kind of a murmur goes through the crowd. The women had
+looked into the magic crystal and seen that they were beautiful, and was
+confiding the secret to the men. The men seemed to be urging the lack
+of money and the hard times just before the election, but their excuses
+didn't go.
+
+"Then was my time.
+
+"I called McClintock away from an animated conversation with his mules
+and told him to do some interpreting.
+
+"'Tell 'em,' says I, 'that gold-dust will buy for them these befitting
+ornaments for kings and queens of the earth. Tell 'em the yellow sand
+they wash out of the waters for the High Sanctified Yacomay and Chop
+Suey of the tribe will buy the precious jewels and charms that will make
+them beautiful and preserve and pickle them from evil spirits. Tell 'em
+the Pittsburgh banks are paying four per cent. interest on deposits
+by mail, while this get-rich-frequently custodian of the public funds
+ain't even paying attention. Keep telling 'em, Mac,' says I, 'to let the
+gold-dust family do their work. Talk to 'em like a born anti-Bryanite,'
+says I. 'Remind 'em that Tom Watson's gone back to Georgia,' says I.
+
+"McClintock waves his hand affectionately at one of his mules, and then
+hurls a few stickfuls of minion type at the mob of shoppers.
+
+"A gutta-percha Indian man, with a lady hanging on his arm, with three
+strings of my fish-scale jewelry and imitation marble beads around her
+neck, stands up on a block of stone and makes a talk that sounds like
+a man shaking dice in a box to fill aces and sixes.
+
+"'He says,' says McClintock, 'that the people not know that gold-dust
+will buy their things. The women very mad. The Grand Yacuma tell them
+it no good but for keep to make bad spirits keep away.'
+
+"'You can't keep bad spirits away from money,' says I.
+
+"'They say,' goes on McClintock, 'the Yacuma fool them. They raise
+plenty row.'
+
+"'Going! Going!' says I. 'Gold-dust or cash takes the entire stock. The
+dust weighed before you, and taken at sixteen dollars the ounce--the
+highest price on the Gaudymala coast.'
+
+"Then the crowd disperses all of a sudden, and I don't know what's up.
+Mac and me packs away the hand-mirrors and jewelry they had handed back
+to us, and we had the mules back to the corral they had set apart for
+our garage.
+
+"While we was there we hear great noises of shouting, and down across
+the plaza runs Patrick Shane, hotfoot, with his clothes ripped half off,
+and scratches on his face like a cat had fought him hard for every one
+of its lives.
+
+"'They're looting the treasury, W. D.,' he sings out. 'They're going to
+kill me and you, too. Unlimber a couple of mules at once. We'll have to
+make a get-away in a couple of minutes.'
+
+"'They've found out,' says I,' the truth about the law of supply and
+demand.'
+
+"'It's the women, mostly,' says the King. 'And they used to admire me
+so!'
+
+"'They hadn't seen looking-glasses then,' says I.
+
+"'They've got knives and hatchets,' says Shane; 'hurry!'
+
+"'Take that roan mule,' says I. 'You and your law of supply! I'll ride
+the dun, for he's two knots per hour the faster. The roan has a stiff
+knee, but he may make it,' says I. 'If you'd included reciprocity in
+your political platform I might have given you the dun,' says I.
+
+"Shane and McClintock and me mounted our mules and rode across the
+rawhide bridge just as the Peches reached the other side and began
+firing stones and long knives at us. We cut the thongs that held up
+our end of the bridge and headed for the coast."
+
+
+
+A tall, bulky policeman came into Finch's shop at that moment and leaned
+an elbow on the showcase. Finch nodded at him friendly.
+
+"I heard down at Casey's," said the cop, in rumbling, husky tones, "that
+there was going to be a picnic of the Hat-Cleaners' Union over at Bergen
+Beach, Sunday. Is that right?"
+
+"Sure," said Finch. "There'll be a dandy time."
+
+"Gimme five tickets," said the cop, throwing a five-dollar bill on the
+showcase.
+
+"Why," said Finch, "ain't you going it a little too--"
+
+"Go to h----!" said the cop. "You got 'em to sell, ain't you? Somebody's
+got to buy 'em. Wish I could go along."
+
+I was glad to See Finch so well thought of in his neighborhood.
+
+And then in came a wee girl of seven, with dirty face and pure blue eyes
+and a smutched and insufficient dress.
+
+"Mamma says," she recited shrilly, "that you must give me eighty cents
+for the grocer and nineteen for the milkman and five cents for me to buy
+hokey-pokey with--but she didn't say that," the elf concluded, with a
+hopeful but honest grin.
+
+Finch shelled out the money, counting it twice, but I noticed that the
+total sum that the small girl received was one dollar and four cents.
+
+"That's the right kind of a law," remarked Finch, as he carefully broke
+some of the stitches of my hatband so that it would assuredly come off
+within a few days--"the law of supply and demand. But they've both got
+to work together. I'll bet," he went on, with his dry smile, "she'll get
+jelly beans with that nickel--she likes 'em. What's supply if there's no
+demand for it?"
+
+"What ever became of the King?" I asked, curiously.
+
+"Oh, I might have told you," said Finch. "That was Shane came in and
+bought the tickets. He came back with me, and he's on the force now."
+
+
+
+
+BURIED TREASURE
+
+
+There are many kinds of fools. Now, will everybody please sit still
+until they are called upon specifically to rise?
+
+I had been every kind of fool except one. I had expended my
+patrimony, pretended my matrimony, played poker, lawn-tennis, and
+bucket-shops--parted soon with my money in many ways. But there remained
+one rule of the wearer of cap and bells that I had not played. That was
+the Seeker after Buried Treasure. To few does the delectable furor come.
+But of all the would-be followers in the hoof-prints of King Midas none
+has found a pursuit so rich in pleasurable promise.
+
+But, going back from my theme a while--as lame pens must do--I was a
+fool of the sentimental sort. I saw May Martha Mangum, and was hers.
+She was eighteen, the color of the white ivory keys of a new piano,
+beautiful, and possessed by the exquisite solemnity and pathetic
+witchery of an unsophisticated angel doomed to live in a small, dull,
+Texas prairie-town. She had a spirit and charm that could have enabled
+her to pluck rubies like raspberries from the crown of Belgium or any
+other sporty kingdom, but she did not know it, and I did not paint the
+picture for her.
+
+You see, I wanted May Martha Mangum for to have and to hold. I wanted
+her to abide with me, and put my slippers and pipe away every day in
+places where they cannot be found of evenings.
+
+May Martha's father was a man hidden behind whiskers and spectacles. He
+lived for bugs and butterflies and all insects that fly or crawl or buzz
+or get down your back or in the butter. He was an etymologist, or words
+to that effect. He spent his life seining the air for flying fish of
+the June-bug order, and then sticking pins through 'em and calling 'em
+names.
+
+He and May Martha were the whole family. He prized her highly as a
+fine specimen of the _racibus humanus_ because she saw that he had
+food at times, and put his clothes on right side before, and kept
+his alcohol-bottles filled. Scientists, they say, are apt to be
+absent-minded.
+
+There was another besides myself who thought May Martha Mangum one to be
+desired. That was Goodloe Banks, a young man just home from college. He
+had all the attainments to be found in books--Latin, Greek, philosophy,
+and especially the higher branches of mathematics and logic.
+
+If it hadn't been for his habit of pouring out this information and
+learning on every one that he addressed, I'd have liked him pretty well.
+But, even as it was, he and I were, you would have thought, great pals.
+
+We got together every time we could because each of us wanted to pump
+the other for whatever straws we could to find which way the wind blew
+from the heart of May Martha Mangum--rather a mixed metaphor; Goodloe
+Banks would never have been guilty of that. That is the way of rivals.
+
+You might say that Goodloe ran to books, manners, culture, rowing,
+intellect, and clothes. I would have put you in mind more of baseball
+and Friday-night debating societies--by way of culture--and maybe of a
+good horseback rider.
+
+But in our talks together, and in our visits and conversation with May
+Martha, neither Goodloe Banks nor I could find out which one of us she
+preferred. May Martha was a natural-born non-committal, and knew in her
+cradle how to keep people guessing.
+
+As I said, old man Mangum was absent-minded. After a long time he found
+out one day--a little butterfly must have told him--that two young
+men were trying to throw a net over the head of the young person,
+a daughter, or some such technical appendage, who looked after his
+comforts.
+
+I never knew scientists could rise to such occasions. Old Mangum orally
+labelled and classified Goodloe and myself easily among the lowest
+orders of the vertebrates; and in English, too, without going any
+further into Latin than the simple references to _Orgetorix, Rex
+Helvetii_--which is as far as I ever went, myself. And he told us that
+if he ever caught us around his house again he would add us to his
+collection.
+
+Goodloe Banks and I remained away five days, expecting the storm to
+subside. When we dared to call at the house again May Martha Mangum and
+her father were gone. Gone! The house they had rented was closed. Their
+little store of goods and chattels was gone also.
+
+And not a word of farewell to either of us from May Martha--not a white,
+fluttering note pinned to the hawthorn-bush; not a chalk-mark on the
+gate-post nor a post-card in the post-office to give us a clew.
+
+For two months Goodloe Banks and I--separately--tried every scheme
+we could think of to track the runaways. We used our friendship and
+influence with the ticket-agent, with livery-stable men, railroad
+conductors, and our one lone, lorn constable, but without results.
+
+Then we became better friends and worse enemies than ever. We
+forgathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon every afternoon after
+work, and played dominoes, and laid conversational traps to find out
+from each other if anything had been discovered. That is the way of
+rivals.
+
+Now, Goodloe Banks had a sarcastic way of displaying his own learning
+and putting me in the class that was reading "Poor Jane Ray, her bird
+is dead, she cannot play." Well, I rather liked Goodloe, and I had
+a contempt for his college learning, and I was always regarded as
+good-natured, so I kept my temper. And I was trying to find out if he
+knew anything about May Martha, so I endured his society.
+
+In talking things over one afternoon he said to me:
+
+"Suppose you do find her, Ed, whereby would you profit? Miss Mangum has
+a mind. Perhaps it is yet uncultured, but she is destined for higher
+things than you could give her. I have talked with no one who seemed to
+appreciate more the enchantment of the ancient poets and writers and
+the modern cults that have assimilated and expended their philosophy of
+life. Don't you think you are wasting your time looking for her?"
+
+"My idea," said I, "of a happy home is an eight-room house in a grove of
+live-oaks by the side of a _charco_ on a Texas prairie. A piano," I went
+on, "with an automatic player in the sitting-room, three thousand head
+of cattle under fence for a starter, a buckboard and ponies always
+hitched at a post for 'the missus'--and May Martha Mangum to spend the
+profits of the ranch as she pleases, and to abide with me, and put my
+slippers and pipe away every day in places where they cannot be found of
+evenings. That," said I, "is what is to be; and a fig--a dried, Smyrna,
+dago-stand fig--for your curriculums, cults, and philosophy."
+
+"She is meant for higher things," repeated Goodloe Banks.
+
+"Whatever she is meant for," I answered, just now she is out of pocket.
+And I shall find her as soon as I can without aid of the colleges."
+
+"The game is blocked," said Goodloe, putting down a domino; and we had
+the beer.
+
+Shortly after that a young farmer whom I knew came into town and brought
+me a folded blue paper. He said his grandfather had just died. I
+concealed a tear, and he went on to say that the old man had jealously
+guarded this paper for twenty years. He left it to his family as part of
+his estate, the rest of which consisted of two mules and a hypotenuse of
+non-arable land.
+
+The sheet of paper was of the old, blue kind used during the rebellion
+of the abolitionists against the secessionists. It was dated June
+14, 1863, and it described the hiding-place of ten burro-loads of
+gold and silver coin valued at three hundred thousand dollars. Old
+Rundle--grandfather of his grandson, Sam--was given the information by
+a Spanish priest who was in on the treasure-burying, and who died many
+years before--no, afterward--in old Rundle's house. Old Rundle wrote it
+down from dictation.
+
+"Why didn't your father look this up?" I asked young Rundle.
+
+"He went blind before he could do so," he replied.
+
+"Why didn't you hunt for it yourself?" I asked.
+
+"Well," said he, "I've only known about the paper for ten years. First
+there was the spring ploughin' to do, and then choppin' the weeds out of
+the corn; and then come takin' fodder; and mighty soon winter was on us.
+It seemed to run along that way year after year."
+
+That sounded perfectly reasonable to me, so I took it up with young Lee
+Rundle at once.
+
+The directions on the paper were simple. The whole burro cavalcade laden
+with the treasure started from an old Spanish mission in Dolores County.
+They travelled due south by the compass until they reached the Alamito
+River. They forded this, and buried the treasure on the top of a little
+mountain shaped like a pack-saddle standing in a row between two higher
+ones. A heap of stones marked the place of the buried treasure. All the
+party except the Spanish priest were killed by Indians a few days later.
+The secret was a monopoly. It looked good to me.
+
+Lee Rundle suggested that we rig out a camping outfit, hire a surveyor
+to run out the line from the Spanish mission, and then spend the three
+hundred thousand dollars seeing the sights in Fort Worth. But, without
+being highly educated, I knew a way to save time and expense.
+
+We went to the State land-office and had a practical, what they call a
+"working," sketch made of all the surveys of land from the old mission
+to the Alamito River. On this map I drew a line due southward to the
+river. The length of lines of each survey and section of land was
+accurately given on the sketch. By these we found the point on the river
+and had a "connection" made with it and an important, well-identified
+corner of the Los Animos five-league survey--a grant made by King Philip
+of Spain.
+
+By doing this we did not need to have the line run out by a surveyor. It
+was a great saving of expense and time.
+
+So, Lee Rundle and I fitted out a two-horse wagon team with all the
+accessories, and drove a hundred and forty-nine miles to Chico, the
+nearest town to the point we wished to reach. There we picked up a
+deputy county surveyor. He found the corner of the Los Animos survey for
+us, ran out the five thousand seven hundred and twenty varas west that
+our sketch called for, laid a stone on the spot, had coffee and bacon,
+and caught the mail-stage back to Chico.
+
+I was pretty sure we would get that three hundred thousand dollars.
+Lee Rundle's was to be only one-third, because I was paying all the
+expenses. With that two hundred thousand dollars I knew I could find
+May Martha Mangum if she was on earth. And with it I could flutter the
+butterflies in old man Mangum's dovecot, too. If I could find that
+treasure!
+
+But Lee and I established camp. Across the river were a dozen little
+mountains densely covered by cedar-brakes, but not one shaped like
+a pack-saddle. That did not deter us. Appearances are deceptive. A
+pack-saddle, like beauty, may exist only in the eye of the beholder.
+
+I and the grandson of the treasure examined those cedar-covered hills
+with the care of a lady hunting for the wicked flea. We explored every
+side, top, circumference, mean elevation, angle, slope, and concavity of
+every one for two miles up and down the river. We spent four days doing
+so. Then we hitched up the roan and the dun, and hauled the remains
+of the coffee and bacon the one hundred and forty-nine miles back to
+Concho City.
+
+Lee Rundle chewed much tobacco on the return trip. I was busy driving,
+because I was in a hurry.
+
+As shortly as could be after our empty return Goodloe Banks and I
+forgathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon to play dominoes and
+fish for information. I told Goodloe about my expedition after the
+buried treasure.
+
+"If I could have found that three hundred thousand dollars," I said to
+him, "I could have scoured and sifted the surface of the earth to find
+May Martha Mangum."
+
+"She is meant for higher things," said Goodloe. "I shall find her
+myself. But, tell me how you went about discovering the spot where this
+unearthed increment was imprudently buried."
+
+I told him in the smallest detail. I showed him the draughtsman's sketch
+with the distances marked plainly upon it.
+
+After glancing over it in a masterly way, he leaned back in his chair
+and bestowed upon me an explosion of sardonic, superior, collegiate
+laughter.
+
+"Well, you _are_ a fool, Jim," he said, when he could speak.
+
+"It's your play," said I, patiently, fingering my double-six.
+
+"Twenty," said Goodloe, making two crosses on the table with his chalk.
+
+"Why am I a fool?" I asked. "Buried treasure has been found before in
+many places."
+
+"Because," said he, "in calculating the point on the river where
+your line would strike you neglected to allow for the variation. The
+variation there would be nine degrees west. Let me have your pencil."
+
+Goodloe Banks figured rapidly on the back of an envelope.
+
+"The distance, from north to south, of the line run from the Spanish
+mission," said he, "is exactly twenty-two miles. It was run by a
+pocket-compass, according to your story. Allowing for the variation,
+the point on the Alamito River where you should have searched for your
+treasure is exactly six miles and nine hundred and forty-five varas
+farther west than the place you hit upon. Oh, what a fool you are, Jim!"
+
+"What is this variation that you speak of?" I asked. "I thought figures
+never lied."
+
+"The variation of the magnetic compass," said Goodloe, "from the true
+meridian."
+
+He smiled in his superior way; and then I saw come out in his face the
+singular, eager, consuming cupidity of the seeker after buried treasure.
+
+"Sometimes," he said with the air of the oracle, "these old traditions
+of hidden money are not without foundation. Suppose you let me look over
+that paper describing the location. Perhaps together we might--"
+
+The result was that Goodloe Banks and I, rivals in love, became
+companions in adventure. We went to Chico by stage from Huntersburg,
+the nearest railroad town. In Chico we hired a team drawing a covered
+spring-wagon and camping paraphernalia. We had the same surveyor run
+out our distance, as revised by Goodloe and his variations, and then
+dismissed him and sent him on his homeward road.
+
+It was night when we arrived. I fed the horses and made a fire near the
+bank of the river and cooked supper. Goodloe would have helped, but his
+education had not fitted him for practical things.
+
+But while I worked he cheered me with the expression of great thoughts
+handed down from the dead ones of old. He quoted some translations from
+the Greek at much length.
+
+"Anacreon," he explained. "That was a favorite passage with Miss
+Mangum--as I recited it."
+
+"She is meant for higher things," said I, repeating his phrase.
+
+"Can there be anything higher," asked Goodloe, "than to dwell in the
+society of the classics, to live in the atmosphere of learning and
+culture? You have often decried education. What of your wasted efforts
+through your ignorance of simple mathematics? How soon would you have
+found your treasure if my knowledge had not shown you your error?"
+
+"We'll take a look at those hills across the river first," said I,
+"and see what we find. I am still doubtful about variations. I have
+been brought up to believe that the needle is true to the pole."
+
+The next morning was a bright June one. We were up early and had
+breakfast. Goodloe was charmed. He recited--Keats, I think it was, and
+Kelly or Shelley--while I broiled the bacon. We were getting ready to
+cross the river, which was little more than a shallow creek there, and
+explore the many sharp-peaked cedar-covered hills on the other side.
+
+"My good Ulysses," said Goodloe, slapping me on the shoulder while I was
+washing the tin breakfast-plates, "let me see the enchanted document
+once more. I believe it gives directions for climbing the hill shaped
+like a pack-saddle. I never saw a pack-saddle. What is it like, Jim?"
+
+"Score one against culture," said I. "I'll know it when I see it."
+
+Goodloe was looking at old Rundle's document when he ripped out a most
+uncollegiate swear-word.
+
+"Come here," he said, holding the paper up against the sunlight. "Look
+at that," he said, laying his finger against it.
+
+On the blue paper--a thing I had never noticed before--I saw stand out
+in white letters the word and figures: "Malvern, 1898."
+
+"What about it?" I asked.
+
+"It's the water-mark," said Goodloe. "The paper was manufactured in
+1898. The writing on the paper is dated 1863. This is a palpable fraud."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said I. "The Rundles are pretty reliable, plain,
+uneducated country people. Maybe the paper manufacturers tried to
+perpetrate a swindle."
+
+And then Goodloe Banks went as wild as his education permitted. He
+dropped the glasses off his nose and glared at me.
+
+"I've often told you you were a fool," he said. "You have let yourself
+be imposed upon by a clodhopper. And you have imposed upon me."
+
+"How," I asked, "have I imposed upon you?"
+
+"By your ignorance," said he. "Twice I have discovered serious flaws in
+your plans that a common-school education should have enabled you to
+avoid. And," he continued, "I have been put to expense that I could ill
+afford in pursuing this swindling quest. I am done with it."
+
+I rose and pointed a large pewter spoon at him, fresh from the
+dish-water.
+
+"Goodloe Banks," I said, "I care not one parboiled navy bean for your
+education. I always barely tolerated it in any one, and I despised it in
+you. What has your learning done for you? It is a curse to yourself and
+a bore to your friends. Away," I said--"away with your water-marks and
+variations! They are nothing to me. They shall not deflect me from the
+quest."
+
+I pointed with my spoon across the river to a small mountain shaped like
+a pack-saddle.
+
+"I am going to search that mountain," I went on, "for the treasure.
+Decide now whether you are in it or not. If you wish to let a
+water-mark or a variation shake your soul, you are no true adventurer.
+Decide."
+
+A white cloud of dust began to rise far down the river road. It was the
+mail-wagon from Hesperus to Chico. Goodloe flagged it.
+
+"I am done with the swindle," said he, sourly. "No one but a fool would
+pay any attention to that paper now. Well, you always were a fool, Jim.
+I leave you to your fate."
+
+He gathered his personal traps, climbed into the mail-wagon, adjusted
+his glasses nervously, and flew away in a cloud of dust.
+
+After I had washed the dishes and staked the horses on new grass,
+I crossed the shallow river and made my way slowly through the
+cedar-brakes up to the top of the hill shaped like a pack-saddle.
+
+It was a wonderful June day. Never in my life had I seen so many birds,
+so many butter-flies, dragon-flies, grasshoppers, and such winged and
+stinged beasts of the air and fields.
+
+I investigated the hill shaped like a pack-saddle from base to summit.
+I found an absolute absence of signs relating to buried treasure. There
+was no pile of stones, no ancient blazes on the trees, none of the
+evidences of the three hundred thousand dollars, as set forth in the
+document of old man Rundle.
+
+I came down the hill in the cool of the afternoon. Suddenly, out of the
+cedar-brake I stepped into a beautiful green valley where a tributary
+small stream ran into the Alamito River.
+
+
+
+And there I was startled to see what I took to be a wild man, with
+unkempt beard and ragged hair, pursuing a giant butterfly with brilliant
+wings.
+
+"Perhaps he is an escaped madman," I thought; and wondered how he had
+strayed so far from seats of education and learning.
+
+And then I took a few more steps and saw a vine-covered cottage near
+the small stream. And in a little grassy glade I saw May Martha Mangum
+plucking wild flowers.
+
+She straightened up and looked at me. For the first time since I knew
+her I saw her face--which was the color of the white keys of a new
+piano--turn pink. I walked toward her without a word. She let the
+gathered flowers trickle slowly from her hand to the grass.
+
+"I knew you would come, Jim," she said clearly. "Father wouldn't let me
+write, but I knew you would come."
+
+What followed you may guess--there was my wagon and team just across the
+river.
+
+
+
+I've often wondered what good too much education is to a man if he can't
+use it for himself. If all the benefits of it are to go to others, where
+does it come in?
+
+For May Martha Mangum abides with me. There is an eight-room house in a
+live-oak grove, and a piano with an automatic player, and a good start
+toward the three thousand head of cattle is under fence.
+
+And when I ride home at night my pipe and slippers are put away in
+places where they cannot be found.
+
+But who cares for that? Who cares--who cares?
+
+
+
+
+TO HIM WHO WAITS
+
+
+The Hermit of the Hudson was hustling about his cave with unusual
+animation.
+
+The cave was on or in the top of a little spur of the Catskills that had
+strayed down to the river's edge, and, not having a ferry ticket, had to
+stop there. The bijou mountains were densely wooded and were infested
+by ferocious squirrels and woodpeckers that forever menaced the summer
+transients. Like a badly sewn strip of white braid, a macadamized road
+ran between the green skirt of the hills and the foamy lace of the
+river's edge. A dim path wound from the comfortable road up a rocky
+height to the hermit's cave. One mile upstream was the Viewpoint Inn,
+to which summer folk from the city came; leaving cool, electric-fanned
+apartments that they might be driven about in burning sunshine,
+shrieking, in gasoline launches, by spindle-legged Modreds bearing the
+blankest of shields.
+
+Train your lorgnette upon the hermit and let your eye receive the
+personal touch that shall endear you to the hero.
+
+A man of forty, judging him fairly, with long hair curling at the ends,
+dramatic eyes, and a forked brown beard like those that were imposed
+upon the West some years ago by self-appointed "divine healers" who
+succeeded the grasshopper crop. His outward vesture appeared to be kind
+of gunny-sacking, cut and made into a garment that would have made the
+fortune of a London tailor. His long, well-shaped fingers, delicate
+nose, and poise of manner raised him high above the class of hermits
+who fear water and bury money in oyster-cans in their caves in spots
+indicated by rude crosses chipped in the stone wall above.
+
+The hermit's home was not altogether a cave. The cave was an addition
+to the hermitage, which was a rude hut made of poles daubed with clay
+and covered with the best quality of rust-proof zinc roofing.
+
+In the house proper there were stone slabs for seats, a rustic bookcase
+made of unplaned poplar planks, and a table formed of a wooden slab laid
+across two upright pieces of granite--something between the furniture of
+a Druid temple and that of a Broadway beefsteak dungeon. Hung against
+the walls were skins of wild animals purchased in the vicinity of Eighth
+Street and University Place, New York.
+
+The rear of the cabin merged into the cave. There the hermit cooked his
+meals on a rude stone hearth. With infinite patience and an old axe he
+had chopped natural shelves in the rocky walls. On them stood his stores
+of flour, bacon, lard, talcum-powder, kerosene, baking-powder, soda-mint
+tablets, pepper, salt, and Olivo-Cremo Emulsion for chaps and roughness
+of the hands and face.
+
+The hermit had hermited there for ten years. He was an asset of the
+Viewpoint Inn. To its guests he was second in interest only to the
+Mysterious Echo in the Haunted Glen. And the Lover's Leap beat him only
+a few inches, flat-footed. He was known far (but not very wide, on
+account of the topography) as a scholar of brilliant intellect who had
+forsworn the world because he had been jilted in a love affair. Every
+Saturday night the Viewpoint Inn sent to him surreptitiously a basket
+of provisions. He never left the immediate outskirts of his hermitage.
+Guests of the inn who visited him said his store of knowledge, wit, and
+scintillating philosophy were simply wonderful, you know.
+
+That summer the Viewpoint Inn was crowded with guests. So, on Saturday
+nights, there were extra cans of tomatoes, and sirloin steak, instead
+of "rounds," in the hermit's basket.
+
+Now you have the material allegations in the case. So, make way for
+Romance.
+
+Evidently the hermit expected a visitor. He carefully combed his
+long hair and parted his apostolic beard. When the ninety-eight-cent
+alarm-clock on a stone shelf announced the hour of five he picked up his
+gunny-sacking skirts, brushed them carefully, gathered an oaken staff,
+and strolled slowly into the thick woods that surrounded the hermitage.
+
+He had not long to wait. Up the faint pathway, slippery with its carpet
+of pine-needles, toiled Beatrix, youngest and fairest of the famous
+Trenholme sisters. She was all in blue from hat to canvas pumps, varying
+in tint from the shade of the tinkle of a bluebell at daybreak on a
+spring Saturday to the deep hue of a Monday morning at nine when the
+washerwoman has failed to show up.
+
+Beatrix dug her cerulean parasol deep into the pine-needles and sighed.
+The hermit, on the _q. t._, removed a grass burr from the ankle of
+one sandalled foot with the big toe of his other one. She blued--and
+almost starched and ironed him--with her cobalt eyes.
+
+"It must be so nice," she said in little, tremulous gasps, "to be a
+hermit, and have ladies climb mountains to talk to you."
+
+The hermit folded his arms and leaned against a tree. Beatrix, with a
+sigh, settled down upon the mat of pine-needles like a bluebird upon her
+nest. The hermit followed suit; drawing his feet rather awkwardly under
+his gunny-sacking.
+
+"It must be nice to be a mountain," said he, with ponderous lightness,
+"and have angels in blue climb up you instead of flying over you."
+
+"Mamma had neuralgia," said Beatrix, "and went to bed, or I couldn't
+have come. It's dreadfully hot at that horrid old inn. But we hadn't
+the money to go anywhere else this summer."
+
+"Last night," said the hermit, "I climbed to the top of that big rock
+above us. I could see the lights of the inn and hear a strain or two of
+the music when the wind was right. I imagined you moving gracefully in
+the arms of others to the dreamy music of the waltz amid the fragrance
+of flowers. Think how lonely I must have been!"
+
+The youngest, handsomest, and poorest of the famous Trenholme sisters
+sighed.
+
+"You haven't quite hit it," she said, plaintively. "I was moving
+gracefully _at_ the arms of another. Mamma had one of her periodical
+attacks of rheumatism in both elbows and shoulders, and I had to rub
+them for an hour with that horrid old liniment. I hope you didn't think
+_that_ smelled like flowers. You know, there were some West Point boys
+and a yacht load of young men from the city at last evening's weekly
+dance. I've known mamma to sit by an open window for three hours with
+one-half of her registering 85 degrees and the other half frostbitten,
+and never sneeze once. But just let a bunch of ineligibles come around
+where I am, and she'll begin to swell at the knuckles and shriek with
+pain. And I have to take her to her room and rub her arms. To see mamma
+dressed you'd be surprised to know the number of square inches of surface
+there are to her arms. I think it must be delightful to be a hermit.
+That--cassock--or gabardine, isn't it?--that you wear is so becoming.
+Do you make it--or them--of course you must have changes--yourself? And
+what a blessed relief it must be to wear sandals instead of shoes! Think
+how we must suffer--no matter how small I buy my shoes they always pinch
+my toes. Oh, why can't there be lady hermits, too!"
+
+The beautifulest and most adolescent Trenholme sister extended
+two slender blue ankles that ended in two enormous blue-silk
+bows that almost concealed two fairy Oxfords, also of one of the
+forty-seven shades of blue. The hermit, as if impelled by a kind of
+reflex-telepathic action, drew his bare toes farther beneath his
+gunny-sacking.
+
+"I have heard about the romance of your life," said Miss Trenholme,
+softly. "They have it printed on the back of the menu card at the inn.
+Was she very beautiful and charming?"
+
+"On the bills of fare!" muttered the hermit; "but what do I care for the
+world's babble? Yes, she was of the highest and grandest type. Then,"
+he continued, "_then_ I thought the world could never contain another
+equal to her. So I forsook it and repaired to this mountain fastness
+to spend the remainder of my life alone--to devote and dedicate my
+remaining years to her memory."
+
+"It's grand," said Miss Trenholme, "absolutely grand. I think a hermit's
+life is the ideal one. No bill-collectors calling, no dressing for
+dinner--how I'd like to be one! But there's no such luck for me. If I
+don't marry this season I honestly believe mamma will force me into
+settlement work or trimming hats. It isn't because I'm getting old or
+ugly; but we haven't enough money left to butt in at any of the swell
+places any more. And I don't want to marry--unless it's somebody I like.
+That's why I'd like to be a hermit. Hermits don't ever marry, do they?"
+
+"Hundreds of 'em," said the hermit, "when they've found the right one."
+
+"But they're hermits," said the youngest and beautifulest, "because
+they've lost the right one, aren't they?"
+
+"Because they think they have," answered the recluse, fatuously.
+"Wisdom comes to one in a mountain cave as well as to one in the world
+of 'swells,' as I believe they are called in the argot."
+
+"When one of the 'swells' brings it to them," said Miss Trenholme. "And
+my folks are swells. That's the trouble. But there are so many swells
+at the seashore in the summer-time that we hardly amount to more than
+ripples. So we've had to put all our money into river and harbor
+appropriations. We were all girls, you know. There were four of us. I'm
+the only surviving one. The others have been married off. All to money.
+Mamma is so proud of my sisters. They send her the loveliest pen-wipers
+and art calendars every Christmas. I'm the only one on the market now.
+I'm forbidden to look at any one who hasn't money."
+
+"But--" began the hermit.
+
+"But, oh," said the beautifulest, "of course hermits have great pots of
+gold and doubloons buried somewhere near three great oak-trees. They all
+have."
+
+"I have not," said the hermit, regretfully.
+
+"I'm so sorry," said Miss Trenholme. "I always thought they had. I think
+I must go now."
+
+Oh, beyond question, she was the beautifulest.
+
+"Fair lady--" began the hermit.
+
+"I am Beatrix Trenholme--some call me Trix," she said. "You must come
+to the inn to see me."
+
+"I haven't been a stone's-throw from my cave in ten years," said the
+hermit.
+
+"You must come to see me there," she repeated. "Any evening except
+Thursday."
+
+The hermit smiled weakly.
+
+"Good-bye," she said, gathering the folds of her pale-blue skirt. "I
+shall expect you. But not on Thursday evening, remember."
+
+What an interest it would give to the future menu cards of the Viewpoint
+Inn to have these printed lines added to them: "Only once during the
+more than ten years of his lonely existence did the mountain hermit
+leave his famous cave. That was when he was irresistibly drawn to the
+inn by the fascinations of Miss Beatrix Trenholme, youngest and most
+beautiful of the celebrated Trenholme sisters, whose brilliant marriage
+to--"
+
+Aye, to whom?
+
+The hermit walked back to the hermitage. At the door stood Bob Binkley,
+his old friend and companion of the days before he had renounced the
+world--Bob, himself, arrayed like the orchids of the greenhouse in the
+summer man's polychromatic garb--Bob, the millionaire, with his fat,
+firm, smooth, shrewd face, his diamond rings, sparkling fob-chain, and
+pleated bosom. He was two years older than the hermit, and looked five
+years younger.
+
+"You're Hamp Ellison, in spite of those whiskers and that going-away
+bathrobe," he shouted. "I read about you on the bill of fare at the inn.
+They've run your biography in between the cheese and 'Not Responsible
+for Coats and Umbrellas.' What 'd you do it for, Hamp? And ten years,
+too--gee whilikins!"
+
+"You're just the same," said the hermit. "Come in and sit down. Sit on
+that limestone rock over there; it's softer than the granite."
+
+"I can't understand it, old man," said Binkley. "I can see how you could
+give up a woman for ten years, but not ten years for a woman. Of course
+I know why you did it. Everybody does. Edith Carr. She jilted four or
+five besides you. But you were the only one who took to a hole in the
+ground. The others had recourse to whiskey, the Klondike, politics, and
+that _similia similibus_ cure. But, say--Hamp, Edith Carr was just about
+the finest woman in the world--high-toned and proud and noble, and
+playing her ideals to win at all kinds of odds. She certainly was a
+crackerjack."
+
+"After I renounced the world," said the hermit, "I never heard of her
+again."
+
+"She married me," said Binkley.
+
+The hermit leaned against the wooden walls of his ante-cave and wriggled
+his toes.
+
+"I know how you feel about it," said Binkley. "What else could she
+do? There were her four sisters and her mother and old man Carr--you
+remember how he put all the money he had into dirigible balloons? Well,
+everything was coming down and nothing going up with 'em, as you might
+say. Well, I know Edith as well as you do--although I married her. I was
+worth a million then, but I've run it up since to between five and six.
+It wasn't me she wanted as much as--well, it was about like this. She
+had that bunch on her hands, and they had to be taken care of. Edith
+married me two months after you did the ground-squirrel act. I thought
+she liked me, too, at the time."
+
+"And now?" inquired the recluse.
+
+"We're better friends than ever now. She got a divorce from me two years
+ago. Just incompatibility. I didn't put in any defence. Well, well,
+well, Hamp, this is certainly a funny dugout you've built here. But you
+always were a hero of fiction. Seems like you'd have been the very one
+to strike Edith's fancy. Maybe you did--but it's the bank-roll that
+catches 'em, my boy--your caves and whiskers won't do it. Honestly,
+Hamp, don't you think you've been a darned fool?"
+
+The hermit smiled behind his tangled beard. He was and always had been
+so superior to the crude and mercenary Binkley that even his vulgarities
+could not anger him. Moreover, his studies and meditations in his
+retreat had raised him far above the little vanities of the world. His
+little mountain-side had been almost an Olympus, over the edge of which
+he saw, smiling, the bolts hurled in the valleys of man below. Had his
+ten years of renunciation, of thought, of devotion to an ideal, of
+living scorn of a sordid world, been in vain? Up from the world had
+come to him the youngest and beautifulest--fairer than Edith--one and
+three-seventh times lovelier than the seven-years-served Rachel. So the
+hermit smiled in his beard.
+
+When Binkley had relieved the hermitage from the blot of his presence
+and the first faint star showed above the pines, the hermit got the can
+of baking-powder from his cupboard. He still smiled behind his beard.
+
+There was a slight rustle in the doorway. There stood Edith Carr, with
+all the added beauty and stateliness and noble bearing that ten years
+had brought her.
+
+She was never one to chatter. She looked at the hermit with her large,
+_thinking_, dark eyes. The hermit stood still, surprised into a pose as
+motionless as her own. Only his subconscious sense of the fitness of
+things caused him to turn the baking-powder can slowly in his hands
+until its red label was hidden against his bosom.
+
+"I am stopping at the inn," said Edith, in low but clear tones. "I heard
+of you there. I told myself that I _must_ see you. I want to ask your
+forgiveness. I sold my happiness for money. There were others to be
+provided for--but that does not excuse me. I just wanted to see you
+and ask your forgiveness. You have lived here ten years, they tell me,
+cherishing my memory! I was blind, Hampton. I could not see then that
+all the money in the world cannot weigh in the scales against a faithful
+heart. If--but it is too late now, of course."
+
+Her assertion was a question clothed as best it could be in a loving
+woman's pride. But through the thin disguise the hermit saw easily
+that his lady had come back to him--if he chose. He had won a golden
+crown--if it pleased him to take it. The reward of his decade of
+faithfulness was ready for his hand--if he desired to stretch it forth.
+
+For the space of one minute the old enchantment shone upon him with
+a reflected radiance. And then by turns he felt the manly sensations
+of indignation at having been discarded, and of repugnance at having
+been--as it were--sought again. And last of all--how strange that it
+should have come at last!--the pale-blue vision of the beautifulest of
+the Trenholme sisters illuminated his mind's eye and left him without
+a waver.
+
+"It is too late," he said, in deep tones, pressing the baking-powder
+can against his heart.
+
+Once she turned after she had gone slowly twenty yards down the path.
+The hermit had begun to twist the lid off his can, but he hid it again
+under his sacking robe. He could see her great eyes shining sadly
+through the twilight; but he stood inflexible in the doorway of his
+shack and made no sign.
+
+
+
+Just as the moon rose on Thursday evening the hermit was seized by the
+world-madness.
+
+Up from the inn, fainter than the horns of elf-land, came now and then
+a few bars of music played by the casino band. The Hudson was broadened
+by the night into an illimitable sea--those lights, dimly seen on its
+opposite shore, were not beacons for prosaic trolley-lines, but low-set
+stars millions of miles away. The waters in front of the inn were gay
+with fireflies--or were they motor-boats, smelling of gasoline and oil?
+Once the hermit had known these things and had sported with Amaryllis
+in the shade of the red-and-white-striped awnings. But for ten years
+he had turned a heedless ear to these far-off echoes of a frivolous
+world. But to-night there was something wrong.
+
+The casino band was playing a waltz--a waltz. What a fool he had
+been to tear deliberately ten years of his life from the calendar
+of existence for one who had given him up for the false joys that
+wealth--"_tum_ ti _tum_ ti _tum_ ti"--how did that waltz go? Butthose
+years had not been sacrificed--had they not brought him the star and
+pearl of all the world, the youngest and beautifulest of--
+
+"But do _not_ come on Thursday evening," she had insisted. Perhaps by
+now she would be moving slowly and gracefully to the strains of that
+waltz, held closely by West-Pointers or city commuters, while he, who
+had read in her eyes things that had recompensed him for ten lost
+years of life, moped like some wild animal in its mountain den. Why
+should--"
+
+"Damn it," said the hermit, suddenly, "I'll do it!"
+
+He threw down his Marcus Aurelius and threw off his gunny-sack toga.
+He dragged a dust-covered trunk from a corner of the cave, and with
+difficulty wrenched open its lid.
+
+Candles he had in plenty, and the cave was soon aglow. Clothes--ten
+years old in cut--scissors, razors, hats, shoes, all his discarded
+attire and belongings, were dragged ruthlessly from their renunciatory
+rest and strewn about in painful disorder.
+
+A pair of scissors soon reduced his beard sufficiently for the dulled
+razors to perform approximately their office. Cutting his own hair
+was beyond the hermit's skill. So he only combed and brushed it
+backward as smoothly as he could. Charity forbids us to consider the
+heartburnings and exertions of one so long removed from haberdashery
+and society.
+
+At the last the hermit went to an inner corner of his cave and began
+to dig in the soft earth with a long iron spoon. Out of the cavity he
+thus made he drew a tin can, and out of the can three thousand dollars
+in bills, tightly rolled and wrapped in oiled silk. He was a real
+hermit, as this may assure you.
+
+You may take a brief look at him as he hastens down the little
+mountain-side. A long, wrinkled black frock-coat reached to his
+calves. White duck trousers, unacquainted with the tailor's goose, a
+pink shirt, white standing collar with brilliant blue butterfly tie,
+and buttoned congress gaiters. But think, sir and madam--ten years!
+From beneath a narrow-brimmed straw hat with a striped band flowed his
+hair. Seeing him, with all your shrewdness you could not have guessed
+him. You would have said that he played Hamlet--or the tuba--or
+pinochle--you would never have laid your hand on your heart and said:
+"He is a hermit who lived ten years in a cave for love of one lady--to
+win another."
+
+The dancing pavilion extended above the waters of the river. Gay
+lanterns and frosted electric globes shed a soft glamour within it. A
+hundred ladies and gentlemen from the inn and summer cottages flitted
+in and about it. To the left of the dusty roadway down which the
+hermit had tramped were the inn and grill-room. Something seemed to
+be on there, too. The windows were brilliantly lighted, and music was
+playing--music different from the two-steps and waltzes of the casino
+band.
+
+A negro man wearing a white jacket came through the iron gate, with
+its immense granite posts and wrought-iron lamp-holders.
+
+"What is going on here to-night?" asked the hermit.
+
+"Well, sah," said the servitor, "dey is having de reg'lar
+Thursday-evenin' dance in de casino. And in de grill-room dere's a
+beefsteak dinner, sah."
+
+The hermit glanced up at the inn on the hillside whence burst suddenly
+a triumphant strain of splendid harmony.
+
+"And up there," said he, "they are playing Mendelssohn--what is going
+on up there?"
+
+"Up in de inn," said the dusky one, "dey is a weddin' goin' on. Mr.
+Binkley, a mighty rich man, am marryin' Miss Trenholme, sah--de young
+lady who am quite de belle of de place, sah."
+
+
+
+
+HE ALSO SERVES
+
+
+
+If I could have a thousand years--just one little thousand years--more
+of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to
+touch the hem of her robe.
+
+Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and
+garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words
+of the things they have seen and considered. The recording of their
+tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are only
+two fates I dread--deafness and writer's cramp. The hand is yet
+steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in
+the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp-follower
+of fortune.
+
+Biography shall claim you but an instant--I first knew Hunky when he
+was head-waiter at Chubb's little beefsteak restaurant and café on
+Third Avenue. There was only one waiter besides.
+
+Then, successively, I caromed against him in the little streets of
+the Big City after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a
+treasure-seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a
+pearl-fisher in the Arkansas River. Between these dashes into the land
+of adventure he usually came back to Chubb's for a while. Chubb's was
+a port for him when gales blew too high; but when you dined there and
+Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he would come to
+anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago. You wouldn't
+care for his description--he was soft of voice and hard of face,
+and rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any approach to a
+disturbance among Chubb's customers.
+
+One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street
+and Third Avenue after an absence of several months. In ten minutes
+we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my
+ears began to get busy. I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw
+Hunky's word-of-mouth blows--it all came to something like this:
+
+"Speaking of the next election," said Hunky, "did you ever know much
+about Indians? No? I don't mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or
+Laughing Water kind--I mean the modern Indian--the kind that takes
+Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the half-back on the other side
+in football games. The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the
+afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills
+up on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the
+ancestral wickiup.
+
+"Well, they ain't so bad. I like 'em better than most foreigners that
+have come over in the last few hundred years. One thing about the
+Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own
+vices for them of the pale-faces--and he retains all his own virtues.
+Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets
+'em loose. But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep
+their own vices--and it's going to take our whole standing army some
+day to police that gang.
+
+"But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High Jack
+Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania
+college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent
+kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with turned-back cuffs. He was
+a friend of mine. I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during
+the land boom, and we got thick. He had got all there was out of
+colleges and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt. He was a
+man of first-class style and wrote essays, and had been invited to
+visit rich guys' houses in Boston and such places.
+
+"There was a Cherokee girl in Muscogee that High Jack was foolish
+about. He took me to see her a few times. Her name was Florence Blue
+Feather--but you want to clear your mind of all ideas of squaws with
+nose-rings and army blankets. This young lady was whiter than you
+are, and better educated than I ever was. You couldn't have told her
+from any of the girls shopping in the swell Third Avenue stores. I
+liked her so well that I got to calling on her now and then when High
+Jack wasn't along, which is the way of friends in such matters. She
+was educated at the Muscogee College, and was making a specialty
+of--let's see--eth--yes, ethnology. That's the art that goes back
+and traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from
+jelly-fish through monkeys and to the O'Briens. High Jack had took
+up that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of
+riotous assemblies--Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder-parties, and
+such. Having a mutual taste for musty information like that was what
+made 'em like each other, I suppose. But I don't know! What they
+call congeniality of tastes ain't always it. Now, when Miss Blue
+Feather and me was talking together, I listened to her affidavits
+about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins german
+(well, if the Germans don't nod, who does?) to the mound-builders of
+Ohio with incomprehension and respect. And when I'd tell her about
+the Bowery and Coney Island, and sing her a few songs that I'd heard
+the Jamaica niggers sing at their church lawn-parties, she didn't look
+much less interested than she did when High Jack would tell her that
+he had a pipe that the first inhabitants of America originally arrived
+here on stilts after a freshet at Tenafly, New Jersey.
+
+"But I was going to tell you more about High Jack.
+
+"About six months ago I get a letter from him, saying he'd been
+commissioned by the Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology at Washington
+to go down to Mexico and translate some excavations or dig up the
+meaning of some shorthand notes on some ruins--or something of that
+sort. And if I'd go along he could squeeze the price into the expense
+account.
+
+"Well, I'd been holding a napkin over my arm at Chubb's about long
+enough then, so I wired High Jack 'Yes'; and he sent me a ticket, and
+I met him in Washington, and he had a lot of news to tell me. First
+of all, was that Florence Blue Feather had suddenly disappeared from
+her home and environments.
+
+"'Run away?' I asked.
+
+"'Vanished,' says High Jack. 'Disappeared like your shadow when
+the sun goes under a cloud. She was seen on the street, and then
+she turned a corner and nobody ever seen her afterward. The whole
+community turned out to look for her, but we never found a clew.'
+
+"'That's bad--that's bad,' says I. 'She was a mighty nice girl, and
+as smart as you find em.'
+
+"High Jack seemed to take it hard. I guess he must have esteemed Miss
+Blue Feather quite highly. I could see that he'd referred the matter
+to the whiskey-jug. That was his weak point--and many another man's.
+I've noticed that when a man loses a girl he generally takes to drink
+either just before or just after it happens.
+
+"From Washington we railroaded it to New Orleans, and there took a
+tramp steamer bound for Belize. And a gale pounded us all down the
+Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a
+little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula. Suppose the
+ship had run against that name in the dark!
+
+"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cyclone in the bay,' says High
+Jack Snakefeeder. So we get the captain to send us ashore in a dory
+when the squall seemed to cease from squalling.
+
+"'We will find ruins here or make 'em,' says High. 'The Government
+doesn't care which we do. An appropriation is an appropriation.'
+
+"Boca de Coacoyula was a dead town. Them biblical towns we read
+about--Tired and Siphon--after they was destroyed, they must have
+looked like Forty-second Street and Broadway compared to this Boca
+place. It still claimed 1300 inhabitants as estimated and engraved
+on the stone court-house by the census-taker in 1597. The citizens
+were a mixture of Indians and other Indians; but some of 'em was
+light-colored, which I was surprised to see. The town was huddled up
+on the shore, with woods so thick around it that a subpoena-server
+couldn't have reached a monkey ten yards away with the papers. We
+wondered what kept it from being annexed to Kansas; but we soon found
+out that it was Major Bing.
+
+"Major Bing was the ointment around the fly. He had the cochineal,
+sarsaparilla, log-wood, annatto, hemp, and all other dye-woods and
+pure food adulteration concessions cornered. He had five-sixths of
+the Boca de Thingama-jiggers working for him on shares. It was a
+beautiful graft. We used to brag about Morgan and E. H. and others
+of our wisest when I was in the provinces--but now no more. That
+peninsula has got our little country turned into a submarine without
+even the observation tower showing.
+
+"Major Bing's idea was this. He had the population go forth into the
+forest and gather these products. When they brought 'em in he gave
+'em one-fifth for their trouble. Sometimes they'd strike and demand a
+sixth. The Major always gave in to 'em.
+
+"The Major had a bungalow so close on the sea that the nine-inch
+tide seeped through the cracks in the kitchen floor. Me and him and
+High Jack Snakefeeder sat on the porch and drank rum from noon till
+midnight. He said he had piled up $300,000 in New Orleans banks, and
+High and me could stay with him forever if we would. But High Jack
+happened to think of the United States, and began to talk ethnology.
+
+"'Ruins!' says Major Bing. 'The woods are full of 'em. I don't know
+how far they date back, but they was here before I came.'
+
+"High Jack asks what form of worship the citizens of that locality are
+addicted to.
+
+"'Why,' says the Major, rubbing his nose, 'I can't hardly say. I
+imagine it's infidel or Aztec or Nonconformist or something like
+that. There's a church here--a Methodist or some other kind--with
+a parson named Skidder. He claims to have converted the people to
+Christianity. He and me don't assimilate except on state occasions.
+I imagine they worship some kind of gods or idols yet. But Skidder
+says he has 'em in the fold.'
+
+"A few days later High Jack and me, prowling around, strikes a plain
+path into the forest, and follows it a good four miles. Then a branch
+turns to the left. We go a mile, maybe, down that, and run up against
+the finest ruin you ever saw--solid stone with trees and vines and
+under-brush all growing up against it and in it and through it. All
+over it was chiselled carvings of funny beasts and people that would
+have been arrested if they'd ever come out in vaudeville that way. We
+approached it from the rear.
+
+"High Jack had been drinking too much rum ever since we landed in
+Boca. You know how an Indian is--the palefaces fixed his clock when
+they introduced him to firewater. He'd brought a quart along with
+him.
+
+"'Hunky,' says he, 'we'll explore the ancient temple. It may be that
+the storm that landed us here was propitious. The Minority Report
+Bureau of Ethnology,' says he, 'may yet profit by the vagaries of wind
+and tide.'
+
+"We went in the rear door of the bum edifice. We struck a kind of
+alcove without bath. There was a granite davenport, and a stone
+wash-stand without any soap or exit for the water, and some hardwood
+pegs drove into holes in the wall, and that was all. To go out of that
+furnished apartment into a Harlem hall bedroom would make you feel
+like getting back home from an amateur violoncello solo at an East
+Side Settlement house.
+
+"While High was examining some hieroglyphics on the wall that the
+stone-masons must have made when their tools slipped, I stepped into
+the front room. That was at least thirty by fifty feet, stone floor,
+six little windows like square port-holes that didn't let much light
+in.
+
+"I looked back over my shoulder, and sees High Jack's face three feet
+away.
+
+"'High,' says I, 'of all the--'
+
+"And then I noticed he looked funny, and I turned around.
+
+"He'd taken off his clothes to the waist, and he didn't seem to hear
+me. I touched him, and came near beating it. High Jack had turned to
+stone. I had been drinking some rum myself.
+
+"'Ossified!' I says to him, loudly. 'I knew what would happen if you
+kept it up.'
+
+"And then High Jack comes in from the alcove when he hears me
+conversing with nobody, and we have a look at Mr. Snakefeeder No. 2.
+It's a stone idol, or god, or revised statute or something, and it
+looks as much like High Jack as one green pea looks like itself. It's
+got exactly his face and size and color, but it's steadier on its
+pins. It stands on a kind of rostrum or pedestal, and you can see
+it's been there ten million years.
+
+"'He's a cousin of mine,' sings High, and then he turns solemn.
+
+"'Hunky,' he says, putting one hand on my shoulder and one on the
+statue's, 'I'm in the holy temple of my ancestors.'
+
+"'Well, if looks goes for anything,' says I, 'you've struck a twin.
+Stand side by side with buddy, and let's see if there's any
+difference.'
+
+"There wasn't. You know an Indian can keep his face as still as an
+iron dog's when he wants to, so when High Jack froze his features you
+couldn't have told him from the other one.
+
+"'There's some letters,' says I, 'on his nob's pedestal, but I can't
+make 'em out. The alphabet of this country seems to be composed of
+sometimes _a_, _e_, _i_, _o_, and _u_, but generally _z's_, _l's_,
+and _t's_.'
+
+"High Jack's ethnology gets the upper hand of his rum for a minute,
+and he investigates the inscription.
+
+"'Hunky,' says he, 'this is a statue of Tlotopaxl, one of the most
+powerful gods of the ancient Aztecs.'
+
+"'Glad to know him,' says I, 'but in his present condition he reminds
+me of the joke Shakespeare got off on Julius Cæsar. We might say
+about your friend:
+
+
+   "'Imperious What's-his-name, dead and turned to stone--
+     No use to write or call him on the 'phone.'
+
+
+"'Hunky,' says High Jack Snakefeeder, looking at me funny, 'do you
+believe in reincarnation?'
+
+"'It sounds to me,' says I, 'like either a clean-up of the
+slaughter-houses or a new kind of Boston pink. I don't know.'
+
+"'I believe,' says he, 'that I am the reincarnation of Tlotopaxl.
+My researches have convinced me that the Cherokees, of all the North
+American tribes, can boast of the straightest descent from the
+proud Aztec race. That,' says he, 'was a favorite theory of mine and
+Florence Blue Feather's. And she--what if she--'
+
+"High Jack grabs my arm and walls his eyes at me. Just then he looked
+more like his eminent co-Indian murderer, Crazy Horse.
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'what if she, what if she, what if she? You're
+drunk,' says I. 'Impersonating idols and believing in--what was
+it?--recarnalization? Let's have a drink,' says I. 'It's as spooky here
+as a Brooklyn artificial-limb factory at midnight with the gas turned
+down.'
+
+"Just then I heard somebody coming, and I dragged High Jack into the
+bedless bedchamber. There was peep-holes bored through the wall, so
+we could see the whole front part of the temple. Major Bing told me
+afterward that the ancient priests in charge used to rubber through
+them at the congregation.
+
+"In a few minutes an old Indian woman came in with a big oval earthen
+dish full of grub. She set it on a square block of stone in front of
+the graven image, and laid down and walloped her face on the floor a
+few times, and then took a walk for herself.
+
+"High Jack and me was hungry, so we came out and looked it over.
+There was goat steaks and fried rice-cakes, and plantains and cassava,
+and broiled land-crabs and mangoes--nothing like what you get at
+Chubb's.
+
+"We ate hearty--and had another round of rum.
+
+"'It must be old Tecumseh's--or whatever you call him--birthday,' says
+I. 'Or do they feed him every day? I thought gods only drank vanilla
+on Mount Catawampus.'
+
+"Then some more native parties in short kimonos that showed their
+aboriginees punctured the near-horizon, and me and High had to skip
+back into Father Axletree's private boudoir. They came by ones, twos,
+and threes, and left all sorts of offerings--there was enough grub
+for Bingham's nine gods of war, with plenty left over for the Peace
+Conference at The Hague. They brought jars of honey, and bunches of
+bananas, and bottles of wine, and stacks of tortillas, and beautiful
+shawls worth one hundred dollars apiece that the Indian women weave of
+a kind of vegetable fibre like silk. All of 'em got down and wriggled
+on the floor in front of that hard-finish god, and then sneaked off
+through the woods again.
+
+"'I wonder who gets this rake-off?' remarks High Jack.
+
+"'Oh,' says I, 'there's priests or deputy idols or a committee of
+disarrangements somewhere in the woods on the job. Wherever you
+find a god you'll find somebody waiting to take charge of the burnt
+offerings.'
+
+"And then we took another swig of rum and walked out to the parlor
+front door to cool off, for it was as hot inside as a summer camp on
+the Palisades.
+
+"And while we stood there in the breeze we looks down the path and
+sees a young lady approaching the blasted ruin. She was bare-footed
+and had on a white robe, and carried a wreath of white flowers in her
+hand. When she got nearer we saw she had a long blue feather stuck
+through her black hair. And when she got nearer still me and High
+Jack Snakefeeder grabbed each other to keep from tumbling down on the
+floor; for the girl's face was as much like Florence Blue Feather's
+as his was like old King Toxicology's.
+
+"And then was when High Jack's booze drowned his system of ethnology.
+He dragged me inside back of the statue, and says:
+
+"'Lay hold of it, Hunky. We'll pack it into the other room. I felt
+it all the time,' says he. 'I'm the reconsideration of the god
+Locomotorataxia, and Florence Blue Feather was my bride a thousand
+years ago. She has come to seek me in the temple where I used to
+reign.'
+
+"'All right,' says I. 'There's no use arguing against the rum
+question. You take his feet.'
+
+"We lifted the three-hundred-pound stone god, and carried him into
+the back room of the café--the temple, I mean--and leaned him against
+the wall. It was more work than bouncing three live ones from an
+all-night Broadway joint on New-Year's Eve.
+
+"Then High Jack ran out and brought in a couple of them Indian silk
+shawls and began to undress himself.
+
+"'Oh, figs!' says I. 'Is it thus? Strong drink is an adder and
+subtractor, too. Is it the heat or the call of the wild that's got
+you?'
+
+"But High Jack is too full of exaltation and cane-juice to reply. He
+stops the disrobing business just short of the Manhattan Beach rules,
+and then winds them red-and-white shawls around him, and goes out and.
+stands on the pedestal as steady as any platinum deity you ever saw.
+And I looks through a peek-hole to see what he is up to.
+
+"In a few minutes in comes the girl with the flower wreath. Danged
+if I wasn't knocked a little silly when she got close, she looked
+so exactly much like Florence Blue Feather. 'I wonder,' says I to
+myself, 'if she has been reincarcerated, too? If I could see,' says I
+to myself, 'whether she has a mole on her left--' But the next minute
+I thought she looked one-eighth of a shade darker than Florence; but
+she looked good at that. And High Jack hadn't drunk all the rum that
+had been drank.
+
+"The girl went up within ten feet of the bum idol, and got down and
+massaged her nose with the floor, like the rest did. Then she went
+nearer and laid the flower wreath on the block of stone at High Jack's
+feet. Rummy as I was, I thought it was kind of nice of her to think
+of offering flowers instead of household and kitchen provisions. Even
+a stone god ought to appreciate a little sentiment like that on top of
+the fancy groceries they had piled up in front of him.
+
+"And then High Jack steps down from his pedestal, quiet, and mentions
+a few words that sounded just like the hieroglyphics carved on the
+walls of the ruin. The girl gives a little jump backward, and her
+eyes fly open as big as doughnuts; but she don't beat it.
+
+"Why didn't she? I'll tell you why I think why. It don't seem to a
+girl so supernatural, unlikely, strange, and startling that a stone
+god should come to life for _her_. If he was to do it for one of them
+snub-nosed brown girls on the other side of the woods, now, it would
+be different--but _her_! I'll bet she said to herself: 'Well, goodness
+me! you've been a long time getting on your job. I've half a mind not
+to speak to you.'
+
+"But she and High Jack holds hands and walks away out of the temple
+together. By the time I'd had time to take another drink and enter
+upon the scene they was twenty yards away, going up the path in the
+woods that the girl had come down. With the natural scenery already
+in place, it was just like a play to watch 'em--she looking up at
+him, and him giving her back the best that an Indian can hand,
+out in the way of a goo-goo eye. But there wasn't anything in that
+recarnification and revulsion to tintype for me.
+
+"'Hey! Injun!' I yells out to High Jack. 'We've got a board-bill due
+in town, and you're leaving me without a cent. Brace up and cut out
+the Neapolitan fisher-maiden, and let's go back home.'
+
+"But on the two goes; without looking once back until, as you might
+say, the forest swallowed 'em up. And I never saw or heard of High
+Jack Snakefeeder from that day to this. I don't know if the Cherokees
+came from the Aspics; but if they did, one of 'em went back.
+
+"All I could do was to hustle back to that Boca place and panhandle
+Major Bing. He detached himself from enough of his winnings to buy me
+a ticket home. And I'm back again on the job at Chubb's, sir, and I'm
+going to hold it steady. Come round, and you'll find the steaks as
+good as ever."
+
+I wondered what Hunky Magee thought about his own story; so I asked
+him if he had any theories about reincarnation and transmogrification
+and such mysteries as he had touched upon.
+
+"Nothing like that," said Hunky, positively. "What ailed High Jack
+was too much booze and education. They'll do an Indian up every
+time."
+
+"But what about Miss Blue Feather?" I persisted.
+
+"Say," said Hunky, with a grin, "that little lady that stole High Jack
+certainly did give me a jar when I first took a look at her, but it
+was only for a minute. You remember I told you High Jack said that
+Miss Florence Blue Feather disappeared from home about a year ago?
+Well, where she landed four days later was in as neat a five-room flat
+on East Twenty-third Street as you ever walked sideways through--and
+she's been Mrs. Magee ever since."
+
+
+
+
+THE MOMENT OF VICTORY
+
+
+Ben Granger is a war veteran aged twenty-nine--which should enable
+you to guess the war. He is also principal merchant and postmaster of
+Cadiz, a little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico
+perpetually blow.
+
+Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater
+Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a
+corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air
+college in which the Filipino was schooled. Now, with his bayonet
+beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal's guard of
+cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the
+matted jungles of Mindanao. Always have his interest and choice been
+for deeds rather than for words; but the consideration and digestion
+of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will
+attest.
+
+"What is it," he asked me one moonlit eve, as we sat among his boxes
+and barrels, "that generally makes men go through dangers, and fire,
+and trouble, and starvation, and battle, and such recourses? What
+does a man do it for? Why does he try to outdo his fellow-humans, and
+be braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his best
+friends are? What's his game? What does he expect to get out of it?
+He don't do it just for the fresh air and exercise. What would you
+say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for
+his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in
+the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields,
+links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and _vice versa_
+places of the world?"
+
+"Well, Ben," said I, with judicial seriousness, "I think we might
+safely limit the number of motives of a man who seeks fame to three--to
+ambition, which is a desire for popular applause; to avarice, which
+looks to the material side of success; and to love of some woman whom
+he either possesses or desires to possess."
+
+Ben pondered over my words while a mocking-bird on the top of a
+mesquite by the porch trilled a dozen bars.
+
+"I reckon," said he, "that your diagnosis about covers the case
+according to the rules laid down in the copy-books and historical
+readers. But what I had in my mind was the case of Willie Robbins, a
+person I used to know. I'll tell you about him before I close up the
+store, if you don't mind listening.
+
+"Willie was one of our social set up in San Augustine. I was clerking
+there then for Brady & Murchison, wholesale dry-goods and ranch
+supplies. Willie and I belonged to the same german club and athletic
+association and military company. He played the triangle in our
+serenading and quartet crowd that used to ring the welkin three nights
+a week somewhere in town.
+
+"Willie jibed with his name considerable. He weighed about as much
+as a hundred pounds of veal in his summer suitings, and he had a
+'Where-is-Mary?' expression on his features so plain that you could
+almost see the wool growing on him.
+
+"And yet you couldn't fence him away from the girls with barbed wire.
+You know that kind of young fellows--a kind of a mixture of fools and
+angels--they rush in and fear to tread at the same time; but they never
+fail to tread when they get the chance. He was always on hand when 'a
+joyful occasion was had,' as the morning paper would say, looking as
+happy as a king full, and at the same time as uncomfortable as a raw
+oyster served with sweet pickles. He danced like he had hind hobbles
+on; and he had a vocabulary of about three hundred and fifty words
+that he made stretch over four germans a week, and plagiarized from
+to get him through two ice-cream suppers and a Sunday-night call. He
+seemed to me to be a sort of a mixture of Maltese kitten, sensitive
+plant, and a member of a stranded 'Two Orphans' company.
+
+"I'll give you an estimate of his physiological and pictorial make-up,
+and then I'll stick spurs into the sides of my narrative.
+
+"Willie inclined to the Caucasian in his coloring and manner of style.
+His hair was opalescent and his conversation fragmentary. His eyes
+were the same blue shade as the china dog's on the right-hand corner
+of your Aunt Ellen's mantelpiece. He took things as they came, and I
+never felt any hostility against him. I let him live, and so did
+others.
+
+"But what does this Willie do but coax his heart out of his boots and
+lose it to Myra Allison, the liveliest, brightest, keenest, smartest,
+and prettiest girl in San Augustine. I tell you, she had the blackest
+eyes, the shiniest curls, and the most tantalizing--Oh, no, you're
+off--I wasn't a victim. I might have been, but I knew better. I kept
+out. Joe Granberry was It from the start. He had everybody else
+beat a couple of leagues and thence east to a stake and mound. But,
+anyhow, Myra was a nine-pound, full-merino, fall-clip fleece, sacked
+and loaded on a four-horse team for San Antone.
+
+"One night there was an ice-cream sociable at Mrs. Colonel
+Spraggins', in San Augustine. We fellows had a big room up-stairs
+opened up for us to put our hats and things in, and to comb our hair
+and put on the clean collars we brought along inside the sweat-bands
+of our hats--in short, a room to fix up in just like they have
+everywhere at high-toned doings. A little farther down the hall
+was the girls' room, which they used to powder up in, and so forth.
+Downstairs we--that is, the San Augustine Social Cotillion and
+Merrymakers' Club--had a stretcher put down in the parlor where our
+dance was going on.
+
+"Willie Robbins and me happened to be up in our--cloak-room, I believe
+we called it--when Myra Allison skipped through the hall on her way
+down-stairs from the girls' room. Willie was standing before the
+mirror, deeply interested in smoothing down the blond grass-plot on
+his head, which seemed to give him lots of trouble. Myra was always
+full of life and devilment. She stopped and stuck her head in our
+door. She certainly was good-looking. But I knew how Joe Granberry
+stood with her. So did Willie; but he kept on ba-a-a-ing after her
+and following her around. He had a system of persistence that didn't
+coincide with pale hair and light eyes.
+
+"'Hello, Willie!' says Myra. 'What are you doing to yourself in the
+glass?'
+
+"'I'm trying to look fly,' says Willie.
+
+"'Well, you never could _be_ fly,' says Myra, with her special laugh,
+which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an
+empty canteen against my saddle-horn.
+
+"I looked around at Willie after Myra had gone. He had a kind of a
+lily-white look on him which seemed to show that her remark had, as
+you might say, disrupted his soul. I never noticed anything in what
+she said that sounded particularly destructive to a man's ideas
+of self-consciousness; but he was set back to an extent you could
+scarcely imagine.
+
+"After we went down-stairs with our clean collars on, Willie never
+went near Myra again that night. After all, he seemed to be a diluted
+kind of a skim-milk sort of a chap, and I never wondered that Joe
+Granberry beat him out.
+
+"The next day the battleship _Maine_ was blown up, and then pretty soon
+somebody--I reckon it was Joe Bailey, or Ben Tillman, or maybe the
+Government--declared war against Spain.
+
+"Well, everybody south of Mason & Hamlin's line knew that the North
+by itself couldn't whip a whole country the size of Spain. So the
+Yankees commenced to holler for help, and the Johnny Rebs answered the
+call. 'We're coming, Father William, a hundred thousand strong--and
+then some,' was the way they sang it. And the old party lines drawn
+by Sherman's march and the Kuklux and nine-cent cotton and the Jim
+Crow street-car ordinances faded away. We became one undivided.
+country, with no North, very little East, a good-sized chunk of West,
+and a South that loomed up as big as the first foreign label on a new
+eight-dollar suit-case.
+
+"Of course the dogs of war weren't a complete pack without a yelp from
+the San Augustine Rifles, Company D, of the Fourteenth Texas Regiment.
+Our company was among the first to land in Cuba and strike terror
+into the hearts of the foe. I'm not going to give you a history of
+the war, I'm just dragging it in to fill out my story about Willie
+Robbins, just as the Republican party dragged it in to help out the
+election in 1898.
+
+"If anybody ever had heroitis, it was that Willie Robbins. From the
+minute he set foot on the soil of the tyrants of Castile he seemed to
+engulf danger as a cat laps up cream. He certainly astonished every
+man in our company, from the captain up. You'd have expected him
+to gravitate naturally to the job of an orderly to the colonel, or
+typewriter in the commissary--but not any. He created the part of
+the flaxen-haired boy hero who lives and gets back home with the
+goods, instead of dying with an important despatch in his hands at
+his colonel's feet.
+
+"Our company got into a section of Cuban scenery where one of the
+messiest and most unsung portions of the campaign occurred. We were
+out every day capering around in the bushes, and having little
+skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kind of
+tired-out feuds than anything else. The war was a joke to us, and
+of no interest to them. We never could see it any other way than as
+a howling farce-comedy that the San Augustine Rifles were actually
+fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes. And the blamed little
+señors didn't get enough pay to make them care whether they were
+patriots or traitors. Now and then somebody would get killed. It
+seemed like a waste of life to me. I was at Coney Island when I went
+to New York once, and one of them down-hill skidding apparatuses they
+call 'roller-coasters' flew the track and killed a man in a brown
+sack-suit. Whenever the Spaniards shot one of our men, it struck me
+as just about as unnecessary and regrettable as that was.
+
+"But I'm dropping Willie Robbins out of the conversation.
+
+"He was out for bloodshed, laurels, ambition, medals, recommendations,
+and all other forms of military glory. And he didn't seem to be
+afraid of any of the recognized forms of military danger, such as
+Spaniards, cannon-balls, canned beef, gunpowder, or nepotism. He went
+forth with his pallid hair and china-blue eyes and ate up Spaniards
+like you would sardines _à la canopy_. Wars and rumbles of wars never
+flustered him. He would stand guard-duty, mosquitoes, hardtack,
+treat, and fire with equally perfect unanimity. No blondes in history
+ever come in comparison distance of him except the Jack of Diamonds
+and Queen Catherine of Russia.
+
+"I remember, one time, a little _caballard_ of Spanish men sauntered
+out from behind a patch of sugar-cane and shot Bob Turner, the first
+sergeant of our company, while we were eating dinner. As required
+by the army regulations, we fellows went through the usual tactics
+of falling into line, saluting the enemy, and loading and firing,
+kneeling.
+
+"That wasn't the Texas way of scrapping; but, being a very important
+addendum and annex to the regular army, the San Augustine Rifles had
+to conform to the red-tape system of getting even.
+
+"By the time we had got out our 'Upton's Tactics,' turned to page
+fifty-seven, said 'one--two--three--one--two--three' a couple of
+times, and got blank cartridges into our Springfields, the Spanish
+outfit had smiled repeatedly, rolled and lit cigarettes by squads, and
+walked away contemptuously.
+
+"I went straight to Captain Floyd, and says to him: 'Sam, I don't
+think this war is a straight game. You know as well as I do that Bob
+Turner was one of the whitest fellows that ever threw a leg over a
+saddle, and now these wirepullers in Washington have fixed his clock.
+He's politically and ostensibly dead. It ain't fair. Why should they
+keep this thing up? If they want Spain licked, why don't they turn
+the San Augustine Rifles and Joe Seely's ranger company and a car-load
+of West Texas deputy-sheriffs onto these Spaniards, and let us
+exonerate them from the face of the earth? I never did,' says I,
+'care much about fighting by the Lord Chesterfield ring rules. I'm
+going to hand in my resignation and go home if anybody else I am
+personally acquainted with gets hurt in this war. If you can get
+somebody in my place, Sam,' says I, 'I'll quit the first of next week.
+I don't want to work in an army that don't give its help a chance.
+Never mind my wages,' says I; 'let the Secretary of the Treasury keep
+'em.'
+
+"'Well, Ben,' says the captain to me, 'your allegations and estimations
+of the tactics of war, government, patriotism, guard-mounting,
+and democracy are all right. But I've looked into the system of
+international arbitration and the ethics of justifiable slaughter
+a little closer, maybe, than you have. Now, you can hand in your
+resignation the first of next week if you are so minded. But if you
+do,' says Sam, 'I'll order a corporal's guard to take you over by
+that limestone bluff on the creek and shoot enough lead into you to
+ballast a submarine air-ship. I'm captain of this company, and I've
+swore allegiance to the Amalgamated States regardless of sectional,
+secessional, and Congressional differences. Have you got any
+smoking-tobacco?' winds up Sam. 'Mine got wet when I swum the creek
+this morning.'
+
+"The reason I drag all this _non ex parte_ evidence in is because Willie
+Robbins was standing there listening to us. I was a second sergeant
+and he was a private then, but among us Texans and Westerners there
+never was as much tactics and subordination as there was in the
+regular army. We never called our captain anything but 'Sam' except
+when there was a lot of major-generals and admirals around, so as to
+preserve the discipline.
+
+"And says Willie Robbins to me, in a sharp construction of voice much
+unbecoming to his light hair and previous record:
+
+"'You ought to be shot, Ben, for emitting any such sentiments. A man
+that won't fight for his country is worse than a horse-thief. If I
+was the cap, I'd put you in the guard-house for thirty days on round
+steak and tamales. War,' says Willie, 'is great and glorious. I
+didn't know you were a coward.'
+
+"'I'm not,' says I. 'If I was, I'd knock some of the pallidness off
+of your marble brow. I'm lenient with you,' I says, 'just as I am
+with the Spaniards, because you have always reminded me of something
+with mushrooms on the side. Why, you little Lady of Shalott,' says I,
+'you underdone leader of cotillions, you glassy fashion and moulded
+form, you white-pine soldier made in the Cisalpine Alps in Germany
+for the late New-Year trade, do you know of whom you are talking
+to? We've been in the same social circle,' says I, 'and I've put
+up with you because you seemed so meek and self-un-satisfying. I
+don't understand why you have so sudden taken a personal interest
+in chivalrousness and murder. Your nature's undergone a complete
+revelation. Now, how is it?'
+
+"'Well, you wouldn't understand, Ben,' says Willie, giving one of his
+refined smiles and turning away.
+
+"'Come back here!' says I, catching him by the tail of his khaki coat.
+'You've made me kind of mad, in spite of the aloofness in which I have
+heretofore held you. You are out for making a success in this hero
+business, and I believe I know what for. You are doing it either
+because you are crazy or because you expect to catch some girl by it.
+Now, if it's a girl, I've got something here to show you.'
+
+"I wouldn't have done it, but I was plumb mad. I pulled a San
+Augustine paper out of my hip-pocket, and showed him an item. It was
+a half a column about the marriage of Myra Allison and Joe Granberry.
+
+"Willie laughed, and I saw I hadn't touched him.
+
+"'Oh,' says he, 'everybody knew that was going to happen. I heard
+about that a week ago.' And then he gave me the laugh again.
+
+"'All right,' says I. 'Then why do you so recklessly chase the bright
+rainbow of fame? Do you expect to be elected President, or do you
+belong to a suicide club?'
+
+"And then Captain Sam interferes.
+
+"'You gentlemen quit jawing and go back to your quarters,' says he,
+'or I'll have you escorted to the guard-house. Now, scat, both of
+you! Before you go, which one of you has got any chewing-tobacco?'
+
+"'We're off, Sam,' says I. 'It's supper-time, anyhow. But what do
+you think of what we was talking about? I've noticed you throwing out
+a good many grappling-hooks for this here balloon called fame--What's
+ambition, anyhow? What does a man risk his life day after day for?
+Do you know of anything he gets in the end that can pay him for the
+trouble? I want to go back home,' says I. 'I don't care whether Cuba
+sinks or swims, and I don't give a pipeful of rabbit tobacco whether
+Queen Sophia Christina or Charlie Culberson rules these fairy isles;
+and I don't want my name on any list except the list of survivors.
+But I've noticed you, Sam,' says I, 'seeking the bubble notoriety in
+the cannon's larynx a number of times. Now, what do you do it for? Is
+it ambition, business, or some freckle-faced Phoebe at home that you
+are heroing for?'
+
+"'Well, Ben,' says Sam, kind of hefting his sword out from between
+his knees, 'as your superior officer I could court-martial you for
+attempted cowardice and desertion. But I won't. And I'll tell you
+why I'm trying for promotion and the usual honors of war and conquest.
+A major gets more pay than a captain, and I need the money.'
+
+"'Correct for you!' says I. 'I can understand that. Your system of
+fame-seeking is rooted in the deepest soil of patriotism. But I can't
+comprehend,' says I, 'why Willie Robbins, whose folks at home are well
+off, and who used to be as meek and undesirous of notice as a cat with
+cream on his whiskers, should all at once develop into a warrior bold
+with the most fire-eating kind of proclivities. And the girl in his
+case seems to have been eliminated by marriage to another fellow. I
+reckon,' says I, 'it's a plain case of just common ambition. He wants
+his name, maybe, to go thundering down the coroners of time. It must
+be that.'
+
+"Well, without itemizing his deeds, Willie sure made good as a hero.
+He simply spent most of his time on his knees begging our captain to
+send him on forlorn hopes and dangerous scouting expeditions. In
+every fight he was the first man to mix it at close quarters with the
+Don Alfonsos. He got three or four bullets planted in various parts
+of his autonomy. Once he went off with a detail of eight men and
+captured a whole company of Spanish. He kept Captain Floyd busy
+writing out recommendations of his bravery to send in to headquarters;
+and he began to accumulate medals for all kinds of things--heroism
+and target-shooting and valor and tactics and uninsubordination, and
+all the little accomplishments that look good to the third assistant
+secretaries of the War Department.
+
+"Finally, Cap Floyd got promoted to be a major-general, or a knight
+commander of the main herd, or something like that. He pounded around
+on a white horse, all desecrated up with gold-leaf and hen-feathers
+and a Good Templar's hat, and wasn't allowed by the regulations to
+speak to us. And Willie Robbins was made captain of our company.
+
+"And maybe he didn't go after the wreath of fame then! As far as
+I could see it was him that ended the war. He got eighteen of us
+boys--friends of his, too--killed in battles that he stirred up
+himself, and that didn't seem to me necessary at all. One night he took
+twelve of us and waded through a little rill about a hundred and ninety
+yards wide, and climbed a couple of mountains, and sneaked through a
+mile of neglected shrubbery and a couple of rock-quarries and into a
+rye-straw village, and captured a Spanish general named, as they said,
+Benny Veedus. Benny seemed to me hardly worth the trouble, being a
+blackish man without shoes or cuffs, and anxious to surrender and throw
+himself on the commissary of his foe.
+
+"But that job gave Willie the big boost he wanted. The San Augustine
+_News_ and the Galveston, St. Louis, New York, and Kansas City papers
+printed his picture and columns of stuff about him. Old San Augustine
+simply went crazy over its 'gallant son.' The _News_ had an editorial
+tearfully begging the Government to call off the regular army and
+the national guard, and let Willie carry on the rest of the war
+single-handed. It said that a refusal to do so would be regarded as a
+proof that the Northern jealousy of the South was still as rampant as
+ever.
+
+"If the war hadn't ended pretty soon, I don't know to what heights of
+gold braid and encomiums Willie would have climbed; but it did. There
+was a secession of hostilities just three days after he was appointed
+a colonel, and got in three more medals by registered mail, and shot
+two Spaniards while they were drinking lemonade in an ambuscade.
+
+"Our company went back to San Augustine when the war was over. There
+wasn't anywhere else for it to go. And what do you think? The old
+town notified us in print, by wire cable, special delivery, and a
+nigger named Saul sent on a gray mule to San Antone, that they was
+going to give us the biggest blow-out, complimentary, alimentary, and
+elementary, that ever disturbed the kildees on the sand-flats outside
+of the immediate contiguity of the city.
+
+"I say 'we,' but it was all meant for ex-Private, Captain _de facto_,
+and Colonel-elect Willie Robbins. The town was crazy about him. They
+notified us that the reception they were going to put up would make
+the Mardi Gras in New Orleans look like an afternoon tea in Bury St.
+Edmunds with a curate's aunt.
+
+"Well, the San Augustine Rifles got back home on schedule time.
+Everybody was at the depot giving forth Roosevelt-Democrat--they
+used to be called Rebel--yells. There was two brass-bands, and the
+mayor, and schoolgirls in white frightening the street-car horses by
+throwing Cherokee roses in the streets, and--well, maybe you've seen
+a celebration by a town that was inland and out of water.
+
+"They wanted Brevet-Colonel Willie to get into a carriage and be drawn
+by prominent citizens and some of the city aldermen to the armory, but
+he stuck to his company and marched at the head of it up Sam Houston
+Avenue. The buildings on both sides was covered with flags and
+audiences, and everybody hollered 'Robbins!' or 'Hello, Willie!' as
+we marched up in files of fours. I never saw a illustriouser-looking
+human in my life than Willie was. He had at least seven or eight
+medals and diplomas and decorations on the breast of his khaki coat;
+he was sunburnt the color of a saddle, and he certainly done himself
+proud.
+
+"They told us at the depot that the courthouse was to be illuminated
+at half-past seven, and there would be speeches and chili-con-carne at
+the Palace Hotel. Miss Delphine Thompson was to read an original poem
+by James Whitcomb Ryan, and Constable Hooker had promised us a salute
+of nine guns from Chicago that he had arrested that day.
+
+"After we had disbanded in the armory, Willie says to me:
+
+"'Want to walk out a piece with me?'
+
+"'Why, yes,' says I, 'if it ain't so far that we can't hear the tumult
+and the shouting die away. I'm hungry myself,' says I, 'and I'm
+pining for some home grub, but I'll go with you.'
+
+"Willie steered me down some side streets till we came to a little
+white cottage in a new lot with a twenty-by-thirty-foot lawn decorated
+with brickbats and old barrel-staves.
+
+"'Halt and give the countersign,' says I to Willie. 'Don't you know
+this dugout? It's the bird's-nest that Joe Granberry built before he
+married Myra Allison. What you going there for?'
+
+"But Willie already had the gate open. He walked up the brick walk to
+the steps, and I went with him. Myra was sitting in a rocking-chair
+on the porch, sewing. Her hair was smoothed back kind of hasty and
+tied in a knot. I never noticed till then that she had freckles. Joe
+was at one side of the porch, in his shirt-sleeves, with no collar
+on, and no signs of a shave, trying to scrape out a hole among the
+brickbats and tin cans to plant a little fruit-tree in. He looked up
+but never said a word, and neither did Myra.
+
+"Willie was sure dandy-looking in his uniform, with medals strung on
+his breast and his new gold-handled sword. You'd never have taken him
+for the little white-headed snipe that the girls used to order about
+and make fun of. He just stood there for a minute, looking at Myra
+with a peculiar little smile on his face; and then he says to her,
+slow, and kind of holding on to his words with his teeth:
+
+"'_Oh, I don't know! Maybe I could if I tried!_'
+
+"That was all that was said. Willie raised his hat, and we walked
+away.
+
+"And, somehow, when he said that, I remembered, all of a sudden,
+the night of that dance and Willie brushing his hair before the
+looking-glass, and Myra sticking her head in the door to guy him.
+
+"When we got back to Sam Houston Avenue, Willie says:
+
+"'Well, so long, Ben. I'm going down home and get off my shoes and
+take a rest.'
+
+"'You?' says I. 'What's the matter with you? Ain't the court-house
+jammed with everybody in town waiting to honor the hero? And two
+brass-bands, and recitations and flags and jags and grub to follow
+waiting for you?'
+
+"Willie sighs.
+
+"'All right, Ben,' says he. 'Darned if I didn't forget all about
+that.'
+
+"And that's why I say," concluded Ben Granger, "that you can't tell
+where ambition begins any more than you can where it is going to wind
+up."
+
+
+
+
+THE HEAD-HUNTER
+
+
+When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over, I went to the
+Philippine Islands. There I remained as bush-whacker correspondent
+for my paper until its managing editor notified me that an
+eight-hundred-word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao
+over the death of an infant Moro was not considered by the office to
+be war news. So I resigned, and came home.
+
+On board the trading-vessel that brought me back I pondered much
+upon the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the
+yellow-brown people. The manoeuvres and skirmishings of the petty war
+interested me not: I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable
+countenance of that race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon
+us out of an unguessable past.
+
+Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and
+attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as
+the head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never
+seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their
+concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through
+unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless
+chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near with the invisible
+hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such signs as
+a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make--a twig crackling
+in the awful, sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the
+screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the rushes
+of a water-level--a hint of death for every mile and every hour--they
+amused me greatly, those little fellows of one idea.
+
+When you think of it, their method is beautifully and almost
+hilariously effective and simple.
+
+You have your hut in which you live and carry out the destiny that
+was decreed for you. Spiked to the jamb of your bamboo doorway is a
+basket made of green withes, plaited. From time to time, as vanity or
+ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move you, you creep forth
+with your snickersnee and take up the silent trail. Back from it you
+come, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of your victim, which
+you deposit with pardonable pride in the basket at the side of your
+door. It may be the head of your enemy, your friend, or a stranger,
+according as competition, jealousy, or simple sportiveness has been
+your incentive to labor.
+
+In any case, your reward is certain. The village men, in passing,
+stop to congratulate you, as your neighbor on weaker planes of life
+stops to admire and praise the begonias in your front yard. Your
+particular brown maid lingers, with fluttering bosom, casting soft
+tiger's eyes at the evidence of your love for her. You chew betel-nut
+and listen, content, to the intermittent soft drip from the ends of
+the severed neck arteries. And you show your teeth and grunt like a
+water-buffalo--which is as near as you can come to laughing--at the
+thought that the cold, acephalous body of your door ornament is being
+spotted by wheeling vultures in the Mindanaoan wilds.
+
+Truly, the life of the merry head-hunter captivated me. He had
+reduced art and philosophy to a simple code. To take your adversary's
+head, to basket it at the portal of your castle, to see it lying
+there, a dead thing, with its cunning and stratagems and power gone--
+Is there a better way to foil his plots, to refute his arguments, to
+establish your superiority over his skill and wisdom?
+
+The ship that brought me home was captained by an erratic Swede, who
+changed his course and deposited me, with genuine compassion, in
+a small town on the Pacific coast of one of the Central American
+republics, a few hundred miles south of the port to which he had
+engaged to convey me. But I was wearied of movement and exotic
+fancies; so I leaped contentedly upon the firm sands of the village of
+Mojada, telling myself I should be sure to find there the rest that I
+craved. After all, far better to linger there (I thought), lulled by
+the sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of palm-fronds, than
+to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home in the East, and
+there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and scourged by fatuous
+relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping neighbors sad stories of the
+death of colonial governors.
+
+
+
+When I first saw Chloe Greene she was standing, all in white, in the
+doorway of her father's tile-roofed 'dobe house. She was polishing
+a silver cup with a cloth, and she looked like a pearl laid against
+black velvet. She turned on me a flatteringly protracted but a
+wiltingly disapproving gaze, and then went inside, humming a light
+song to indicate the value she placed upon my existence.
+
+Small wonder: for Dr. Stamford (the most disreputable professional
+man between Juneau and Valparaiso) and I were zigzagging along the
+turfy street, tunelessly singing the words of "Auld Lang Syne" to the
+air of "Muzzer's Little Coal-Black Coon." We had come from the ice
+factory, which was Mojada's palace of wickedness, where we had been
+playing billiards and opening black bottles, white with frost, that
+we dragged with strings out of old Sandoval's ice-cold vats.
+
+I turned in sudden rage to Dr. Stamford, as sober as the verger of a
+cathedral. In a moment I had become aware that we were swine cast
+before a pearl.
+
+"You beast," I said, "this is half your doing. And the other half
+is the fault of this cursed country. I'd better have gone back to
+Sleepy-town and died in a wild orgy of currant wine and buns than to
+have had this happen."
+
+Stamford filled the empty street with his roaring laughter.
+
+"You too!" he cried. "And all as quick as the popping of a cork.
+Well, she does seem to strike agreeably upon the retina. But don't
+burn your fingers. All Mojada will tell you that Louis Devoe is the
+man.
+
+"We will see about that," said I. "And, perhaps, whether he is _a_
+man as well as _the_ man."
+
+I lost no time in meeting Louis Devoe. That was easily accomplished,
+for the foreign colony in Mojada numbered scarce a dozen; and they
+gathered daily at a half-decent hotel kept by a Turk, where they
+managed to patch together the fluttering rags of country and
+civilization that were left them. I sought Devoe before I did my
+pearl of the doorway, because I had learned a little of the game of
+war, and knew better than to strike for a prize before testing the
+strength of the enemy.
+
+A sort of cold dismay--something akin to fear--filled me when I had
+estimated him. I found a man so perfectly poised, so charming, so
+deeply learned in the world's rituals, so full of tact, courtesy, and
+hospitality, so endowed with grace and ease and a kind of careless,
+haughty power that I almost overstepped the bounds in probing him, in
+turning him on the spit to find the weak point that I so craved for
+him to have. But I left him whole--I had to make bitter acknowledgment
+to myself that Louis Devoe was a gentleman worthy of my best blows;
+and I swore to give him them. He was a great merchant of the country,
+a wealthy importer and exporter. All day he sat in a fastidiously
+appointed office, surrounded by works of art and evidences of his high
+culture, directing through glass doors and windows the affairs of his
+house.
+
+In person he was slender and hardly tall. His small, well-shaped head
+was covered with thick, brown hair, trimmed short, and he wore a
+thick, brown beard also cut close and to a fine point. His manners
+were a pattern.
+
+Before long I had become a regular and a welcome visitor at the
+Greene home. I shook my wild habits from me like a worn-out cloak.
+I trained for the conflict with the care of a prize-fighter and the
+self-denial of a Brahmin.
+
+As for Chloe Greene, I shall weary you with no sonnets to her eyebrow.
+She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a November pippin,
+and no more mysterious than a window-pane. She had whimsical little
+theories that she had deduced from life, and that fitted the maxims
+of Epictetus like princess gowns. I wonder, after all, if that old
+duffer wasn't rather wise!
+
+Chloe had a father, the Reverend Homer Greene, and an intermittent
+mother, who sometimes palely presided over a twilight teapot. The
+Reverend Homer was a burr-like man with a life-work. He was writing
+a concordance to the Scriptures, and had arrived as far as Kings.
+Being, presumably, a suitor for his daughter's hand, I was timber for
+his literary outpourings. I had the family tree of Israel drilled
+into my head until I used to cry aloud in my sleep: "And Aminadab
+begat Jay Eye See," and so forth, until he had tackled another book.
+I once made a calculation that the Reverend Homer's concordance would
+be worked up as far as the Seven Vials mentioned in Revelations about
+the third day after they were opened.
+
+Louis Devoe, as well as I, was a visitor and an intimate friend of the
+Greenes. It was there I met him the oftenest, and a more agreeable
+man or a more accomplished I have never hated in my life.
+
+Luckily or unfortunately, I came to be accepted as a Boy. My
+appearance was youthful, and I suppose I had that pleading and
+homeless air that always draws the motherliness that is in women and
+the cursed theories and hobbies of paterfamilias.
+
+Chloe called me "Tommy," and made sisterly fun of my attempts to
+woo her. With Devoe she was vastly more reserved. He was the man of
+romance, one to stir her imagination and deepest feelings had her
+fancy leaned toward him. I was closer to her, but standing in no
+glamour; I had the task before me of winning her in what seems to me
+the American way of fighting--with cleanness and pluck and everyday
+devotion to break away the barriers of friendship that divided us, and
+to take her, if I could, between sunrise and dark, abetted by neither
+moonlight nor music nor foreign wiles.
+
+Chloe gave no sign of bestowing her blithe affections upon either of
+us. But one day she let out to me an inkling of what she preferred
+in a man. It was tremendously interesting to me, but not illuminating
+as to its application. I had been tormenting her for the dozenth time
+with the statement and catalogue of my sentiments toward her.
+
+"Tommy," said she, "I don't want a man to show his love for me by
+leading an army against another country and blowing people off the
+earth with cannons."
+
+"If you mean that the opposite way," I answered, "as they say women
+do, I'll see what I can do. The papers are full of this diplomatic
+row in Russia. My people know some big people in Washington who are
+right next to the army people, and I could get an artillery commission
+and--"
+
+"I'm not that way," interrupted Chloe. "I mean what I say. It isn't
+the big things that are done in the world, Tommy, that count with a
+woman. When the knights were riding abroad in their armor to slay
+dragons, many a stay-at-home page won a lonesome lady's hand by being
+on the spot to pick up her glove and be quick with her cloak when the
+wind blew. The man I am to like best, whoever he shall be, must show
+his love in little ways. He must never forget, after hearing it once,
+that I do not like to have any one walk at my left side; that I detest
+bright-colored neckties; that I prefer to sit with my back to a light;
+that I like candied violets; that I must not be talked to when I am
+looking at the moonlight shining on water, and that I very, very often
+long for dates stuffed with English walnuts."
+
+"Frivolity," I said, with a frown. "Any well-trained servant would be
+equal to such details."
+
+"And he must remember," went on Chloe, to remind me of what I want
+when I do not know, myself, what I want."
+
+"You're rising in the scale," I said. "What you seem to need is a
+first-class clairvoyant."
+
+"And if I say that I am dying to hear a Beethoven sonata, and stamp my
+foot when I say it, he must know by that that what my soul craves is
+salted almonds; and he will have them ready in his pocket."
+
+"Now," said I, "I am at a loss. I do not know whether your soul's
+affinity is to be an impresario or a fancy grocer."
+
+Chloe turned her pearly smile upon me.
+
+"Take less than half of what I said as a jest," she went on. "And
+don't think too lightly of the little things, Boy. Be a paladin if
+you must, but don't let it show on you. Most women are only very big
+children, and most men are only very little ones. Please us; don't
+try to overpower us. When we want a hero we can make one out of even
+a plain grocer the third time he catches our handkerchief before it
+falls to the ground."
+
+That evening I was taken down with pernicious fever. That is a kind
+of coast fever with improvements and high-geared attachments. Your
+temperature goes up among the threes and fours and remains there,
+laughing scornfully and feverishly at the cinchona trees and the
+coal-tar derivatives. Pernicious fever is a case for a simple
+mathematician instead of a doctor. It is merely this formula:
+Vitality + the desire to live - the duration of the fever = the
+result.
+
+I took to my bed in the two-roomed thatched hut where I had been
+comfortably established, and sent for a gallon of rum. That was not
+for myself. Drunk, Stamford was the best doctor between the Andes
+and the Pacific. He came, sat at my bedside, and drank himself into
+condition.
+
+"My boy," said he, "my lily-white and reformed Romeo, medicine will do
+you no good. But I will give you quinine, which, being bitter, will
+arouse in you hatred and anger--two stimulants that will add ten per
+cent. to your chances. You are as strong as a caribou calf, and you
+will get well if the fever doesn't get in a knockout blow when you're
+off your guard."
+
+For two weeks I lay on my back feeling like a Hindoo widow on a
+burning ghat. Old Atasca, an untrained Indian nurse, sat near the
+door like a petrified statue of What's-the-Use, attending to her
+duties, which were, mainly, to see that time went by without slipping
+a cog. Sometimes I would fancy myself back in the Philippines, or, at
+worse times, sliding off the horsehair sofa in Sleepytown.
+
+One afternoon I ordered Atasca to vamose, and got up and dressed
+carefully. I took my temperature, which I was pleased to find 104.
+I paid almost dainty attention to my dress, choosing solicitously
+a necktie of a dull and subdued hue. The mirror showed that I was
+looking little the worse from my illness. The fever gave brightness
+to my eyes and color to my face. And while I looked at my reflection
+my color went and came again as I thought of Chloe Greene and the
+millions of eons that had passed since I'd seen her, and of Louis
+Devoe and the time he had gained on me.
+
+I went straight to her house. I seemed to float rather than walk; I
+hardly felt the ground under my feet; I thought pernicious fever must
+be a great boon to make one feel so strong.
+
+I found Chloe and Louis Devoe sitting under the awning in front of the
+house. She jumped up and met me with a double handshake.
+
+"I'm glad, glad, glad to see you out again!" she cried, every word a
+pearl strung on the string of her sentence. "You are well, Tommy--or
+better, of course. I wanted to come to see you, but they wouldn't let
+me."
+
+"Oh yes," said I, carelessly, "it was nothing. Merely a little fever.
+I am out again, as you see."
+
+We three sat there and talked for half an hour or so. Then Chloe
+looked out yearningly and almost piteously across the ocean. I could
+see in her sea-blue eyes some deep and intense desire. Devoe, curse
+him! saw it too.
+
+"What is it?" we asked, in unison.
+
+"Cocoanut-pudding," said Chloe, pathetically. "I've wanted some--oh,
+so badly, for two days. It's got beyond a wish; it's an obsession."
+
+"The cocoanut season is over," said Devoe, in that voice of his that
+gave thrilling interest to his most commonplace words. "I hardly
+think one could be found in Mojada. The natives never use them except
+when they are green and the milk is fresh. They sell all the ripe
+ones to the fruiterers."
+
+"Wouldn't a broiled lobster or a Welsh rabbit do as well?" I remarked,
+with the engaging idiocy of a pernicious-fever convalescent.
+
+Chloe came as near to pouting as a sweet disposition and a perfect
+profile would allow her to come.
+
+The Reverend Homer poked his ermine-lined face through the doorway and
+added a concordance to the conversation.
+
+"Sometimes," said he, "old Campos keeps the dried nuts in his little
+store on the hill. But it would be far better, my daughter, to
+restrain unusual desires, and partake thankfully of the daily dishes
+that the Lord has set before us."
+
+"Stuff!" said I.
+
+"How was that?" asked the Reverend Homer, sharply.
+
+"I say it's tough," said I, "to drop into the vernacular, that Miss
+Greene should be deprived of the food she desires--a simple thing like
+kalsomine-pudding. Perhaps," I continued, solicitously, "some pickled
+walnuts or a fricassee of Hungarian butternuts would do as well."
+
+Every one looked at me with a slight exhibition of curiosity.
+
+Louis Devoe arose and made his adieus. I watched him until he had
+sauntered slowly and grandiosely to the corner, around which he turned
+to reach his great warehouse and store. Chloe made her excuses, and
+went inside for a few minutes to attend to some detail affecting the
+seven-o'clock dinner. She was a passed mistress in housekeeping. I
+had tasted her puddings and bread with beatitude.
+
+When all had gone, I turned casually and saw a basket made of
+plaited green withes hanging by a nail outside the door-jamb. With
+a rush that made my hot temples throb there came vividly to my mind
+recollections of the head-hunters--_those grim, flinty, relentless
+little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the
+subtle terror of their concealed presence . . . From time to time,
+as vanity or ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move him,
+one creeps forth with his snickersnee and takes up the silent
+trail . . . Back he comes, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head
+of his victim . . . His particular brown or white maid lingers, with
+fluttering bosom, casting soft tiger's eyes at the evidence of his
+love for her_.
+
+I stole softly from the house and returned to my hut. From its
+supporting nails in the wall I took a machete as heavy as a butcher's
+cleaver and sharper than a safety-razor. And then I chuckled softly
+to myself, and set out to the fastidiously appointed private office of
+Monsieur Louis Devoe, usurper to the hand of the Pearl of the Pacific.
+
+He was never slow at thinking; he gave one look at my face and another
+at the weapon in my hand as I entered his door, and then he seemed
+to fade from my sight. I ran to the back door, kicked it open, and
+saw him running like a deer up the road toward the wood that began
+two hundred yards away. I was after him, with a shout. I remember
+hearing children and women screaming, and seeing them flying from the
+road.
+
+He was fleet, but I was stronger. A mile, and I had almost come up
+with him. He doubled cunningly and dashed into a brake that extended
+into a small cañon. I crashed through this after him, and in five
+minutes had him cornered in an angle of insurmountable cliffs. There
+his instinct of self-preservation steadied him, as it will steady even
+animals at bay. He turned to me, quite calm, with a ghastly smile.
+
+"Oh, Rayburn!" he said, with such an awful effort at ease that I was
+impolite enough to laugh rudely in his face. "Oh, Rayburn!" said he,
+"come, let's have done with this nonsense. Of course, I know it's the
+fever and you're not yourself; but collect yourself, man--give me that
+ridiculous weapon, now, and let's go back and talk it over."
+
+"I will go back," said I, "carrying your head with me. We will see
+how charmingly it can discourse when it lies in the basket at her
+door."
+
+"Come," said he, persuasively, "I think better of you than to suppose
+that you try this sort of thing as a joke. But even the vagaries of
+a fever-crazed lunatic come some time to a limit. What is this talk
+about heads and baskets? Get yourself together and throw away that
+absurd cane-chopper. What would Miss Greene think of you?" he ended,
+with the silky cajolery that one would use toward a fretful child.
+
+"Listen," said I. "At last you have struck upon the right note. What
+would she think of me? Listen," I repeated.
+
+"There are women," I said, "who look upon horsehair sofas and currant
+wine as dross. To them even the calculated modulation of your
+well-trimmed talk sounds like the dropping of rotten plums from a tree
+in the night. They are the maidens who walk back and forth in the
+villages, scorning the emptiness of the baskets at the doors of the
+young men who would win them.
+
+"One such as they," I said, "is waiting. Only a fool would try to win
+a woman by drooling like a braggart in her doorway or by waiting upon
+her whims like a footman. They are all daughters of Herodias, and to
+gain their hearts one must lay the heads of his enemies before them
+with his own hands. Now, bend your neck, Louis Devoe. Do not be a
+coward as well as a chatterer at a lady's tea-table."
+
+"There, there!" said Devoe, falteringly. "You know me, don't you,
+Rayburn?"
+
+"Oh yes," I said, "I know you. I know you. I know you. But the
+basket is empty. The old men of the village and the young men, and
+both the dark maidens and the ones who are as fair as pearls walk back
+and forth and see its emptiness. Will you kneel now, or must we have
+a scuffle? It is not like you to make things go roughly and with bad
+form. But the basket is waiting for your head."
+
+With that he went to pieces. I had to catch him as he tried to
+scamper past me like a scared rabbit. I stretched him out and got a
+foot on his chest, but he squirmed like a worm, although I appealed
+repeatedly to his sense of propriety and the duty he owed to himself
+as a gentleman not to make a row.
+
+But at last he gave me the chance, and I swung the machete.
+
+It was not hard work. He flopped like a chicken during the six or
+seven blows that it took to sever his head; but finally he lay still,
+and I tied his head in my handkerchief. The eyes opened and shut
+thrice while I walked a hundred yards. I was red to my feet with the
+drip, but what did that matter? With delight I felt under my hands
+the crisp touch of his short, thick, brown hair and close-trimmed
+beard.
+
+I reached the house of the Greenes and dumped the head of Louis Devoe
+into the basket that still hung by the nail in the door-jamb. I sat
+in a chair under the awning and waited. The sun was within two hours
+of setting. Chloe came out and looked surprised.
+
+"Where have you been, Tommy?" she asked. "You were gone when I came
+out."
+
+"Look in the basket," I said, rising to my feet. She looked, and gave
+a little scream--of delight, I was pleased to note.
+
+"Oh, Tommy!" she said. "It was just what I wanted you to do. It's
+leaking a little, but that doesn't matter. Wasn't I telling you?
+It's the little things that count. And you remembered."
+
+Little things! She held the ensanguined head of Louis Devoe in her
+white apron. Tiny streams of red widened on her apron and dripped
+upon the floor. Her face was bright and tender.
+
+"Little things, indeed!" I thought again. "The head-hunters are
+right. These are the things that women like you to do for them."
+
+Chloe came close to me. There was no one in sight. She looked tip at
+me with sea-blue eyes that said things they had never said before.
+
+"You think of me," she said. "You are the man I was describing. You
+think of the little things, and they are what make the world worth
+living in. The man for me must consider my little wishes, and make me
+happy in small ways. He must bring me little red peaches in December
+if I wish for them, and then I will love him till June. I will have
+no knight in armor slaying his rival or killing dragons for me. You
+please me very well, Tommy."
+
+I stooped and kissed her. Then a moisture broke out on my forehead,
+and I began to feel weak. I saw the red stains vanish from Chloe's
+apron, and the head of Louis Devoe turn to a brown, dried cocoanut.
+
+"There will be cocoanut-pudding for dinner, Tommy, boy," said Chloe,
+gayly, "and you must come. I must go in for a little while."
+
+She vanished in a delightful flutter.
+
+Dr. Stamford tramped up hurriedly. He seized my pulse as though it
+were his own property that I had escaped with.
+
+"You are the biggest fool outside of any asylum!" he said, angrily.
+"Why did you leave your bed? And the idiotic things you've been
+doing!--and no wonder, with your pulse going like a sledge-hammer."
+
+"Name some of them," said I.
+
+"Devoe sent for me," said Stamford. "He saw you from his window go to
+old Campos' store, chase him up the hill with his own yardstick, and
+then come back and make off with his biggest cocoanut."
+
+"It's the little things that count, after all," said I.
+
+"It's your little bed that counts with you just now," said the doctor.
+"You come with me at once, or I'll throw up the case. 'You're as
+loony as a loon."
+
+So I got no cocoanut-pudding that evening, but I conceived a distrust
+as to the value of the method of the head-hunters. Perhaps for many
+centuries the maidens of the villages may have been looking wistfully
+at the heads in the baskets at the doorways, longing for other and
+lesser trophies.
+
+
+
+
+NO STORY
+
+
+To avoid having this book hurled into corner of the room by the
+suspicious reader, I will assert in time that this is not a newspaper
+story. You will encounter no shirt-sleeved, omniscient city editor,
+no prodigy "cub" reporter just off the farm, no scoop, no story--no
+anything.
+
+But if you will concede me the setting of the first scene in the
+reporters' room of the _Morning Beacon_, I will repay the favor by
+keeping strictly my promises set forth above.
+
+I was doing space-work on the _Beacon_, hoping to be put on a salary.
+Some one had cleared with a rake or a shovel a small space for me at
+the end of a long table piled high with exchanges, _Congressional
+Records_, and old files. There I did my work. I wrote whatever the
+city whispered or roared or chuckled to me on my diligent wanderings
+about its streets. My income was not regular.
+
+One day Tripp came in and leaned on my table. Tripp was something in
+the mechanical department--I think he had something to do with the
+pictures, for he smelled of photographers' supplies, and his hands
+were always stained and cut up with acids. He was about twenty-five
+and looked forty. Half of his face was covered with short, curly red
+whiskers that looked like a door-mat with the "welcome" left off. He
+was pale and unhealthy and miserable and fawning, and an assiduous
+borrower of sums ranging from twenty-five cents to a dollar. One
+dollar was his limit. He knew the extent of his credit as well as the
+Chemical National Bank knows the amount of H2O that collateral will
+show on analysis. When he sat on my table he held one hand with the
+other to keep both from shaking. Whiskey. He had a spurious air of
+lightness and bravado about him that deceived no one, but was useful
+in his borrowing because it was so pitifully and perceptibly assumed.
+
+This day I had coaxed from the cashier five shining silver dollars as
+a grumbling advance on a story that the Sunday editor had reluctantly
+accepted. So if I was not feeling at peace with the world, at least
+an armistice had been declared; and I was beginning with ardor to
+write a description of the Brooklyn Bridge by moonlight.
+
+"Well, Tripp," said I, looking up at him rather impatiently, "how goes
+it?" He was looking to-day more miserable, more cringing and haggard
+and downtrodden than I had ever seen him. He was at that stage of
+misery where he drew your pity so fully that you longed to kick him.
+
+"Have you got a dollar?" asked Tripp, with his most fawning look
+and his dog-like eyes that blinked in the narrow space between his
+high-growing matted beard and his low-growing matted hair.
+
+"I have," said I; and again I said, "I have," more loudly and
+inhospitably, "and four besides. And I had hard work corkscrewing
+them out of old Atkinson, I can tell you. And I drew them," I
+continued, "to meet a want--a hiatus--a demand--a need--an exigency--a
+requirement of exactly five dollars."
+
+I was driven to emphasis by the premonition that I was to lose one of
+the dollars on the spot.
+
+"I don't want to borrow any," said Tripp, and I breathed again. "I
+thought you'd like to get put onto a good story," he went on. "I've
+got a rattling fine one for you. You ought to make it run a column
+at least. It'll make a dandy if you work it up right. It'll probably
+cost you a dollar or two to get the stuff. I don't want anything out
+of it myself."
+
+I became placated. The proposition showed that Tripp appreciated past
+favors, although he did not return them. If he had been wise enough
+to strike me for a quarter then he would have got it.
+
+"What is the story?" I asked, poising my pencil with a finely
+calculated editorial air.
+
+"I'll tell you," said Tripp. "It's a girl. A beauty. One of the
+howlingest Amsden's Junes you ever saw. Rosebuds covered with dew--
+violets in their mossy bed--and truck like that. She's lived on Long
+Island twenty years and never saw New York City before. I ran against
+her on Thirty-fourth Street. She'd just got in on the East River
+ferry. I tell you, she's a beauty that would take the hydrogen out
+of all the peroxides in the world. She stopped me on the street and
+asked me where she could find George Brown. Asked me where she could
+find _George Brown in New York City!_ What do you think of that?
+
+"I talked to her, and found that she was going to marry a young
+farmer named Dodd--Hiram Dodd--next week. But it seems that George
+Brown still holds the championship in her youthful fancy. George had
+greased his cowhide boots some years ago, and came to the city to make
+his fortune. But he forgot to remember to show up again at Greenburg,
+and Hiram got in as second-best choice. But when it comes to the
+scratch Ada--her name's Ada Lowery--saddles a nag and rides eight
+miles to the railroad station and catches the 6.45 A.M. train for
+the city. Looking for George, you know--you understand about women--
+George wasn't there, so she wanted him.
+
+"Well, you know, I couldn't leave her loose in Wolftown-on-the-Hudson.
+I suppose she thought the first person she inquired of would say:
+'George Brown?--why, yes--lemme see--he's a short man with light-blue
+eyes, ain't he? Oh yes--you'll find George on One Hundred and
+Twenty-fifth Street, right next to the grocery. He's bill-clerk in
+a saddle-and-harness store.' That's about how innocent and beautiful
+she is. You know those little Long Island water-front villages like
+Greenburg--a couple of duck-farms for sport, and clams and about nine
+summer visitors for industries. That's the kind of a place she comes
+from. But, say--you ought to see her!
+
+"What could I do? I don't know what money looks like in the morning.
+And she'd paid her last cent of pocket-money for her railroad ticket
+except a quarter, which she had squandered on gum-drops. She was
+eating them out of a paper bag. I took her to a boarding-house on
+Thirty-second Street where I used to live, and hocked her. She's in
+soak for a dollar. That's old Mother McGinnis' price per day. I'll
+show you the house."
+
+"What words are these, Tripp?" said I. "I thought you said you had a
+story. Every ferryboat that crosses the East River brings or takes
+away girls from Long Island."
+
+The premature lines on Tripp's face grew deeper. He frowned seriously
+from his tangle of hair. He separated his hands and emphasized his
+answer with one shaking forefinger.
+
+"Can't you see," he said, "what a rattling fine story it would make?
+You could do it fine. All about the romance, you know, and describe
+the girl, and put a lot of stuff in it about true love, and sling
+in a few stickfuls of funny business--joshing the Long Islanders
+about being green, and, well--you know how to do it. You ought to
+get fifteen dollars out of it, anyhow. And it'll cost you only about
+four dollars. You'll make a clear profit of eleven."
+
+"How will it cost me four dollars?" I asked, suspiciously.
+
+"One dollar to Mrs. McGinnis," Tripp answered, promptly, "and two
+dollars to pay the girl's fare back home."
+
+"And the fourth dimension?" I inquired, making a rapid mental
+calculation.
+
+"One dollar to me," said Tripp. "For whiskey. Are you on?"
+
+I smiled enigmatically and spread my elbows as if to begin writing
+again. But this grim, abject, specious, subservient, burr-like wreck
+of a man would not be shaken off. His forehead suddenly became
+shiningly moist.
+
+"Don't you see," he said, with a sort of desperate calmness, "that
+this girl has got to be sent home to-day--not to-night nor to-morrow,
+but to-day? I can't do anything for her. You know, I'm the janitor
+and corresponding secretary of the Down-and-Out Club. I thought you
+could make a newspaper story out of it and win out a piece of money
+on general results. But, anyhow, don't you see that she's got to get
+back home before night?"
+
+And then I began to feel that dull, leaden, soul-depressing sensation
+known as the sense of duty. Why should that sense fall upon one as a
+weight and a burden? I knew that I was doomed that day to give up the
+bulk of my store of hard-wrung coin to the relief of this Ada Lowery.
+But I swore to myself that Tripp's whiskey dollar would not be
+forthcoming. He might play knight-errant at my expense, but he would
+indulge in no wassail afterward, commemorating my weakness and
+gullibility. In a kind of chilly anger I put on my coat and hat.
+
+Tripp, submissive, cringing, vainly endeavoring to please, conducted
+me via the street-cars to the human pawn-shop of Mother McGinnis. I
+paid the fares. It seemed that the collodion-scented Don Quixote and
+the smallest minted coin were strangers.
+
+Tripp pulled the bell at the door of the mouldy red-brick
+boarding-house. At its faint tinkle he paled, and crouched as a
+rabbit makes ready to spring away at the sound of a hunting-dog.
+I guessed what a life he had led, terror-haunted by the coming
+footsteps of landladies.
+
+"Give me one of the dollars--quick!" he said.
+
+The door opened six inches. Mother McGinnis stood there with white
+eyes--they were white, I say--and a yellow face, holding together at
+her throat with one hand a dingy pink flannel dressing-sack. Tripp
+thrust the dollar through the space without a word, and it bought us
+entry.
+
+"She's in the parlor," said the McGinnis, turning the back of her sack
+upon us.
+
+In the dim parlor a girl sat at the cracked marble centre-table
+weeping comfortably and eating gum-drops. She was a flawless beauty.
+Crying had only made her brilliant eyes brighter. When she crunched
+a gum-drop you thought only of the poetry of motion and envied the
+senseless confection. Eve at the age of five minutes must have been
+a ringer for Miss Ada Lowery at nineteen or twenty. I was introduced,
+and a gum-drop suffered neglect while she conveyed to me a naïve
+interest, such as a puppy dog (a prize winner) might bestow upon a
+crawling beetle or a frog.
+
+Tripp took his stand by the table, with the fingers of one hand spread
+upon it, as an attorney or a master of ceremonies might have stood.
+But he looked the master of nothing. His faded coat was buttoned
+high, as if it sought to be charitable to deficiencies of tie and
+linen.
+
+I thought of a Scotch terrier at the sight of his shifty eyes in the
+glade between his tangled hair and beard. For one ignoble moment I
+felt ashamed of having been introduced as his friend in the presence
+of so much beauty in distress. But evidently Tripp meant to conduct
+the ceremonies, whatever they might be. I thought I detected in his
+actions and pose an intention of foisting the situation upon me as
+material for a newspaper story, in a lingering hope of extracting from
+me his whiskey dollar.
+
+"My friend" (I shuddered), "Mr. Chalmers," said Tripp, "will tell
+you, Miss Lowery, the same that I did. He's a reporter, and he can
+hand out the talk better than I can. That's why I brought him with
+me." (O Tripp, wasn't it the _silver_-tongued orator you wanted?)
+"He's wise to a lot of things, and he'll tell you now what's best
+to do."
+
+I stood on one foot, as it were, as I sat in my rickety chair.
+
+"Why--er--Miss Lowery," I began, secretly enraged at Tripp's awkward
+opening, "I am at your service, of course, but--er--as I haven't been
+apprized of the circumstances of the case, I--er--"
+
+"Oh," said Miss Lowery, beaming for a moment, "it ain't as bad as
+that--there ain't any circumstances. It's the first time I've ever
+been in New York except once when I was five years old, and I had no
+idea it was such a big town. And I met Mr.--Mr. Snip on the street
+and asked him about a friend of mine, and he brought me here and asked
+me to wait."
+
+"I advise you, Miss Lowery," said Tripp, "to tell Mr. Chalmers all.
+He's a friend of mine" (I was getting used to it by this time), "and
+he'll give you the right tip."
+
+"Why, certainly," said Miss Ada, chewing a gum-drop toward me. "There
+ain't anything to tell except that--well, everything's fixed for me to
+marry Hiram Dodd next Thursday evening. Hi has got two hundred acres
+of land with a lot of shore-front, and one of the best truck-farms on
+the Island. But this morning I had my horse saddled up--he's a white
+horse named Dancer--and I rode over to the station. I told 'em at
+home I was going to spend the day with Susie Adams. It was a story,
+I guess, but I don't care. And I came to New York on the train, and
+I met Mr.--Mr. Flip on the street and asked him if he knew where I
+could find G--G--"
+
+"Now, Miss Lowery," broke in Tripp, loudly, and with much bad taste,
+I thought, as she hesitated with her word, "you like this young man,
+Hiram Dodd, don't you? He's all right, and good to you, ain't he?"
+
+"Of course I like him," said Miss Lowery emphatically. "Hi's all
+right. And of course he's good to me. So is everybody."
+
+I could have sworn it myself. Throughout Miss Ada Lowery's life all
+men would be to good to her. They would strive, contrive, struggle,
+and compete to hold umbrellas over her hat, check her trunk, pick up
+her handkerchief, and buy for her soda at the fountain.
+
+"But," went on Miss Lowery, "last night I got to thinking about
+G--George, and I--"
+
+Down went the bright gold head upon dimpled, clasped hands on the
+table. Such a beautiful April storm! Unrestrainedly she sobbed. I
+wished I could have comforted her. But I was not George. And I was
+glad I was not Hiram--and yet I was sorry, too.
+
+By-and-by the shower passed. She straightened up, brave and half-way
+smiling. She would have made a splendid wife, for crying only made
+her eyes more bright and tender. She took a gum-drop and began her
+story.
+
+"I guess I'm a terrible hayseed," she said between her little gulps
+and sighs, "but I can't help it. G--George Brown and I were sweethearts
+since he was eight and I was five. When he was nineteen--that was
+four years ago--he left Greenburg and went to the city. He said he was
+going to be a policeman or a railroad president or something. And then
+he was coming back for me. But I never heard from him any more. And
+I--I--liked him."
+
+Another flow of tears seemed imminent, but Tripp hurled himself into
+the crevasse and dammed it. Confound him, I could see his game. He
+was trying to make a story of it for his sordid ends and profit.
+
+"Go on, Mr. Chalmers," said he, "and tell the lady what's the proper
+caper. That's what I told her--you'd hand it to her straight. Spiel
+up."
+
+I coughed, and tried to feel less wrathful toward Tripp. I saw my
+duty. Cunningly I had been inveigled, but I was securely trapped.
+Tripp's first dictum to me had been just and correct. The young lady
+must be sent back to Greenburg that day. She must be argued with,
+convinced, assured, instructed, ticketed, and returned without delay.
+I hated Hiram and despised George; but duty must be done. _Noblesse
+oblige_ and only five silver dollars are not strictly romantic
+compatibles, but sometimes they can be made to jibe. It was mine to
+be Sir Oracle, and then pay the freight. So I assumed an air that
+mingled Solomon's with that of the general passenger agent of the
+Long Island Railroad.
+
+"Miss Lowery," said I, as impressively as I could, "life is rather a
+queer proposition, after all." There was a familiar sound to these
+words after I had spoken them, and I hoped Miss Lowery had never
+heard Mr. Cohan's song. "Those whom we first love we seldom wed. Our
+earlier romances, tinged with the magic radiance of youth, often fail
+to materialize." The last three words sounded somewhat trite when
+they struck the air. "But those fondly cherished dreams," I went
+on, "may cast a pleasant afterglow on our future lives, however
+impracticable and vague they may have been. But life is full of
+realities as well as visions and dreams. One cannot live on memories.
+May I ask, Miss Lowery, if you think you could pass a happy--that is,
+a contented and harmonious life with Mr.--er--Dodd--if in other ways
+than romantic recollections he seems to--er--fill the bill, as I might
+say?"
+
+"Oh, Hi's all right," answered Miss Lowery. "Yes, I could get along
+with him fine. He's promised me an automobile and a motor-boat. But
+somehow, when it got so close to the time I was to marry him, I
+couldn't help wishing--well, just thinking about George. Something
+must have happened to him or he'd have written. On the day he left,
+he and me got a hammer and a chisel and cut a dime into two pieces. I
+took one piece and he took the other, and we promised to be true to
+each other and always keep the pieces till we saw each other again.
+I've got mine at home now in a ring-box in the top drawer of my
+dresser. I guess I was silly to come up here looking for him. I
+never realized what a big place it is."
+
+And then Tripp joined in with a little grating laugh that he had,
+still trying to drag in a little story or drama to earn the miserable
+dollar that he craved.
+
+"Oh, the boys from the country forget a lot when they come to the city
+and learn something. I guess George, maybe, is on the bum, or got
+roped in by some other girl, or maybe gone to the dogs on account of
+whiskey or the races. You listen to Mr. Chalmers and go back home,
+and you'll be all right."
+
+But now the time was come for action, for the hands of the clock
+were moving close to noon. Frowning upon Tripp, I argued gently and
+philosophically with Miss Lowery, delicately convincing her of the
+importance of returning home at once. And I impressed upon her
+the truth that it would not be absolutely necessary to her future
+happiness that she mention to Hi the wonders or the fact of her visit
+to the city that had swallowed up the unlucky George.
+
+She said she had left her horse (unfortunate Rosinante) tied to a tree
+near the railroad station. Tripp and I gave her instructions to mount
+the patient steed as soon as she arrived and ride home as fast as
+possible. There she was to recount the exciting adventure of a day
+spent with Susie Adams. She could "fix" Susie--I was sure of that--
+and all would be well.
+
+And then, being susceptible to the barbed arrows of beauty, I warmed
+to the adventure. The three of us hurried to the ferry, and there I
+found the price of a ticket to Greenburg to be but a dollar and eighty
+cents. I bought one, and a red, red rose with the twenty cents for
+Miss Lowery. We saw her aboard her ferryboat, and stood watching her
+wave her handkerchief at us until it was the tiniest white patch
+imaginable. And then Tripp and I faced each other, brought back to
+earth, left dry and desolate in the shade of the sombre verities of
+life.
+
+The spell wrought by beauty and romance was dwindling. I looked at
+Tripp and almost sneered. He looked more careworn, contemptible, and
+disreputable than ever. I fingered the two silver dollars remaining
+in my pocket and looked at him with the half-closed eyelids of
+contempt. He mustered up an imitation of resistance.
+
+"Can't you get a story out of it?" he asked, huskily. "Some sort of
+a story, even if you have to fake part of it?"
+
+"Not a line," said I. "I can fancy the look on Grimes' face if I
+should try to put over any slush like this. But we've helped the
+little lady out, and that'll have to be our only reward."
+
+"I'm sorry," said Tripp, almost inaudibly. "I'm sorry you're out your
+money. Now, it seemed to me like a find of a big story, you know--
+that is, a sort of thing that would write up pretty well."
+
+"Let's try to forget it," said I, with a praiseworthy attempt at
+gayety, "and take the next car 'cross town."
+
+I steeled myself against his unexpressed but palpable desire. He
+should not coax, cajole, or wring from me the dollar he craved. I had
+had enough of that wild-goose chase.
+
+Tripp feebly unbuttoned his coat of the faded pattern and glossy seams
+to reach for something that had once been a handkerchief deep down in
+some obscure and cavernous pocket. As he did so I caught the shine
+of a cheap silver-plated watch-chain across his vest, and something
+dangling from it caused me to stretch forth my hand and seize it
+curiously. It was the half of a silver dime that had been cut in
+halves with a chisel.
+
+"What!" I said, looking at him keenly.
+
+"Oh yes," he responded, dully. "George Brown, alias Tripp. What's
+the use?"
+
+Barring the W. C. T. U., I'd like to know if anybody disapproves of
+my having produced promptly from my pocket Tripp's whiskey dollar and
+unhesitatingly laying it in his hand.
+
+
+
+
+THE HIGHER PRAGMATISM
+
+
+I
+
+
+Where to go for wisdom has become a question of serious import.
+The ancients are discredited; Plato is boiler-plate; Aristotle is
+tottering; Marcus Aurelius is reeling; Æsop has been copyrighted by
+Indiana; Solomon is too solemn; you couldn't get anything out of
+Epictetus with a pick.
+
+The ant, which for many years served as a model of intelligence and
+industry in the school-readers, has been proven to be a doddering
+idiot and a waster of time and effort. The owl to-day is hooted at.
+Chautauqua conventions have abandoned culture and adopted diabolo.
+Graybeards give glowing testimonials to the venders of patent
+hair-restorers. There are typographical errors in the almanacs
+published by the daily newspapers. College professors have become--
+
+But there shall be no personalities.
+
+To sit in classes, to delve into the encyclopedia or the
+past-performances page, will not make us wise. As the poet says,
+"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers." Wisdom is dew, which, while
+we know it not, soaks into us, refreshes us, and makes us grow.
+Knowledge is a strong stream of water turned on us through a hose.
+It disturbs our roots.
+
+Then, let us rather gather wisdom. But how to do so requires
+knowledge. If we know a thing, we know it; but very often we are not
+wise to it that we are wise, and--
+
+But let's go on with the story.
+
+
+II
+
+
+Once upon a time I found a ten-cent magazine lying on a bench in a
+little city park. Anyhow, that was the amount he asked me for when
+I sat on the bench next to him. He was a musty, dingy, and tattered
+magazine, with some queer stories bound in him, I was sure. He turned
+out to be a scrap-book.
+
+"I am a newspaper reporter," I said to him, to try him. "I have been
+detailed to write up some of the experiences of the unfortunate ones
+who spend their evenings in this park. May I ask you to what you
+attribute your downfall in--"
+
+I was interrupted by a laugh from my purchase--a laugh so rusty and
+unpractised that I was sure it had been his first for many a day.
+
+"Oh, no, no," said he. "You ain't a reporter. Reporters don't talk
+that way. They pretend to be one of us, and say they've just got in
+on the blind baggage from St. Louis. I can tell a reporter on sight.
+Us park bums get to be fine judges of human nature. We sit here all
+day and watch the people go by. I can size up anybody who walks past
+my bench in a way that would surprise you."
+
+"Well," I said, "go on and tell me. How do you size me up?"
+
+"I should say," said the student of human nature with unpardonable
+hesitation, "that you was, say, in the contracting business--or maybe
+worked in a store--or was a sign-painter. You stopped in the park to
+finish your cigar, and thought you'd get a little free monologue out
+of me. Still, you might be a plasterer or a lawyer--it's getting kind
+of dark, you see. And your wife won't let you smoke at home."
+
+I frowned gloomily.
+
+"But, judging again," went on the reader of men, "I'd say you ain't
+got a wife."
+
+"No," said I, rising restlessly. "No, no, no, I ain't. But I _will_
+have, by the arrows of Cupid! That is, if--"
+
+My voice must have trailed away and muffled itself in uncertainty and
+despair.
+
+"I see you have a story yourself," said the dusty vagrant--impudently,
+it seemed to me. "Suppose you take your dime back and spin your yarn
+for me. I'm interested myself in the ups and downs of unfortunate
+ones who spend their evenings in the park."
+
+Somehow, that amused me. I looked at the frowsy derelict with more
+interest. I did have a story. Why not tell it to him? I had told
+none of my friends. I had always been a reserved and bottled-up man.
+It was psychical timidity or sensitiveness--perhaps both. And I smiled
+to myself in wonder when I felt an impulse to confide in this stranger
+and vagabond.
+
+"Jack," said I.
+
+"Mack," said he.
+
+"Mack," said I, "I'll tell you."
+
+"Do you want the dime back in advance?" said he.
+
+I handed him a dollar.
+
+"The dime," said I, "was the price of listening to _your_ story."
+
+"Right on the point of the jaw," said he. "Go on."
+
+And then, incredible as it may seem to the lovers in the world who
+confide their sorrows only to the night wind and the gibbous moon, I
+laid bare my secret to that wreck of all things that you would have
+supposed to be in sympathy with love.
+
+I told him of the days and weeks and months that I had spent in
+adoring Mildred Telfair. I spoke of my despair, my grievous days
+and wakeful nights, my dwindling hopes and distress of mind. I even
+pictured to this night-prowler her beauty and dignity, the great sway
+she had in society, and the magnificence of her life as the elder
+daughter of an ancient race whose pride overbalanced the dollars of
+the city's millionaires.
+
+"Why don't you cop the lady out?" asked Mack, bringing me down to
+earth and dialect again.
+
+I explained to him that my worth was so small, my income so minute,
+and my fears so large that I hadn't the courage to speak to her of
+my worship. I told him that in her presence I could only blush and
+stammer, and that she looked upon me with a wonderful, maddening smile
+of amusement.
+
+"She kind of moves in the professional class, don't she?" asked Mack.
+
+"The Telfair family--" I began, haughtily.
+
+"I mean professional beauty," said my hearer.
+
+"She is greatly and widely admired," I answered, cautiously.
+
+"Any sisters?"
+
+"One."
+
+"You know any more girls?"
+
+"Why, several," I answered. "And a few others."
+
+"Say," said Mack, "tell me one thing--can you hand out the dope
+to other girls? Can you chin 'em and make matinée eyes at 'em and
+squeeze 'em? You know what I mean. You're just shy when it comes to
+this particular dame--the professional beauty--ain't that right?"
+
+"In a way you have outlined the situation with approximate truth," I
+admitted.
+
+"I thought so," said Mack, grimly. "Now, that reminds me of my own
+case. I'll tell you about it."
+
+I was indignant, but concealed it. What was this loafer's case or
+anybody's case compared with mine? Besides, I had given him a dollar
+and ten cents.
+
+"Feel my muscle," said my companion, suddenly, flexing his biceps. I
+did so mechanically. The fellows in gyms are always asking you to do
+that. His arm was as hard as cast-iron.
+
+"Four years ago," said Mack, "I could lick any man in New York outside
+of the professional ring. Your case and mine is just the same. I come
+from the West Side--between Thirtieth and Fourteenth--I won't give the
+number on the door. I was a scrapper when I was ten, and when I was
+twenty no amateur in the city could stand up four rounds with me. 'S
+a fact. You know Bill McCarty? No? He managed the smokers for some
+of them swell clubs. Well, I knocked out everything Bill brought up
+before me. I was a middle-weight, but could train down to a welter
+when necessary. I boxed all over the West Side at bouts and benefits
+and private entertainments, and was never put out once.
+
+"But, say, the first time I put my foot in the ring with a professional
+I was no more than a canned lobster. I dunno how it was--I seemed to
+lose heart. I guess I got too much imagination. There was a formality
+and publicness about it that kind of weakened my nerve. I never won a
+fight in the ring. Light-weights and all kinds of scrubs used to sign
+up with my manager and then walk up and tap me on the wrist and see me
+fall. The minute I seen the crowd and a lot of gents in evening clothes
+down in front, and seen a professional come inside the ropes, I got as
+weak as ginger-ale.
+
+"Of course, it wasn't long till I couldn't get no backers, and I didn't
+have any more chances to fight a professional--or many amateurs,
+either. But lemme tell you--I was as good as most men inside the ring
+or out. It was just that dumb, dead feeling I had when I was up against
+a regular that always done me up.
+
+"Well, sir, after I had got out of the business, I got a mighty grouch
+on. I used to go round town licking private citizens and all kinds of
+unprofessionals just to please myself. I'd lick cops in dark streets
+and car-conductors and cab-drivers and draymen whenever I could start
+a row with 'em. It didn't make any difference how big they were, or
+how much science they had, I got away with 'em. If I'd only just have
+had the confidence in the ring that I had beating up the best men
+outside of it, I'd be wearing black pearls and heliotrope silk socks
+to-day.
+
+"One evening I was walking along near the Bowery, thinking about
+things, when along comes a slumming-party. About six or seven they
+was, all in swallowtails, and these silk hats that don't shine. One
+of the gang kind of shoves me off the sidewalk. I hadn't had a scrap
+in three days, and I just says, 'De-light-ed!' and hits him back of
+the ear.
+
+"Well, we had it. That Johnnie put up as decent a little fight as
+you'd want to see in the moving pictures. It was on a side street,
+and no cops around. The other guy had a lot of science, but it only
+took me about six minutes to lay him out.
+
+"Some of the swallowtails dragged him up against some steps and began
+to fan him. Another one of 'em comes over to me and says:
+
+"'Young man, do you know what you've done?'
+
+"'Oh, beat it,' says I. 'I've done nothing but a little punching-bag
+work. Take Freddy back to Yale and tell him to quit studying
+sociology on the wrong side of the sidewalk.'
+
+"'My good fellow,' says he, 'I don't know who you are, but I'd like
+to. You've knocked out Reddy Burns, the champion middle-weight of the
+world! He came to New York yesterday, to try to get a match on with
+Jim Jeffries. If you--'
+
+"But when I come out of my faint I was laying on the floor in a
+drug-store saturated with aromatic spirits of ammonia. If I'd known
+that was Reddy Burns, I'd have got down in the gutter and crawled past
+him instead of handing him one like I did. Why, if I'd ever been in a
+ring and seen him climbing over the ropes, I'd have been all to the
+sal-volatile.
+
+"So that's what imagination does," concluded Mack. "And, as I said,
+your case and mine is simultaneous. You'll never win out. You can't
+go up against the professionals. I tell you, it's a park bench for
+yours in this romance business."
+
+Mack, the pessimist, laughed harshly.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't see the parallel," I said, coldly. "I have only a
+very slight acquaintance with the prize-ring."
+
+The derelict touched my sleeve with his forefinger, for emphasis, as
+he explained his parable.
+
+"Every man," said he, with some dignity, "has got his lamps on
+something that looks good to him. With you, it's this dame that
+you're afraid to say your say to. With me, it was to win out in the
+ring. Well, you'll lose just like I did."
+
+"Why do you think I shall lose?" I asked warmly.
+
+"'Cause," said he, "you're afraid to go in the ring. You dassen't
+stand up before a professional. Your case and mine is just the same.
+You're a amateur; and that means that you'd better keep outside of the
+ropes."
+
+"Well, I must be going," I said, rising and looking with elaborate
+care at my watch.
+
+When I was twenty feet away the park-bencher called to me.
+
+"Much obliged for the dollar," he said. "And for the dime. But
+you'll never get 'er. You're in the amateur class."
+
+"Serves you right," I said to myself, "for hobnobbing with a tramp.
+His impudence!"
+
+But, as I walked, his words seemed to repeat themselves over and over
+again in my brain. I think I even grew angry at the man.
+
+"I'll show him!" I finally said, aloud. "I'll show him that I can
+fight Reddy Burns, too--even knowing who he is."
+
+I hurried to a telephone-booth and rang up the Telfair residence.
+
+A soft, sweet voice answered. Didn't I know that voice? My hand
+holding the receiver shook.
+
+"Is that _you_?" said I, employing the foolish words that form the
+vocabulary of every talker through the telephone.
+
+"Yes, this is I," came back the answer in the low, clear-cut tones
+that are an inheritance of the Telfairs. "Who is it, please?"
+
+"It's me," said I, less ungrammatically than egotistically. "It's me,
+and I've got a few things that I want to say to you right now and
+immediately and straight to the point."
+
+"_Dear_ me," said the voice. "Oh, it's you, Mr. Arden!"
+
+I wondered if any accent on the first word was intended; Mildred was
+fine at saying things that you had to study out afterward.
+
+"Yes," said I. "I hope so. And now to come down to brass tacks." I
+thought that rather a vernacularism, if there is such a word, as
+soon as I had said it; but I didn't stop to apologize. "You know, of
+course, that I love you, and that I have been in that idiotic state
+for a long time. I don't want any more foolishness about it--that is,
+I mean I want an answer from you right now. Will you marry me or not?
+Hold the wire, please. Keep out, Central. Hello, hello! Will you, or
+will you _not_?"
+
+That was just the uppercut for Reddy Burns' chin. The answer came
+back:
+
+"Why, Phil, dear, of course I will! I didn't know that you--that is,
+you never said--oh, come up to the house, please--I can't say what I
+want to over the 'phone. You are so importunate. But please come up
+to the house, won't you?"
+
+Would I?
+
+I rang the bell of the Telfair house violently. Some sort of a human
+came to the door and shooed me into the drawing-room.
+
+"Oh, well," said I to myself, looking at the ceiling, "any one can
+learn from any one. That was a pretty good philosophy of Mack's,
+anyhow. He didn't take advantage of his experience, but I get the
+benefit of it. If you want to get into the professional class, you've
+got to--"
+
+I stopped thinking then. Some one was coming down the stairs. My
+knees began to shake. I knew then how Mack had felt when a
+professional began to climb over the ropes.
+
+I looked around foolishly for a door or a window by which I might
+escape. If it had been any other girl approaching, I mightn't have--
+
+But just then the door opened, and Bess, Mildred's younger sister,
+came in. I'd never seen her look so much like a glorified angel. She
+walked straight tip to me, and--and--
+
+I'd never noticed before what perfectly wonderful eyes and hair
+Elizabeth Telfair had.
+
+"Phil," she said, in the Telfair, sweet, thrilling tones, "why didn't
+you tell me about it before? I thought it was sister you wanted all
+the time, until you telephoned to me a few minutes ago!"
+
+I suppose Mack and I always will be hopeless amateurs. But, as the
+thing has turned out in my case, I'm mighty glad of it.
+
+
+
+
+BEST-SELLER
+
+
+I
+
+
+One day last summer I went to Pittsburgh--well, I had to go there on
+business.
+
+My chair-car was profitably well filled with people of the kind one
+usually sees on chair-cars. Most of them were ladies in brown-silk
+dresses cut with square yokes, with lace insertion, and dotted veils,
+who refused to have the windows raised. Then there was the usual
+number of men who looked as if they might be in almost any business
+and going almost anywhere. Some students of human nature can look at
+a man in a Pullman and tell you where he is from, his occupation and
+his stations in life, both flag and social; but I never could. The
+only way I can correctly judge a fellow-traveller is when the train is
+held up by robbers, or when he reaches at the same time I do for the
+last towel in the dressing-room of the sleeper.
+
+The porter came and brushed the collection of soot on the window-sill
+off to the left knee of my trousers. I removed it with an air of
+apology. The temperature was eighty-eight. One of the dotted-veiled
+ladies demanded the closing of two more ventilators, and spoke loudly
+of Interlaken. I leaned back idly in chair No. 7, and looked with
+the tepidest curiosity at the small, black, bald-spotted head just
+visible above the back of No. 9.
+
+Suddenly No. 9 hurled a book to the floor between his chair and the
+window, and, looking, I saw that it was "The Rose-Lady and Trevelyan,"
+one of the best-selling novels of the present day. And then the
+critic or Philistine, whichever he was, veered his chair toward the
+window, and I knew him at once for John A. Pescud, of Pittsburgh,
+travelling salesman for a plate-glass company--an old acquaintance
+whom I had not seen in two years.
+
+In two minutes we were faced, had shaken hands, and had finished with
+such topics as rain, prosperity, health, residence, and destination.
+Politics might have followed next; but I was not so ill-fated.
+
+I wish you might know John A. Pescud. He is of the stuff that heroes
+are not often lucky enough to be made of. He is a small man with a
+wide smile, and an eye that seems to be fixed upon that little red
+spot on the end of your nose. I never saw him wear but one kind of
+necktie, and he believes in cuff-holders and button-shoes. He is as
+hard and true as anything ever turned out by the Cambria Steel Works;
+and he believes that as soon as Pittsburgh makes smoke-consumers
+compulsory, St. Peter will come down and sit at the foot of
+Smithfield Street, and let somebody else attend to the gate up in
+the branch heaven. He believes that "our" plate-glass is the most
+important commodity in the world, and that when a man is in his home
+town he ought to be decent and law-abiding.
+
+During my acquaintance with him in the City of Diurnal Night I had
+never known his views on life, romance, literature, and ethics. We
+had browsed, during our meetings, on local topics, and then parted,
+after Chateau Margaux, Irish stew, flannel-cakes, cottage-pudding,
+and coffee (hey, there!--with milk separate). Now I was to get more
+of his ideas. By way of facts, he told me that business had picked
+up since the party conventions, and that he was going to get off at
+Coketown.
+
+
+II
+
+
+"Say," said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his
+right shoe, "did you ever read one of these best-sellers? I mean
+the kind where the hero is an American swell--sometimes even from
+Chicago--who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is
+travelling under an alias, and follows her to her father's kingdom
+or principality? I guess you have. They're all alike. Sometimes
+this going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent,
+and sometimes he is a Van Something from New York, or a Chicago
+wheat-broker worthy fifty millions. But he's always ready to break
+into the king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens
+and princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four or the B.
+and O. There doesn't seem to be any other reason in the book for their
+being here.
+
+"Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said, and
+finds out who she is. He meets her on the _corso_ or the _strasse_ one
+evening and gives us ten pages of conversation. She reminds him of
+the difference in their stations, and that gives him a chance to ring
+in three solid pages about America's uncrowned sovereigns. If you'd
+take his remarks and set 'em to music, and then take the music away
+from 'em, they'd sound exactly like one of George Cohan's songs.
+
+"Well, you know how it runs on, if you've read any of 'em--he slaps
+the king's Swiss body-guards around like everything whenever they
+get in his way. He's a great fencer, too. Now, I've known of some
+Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of
+any fencers coming from there. He stands on the first landing of the
+royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier
+in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors
+who come to massacre the said king. And then he has to fight duels
+with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian
+archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.
+
+"But the great scene is when his rival for the princess' hand, Count
+Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel,
+armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian
+bloodhounds. This scene is what runs the best-seller into the
+twenty-ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a
+check for the advance royalties.
+
+"The American hero shucks his coat and throws it over the heads of the
+bloodhounds, gives the mitrailleuse a slap with his mitt, says 'Yah!'
+to the yataghan, and lands in Kid McCoy's best style on the count's
+left eye. Of course, we have a neat little prize-fight right then
+and there. The count--in order to make the go possible--seems to be
+an expert at the art of self-defence, himself; and here we have the
+Corbett-Sullivan fight done over into literature. The book ends with
+the broker and the princess doing a John Cecil Clay cover under the
+linden-trees on the Gorgonzola Walk. That winds up the love-story
+plenty good enough. But I notice that the book dodges the final
+issue. Even a best-seller has sense enough to shy at either leaving a
+Chicago grain broker on the throne of Lobsterpotsdam or bringing over
+a real princess to eat fish and potato salad in an Italian chalet on
+Michigan Avenue. What do you think about 'em?"
+
+"Why," said I, "I hardly know, John. There's a saying: 'Love levels
+all ranks,' you know."
+
+"Yes," said Pescud, "but these kind of love-stories are rank--on the
+level. I know something about literature, even if I am in plate-glass.
+These kind of books are wrong, and yet I never go into a train but
+what they pile 'em up on me. No good can come out of an international
+clinch between the Old-World aristocracy and one of us fresh
+Americans. When people in real life marry, they generally hunt up
+somebody in their own station. A fellow usually picks out a girl that
+went to the same high-school and belonged to the same singing-society
+that he did. When young millionaires fall in love, they always select
+the chorus-girl that likes the same kind of sauce on the lobster that
+he does. Washington newspaper correspondents always many widow ladies
+ten years older than themselves who keep boarding-houses. No, sir,
+you can't make a novel sound right to me when it makes one of C. D.
+Gibson's bright young men go abroad and turn kingdoms upside down
+just because he's a Taft American and took a course at a gymnasium.
+And listen how they talk, too!"
+
+Pescud picked up the best-seller and hunted his page.
+
+"Listen at this," said he. "Trevelyan is chinning with the Princess
+Alwyna at the back end of the tulip-garden. This is how it goes:
+
+
+   "'Say not so, dearest and sweetest of earth's fairest flowers.
+   Would I aspire? You are a star set high above me in a royal
+   heaven; I am only--myself. Yet I am a man, and I have a heart
+   to do and dare. I have no title save that of an uncrowned
+   sovereign; but I have an arm and a sword that yet might free
+   Schutzenfestenstein from the plots of traitors.'
+
+
+"Think of a Chicago man packing a sword, and talking about freeing
+anything that sounded as much like canned pork as that! He'd be much
+more likely to fight to have an import duty put on it."
+
+"I think I understand you, John," said I. "You want fiction-writers
+to be consistent with their scenes and characters. They shouldn't
+mix Turkish pashas with Vermont farmers, or English dukes with Long
+Island clam-diggers, or Italian countesses with Montana cowboys, or
+Cincinnati brewery agents with the rajahs of India."
+
+"Or plain business men with aristocracy high above 'em," added Pescud.
+"It don't jibe. People are divided into classes, whether we admit it
+or not, and it's everybody's impulse to stick to their own class.
+They do it, too. I don't see why people go to work and buy hundreds
+of thousands of books like that. You don't see or hear of any such
+didoes and capers in real life."
+
+
+III
+
+
+"Well, John," said I, "I haven't read a best-seller in a long time.
+Maybe I've had notions about them somewhat like yours. But tell me
+more about yourself. Getting along all right with the company?"
+
+"Bully," said Pescud, brightening at once. "I've had my salary raised
+twice since I saw you, and I get a commission, too. I've bought a
+neat slice of real estate out in the East End, and have run up a
+house on it. Next year the firm is going to sell me some shares of
+stock. Oh, I'm in on the line of General Prosperity, no matter who's
+elected!"
+
+"Met your affinity yet, John?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, I didn't tell you about that, did I?" said Pescud with a broader
+grin.
+
+"O-ho!" I said. "So you've taken time enough off from your plate-glass
+to have a romance?"
+
+"No, no," said John. "No romance--nothing like that! But I'll tell
+you about it.
+
+"I was on the south-bound, going to Cincinnati, about eighteen months
+ago, when I saw, across the aisle, the finest-looking girl I'd ever
+laid eyes on. Nothing spectacular, you know, but just the sort you
+want for keeps. Well, I never was up to the flirtation business,
+either handkerchief, automobile, postage-stamp, or door-step, and she
+wasn't the kind to start anything. She read a book and minded her
+business, which was to make the world prettier and better just by
+residing on it. I kept on looking out of the side doors of my eyes,
+and finally the proposition got out of the Pullman class into a case
+of a cottage with a lawn and vines running over the porch. I never
+thought of speaking to her, but I let the plate-glass business go to
+smash for a while.
+
+"She changed cars at Cincinnati, and took a sleeper to Louisville over
+the L. and N. There she bought another ticket, and went on through
+Shelbyville, Frankfort, and Lexington. Along there I began to have
+a hard time keeping up with her. The trains came along when they
+pleased, and didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular, except to
+keep on the track and the right of way as much as possible. Then they
+began to stop at junctions instead of towns, and at last they stopped
+altogether. I'll bet Pinkerton would outbid the plate-glass people
+for my services any time if they knew how I managed to shadow that
+young lady. I contrived to keep out of her sight as much as I could,
+but I never lost track of her.
+
+"The last station she got off at was away down in Virginia, about
+six in the afternoon. There were about fifty houses and four hundred
+niggers in sight. The rest was red mud, mules, and speckled hounds.
+
+"A tall old man, with a smooth face and white hair, looking as proud
+as Julius Cæsar and Roscoe Conkling on the same post-card, was there
+to meet her. His clothes were frazzled, but I didn't notice that
+till later. He took her little satchel, and they started over the
+plank-walks and went up a road along the hill. I kept along a piece
+behind 'em, trying to look like I was hunting a garnet ring in the
+sand that my sister had lost at a picnic the previous Saturday.
+
+"They went in a gate on top of the hill. It nearly took my breath
+away when I looked up. Up there in the biggest grove I ever saw was a
+tremendous house with round white pillars about a thousand feet high,
+and the yard was so full of rose-bushes and box-bushes and lilacs
+that you couldn't have seen the house if it hadn't been as big as the
+Capitol at Washington.
+
+"'Here's where I have to trail,' says I to myself. I thought before
+that she seemed to be in moderate circumstances, at least. This
+must be the Governor's mansion, or the Agricultural Building of a
+new World's Fair, anyhow. I'd better go back to the village and get
+posted by the postmaster, or drug the druggist for some information.
+
+"In the village I found a pine hotel called the Bay View House. The
+only excuse for the name was a bay horse grazing in the front yard. I
+set my sample-case down, and tried to be ostensible. I told the
+landlord I was taking orders for plate-glass.
+
+"'I don't want no plates,' says he, 'but I do need another glass
+molasses-pitcher.'
+
+"By-and-by I got him down to local gossip and answering questions.
+
+"'Why,' says he, 'I thought everybody knowed who lived in the big
+white house on the hill. It's Colonel Allyn, the biggest man and the
+finest quality in Virginia, or anywhere else. They're the oldest
+family in the State. That was his daughter that got off the train.
+She's been up to Illinois to see her aunt, who is sick.'
+
+"I registered at the hotel, and on the third day I caught the young
+lady walking in the front yard, down next to the paling fence. I
+stopped and raised my hat--there wasn't any other way.
+
+"'Excuse me,' says I, 'can you tell me where Mr. Hinkle lives?'
+
+"She looks at me as cool as if I was the man come to see about the
+weeding of the garden, but I thought I saw just a slight twinkle of
+fun in her eyes.
+
+"'No one of that name lives in Birchton,' says she. 'That is,' she
+goes on, 'as far as I know. Is the gentleman you are seeking white?'
+
+"Well, that tickled me. 'No kidding,' says I. 'I'm not looking for
+smoke, even if I do come from Pittsburgh.'
+
+"'You are quite a distance from home,' says she.
+
+"'I'd have gone a thousand miles farther,' says I.
+
+"'Not if you hadn't waked up when the train started in Shelbyville,'
+says she; and then she turned almost as red as one of the roses on
+the bushes in the yard. I remembered I had dropped off to sleep on a
+bench in the Shelbyville station, waiting to see which train she took,
+and only just managed to wake up in time.
+
+"And then I told her why I had come, as respectful and earnest as I
+could. And I told her everything about myself, and what I was making,
+and how that all I asked was just to get acquainted with her and try
+to get her to like me.
+
+"She smiles a little, and blushes some, but her eyes never get mixed
+up. They look straight at whatever she's talking to.
+
+"'I never had any one talk like this to me before, Mr. Pescud,' says
+she. 'What did you say your name is--John?'
+
+"'John A.,' says I.
+
+"'And you came mighty near missing the train at Powhatan Junction,
+too,' says she, with a laugh that sounded as good as a mileage-book to
+me.
+
+"'How did you know?' I asked.
+
+"'Men are very clumsy,' said she. 'I knew you were on every train. I
+thought you were going to speak to me, and I'm glad you didn't.'
+
+"Then we had more talk; and at last a kind of proud, serious look came
+on her face, and she turned and pointed a finger at the big house.
+
+"'The Allyns,' says she, 'have lived in Elmcroft for a hundred years.
+We are a proud family. Look at that mansion. It has fifty rooms.
+See the pillars and porches and balconies. The ceilings in the
+reception-rooms and the ball-room are twenty-eight feet high. My
+father is a lineal descendant of belted earls.'
+
+"'I belted one of 'em once in the Duquesne Hotel, in Pittsburgh,'
+says I, 'and he didn't offer to resent it. He was there dividing his
+attentions between Monongahela whiskey and heiresses, and he got
+fresh.'
+
+"'Of course,' she goes on, 'my father wouldn't allow a drummer to set
+his foot in Elmcroft. If he knew that I was talking to one over the
+fence he would lock me in my room.'
+
+"'Would _you_ let me come there?' says I. 'Would _you_ talk to me
+if I was to call? For,' I goes on, 'if you said I might come and
+see you, the earls might be belted or suspendered, or pinned up with
+safety-pins, as far as I am concerned.'
+
+"'I must not talk to you,' she says, 'because we have not been
+introduced. It is not exactly proper. So I will say good-bye, Mr.--'
+
+"'Say the name,' says I. 'You haven't forgotten it.'
+
+"'Pescud,' says she, a little mad.
+
+"'The rest of the name!' I demands, cool as could be.
+
+"'John,' says she.
+
+"'John--what?' I says.
+
+"'John A.,' says she, with her head high. 'Are you through, now?'
+
+"'I'm coming to see the belted earl to-morrow,' I says.
+
+"'He'll feed you to his fox-hounds,' says she, laughing.
+
+"'If he does, it'll improve their running,' says I. 'I'm something of
+a hunter myself.'
+
+"'I must be going in now,' says she. 'I oughtn't to have spoken to you
+at all. I hope you'll have a pleasant trip back to Minneapolis--or
+Pittsburgh, was it? Good-bye!'
+
+"'Good-night,' says I, 'and it wasn't Minneapolis. What's your name,
+first, please?'
+
+"She hesitated. Then she pulled a leaf off a bush, and said:
+
+"'My name is Jessie,' says she.
+
+"'Good-night, Miss Allyn,' says I.
+
+"The next morning at eleven, sharp, I rang the door-bell of that
+World's Fair main building. After about three-quarters of an hour an
+old nigger man about eighty showed up and asked what I wanted. I gave
+him my business card, and said I wanted to see the colonel. He showed
+me in.
+
+"Say, did you ever crack open a wormy English walnut? That's what
+that house was like. There wasn't enough furniture in it to fill an
+eight-dollar flat. Some old horsehair lounges and three-legged chairs
+and some framed ancestors on the walls were all that met the eye. But
+when Colonel Allyn comes in, the place seemed to light up. You could
+almost hear a band playing, and see a bunch of old-timers in wigs
+and white stockings dancing a quadrille. It was the style of him,
+although he had on the same shabby clothes I saw him wear at the
+station.
+
+"For about nine seconds he had me rattled, and I came mighty near
+getting cold feet and trying to sell him some plate-glass. But I got
+my nerve back pretty quick. He asked me to sit down, and I told him
+everything. I told him how I followed his daughter from Cincinnati,
+and what I did it for, and all about my salary and prospects, and
+explained to him my little code of living--to be always decent and
+right in your home town; and when you're on the road, never take more
+than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent
+limit. At first I thought he was going to throw me out of the window,
+but I kept on talking. Pretty soon I got a chance to tell him that
+story about the Western Congressman who had lost his pocket-book
+and the grass widow--you remember that story. Well, that got him to
+laughing, and I'll bet that was the first laugh those ancestors and
+horsehair sofas had heard in many a day.
+
+"We talked two hours. I told him everything I knew; and then he began
+to ask questions, and I told him the rest. All I asked of him was to
+give me a chance. If I couldn't make a hit with the little lady, I'd
+clear out, and not bother any more. At last he says:
+
+"'There was a Sir Courtenay Pescud in the time of Charles I, if I
+remember rightly.'
+
+"'If there was,' says I, 'he can't claim kin with our bunch. We've
+always lived in and around Pittsburgh. I've got an uncle in the
+real-estate business, and one in trouble somewhere out in Kansas.
+You can inquire about any of the rest of us from anybody in old
+Smoky Town, and get satisfactory replies. Did you ever run across
+that story about the captain of the whaler who tried to make a
+sailor say his prayers?' says I.
+
+"'It occurs to me that I have never been so fortunate,' says the
+colonel.
+
+"So I told it to him. Laugh! I was wishing to myself that he was a
+customer. What a bill of glass I'd sell him! And then he says:
+
+"'The relating of anecdotes and humorous occurrences has always seemed
+to me, Mr. Pescud, to be a particularly agreeable way of promoting
+and perpetuating amenities between friends. With your permission, I
+will relate to you a fox-hunting story with which I was personally
+connected, and which may furnish you some amusement.'
+
+"So he tells it. It takes forty minutes by the watch. Did I laugh?
+Well, say! When I got my face straight he calls in old Pete, the
+superannuated darky, and sends him down to the hotel to bring up my
+valise. It was Elmcroft for me while I was in the town.
+
+"Two evenings later I got a chance to speak a word with Miss Jessie
+alone on the porch while the colonel was thinking up another story.
+
+"'It's going to be a fine evening,' says I.
+
+"'He's coming,' says she. 'He's going to tell you, this time, the
+story about the old negro and the green watermelons. It always comes
+after the one about the Yankees and the game rooster. There was
+another time,' she goes on, 'that you nearly got left--it was at
+Pulaski City.'
+
+"'Yes,' says I, 'I remember. My foot slipped as I was jumping on the
+step, and I nearly tumbled off.'
+
+"'I know,' says she. 'And--and I--_I was afraid you had, John A. I
+was afraid you had._'
+
+"And then she skips into the house through one of the big windows."
+
+
+IV
+
+
+"Coketown!" droned the porter, making his way through the slowing car.
+
+Pescud gathered his hat and baggage with the leisurely promptness of
+an old traveller.
+
+"I married her a year ago," said John. "I told you I built a house in
+the East End. The belted--I mean the colonel--is there, too. I find
+him waiting at the gate whenever I get back from a trip to hear any
+new story I might have picked up on the road."
+
+I glanced out of the window. Coketown was nothing more than a ragged
+hillside dotted with a score of black dismal huts propped up against
+dreary mounds of slag and clinkers. It rained in slanting torrents,
+too, and the rills foamed and splashed down through the black mud to
+the railroad-tracks.
+
+"You won't sell much plate-glass here, John," said I. "Why do you get
+off at this end-o'-the-world?"
+
+"Why," said Pescud, "the other day I took Jessie for a little trip to
+Philadelphia, and coming back she thought she saw some petunias in
+a pot in one of those windows over there just like some she used to
+raise down in the old Virginia home. So I thought I'd drop off here
+for the night, and see if I could dig up some of the cuttings or
+blossoms for her. Here we are. Good-night, old man. I gave you the
+address. Come out and see us when you have time."
+
+The train moved forward. One of the dotted brown ladies insisted
+on having windows raised, now that the rain beat against them. The
+porter came along with his mysterious wand and began to light the car.
+
+I glanced downward and saw the best-seller. I picked it up and set it
+carefully farther along on the floor of the car, where the rain-drops
+would not fall upon it. And then, suddenly, I smiled, and seemed to
+see that life has no geographical metes and bounds.
+
+"Good-luck to you, Trevelyan," I said. "And may you get the petunias
+for your princess!"
+
+
+
+
+RUS IN URBE
+
+
+Considering men in relation to money, there are three kinds whom I
+dislike: men who have more money than they can spend; men who have
+more money than they do spend; and men who spend more money than they
+have. Of the three varieties, I believe I have the least liking for
+the first. But, as a man, I liked Spencer Grenville North pretty
+well, although he had something like two or ten or thirty millions--
+I've forgotten exactly how many.
+
+I did not leave town that summer. I usually went down to a village
+on the south shore of Long Island. The place was surrounded by
+duck-farms, and the ducks and dogs and whippoorwills and rusty
+windmills made so much noise that I could sleep as peacefully as if
+I were in my own flat six doors from the elevated railroad in New
+York. But that summer I did not go. Remember that. One of my friends
+asked me why I did not. I replied:
+
+"Because, old man, New York is the finest summer resort in the world."
+You have heard that phrase before. But that is what I told him.
+
+I was press-agent that year for Binkly & Bing, the theatrical managers
+and producers. Of course you know what a press-agent is. Well, he is
+not. That is the secret of being one.
+
+Binkly was touring France in his new C. & N. Williamson car, and Bing
+had gone to Scotland to learn curling, which he seemed to associate in
+his mind with hot tongs rather than with ice. Before they left they
+gave me June and July, on salary, for my vacation, which act was in
+accord with their large spirit of liberality. But I remained in New
+York, which I had decided was the finest summer resort in--
+
+But I said that before.
+
+On July the 10th, North came to town from his camp in the Adirondacks.
+Try to imagine a camp with sixteen rooms, plumbing, eiderdown quilts,
+a butler, a garage, solid silver plate, and a long-distance telephone.
+Of course it was in the woods--if Mr. Pinchot wants to preserve the
+forests let him give every citizen two or ten or thirty million
+dollars, and the trees will all gather around the summer camps, as the
+Birnam woods came to Dunsinane, and be preserved.
+
+North came to see me in my three rooms and bath, extra charge for
+light when used extravagantly or all night. He slapped me on the back
+(I would rather have my shins kicked any day), and greeted me with
+out-door obstreperousness and revolting good spirits. He was
+insolently brown and healthy-looking, and offensively well dressed.
+
+"Just ran down for a few days," said he, "to sign some papers and
+stuff like that. My lawyer wired me to come. Well, you indolent
+cockney, what are you doing in town? I took a chance and telephoned,
+and they said you were here. What's the matter with that Utopia on
+Long Island where you used to take your typewriter and your villainous
+temper every summer? Anything wrong with the--er--swans, weren't
+they, that used to sing on the farms at night?"
+
+"Ducks," said I. "The songs of swans are for luckier ears. They swim
+and curve their necks in artificial lakes on the estates of the
+wealthy to delight the eyes of the favorites of Fortune."
+
+"Also in Central Park," said North, "to delight the eyes of immigrants
+and bummers. I've seen em there lots of times. But why are you in
+the city so late in the summer?"
+
+"New York City," I began to recite, "is the finest sum--"
+
+"No, you don't," said North, emphatically. "You don't spring that old
+one on me. I know you know better. Man, you ought to have gone up
+with us this summer. The Prestons are there, and Tom Volney and the
+Monroes and Lulu Stanford and the Miss Kennedy and her aunt that you
+liked so well."
+
+"I never liked Miss Kennedy's aunt," I said.
+
+"I didn't say you did," said North. "We are having the greatest time
+we've ever had. The pickerel and trout are so ravenous that I believe
+they would swallow your hook with a Montana copper-mine prospectus
+fastened on it. And we've a couple of electric launches; and I'll
+tell you what we do every night or two--we tow a rowboat behind each
+one with a big phonograph and a boy to change the discs in 'em. On
+the water, and twenty yards behind you, they are not so bad. And
+there are passably good roads through the woods where we go motoring.
+I shipped two cars up there. And the Pinecliff Inn is only three
+miles away. You know the Pinecliff. Some good people are there this
+season, and we run over to the dances twice a week. Can't you go back
+with me for a week, old man?"
+
+I laughed. "Northy," said I--"if I may be so familiar with a
+millionaire, because I hate both the names Spencer and Grenville--your
+invitation is meant kindly, but--the city in the summer-time for me.
+Here, while the _bourgeoisie_ is away, I can live as Nero lived--
+barring, thank heaven, the fiddling--while the city burns at ninety
+in the shade. The tropics and the zones wait upon me like handmaidens.
+I sit under Florida palms and eat pomegranates while Boreas himself,
+electrically conjured up, blows upon me his Arctic breath. As for
+trout, you know, yourself, that Jean, at Maurice's, cooks them better
+than any one else in the world."
+
+"Be advised," said North. "My chef has pinched the blue ribbon from
+the lot. He lays some slices of bacon inside the trout, wraps it all
+in corn-husks--the husks of green corn, you know--buries them in hot
+ashes and covers them with live coals. We build fires on the bank of
+the lake and have fish suppers."
+
+"I know," said I. "And the servants bring down tables and chairs and
+damask cloths, and you eat with silver forks. I know the kind of
+camps that you millionaires have. And there are champagne pails set
+about, disgracing the wild flowers, and, no doubt, Madame Tetrazzini
+to sing in the boat pavilion after the trout."
+
+"Oh no," said North, concernedly, "we were never as bad as that. We
+did have a variety troupe up from the city three or four nights, but
+they weren't stars by as far as light can travel in the same length
+of time. I always like a few home comforts even when I'm roughing it.
+But don't tell me you prefer to stay in the city during summer. I
+don't believe it. If you do, why did you spend your summers there for
+the last four years, even sneaking away from town on a night train,
+and refusing to tell your friends where this Arcadian village was?"
+
+"Because," said I, "they might have followed me and discovered it.
+But since then I have learned that Amaryllis has come to town. The
+coolest things, the freshest, the brightest, the choicest, are to be
+found in the city. If you've nothing on hand this evening I will show
+you."
+
+"I'm free," said North, "and I have my light car outside. I suppose,
+since you've been converted to the town, that your idea of rural sport
+is to have a little whirl between bicycle cops in Central Park and
+then a mug of sticky ale in some stuffy rathskeller under a fan that
+can't stir up as many revolutions in a week as Nicaragua can in a
+day."
+
+"We'll begin with the spin through the Park, anyhow," I said. I was
+choking with the hot, stale air of my little apartment, and I wanted
+that breath of the cool to brace me for the task of proving to my
+friend that New York was the greatest--and so forth.
+
+"Where can you find air any fresher or purer than this?" I asked, as
+we sped into Central's boskiest dell.
+
+"Air!" said North, contemptuously. "Do you call this air?--this muggy
+vapor, smelling of garbage and gasoline smoke. Man, I wish you could
+get one sniff of the real Adirondack article in the pine woods at
+daylight."
+
+"I have heard of it," said I. "But for fragrance and tang and a joy
+in the nostrils I would not give one puff of sea breeze across the
+bay, down on my little boat dock on Long Island, for ten of your
+turpentine-scented tornadoes."
+
+"Then why," asked North, a little curiously, "don't you go there
+instead of staying cooped up in this Greater Bakery?"
+
+"Because," said I, doggedly, "I have discovered that New York is the
+greatest summer--"
+
+"Don't say that again," interrupted North, "unless you've actually got
+a job as General Passenger Agent of the Subway. You can't really
+believe it."
+
+I went to some trouble to try to prove my theory to my friend. The
+Weather Bureau and the season had conspired to make the argument
+worthy of an able advocate.
+
+The city seemed stretched on a broiler directly above the furnaces
+of Avernus. There was a kind of tepid gayety afoot and awheel in the
+boulevards, mainly evinced by languid men strolling about in straw
+hats and evening clothes, and rows of idle taxicabs with their flags
+up, looking like a blockaded Fourth of July procession. The hotels
+kept up a specious brilliancy and hospitable outlook, but inside one
+saw vast empty caverns, and the footrails at the bars gleamed brightly
+from long disacquaintance with the sole-leather of customers. In
+the cross-town streets the steps of the old brownstone houses were
+swarming with "stoopers," that motley race hailing from sky-light room
+and basement, bringing out their straw door-step mats to sit and fill
+the air with strange noises and opinions.
+
+North and I dined on the top of a hotel; and here, for a few minutes,
+I thought I had made a score. An east wind, almost cool, blew across
+the roofless roof. A capable orchestra concealed in a bower of
+wistaria played with sufficient judgment to make the art of music
+probable and the art of conversation possible.
+
+Some ladies in reproachless summer gowns at other tables gave
+animation and color to the scene. And an excellent dinner, mainly
+from the refrigerator, seemed to successfully back my judgment as to
+summer resorts. But North grumbled all during the meal, and cursed
+his lawyers and prated so of his confounded camp in the woods that I
+began to wish he would go back there and leave me in my peaceful city
+retreat.
+
+After dining we went to a roof-garden vaudeville that was being
+much praised. There we found a good bill, an artificially cooled
+atmosphere, cold drinks, prompt service, and a gay, well-dressed
+audience. North was bored.
+
+"If this isn't comfortable enough for you on the hottest August night
+for five years," I said, a little sarcastically, "you might think
+about the kids down in Delancey and Hester streets lying out on the
+fire-escapes with their tongues hanging out, trying to get a breath of
+air that hasn't been fried on both sides. The contrast might increase
+your enjoyment."
+
+"Don't talk Socialism," said North. "I gave five hundred dollars to
+the free ice fund on the first of May. I'm contrasting these stale,
+artificial, hollow, wearisome 'amusements' with the enjoyment a
+man can get in the woods. You should see the firs and pines do
+skirt-dances during a storm; and lie down flat and drink out of a
+mountain branch at the end of a day's tramp after the deer. That's
+the only way to spend a summer. Get out and live with nature."
+
+"I agree with you absolutely," said I, with emphasis.
+
+For one moment I had relaxed my vigilance, and had spoken my true
+sentiments. North looked at me long and curiously.
+
+"Then why, in the name of Pan and Apollo," he asked, "have you been
+singing this deceitful pæan to summer in town?"
+
+I suppose I looked my guilt.
+
+"Ha," said North, "I see. May I ask her name?"
+
+"Annie Ashton," said I, simply. "She played Nannette in Binkley &
+Bing's production of 'The Silver Cord.' She is to have a better part
+next season."
+
+"Take me to see her," said North.
+
+Miss Ashton lived with her mother in a small hotel. They were out
+of the West, and had a little money that bridged the seasons. As
+press-agent of Binkley & Bing I had tried to keep her before the
+public. As Robert James Vandiver I had hoped to withdraw her; for if
+ever one was made to keep company with said Vandiver and smell the
+salt breeze on the south shore of Long Island and listen to the ducks
+quack in the watches of the night, it was the Ashton set forth above.
+
+But she had a soul above ducks--above nightingales; aye, even above
+birds of paradise. She was very beautiful, with quiet ways, and
+seemed genuine. She had both taste and talent for the stage, and she
+liked to stay at home and read and make caps for her mother. She was
+unvaryingly kind and friendly with Binkley & Bing's press-agent.
+Since the theatre had closed she had allowed Mr. Vandiver to call in
+an unofficial rôle. I had often spoken to her of my friend, Spencer
+Grenville North; and so, as it was early, the first turn of the
+vaudeville being not yet over, we left to find a telephone.
+
+Miss Ashton would be very glad to see Mr. Vandiver and Mr. North.
+
+We found her fitting a new cap on her mother. I never saw her look
+more charming.
+
+North made himself disagreeably entertaining. He was a good talker,
+and had a way with him. Besides, he had two, ten, or thirty millions,
+I've forgotten which. I incautiously admired the mother's cap,
+whereupon she brought out her store of a dozen or two, and I took a
+course in edgings and frills. Even though Annie's fingers had pinked,
+or ruched, or hemmed, or whatever you do to 'em, they palled upon me.
+And I could hear North drivelling to Annie about his odious Adirondack
+camp.
+
+Two days after that I saw North in his motor-car with Miss Ashton and
+her mother. On the next afternoon he dropped in on me.
+
+"Bobby," said he, "this old burg isn't such a bad proposition in the
+summer-time, after all. Since I've keen knocking around it looks
+better to me. There are some first-rate musical comedies and light
+operas on the roofs and in the outdoor gardens. And if you hunt up
+the right places and stick to soft drinks, you can keep about as cool
+here as you can in the country. Hang it! when you come to think of
+it, there's nothing much to the country, anyhow. You get tired and
+sunburned and lonesome, and you have to eat any old thing that the
+cook dishes up to you."
+
+"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" said I.
+
+"It certainly does. Now, I found some whitebait yesterday, at
+Maurice's, with a new sauce that beats anything in the trout line I
+ever tasted."
+
+"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" I said.
+
+"Immense. The sauce is the main thing with whitebait."
+
+"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" I asked, looking him straight in
+the eye. He understood.
+
+"Look here, Bob," he said, "I was going to tell you. I couldn't help
+it. I'll play fair with you, but I'm going in to win. She is the
+'one particular' for me."
+
+"All right," said I. "It's a fair field. There are no rights for you
+to encroach upon."
+
+On Thursday afternoon Miss Ashton invited North and myself to have
+tea in her apartment. He was devoted, and she was more charming
+than usual. By avoiding the subject of caps I managed to get a
+word or two into and out of the talk. Miss Ashton asked me in a
+make-conversational tone something about the next season's tour.
+
+"Oh," said I, "I don't know about that. I'm not going to be with
+Binkley & Bing next season."
+
+"Why, I thought," said she, "that they were going to put the Number
+One road company under your charge. I thought you told me so."
+
+"They were," said I, "but they won't.. I'll tell you what I'm going
+to do. I'm going to the south shore of Long Island and buy a small
+cottage I know there on the edge of the bay. And I'll buy a catboat
+and a rowboat and a shotgun and a yellow dog. I've got money enough
+to do it. And I'll smell the salt wind all day when it blows from the
+sea and the pine odor when it blows from the land. And, of course,
+I'll write plays until I have a trunk full of 'em on hand.
+
+"And the next thing and the biggest thing I'll do will be to buy that
+duck-farm next door. Few people understand ducks. I can watch 'em
+for hours. They can march better than any company in the National
+Guard, and they can play 'follow my leader' better than the entire
+Democratic party. Their voices don't amount to much, but I like to
+hear 'em. They wake you up a dozen times a night, but there's a
+homely sound about their quacking that is more musical to me than the
+cry of 'Fresh strawber-rees!' under your window in the morning when
+you want to sleep.
+
+"And," I went on, enthusiastically, "do you know the value of ducks
+besides their beauty and intelligence and order and sweetness of
+voice? Picking their feathers gives you an unfailing and never-ceasing
+income. On a farm that I know the feathers were sold for $400 in one
+year. Think of that! And the ones shipped to the market will bring
+in more money than that. Yes, I am for the ducks and the salt breeze
+coming over the bay. I think I shall get a Chinaman cook, and with him
+and the dog and the sunsets for company I shall do well. No more of
+this dull, baking, senseless, roaring city for me."
+
+Miss Ashton looked surprised. North laughed.
+
+"I am going to begin one of my plays tonight," I said, "so I must be
+going." And with that I took my departure.
+
+A few days later Miss Ashton telephoned to me, asking me to call at
+four in the afternoon.
+
+I did.
+
+"You have been very good to me," she said, hesitatingly, "and I
+thought I would tell you. I am going to leave the stage."
+
+"Yes," said I, "I suppose you will. They usually do when there's so
+much money."
+
+"There is no money," she said, "or very little. Our money is almost
+gone."
+
+"But I am told," said I, "that he has something like two or ten or
+thirty millions--I have forgotten which."
+
+"I know what you mean," she said. "I will not pretend that I do not.
+I am not going to marry Mr. North."
+
+"Then why are you leaving the stage?" I asked, severely. "What else
+can you do to earn a living?"
+
+She came closer to me, and I can see the look in her eyes yet as she
+spoke.
+
+"I can pick ducks," she said.
+
+We sold the first year's feathers for $350.
+
+
+
+
+A POOR RULE
+
+
+I have always maintained, and asserted time to time, that woman is
+no mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and
+interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself
+upon credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong we shall see. As
+"Harper's Drawer" used to say in bygone years: "The following good
+story is told of Miss ----, Mr. ----, Mr. ----, and Mr. ----."
+
+We shall have to omit "Bishop X" and "the Rev. ----," for they do not
+belong.
+
+In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern
+Pacific. A reporter would have called it a "mushroom" town; but it
+was not. Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.
+
+The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the
+passengers both to drink and to dine. There was a new yellow-pine
+hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences.
+The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, "black-waxy" mud,
+and mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an
+about-to-be city. The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the
+twice-a-day train, by which you might leave, creditably sustained
+the rôle of charity.
+
+The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while
+it rained, and the warmest when it shone. It was operated, owned, and
+perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out
+of Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and
+sorghum.
+
+There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which
+the family lived. From the kitchen extended a "shelter" made of poles
+covered with chaparral brush. Under this was a table and two benches,
+each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry. Here
+was set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans,
+soda-biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu.
+
+Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as "Betty," but denied
+to the eyesight, presided at the range. Pa Hinkle himself, with
+salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands. During rush hours a
+Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided
+him in waiting on the guests. As is customary at Parisian banquets, I
+place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.
+
+Ileen Hinkle!
+
+The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. No doubt she
+had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography
+that Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have endorsed the
+phonography.
+
+Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to
+invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through
+Galveston and Del Rio. She sat on a high stool in a rough pine
+grand-stand--or was it a temple?--under the shelter at the door of
+the kitchen. There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with
+a little arch under which you passed your money. Heaven knows why the
+barbed wire; for every man who dined Parisianly there would have died
+in her service. Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you
+put it under the arch, and she took it.
+
+I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you. Instead, I
+must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: _A Philosophical
+Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_.
+It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive
+conceptions of beauty--roundness and smoothness, I think they are,
+according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm; as
+for smoothness--the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother
+she becomes.
+
+Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure
+Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam. She
+was a fruit-stand blonde--strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc. Her
+eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm
+that never comes. But it seems to me that words (at any rate per) are
+wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful. Like fancy, "It is
+engendered in the eyes." There are three kinds of beauties--I was
+foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a story.
+
+The first is the freckle-faced, snub-nosed girl whom you like. The
+second is Maud Adams. The third is, or are, the ladies in Bouguereau's
+paintings. Ileen Hinkle was the fourth. She was the mayoress of
+Spotless Town. There were a thousand golden apples coming to her as
+Helen of the Troy laundries.
+
+The Parisian Restaurant was within a radius. Even from beyond its
+circumference men rode in to Paloma to win her smiles. They got them.
+One meal--one smile--one dollar. But, with all her impartiality,
+Ileen seemed to favor three of her admirers above the rest. According
+to the rules of politeness, I will mention myself last.
+
+The first was an artificial product known as Bryan Jacks--a name
+that had obviously met with reverses. Jacks was the outcome of paved
+cities. He was a small man made of some material resembling flexible
+sandstone. His hair was the color of a brick Quaker meeting-house;
+his eyes were twin cranberries; his mouth was like the aperture under
+a drop-letters-here sign.
+
+He knew every city from Bangor to San Francisco, thence north to
+Portland, thence S. 45 E. to a given point in Florida. He had mastered
+every art, trade, game, business, profession, and sport in the world,
+had been present at, or hurrying on his way to, every headline event
+that had ever occurred between oceans since he was five years old. You
+might open the atlas, place your finger at random upon the name of
+a town, and Jacks would tell you the front names of three prominent
+citizens before you could close it again. He spoke patronizingly and
+even disrespectfully of Broadway, Beacon Hill, Michigan, Euclid, and
+Fifth avenues, and the St. Louis Four Courts. Compared with him as a
+cosmopolite, the Wandering Jew would have seemed a mere hermit. He had
+learned everything the world could teach him, and he would tell you
+about it.
+
+I hate to be reminded of Pollok's "Course of Time," and so do you;
+but every time I saw Jacks I would think of the poet's description
+of another poet by the name of G. G. Byron who "Drank early; deeply
+drank--drank draughts that common millions might have quenched; then
+died of thirst because there was no more to drink."
+
+That fitted Jacks, except that, instead of dying, he came to Paloma,
+which was about the same thing. He was a telegrapher and station-and
+express-agent at seventy-five dollars a month. Why a young man who
+knew everything and could do everything was content to serve in such
+an obscure capacity I never could understand, although he let out
+a hint once that it was as a personal favor to the president and
+stockholders of the S. P. Ry. Co.
+
+One more line of description, and I turn Jacks over to you. He wore
+bright blue clothes, yellow shoes, and a bow tie made of the same
+cloth as his shirt.
+
+My rival No.2 was Bud Cunningham, whose services had been engaged by
+a ranch near Paloma to assist in compelling refractory cattle to keep
+within the bounds of decorum and order. Bud was the only cowboy off
+the stage that I ever saw who looked like one on it. He wore the
+sombrero, the chaps, and the handkerchief tied at the back of his
+neck.
+
+Twice a week Bud rode in from the Val Verde Ranch to sup at the
+Parisian Restaurant. He rode a many-high-handed Kentucky horse at a
+tremendously fast lope, which animal he would rein up so suddenly
+under the big mesquite at the corner of the brush shelter that his
+hoofs would plough canals yards long in the loam.
+
+Jacks and I were regular boarders at the restaurant, of course.
+
+The front room of the Hinkle House was as neat a little parlor as
+there was in the black-waxy country. It was all willow rocking-chairs,
+and home-knit tidies, and albums, and conch shells in a row. And a
+little upright piano in one corner.
+
+Here Jacks and Bud and I--or sometimes one or two of us, according
+to our good-luck--used to sit of evenings when the tide of trade was
+over, and "visit" Miss Hinkle.
+
+Ileen was a girl of ideas. She was destined for higher things (if
+there can be anything higher) than taking in dollars all day through a
+barbed-wire wicket. She had read and listened and thought. Her looks
+would have formed a career for a less ambitious girl; but, rising
+superior to mere beauty, she must establish something in the nature of
+a _salon_--the only one in Paloma.
+
+"Don't you think that Shakespeare was a great writer?" she would ask,
+with such a pretty little knit of her arched brows that the late
+Ignatius Donnelly, himself, had he seen it, could scarcely have saved
+his Bacon.
+
+Ileen was of the opinion, also, that Boston is more cultured than
+Chicago; that Rosa Bonheur was one of the greatest of women painters;
+that Westerners are more spontaneous and open-hearted than Easterners;
+that London must be a very foggy city, and that California must be
+quite lovely in the springtime. And of many other opinions indicating
+a keeping up with the world's best thought.
+
+These, however, were but gleaned from hearsay and evidence: Ileen
+had theories of her own. One, in particular, she disseminated to us
+untiringly. Flattery she detested. Frankness and honesty of speech
+and action, she declared, were the chief mental ornaments of man
+and woman. If ever she could like any one, it would be for those
+qualities.
+
+"I'm awfully weary," she said, one evening, when we three musketeers
+of the mesquite were in the little parlor, "of having compliments on
+my looks paid to me. I know I'm not beautiful."
+
+(Bud Cunningham told me afterward that it was all he could do to keep
+from calling her a liar when she said that.)
+
+"I'm only a little Middle-Western girl," went on Ileen, "who just
+wants to be simple and neat, and tries to help her father make a
+humble living."
+
+(Old Man Hinkle was shipping a thousand silver dollars a month, clear
+profit, to a bank in San Antonio.)
+
+Bud twisted around in his chair and bent the rim of his hat, from
+which he could never be persuaded to separate. He did not know
+whether she wanted what she said she wanted or what she knew she
+deserved. Many a wiser man has hesitated at deciding. Bud decided.
+
+"Why--ah, Miss Ileen, beauty, as you might say, ain't everything. Not
+sayin' that you haven't your share of good looks, I always admired
+more than anything else about you the nice, kind way you treat your
+ma and pa. Any one what's good to their parents and is a kind of
+home-body don't specially need to be too pretty."
+
+Ileen gave him one of her sweetest smiles. "Thank you, Mr.
+Cunningham," she said. "I consider that one of the finest compliments
+I've had in a long time. I'd so much rather hear you say that than to
+hear you talk about my eyes and hair. I'm glad you believe me when I
+say I don't like flattery."
+
+Our cue was there for us. Bud had made a good guess. You couldn't
+lose Jacks. He chimed in next.
+
+"Sure thing, Miss Ileen," he said; "the good-lookers don't always win
+out. Now, you ain't bad looking, of course--but that's nix-cum-rous.
+I knew a girl once in Dubuque with a face like a cocoanut, who could
+skin the cat twice on a horizontal bar without changing hands. Now, a
+girl might have the California peach crop mashed to a marmalade and
+not be able to do that. I've seen--er--worse lookers than _you_, Miss
+Ileen; but what I like about you is the business way you've got of
+doing things. Cool and wise--that's the winning way for a girl. Mr.
+Hinkle told me the other day you'd never taken in a lead silver dollar
+or a plugged one since you've been on the job. Now, that's the stuff
+for a girl--that's what catches me."
+
+Jacks got his smile, too.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Jacks," said Ileen. "If you only knew how I
+appreciate any one's being candid and not a flatterer! I get so tired
+of people telling me I'm pretty. I think it is the loveliest thing to
+have friends who tell you the truth."
+
+Then I thought I saw an expectant look on Ileen's face as she glanced
+toward me. I had a wild, sudden impulse to dare fate, and tell her of
+all the beautiful handiwork of the Great Artificer she was the most
+exquisite--that she was a flawless pearl gleaming pure and serene in a
+setting of black mud and emerald prairies--that she was--a--a corker;
+and as for mine, I cared not if she were as cruel as a serpent's
+tooth to her fond parents, or if she couldn't tell a plugged dollar
+from a bridle buckle, if I might sing, chant, praise, glorify, and
+worship her peerless and wonderful beauty.
+
+But I refrained. I feared the fate of a flatterer. I had witnessed
+her delight at the crafty and discreet words of Bud and Jacks. No!
+Miss Hinkle was not one to be beguiled by the plated-silver tongue of
+a flatterer. So I joined the ranks of the candid and honest. At once
+I became mendacious and didactic.
+
+"In all ages, Miss Hinkle," said I, "in spite of the poetry and
+romance of each, intellect in woman has been admired more than beauty.
+Even in Cleopatra, herself, men found more charm in her queenly mind
+than in her looks."
+
+"Well, I should think so!" said Ileen. "I've seen pictures of her
+that weren't so much. She had an awfully long nose."
+
+"If I may say so," I went on, "you remind me of Cleopatra, Miss
+Ileen."
+
+"Why, my nose isn't so long!" said she, opening her eyes wide and
+touching that comely feature with a dimpled forefinger.
+
+"Why--er--I mean," said I--"I mean as to mental endowments."
+
+"Oh!" said she; and then I got my smile just as Bud and Jacks had got
+theirs.
+
+"Thank every one of you," she said, very, very sweetly, "for being
+so frank and honest with me. That's the way I want you to be always.
+Just tell me plainly and truthfully what you think, and we'll all be
+the best friends in the world. And now, because you've been so good
+to me, and understand so well how I dislike people who do nothing but
+pay me exaggerated compliments, I'll sing and play a little for you."
+
+Of course, we expressed our thanks and joy; but we would have been
+better pleased if Ileen had remained in her low rocking-chair face to
+face with us and let us gaze upon her. For she was no Adelina Patti--
+not even on the farewellest of the diva's farewell tours. She had a
+cooing little voice like that of a turtle-dove that could almost fill
+the parlor when the windows and doors were closed, and Betty was not
+rattling the lids of the stove in the kitchen. She had a gamut that I
+estimate at about eight inches on the piano; and her runs and trills
+sounded like the clothes bubbling in your grandmother's iron wash-pot.
+Believe that she must have been beautiful when I tell you that it
+sounded like music to us.
+
+Ileen's musical taste was catholic. She would sing through a pile of
+sheet music on the left-hand top of the piano, laying each slaughtered
+composition on the right-hand top. The next evening she would sing
+from right to left. Her favorites were Mendelssohn, and Moody and
+Sankey. By request she always wound up with "Sweet Violets" and "When
+the Leaves Begin to Turn."
+
+When we left at ten o'clock the three of us would go down to Jacks'
+little wooden station and sit on the platform, swinging our feet and
+trying to pump one another for clews as to which way Miss Ileen's
+inclinations seemed to lean. That is the way of rivals--they do
+not avoid and glower at one another; they convene and converse and
+construe--striving by the art politic to estimate the strength of the
+enemy.
+
+One day there came a dark horse to Paloma, a young lawyer who at once
+flaunted his shingle and himself spectacularly upon the town. His
+name was C. Vincent Vesey. You could see at a glance that he was a
+recent graduate of a southwestern law school. His Prince Albert coat,
+light striped trousers, broad-brimmed soft black hat, and narrow white
+muslin bow tie proclaimed that more loudly than any diploma could.
+Vesey was a compound of Daniel Webster, Lord Chesterfield, Beau
+Brummell, and Little Jack Horner. His coming boomed Paloma. The next
+day after he arrived an addition to the town was surveyed and laid off
+in lots.
+
+Of course, Vesey, to further his professional fortunes, must mingle
+with the citizenry and outliers of Paloma. And, as well as with the
+soldier men, he was bound to seek popularity with the gay dogs of the
+place. So Jacks and Bud Cunningham and I came to be honored by his
+acquaintance.
+
+The doctrine of predestination would have been discredited had
+not Vesey seen Ileen Hinkle and become fourth in the tourney.
+Magnificently, he boarded at the yellow pine hotel instead of at the
+Parisian Restaurant; but he came to be a formidable visitor in the
+Hinkle parlor. His competition reduced Bud to an inspired increase
+of profanity, drove Jacks to an outburst of slang so weird that it
+sounded more horrible than the most trenchant of Bud's imprecations,
+and made me dumb with gloom.
+
+For Vesey had the rhetoric. Words flowed from him like oil from
+a gusher. Hyperbole, compliment, praise, appreciation, honeyed
+gallantry, golden opinions, eulogy, and unveiled panegyric vied with
+one another for pre-eminence in his speech. We had small hopes that
+Ileen could resist his oratory and Prince Albert.
+
+But a day came that gave us courage.
+
+About dusk one evening I was sitting on the little gallery in front
+of the Hinkle parlor, waiting for Ileen to come, when I heard voices
+inside. She had come into the room with her father, and Old Man
+Hinkle began to talk to her. I had observed before that he was a
+shrewd man, and not unphilosophic.
+
+"Ily," said he, "I notice there's three or four young fellers that
+have been callin' to see you regular for quite a while. Is there any
+one of 'em you like better than another?"
+
+"Why, pa," she answered, "I like all of 'em very well. I think Mr.
+Cunningham and Mr. Jacks and Mr. Harris are very nice young men. They
+are so frank and honest in everything they say to me. I haven't known
+Mr. Vesey very long, but I think he's a very nice young man, he's so
+frank and honest in everything he says to me."
+
+"Now, that's what I'm gittin' at," says old Hinkle. "You've always
+been sayin' you like people what tell the truth and don't go
+humbuggin' you with compliments and bogus talk. Now, suppose you
+make a test of these fellers, and see which one of 'em will talk the
+straightest to you."
+
+"But how'll I do it, pa?"
+
+"I'll tell you how. You know you sing a little bit, Ily; you took
+music-lessons nearly two years in Logansport. It wasn't long, but it
+was all we could afford then. And your teacher said you didn't have
+any voice, and it was a waste of money to keep on. Now, suppose you
+ask the fellers what they think of your singin', and see what each
+one of 'em tells you. The man that'll tell you the truth about it'll
+have a mighty lot of nerve, and 'll do to tie to. What do you think
+of the plan?"
+
+"All right, pa," said Ileen. "I think it's a good idea. I'll try
+it."
+
+Ileen and Mr. Hinkle went out of the room through the inside doors.
+Unobserved, I hurried down to the station. Jacks was at his telegraph
+table waiting for eight o'clock to come. It was Bud's night in town,
+and when he rode in I repeated the conversation to them both. I was
+loyal to my rivals, as all true admirers of all Ileens should be.
+
+Simultaneously the three of us were smitten by an uplifting thought.
+Surely this test would eliminate Vesey from the contest. He, with his
+unctuous flattery, would be driven from the lists. Well we remembered
+Ileen's love of frankness and honesty--how she treasured truth and
+candor above vain compliment and blandishment.
+
+Linking arms, we did a grotesque dance of joy up and down the
+platform, singing "Muldoon Was a Solid Man" at the top of our voices.
+
+That evening four of the willow rocking-chairs were filled besides the
+lucky one that sustained the trim figure of Miss Hinkle. Three of us
+awaited with suppressed excitement the application of the test. It
+was tried on Bud first.
+
+"Mr. Cunningham," said Ileen, with her dazzling smile, after she had
+sung "When the Leaves Begin to Turn," "what do you really think of my
+voice? Frankly and honestly, now, as you know I want you to always be
+toward me."
+
+Bud squirmed in his chair at his chance to show the sincerity that he
+knew was required of him.
+
+"Tell you the truth, Miss Ileen," he said, earnestly, "you ain't got
+much more voice than a weasel--just a little squeak, you know. Of
+course, we all like to hear you sing, for it's kind of sweet and
+soothin' after all, and you look most as mighty well sittin' on the
+piano-stool as you do faced around. But as for real singin'--I reckon
+you couldn't call it that."
+
+I looked closely at Ileen to see if Bud had overdone his frankness,
+but her pleased smile and sweetly spoken thanks assured me that we
+were on the right track.
+
+"And what do you think, Mr. Jacks?" she asked next.
+
+"Take it from me," said Jacks, "you ain't in the prima donna class.
+I've heard 'em warble in every city in the United States; and I tell
+you your vocal output don't go. Otherwise, you've got the grand
+opera bunch sent to the soap factory--in looks, I mean; for the high
+screechers generally look like Mary Ann on her Thursday out. But nix
+for the gargle work. Your epiglottis ain't a real side-stepper--its
+footwork ain't good."
+
+With a merry laugh at Jacks' criticism, Ileen looked inquiringly at
+me.
+
+I admit that I faltered a little. Was there not such a thing as being
+too frank? Perhaps I even hedged a little in my verdict; but I stayed
+with the critics.
+
+"I am not skilled in scientific music, Miss Ileen," I said, "but,
+frankly, I cannot praise very highly the singing-voice that Nature has
+given you. It has long been a favorite comparison that a great singer
+sings like a bird. Well, there are birds and birds. I would say that
+your voice reminds me of the thrush's--throaty and not strong, nor of
+much compass or variety--but still--er--sweet--in--er--its--way, and--
+er--"
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Harris," interrupted Miss Hinkle. "I knew I could
+depend upon your frankness and honesty."
+
+And then C. Vincent Vesey drew back one sleeve from his snowy cuff,
+and the water came down at Lodore.
+
+My memory cannot do justice to his masterly tribute to that priceless,
+God-given treasure--Miss Hinkle's voice. He raved over it in terms
+that, if they had been addressed to the morning stars when they sang
+together, would have made that stellar choir explode in a meteoric
+shower of flaming self-satisfaction.
+
+He marshalled on his white finger-tips the grand opera stars of all
+the continents, from Jenny Lind to Emma Abbott, only to depreciate
+their endowments. He spoke of larynxes, of chest notes, of phrasing,
+arpeggios, and other strange paraphernalia of the throaty art. He
+admitted, as though driven to a corner, that Jenny Lind had a note or
+two in the high register that Miss Hinkle had not yet acquired--but--
+"!!!"--that was a mere matter of practice and training.
+
+And, as a peroration, he predicted--solemnly predicted--a career in
+vocal art for the "coming star of the Southwest--and one of which
+grand old Texas may well be proud," hitherto unsurpassed in the annals
+of musical history.
+
+When we left at ten, Ileen gave each of us her usual warm, cordial
+handshake, entrancing smile, and invitation to call again. I could
+not see that one was favored above or below another--but three of us
+knew--we knew.
+
+We knew that frankness and honesty had won, and that the rivals now
+numbered three instead of four.
+
+Down at the station Jacks brought out a pint bottle of the proper
+stuff, and we celebrated the downfall of a blatant interloper.
+
+Four days went by without anything happening worthy of recount.
+
+On the fifth, Jacks and I, entering the brush arbor for our supper,
+saw the Mexican youth, instead of a divinity in a spotless waist and a
+navy-blue skirt, taking in the dollars through the barbed-wire wicket.
+
+We rushed into the kitchen, meeting Pa Hinkle coming out with two cups
+of hot coffee in his hands.
+
+"Where's Ileen?" we asked, in recitative.
+
+Pa Hinkle was a kindly man. "Well, gents," said he, "it was a sudden
+notion she took; but I've got the money, and I let her have her way.
+She's gone to a corn--a conservatory in Boston for four years for to
+have her voice cultivated. Now, excuse me to pass, gents, for this
+coffee's hot, and my thumbs is tender."
+
+That night there were four instead of three of us sitting on the
+station platform and swinging our feet. C. Vincent Vesey was one of
+us. We discussed things while dogs barked at the moon that rose, as
+big as a five-cent piece or a flour barrel, over the chaparral.
+
+And what we discussed was whether it is better to lie to a woman or
+to tell her the truth.
+
+And as all of us were young then, we did not come to a decision.
+
+
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Options, by O. Henry</title>
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Options, by O. Henry</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p class="noindent">Title: Options</p>
+<p class="noindent">       "The Rose of Dixie"; The Third Ingredient; The Hiding of Black Bill; Schools and Schools; Thimble, Thimble; Supply and Demand; Buried Treasure; To Him Who Waits; He Also Serves; The Moment of Victory; The Head-Hunter; No Story; The Higher Pragmatism; Best-Seller; Rus in Urbe; A Poor Rule</p>
+<p class="noindent">Author: O. Henry</p>
+<p class="noindent">Release Date: December, 1998  [eBook #1583]<br />
+HTML version added: October 14, 2005<br />
+HTML version most recently updated: August 26, 2017</p>
+<p class="noindent">Language: English</p>
+<p class="noindent">Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p class="noindent">***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OPTIONS***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Tim O'Connell<br />
+    and revised by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.<br />
+    <br />
+    HTML version prepared by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table class="ed" style="margin: 0 auto; background-color: #ccccff;" border="0" cellpadding="10">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">
+      Note:
+    </td>
+    <td>
+      Many of the author's spellings follow older, obsolete, or
+      intentionally incorrect practice.
+    </td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>Options</h1>
+
+<h4>by</h4>
+
+<h2>O. Henry</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="narrow" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="center">
+<table style="margin: 0 auto" cellpadding="2">
+<tr><td><a href="#1" >"<span class="smallcaps">The Rose of Dixie</span>"</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#2" ><span class="smallcaps">The Third Ingredient</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#3" ><span class="smallcaps">The Hiding of Black Bill</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#4" ><span class="smallcaps">Schools and Schools</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#5" ><span class="smallcaps">Thimble, Thimble</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#6" ><span class="smallcaps">Supply and Demand</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#7" ><span class="smallcaps">Buried Treasure</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#8" ><span class="smallcaps">To Him Who Waits</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#9" ><span class="smallcaps">He Also Serves</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#10"><span class="smallcaps">The Moment of Victory</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#11"><span class="smallcaps">The Head-Hunter</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#12"><span class="smallcaps">No Story</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#13"><span class="smallcaps">The Higher Pragmatism</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#14"><span class="smallcaps">Best-Seller</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#15"><span class="smallcaps">Rus in Urbe</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#16"><span class="smallcaps">A Poor Rule</span></a></td></tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="narrow" />
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="1"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>"THE ROSE OF DIXIE"</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>When <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> magazine was started by a stock company
+in Toombs City, Georgia, there was never but one candidate for its chief
+editorial position in the minds of its owners. Col. Aquila Telfair was
+the man for the place. By all the rights of learning, family,
+reputation, and Southern traditions, he was its foreordained, fit, and
+logical editor. So, a committee of the patriotic Georgia citizens who
+had subscribed the founding fund of $100,000 called upon Colonel Telfair
+at his residence, Cedar Heights, fearful lest the enterprise and the
+South should suffer by his possible refusal.</p>
+
+<p>The colonel received them in his great library, where he spent
+most of his days. The library had descended to him from his father. It
+contained ten thousand volumes, some of which had been published as
+late as the year 1861. When the deputation arrived, Colonel Telfair
+was seated at his massive white-pine centre-table, reading Burton's
+"Anatomy of Melancholy." He arose and shook hands punctiliously with
+each member of the committee. If you were familiar with <i>The Rose of
+Dixie</i> you will remember the colonel's portrait, which appeared in it
+from time to time. You could not forget the long, carefully brushed
+white hair; the hooked, high-bridged nose, slightly twisted to the
+left; the keen eyes under the still black eyebrows; the classic mouth
+beneath the drooping white mustache, slightly frazzled at the ends.</p>
+
+<p>The committee solicitously offered him the position of managing
+editor, humbly presenting an outline of the field that the publication
+was designed to cover and mentioning a comfortable salary. The
+colonel's lands were growing poorer each year and were much cut up by
+red gullies. Besides, the honor was not one to be refused.</p>
+
+<p>In a forty-minute speech of acceptance, Colonel Telfair gave an
+outline of English literature from Chaucer to Macaulay, re-fought the
+battle of Chancellorsville, and said that, God helping him, he would
+so conduct <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> that its fragrance and beauty would
+permeate the entire world, hurling back into the teeth of the Northern
+minions their belief that no genius or good could exist in the brains
+and hearts of the people whose property they had destroyed and whose
+rights they had curtailed.</p>
+
+<p>Offices for the magazine were partitioned off and furnished in the
+second floor of the First National Bank building; and it was for the
+colonel to cause <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> to blossom and flourish or to
+wilt in the balmy air of the land of flowers.</p>
+
+<p>The staff of assistants and contributors that Editor-Colonel Telfair
+drew about him was a peach. It was a whole crate of Georgia peaches.
+The first assistant editor, Tolliver Lee Fairfax, had had a father
+killed during Pickett's charge. The second assistant, Keats Unthank,
+was the nephew of one of Morgan's Raiders. The book reviewer, Jackson
+Rockingham, had been the youngest soldier in the Confederate army,
+having appeared on the field of battle with a sword in one hand and a
+milk-bottle in the other. The art editor, Roncesvalles Sykes, was a
+third cousin to a nephew of Jefferson Davis. Miss Lavinia Terhune,
+the colonel's stenographer and typewriter, had an aunt who had once
+been kissed by Stonewall Jackson. Tommy Webster, the head office-boy,
+got his job by having recited Father Ryan's poems, complete, at the
+commencement exercises of the Toombs City High School. The girls who
+wrapped and addressed the magazines were members of old Southern
+families in Reduced Circumstances. The cashier was a scrub named
+Hawkins, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had recommendations and a bond
+from a guarantee company filed with the owners. Even Georgia stock
+companies sometimes realize that it takes live ones to bury the
+dead.</p>
+
+<p>Well, sir, if you believe me, <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> blossomed five
+times before anybody heard of it except the people who buy their hooks
+and eyes in Toombs City. Then Hawkins climbed off his stool and told on
+'em to the stock company. Even in Ann Arbor he had been used to having
+his business propositions heard of at least as far away as Detroit. So
+an advertising manager was engaged&mdash;Beauregard Fitzhugh
+Banks&mdash;a young man in a lavender necktie, whose grandfather had
+been the Exalted High Pillow-slip of the Kuklux Klan.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of which <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> kept coming out every
+month. Although in every issue it ran photos of either the Taj Mahal or
+the Luxembourg Gardens, or Carmencita or La Follette, a certain number
+of people bought it and subscribed for it. As a boom for it,
+Editor-Colonel Telfair ran three different views of Andrew Jackson's old
+home, "The Hermitage," a full-page engraving of the second battle of
+Manassas, entitled "Lee to the Rear!" and a five-thousand-word biography
+of Belle Boyd in the same number. The subscription list that month
+advanced 118. Also there were poems in the same issue by Leonina Vashti
+Haricot (pen-name), related to the Haricots of Charleston, South
+Carolina, and Bill Thompson, nephew of one of the stockholders. And an
+article from a special society correspondent describing a tea-party
+given by the swell Boston and English set, where a lot of tea was
+spilled overboard by some of the guests masquerading as Indians.</p>
+
+<p>One day a person whose breath would easily cloud a mirror, he was so
+much alive, entered the office of <i>The Rose of Dixie</i>. He was a man
+about the size of a real-estate agent, with a self-tied tie and a
+manner that he must have borrowed conjointly from W. J. Bryan,
+Hackenschmidt, and Hetty Green. He was shown into the editor-colonel's
+<i>pons asinorum</i>. Colonel Telfair rose and began a Prince
+Albert bow.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm Thacker," said the intruder, taking the editor's
+chair&mdash;"T. T. Thacker, of New York."</p>
+
+<p>He dribbled hastily upon the colonel's desk some cards, a bulky
+manila envelope, and a letter from the owners of <i>The Rose of
+Dixie</i>. This letter introduced Mr. Thacker, and politely requested
+Colonel Telfair to give him a conference and whatever information about
+the magazine he might desire.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been corresponding with the secretary of the magazine owners
+for some time," said Thacker, briskly. "I'm a practical magazine man
+myself, and a circulation booster as good as any, if I do say it. I'll
+guarantee an increase of anywhere from ten thousand to a hundred
+thousand a year for any publication that isn't printed in a dead
+language. I've had my eye on <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> ever since it
+started. I know every end of the business from editing to setting up the
+classified ads. Now, I've come down here to put a good bunch of money in
+the magazine, if I can see my way clear. It ought to be made to pay. The
+secretary tells me it's losing money. I don't see why a magazine in the
+South, if it's properly handled, shouldn't get a good circulation in the
+North, too."</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Telfair leaned back in his chair and polished his gold-rimmed
+glasses.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Thacker," said he, courteously but firmly, "<i>The Rose of
+Dixie</i> is a publication devoted to the fostering and the voicing of
+Southern genius. Its watchword, which you may have seen on the cover, is
+'Of, For, and By the South.'"</p>
+
+<p>"But you wouldn't object to a Northern circulation, would you?" asked
+Thacker.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose," said the editor-colonel, "that it is customary to open
+the circulation lists to all. I do not know. I have nothing to do
+with the business affairs of the magazine. I was called upon to
+assume editorial control of it, and I have devoted to its conduct such
+poor literary talents as I may possess and whatever store of erudition
+I may have acquired."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," said Thacker. "But a dollar is a dollar anywhere, North,
+South, or West&mdash;whether you're buying codfish, goober peas,
+or Rocky Ford cantaloupes. Now, I've been looking over your November
+number. I see one here on your desk. You don't mind running over it with
+me?</p>
+
+<p>"Well, your leading article is all right. A good write-up of the
+cotton-belt with plenty of photographs is a winner any time. New York
+is always interested in the cotton crop. And this sensational account
+of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, by a schoolmate of a niece of the Governor
+of Kentucky, isn't such a bad idea. It happened so long ago that most
+people have forgotten it. Now, here's a poem three pages long called
+'The Tyrant's Foot,' by Lorella Lascelles. I've pawed around a good deal
+over manuscripts, but I never saw her name on a rejection slip."</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Lascelles," said the editor, "is one of our most widely
+recognized Southern poetesses. She is closely related to the Alabama
+Lascelles family, and made with her own hands the silken Confederate
+banner that was presented to the governor of that state at his
+inauguration."</p>
+
+<p>"But why," persisted Thacker, "is the poem illustrated with a view of
+the M. &amp; O. Railroad freight depot at Tuscaloosa?"</p>
+
+<p>"The illustration," said the colonel, with dignity, "shows a corner
+of the fence surrounding the old homestead where Miss Lascelles was
+born."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," said Thacker. "I read the poem, but I couldn't tell
+whether it was about the depot of the battle of Bull Run. Now, here's
+a short story called 'Rosies' Temptation,' by Fosdyke Piggott. It's
+rotten. What is a Piggott, anyway?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Piggott," said the editor, "is a brother of the principal
+stockholder of the magazine."</p>
+
+<p>"All's right with the world&mdash;Piggott passes," said Thacker.
+"Well this article on Arctic exploration and the one on tarpon fishing
+might go. But how about this write-up of the Atlanta, New Orleans,
+Nashville, and Savannah breweries? It seems to consist mainly of
+statistics about their output and the quality of their beer. What's the
+chip over the bug?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I understand your figurative language," answered Colonel Telfair,
+"it is this: the article you refer to was handed to me by the owners
+of the magazine with instructions to publish it. The literary quality
+of it did not appeal to me. But, in a measure, I feel impelled to
+conform, in certain matters, to the wishes of the gentlemen who are
+interested in the financial side of <i>The Rose</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"I see," said Thacker. "Next we have two pages of selections from
+'Lalla Rookh,' by Thomas Moore. Now, what Federal prison did Moore
+escape from, or what's the name of the F.F.V. family that he
+carries as a handicap?"</p>
+
+<p>"Moore was an Irish poet who died in 1852," said Colonel Telfair,
+pityingly. "He is a classic. I have been thinking of reprinting his
+translation of Anacreon serially in the magazine."</p>
+
+<p>"Look out for the copyright laws," said Thacker, flippantly. Who's
+Bessie Belleclair, who contributes the essay on the newly completed
+water-works plant in Milledgeville?"</p>
+
+<p>"The name, sir," said Colonel Telfair, "is the <i>nom de guerre</i>
+of Miss Elvira Simpkins. I have not the honor of knowing the lady; but
+her contribution was sent to us by Congressman Brower, of her native
+state. Congressman Brower's mother was related to the Polks of
+Tennessee.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, see here, Colonel," said Thacker, throwing down the magazine,
+"this won't do. You can't successfully run a magazine for one
+particular section of the country. You've got to make a universal
+appeal. Look how the Northern publications have catered to the South
+and encouraged the Southern writers. And you've got to go far and
+wide for your contributors. You've got to buy stuff according to its
+quality without any regard to the pedigree of the author. Now, I'll
+bet a quart of ink that this Southern parlor organ you've been running
+has never played a note that originated above Mason &amp; Hamlin's line.
+Am I right?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have carefully and conscientiously rejected all contributions from
+that section of the country&mdash;if I understand your figurative
+language aright," replied the colonel.</p>
+
+<p>"All right. Now I'll show you something."</p>
+
+<p>Thacker reached for his thick manila envelope and dumped a mass of
+typewritten manuscript on the editors desk.</p>
+
+<p>"Here's some truck," said he, "that I paid cash for, and brought
+along with me."</p>
+
+<p>One by one he folded back the manuscripts and showed their first pages
+to the colonel.</p>
+
+<p>Here are four short stories by four of the highest priced authors in
+the United States&mdash;three of 'em living in New York, and one
+commuting. There's a special article on Vienna-bred society by Tom
+Vampson. Here's an Italian serial by Captain
+Jack&mdash;no&mdash;it's the other Crawford. Here are three
+separate expos&eacute;s of city governments by Sniffings, and here's
+a dandy entitled 'What Women Carry in Dress-Suit Cases'&mdash;a
+Chicago newspaper woman hired herself out for five years as a lady's
+maid to get that information. And here's a Synopsis of Preceding
+Chapters of Hall Caine's new serial to appear next June. And here's a
+couple of pounds of <i>vers de société</i> that I got at a rate from the
+clever magazines. That's the stuff that people everywhere want. And now
+here's a write-up with photographs at the ages of four, twelve,
+twenty-two, and thirty of George B. McClellan. It's a prognostication.
+He's bound to be elected Mayor of New York. It'll make a big hit all
+over the country. He&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon," said Colonel Telfair, stiffening in his chair.
+"What was the name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I see," said Thacker, with half a grin. Yes, he's a son of the
+General. We'll pass that manuscript up. But, if you'll excuse me,
+Colonel, it's a magazine we're trying to make go off&mdash;not the first
+gun at Fort Sumter. Now, here's a thing that's bound to get next to
+you. It's an original poem by James Whitcomb Riley. J. W. himself.
+You know what that means to a magazine. I won't tell you what I had
+to pay for that poem; but I'll tell you this&mdash;Riley can make
+more money writing with a fountain-pen than you or I can with one that
+lets the ink run. I'll read you the last two stanzas:<br />&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+   <p class="noindent">"'Pa lays around 'n' loafs all day,<br />
+   <span class="ind1">'N' reads and makes us leave him be.</span><br />
+   He lets me do just like I please,<br />
+   <span class="ind1">'N' when I'm bad he laughs at me,</span><br />
+   'N' when I holler loud 'n' say<br />
+   <span class="ind1">Bad words 'n' then begin to tease</span><br />
+   The cat, 'n' pa just smiles, ma's mad<br />
+   <span class="ind1">'N' gives me Jesse crost her knees.</span><br />
+   <span class="ind2">I always wondered why that wuz&mdash;</span><br />
+   <span class="ind2">I guess it's cause</span><br />
+   <span class="ind5">Pa never does.</span></p>
+
+   <p class="noindent">"''N' after all the lights are out<br />
+   <span class="ind1">I'm sorry 'bout it; so I creep</span><br />
+   Out of my trundle bed to ma's<br />
+   <span class="ind1">'N' say I love her a whole heap,</span><br />
+   'N' kiss her, 'n' I hug her tight.<br />
+   <span class="ind1">'N' it's too dark to see her eyes,</span><br />
+   But every time I do I know<br />
+   <span class="ind1">She cries 'n' cries 'n' cries 'n' cries.</span><br />
+   <span class="ind2">I always wondered why that wuz&mdash;</span><br />
+   <span class="ind2">I guess it's 'cause</span><br />
+   <span class="ind5">Pa never does.'</span><br />&nbsp;</p>
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>"That's the stuff," continued Thacker. "What do you think of
+that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am not unfamiliar with the works of Mr. Riley," said the colonel,
+deliberately. "I believe he lives in Indiana. For the last ten years
+I have been somewhat of a literary recluse, and am familiar with
+nearly all the books in the Cedar Heights library. I am also of the
+opinion that a magazine should contain a certain amount of poetry.
+Many of the sweetest singers of the South have already contributed to
+the pages of <i>The Rose of Dixie</i>. I, myself, have thought of
+translating from the original for publication in its pages the works
+of the great Italian poet Tasso. Have you ever drunk from the
+fountain of this immortal poet's lines, Mr. Thacker?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not even a demi-Tasso," said Thacker. Now, let's come to the point,
+Colonel Telfair. I've already invested some money in this as a flyer.
+That bunch of manuscripts cost me $4,000. My object was to try a number
+of them in the next issue&mdash;I believe you make up less than a
+month ahead&mdash;and see what effect it has on the circulation. I
+believe that by printing the best stuff we can get in the North, South,
+East, or West we can make the magazine go. You have there the letter
+from the owning company asking you to co-operate with me in the plan.
+Let's chuck out some of this slush that you've been publishing just
+because the writers are related to the Skoopdoodles of Skoopdoodle
+County. Are you with me?"</p>
+
+<p>"As long as I continue to be the editor of The Rose," said Colonel
+Telfair, with dignity, "I shall be its editor. But I desire also to
+conform to the wishes of its owners if I can do so
+conscientiously."</p>
+
+<p>"That's the talk," said Thacker, briskly. "Now, how much of this
+stuff I've brought can we get into the January number? We want to
+begin right away."</p>
+
+<p>"There is yet space in the January number," said the editor, "for
+about eight thousand words, roughly estimated."</p>
+
+<p>"Great!" said Thacker. "It isn't much, but it'll give the readers
+some change from goobers, governors, and Gettysburg. I'll leave the
+selection of the stuff I brought to fill the space to you, as it's all
+good. I've got to run back to New York, and I'll be down again in a
+couple of weeks."</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Telfair slowly swung his eye-glasses by their broad, black
+ribbon.</p>
+
+<p>"The space in the January number that I referred to," said he,
+measuredly, "has been held open purposely, pending a decision that I
+have not yet made. A short time ago a contribution was submitted to
+<i>The Rose of Dixie</i> that is one of the most remarkable literary
+efforts that has ever come under my observation. None but a master mind
+and talent could have produced it. It would just fill the space that I
+have reserved for its possible use."</p>
+
+<p>Thacker looked anxious.</p>
+
+<p>"What kind of stuff is it?" he asked. "Eight thousand words sounds
+suspicious. The oldest families must have been collaborating. Is
+there going to be another secession?"</p>
+
+<p>"The author of the article," continued the colonel, ignoring
+Thacker's allusions, "is a writer of some reputation. He has also
+distinguished himself in other ways. I do not feel at liberty to reveal
+to you his name&mdash;at least not until I have decided whether or
+not to accept his contribution."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Thacker, nervously, "is it a continued story, or an
+account of the unveiling of the new town pump in Whitmire, South
+Carolina, or a revised list of General Lee's body-servants, or
+what?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are disposed to be facetious," said Colonel Telfair, calmly.
+"The article is from the pen of a thinker, a philosopher, a lover of
+mankind, a student, and a rhetorician of high degree."</p>
+
+<p>"It must have been written by a syndicate," said Thacker. "But,
+honestly, Colonel, you want to go slow. I don't know of any
+eight-thousand-word single doses of written matter that are read by
+anybody these days, except Supreme Court briefs and reports of murder
+trials. You haven't by any accident gotten hold of a copy of one of
+Daniel Webster's speeches, have you?"</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Telfair swung a little in his chair and looked steadily from
+under his bushy eyebrows at the magazine promoter.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Thacker," he said, gravely, "I am willing to segregate the
+somewhat crude expression of your sense of humor from the solicitude
+that your business investments undoubtedly have conferred upon you.
+But I must ask you to cease your jibes and derogatory comments upon
+the South and the Southern people. They, sir, will not be tolerated
+in the office of <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> for one moment. And before you
+proceed with more of your covert insinuations that I, the editor of this
+magazine, am not a competent judge of the merits of the matter submitted
+to its consideration, I beg that you will first present some evidence or
+proof that you are my superior in any way, shape, or form relative to
+the question in hand."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come, Colonel," said Thacker, good-naturedly. "I didn't do
+anything like that to you. It sounds like an indictment by the fourth
+assistant attorney-general. Let's get back to business. What's this
+8,000 to 1 shot about?"</p>
+
+<p>"The article," said Colonel Telfair, acknowledging the apology by a
+slight bow, "covers a wide area of knowledge. It takes up theories
+and questions that have puzzled the world for centuries, and disposes
+of them logically and concisely. One by one it holds up to view the
+evils of the world, points out the way of eradicating them, and then
+conscientiously and in detail commends the good. There is hardly a
+phase of human life that it does not discuss wisely, calmly, and
+equitably. The great policies of governments, the duties of private
+citizens, the obligations of home life, law, ethics,
+morality&mdash;all these important subjects are handled with a calm
+wisdom and confidence that I must confess has captured my
+admiration."</p>
+
+<p>"It must be a crackerjack," said Thacker, impressed.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a great contribution to the world's wisdom," said the colonel.
+"The only doubt remaining in my mind as to the tremendous advantage it
+would be to us to give it publication in <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> is
+that I have not yet sufficient information about the author to give his
+work publicity in our magazine.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you said he is a distinguished man," said Thacker.</p>
+
+<p>"He is," replied the colonel, "both in literary and in other more
+diversified and extraneous fields. But I am extremely careful about
+the matter that I accept for publication. My contributors are people
+of unquestionable repute and connections, which fact can be verified
+at any time. As I said, I am holding this article until I can acquire
+more information about its author. I do not know whether I will
+publish it or not. If I decide against it, I shall be much pleased,
+Mr. Thacker, to substitute the matter that you are leaving with me in
+its place."</p>
+
+<p>Thacker was somewhat at sea.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't seem to gather," said he, "much about the gist of this
+inspired piece of literature. It sounds more like a dark horse than
+Pegasus to me."</p>
+
+<p>"It is a human document," said the colonel-editor, confidently, "from
+a man of great accomplishments who, in my opinion, has obtained a
+stronger grasp on the world and its outcomes than that of any man living
+to-day."</p>
+
+<p>Thacker rose to his feet excitedly.</p>
+
+<p>"Say!" he said. "It isn't possible that you've cornered John D.
+Rockefeller's memoirs, is it? Don't tell me that all at once."</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir," said Colonel Telfair. "I am speaking of mentality and
+literature, not of the less worthy intricacies of trade."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what's the trouble about running the article," asked Thacker,
+a little impatiently, "if the man's well known and has got the
+stuff?"</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Telfair sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Thacker," said he, "for once I have been tempted. Nothing has
+yet appeared in <i>The Rose of Dixie</i> that has not been from the pen
+of one of its sons or daughters. I know little about the author of this
+article except that he has acquired prominence in a section of the
+country that has always been inimical to my heart and mind. But I
+recognize his genius; and, as I have told you, I have instituted an
+investigation of his personality. Perhaps it will be futile. But I shall
+pursue the inquiry. Until that is finished, I must leave open the
+question of filling the vacant space in our January number."</p>
+
+<p>Thacker arose to leave.</p>
+
+<p>"All right, Colonel," he said, as cordially as he could. "You use
+your own judgment. If you've really got a scoop or something that
+will make 'em sit up, run it instead of my stuff. I'll drop in again
+in about two weeks. Good luck!"</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Telfair and the magazine promoter shook hands.</p>
+
+<p>Returning a fortnight later, Thacker dropped off a very rocky Pullman
+at Toombs City. He found the January number of the magazine made up
+and the forms closed.</p>
+
+<p>The vacant space that had been yawning for type was filled by an
+article that was headed thus:<br />&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="center">
+<p class="noindent"><span class="small"><span class="smallcaps">second
+message to congress</span></span><br />
+<br />
+Written for</p>
+</div>
+
+<h3>THE ROSE OF DIXIE</h3>
+
+<div class="center">
+<p class="noindent"><span class="small">BY</span><br />
+<br />
+A Member of the Well-known<br />
+<br />
+<b>BULLOCH FAMILY, OF GEORGIA</b><br />
+<br />
+<span class="small"><span class="smallcaps">T.
+Roosevelt</span></span></p>
+</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="2"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>THE THIRD INGREDIENT</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an
+apartment-house. It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front
+residences welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the
+wraps and head-gear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the
+sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You may
+have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for twenty
+dollars. Among the Vallambrosa's roomers are stenographers, musicians,
+brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students, wire-tappers, and
+other people who lean far over the banister-rail when the door-bell
+rings.</p>
+
+<p>This treatise shall have to do with but two of the
+Vallambrosians&mdash;though meaning no disrespect to the others.</p>
+
+<p>At six o'clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her
+third-floor rear $3.50 room in the Vallambrosa with her nose and chin
+more sharply pointed than usual. To be discharged from the department
+store where you have been working four years, and with only fifteen
+cents in your purse, does have a tendency to make your features appear
+more finely chiselled.</p>
+
+<p>And now for Hetty's thumb-nail biography while she climbs the two
+flights of stairs.</p>
+
+<p>She walked into the Biggest Store one morning four years before with
+seventy-five other girls, applying for a job behind the waist
+department counter. The phalanx of wage-earners formed a bewildering
+scene of beauty, carrying a total mass of blond hair sufficient to
+have justified the horseback gallops of a hundred Lady Godivas.</p>
+
+<p>The capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man whose task
+it was to engage six of the contestants, was aware of a feeling of
+suffocation as if he were drowning in a sea of frangipanni, while
+white clouds, hand-embroidered, floated about him. And then a sail
+hove in sight. Hetty Pepper, homely of countenance, with small,
+contemptuous, green eyes and chocolate-colored hair, dressed in a suit
+of plain burlap and a common-sense hat, stood before him with every
+one of her twenty-nine years of life unmistakably in sight.</p>
+
+<p>"You're on!" shouted the bald-headed young man, and was saved. And
+that is how Hetty came to be employed in the Biggest Store. The story
+of her rise to an eight-dollar-a-week salary is the combined stories
+of Hercules, Joan of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood. You
+shall not learn from me the salary that was paid her as a beginner.
+There is a sentiment growing about such things, and I want no
+millionaire store-proprietors climbing the fire-escape of my
+tenement-house to throw dynamite bombs into my skylight boudoir.</p>
+
+<p>The story of Hetty's discharge from the Biggest Store is so nearly a
+repetition of her engagement as to be monotonous.</p>
+
+<p>In each department of the store there is an omniscient, omnipresent,
+and omnivorous person carrying always a mileage book and a red
+necktie, and referred to as a "buyer." The destinies of the girls in
+his department who live on (see Bureau of Victual Statistics)&mdash;so
+much per week are in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>This particular buyer was a capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young,
+bald-headed man. As he walked along the aisles of his department he
+seemed to be sailing on a sea of frangipanni, while white clouds,
+machine-embroidered, floated around him. Too many sweets bring
+surfeit. He looked upon Hetty Pepper's homely countenance, emerald
+eyes, and chocolate-colored hair as a welcome oasis of green in a
+desert of cloying beauty. In a quiet angle of a counter he pinched
+her arm kindly, three inches above the elbow. She slapped him three
+feet away with one good blow of her muscular and not especially
+lily-white right. So, now you know why Hetty Pepper came to leave the
+Biggest Store at thirty minutes' notice, with one dime and a nickel in
+her purse.</p>
+
+<p>This morning's quotations list the price of rib beef at six cents per
+(butcher's) pound. But on the day that Hetty was "released" by the B.
+S. the price was seven and one-half cents. That fact is what makes
+this story possible. Otherwise, the extra four cents would have&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But the plot of nearly all the good stories in the world is concerned
+with shorts who were unable to cover; so you can find no fault with
+this one.</p>
+
+<p>Hetty mounted with her rib beef to her $3.50 third-floor back. One
+hot, savory beef-stew for supper, a night's good sleep, and she would
+be fit in the morning to apply again for the tasks of Hercules, Joan
+of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood.</p>
+
+<p>In her room she got the granite-ware stew-pan out of the
+2&times;4-foot china&mdash;er&mdash;I mean earthenware closet,
+and began to dig down in a rat's-nest of paper bags for the potatoes and
+onions. She came out with her nose and chin just a little sharper
+pointed.</p>
+
+<p>There was neither a potato nor an onion. Now, what kind of a
+beef-stew can you make out of simply beef? You can make oyster-soup
+without oysters, turtle-soup without turtles, coffee-cake without
+coffee, but you can't make beef-stew without potatoes and onions.</p>
+
+<p>But rib beef alone, in an emergency, can make an ordinary pine door
+look like a wrought-iron gambling-house portal to the wolf. With salt
+and pepper and a tablespoonful of flour (first well stirred in a
+little cold water) 'twill serve&mdash;'tis not so deep as a lobster
+&agrave; la Newburg nor so wide as a church festival doughnut; but
+'twill serve.</p>
+
+<p>Hetty took her stew-pan to the rear of the third-floor hall.
+According to the advertisements of the Vallambrosa there was running
+water to be found there. Between you and me and the water-meter, it
+only ambled or walked through the faucets; but technicalities have no
+place here. There was also a sink where housekeeping roomers often
+met to dump their coffee grounds and glare at one another's
+kimonos.</p>
+
+<p>At this sink Hetty found a girl with heavy, gold-brown, artistic hair
+and plaintive eyes, washing two large "Irish" potatoes. Hetty knew
+the Vallambrosa as well as any one not owning "double
+hextra-magnifying eyes" could compass its mysteries. The kimonos were
+her encyclopedia, her "Who's What?" her clearinghouse of news, of goers
+and comers. From a rose-pink kimono edged with Nile green she had
+learned that the girl with the potatoes was a miniature-painter living
+in a kind of attic&mdash;or "studio," as they prefer to call
+it&mdash;on the top floor. Hetty was not certain in her mind what
+a miniature was; but it certainly wasn't a house; because
+house-painters, although they wear splashy overalls and poke ladders in
+your face on the street, are known to indulge in a riotous profusion of
+food at home.</p>
+
+<p>The potato girl was quite slim and small, and handled her potatoes as
+an old bachelor uncle handles a baby who is cutting teeth. She had a
+dull shoemaker's knife in her right hand, and she had begun to peel
+one of the potatoes with it.</p>
+
+<p>Hetty addressed her in the punctiliously formal tone of one who
+intends to be cheerfully familiar with you in the second round.</p>
+
+<p>"Beg pardon," she said, "for butting into what's not my business, but
+if you peel them potatoes you lose out. They're new Bermudas. You
+want to scrape 'em. Lemme show you."</p>
+
+<p>She took a potato and the knife, and began to demonstrate.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, thank you," breathed the artist. "I didn't know. And I
+<i>did</i> hate to see the thick peeling go; it seemed such a waste. But
+I thought they always had to be peeled. When you've got only potatoes to
+eat, the peelings count, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Say, kid," said Hetty, staying her knife, "you ain't up against it,
+too, are you?"</p>
+
+<p>The miniature artist smiled starvedly.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I am. Art&mdash;or, at least, the way I interpret
+it&mdash;doesn't seem to be much in demand. I have only these
+potatoes for my dinner. But they aren't so bad boiled and hot, with a
+little butter and salt."</p>
+
+<p>"Child," said Hetty, letting a brief smile soften her rigid features,
+"Fate has sent me and you together. I've had it handed to me in the
+neck, too; but I've got a chunk of meat in my, room as big as a lap-dog.
+And I've done everything to get potatoes except pray for 'em. Let's me
+and you bunch our commissary departments and make a stew of 'em. We'll
+cook it in my room. If we only had an onion to go in it! Say, kid, you
+haven't got a couple of pennies that've slipped down into the lining of
+your last winter's sealskin, have you? I could step down to the corner
+and get one at old Giuseppe's stand. A stew without an onion is worse'n
+a matin&eacute;e without candy."</p>
+
+<p>"You may call me Cecilia," said the artist. "No; I spent my last
+penny three days ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Then we'll have to cut the onion out instead of slicing it in," said
+Hetty. "I'd ask the janitress for one, but I don't want 'em hep just
+yet to the fact that I'm pounding the asphalt for another job. But I
+wish we did have an onion."</p>
+
+<p>In the shop-girl's room the two began to prepare their supper.
+Cecilia's part was to sit on the couch helplessly and beg to be
+allowed to do something, in the voice of a cooing ring-dove. Hetty
+prepared the rib beef, putting it in cold salted water in the stew-pan
+and setting it on the one-burner gas-stove.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish we had an onion," said Hetty, as she scraped the two
+potatoes.</p>
+
+<p>On the wall opposite the couch was pinned a flaming, gorgeous
+advertising picture of one of the new ferry-boats of the P. U. F.
+F. Railroad that had been built to cut down the time between Los
+Angeles and New York City one-eighth of a minute.</p>
+
+<p>Hetty, turning her head during her continuous monologue, saw tears
+running from her guest's eyes as she gazed on the idealized
+presentment of the speeding, foam-girdled transport.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, say, Cecilia, kid," said Hetty, poising her knife, "is it as
+bad art as that? I ain't a critic; but I thought it kind of brightened
+up the room. Of course, a manicure-painter could tell it was a bum
+picture in a minute. I'll take it down if you say so. I wish to the holy
+Saint Potluck we had an onion."</p>
+
+<p>But the miniature miniature-painter had tumbled down, sobbing, with
+her nose indenting the hard-woven drapery of the couch. Something was
+here deeper than the artistic temperament offended at crude
+lithography.</p>
+
+<p>Hetty knew. She had accepted her r&ocirc;le long ago. How scant the
+words with which we try to describe a single quality of a human being!
+When we reach the abstract we are lost. The nearer to Nature that the
+babbling of our lips comes, the better do we understand. Figuratively
+(let us say), some people are Bosoms, some are Hands, some are Heads,
+some are Muscles, some are Feet, some are Backs for burdens.</p>
+
+<p>Hetty was a Shoulder. Hers was a sharp, sinewy shoulder; but all her
+life people had laid their heads upon it, metaphorically or actually,
+and had left there all or half their troubles. Looking at Life
+anatomically, which is as good a way as any, she was preordained to be
+a Shoulder. There were few truer collar-bones anywhere than hers.</p>
+
+<p>Hetty was only thirty-three, and she had not yet outlived the little
+pang that visited her whenever the head of youth and beauty leaned
+upon her for consolation. But one glance in her mirror always served
+as an instantaneous pain-killer. So she gave one pale look into the
+crinkly old looking-glass on the wall above the gas-stove, turned down
+the flame a little lower from the bubbling beef and potatoes, went
+over to the couch, and lifted Cecilia's head to its confessional.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on and tell me, honey," she said. "I know now that it ain't art
+that's worrying you. You met him on a ferry-boat, didn't you? Go on,
+Cecilia, kid, and tell your&mdash;your Aunt Hetty about it."</p>
+
+<p>But youth and melancholy must first spend the surplus of sighs and
+tears that waft and float the barque of romance to its harbor in the
+delectable isles. Presently, through the stringy tendons that formed
+the bars of the confessional, the penitent&mdash;or was it the
+glorified communicant of the sacred flame&mdash;told her story
+without art or illumination.</p>
+
+<p>"It was only three days ago. I was coming back on the ferry from
+Jersey City. Old Mr. Schrum, an art dealer, told me of a rich man in
+Newark who wanted a miniature of his daughter painted. I went to see
+him and showed him some of my work. When I told him the price would
+be fifty dollars he laughed at me like a hyena. He said an enlarged
+crayon twenty times the size would cost him only eight dollars.</p>
+
+<p>"I had just enough money to buy my ferry ticket back to New York. I
+felt as if I didn't want to live another day. I must have looked as I
+felt, for I saw <i>him</i> on the row of seats opposite me, looking at
+me as if he understood. He was nice-looking, but oh, above everything
+else, he looked kind. When one is tired or unhappy or hopeless, kindness
+counts more than anything else.</p>
+
+<p>"When I got so miserable that I couldn't fight against it any longer,
+I got up and walked slowly out the rear door of the ferry-boat cabin.
+No one was there, and I slipped quickly over the rail and dropped into
+the water. Oh, friend Hetty, it was cold, cold!</p>
+
+<p>"For just one moment I wished I was back in the old Vallambrosa,
+starving and hoping. And then I got numb, and didn't care. And then
+I felt that somebody else was in the water close by me, holding me up.
+<i>He</i> had followed me, and jumped in to save me.</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody threw a thing like a big, white doughnut at us, and he made
+me put my arms through the hole. Then the ferry-boat backed, and they
+pulled us on board. Oh, Hetty, I was so ashamed of my wickedness in
+trying to drown myself; and, besides, my hair had all tumbled down and
+was sopping wet, and I was such a sight.</p>
+
+<p>"And then some men in blue clothes came around; and he gave them his
+card, and I heard him tell them he had seen me drop my purse on the
+edge of the boat outside the rail, and in leaning over to get it I had
+fallen overboard. And then I remembered having read in the papers that
+people who try to kill themselves are locked up in cells with people who
+try to kill other people, and I was afraid.</p>
+
+<p>"But some ladies on the boat took me downstairs to the furnace-room
+and got me nearly dry and did up my hair. When the boat landed,
+<i>he</i> came and put me in a cab. He was all dripping himself, but
+laughed as if he thought it was all a joke. He begged me, but I wouldn't
+tell him my name nor where I lived, I was so ashamed."</p>
+
+<p>"You were a fool, child," said Hetty, kindly. "Wait till I turn the
+light up a bit. I wish to Heaven we had an onion."</p>
+
+<p>"Then he raised his hat," went on Cecilia, "and said: 'Very well. But
+I'll find you, anyhow. I'm going to claim my rights of salvage.'
+Then he gave money to the cab-driver and told him to take me where I
+wanted to go, and walked away. What is 'salvage,' Hetty?"</p>
+
+<p>"The edge of a piece of goods that ain't hemmed," said the shop-girl.
+"You must have looked pretty well frazzled out to the little hero
+boy."</p>
+
+<p>"It's been three days," moaned the miniature-painter, "and he hasn't
+found me yet."</p>
+
+<p>"Extend the time," said Hetty. "This is a big town. Think of how
+many girls he might have to see soaked in water with their hair down
+before he would recognize you. The stew's getting on fine&mdash;but
+oh, for an onion! I'd even use a piece of garlic if I had it."</p>
+
+<p>The beef and potatoes bubbled merrily, exhaling a mouth-watering
+savor that yet lacked something, leaving a hunger on the palate, a
+haunting, wistful desire for some lost and needful ingredient.</p>
+
+<p>"I came near drowning in that awful river," said Cecilia,
+shuddering.</p>
+
+<p>"It ought to have more water in it," said Hetty; "the stew, I mean.
+I'll go get some at the sink."</p>
+
+<p>"It smells good," said the artist.</p>
+
+<p>"That nasty old North River?" objected Hetty. "It smells to me like
+soap factories and wet setter-dogs&mdash;oh, you mean the stew. Well,
+I wish we had an onion for it. Did he look like he had money?"</p>
+
+<p>"First, he looked kind," said Cecilia. "I'm sure he was rich; but
+that matters so little. When he drew out his bill-folder to pay the
+cab-man you couldn't help seeing hundreds and thousands of dollars in
+it. And I looked over the cab doors and saw him leave the ferry
+station in a motor-car; and the chauffeur gave him his bearskin to put
+on, for he was sopping wet. And it was only three days ago."</p>
+
+<p>"What a fool!" said Hetty, shortly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the chauffeur wasn't wet," breathed Cecilia. "And he drove the
+car away very nicely."</p>
+
+<p>"I mean <i>you</i>," said Hetty. "For not giving him your
+address."</p>
+
+<p>"I never give my address to chauffeurs," said Cecilia,
+haughtily.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish we had one," said Hetty, disconsolately.</p>
+
+<p>"What for?"</p>
+
+<p>"For the stew, of course&mdash;oh, I mean an onion."</p>
+
+<p>Hetty took a pitcher and started to the sink at the end of the
+hall.</p>
+
+<p>A young man came down the stairs from above just as she was opposite
+the lower step. He was decently dressed, but pale and haggard. His eyes
+were dull with the stress of some burden of physical or mental woe. In
+his hand he bore an onion&mdash;a pink, smooth, solid, shining onion
+as large around as a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock.</p>
+
+<p>Hetty stopped. So did the young man. There was something Joan of
+Arc-ish, Herculean, and Una-ish in the look and pose of the
+shop-lady&mdash;she had cast off the r&ocirc;les of Job and
+Little-Red-Riding-Hood. The young man stopped at the foot of the stairs
+and coughed distractedly. He felt marooned, held up, attacked, assailed,
+levied upon, sacked, assessed, panhandled, browbeaten, though he knew
+not why. It was the look in Hetty's eyes that did it. In them he saw the
+Jolly Roger fly to the masthead and an able seaman with a dirk between
+his teeth scurry up the ratlines and nail it there. But as yet he did
+not know that the cargo he carried was the thing that had caused him to
+be so nearly blown out of the water without even a parley.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Beg</i> your pardon," said Hetty, as sweetly as her dilute acetic
+acid tones permitted, "but did you find that onion on the stairs? There
+was a hole in the paper bag; and I've just come out to look for it."</p>
+
+<p>The young man coughed for half a minute. The interval may have given
+him the courage to defend his own property. Also, he clutched his
+pungent prize greedily, and, with a show of spirit, faced his grim
+waylayer.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said huskily, "I didn't find it on the stairs. It was given
+to me by Jack Bevens, on the top floor. If you don't believe it, ask
+him. I'll wait until you do."</p>
+
+<p>"I know about Bevens," said Hetty, sourly. "He writes books and
+things up there for the paper-and-rags man. We can hear the postman
+guy him all over the house when he brings them thick envelopes back.
+Say&mdash;do you live in the Vallambrosa?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not," said the young man. "I come to see Bevens sometimes.
+He's my friend. I live two blocks west."</p>
+
+<p>"What are you going to do with the onion?&mdash;<i>begging</i>
+your pardon," said Hetty.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to eat it."</p>
+
+<p>"Raw?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes: as soon as I get home."</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't you got anything else to eat with it?"</p>
+
+<p>The young man considered briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he confessed; "there's not another scrap of anything in my
+diggings to eat. I think old Jack is pretty hard up for grub in his
+shack, too. He hated to give up the onion, but I worried him into
+parting with it."</p>
+
+<p>"Man," said Hetty, fixing him with her world-sapient eyes, and laying
+a bony but impressive finger on his sleeve, "you've known trouble,
+too, haven't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lots," said the onion owner, promptly. "But this onion is my own
+property, honestly come by. If you will excuse me, I must be
+going."</p>
+
+<p>"Listen," said Hetty, paling a little with anxiety. "Raw onion is a
+mighty poor diet. And so is a beef-stew without one. Now, if you're
+Jack Bevens' friend, I guess you're nearly right. There's a little
+lady&mdash;a friend of mine&mdash;in my room there at the end
+of the hall. Both of us are out of luck; and we had just potatoes and
+meat between us. They're stewing now. But it ain't got any soul. There's
+something lacking to it. There's certain things in life that are
+naturally intended to fit and belong together. One is pink cheese-cloth
+and green roses, and one is ham and eggs, and one is Irish and trouble.
+And the other one is beef and potatoes <i>with</i> onions. And still
+another one is people who are up against it and other people in the same
+fix."</p>
+
+<p>The young man went into a protracted paroxysm of coughing. With one
+hand he hugged his onion to his bosom.</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt; no doubt," said he, at length. "But, as I said, I must be
+going, because&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Hetty clutched his sleeve firmly.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be a Dago, Little Brother. Don't eat raw onions. Chip it in
+toward the dinner and line yourself inside with the best stew you ever
+licked a spoon over. Must two ladies knock a young gentleman down and
+drag him inside for the honor of dining with 'em? No harm shall
+befall you, Little Brother. Loosen up and fall into line."</p>
+
+<p>The young man's pale face relaxed into a grin.</p>
+
+<p>"Believe I'll go you," he said, brightening. "If my onion is good as
+a credential, I'll accept the invitation gladly."</p>
+
+<p>"It's good as that, but better as seasoning," said Hetty. "You come
+and stand outside the door till I ask my lady friend if she has any
+objections. And don't run away with that letter of recommendation
+before I come out."</p>
+
+<p>Hetty went into her room and closed the door. The young man waited
+outside.</p>
+
+<p>"Cecilia, kid," said the shop-girl, oiling the sharp saw of her voice
+as well as she could, "there's an onion outside. With a young man
+attached. I've asked him in to dinner. You ain't going to kick, are
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, dear!" said Cecilia, sitting up and patting her artistic hair.
+She cast a mournful glance at the ferry-boat poster on the wall.</p>
+
+<p>"Nit," said Hetty. "It ain't him. You're up against real life now.
+I believe you said your hero friend had money and automobiles. This
+is a poor skeezicks that's got nothing to eat but an onion. But he's
+easy-spoken and not a freshy. I imagine he's been a gentleman, he's
+so low down now. And we need the onion. Shall I bring him in? I'll
+guarantee his behavior."</p>
+
+<p>"Hetty, dear," sighed Cecilia, "I'm so hungry. What difference does
+it make whether he's a prince or a burglar? I don't care. Bring him
+in if he's got anything to eat with him."</p>
+
+<p>Hetty went back into the hall. The onion man was gone. Her heart
+missed a beat, and a gray look settled over her face except on her
+nose and cheek-bones. And then the tides of life flowed in again, for
+she saw him leaning out of the front window at the other end of the
+hall. She hurried there. He was shouting to some one below. The
+noise of the street overpowered the sound of her footsteps. She
+looked down over his shoulder, saw whom he was speaking to, and heard
+his words. He pulled himself in from the window-sill and saw her
+standing over him.</p>
+
+<p>Hetty's eyes bored into him like two steel gimlets.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't lie to me," she said, calmly. "What were you going to do with
+that onion?"</p>
+
+<p>The young man suppressed a cough and faced her resolutely. His manner
+was that of one who had been bearded sufficiently.</p>
+
+<p>"I was going to eat it," said he, with emphatic slowness; "just as I
+told you before."</p>
+
+<p>"And you have nothing else to eat at home?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a thing."</p>
+
+<p>"What kind of work do you do?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am not working at anything just now."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why," said Hetty, with her voice set on its sharpest edge, "do
+you lean out of windows and give orders to chauffeurs in green
+automobiles in the street below?"</p>
+
+<p>The young man flushed, and his dull eyes began to sparkle.</p>
+
+<p>"Because, madam," said he, in <i>accelerando</i> tones, "I pay the
+chauffeur's wages and I own the automobile&mdash;and also this
+onion&mdash;this onion, madam."</p>
+
+<p>He flourished the onion within an inch of Hetty's nose. The shop-lady
+did not retreat a hair's-breadth.</p>
+
+<p>"Then why do you eat onions," she said, with biting contempt, "and
+nothing else?"</p>
+
+<p>"I never said I did," retorted the young man, heatedly. "I said I had
+nothing else to eat where I live. I am not a delicatessen
+store-keeper."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why," pursued Hetty, inflexibly, "were you going to eat a raw
+onion?"</p>
+
+<p>"My mother," said the young man, "always made me eat one for a cold.
+Pardon my referring to a physical infirmity; but you may have noticed
+that I have a very, very severe cold. I was going to eat the onion
+and go to bed. I wonder why I am standing here and apologizing to you
+for it."</p>
+
+<p>"How did you catch this cold?" went on Hetty, suspiciously.</p>
+
+<p>The young man seemed to have arrived at some extreme height of
+feeling. There were two modes of descent open to him&mdash;a burst
+of rage or a surrender to the ridiculous. He chose wisely; and the empty
+hall echoed his hoarse laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"You're a dandy," said he. "And I don't blame you for being careful.
+I don't mind telling you. I got wet. I was on a North River ferry a
+few days ago when a girl jumped overboard. Of course, I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Hetty extended her hand, interrupting his story.</p>
+
+<p>"Give me the onion," she said.</p>
+
+<p>The young man set his jaw a trifle harder.</p>
+
+<p>"Give me the onion," she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>He grinned, and laid it in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>Then Hetty's infrequent, grim, melancholy smile showed itself. She
+took the young man's arm and pointed with her other hand to the door
+of her room.</p>
+
+<p>"Little Brother," she said, "go in there. The little fool you fished
+out of the river is there waiting for you. Go on in. I'll give you
+three minutes before I come. Potatoes is in there, waiting. Go on
+in, Onions."</p>
+
+<p>After he had tapped at the door and entered, Hetty began to peel and
+wash the onion at the sink. She gave a gray look at the gray roofs
+outside, and the smile on her face vanished by little jerks and
+twitches.</p>
+
+<p>"But it's us," she said, grimly, to herself, "it's <i>us</i> that
+furnished the beef."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="3"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>THE HIDING OF BLACK BILL</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>A lank, strong, red-faced man with a Wellington beak and small,
+fiery eyes tempered by flaxen lashes, sat on the station platform at
+Los Pinos swinging his legs to and fro. At his side sat another man,
+fat, melancholy, and seedy, who seemed to be his friend. They had
+the appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible
+coat&mdash;seamy on both sides.</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't seen you in about four years, Ham," said the seedy man.
+"Which way you been travelling?"</p>
+
+<p>"Texas," said the red-faced man. "It was too cold in Alaska for me.
+And I found it warm in Texas. I'll tell you about one hot spell I
+went through there.</p>
+
+<p>"One morning I steps off the International at a water-tank and lets
+it go on without me. 'Twas a ranch country, and fuller of
+spite-houses than New York City. Only out there they build 'em
+twenty miles away so you can't smell what they've got for dinner,
+instead of running 'em up two inches from their neighbors' windows.</p>
+
+<p>"There wasn't any roads in sight, so I footed it 'cross country. The
+grass was shoe-top deep, and the mesquite timber looked just like a
+peach orchard. It was so much like a gentleman's private estate that
+every minute you expected a kennelful of bulldogs to run out and
+bite you. But I must have walked twenty miles before I came in sight
+of a ranch-house. It was a little one, about as big as an
+elevated-railroad station.</p>
+
+<p>"There was a little man in a white shirt and brown overalls and a
+pink handkerchief around his neck rolling cigarettes under a tree in
+front of the door.</p>
+
+<p>"'Greetings,' says I. 'Any refreshment, welcome, emoluments, or even
+work for a comparative stranger?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, come in,' says he, in a refined tone. 'Sit down on that stool,
+please. I didn't hear your horse coming.'</p>
+
+<p>"'He isn't near enough yet,' says I. 'I walked. I don't want to be
+a burden, but I wonder if you have three or four gallons of water
+handy.'</p>
+
+<p>"'You do look pretty dusty,' says he; 'but our bathing
+arrangements&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"'It's a drink I want,' says I. 'Never mind the dust that's on the
+outside.'</p>
+
+<p>"He gets me a dipper of water out of a red jar hanging up, and then
+goes on:</p>
+
+<p>"'Do you want work?'</p>
+
+<p>"'For a time,' says I. 'This is a rather quiet section of the
+country, isn't it?'</p>
+
+<p>"'It is,' says he. 'Sometimes&mdash;so I have been told&mdash;one sees no
+human being pass for weeks at a time. I've been here only a month.
+I bought the ranch from an old settler who wanted to move farther
+west.'</p>
+
+<p>"'It suits me,' says I. 'Quiet and retirement are good for a man
+sometimes. And I need a job. I can tend bar, salt mines, lecture,
+float stock, do a little middle-weight slugging, and play the
+piano.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Can you herd sheep?' asks the little ranchman.</p>
+
+<p>"'Do you mean <i>have</i> I heard sheep?' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"'Can you herd 'em&mdash;take charge of a flock of 'em?' says he.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh,' says I, 'now I understand. You mean chase 'em around and bark
+at 'em like collie dogs. Well, I might,' says I. 'I've never exactly
+done any sheep-herding, but I've often seen 'em from car windows
+masticating daisies, and they don't look dangerous.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm short a herder,' says the ranchman. 'You never can depend on
+the Mexicans. I've only got two flocks. You may take out my bunch of
+muttons&mdash;there are only eight hundred of 'em&mdash;in the morning, if you
+like. The pay is twelve dollars a month and your rations furnished.
+You camp in a tent on the prairie with your sheep. You do your own
+cooking, but wood and water are brought to your camp. It's an easy
+job.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm on,' says I. 'I'll take the job even if I have to garland my
+brow and hold on to a crook and wear a loose-effect and play on a
+pipe like the shepherds do in pictures.'</p>
+
+<p>"So the next morning the little ranchman helps me drive the flock of
+muttons from the corral to about two miles out and let 'em graze on
+a little hillside on the prairie. He gives me a lot of instructions
+about not letting bunches of them stray off from the herd, and
+driving 'em down to a water-hole to drink at noon.</p>
+
+<p>"'I'll bring out your tent and camping outfit and rations in the
+buckboard before night,' says he.</p>
+
+<p>"'Fine,' says I. 'And don't forget the rations. Nor the camping
+outfit. And be sure to bring the tent. Your name's Zollicoffer,
+ain't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"'My name,' says he, 'is Henry Ogden.'</p>
+
+<p>"'All right, Mr. Ogden,' says I. 'Mine is Mr. Percival Saint
+Clair.'</p>
+
+<p>"I herded sheep for five days on the Rancho Chiquito; and then the
+wool entered my soul. That getting next to Nature certainly got next
+to me. I was lonesomer than Crusoe's goat. I've seen a lot of
+persons more entertaining as companions than those sheep were. I'd
+drive 'em to the corral and pen 'em every evening, and then cook my
+corn-bread and mutton and coffee, and lie down in a tent the size of
+a table-cloth, and listen to the coyotes and whip-poor-wills singing
+around the camp.</p>
+
+<p>"The fifth evening, after I had corralled my costly but uncongenial
+muttons, I walked over to the ranch-house and stepped in the door.
+"'Mr. Ogden,' says I, 'you and me have got to get sociable. Sheep
+are all very well to dot the landscape and furnish eight-dollar
+cotton suitings for man, but for table-talk and fireside companions
+they rank along with five-o'clock teazers. If you've got a deck of
+cards, or a parcheesi outfit, or a game of authors, get 'em out, and
+let's get on a mental basis. I've got to do something in an
+intellectual line, if it's only to knock somebody's brains out.'</p>
+
+<p>"This Henry Ogden was a peculiar kind of ranchman. He wore
+finger-rings and a big gold watch and careful neckties. And his face
+was calm, and his nose-spectacles was kept very shiny. I saw once,
+in Muscogee, an outlaw hung for murdering six men, who was a dead
+ringer for him. But I knew a preacher in Arkansas that you would
+have taken to be his brother. I didn't care much for him either way;
+what I wanted was some fellowship and communion with holy saints or
+lost sinners&mdash;anything sheepless would do.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, Saint Clair,' says he, laying down the book he was reading,
+'I guess it must be pretty lonesome for you at first. And I don't
+deny that it's monotonous for me. Are you sure you corralled your
+sheep so they won't stray out?'</p>
+
+<p>"'They're shut up as tight as the jury of a millionaire murderer,'
+says I. 'And I'll be back with them long before they'll need their
+trained nurse.'</p>
+
+<p>"So Ogden digs up a deck of cards, and we play casino. After five
+days and nights of my sheep-camp it was like a toot on Broadway.
+When I caught big casino I felt as excited as if I had made a
+million in Trinity. And when H. O. loosened up a little and told the
+story about the lady in the Pullman car I laughed for five minutes.</p>
+
+<p>"That showed what a comparative thing life is. A man may see so much
+that he'd be bored to turn his head to look at a $3,000,000 fire or
+Joe Weber or the Adriatic Sea. But let him herd sheep for a spell,
+and you'll see him splitting his ribs laughing at 'Curfew Shall Not
+Ring To-night,' or really enjoying himself playing cards with
+ladies.</p>
+
+<p>"By-and-by Ogden gets out a decanter of Bourbon, and then there is
+a total eclipse of sheep.</p>
+
+<p>"'Do you remember reading in the papers, about a month ago,' says
+he, 'about a train hold-up on the M. K. &amp; T.? The express agent was
+shot through the shoulder and about $15,000 in currency taken. And
+it's said that only one man did the job.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Seems to me I do,' says I. 'But such things happen so often they
+don't linger long in the human Texas mind. Did they overtake,
+overhaul, seize, or lay hands upon the despoiler?'</p>
+
+<p>"'He escaped,' says Ogden. 'And I was just reading in a paper to-day
+that the officers have tracked him down into this part of the
+country. It seems the bills the robber got were all the first issue
+of currency to the Second National Bank of Espinosa City. And so
+they've followed the trail where they've been spent, and it leads
+this way.'</p>
+
+<p>"Ogden pours out some more Bourbon, and shoves me the bottle.</p>
+
+<p>"'I imagine,' says I, after ingurgitating another modicum of the
+royal booze, 'that it wouldn't be at all a disingenuous idea for a
+train robber to run down into this part of the country to hide for
+a spell. A sheep-ranch, now,' says I, 'would be the finest kind of a
+place. Who'd ever expect to find such a desperate character among
+these song-birds and muttons and wild flowers? And, by the way,'
+says I, kind of looking H. Ogden over, 'was there any description
+mentioned of this single-handed terror? Was his lineaments or height
+and thickness or teeth fillings or style of habiliments set forth in
+print?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, no,' says Ogden; 'they say nobody got a good sight of him
+because he wore a mask. But they know it was a train-robber called
+Black Bill, because he always works alone and because he dropped a
+handkerchief in the express-car that had his name on it.'</p>
+
+<p>"'All right,' says I. 'I approve of Black Bill's retreat to the
+sheep-ranges. I guess they won't find him.'</p>
+
+<p>"'There's one thousand dollars reward for his capture,' says
+Ogden.</p>
+
+<p>"'I don't need that kind of money,' says I, looking Mr. Sheepman
+straight in the eye. 'The twelve dollars a month you pay me is
+enough. I need a rest, and I can save up until I get enough to pay
+my fare to Texarkana, where my widowed mother lives. If Black Bill,'
+I goes on, looking significantly at Ogden, 'was to have come down
+this way&mdash;say, a month ago&mdash;and bought a little sheep-ranch and&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"'Stop,' says Ogden, getting out of his chair and looking pretty
+vicious. 'Do you mean to insinuate&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"'Nothing,' says I; 'no insinuations. I'm stating a hypodermical
+case. I say, if Black Bill had come down here and bought a
+sheep-ranch and hired me to Little-Boy-Blue 'em and treated me
+square and friendly, as you've done, he'd never have anything to
+fear from me. A man is a man, regardless of any complications he may
+have with sheep or railroad trains. Now you know where I stand.'</p>
+
+<p>"Ogden looks black as camp-coffee for nine seconds, and then he
+laughs, amused.</p>
+
+<p>"'You'll do, Saint Clair,' says he. 'If I <i>was</i> Black Bill
+I wouldn't be afraid to trust you. Let's have a game or two of seven-up
+to-night. That is, if you don't mind playing with a train-robber.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I've told you,' says I, 'my oral sentiments, and there's no
+strings to 'em.'</p>
+
+<p>"While I was shuffling after the first hand, I asks Ogden, as if
+the idea was a kind of a casualty, where he was from.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh,' says he, 'from the Mississippi Valley.'</p>
+
+<p>"'That's a nice little place,' says I. 'I've often stopped over
+there. But didn't you find the sheets a little damp and the food
+poor? Now, I hail,' says I, 'from the Pacific Slope. Ever put up
+there?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Too draughty,' says Ogden. 'But if you're ever in the Middle West
+just mention my name, and you'll get foot-warmers and dripped
+coffee.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says I, 'I wasn't exactly fishing for your private
+telephone number and the middle name of your aunt that carried off
+the Cumberland Presbyterian minister. It don't matter. I just want
+you to know you are safe in the hands of your shepherd. Now, don't
+play hearts on spades, and don't get nervous.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Still harping,' says Ogden, laughing again. 'Don't you suppose
+that if I was Black Bill and thought you suspected me, I'd put a
+Winchester bullet into you and stop my nervousness, if I had any?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Not any,' says I. 'A man who's got the nerve to hold up a train
+single-handed wouldn't do a trick like that. I've knocked about
+enough to know that them are the kind of men who put a value on a
+friend. Not that I can claim being a friend of yours, Mr. Ogden,'
+says I, 'being only your sheep-herder; but under more expeditious
+circumstances we might have been.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Forget the sheep temporarily, I beg,' says Ogden, 'and cut for
+deal.'</p>
+
+<p>"About four days afterward, while my muttons was nooning on the
+water-hole and I deep in the interstices of making a pot of coffee,
+up rides softly on the grass a mysterious person in the garb of the
+being he wished to represent. He was dressed somewhere between a
+Kansas City detective, Buffalo Bill, and the town dog-catcher of
+Baton Rouge. His chin and eye wasn't molded on fighting lines, so I
+knew he was only a scout.</p>
+
+<p>"'Herdin' sheep?' he asks me.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says I, 'to a man of your evident gumptional endowments, I
+wouldn't have the nerve to state that I am engaged in decorating old
+bronzes or oiling bicycle sprockets.'</p>
+
+<p>"'You don't talk or look like a sheep-herder to me,' says he.</p>
+
+<p>"'But you talk like what you look like to me,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"And then he asks me who I was working for, and I shows him Rancho
+Chiquito, two miles away, in the shadow of a low hill, and he tells
+me he's a deputy sheriff.</p>
+
+<p>"'There's a train-robber called Black Bill supposed to be somewhere
+in these parts,' says the scout. 'He's been traced as far as San
+Antonio, and maybe farther. Have you seen or heard of any strangers
+around here during the past month?'</p>
+
+<p>"'I have not,' says I, 'except a report of one over at the Mexican
+quarters of Loomis' ranch, on the Frio.'</p>
+
+<p>"'What do you know about him?' asks the deputy.</p>
+
+<p>"'He's three days old,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"'What kind of a looking man is the man you work for?' he asks.
+'Does old George Ramey own this place yet? He's run sheep here for
+the last ten years, but never had no success.'</p>
+
+<p>"'The old man has sold out and gone West,' I tells him. 'Another
+sheep-fancier bought him out about a month ago.'</p>
+
+<p>"'What kind of a looking man is he?' asks the deputy again.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh,' says I, 'a big, fat kind of a Dutchman with long whiskers and
+blue specs. I don't think he knows a sheep from a ground-squirrel.
+I guess old George soaked him pretty well on the deal,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"After indulging himself in a lot more non-communicative information
+and two-thirds of my dinner, the deputy rides away.</p>
+
+<p>"That night I mentions the matter to Ogden.</p>
+
+<p>"'They're drawing the tendrils of the octopus around Black
+Bill,' says I. And then I told him about the deputy sheriff, and
+how I'd described him to the deputy, and what the deputy said
+about the matter.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, well,' says Ogden, 'let's don't borrow any of Black Bill's
+troubles. We've a few of our own. Get the Bourbon out of the
+cupboard and we'll drink to his health&mdash;unless,' says he, with his
+little cackling laugh, 'you're prejudiced against train-robbers.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'll drink,' says I, 'to any man who's a friend to a friend. And
+I believe that Black Bill,' I goes on, 'would be that. So here's to
+Black Bill, and may he have good luck.'</p>
+
+<p>"And both of us drank.</p>
+
+<p>"About two weeks later comes shearing-time. The sheep had to be
+driven up to the ranch, and a lot of frowzy-headed Mexicans would
+snip the fur off of them with back-action scissors. So the afternoon
+before the barbers were to come I hustled my underdone muttons over
+the hill, across the dell, down by the winding brook, and up to the
+ranch-house, where I penned 'em in a corral and bade 'em my nightly
+adieus.</p>
+
+<p>"I went from there to the ranch-house. I find H. Ogden, Esquire,
+lying asleep on his little cot bed. I guess he had been overcome by
+anti-insomnia or diswakefulness or some of the diseases peculiar to
+the sheep business. His mouth and vest were open, and he breathed
+like a second-hand bicycle pump. I looked at him and gave vent to
+just a few musings. 'Imperial C&aelig;sar,' says I, 'asleep in such
+a way, might shut his mouth and keep the wind away.'</p>
+
+<p>"A man asleep is certainly a sight to make angels weep. What
+good is all his brain, muscle, backing, nerve, influence, and family
+connections? He's at the mercy of his enemies, and more so of his
+friends. And he's about as beautiful as a cab-horse leaning against
+the Metropolitan Opera House at
+12.30 <span class="smallcaps">a.m.</span> dreaming of the plains of
+Arabia. Now, a woman asleep you regard as different. No matter how
+she looks, you know it's better for all hands for her to be that
+way.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I took a drink of Bourbon and one for Ogden, and started in
+to be comfortable while he was taking his nap. He had some books on
+his table on indigenous subjects, such as Japan and drainage and
+physical culture&mdash;and some tobacco, which seemed more to the point.</p>
+
+<p>"After I'd smoked a few, and listened to the sartorial breathing of
+H. O., I happened to look out the window toward the shearing-pens,
+where there was a kind of a road coming up from a kind of a road
+across a kind of a creek farther away.</p>
+
+<p>"I saw five men riding up to the house. All of 'em carried guns
+across their saddles, and among 'em was the deputy that had talked
+to me at my camp.</p>
+
+<p>"They rode up careful, in open formation, with their guns ready. I
+set apart with my eye the one I opinionated to be the boss
+muck-raker of this law-and-order cavalry.</p>
+
+<p>"'Good-evening, gents,' says I. 'Won't you 'light, and tie your
+horses?'</p>
+
+<p>"The boss rides up close, and swings his gun over till the opening
+in it seems to cover my whole front elevation.</p>
+
+<p>"'Don't you move your hands none,' says he, 'till you and me indulge
+in a adequate amount of necessary conversation.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I will not,' says I. 'I am no deaf-mute, and therefore will not
+have to disobey your injunctions in replying.'</p>
+
+<p>"'We are on the lookout,' says he, 'for Black Bill, the man that
+held up the Katy for $15,000 in May. We are searching the ranches
+and everybody on 'em. What is your name, and what do you do on this
+ranch?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Captain,' says I, 'Percival Saint Clair is my occupation, and my
+name is sheep-herder. I've got my flock of veals&mdash;no,
+muttons&mdash;penned here to-night. The shearers are coming to-morrow to
+give them a haircut&mdash;with baa-a-rum, I suppose.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Where's the boss of this ranch?' the captain of the gang
+asks me.</p>
+
+<p>"'Wait just a minute, cap'n,' says I. 'Wasn't there a kind of a
+reward offered for the capture of this desperate character you have
+referred to in your preamble?'</p>
+
+<p>"'There's a thousand dollars reward offered,' says the captain, 'but
+it's for his capture and conviction. There don't seem to be no
+provision made for an informer.'</p>
+
+<p>"'It looks like it might rain in a day or so,' says I, in a tired
+way, looking up at the cerulean blue sky.</p>
+
+<p>"'If you know anything about the locality, disposition, or
+secretiveness of this here Black Bill,' says he, in a severe
+dialect, 'you are amiable to the law in not reporting it.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I heard a fence-rider say,' says I, in a desultory kind of voice,
+'that a Mexican told a cowboy named Jake over at Pidgin's store on
+the Nueces that he heard that Black Bill had been seen in Matamoras
+by a sheepman's cousin two weeks ago.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Tell you what I'll do, Tight Mouth,' says the captain, after
+looking me over for bargains. 'If you put us on so we can scoop
+Black Bill, I'll pay you a hundred dollars out of my own&mdash;out of our
+own&mdash;pockets. That's liberal,' says he. 'You ain't entitled to
+anything. Now, what do you say?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Cash down now?' I asks.</p>
+
+<p>"The captain has a sort of discussion with his helpmates, and they
+all produce the contents of their pockets for analysis. Out of the
+general results they figured up $102.30 in cash and $31 worth of
+plug tobacco.</p>
+
+<p>"'Come nearer, capitan meeo,' says I, 'and listen.' He so did.</p>
+
+<p>"'I am mighty poor and low down in the world,' says I. 'I am working
+for twelve dollars a month trying to keep a lot of animals together
+whose only thought seems to be to get asunder. Although,' says I, 'I
+regard myself as some better than the State of South Dakota, it's a
+come-down to a man who has heretofore regarded sheep only in the
+form of chops. I'm pretty far reduced in the world on account of
+foiled ambitions and rum and a kind of cocktail they make along the
+P. R. R. all the way from Scranton to Cincinnati&mdash;dry gin, French
+vermouth, one squeeze of a lime, and a good dash of orange bitters.
+If you're ever up that way, don't fail to let one try you. And,
+again,' says I, 'I have never yet went back on a friend. I've stayed
+by 'em when they had plenty, and when adversity's overtaken me I've
+never forsook 'em.</p>
+
+<p>"'But,' I goes on, 'this is not exactly the case of a friend. Twelve
+dollars a month is only bowing-acquaintance money. And I do not
+consider brown beans and corn-bread the food of friendship. I am a
+poor man,' says I, 'and I have a widowed mother in Texarkana. You
+will find Black Bill,' says I, 'lying asleep in this house on a cot
+in the room to your right. He's the man you want, as I know from his
+words and conversation. He was in a way a friend,' I explains, 'and
+if I was the man I once was the entire product of the mines of
+Gondola would not have tempted me to betray him. But,' says I,
+'every week half of the beans was wormy, and not nigh enough wood in
+camp.</p>
+
+<p>"'Better go in careful, gentlemen,' says I. 'He seems impatient at
+times, and when you think of his late professional pursuits one
+would look for abrupt actions if he was come upon sudden.'</p>
+
+<p>"So the whole posse unmounts and ties their horses, and unlimbers
+their ammunition and equipments, and tiptoes into the house. And I
+follows, like Delilah when she set the Philip Steins on to Samson.</p>
+
+<p>"The leader of the posse shakes Ogden and wakes him up. And then he
+jumps up, and two more of the reward-hunters grab him. Ogden was
+mighty tough with all his slimness, and he gives 'em as neat a
+single-footed tussle against odds as I ever see.</p>
+
+<p>"'What does this mean?' he says, after they had him down.</p>
+
+<p>"'You're scooped in, Mr. Black Bill,' says the captain. 'That's
+all.'</p>
+
+<p>"'It's an outrage,' says H. Ogden, madder yet.</p>
+
+<p>"'It was,' says the peace-and-good-will man. 'The Katy wasn't
+bothering you, and there's a law against monkeying with express
+packages.'</p>
+
+<p>"And he sits on H. Ogden's stomach and goes through his pockets
+symptomatically and careful.</p>
+
+<p>"'I'll make you perspire for this,' says Ogden, perspiring some
+himself. 'I can prove who I am.'</p>
+
+<p>"'So can I,' says the captain, as he draws from H. Ogden's inside
+coat-pocket a handful of new bills of the Second National Bank of
+Espinosa City. 'Your regular engraved Tuesdays-and-Fridays
+visiting-card wouldn't have a louder voice in proclaiming your
+indemnity than this here currency. You can get up now and prepare to
+go with us and expatriate your sins.'</p>
+
+<p>"H. Ogden gets up and fixes his necktie. He says no more after they
+have taken the money off of him.</p>
+
+<p>"'A well-greased idea,' says the sheriff captain, admiring, 'to slip
+off down here and buy a little sheep-ranch where the hand of man is
+seldom heard. It was the slickest hide-out I ever see,' says the
+captain.</p>
+
+<p>"So one of the men goes to the shearing-pen and hunts up the other
+herder, a Mexican they call John Sallies, and he saddles Ogden's
+horse, and the sheriffs all ride up close around him with their guns
+in hand, ready to take their prisoner to town.</p>
+
+<p>"Before starting, Ogden puts the ranch in John Sallies' hands and
+gives him orders about the shearing and where to graze the sheep,
+just as if he intended to be back in a few days. And a couple of
+hours afterward one Percival Saint Clair, an ex-sheep-herder of the
+Rancho Chiquito, might have been seen, with a hundred and nine
+dollars&mdash;wages and blood-money&mdash;in his pocket, riding south on
+another horse belonging to said ranch."</p>
+
+<p>The red-faced man paused and listened. The whistle of a coming
+freight-train sounded far away among the low hills.</p>
+
+<p>The fat, seedy man at his side sniffed, and shook his frowzy head
+slowly and disparagingly.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Snipy?" asked the other. "Got the blues again?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I ain't" said the seedy one, sniffing again. "But I don't like
+your talk. You and me have been friends, off and on, for fifteen
+year; and I never yet knew or heard of you giving anybody up to the
+law&mdash;not no one. And here was a man whose saleratus you had et and
+at whose table you had played games of cards&mdash;if casino can be so
+called. And yet you inform him to the law and take money for it. It
+never was like you, I say."</p>
+
+<p>"This H. Ogden," resumed the red-faced man, "through a lawyer,
+proved himself free by alibis and other legal terminalities, as I so
+heard afterward. He never suffered no harm. He did me favors, and I
+hated to hand him over."</p>
+
+<p>"How about the bills they found in his pocket?" asked the seedy man.</p>
+
+<p>"I put 'em there," said the red-faced man, "while he was asleep,
+when I saw the posse riding up. I was Black Bill. Look out, Snipy,
+here she comes! We'll board her on the bumpers when she takes water
+at the tank."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="4"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLS</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<h4>I<br />&nbsp;</h4>
+
+
+<p>Old Jerome Warren lived in a hundred-thousand-dollar house at 35
+East Fifty-Soforth Street. He was a downtown broker, so rich that
+he could afford to walk&mdash;for his health&mdash;a few blocks in the
+direction of his office every morning, and then call a cab.</p>
+
+<p>He had an adopted son, the son of an old friend named
+Gilbert&mdash;Cyril Scott could play him nicely&mdash;who was becoming a
+successful painter as fast as he could squeeze the paint out of
+his tubes. Another member of the household was Barbara Ross, a
+step-niece. Man is born to trouble; so, as old Jerome had no
+family of his own, he took up the burdens of others.</p>
+
+<p>Gilbert and Barbara got along swimmingly. There was a tacit and
+tactical understanding all round that the two would stand up under
+a floral bell some high noon, and promise the minister to keep old
+Jerome's money in a state of high commotion. But at this point
+complications must be introduced.</p>
+
+<p>Thirty years before, when old Jerome was young Jerome, there was a
+brother of his named Dick. Dick went West to seek his or somebody
+else's fortune. Nothing was heard of him until one day old Jerome
+had a letter from his brother. It was badly written on ruled paper
+that smelled of salt bacon and coffee-grounds. The writing was
+asthmatic and the spelling St. Vitusy.</p>
+
+<p>It appeared that instead of Dick having forced Fortune to stand
+and deliver, he had been held up himself, and made to give
+hostages to the enemy. That is, as his letter disclosed, he was on
+the point of pegging out with a complication of disorders that
+even whiskey had failed to check. All that his thirty years of
+prospecting had netted him was one daughter, nineteen years old,
+as per invoice, whom he was shipping East, charges prepaid, for
+Jerome to clothe, feed, educate, comfort, and cherish for the rest
+of her natural life or until matrimony should them part.</p>
+
+<p>Old Jerome was a board-walk. Everybody knows that the world is
+supported by the shoulders of Atlas; and that Atlas stands on a
+rail-fence; and that the rail-fence is built on a turtle's back.
+Now, the turtle has to stand on something; and that is a
+board-walk made of men like old Jerome.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know whether immortality shall accrue to man; but if not
+so, I would like to know when men like old Jerome get what is due
+them?</p>
+
+<p>They met Nevada Warren at the station. She was a little girl,
+deeply sunburned and wholesomely good-looking, with a manner that
+was frankly unsophisticated, yet one that not even a cigar-drummer
+would intrude upon without thinking twice. Looking at her, somehow
+you would expect to see her in a short skirt and leather leggings,
+shooting glass balls or taming mustangs. But in her plain white
+waist and black skirt she sent you guessing again. With an easy
+exhibition of strength she swung along a heavy valise, which the
+uniformed porters tried in vain to wrest from her.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sure we shall be the best of friends," said Barbara, pecking
+at the firm, sunburned cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope so," said Nevada.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear little niece," said old Jerome, "you are as welcome to my
+home as if it were your father's own."</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks," said Nevada.</p>
+
+<p>"And I am going to call you 'cousin,'" said Gilbert, with his
+charming smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Take the valise, please," said Nevada. "It weighs a million
+pounds. It's got samples from six of dad's old mines in it," she
+explained to Barbara. "I calculate they'd assay about nine cents
+to the thousand tons, but I promised him to bring them along."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>II<br />&nbsp;</h4>
+
+
+<p>It is a common custom to refer to the usual complication between
+one man and two ladies, or one lady and two men, or a lady and a
+man and a nobleman, or&mdash;well, any of those problems&mdash;as the
+triangle. But they are never unqualified triangles. They are
+always isosceles&mdash;never equilateral. So, upon the coming of Nevada
+Warren, she and Gilbert and Barbara Ross lined up into such a
+figurative triangle; and of that triangle Barbara formed the
+hypotenuse.</p>
+
+<p>One morning old Jerome was lingering long after breakfast over the
+dullest morning paper in the city before setting forth to his
+down-town fly-trap. He had become quite fond of Nevada, finding in
+her much of his dead brother's quiet independence and unsuspicious
+frankness.</p>
+
+<p>A maid brought in a note for Miss Nevada Warren.</p>
+
+<p>"A messenger-boy delivered it at the door, please," she said.
+"He's waiting for an answer."</p>
+
+<p>Nevada, who was whistling a Spanish waltz between her teeth, and
+watching the carriages and autos roll by in the street, took the
+envelope. She knew it was from Gilbert, before she opened it, by
+the little gold palette in the upper left-hand corner.</p>
+
+<p>After tearing it open she pored over the contents for a while,
+absorbedly. Then, with a serious face, she went and stood at her
+uncle's elbow.</p>
+
+<p>"Uncle Jerome, Gilbert is a nice boy, isn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, bless the child!" said old Jerome, crackling his paper
+loudly; "of course he is. I raised him myself."</p>
+
+<p>"He wouldn't write anything to anybody that wasn't exactly&mdash;I mean
+that everybody couldn't know and read, would he?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'd just like to see him try it," said uncle, tearing a handful
+from his newspaper. "Why, what&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Read this note he just sent me, uncle, and see if you think it's
+all right and proper. You see, I don't know much about city people
+and their ways."</p>
+
+<p>Old Jerome threw his paper down and set both his feet upon it. He
+took Gilbert's note and fiercely perused it twice, and then a
+third time.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, child," said he, "you had me almost excited, although I was
+sure of that boy. He's a duplicate of his father, and he was a
+gilt-edged diamond. He only asks if you and Barbara will be ready
+at four o'clock this afternoon for an automobile drive over to
+Long Island. I don't see anything to criticise in it except the
+stationery. I always did hate that shade of blue."</p>
+
+<p>"Would it be all right to go?" asked Nevada, eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, yes, child; of course. Why not? Still, it pleases me to
+see you so careful and candid. Go, by all means."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know," said Nevada, demurely. "I thought I'd ask you.
+Couldn't you go with us, uncle?"</p>
+
+<p>"I? No, no, no, no! I've ridden once in a car that boy was
+driving. Never again! But it's entirely proper for you and Barbara
+to go. Yes, yes. But I will not. No, no, no, no!"</p>
+
+<p>Nevada flew to the door, and said to the maid:</p>
+
+<p>"You bet we'll go. I'll answer for Miss Barbara. Tell the boy to
+say to Mr. Warren, 'You bet we'll go.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Nevada," called old Jerome, "pardon me, my dear, but wouldn't it
+be as well to send him a note in reply? Just a line would do."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I won't bother about that," said Nevada, gayly. "Gilbert will
+understand&mdash;he always does. I never rode in an automobile in my
+life; but I've paddled a canoe down Little Devil River through the
+Lost Horse Ca&ntilde;on, and if it's any livelier than that I'd like to
+know!"</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>III<br />&nbsp;</h4>
+
+
+<p>Two months are supposed to have elapsed.</p>
+
+<p>Barbara sat in the study of the hundred-thousand-dollar house. It
+was a good place for her. Many places are provided in the world
+where men and women may repair for the purpose of extricating
+themselves from divers difficulties. There are cloisters,
+wailing-places, watering-places, confessionals, hermitages,
+lawyer's offices, beauty parlors, air-ships, and studies; and the
+greatest of these are studies.</p>
+
+<p>It usually takes a hypotenuse a long time to discover that it is
+the longest side of a triangle. But it's a long line that has no
+turning.</p>
+
+<p>Barbara was alone. Uncle Jerome and Nevada had gone to the
+theatre. Barbara had not cared to go. She wanted to stay at home
+and study in the study. If you, miss, were a stunning New York
+girl, and saw every day that a brown, ingenuous Western witch was
+getting hobbles and a lasso on the young man you wanted for
+yourself, you, too, would lose taste for the oxidized-silver
+setting of a musical comedy.</p>
+
+<p>Barbara sat by the quartered-oak library table. Her right arm
+rested upon the table, and her dextral fingers nervously
+manipulated a sealed letter. The letter was addressed to Nevada
+Warren; and in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope was
+Gilbert's little gold palette. It had been delivered at nine
+o'clock, after Nevada had left.</p>
+
+<p>Barbara would have given her pearl necklace to know what the
+letter contained; but she could not open and read it by the aid of
+steam, or a pen-handle, or a hair-pin, or any of the generally
+approved methods, because her position in society forbade such an
+act. She had tried to read some of the lines of the letter by
+holding the envelope up to a strong light and pressing it hard
+against the paper, but Gilbert had too good a taste in stationery
+to make that possible.</p>
+
+<p>At eleven-thirty the theatre-goers returned. It was a delicious
+winter night. Even so far as from the cab to the door they were
+powdered thickly with the big flakes downpouring diagonally from
+the east. Old Jerome growled good-naturedly about villainous cab
+service and blockaded streets. Nevada, colored like a rose, with
+sapphire eyes, babbled of the stormy nights in the mountains
+around dad's cabin. During all these wintry apostrophes, Barbara,
+cold at heart, sawed wood&mdash;the only appropriate thing she could
+think of to do.</p>
+
+<p>Old Jerome went immediately up-stairs to hot-water-bottles and
+quinine. Nevada fluttered into the study, the only cheerfully
+lighted room, subsided into an arm-chair, and, while at the
+interminable task of unbuttoning her elbow gloves, gave oral
+testimony as to the demerits of the "show."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I think Mr. Fields is really amusing&mdash;sometimes," said
+Barbara. "Here is a letter for you, dear, that came by special
+delivery just after you had gone."</p>
+
+<p>"Who is it from?" asked Nevada, tugging at a button.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, really," said Barbara, with a smile, "I can only guess. The
+envelope has that queer little thing in one corner that Gilbert
+calls a palette, but which looks to me rather like a gilt heart on
+a school-girl's valentine."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder what he's writing to me about" remarked Nevada,
+listlessly.</p>
+
+<p>"We're all alike," said Barbara; "all women. We try to find out
+what is in a letter by studying the postmark. As a last resort we
+use scissors, and read it from the bottom upward. Here it is."</p>
+
+<p>She made a motion as if to toss the letter across the table to
+Nevada.</p>
+
+<p>"Great catamounts!" exclaimed Nevada. "These centre-fire buttons
+are a nuisance. I'd rather wear buckskins. Oh, Barbara, please
+shuck the hide off that letter and read it. It'll be midnight
+before I get these gloves off!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, dear, you don't want me to open Gilbert's letter to you?
+It's for you, and you wouldn't wish any one else to read it, of
+course!"</p>
+
+<p>Nevada raised her steady, calm, sapphire eyes from her gloves.</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody writes me anything that everybody mightn't read," she
+said. "Go on, Barbara. Maybe Gilbert wants us to go out in his car
+again to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>Curiosity can do more things than kill a cat; and if emotions,
+well recognized as feminine, are inimical to feline life, then
+jealousy would soon leave the whole world catless. Barbara opened
+the letter, with an indulgent, slightly bored air.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, dear," said she, "I'll read it if you want me to."</p>
+
+<p>She slit the envelope, and read the missive with swift-travelling
+eyes; read it again, and cast a quick, shrewd glance at Nevada,
+who, for the time, seemed to consider gloves as the world of her
+interest, and letters from rising artists as no more than messages
+from Mars.</p>
+
+<p>For a quarter of a minute Barbara looked at Nevada with a strange
+steadfastness; and then a smile so small that it widened her mouth
+only the sixteenth part of an inch, and narrowed her eyes no more
+than a twentieth, flashed like an inspired thought across her
+face.</p>
+
+<p>Since the beginning no woman has been a mystery to another woman.
+Swift as light travels, each penetrates the heart and mind of
+another, sifts her sister's words of their cunningest disguises,
+reads her most hidden desires, and plucks the sophistry from her
+wiliest talk like hairs from a comb, twiddling them sardonically
+between her thumb and fingers before letting them float away on
+the breezes of fundamental doubt. Long ago Eve's son rang the
+door-bell of the family residence in Paradise Park, bearing a
+strange lady on his arm, whom he introduced. Eve took her
+daughter-in-law aside and lifted a classic eyebrow.</p>
+
+<p>"The Land of Nod," said the bride, languidly flirting the leaf of
+a palm. "I suppose you've been there, of course?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not lately," said Eve, absolutely unstaggered. "Don't you think
+the apple-sauce they serve over there is execrable? I rather like
+that mulberry-leaf tunic effect, dear; but, of course, the real
+fig goods are not to be had over there. Come over behind this
+lilac-bush while the gentlemen split a celery tonic. I think the
+caterpillar-holes have made your dress open a little in the back."</p>
+
+<p>So, then and there&mdash;according to the records&mdash;was the alliance
+formed by the only two who's-who ladies in the world. Then it was
+agreed that woman should forever remain as clear as a pane of
+glass&mdash;though glass was yet to be discovered&mdash;to other women, and
+that she should palm herself off on man as a mystery.</p>
+
+<p>Barbara seemed to hesitate.</p>
+
+<p>"Really, Nevada," she said, with a little show of embarrassment,
+"you shouldn't have insisted on my opening this. I&mdash;I'm sure it
+wasn't meant for any one else to know."</p>
+
+<p>Nevada forgot her gloves for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Then read it aloud," she said. "Since you've already read it,
+what's the difference? If Mr. Warren has written to me something
+that any one else oughtn't to know, that is all the more reason
+why everybody should know it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Barbara, "this is what it says: 'Dearest Nevada&mdash;Come
+to my studio at twelve o'clock to-night. Do not fail.'" Barbara
+rose and dropped the note in Nevada's lap. "I'm awfully sorry,"
+she said, "that I knew. It isn't like Gilbert. There must be some
+mistake. Just consider that I am ignorant of it, will you, dear? I
+must go up-stairs now, I have such a headache. I'm sure I don't
+understand the note. Perhaps Gilbert has been dining too well, and
+will explain. Good night!"</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>IV<br />&nbsp;</h4>
+
+
+<p>Nevada tiptoed to the hall, and heard Barbara's door close
+upstairs. The bronze clock in the study told the hour of twelve
+was fifteen minutes away. She ran swiftly to the front door, and
+let herself out into the snow-storm. Gilbert Warren's studio was
+six squares away.</p>
+
+<p>By aerial ferry the white, silent forces of the storm attacked the
+city from beyond the sullen East River. Already the snow lay a
+foot deep on the pavements, the drifts heaping themselves like
+scaling-ladders against the walls of the besieged town. The Avenue
+was as quiet as a street in Pompeii. Cabs now and then skimmed
+past like white-winged gulls over a moonlit ocean; and less
+frequent motor-cars&mdash;sustaining the comparison&mdash;hissed through the
+foaming waves like submarine boats on their jocund, perilous
+journeys.</p>
+
+<p>Nevada plunged like a wind-driven storm-petrel on her way. She
+looked up at the ragged sierras of cloud-capped buildings that
+rose above the streets, shaded by the night lights and the
+congealed vapors to gray, drab, ashen, lavender, dun, and cerulean
+tints. They were so like the wintry mountains of her Western home
+that she felt a satisfaction such as the hundred-thousand-dollar
+house had seldom brought her.</p>
+
+<p>A policeman caused her to waver on a corner, just by his eye and
+weight.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, Mabel!" said he. "Kind of late for you to be out, ain't
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I am just going to the drug store," said Nevada, hurrying past
+him.</p>
+
+<p>The excuse serves as a passport for the most sophisticated. Does
+it prove that woman never progresses, or that she sprang from
+Adam's rib, full-fledged in intellect and wiles?</p>
+
+<p>Turning eastward, the direct blast cut down Nevada's speed
+one-half. She made zigzag tracks in the snow; but she was as tough
+as a pi&ntilde;on sapling, and bowed to it as gracefully. Suddenly the
+studio-building loomed before her, a familiar landmark, like a
+cliff above some well-remembered ca&ntilde;on. The haunt of business and
+its hostile neighbor, art, was darkened and silent. The elevator
+stopped at ten.</p>
+
+<p>Up eight flights of Stygian stairs Nevada climbed, and rapped
+firmly at the door numbered "89." She had been there many times
+before, with Barbara and Uncle Jerome.</p>
+
+<p>Gilbert opened the door. He had a crayon pencil in one hand, a
+green shade over his eyes, and a pipe in his mouth. The pipe
+dropped to the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"Am I late?" asked Nevada. "I came as quick as I could. Uncle and
+me were at the theatre this evening. Here I am, Gilbert!"</p>
+
+<p>Gilbert did a Pygmalion-and-Galatea act. He changed from a statue
+of stupefaction to a young man with a problem to tackle. He
+admitted Nevada, got a whisk-broom, and began to brush the snow
+from her clothes. A great lamp, with a green shade, hung over an
+easel, where the artist had been sketching in crayon.</p>
+
+<p>"You wanted me," said Nevada simply, "and I came. You said so in
+your letter. What did you send for me for?"</p>
+
+<p>"You read my letter?" inquired Gilbert, sparring for wind.</p>
+
+<p>"Barbara read it to me. I saw it afterward. It said: 'Come to my
+studio at twelve to-night, and do not fail.' I thought you were
+sick, of course, but you don't seem to be."</p>
+
+<p>"Aha!" said Gilbert irrelevantly. "I'll tell you why I asked you
+to come, Nevada. I want you to marry me immediately&mdash;to-night.
+What's a little snow-storm? Will you do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"You might have noticed that I would, long ago," said Nevada. "And
+I'm rather stuck on the snow-storm idea, myself. I surely would
+hate one of these flowery church noon-weddings. Gilbert, I didn't
+know you had grit enough to propose it this way. Let's shock
+'em&mdash;it's our funeral, ain't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"You bet!" said Gilbert. "Where did I hear that expression?" he
+added to himself. "Wait a minute, Nevada; I want to do a little
+'phoning."</p>
+
+<p>He shut himself in a little dressing-room, and called upon the
+lightnings of the heavens&mdash;condensed into unromantic numbers and
+districts.</p>
+
+<p>"That you, Jack? You confounded sleepyhead! Yes, wake up; this is
+me&mdash;or I&mdash;oh, bother the difference in grammar! I'm going to be
+married right away. Yes! Wake up your sister&mdash;don't answer me
+back; bring her along, too&mdash;you <i>must</i>! Remind Agnes of the time I
+saved her from drowning in Lake Ronkonkoma&mdash;I know it's caddish to
+refer to it, but she must come with you. Yes. Nevada is here,
+waiting. We've been engaged quite a while. Some opposition among
+the relatives, you know, and we have to pull it off this way.
+We're waiting here for you. Don't let Agnes out-talk you&mdash;bring
+her! You will? Good old boy! I'll order a carriage to call for
+you, double-quick time. Confound you, Jack, you're all right!"</p>
+
+<p>Gilbert returned to the room where Nevada waited.</p>
+
+<p>"My old friend, Jack Peyton, and his sister were to have been here
+at a quarter to twelve," he explained; "but Jack is so
+confoundedly slow. I've just 'phoned them to hurry. They'll be
+here in a few minutes. I'm the happiest man in the world, Nevada!
+What did you do with the letter I sent you to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've got it cinched here," said Nevada, pulling it out from
+beneath her opera-cloak.</p>
+
+<p>Gilbert drew the letter from the envelope and looked it over
+carefully. Then he looked at Nevada thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you think it rather queer that I should ask you to come to
+my studio at midnight?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, no," said Nevada, rounding her eyes. "Not if you needed me.
+Out West, when a pal sends you a hurry call&mdash;ain't that what you
+say here?&mdash;we get there first and talk about it after the row is
+over. And it's usually snowing there, too, when things happen. So
+I didn't mind."</p>
+
+<p>Gilbert rushed into another room, and came back burdened with
+overcoats warranted to turn wind, rain, or snow.</p>
+
+<p>"Put this raincoat on," he said, holding it for her. "We have a
+quarter of a mile to go. Old Jack and his sister will be here in a
+few minutes." He began to struggle into a heavy coat. "Oh,
+Nevada," he said, "just look at the headlines on the front page of
+that evening paper on the table, will you? It's about your section
+of the West, and I know it will interest you."</p>
+
+<p>He waited a full minute, pretending to find trouble in the getting
+on of his overcoat, and then turned. Nevada had not moved. She was
+looking at him with strange and pensive directness. Her cheeks had
+a flush on them beyond the color that had been contributed by the
+wind and snow; but her eyes were steady.</p>
+
+<p>"I was going to tell you," she said, "anyhow, before you&mdash;before
+we&mdash;before&mdash;well, before anything. Dad never gave me a day of
+schooling. I never learned to read or write a darned word. Now
+if&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Pounding their uncertain way up-stairs, the feet of Jack, the
+somnolent, and Agnes, the grateful, were heard.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>V<br />&nbsp;</h4>
+
+
+<p>When Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Warren were spinning softly homeward in
+a closed carriage, after the ceremony, Gilbert said:</p>
+
+<p>"Nevada, would you really like to know what I wrote you in the
+letter that you received to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Fire away!" said his bride.</p>
+
+<p>"Word for word," said Gilbert, "it was this: 'My dear Miss
+Warren&mdash;You were right about the flower. It was a hydrangea, and
+not a lilac.'"</p>
+
+<p>"All right," said Nevada. "But let's forget it. The joke's on
+Barbara, anyway!"</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="5"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>THIMBLE, THIMBLE</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>These are the directions for finding the office of Carteret &amp;
+Carteret, Mill Supplies and Leather Belting:</p>
+
+<p>You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown
+Line, the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big
+Ca&ntilde;ons of the Moneygrubber Tribe. Then you turn to the left, to
+the right, dodge a push-cart and the tongue of a two-ton
+four-horse dray and hop, skip, and jump to a granite ledge on the
+side of a twenty-one-story synthetic mountain of stone and iron.
+In the twelfth story is the office of Carteret &amp; Carteret. The
+factory where they make the mill supplies and leather belting is
+in Brooklyn. Those commodities&mdash;to say nothing of Brooklyn&mdash;not
+being of interest to you, let us hold the incidents within the
+confines of a one-act, one-scene play, thereby lessening the toil
+of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher. So, if you
+have the courage to face four pages of type and Carteret &amp;
+Carteret's office boy, Percival, you shall sit on a varnished
+chair in the inner office and peep at the little comedy of the Old
+Nigger Man, the Hunting-Case Watch, and the Open-Faced
+Question&mdash;mostly borrowed from the late Mr. Frank Stockton, as you
+will conclude.</p>
+
+<p>First, biography (but pared to the quick) must intervene. I am for
+the inverted sugar-coated quinine pill&mdash;the bitter on the outside.</p>
+
+<p>The Carterets were, or was (Columbia College professors please
+rule), an old Virginia family. Long time ago the gentlemen of the
+family had worn lace ruffles and carried tinless foils and owned
+plantations and had slaves to burn. But the war had greatly
+reduced their holdings. (Of course you can perceive at once that
+this flavor has been shoplifted from Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, in
+spite of the "et" after "Carter.") Well, anyhow:</p>
+
+<p>In digging up the Carteret history I shall not take you farther
+back than the year 1620. The two original American Carterets came
+over in that year, but by different means of transportation. One
+brother, named John, came in the <i>Mayflower</i> and became a Pilgrim
+Father. You've seen his picture on the covers of the Thanksgiving
+magazines, hunting turkeys in the deep snow with a blunderbuss.
+Blandford Carteret, the other brother, crossed the pond in his own
+brigantine, landed on the Virginia coast, and became an F. F. V.
+John became distinguished for piety and shrewdness in business;
+Blandford for his pride, juleps; marksmanship, and vast
+slave-cultivated plantations.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the Civil War. (I must condense this historical
+interpolation.) Stonewall Jackson was shot; Lee surrendered; Grant
+toured the world; cotton went to nine cents; Old Crow whiskey and
+Jim Crow cars were invented; the Seventy-ninth Massachusetts
+Volunteers returned to the Ninety-seventh Alabama Zouaves the
+battle flag of Lundy's Lane which they bought at a second-hand
+store in Chelsea, kept by a man named Skzchnzski; Georgia sent the
+President a sixty-pound watermelon&mdash;and that brings us up to the
+time when the story begins. My! but that was sparring for an
+opening! I really must brush op on my Aristotle.</p>
+
+<p>The Yankee Carterets went into business in New York long before
+the war. Their house, as far as Leather Belting and Mill Supplies
+was concerned, was as musty and arrogant and solid as one of those
+old East India tea-importing concerns that you read about in
+Dickens. There were some rumors of a war behind its counters, but
+not enough to affect the business.</p>
+
+<p>During and after the war, Blandford Carteret, F.F.V., lost his
+plantations, juleps, marksmanship, and life. He bequeathed little
+more than his pride to his surviving family. So it came to pass
+that Blandford Carteret, the Fifth, aged fifteen, was invited by
+the leather-and-mill-supplies branch of that name to come North
+and learn business instead of hunting foxes and boasting of the
+glory of his fathers on the reduced acres of his impoverished
+family. The boy jumped at the chance; and, at the age of
+twenty-five, sat in the office of the firm equal partner with
+John, the Fifth, of the blunderbuss-and-turkey branch. Here the
+story begins again.</p>
+
+<p>The young men were about the same age, smooth of face, alert, easy
+of manner, and with an air that promised mental and physical
+quickness. They were razored, blue-serged, straw-hatted, and pearl
+stick-pinned like other young New Yorkers who might be
+millionaires or bill clerks.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon at four o'clock, in the private office of the firm,
+Blandford Carteret opened a letter that a clerk had just brought
+to his desk. After reading it, he chuckled audibly for nearly a
+minute. John looked around from his desk inquiringly.</p>
+
+<p>"It's from mother," said Blandford. "I'll read you the funny part
+of it. She tells me all the neighborhood news first, of course,
+and then cautions me against getting my feet wet and musical
+comedies. After that come vital statistics about calves and pigs
+and an estimate of the wheat crop. And now I'll quote some:</p>
+
+<p>"'And what do you think! Old Uncle Jake, who was seventy-six last
+Wednesday, must go travelling. Nothing would do but he must go to
+New York and see his "young Marster Blandford." Old as he is, he
+has a deal of common sense, so I've let him go. I couldn't refuse
+him&mdash;he seemed to have concentrated all his hopes and desires into
+this one adventure into the wide world. You know he was born on
+the plantation, and has never been ten miles away from it in his
+life. And he was your father's body servant during the war, and
+has been always a faithful vassal and servant of the family. He
+has often seen the gold watch&mdash;the watch that was your father's
+and your father's father's. I told him it was to be yours, And he
+begged me to allow him to take it to you and to put it into your
+hands himself.</p>
+
+<p>"'So he has it, carefully enclosed in a buck-skin case, and is
+bringing it to you with all the pride and importance of a king's
+messenger. I gave him money for the round trip and for a two
+weeks' stay in the city. I wish you would see to it that he gets
+comfortable quarters&mdash;Jake won't need much looking after&mdash;he's
+able to take care of himself. But I have read in the papers that
+African bishops and colored potentates generally have much trouble
+in obtaining food and lodging in the Yankee metropolis. That may
+be all right; but I don't see why the best hotel there shouldn't
+take Jake in. Still, I suppose it's a rule.</p>
+
+<p>"'I gave him full directions about finding you, and packed his
+valise myself. You won't have to bother with him; but I do hope
+you'll see that he is made comfortable. Take the watch that he
+brings you&mdash;it's almost a decoration. It has been worn by true
+Carterets, and there isn't a stain upon it nor a false movement of
+the wheels. Bringing it to you is the crowning joy of old Jake's
+life. I wanted him to have that little outing and that happiness
+before it is too late. You have often heard us talk about how
+Jake, pretty badly wounded himself, crawled through the reddened
+grass at Chancellorsville to where your father lay with the bullet
+in his dear heart, and took the watch from his pocket to keep it
+from the "Yanks."</p>
+
+<p>"'So, my son, when the old man comes consider him as a frail but
+worthy messenger from the old-time life and home.</p>
+
+<p>"'You have been so long away from home and so long among the
+people that we have always regarded as aliens that I'm not sure
+that Jake will know you when he sees you. But Jake has a keen
+perception, and I rather believe that he will know a Virginia
+Carteret at sight. I can't conceive that even ten years in
+Yankee-land could change a boy of mine. Anyhow, I'm sure you will
+know Jake. I put eighteen collars in his valise. If he should have
+to buy others, he wears a number 15&#189;. Please see that he gets the
+right ones. He will be no trouble to you at all.</p>
+
+<p>"'If you are not too busy, I'd like for you to find him a place to
+board where they have white-meal corn-bread, and try to keep him
+from taking his shoes off in your office or on the street. His
+right foot swells a little, and he likes to be comfortable.</p>
+
+<p>"'If you can spare the time, count his handkerchiefs when they
+come back from the wash. I bought him a dozen new ones before he
+left. He should be there about the time this letter reaches you. I
+told him to go straight to your office when he arrives.'"</p>
+
+<p>As soon as Blandford had finished the reading of this, something
+happened (as there should happen in stories and must happen on the
+stage).</p>
+
+<p>Percival, the office boy, with his air of despising the world's
+output of mill supplies and leather belting, came in to announce
+that a colored gentleman was outside to see Mr. Blandford
+Carteret.</p>
+
+<p>"Bring him in," said Blandford, rising.</p>
+
+<p>John Carteret swung around in his chair and said to Percival: "Ask
+him to wait a few minutes outside. We'll let you know when to
+bring him in."</p>
+
+<p>Then he turned to his cousin with one of those broad, slow smiles
+that was an inheritance of all the Carterets, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Bland, I've always had a consuming curiosity to understand the
+differences that you haughty Southerners believe to exist between
+'you all' and the people of the North. Of course, I know that you
+consider yourselves made out of finer clay and look upon Adam as
+only a collateral branch of your ancestry; but I don't know why. I
+never could understand the differences between us."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, John," said Blandford, laughing, "what you don't understand
+about it is just the difference, of course. I suppose it was the
+feudal way in which we lived that gave us our lordly baronial airs
+and feeling of superiority."</p>
+
+<p>"But you are not feudal, now," went on John. "Since we licked you
+and stole your cotton and mules you've had to go to work just as
+we 'damyankees,' as you call us, have always been doing. And
+you're just as proud and exclusive and upper-classy as you were
+before the war. So it wasn't your money that caused it."</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe it was the climate," said Blandford, lightly, "or maybe our
+negroes spoiled us. I'll call old Jake in, now. I'll be glad to
+see the old villain again."</p>
+
+<p>"Wait just a moment," said John. "I've got a little theory I want
+to test. You and I are pretty much alike in our general
+appearance. Old Jake hasn't seen you since you were fifteen. Let's
+have him in and play fair and see which of us gets the watch. The
+old darky surely ought to be able to pick out his 'young marster'
+without any trouble. The alleged aristocratic superiority of a
+'reb' ought to be visible to him at once. He couldn't make the
+mistake of handing over the timepiece to a Yankee, of course. The
+loser buys the dinner this evening and two dozen 15&#189; collars for
+Jake. Is it a go?"</p>
+
+<p>Blandford agreed heartily. Percival was summoned, and told to
+usher the "colored gentleman" in.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jake stepped inside the private office cautiously. He was a
+little old man, as black as soot, wrinkled and bald except for a
+fringe of white wool, cut decorously short, that ran over his ears
+and around his head. There was nothing of the stage "uncle" about
+him: his black suit nearly fitted him; his shoes shone, and his
+straw hat was banded with a gaudy ribbon. In his right hand he
+carried something carefully concealed by his closed fingers.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jake stopped a few steps from the door. Two young men sat in
+their revolving desk-chairs ten feet apart and looked at him in
+friendly silence. His gaze slowly shifted many times from one to
+the other. He felt sure that he was in the presence of one, at
+least, of the revered family among whose fortunes his life had
+begun and was to end.</p>
+
+<p>One had the pleasing but haughty Carteret air; the other had the
+unmistakable straight, long family nose. Both had the keen black
+eyes, horizontal brows, and thin, smiling lips that had
+distinguished both the Carteret of the <i>Mayflower</i> and him of the
+brigantine. Old Jake had thought that he could have picked out his
+young master instantly from a thousand Northerners; but he found
+himself in difficulties. The best he could do was to use strategy.</p>
+
+<p>"Howdy, Marse Blandford&mdash;howdy, suh?" he said, looking midway
+between the two young men.</p>
+
+<p>"Howdy, Uncle Jake?" they both answered pleasantly and in unison.
+"Sit down. Have you brought the watch?"</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jake chose a hard-bottom chair at a respectful distance, sat
+on the edge of it, and laid his hat carefully on the floor. The
+watch in its buckskin case he gripped tightly. He had not risked
+his life on the battle-field to rescue that watch from his "old
+marster's" foes to hand it over again to the enemy without a
+struggle.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, suh; I got it in my hand, suh. I'm gwine give it to you
+right away in jus' a minute. Old Missus told me to put it in young
+Marse Blandford's hand and tell him to wear it for the family
+pride and honor. It was a mighty longsome trip for an old nigger
+man to make&mdash;ten thousand miles, it must be, back to old Vi'ginia,
+suh. You've growed mightily, young marster. I wouldn't have
+reconnized you but for yo' powerful resemblance to old marster."</p>
+
+<p>With admirable diplomacy the old man kept his eyes roaming in the
+space between the two men. His words might have been addressed to
+either. Though neither wicked nor perverse, he was seeking for a
+sign.</p>
+
+<p>Blandford and John exchanged winks.</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon you done got you ma's letter," went on Uncle Jake. "She
+said she was gwine to write to you 'bout my comin' along up this
+er-way.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, Uncle Jake," said John briskly. "My cousin and I have
+just been notified to expect you. We are both Carterets, you
+know."</p>
+
+<p>"Although one of us," said Blandford, "was born and raised in the
+North."</p>
+
+<p>"So if you will hand over the watch&mdash;" said John.</p>
+
+<p>"My cousin and I&mdash;" said Blandford.</p>
+
+<p>"Will then see to it&mdash;" said John.</p>
+
+<p>"That comfortable quarters are found for you," said Blandford.</p>
+
+<p>With creditable ingenuity, old Jake set up a cackling,
+high-pitched, protracted laugh. He beat his knee, picked up his
+hat and bent the brim in an apparent paroxysm of humorous
+appreciation. The seizure afforded him a mask behind which he
+could roll his eyes impartially between, above, and beyond his two
+tormentors.</p>
+
+<p>"I sees what!" he chuckled, after a while. "You gen'lemen is
+tryin' to have fun with the po' old nigger. But you can't fool old
+Jake. I knowed you, Marse Blandford, the minute I sot eyes on you.
+You was a po' skimpy little boy no mo' than about fo'teen when you
+lef' home to come No'th; but I knowed you the minute I sot eyes on
+you. You is the mawtal image of old marster. The other gen'leman
+resembles you mightily, suh; but you can't fool old Jake on a
+member of the old Vi'ginia family. No suh."</p>
+
+<p>At exactly the same time both Carterets smiled and extended a hand
+for the watch.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Jake's wrinkled, black face lost the expression of amusement
+to which he had vainly twisted it. He knew that he was being
+teased, and that it made little real difference, as far as its
+safety went, into which of those outstretched hands he placed the
+family treasure. But it seemed to him that not only his own pride
+and loyalty but much of the Virginia Carterets' was at stake. He
+had heard down South during the war about that other branch of the
+family that lived in the North and fought on "the yuther side,"
+and it had always grieved him. He had followed his "old marster's"
+fortunes from stately luxury through war to almost poverty. And
+now, with the last relic and reminder of him, blessed by "old
+missus," and intrusted implicitly to his care, he had come ten
+thousand miles (as it seemed) to deliver it into the hands of the
+one who was to wear it and wind it and cherish it and listen to it
+tick off the unsullied hours that marked the lives of the
+Carterets&mdash;of Virginia.</p>
+
+<p>His experience and conception of the Yankees had been an
+impression of tyrants&mdash;"low-down, common trash"&mdash;in blue, laying
+waste with fire and sword. He had seen the smoke of many burning
+homesteads almost as grand as Carteret Hall ascending to the
+drowsy Southern skies. And now he was face to face with one of
+them&mdash;and he could not distinguish him from his "young marster"
+whom he had come to find and bestow upon him the emblem of his
+kingship&mdash;even as the arm "clothed in white samite, mystic,
+wonderful" laid Excalibur in the right hand of Arthur. He saw
+before him two young men, easy, kind, courteous, welcoming, either
+of whom might have been the one he sought. Troubled, bewildered,
+sorely grieved at his weakness of judgment, old Jake abandoned his
+loyal subterfuges. His right hand sweated against the buckskin
+cover of the watch. He was deeply humiliated and chastened.
+Seriously, now, his prominent, yellow-white eyes closely scanned
+the two young men. At the end of his scrutiny he was conscious of
+but one difference between them. One wore a narrow black tie with
+a white pearl stickpin. The other's "four-in-hand" was a narrow
+blue one pinned with a black pearl.</p>
+
+<p>And then, to old Jake's relief, there came a sudden distraction.
+Drama knocked at the door with imperious knuckles, and forced
+Comedy to the wings, and Drama peeped with a smiling but set face
+over the footlights.</p>
+
+<p>Percival, the hater of mill supplies, brought in a card, which he
+handed, with the manner of one bearing a cartel, to Blue-Tie.</p>
+
+<p>"Olivia De Ormond," read Blue-Tie from the card. He looked
+inquiringly at his cousin.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not have her in," said Black-Tie, "and bring matters to a
+conclusion?"</p>
+
+<p>"Uncle Jake," said one of the young men, "would you mind taking
+that chair over there in the corner for a while? A lady is coming
+in&mdash;on some business. We'll take up your case afterward."</p>
+
+<p>The lady whom Percival ushered in was young and petulantly,
+decidedly, freshly, consciously, and intentionally pretty. She was
+dressed with such expensive plainness that she made you consider
+lace and ruffles as mere tatters and rags. But one great ostrich
+plume that she wore would have marked her anywhere in the army of
+beauty as the wearer of the merry helmet of Navarre.</p>
+
+<p>Miss De Ormond accepted the swivel chair at Blue-Tie's desk. Then
+the gentlemen drew leather-upholstered seats conveniently near,
+and spoke of the weather.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said she, "I noticed it was warmer. But I mustn't take up
+too much of your time during business hours. That is," she
+continued, "unless we talk business."</p>
+
+<p>She addressed her words to Blue-Tie, with a charming smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," said he. "You don't mind my cousin being present, do
+you? We are generally rather confidential with each
+other&mdash;especially in business matters."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no," caroled Miss De Ormond. "I'd rather he did hear. He knows
+all about it, anyhow. In fact, he's quite a material witness
+because he was present when you&mdash;when it happened. I thought you
+might want to talk things over before&mdash;well, before any action is
+taken, as I believe the lawyers say."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you anything in the way of a proposition to make?" asked
+Black-Tie.</p>
+
+<p>Miss De Ormond looked reflectively at the neat toe of one of her
+dull kid-pumps.</p>
+
+<p>"I had a proposal made to me," she said. "If the proposal sticks
+it cuts out the proposition. Let's have that settled first."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, as far as&mdash;" began Blue-Tie.</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me, cousin," interrupted Black-Tie, "if you don't mind my
+cutting in." And then he turned, with a good-natured air, toward
+the lady.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, let's recapitulate a bit," he said cheerfully. "All three of
+us, besides other mutual acquaintances, have been out on a good
+many larks together."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I'll have to call the birds by another name," said
+Miss De Ormond.</p>
+
+<p>"All right," responded Black-Tie, with unimpaired cheerfulness;
+"suppose we say 'squabs' when we talk about the 'proposal' and
+'larks' when we discuss the 'proposition.' You have a quick mind,
+Miss De Ormond. Two months ago some half-dozen of us went in a
+motor-car for a day's run into the country. We stopped at a
+road-house for dinner. My cousin proposed marriage to you then and
+there. He was influenced to do so, of course, by the beauty and
+charm which no one can deny that you possess."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I had you for a press agent, Mr. Carteret," said the
+beauty, with a dazzling smile.</p>
+
+<p>"You are on the stage, Miss De Ormond," went on Black-Tie. "You
+have had, doubtless, many admirers, and perhaps other proposals.
+You must remember, too, that we were a party of merrymakers on
+that occasion. There were a good many corks pulled. That the
+proposal of marriage was made to you by my cousin we cannot deny.
+But hasn't it been your experience that, by common consent, such
+things lose their seriousness when viewed in the next day's
+sunlight? Isn't there something of a 'code' among good 'sports'&mdash;I
+use the word in its best sense&mdash;that wipes out each day the
+follies of the evening previous?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes," said Miss De Ormond. "I know that very well. And I've
+always played up to it. But as you seem to be conducting the
+case&mdash;with the silent consent of the defendant&mdash;I'll tell you
+something more. I've got letters from him repeating the proposal.
+And they're signed, too."</p>
+
+<p>"I understand," said Black-Tie gravely. "What's your price for the
+letters?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not a cheap one," said Miss De Ormond. "But I had decided to
+make you a rate. You both belong to a swell family. Well, if I <i>am</i>
+on the stage nobody can say a word against me truthfully. And the
+money is only a secondary consideration. It isn't the money I was
+after. I&mdash;I believed him&mdash;and&mdash;and I liked him."</p>
+
+<p>She cast a soft, entrancing glance at Blue-Tie from under her long
+eyelashes.</p>
+
+<p>"And the price?" went on Black-Tie, inexorably.</p>
+
+<p>"Ten thousand dollars," said the lady, sweetly.</p>
+
+<p>"Or&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Or the fulfillment of the engagement to marry."</p>
+
+<p>"I think it is time," interrupted Blue-Tie, "for me to be allowed
+to say a word or two. You and I, cousin, belong to a family that
+has held its head pretty high. You have been brought up in a
+section of the country very different from the one where our
+branch of the family lived. Yet both of us are Carterets, even if
+some of our ways and theories differ. You remember, it is a
+tradition of the family, that no Carteret ever failed in chivalry
+to a lady or failed to keep his word when it was given."</p>
+
+<p>Then Blue-Tie, with frank decision showing on his countenance,
+turned to Miss De Ormond.</p>
+
+<p>"Olivia," said he, "on what date will you marry me?"</p>
+
+<p>Before she could answer, Black-Tie again interposed.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a long journey," said he, "from Plymouth rock to Norfolk
+Bay. Between the two points we find the changes that nearly three
+centuries have brought. In that time the old order has changed. We
+no longer burn witches or torture slaves. And to-day we neither
+spread our cloaks on the mud for ladies to walk over nor treat
+them to the ducking-stool. It is the age of common sense,
+adjustment, and proportion. All of us&mdash;ladies, gentlemen, women,
+men, Northerners, Southerners, lords, caitiffs, actors,
+hardware-drummers, senators, hod-carriers, and politicians&mdash;are
+coming to a better understanding. Chivalry is one of our words
+that changes its meaning every day. Family pride is a thing of
+many constructions&mdash;it may show itself by maintaining a moth-eaten
+arrogance in a cobwebbed Colonial mansion or by the prompt paying
+of one's debts.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, I suppose you've had enough of my monologue. I've learned
+something of business and a little of life; and I somehow believe,
+cousin, that our great-great-grandfathers, the original Carterets,
+would indorse my view of this matter."</p>
+
+<p>Black-Tie wheeled around to his desk, wrote in a check-book and
+tore out the check, the sharp rasp of the perforated leaf making
+the only sound in the room. He laid the check within easy reach of
+Miss De Ormond's hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Business is business," said he. "We live in a business age. There
+is my personal check for $10,000. What do you say, Miss De
+Ormond&mdash;will it he orange blossoms or cash?"</p>
+
+<p>Miss De Ormond picked up the cheek carelessly, folded it
+indifferently, and stuffed it into her glove.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, this'll do," she said, calmly. "I just thought I'd call and
+put it up to you. I guess you people are all right. But a girl has
+feelings, you know. I've heard one of you was a Southerner&mdash;I
+wonder which one of you it is?"</p>
+
+<p>She arose, smiled sweetly, and walked to the door. There, with a
+flash of white teeth and a dip of the heavy plume, she
+disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Both of the cousins had forgotten Uncle Jake for the time. But now
+they heard the shuffling of his shoes as he came across the rug
+toward them from his seat in the corner.</p>
+
+<p>"Young marster," he said, "take yo' watch."</p>
+
+<p>And without hesitation he laid the ancient timepiece in the hand
+of its rightful owner.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="6"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>SUPPLY AND DEMAND</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>Finch keeps a hats-cleaned-by-electricity-while-you-wait
+establishment, nine feet by twelve, in Third Avenue. Once a
+customer, you are always his. I do not know his secret process,
+but every four days your hat needs to be cleaned again.</p>
+
+<p>Finch is a leathern, sallow, slow-footed man, between twenty and
+forty. You would say he had been brought up a bushelman in Essex
+Street. When business is slack he likes to talk, so I had my hat
+cleaned even oftener than it deserved, hoping Finch might let me
+into some of the secrets of the sweatshops.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon I dropped in and found Finch alone. He began to
+anoint my headpiece de Panama with his mysterious fluid that
+attracted dust and dirt like a magnet.</p>
+
+<p>"They say the Indians weave 'em under water," said I, for a
+leader.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you believe it," said Finch. "No Indian or white man could
+stay under water that long. Say, do you pay much attention to
+politics? I see in the paper something about a law they've passed
+called 'the law of supply and demand.'"</p>
+
+<p>I explained to him as well as I could that the reference was to a
+politico-economical law, and not to a legal statute.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know," said Finch. "I heard a good deal about it a year
+or so ago, but in a one-sided way."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said I, "political orators use it a great deal. In fact,
+they never give it a rest. I suppose you heard some of those
+cart-tail fellows spouting on the subject over here on the east
+side."</p>
+
+<p>"I heard it from a king," said Finch&mdash;"the white king of a tribe
+of Indians in South America."</p>
+
+<p>I was interested but not surprised. The big city is like a
+mother's knee to many who have strayed far and found the roads
+rough beneath their uncertain feet. At dusk they come home and sit
+upon the door-step. I know a piano player in a cheap caf&eacute; who
+has shot lions in Africa, a bell-boy who fought in the British army
+against the Zulus, an express-driver whose left arm had been
+cracked like a lobster's claw for a stew-pot of Patagonian
+cannibals when the boat of his rescuers hove in sight. So a
+hat-cleaner who had been a friend of a king did not oppress me.</p>
+
+<p>"A new band?" asked Finch, with his dry, barren smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said I, "and half an inch wider." I had had a new band five
+days before.</p>
+
+<p>"I meets a man one night," said Finch, beginning his story&mdash;"a man
+brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating
+schweinerknuckel in Schlagel's. That was two years ago, when I was
+a hose-cart driver for No. 98. His discourse runs to the subject
+of gold. He says that certain mountains in a country down South
+that he calls Gaudymala is full of it. He says the Indians wash it
+out of the streams in plural quantities.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, Geronimo!' says I. 'Indians! There's no Indians in the
+South,' I tell him, 'except Elks, Maccabees, and the buyers for
+the fall dry-goods trade. The Indians are all on the
+reservations,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm telling you this with reservations,' says he. 'They ain't
+Buffalo Bill Indians; they're squattier and more pedigreed. They
+call 'em Inkers and Aspics, and they was old inhabitants when
+Mazuma was King of Mexico. They wash the gold out of the mountain
+streams,' says the brown man, 'and fill quills with it; and then
+they empty 'em into red jars till they are full; and then they
+pack it in buckskin sacks of one arroba each&mdash;an arroba is
+twenty-five pounds&mdash;and store it in a stone house, with an
+engraving of a idol with marcelled hair, playing a flute, over the
+door.'</p>
+
+<p>"'How do they work off this unearth increment?' I asks.</p>
+
+<p>"'They don't,' says the man. 'It's a case of "Ill fares the land
+with the great deal of velocity where wealth accumulates and there
+ain't any reciprocity."'</p>
+
+<p>"After this man and me got through our conversation, which left
+him dry of information, I shook hands with him and told him I was
+sorry I couldn't believe him. And a month afterward I landed on
+the coast of this Gaudymala with $1,300 that I had been saving up
+for five years. I thought I knew what Indians liked, and I fixed
+myself accordingly. I loaded down four pack-mules with red woollen
+blankets, wrought-iron pails, jewelled side-combs for the ladies,
+glass necklaces, and safety-razors. I hired a black mozo, who was
+supposed to be a mule-driver and an interpreter too. It turned out
+that he could interpret mules all right, but he drove the English
+language much too hard. His name sounded like a Yale key when you
+push it in wrong side up, but I called him McClintock, which was
+close to the noise.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, this gold village was forty miles up in the mountains, and
+it took us nine days to find it. But one afternoon McClintock led
+the other mules and myself over a rawhide bridge stretched across
+a precipice five thousand feet deep, it seemed to me. The hoofs of
+the beasts drummed on it just like before George M. Cohan makes
+his first entrance on the stage.</p>
+
+<p>"This village was built of mud and stone, and had no streets. Some
+few yellow-and-brown persons popped their heads out-of-doors,
+looking about like Welsh rabbits with Worcester sauce on em. Out
+of the biggest house, that had a kind of a porch around it, steps
+a big white man, red as a beet in color, dressed in fine tanned
+deerskin clothes, with a gold chain around his neck, smoking a
+cigar. I've seen United States Senators of his style of features
+and build, also head-waiters and cops.</p>
+
+<p>"He walks up and takes a look at us, while McClintock disembarks
+and begins to interpret to the lead mule while he smokes a
+cigarette.</p>
+
+<p>"'Hello, Buttinsky,' says the fine man to me. 'How did you get in
+the game? I didn't see you buy any chips. Who gave you the keys of
+the city?'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm a poor traveller,' says I. 'Especially mule-back. You'll
+excuse me. Do you run a hack line or only a bluff?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Segregate yourself from your pseudo-equine quadruped,' says he,
+'and come inside.'</p>
+
+<p>"He raises a finger, and a villager runs up.</p>
+
+<p>"'This man will take care of your outfit,' says he, 'and I'll take
+care of you.'</p>
+
+<p>"He leads me into the biggest house, and sets out the chairs and a
+kind of a drink the color of milk. It was the finest room I ever
+saw. The stone walls was hung all over with silk shawls, and there
+was red and yellow rugs on the floor, and jars of red pottery and
+Angora goat skins, and enough bamboo furniture to misfurnish half
+a dozen seaside cottages.</p>
+
+<p>"'In the first place,' says the man, 'you want to know who I am.
+I'm sole lessee and proprietor of this tribe of Indians. They call
+me the Grand Yacuma, which is to say King or Main Finger of the
+bunch. I've got more power here than a charg&eacute; d'affaires, a charge
+of dynamite, and a charge account at Tiffany's combined. In fact,
+I'm the Big Stick, with as many extra knots on it as there is on
+the record run of the Lusitania. Oh, I read the papers now and
+then,' says he. 'Now, let's hear your entitlements,' he goes on,
+'and the meeting will be open.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says I, 'I am known as one W. D. Finch. Occupation,
+capitalist. Address, 541 East Thirty-second&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"'New York,' chips in the Noble Grand. 'I know,' says he,
+grinning. 'It ain't the first time you've seen it go down on the
+blotter. I can tell by the way you hand it out. Well, explain
+"capitalist."'</p>
+
+<p>"I tells this boss plain what I come for and how I come to came.</p>
+
+<p>"'Gold-dust?' says he, looking as puzzled as a baby that's got a
+feather stuck on its molasses finger. 'That's funny. This ain't a
+gold-mining country. And you invested all your capital on a
+stranger's story? Well, well! These Indians of mine&mdash;they are the
+last of the tribe of Peches&mdash;are simple as children. They know
+nothing of the purchasing power of gold. I'm afraid you've been
+imposed on,' says he.</p>
+
+<p>"'Maybe so,' says I, 'but it sounded pretty straight to me.'</p>
+
+<p>"'W. D.,' says the King, all of a sudden, 'I'll give you a square
+deal. It ain't often I get to talk to a white man, and I'll give
+you a show for your money. It may be these constituents of mine
+have a few grains of gold-dust hid away in their clothes.
+To-morrow you may get out these goods you've brought up and see if
+you can make any sales. Now, I'm going to introduce myself
+unofficially. My name is Shane&mdash;Patrick Shane. I own this tribe of
+Peche Indians by right of conquest&mdash;single handed and unafraid. I
+drifted up here four years ago, and won 'em by my size and
+complexion and nerve. I learned their language in six weeks&mdash;it's
+easy: you simply emit a string of consonants as long as your
+breath holds out and then point at what you're asking for.</p>
+
+<p>"'I conquered 'em, spectacularly,' goes on King Shane, 'and then I
+went at 'em with economical politics, law, sleight-of-hand, and a
+kind of New England ethics and parsimony. Every Sunday, or as near
+as I can guess at it, I preach to 'em in the council-house (I'm
+the council) on the law of supply and demand. I praise supply and
+knock demand. I use the same text every time. You wouldn't think,
+W. D.,' says Shane, 'that I had poetry in me, would you?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says I, 'I wouldn't know whether to call it poetry or
+not.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Tennyson,' says Shane, 'furnishes the poetic gospel I preach. I
+always considered him the boss poet. Here's the way the text
+goes:<br />&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<p class="noindent">"'"For, not to admire, if a man could learn
+it, were more<br />
+Than to walk all day like a Sultan of old in a garden of
+spice."<br />&nbsp;</p>
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>"'You see, I teach 'em to cut out demand&mdash;that supply is the main
+thing. I teach 'em not to desire anything beyond their simplest
+needs. A little mutton, a little cocoa, and a little fruit brought
+up from the coast&mdash;that's all they want to make 'em happy. I've
+got 'em well trained. They make their own clothes and hats out of
+a vegetable fibre and straw, and they're a contented lot. It's a
+great thing,' winds up Shane, 'to have made a people happy by the
+incultivation of such simple institutions.'</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the next day, with the King's permission, I has the
+McClintock open up a couple of sacks of my goods in the little
+plaza of the village. The Indians swarmed around by the hundred
+and looked the bargain-counter over. I shook red blankets at 'em,
+flashed finger-rings and ear-bobs, tried pearl necklaces and
+side-combs on the women, and a line of red hosiery on the men.
+'Twas no use. They looked on like hungry graven images, but I
+never made a sale. I asked McClintock what was the trouble. Mac
+yawned three or four times, rolled a cigarette, made one or two
+confidential side remarks to a mule, and then condescended to
+inform me that the people had no money.</p>
+
+<p>"Just then up strolls King Patrick, big and red and royal as
+usual, with the gold chain over his chest and his cigar in front
+of him.</p>
+
+<p>"'How's business, W. D.?' he asks.</p>
+
+<p>"'Fine,' says I. 'It's a bargain-day rush. I've got one more line
+of goods to offer before I shut up shop. I'll try 'em with
+safety-razors. I've got two gross that I bought at a fire sale.'</p>
+
+<p>"Shane laughs till some kind of mameluke or private secretary he
+carries with him has to hold him up.</p>
+
+<p>"'O my sainted Aunt Jerusha!' says he, 'ain't you one of the Babes
+in the Goods, W. D.? Don't you know that no Indians ever shave?
+They pull out their whiskers instead.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says I, 'that's just what these razors would do for
+'em&mdash;they wouldn't have any kick coming if they used 'em once.'</p>
+
+<p>"Shane went away, and I could hear him laughing a block, if there
+had been any block.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tell 'em,' says I to McClintock, 'it ain't money I want&mdash;tell
+'em I'll take gold-dust. Tell 'em I'll allow 'em sixteen dollars
+an ounce for it in trade. That's what I'm out for&mdash;the dust.'</p>
+
+<p>"Mac interprets, and you'd have thought a squadron of cops had
+charged the crowd to disperse it. Every uncle's nephew and aunt's
+niece of 'em faded away inside of two minutes.</p>
+
+<p>"At the royal palace that night me and the King talked it over.</p>
+
+<p>"'They've got the dust hid out somewhere,' says I, 'or they
+wouldn't have been so sensitive about it.'</p>
+
+<p>"'They haven't,' says Shane. 'What's this gag you've got about
+gold? You been reading Edward Allen Poe? They ain't got any gold.'</p>
+
+<p>"'They put it in quills,' says I, 'and then they empty it in jars,
+and then into sacks of twenty-five pounds each. I got it
+straight.'</p>
+
+<p>"'W. D.,' says Shane, laughing and chewing his cigar, 'I don't
+often see a white man, and I feel like putting you on. I don't
+think you'll get away from here alive, anyhow, so I'm going to
+tell you. Come over here.'</p>
+
+<p>"He draws aside a silk fibre curtain in a corner of the room and
+shows me a pile of buckskin sacks.</p>
+
+<p>"'Forty of 'em,' says Shane. 'One arroba in each one. In round
+numbers, $220,000 worth of gold-dust you see there. It's all mine.
+It belongs to the Grand Yacuma. They bring it all to me. Two
+hundred and twenty thousand dollars&mdash;think of that, you glass-bead
+peddler,' says Shane&mdash;'and all mine.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Little good it does you,' says I, contemptuously and hatefully.
+'And so you are the government depository of this gang of
+moneyless money-makers? Don't you pay enough interest on it to
+enable one of your depositors to buy an Augusta (Maine) Pullman
+carbon diamond worth $200 for $4.85?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Listen,' says Patrick Shane, with the sweat coming out on his
+brow. 'I'm confidant with you, as you have, somehow, enlisted my
+regards. Did you ever,' he says, 'feel the avoirdupois power of
+gold&mdash;not the troy weight of it, but the
+sixteen-ounces-to-the-pound force of it?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Never,' says I. 'I never take in any bad money.'</p>
+
+<p>"Shane drops down on the floor and throws his arms over the sacks
+of gold-dust.</p>
+
+<p>"'I love it,' says he. 'I want to feel the touch of it day and
+night. It's my pleasure in life. I come in this room, and I'm a
+king and a rich man. I'll be a millionaire in another year. The
+pile's getting bigger every month. I've got the whole tribe
+washing out the sands in the creeks. I'm the happiest man in the
+world, W. D. I just want to be near this gold, and know it's mine
+and it's increasing every day. Now, you know,' says he, 'why my
+Indians wouldn't buy your goods. They can't. They bring all the
+dust to me. I'm their king. I've taught 'em not to desire or
+admire. You might as well shut up shop.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'll tell you what you are,' says I. 'You're a plain,
+contemptible miser. You preach supply and you forget demand. Now,
+supply,' I goes on, 'is never anything but supply. On the
+contrary,' says I, 'demand is a much broader syllogism and
+assertion. Demand includes the rights of our women and children,
+and charity and friendship, and even a little begging on the
+street corners. They've both got to harmonize equally. And I've
+got a few things up my commercial sleeve yet,' says I, 'that may
+jostle your preconceived ideas of politics and economy.</p>
+
+<p>"The next morning I had McClintock bring up another mule-load of
+goods to the plaza and open it up. The people gathered around the
+same as before.</p>
+
+<p>"I got out the finest line of necklaces, bracelets, hair-combs,
+and earrings that I carried, and had the women put 'em on. And
+then I played trumps.</p>
+
+<p>"Out of my last pack I opened up a half gross of hand-mirrors,
+with solid tinfoil backs, and passed 'em around among the ladies.
+That was the first introduction of looking-glasses among the Peche
+Indians.</p>
+
+<p>"Shane walks by with his big laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"'Business looking up any?' he asks.</p>
+
+<p>"'It's looking at itself right now,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"By-and-by a kind of a murmur goes through the crowd. The women
+had looked into the magic crystal and seen that they were
+beautiful, and was confiding the secret to the men. The men seemed
+to be urging the lack of money and the hard times just before the
+election, but their excuses didn't go.</p>
+
+<p>"Then was my time.</p>
+
+<p>"I called McClintock away from an animated conversation with his
+mules and told him to do some interpreting.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tell 'em,' says I, 'that gold-dust will buy for them these
+befitting ornaments for kings and queens of the earth. Tell 'em
+the yellow sand they wash out of the waters for the High
+Sanctified Yacomay and Chop Suey of the tribe will buy the
+precious jewels and charms that will make them beautiful and
+preserve and pickle them from evil spirits. Tell 'em the
+Pittsburgh banks are paying four per cent. interest on deposits by
+mail, while this get-rich-frequently custodian of the public funds
+ain't even paying attention. Keep telling 'em, Mac,' says I, 'to
+let the gold-dust family do their work. Talk to 'em like a born
+anti-Bryanite,' says I. 'Remind 'em that Tom Watson's gone back to
+Georgia,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"McClintock waves his hand affectionately at one of his mules, and
+then hurls a few stickfuls of minion type at the mob of shoppers.</p>
+
+<p>"A gutta-percha Indian man, with a lady hanging on his arm, with
+three strings of my fish-scale jewelry and imitation marble beads
+around her neck, stands up on a block of stone and makes a talk
+that sounds like a man shaking dice in a box to fill aces and
+sixes.</p>
+
+<p>"'He says,' says McClintock, 'that the people not know that
+gold-dust will buy their things. The women very mad. The Grand
+Yacuma tell them it no good but for keep to make bad spirits keep
+away.'</p>
+
+<p>"'You can't keep bad spirits away from money,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"'They say,' goes on McClintock, 'the Yacuma fool them. They raise
+plenty row.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Going! Going!' says I. 'Gold-dust or cash takes the entire
+stock. The dust weighed before you, and taken at sixteen dollars
+the ounce&mdash;the highest price on the Gaudymala coast.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then the crowd disperses all of a sudden, and I don't know what's
+up. Mac and me packs away the hand-mirrors and jewelry they had
+handed back to us, and we had the mules back to the corral they
+had set apart for our garage.</p>
+
+<p>"While we was there we hear great noises of shouting, and down
+across the plaza runs Patrick Shane, hotfoot, with his clothes
+ripped half off, and scratches on his face like a cat had fought
+him hard for every one of its lives.</p>
+
+<p>"'They're looting the treasury, W. D.,' he sings out. 'They're
+going to kill me and you, too. Unlimber a couple of mules at once.
+We'll have to make a get-away in a couple of minutes.'</p>
+
+<p>"'They've found out,' says I,' the truth about the law of supply
+and demand.'</p>
+
+<p>"'It's the women, mostly,' says the King. 'And they used to admire
+me so!'</p>
+
+<p>"'They hadn't seen looking-glasses then,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"'They've got knives and hatchets,' says Shane; 'hurry!'</p>
+
+<p>"'Take that roan mule,' says I. 'You and your law of supply! I'll
+ride the dun, for he's two knots per hour the faster. The roan has
+a stiff knee, but he may make it,' says I. 'If you'd included
+reciprocity in your political platform I might have given you the
+dun,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"Shane and McClintock and me mounted our mules and rode across the
+rawhide bridge just as the Peches reached the other side and began
+firing stones and long knives at us. We cut the thongs that held
+up our end of the bridge and headed for the coast."</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A tall, bulky policeman came into Finch's shop at that moment and
+leaned an elbow on the showcase. Finch nodded at him friendly.</p>
+
+<p>"I heard down at Casey's," said the cop, in rumbling, husky tones,
+"that there was going to be a picnic of the Hat-Cleaners' Union
+over at Bergen Beach, Sunday. Is that right?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," said Finch. "There'll be a dandy time."</p>
+
+<p>"Gimme five tickets," said the cop, throwing a five-dollar bill on
+the showcase.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," said Finch, "ain't you going it a little too&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Go to h&ndash;&ndash;&ndash;&ndash;!" said the cop. "You got 'em
+to sell, ain't you? Somebody's got to buy 'em. Wish I could go
+along."</p>
+
+<p>I was glad to See Finch so well thought of in his neighborhood.</p>
+
+<p>And then in came a wee girl of seven, with dirty face and pure
+blue eyes and a smutched and insufficient dress.</p>
+
+<p>"Mamma says," she recited shrilly, "that you must give me eighty
+cents for the grocer and nineteen for the milkman and five cents
+for me to buy hokey-pokey with&mdash;but she didn't say that," the elf
+concluded, with a hopeful but honest grin.</p>
+
+<p>Finch shelled out the money, counting it twice, but I noticed that
+the total sum that the small girl received was one dollar and four
+cents.</p>
+
+<p>"That's the right kind of a law," remarked Finch, as he carefully
+broke some of the stitches of my hatband so that it would
+assuredly come off within a few days&mdash;"the law of supply and
+demand. But they've both got to work together. I'll bet," he went
+on, with his dry smile, "she'll get jelly beans with that
+nickel&mdash;she likes 'em. What's supply if there's no demand for it?"</p>
+
+<p>"What ever became of the King?" I asked, curiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I might have told you," said Finch. "That was Shane came in
+and bought the tickets. He came back with me, and he's on the
+force now."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="7"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>BURIED TREASURE</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>There are many kinds of fools. Now, will everybody please sit
+still until they are called upon specifically to rise?</p>
+
+<p>I had been every kind of fool except one. I had expended my
+patrimony, pretended my matrimony, played poker, lawn-tennis, and
+bucket-shops&mdash;parted soon with my money in many ways. But there
+remained one rule of the wearer of cap and bells that I had not
+played. That was the Seeker after Buried Treasure. To few does the
+delectable furor come. But of all the would-be followers in the
+hoof-prints of King Midas none has found a pursuit so rich in
+pleasurable promise.</p>
+
+<p>But, going back from my theme a while&mdash;as lame pens must do&mdash;I was
+a fool of the sentimental sort. I saw May Martha Mangum, and was
+hers. She was eighteen, the color of the white ivory keys of a new
+piano, beautiful, and possessed by the exquisite solemnity and
+pathetic witchery of an unsophisticated angel doomed to live in a
+small, dull, Texas prairie-town. She had a spirit and charm that
+could have enabled her to pluck rubies like raspberries from the
+crown of Belgium or any other sporty kingdom, but she did not know
+it, and I did not paint the picture for her.</p>
+
+<p>You see, I wanted May Martha Mangum for to have and to hold. I
+wanted her to abide with me, and put my slippers and pipe away
+every day in places where they cannot be found of evenings.</p>
+
+<p>May Martha's father was a man hidden behind whiskers and
+spectacles. He lived for bugs and butterflies and all insects that
+fly or crawl or buzz or get down your back or in the butter. He
+was an etymologist, or words to that effect. He spent his life
+seining the air for flying fish of the June-bug order, and then
+sticking pins through 'em and calling 'em names.</p>
+
+<p>He and May Martha were the whole family. He prized her highly as a
+fine specimen of the <i>racibus humanus</i> because she saw that he had
+food at times, and put his clothes on right side before, and kept
+his alcohol-bottles filled. Scientists, they say, are apt to be
+absent-minded.</p>
+
+<p>There was another besides myself who thought May Martha Mangum one
+to be desired. That was Goodloe Banks, a young man just home from
+college. He had all the attainments to be found in books&mdash;Latin,
+Greek, philosophy, and especially the higher branches of
+mathematics and logic.</p>
+
+<p>If it hadn't been for his habit of pouring out this information
+and learning on every one that he addressed, I'd have liked him
+pretty well. But, even as it was, he and I were, you would have
+thought, great pals.</p>
+
+<p>We got together every time we could because each of us wanted to
+pump the other for whatever straws we could to find which way the
+wind blew from the heart of May Martha Mangum&mdash;rather a mixed
+metaphor; Goodloe Banks would never have been guilty of that. That
+is the way of rivals.</p>
+
+<p>You might say that Goodloe ran to books, manners, culture, rowing,
+intellect, and clothes. I would have put you in mind more of
+baseball and Friday-night debating societies&mdash;by way of
+culture&mdash;and maybe of a good horseback rider.</p>
+
+<p>But in our talks together, and in our visits and conversation with
+May Martha, neither Goodloe Banks nor I could find out which one
+of us she preferred. May Martha was a natural-born non-committal,
+and knew in her cradle how to keep people guessing.</p>
+
+<p>As I said, old man Mangum was absent-minded. After a long time he
+found out one day&mdash;a little butterfly must have told him&mdash;that two
+young men were trying to throw a net over the head of the young
+person, a daughter, or some such technical appendage, who looked
+after his comforts.</p>
+
+<p>I never knew scientists could rise to such occasions. Old Mangum
+orally labelled and classified Goodloe and myself easily among the
+lowest orders of the vertebrates; and in English, too, without
+going any further into Latin than the simple references to
+<i>Orgetorix, Rex Helvetii</i>&mdash;which is as far as I ever went, myself.
+And he told us that if he ever caught us around his house again he
+would add us to his collection.</p>
+
+<p>Goodloe Banks and I remained away five days, expecting the storm
+to subside. When we dared to call at the house again May Martha
+Mangum and her father were gone. Gone! The house they had rented
+was closed. Their little store of goods and chattels was gone
+also.</p>
+
+<p>And not a word of farewell to either of us from May Martha&mdash;not a
+white, fluttering note pinned to the hawthorn-bush; not a
+chalk-mark on the gate-post nor a post-card in the post-office to
+give us a clew.</p>
+
+<p>For two months Goodloe Banks and I&mdash;separately&mdash;tried every scheme
+we could think of to track the runaways. We used our friendship
+and influence with the ticket-agent, with livery-stable men,
+railroad conductors, and our one lone, lorn constable, but without
+results.</p>
+
+<p>Then we became better friends and worse enemies than ever. We
+forgathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon every afternoon
+after work, and played dominoes, and laid conversational traps to
+find out from each other if anything had been discovered. That is
+the way of rivals.</p>
+
+<p>Now, Goodloe Banks had a sarcastic way of displaying his own
+learning and putting me in the class that was reading "Poor Jane
+Ray, her bird is dead, she cannot play." Well, I rather liked
+Goodloe, and I had a contempt for his college learning, and I was
+always regarded as good-natured, so I kept my temper. And I was
+trying to find out if he knew anything about May Martha, so I
+endured his society.</p>
+
+<p>In talking things over one afternoon he said to me:</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose you do find her, Ed, whereby would you profit? Miss
+Mangum has a mind. Perhaps it is yet uncultured, but she is
+destined for higher things than you could give her. I have talked
+with no one who seemed to appreciate more the enchantment of the
+ancient poets and writers and the modern cults that have
+assimilated and expended their philosophy of life. Don't you think
+you are wasting your time looking for her?"</p>
+
+<p>"My idea," said I, "of a happy home is an eight-room house in a
+grove of live-oaks by the side of a <i>charco</i> on a Texas prairie. A
+piano," I went on, "with an automatic player in the sitting-room,
+three thousand head of cattle under fence for a starter, a
+buckboard and ponies always hitched at a post for 'the
+missus'&mdash;and May Martha Mangum to spend the profits of the ranch
+as she pleases, and to abide with me, and put my slippers and pipe
+away every day in places where they cannot be found of evenings.
+That," said I, "is what is to be; and a fig&mdash;a dried, Smyrna,
+dago-stand fig&mdash;for your curriculums, cults, and philosophy."</p>
+
+<p>"She is meant for higher things," repeated Goodloe Banks.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever she is meant for," I answered, just now she is out of
+pocket. And I shall find her as soon as I can without aid of the
+colleges."</p>
+
+<p>"The game is blocked," said Goodloe, putting down a domino; and we
+had the beer.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after that a young farmer whom I knew came into town and
+brought me a folded blue paper. He said his grandfather had just
+died. I concealed a tear, and he went on to say that the old man
+had jealously guarded this paper for twenty years. He left it to
+his family as part of his estate, the rest of which consisted of
+two mules and a hypotenuse of non-arable land.</p>
+
+<p>The sheet of paper was of the old, blue kind used during the
+rebellion of the abolitionists against the secessionists. It was
+dated June 14, 1863, and it described the hiding-place of ten
+burro-loads of gold and silver coin valued at three hundred
+thousand dollars. Old Rundle&mdash;grandfather of his grandson,
+Sam&mdash;was given the information by a Spanish priest who was in on
+the treasure-burying, and who died many years before&mdash;no,
+afterward&mdash;in old Rundle's house. Old Rundle wrote it down from
+dictation.</p>
+
+<p>"Why didn't your father look this up?" I asked young Rundle.</p>
+
+<p>"He went blind before he could do so," he replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Why didn't you hunt for it yourself?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said he, "I've only known about the paper for ten years.
+First there was the spring ploughin' to do, and then choppin' the
+weeds out of the corn; and then come takin' fodder; and mighty
+soon winter was on us. It seemed to run along that way year after
+year."</p>
+
+<p>That sounded perfectly reasonable to me, so I took it up with
+young Lee Rundle at once.</p>
+
+<p>The directions on the paper were simple. The whole burro cavalcade
+laden with the treasure started from an old Spanish mission in
+Dolores County. They travelled due south by the compass until they
+reached the Alamito River. They forded this, and buried the
+treasure on the top of a little mountain shaped like a pack-saddle
+standing in a row between two higher ones. A heap of stones marked
+the place of the buried treasure. All the party except the Spanish
+priest were killed by Indians a few days later. The secret was a
+monopoly. It looked good to me.</p>
+
+<p>Lee Rundle suggested that we rig out a camping outfit, hire a
+surveyor to run out the line from the Spanish mission, and then
+spend the three hundred thousand dollars seeing the sights in Fort
+Worth. But, without being highly educated, I knew a way to save
+time and expense.</p>
+
+<p>We went to the State land-office and had a practical, what they
+call a "working," sketch made of all the surveys of land from the
+old mission to the Alamito River. On this map I drew a line due
+southward to the river. The length of lines of each survey and
+section of land was accurately given on the sketch. By these we
+found the point on the river and had a "connection" made with it
+and an important, well-identified corner of the Los Animos
+five-league survey&mdash;a grant made by King Philip of Spain.</p>
+
+<p>By doing this we did not need to have the line run out by a
+surveyor. It was a great saving of expense and time.</p>
+
+<p>So, Lee Rundle and I fitted out a two-horse wagon team with all
+the accessories, and drove a hundred and forty-nine miles to
+Chico, the nearest town to the point we wished to reach. There we
+picked up a deputy county surveyor. He found the corner of the Los
+Animos survey for us, ran out the five thousand seven hundred and
+twenty varas west that our sketch called for, laid a stone on the
+spot, had coffee and bacon, and caught the mail-stage back to
+Chico.</p>
+
+<p>I was pretty sure we would get that three hundred thousand
+dollars. Lee Rundle's was to be only one-third, because I was
+paying all the expenses. With that two hundred thousand dollars I
+knew I could find May Martha Mangum if she was on earth. And with
+it I could flutter the butterflies in old man Mangum's dovecot,
+too. If I could find that treasure!</p>
+
+<p>But Lee and I established camp. Across the river were a dozen
+little mountains densely covered by cedar-brakes, but not one
+shaped like a pack-saddle. That did not deter us. Appearances are
+deceptive. A pack-saddle, like beauty, may exist only in the eye
+of the beholder.</p>
+
+<p>I and the grandson of the treasure examined those cedar-covered
+hills with the care of a lady hunting for the wicked flea. We
+explored every side, top, circumference, mean elevation, angle,
+slope, and concavity of every one for two miles up and down the
+river. We spent four days doing so. Then we hitched up the roan
+and the dun, and hauled the remains of the coffee and bacon the
+one hundred and forty-nine miles back to Concho City.</p>
+
+<p>Lee Rundle chewed much tobacco on the return trip. I was busy
+driving, because I was in a hurry.</p>
+
+<p>As shortly as could be after our empty return Goodloe Banks and I
+forgathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon to play dominoes
+and fish for information. I told Goodloe about my expedition after
+the buried treasure.</p>
+
+<p>"If I could have found that three hundred thousand dollars," I
+said to him, "I could have scoured and sifted the surface of the
+earth to find May Martha Mangum."</p>
+
+<p>"She is meant for higher things," said Goodloe. "I shall find her
+myself. But, tell me how you went about discovering the spot where
+this unearthed increment was imprudently buried."</p>
+
+<p>I told him in the smallest detail. I showed him the draughtsman's
+sketch with the distances marked plainly upon it.</p>
+
+<p>After glancing over it in a masterly way, he leaned back in his
+chair and bestowed upon me an explosion of sardonic, superior,
+collegiate laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you <i>are</i> a fool, Jim," he said, when he could speak.</p>
+
+<p>"It's your play," said I, patiently, fingering my double-six.</p>
+
+<p>"Twenty," said Goodloe, making two crosses on the table with his
+chalk.</p>
+
+<p>"Why am I a fool?" I asked. "Buried treasure has been found before
+in many places."</p>
+
+<p>"Because," said he, "in calculating the point on the river where
+your line would strike you neglected to allow for the variation.
+The variation there would be nine degrees west. Let me have your
+pencil."</p>
+
+<p>Goodloe Banks figured rapidly on the back of an envelope.</p>
+
+<p>"The distance, from north to south, of the line run from the
+Spanish mission," said he, "is exactly twenty-two miles. It was
+run by a pocket-compass, according to your story. Allowing for the
+variation, the point on the Alamito River where you should have
+searched for your treasure is exactly six miles and nine hundred
+and forty-five varas farther west than the place you hit upon. Oh,
+what a fool you are, Jim!"</p>
+
+<p>"What is this variation that you speak of?" I asked. "I thought
+figures never lied."</p>
+
+<p>"The variation of the magnetic compass," said Goodloe, "from the
+true meridian."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled in his superior way; and then I saw come out in his face
+the singular, eager, consuming cupidity of the seeker after buried
+treasure.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes," he said with the air of the oracle, "these old
+traditions of hidden money are not without foundation. Suppose you
+let me look over that paper describing the location. Perhaps
+together we might&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The result was that Goodloe Banks and I, rivals in love, became
+companions in adventure. We went to Chico by stage from
+Huntersburg, the nearest railroad town. In Chico we hired a team
+drawing a covered spring-wagon and camping paraphernalia. We had
+the same surveyor run out our distance, as revised by Goodloe and
+his variations, and then dismissed him and sent him on his
+homeward road.</p>
+
+<p>It was night when we arrived. I fed the horses and made a fire
+near the bank of the river and cooked supper. Goodloe would have
+helped, but his education had not fitted him for practical things.</p>
+
+<p>But while I worked he cheered me with the expression of great
+thoughts handed down from the dead ones of old. He quoted some
+translations from the Greek at much length.</p>
+
+<p>"Anacreon," he explained. "That was a favorite passage with Miss
+Mangum&mdash;as I recited it."</p>
+
+<p>"She is meant for higher things," said I, repeating his phrase.</p>
+
+<p>"Can there be anything higher," asked Goodloe, "than to dwell in
+the society of the classics, to live in the atmosphere of learning
+and culture? You have often decried education. What of your wasted
+efforts through your ignorance of simple mathematics? How soon
+would you have found your treasure if my knowledge had not shown
+you your error?"</p>
+
+<p>"We'll take a look at those hills across the river first," said I,
+"and see what we find. I am still doubtful about variations. I
+have been brought up to believe that the needle is true to the
+pole."</p>
+
+<p>The next morning was a bright June one. We were up early and had
+breakfast. Goodloe was charmed. He recited&mdash;Keats, I think it was,
+and Kelly or Shelley&mdash;while I broiled the bacon. We were getting
+ready to cross the river, which was little more than a shallow
+creek there, and explore the many sharp-peaked cedar-covered hills
+on the other side.</p>
+
+<p>"My good Ulysses," said Goodloe, slapping me on the shoulder while
+I was washing the tin breakfast-plates, "let me see the enchanted
+document once more. I believe it gives directions for climbing the
+hill shaped like a pack-saddle. I never saw a pack-saddle. What is
+it like, Jim?"</p>
+
+<p>"Score one against culture," said I. "I'll know it when I see it."</p>
+
+<p>Goodloe was looking at old Rundle's document when he ripped out a
+most uncollegiate swear-word.</p>
+
+<p>"Come here," he said, holding the paper up against the sunlight.
+"Look at that," he said, laying his finger against it.</p>
+
+<p>On the blue paper&mdash;a thing I had never noticed before&mdash;I saw stand
+out in white letters the word and figures: "Malvern, 1898."</p>
+
+<p>"What about it?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It's the water-mark," said Goodloe. "The paper was manufactured
+in 1898. The writing on the paper is dated 1863. This is a
+palpable fraud."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know," said I. "The Rundles are pretty reliable,
+plain, uneducated country people. Maybe the paper manufacturers
+tried to perpetrate a swindle."</p>
+
+<p>And then Goodloe Banks went as wild as his education permitted. He
+dropped the glasses off his nose and glared at me.</p>
+
+<p>"I've often told you you were a fool," he said. "You have let
+yourself be imposed upon by a clodhopper. And you have imposed
+upon me."</p>
+
+<p>"How," I asked, "have I imposed upon you?"</p>
+
+<p>"By your ignorance," said he. "Twice I have discovered serious
+flaws in your plans that a common-school education should have
+enabled you to avoid. And," he continued, "I have been put to
+expense that I could ill afford in pursuing this swindling quest.
+I am done with it."</p>
+
+<p>I rose and pointed a large pewter spoon at him, fresh from the
+dish-water.</p>
+
+<p>"Goodloe Banks," I said, "I care not one parboiled navy bean for
+your education. I always barely tolerated it in any one, and I
+despised it in you. What has your learning done for you? It is a
+curse to yourself and a bore to your friends. Away," I said&mdash;"away
+with your water-marks and variations! They are nothing to me. They
+shall not deflect me from the quest."</p>
+
+<p>I pointed with my spoon across the river to a small mountain
+shaped like a pack-saddle.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going to search that mountain," I went on, "for the
+treasure. Decide now whether you are in it or not. If you wish to
+let a water-mark or a variation shake your soul, you are no true
+adventurer. Decide."</p>
+
+<p>A white cloud of dust began to rise far down the river road. It
+was the mail-wagon from Hesperus to Chico. Goodloe flagged it.</p>
+
+<p>"I am done with the swindle," said he, sourly. "No one but a fool
+would pay any attention to that paper now. Well, you always were a
+fool, Jim. I leave you to your fate."</p>
+
+<p>He gathered his personal traps, climbed into the mail-wagon,
+adjusted his glasses nervously, and flew away in a cloud of dust.</p>
+
+<p>After I had washed the dishes and staked the horses on new grass,
+I crossed the shallow river and made my way slowly through the
+cedar-brakes up to the top of the hill shaped like a pack-saddle.</p>
+
+<p>It was a wonderful June day. Never in my life had I seen so many
+birds, so many butter-flies, dragon-flies, grasshoppers, and such
+winged and stinged beasts of the air and fields.</p>
+
+<p>I investigated the hill shaped like a pack-saddle from base to
+summit. I found an absolute absence of signs relating to buried
+treasure. There was no pile of stones, no ancient blazes on the
+trees, none of the evidences of the three hundred thousand
+dollars, as set forth in the document of old man Rundle.</p>
+
+<p>I came down the hill in the cool of the afternoon. Suddenly, out
+of the cedar-brake I stepped into a beautiful green valley where a
+tributary small stream ran into the Alamito River.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>And there I was startled to see what I took to be a wild man, with
+unkempt beard and ragged hair, pursuing a giant butterfly with
+brilliant wings.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps he is an escaped madman," I thought; and wondered how he
+had strayed so far from seats of education and learning.</p>
+
+<p>And then I took a few more steps and saw a vine-covered cottage
+near the small stream. And in a little grassy glade I saw May
+Martha Mangum plucking wild flowers.</p>
+
+<p>She straightened up and looked at me. For the first time since I
+knew her I saw her face&mdash;which was the color of the white keys of
+a new piano&mdash;turn pink. I walked toward her without a word. She
+let the gathered flowers trickle slowly from her hand to the
+grass.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew you would come, Jim," she said clearly. "Father wouldn't
+let me write, but I knew you would come."</p>
+
+<p>What followed you may guess&mdash;there was my wagon and team just
+across the river.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>I've often wondered what good too much education is to a man if he
+can't use it for himself. If all the benefits of it are to go to
+others, where does it come in?</p>
+
+<p>For May Martha Mangum abides with me. There is an eight-room house
+in a live-oak grove, and a piano with an automatic player, and a
+good start toward the three thousand head of cattle is under
+fence.</p>
+
+<p>And when I ride home at night my pipe and slippers are put away in
+places where they cannot be found.</p>
+
+<p>But who cares for that? Who cares&mdash;who cares?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="8"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>TO HIM WHO WAITS</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>The Hermit of the Hudson was hustling about his cave with unusual
+animation.</p>
+
+<p>The cave was on or in the top of a little spur of the Catskills
+that had strayed down to the river's edge, and, not having a ferry
+ticket, had to stop there. The bijou mountains were densely wooded
+and were infested by ferocious squirrels and woodpeckers that
+forever menaced the summer transients. Like a badly sewn strip of
+white braid, a macadamized road ran between the green skirt of the
+hills and the foamy lace of the river's edge. A dim path wound
+from the comfortable road up a rocky height to the hermit's cave.
+One mile upstream was the Viewpoint Inn, to which summer folk from
+the city came; leaving cool, electric-fanned apartments that they
+might be driven about in burning sunshine, shrieking, in gasoline
+launches, by spindle-legged Modreds bearing the blankest of
+shields.</p>
+
+<p>Train your lorgnette upon the hermit and let your eye receive the
+personal touch that shall endear you to the hero.</p>
+
+<p>A man of forty, judging him fairly, with long hair curling at the
+ends, dramatic eyes, and a forked brown beard like those that were
+imposed upon the West some years ago by self-appointed "divine
+healers" who succeeded the grasshopper crop. His outward vesture
+appeared to be kind of gunny-sacking, cut and made into a garment
+that would have made the fortune of a London tailor. His long,
+well-shaped fingers, delicate nose, and poise of manner raised him
+high above the class of hermits who fear water and bury money in
+oyster-cans in their caves in spots indicated by rude crosses
+chipped in the stone wall above.</p>
+
+<p>The hermit's home was not altogether a cave. The cave was an
+addition to the hermitage, which was a rude hut made of poles
+daubed with clay and covered with the best quality of rust-proof
+zinc roofing.</p>
+
+<p>In the house proper there were stone slabs for seats, a rustic
+bookcase made of unplaned poplar planks, and a table formed of a
+wooden slab laid across two upright pieces of granite&mdash;something
+between the furniture of a Druid temple and that of a Broadway
+beefsteak dungeon. Hung against the walls were skins of wild
+animals purchased in the vicinity of Eighth Street and University
+Place, New York.</p>
+
+<p>The rear of the cabin merged into the cave. There the hermit
+cooked his meals on a rude stone hearth. With infinite patience
+and an old axe he had chopped natural shelves in the rocky walls.
+On them stood his stores of flour, bacon, lard, talcum-powder,
+kerosene, baking-powder, soda-mint tablets, pepper, salt, and
+Olivo-Cremo Emulsion for chaps and roughness of the hands and
+face.</p>
+
+<p>The hermit had hermited there for ten years. He was an asset of
+the Viewpoint Inn. To its guests he was second in interest only to
+the Mysterious Echo in the Haunted Glen. And the Lover's Leap beat
+him only a few inches, flat-footed. He was known far (but not very
+wide, on account of the topography) as a scholar of brilliant
+intellect who had forsworn the world because he had been jilted in
+a love affair. Every Saturday night the Viewpoint Inn sent to him
+surreptitiously a basket of provisions. He never left the
+immediate outskirts of his hermitage. Guests of the inn who
+visited him said his store of knowledge, wit, and scintillating
+philosophy were simply wonderful, you know.</p>
+
+<p>That summer the Viewpoint Inn was crowded with guests. So, on
+Saturday nights, there were extra cans of tomatoes, and sirloin
+steak, instead of "rounds," in the hermit's basket.</p>
+
+<p>Now you have the material allegations in the case. So, make way
+for Romance.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently the hermit expected a visitor. He carefully combed his
+long hair and parted his apostolic beard. When the
+ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock on a stone shelf announced the hour
+of five he picked up his gunny-sacking skirts, brushed them
+carefully, gathered an oaken staff, and strolled slowly into the
+thick woods that surrounded the hermitage.</p>
+
+<p>He had not long to wait. Up the faint pathway, slippery with its
+carpet of pine-needles, toiled Beatrix, youngest and fairest of
+the famous Trenholme sisters. She was all in blue from hat to
+canvas pumps, varying in tint from the shade of the tinkle of a
+bluebell at daybreak on a spring Saturday to the deep hue of a
+Monday morning at nine when the washerwoman has failed to show up.</p>
+
+<p>Beatrix dug her cerulean parasol deep into the pine-needles and
+sighed. The hermit, on the <i>q. t.</i>, removed a grass burr from the
+ankle of one sandalled foot with the big toe of his other one. She
+blued&mdash;and almost starched and ironed him&mdash;with her cobalt eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"It must be so nice," she said in little, tremulous gasps, "to be
+a hermit, and have ladies climb mountains to talk to you."</p>
+
+<p>The hermit folded his arms and leaned against a tree. Beatrix,
+with a sigh, settled down upon the mat of pine-needles like a
+bluebird upon her nest. The hermit followed suit; drawing his feet
+rather awkwardly under his gunny-sacking.</p>
+
+<p>"It must be nice to be a mountain," said he, with ponderous
+lightness, "and have angels in blue climb up you instead of flying
+over you."</p>
+
+<p>"Mamma had neuralgia," said Beatrix, "and went to bed, or I
+couldn't have come. It's dreadfully hot at that horrid old inn.
+But we hadn't the money to go anywhere else this summer."</p>
+
+<p>"Last night," said the hermit, "I climbed to the top of that big
+rock above us. I could see the lights of the inn and hear a strain
+or two of the music when the wind was right. I imagined you moving
+gracefully in the arms of others to the dreamy music of the waltz
+amid the fragrance of flowers. Think how lonely I must have been!"</p>
+
+<p>The youngest, handsomest, and poorest of the famous Trenholme
+sisters sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't quite hit it," she said, plaintively. "I was moving
+gracefully <i>at</i> the arms of another. Mamma had one of her periodical
+attacks of rheumatism in both elbows and shoulders, and I had to
+rub them for an hour with that horrid old liniment. I hope you
+didn't think <i>that</i> smelled like flowers. You know, there were
+some West Point boys and a yacht load of young men from the city at
+last evening's weekly dance. I've known mamma to sit by an open
+window for three hours with one-half of her registering 85 degrees
+and the other half frostbitten, and never sneeze once. But just
+let a bunch of ineligibles come around where I am, and she'll
+begin to swell at the knuckles and shriek with pain. And I have to
+take her to her room and rub her arms. To see mamma dressed you'd
+be surprised to know the number of square inches of surface there
+are to her arms. I think it must be delightful to be a hermit.
+That&mdash;cassock&mdash;or gabardine, isn't it?&mdash;that you wear is so
+becoming. Do you make it&mdash;or them&mdash;of course you must have
+changes&mdash;yourself? And what a blessed relief it must be to wear
+sandals instead of shoes! Think how we must suffer&mdash;no matter how
+small I buy my shoes they always pinch my toes. Oh, why can't
+there be lady hermits, too!"</p>
+
+<p>The beautifulest and most adolescent Trenholme sister extended two
+slender blue ankles that ended in two enormous blue-silk bows that
+almost concealed two fairy Oxfords, also of one of the forty-seven
+shades of blue. The hermit, as if impelled by a kind of
+reflex-telepathic action, drew his bare toes farther beneath his
+gunny-sacking.</p>
+
+<p>"I have heard about the romance of your life," said Miss
+Trenholme, softly. "They have it printed on the back of the menu
+card at the inn. Was she very beautiful and charming?"</p>
+
+<p>"On the bills of fare!" muttered the hermit; "but what do I care
+for the world's babble? Yes, she was of the highest and grandest
+type. Then," he continued, "<i>then</i> I thought the world could never
+contain another equal to her. So I forsook it and repaired to this
+mountain fastness to spend the remainder of my life alone&mdash;to
+devote and dedicate my remaining years to her memory."</p>
+
+<p>"It's grand," said Miss Trenholme, "absolutely grand. I think a
+hermit's life is the ideal one. No bill-collectors calling, no
+dressing for dinner&mdash;how I'd like to be one! But there's no such
+luck for me. If I don't marry this season I honestly believe mamma
+will force me into settlement work or trimming hats. It isn't
+because I'm getting old or ugly; but we haven't enough money left
+to butt in at any of the swell places any more. And I don't want
+to marry&mdash;unless it's somebody I like. That's why I'd like to be a
+hermit. Hermits don't ever marry, do they?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hundreds of 'em," said the hermit, "when they've found the right
+one."</p>
+
+<p>"But they're hermits," said the youngest and beautifulest,
+"because they've lost the right one, aren't they?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because they think they have," answered the recluse, fatuously.
+"Wisdom comes to one in a mountain cave as well as to one in the
+world of 'swells,' as I believe they are called in the argot."</p>
+
+<p>"When one of the 'swells' brings it to them," said Miss Trenholme.
+"And my folks are swells. That's the trouble. But there are so
+many swells at the seashore in the summer-time that we hardly
+amount to more than ripples. So we've had to put all our money
+into river and harbor appropriations. We were all girls, you know.
+There were four of us. I'm the only surviving one. The others have
+been married off. All to money. Mamma is so proud of my sisters.
+They send her the loveliest pen-wipers and art calendars every
+Christmas. I'm the only one on the market now. I'm forbidden to
+look at any one who hasn't money."</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;" began the hermit.</p>
+
+<p>"But, oh," said the beautifulest, "of course hermits have great
+pots of gold and doubloons buried somewhere near three great
+oak-trees. They all have."</p>
+
+<p>"I have not," said the hermit, regretfully.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm so sorry," said Miss Trenholme. "I always thought they had. I
+think I must go now."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, beyond question, she was the beautifulest.</p>
+
+<p>"Fair lady&mdash;" began the hermit.</p>
+
+<p>"I am Beatrix Trenholme&mdash;some call me Trix," she said. "You must
+come to the inn to see me."</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't been a stone's-throw from my cave in ten years," said
+the hermit.</p>
+
+<p>"You must come to see me there," she repeated. "Any evening except
+Thursday."</p>
+
+<p>The hermit smiled weakly.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye," she said, gathering the folds of her pale-blue skirt.
+"I shall expect you. But not on Thursday evening, remember."</p>
+
+<p>What an interest it would give to the future menu cards of the
+Viewpoint Inn to have these printed lines added to them: "Only
+once during the more than ten years of his lonely existence did
+the mountain hermit leave his famous cave. That was when he was
+irresistibly drawn to the inn by the fascinations of Miss Beatrix
+Trenholme, youngest and most beautiful of the celebrated Trenholme
+sisters, whose brilliant marriage to&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Aye, to whom?</p>
+
+<p>The hermit walked back to the hermitage. At the door stood Bob
+Binkley, his old friend and companion of the days before he had
+renounced the world&mdash;Bob, himself, arrayed like the orchids of the
+greenhouse in the summer man's polychromatic garb&mdash;Bob, the
+millionaire, with his fat, firm, smooth, shrewd face, his diamond
+rings, sparkling fob-chain, and pleated bosom. He was two years
+older than the hermit, and looked five years younger.</p>
+
+<p>"You're Hamp Ellison, in spite of those whiskers and that
+going-away bathrobe," he shouted. "I read about you on the bill of
+fare at the inn. They've run your biography in between the cheese
+and 'Not Responsible for Coats and Umbrellas.' What 'd you do it
+for, Hamp? And ten years, too&mdash;gee whilikins!"</p>
+
+<p>"You're just the same," said the hermit. "Come in and sit down.
+Sit on that limestone rock over there; it's softer than the
+granite."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't understand it, old man," said Binkley. "I can see how you
+could give up a woman for ten years, but not ten years for a
+woman. Of course I know why you did it. Everybody does. Edith
+Carr. She jilted four or five besides you. But you were the only
+one who took to a hole in the ground. The others had recourse to
+whiskey, the Klondike, politics, and that <i>similia similibus</i> cure.
+But, say&mdash;Hamp, Edith Carr was just about the finest woman in the
+world&mdash;high-toned and proud and noble, and playing her ideals to
+win at all kinds of odds. She certainly was a crackerjack."</p>
+
+<p>"After I renounced the world," said the hermit, "I never heard of
+her again."</p>
+
+<p>"She married me," said Binkley.</p>
+
+<p>The hermit leaned against the wooden walls of his ante-cave and
+wriggled his toes.</p>
+
+<p>"I know how you feel about it," said Binkley. "What else could she
+do? There were her four sisters and her mother and old man
+Carr&mdash;you remember how he put all the money he had into dirigible
+balloons? Well, everything was coming down and nothing going up
+with 'em, as you might say. Well, I know Edith as well as you
+do&mdash;although I married her. I was worth a million then, but I've
+run it up since to between five and six. It wasn't me she wanted
+as much as&mdash;well, it was about like this. She had that bunch on
+her hands, and they had to be taken care of. Edith married me two
+months after you did the ground-squirrel act. I thought she liked
+me, too, at the time."</p>
+
+<p>"And now?" inquired the recluse.</p>
+
+<p>"We're better friends than ever now. She got a divorce from me two
+years ago. Just incompatibility. I didn't put in any defence.
+Well, well, well, Hamp, this is certainly a funny dugout you've
+built here. But you always were a hero of fiction. Seems like
+you'd have been the very one to strike Edith's fancy. Maybe you
+did&mdash;but it's the bank-roll that catches 'em, my boy&mdash;your caves
+and whiskers won't do it. Honestly, Hamp, don't you think you've
+been a darned fool?"</p>
+
+<p>The hermit smiled behind his tangled beard. He was and always had
+been so superior to the crude and mercenary Binkley that even his
+vulgarities could not anger him. Moreover, his studies and
+meditations in his retreat had raised him far above the little
+vanities of the world. His little mountain-side had been almost an
+Olympus, over the edge of which he saw, smiling, the bolts hurled
+in the valleys of man below. Had his ten years of renunciation, of
+thought, of devotion to an ideal, of living scorn of a sordid
+world, been in vain? Up from the world had come to him the
+youngest and beautifulest&mdash;fairer than Edith&mdash;one and
+three-seventh times lovelier than the seven-years-served Rachel.
+So the hermit smiled in his beard.</p>
+
+<p>When Binkley had relieved the hermitage from the blot of his
+presence and the first faint star showed above the pines, the
+hermit got the can of baking-powder from his cupboard. He still
+smiled behind his beard.</p>
+
+<p>There was a slight rustle in the doorway. There stood Edith Carr,
+with all the added beauty and stateliness and noble bearing that
+ten years had brought her.</p>
+
+<p>She was never one to chatter. She looked at the hermit with her
+large, <i>thinking</i>, dark eyes. The hermit stood still, surprised into
+a pose as motionless as her own. Only his subconscious sense of
+the fitness of things caused him to turn the baking-powder can
+slowly in his hands until its red label was hidden against his
+bosom.</p>
+
+<p>"I am stopping at the inn," said Edith, in low but clear tones. "I
+heard of you there. I told myself that I <i>must</i> see you. I want to
+ask your forgiveness. I sold my happiness for money. There were
+others to be provided for&mdash;but that does not excuse me. I just
+wanted to see you and ask your forgiveness. You have lived here
+ten years, they tell me, cherishing my memory! I was blind,
+Hampton. I could not see then that all the money in the world
+cannot weigh in the scales against a faithful heart. If&mdash;but it is
+too late now, of course."</p>
+
+<p>Her assertion was a question clothed as best it could be in a
+loving woman's pride. But through the thin disguise the hermit saw
+easily that his lady had come back to him&mdash;if he chose. He had won
+a golden crown&mdash;if it pleased him to take it. The reward of his
+decade of faithfulness was ready for his hand&mdash;if he desired to
+stretch it forth.</p>
+
+<p>For the space of one minute the old enchantment shone upon him
+with a reflected radiance. And then by turns he felt the manly
+sensations of indignation at having been discarded, and of
+repugnance at having been&mdash;as it were&mdash;sought again. And last of
+all&mdash;how strange that it should have come at last!&mdash;the pale-blue
+vision of the beautifulest of the Trenholme sisters illuminated
+his mind's eye and left him without a waver.</p>
+
+<p>"It is too late," he said, in deep tones, pressing the
+baking-powder can against his heart.</p>
+
+<p>Once she turned after she had gone slowly twenty yards down the
+path. The hermit had begun to twist the lid off his can, but he
+hid it again under his sacking robe. He could see her great eyes
+shining sadly through the twilight; but he stood inflexible in the
+doorway of his shack and made no sign.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Just as the moon rose on Thursday evening the hermit was seized by
+the world-madness.</p>
+
+<p>Up from the inn, fainter than the horns of elf-land, came now and
+then a few bars of music played by the casino band. The Hudson was
+broadened by the night into an illimitable sea&mdash;those lights, dimly
+seen on its opposite shore, were not beacons for prosaic
+trolley-lines, but low-set stars millions of miles away. The waters
+in front of the inn were gay with fireflies&mdash;or were they motor-boats,
+smelling of gasoline and oil? Once the hermit had known these things
+and had sported with Amaryllis in the shade of the
+red-and-white-striped awnings. But for ten years he had turned a
+heedless ear to these far-off echoes of a frivolous world. But
+to-night there was something wrong.</p>
+
+<p>The casino band was playing a waltz&mdash;a waltz. What a fool he had
+been to tear deliberately ten years of his life from the calendar of
+existence for one who had given him up for the false joys that
+wealth&mdash;"<i>tum</i> ti <i>tum</i> ti <i>tum</i> ti"&mdash;how did that
+waltz go? But those years had not been sacrificed&mdash;had they not
+brought him the star and pearl of all the world, the youngest and
+beautifulest of&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"But do <i>not</i> come on Thursday evening," she had insisted. Perhaps
+by now she would be moving slowly and gracefully to the strains of that
+waltz, held closely by West-Pointers or city commuters, while he,
+who had read in her eyes things that had recompensed him for ten
+lost years of life, moped like some wild animal in its mountain den.
+Why should&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Damn it," said the hermit, suddenly, "I'll do it!"</p>
+
+<p>He threw down his Marcus Aurelius and threw off his gunny-sack toga.
+He dragged a dust-covered trunk from a corner of the cave, and with
+difficulty wrenched open its lid.</p>
+
+<p>Candles he had in plenty, and the cave was soon aglow. Clothes&mdash;ten
+years old in cut&mdash;scissors, razors, hats, shoes, all his discarded
+attire and belongings, were dragged ruthlessly from their
+renunciatory rest and strewn about in painful disorder.</p>
+
+<p>A pair of scissors soon reduced his beard sufficiently for the
+dulled razors to perform approximately their office. Cutting his own
+hair was beyond the hermit's skill. So he only combed and brushed it
+backward as smoothly as he could. Charity forbids us to consider the
+heartburnings and exertions of one so long removed from haberdashery
+and society.</p>
+
+<p>At the last the hermit went to an inner corner of his cave and began
+to dig in the soft earth with a long iron spoon. Out of the cavity
+he thus made he drew a tin can, and out of the can three thousand
+dollars in bills, tightly rolled and wrapped in oiled silk. He was a
+real hermit, as this may assure you.</p>
+
+<p>You may take a brief look at him as he hastens down the little
+mountain-side. A long, wrinkled black frock-coat reached to his
+calves. White duck trousers, unacquainted with the tailor's goose, a
+pink shirt, white standing collar with brilliant blue butterfly tie,
+and buttoned congress gaiters. But think, sir and madam&mdash;ten years!
+From beneath a narrow-brimmed straw hat with a striped band flowed
+his hair. Seeing him, with all your shrewdness you could not have
+guessed him. You would have said that he played Hamlet&mdash;or the
+tuba&mdash;or pinochle&mdash;you would never have laid your hand on your heart
+and said: "He is a hermit who lived ten years in a cave for love of
+one lady&mdash;to win another."</p>
+
+<p>The dancing pavilion extended above the waters of the river. Gay
+lanterns and frosted electric globes shed a soft glamour within it.
+A hundred ladies and gentlemen from the inn and summer cottages
+flitted in and about it. To the left of the dusty roadway down which
+the hermit had tramped were the inn and grill-room. Something seemed
+to be on there, too. The windows were brilliantly lighted, and music
+was playing&mdash;music different from the two-steps and waltzes of the
+casino band.</p>
+
+<p>A negro man wearing a white jacket came through the iron gate, with
+its immense granite posts and wrought-iron lamp-holders.</p>
+
+<p>"What is going on here to-night?" asked the hermit.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sah," said the servitor, "dey is having de reg'lar
+Thursday-evenin' dance in de casino. And in de grill-room dere's a
+beefsteak dinner, sah."</p>
+
+<p>The hermit glanced up at the inn on the hillside whence burst
+suddenly a triumphant strain of splendid harmony.</p>
+
+<p>"And up there," said he, "they are playing Mendelssohn&mdash;what is
+going on up there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Up in de inn," said the dusky one, "dey is a weddin' goin' on. Mr.
+Binkley, a mighty rich man, am marryin' Miss Trenholme, sah&mdash;de
+young lady who am quite de belle of de place, sah."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="9"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>HE ALSO SERVES</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>If I could have a thousand years&mdash;just one little thousand
+years&mdash;more of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true
+Romance to touch the hem of her robe.</p>
+
+<p>Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road
+and garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed
+words of the things they have seen and considered. The recording of
+their tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are
+only two fates I dread&mdash;deafness and writer's cramp. The hand is yet
+steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in
+the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true
+camp-follower of fortune.</p>
+
+<p>Biography shall claim you but an instant&mdash;I first knew Hunky when
+he was head-waiter at Chubb's little beefsteak restaurant and
+caf&eacute; on Third Avenue. There was only one waiter besides.</p>
+
+<p>Then, successively, I caromed against him in the little streets of
+the Big City after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a
+treasure-seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a
+pearl-fisher in the Arkansas River. Between these dashes into the
+land of adventure he usually came back to Chubb's for a while.
+Chubb's was a port for him when gales blew too high; but when you
+dined there and Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he
+would come to anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago.
+You wouldn't care for his description&mdash;he was soft of voice and hard
+of face, and rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any
+approach to a disturbance among Chubb's customers.</p>
+
+<p>One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street
+and Third Avenue after an absence of several months. In ten minutes
+we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my
+ears began to get busy. I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw
+Hunky's word-of-mouth blows&mdash;it all came to something like this:</p>
+
+<p>"Speaking of the next election," said Hunky, "did you ever know much
+about Indians? No? I don't mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or
+Laughing Water kind&mdash;I mean the modern Indian&mdash;the kind that takes
+Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the half-back on the other side
+in football games. The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the
+afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills
+up on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the
+ancestral wickiup.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, they ain't so bad. I like 'em better than most foreigners
+that have come over in the last few hundred years. One thing about
+the Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all
+his own vices for them of the pale-faces&mdash;and he retains all his own
+virtues. Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves
+whenever he lets 'em loose. But the imported foreigners adopt our
+virtues and keep their own vices&mdash;and it's going to take our whole
+standing army some day to police that gang.</p>
+
+<p>"But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High
+Jack Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a
+Pennsylvania college and the latest thing in pointed-toed,
+rubber-heeled, patent kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with
+turned-back cuffs. He was a friend of mine. I met him in
+Tahlequah when I was out there
+during the land boom, and we got thick. He had got all there was out
+of colleges and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt. He
+was a man of first-class style and wrote essays, and had been
+invited to visit rich guys' houses in Boston and such places.</p>
+
+<p>"There was a Cherokee girl in Muscogee that High Jack was foolish
+about. He took me to see her a few times. Her name was Florence Blue
+Feather&mdash;but you want to clear your mind of all ideas of squaws with
+nose-rings and army blankets. This young lady was whiter than you
+are, and better educated than I ever was. You couldn't have told her
+from any of the girls shopping in the swell Third Avenue stores. I
+liked her so well that I got to calling on her now and then when
+High Jack wasn't along, which is the way of friends in such matters.
+She was educated at the Muscogee College, and was making a specialty
+of&mdash;let's see&mdash;eth&mdash;yes, ethnology. That's the art that goes back
+and traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from
+jelly-fish through monkeys and to the O'Briens. High Jack had took
+up that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of
+riotous assemblies&mdash;Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder-parties,
+and such. Having a mutual taste for musty information like that was
+what made 'em like each other, I suppose. But I don't know! What
+they call congeniality of tastes ain't always it. Now, when Miss
+Blue Feather and me was talking together, I listened to her
+affidavits about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins
+german (well, if the Germans don't nod, who does?) to the
+mound-builders of Ohio with incomprehension and respect. And when
+I'd tell her about the Bowery and Coney Island, and sing her a few
+songs that I'd heard the Jamaica niggers sing at their church
+lawn-parties, she didn't look much less interested than she did when
+High Jack would tell her that he had a pipe that the first
+inhabitants of America originally arrived here on stilts after a
+freshet at Tenafly, New Jersey.</p>
+
+<p>"But I was going to tell you more about High Jack.</p>
+
+<p>"About six months ago I get a letter from him, saying he'd been
+commissioned by the Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology at
+Washington to go down to Mexico and translate some excavations or
+dig up the meaning of some shorthand notes on some ruins&mdash;or
+something of that sort. And if I'd go along he could squeeze the
+price into the expense account.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'd been holding a napkin over my arm at Chubb's about long
+enough then, so I wired High Jack 'Yes'; and he sent me a ticket,
+and I met him in Washington, and he had a lot of news to tell me.
+First of all, was that Florence Blue Feather had suddenly
+disappeared from her home and environments.</p>
+
+<p>"'Run away?' I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"'Vanished,' says High Jack. 'Disappeared like your shadow when the
+sun goes under a cloud. She was seen on the street, and then she
+turned a corner and nobody ever seen her afterward. The whole
+community turned out to look for her, but we never found a clew.'</p>
+
+<p>"'That's bad&mdash;that's bad,' says I. 'She was a mighty nice girl, and
+as smart as you find em.'</p>
+
+<p>"High Jack seemed to take it hard. I guess he must have esteemed
+Miss Blue Feather quite highly. I could see that he'd referred the
+matter to the whiskey-jug. That was his weak point&mdash;and many another
+man's. I've noticed that when a man loses a girl he generally takes
+to drink either just before or just after it happens.</p>
+
+<p>"From Washington we railroaded it to New Orleans, and there took a
+tramp steamer bound for Belize. And a gale pounded us all down the
+Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a
+little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula. Suppose the
+ship had run against that name in the dark!</p>
+
+<p>"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cyclone in the bay,' says High
+Jack Snakefeeder. So we get the captain to send us ashore in a dory
+when the squall seemed to cease from squalling.</p>
+
+<p>"'We will find ruins here or make 'em,' says High. 'The Government
+doesn't care which we do. An appropriation is an appropriation.'</p>
+
+<p>"Boca de Coacoyula was a dead town. Them biblical towns we read
+about&mdash;Tired and Siphon&mdash;after they was destroyed, they must have
+looked like Forty-second Street and Broadway compared to this Boca
+place. It still claimed 1300 inhabitants as estimated and engraved
+on the stone court-house by the census-taker in 1597. The citizens
+were a mixture of Indians and other Indians; but some of 'em was
+light-colored, which I was surprised to see. The town was huddled
+up on the shore, with woods so thick around it that a
+subpoena-server couldn't have reached a monkey ten yards away with
+the papers. We wondered what kept it from being annexed to Kansas;
+but we soon found out that it was Major Bing.</p>
+
+<p>"Major Bing was the ointment around the fly. He had the cochineal,
+sarsaparilla, log-wood, annatto, hemp, and all other dye-woods and
+pure food adulteration concessions cornered. He had five-sixths of
+the Boca de Thingama-jiggers working for him on shares. It was a
+beautiful graft. We used to brag about Morgan and E. H. and others
+of our wisest when I was in the provinces&mdash;but now no more. That
+peninsula has got our little country turned into a submarine without
+even the observation tower showing.</p>
+
+<p>"Major Bing's idea was this. He had the population go forth into the
+forest and gather these products. When they brought 'em in he gave
+'em one-fifth for their trouble. Sometimes they'd strike and demand
+a sixth. The Major always gave in to 'em.</p>
+
+<p>"The Major had a bungalow so close on the sea that the nine-inch
+tide seeped through the cracks in the kitchen floor. Me and him and
+High Jack Snakefeeder sat on the porch and drank rum from noon till
+midnight. He said he had piled up $300,000 in New Orleans banks, and
+High and me could stay with him forever if we would. But High Jack
+happened to think of the United States, and began to talk ethnology.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ruins!' says Major Bing. 'The woods are full of 'em. I don't know
+how far they date back, but they was here before I came.'</p>
+
+<p>"High Jack asks what form of worship the citizens of that locality
+are addicted to.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why,' says the Major, rubbing his nose, 'I can't hardly say. I
+imagine it's infidel or Aztec or Nonconformist or something like
+that. There's a church here&mdash;a Methodist or some other kind&mdash;with a
+parson named Skidder. He claims to have converted the people to
+Christianity. He and me don't assimilate except on state occasions.
+I imagine they worship some kind of gods or idols yet. But Skidder
+says he has 'em in the fold.'</p>
+
+<p>"A few days later High Jack and me, prowling around, strikes a plain
+path into the forest, and follows it a good four miles. Then a
+branch turns to the left. We go a mile, maybe, down that, and run up
+against the finest ruin you ever saw&mdash;solid stone with trees and
+vines and under-brush all growing up against it and in it and
+through it. All over it was chiselled carvings of funny beasts and
+people that would have been arrested if they'd ever come out in
+vaudeville that way. We approached it from the rear.</p>
+
+<p>"High Jack had been drinking too much rum ever since we landed in
+Boca. You know how an Indian is&mdash;the palefaces fixed his clock when
+they introduced him to firewater. He'd brought a quart along with
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"'Hunky,' says he, 'we'll explore the ancient temple. It may be that
+the storm that landed us here was propitious. The Minority Report
+Bureau of Ethnology,' says he, 'may yet profit by the vagaries of
+wind and tide.'</p>
+
+<p>"We went in the rear door of the bum edifice. We struck a kind of
+alcove without bath. There was a granite davenport, and a stone
+wash-stand without any soap or exit for the water, and some
+hardwood pegs drove into holes in the wall, and that was all. To go
+out of that furnished apartment into a Harlem hall bedroom would
+make you feel like getting back home from an amateur violoncello
+solo at an East Side Settlement house.</p>
+
+<p>"While High was examining some hieroglyphics on the wall that the
+stone-masons must have made when their tools slipped, I stepped into
+the front room. That was at least thirty by fifty feet, stone floor,
+six little windows like square port-holes that didn't let much light
+in.</p>
+
+<p>"I looked back over my shoulder, and sees High Jack's face three
+feet away.</p>
+
+<p>"'High,' says I, 'of all the&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"And then I noticed he looked funny, and I turned around.</p>
+
+<p>"He'd taken off his clothes to the waist, and he didn't seem to hear
+me. I touched him, and came near beating it. High Jack had turned to
+stone. I had been drinking some rum myself.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ossified!' I says to him, loudly. 'I knew what would happen if you
+kept it up.'</p>
+
+<p>"And then High Jack comes in from the alcove when he hears me
+conversing with nobody, and we have a look at Mr. Snakefeeder No. 2.
+It's a stone idol, or god, or revised statute or something, and it
+looks as much like High Jack as one green pea looks like itself.
+It's got exactly his face and size and color, but it's steadier on
+its pins. It stands on a kind of rostrum or pedestal, and you can
+see it's been there ten million years.</p>
+
+<p>"'He's a cousin of mine,' sings High, and then he turns solemn.</p>
+
+<p>"'Hunky,' he says, putting one hand on my shoulder and one on the
+statue's, 'I'm in the holy temple of my ancestors.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, if looks goes for anything,' says I, 'you've struck a twin.
+Stand side by side with buddy, and let's see if there's any
+difference.'</p>
+
+<p>"There wasn't. You know an Indian can keep his face as still as an
+iron dog's when he wants to, so when High Jack froze his features
+you couldn't have told him from the other one.</p>
+
+<p>"'There's some letters,' says I, 'on his nob's pedestal, but I can't
+make 'em out. The alphabet of this country seems to be composed of
+sometimes <i>a</i>, <i>e</i>, <i>i</i>, <i>o</i>, and <i>u</i>, but
+generally <i>z's</i>, <i>l's</i>, and <i>t's</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>"High Jack's ethnology gets the upper hand of his rum for a minute,
+and he investigates the inscription.</p>
+
+<p>"'Hunky,' says he, 'this is a statue of Tlotopaxl, one of the most
+powerful gods of the ancient Aztecs.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Glad to know him,' says I, 'but in his present condition he
+reminds me of the joke Shakespeare got off on Julius C&aelig;sar.
+We might say about your friend:<br />&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<p class="noindent">"'Imperious what's-his-name, dead and turned to
+stone&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;No use to write or call him on the 'phone.'<br />&nbsp;</p>
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>"'Hunky,' says High Jack Snakefeeder, looking at me funny, 'do you
+believe in reincarnation?'</p>
+
+<p>"'It sounds to me,' says I, 'like either a clean-up of the
+slaughter-houses or a new kind of Boston pink. I don't know.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I believe,' says he, 'that I am the reincarnation of Tlotopaxl. My
+researches have convinced me that the Cherokees, of all the North
+American tribes, can boast of the straightest descent from the proud
+Aztec race. That,' says he, 'was a favorite theory of mine and
+Florence Blue Feather's. And she&mdash;what if she&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"High Jack grabs my arm and walls his eyes at me. Just then he
+looked more like his eminent co-Indian murderer, Crazy Horse.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' says I, 'what if she, what if she, what if she? You're
+drunk,' says I. 'Impersonating idols and believing in&mdash;what was
+it?&mdash;recarnalization? Let's have a drink,' says I. 'It's as spooky
+here as a Brooklyn artificial-limb factory at midnight with the gas
+turned down.'</p>
+
+<p>"Just then I heard somebody coming, and I dragged High Jack into the
+bedless bedchamber. There was peep-holes bored through the wall, so
+we could see the whole front part of the temple. Major Bing told me
+afterward that the ancient priests in charge used to rubber through
+them at the congregation.</p>
+
+<p>"In a few minutes an old Indian woman came in with a big oval
+earthen dish full of grub. She set it on a square block of stone in
+front of the graven image, and laid down and walloped her face on
+the floor a few times, and then took a walk for herself.</p>
+
+<p>"High Jack and me was hungry, so we came out and looked it over.
+There was goat steaks and fried rice-cakes, and plantains and
+cassava, and broiled land-crabs and mangoes&mdash;nothing like what you
+get at Chubb's.</p>
+
+<p>"We ate hearty&mdash;and had another round of rum.</p>
+
+<p>"'It must be old Tecumseh's&mdash;or whatever you call him&mdash;birthday,'
+says I. 'Or do they feed him every day? I thought gods only drank
+vanilla on Mount Catawampus.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then some more native parties in short kimonos that showed their
+aboriginees punctured the near-horizon, and me and High had to skip
+back into Father Axletree's private boudoir. They came by ones,
+twos, and threes, and left all sorts of offerings&mdash;there was enough
+grub for Bingham's nine gods of war, with plenty left over for the
+Peace Conference at The Hague. They brought jars of honey, and
+bunches of bananas, and bottles of wine, and stacks of tortillas,
+and beautiful shawls worth one hundred dollars apiece that the
+Indian women weave of a kind of vegetable fibre like silk. All of
+'em got down and wriggled on the floor in front of that hard-finish
+god, and then sneaked off through the woods again.</p>
+
+<p>"'I wonder who gets this rake-off?' remarks High Jack.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh,' says I, 'there's priests or deputy idols or a committee of
+disarrangements somewhere in the woods on the job. Wherever you find
+a god you'll find somebody waiting to take charge of the burnt
+offerings.'</p>
+
+<p>"And then we took another swig of rum and walked out to the parlor
+front door to cool off, for it was as hot inside as a summer camp on
+the Palisades.</p>
+
+<p>"And while we stood there in the breeze we looks down the path and
+sees a young lady approaching the blasted ruin. She was bare-footed
+and had on a white robe, and carried a wreath of white flowers in
+her hand. When she got nearer we saw she had a long blue feather
+stuck through her black hair. And when she got nearer still me and
+High Jack Snakefeeder grabbed each other to keep from tumbling down
+on the floor; for the girl's face was as much like Florence Blue
+Feather's as his was like old King Toxicology's.</p>
+
+<p>"And then was when High Jack's booze drowned his system of
+ethnology. He dragged me inside back of the statue, and says:</p>
+
+<p>"'Lay hold of it, Hunky. We'll pack it into the other room. I felt
+it all the time,' says he. 'I'm the reconsideration of the god
+Locomotorataxia, and Florence Blue Feather was my bride a thousand
+years ago. She has come to seek me in the temple where I used to
+reign.'</p>
+
+<p>"'All right,' says I. 'There's no use arguing against the rum
+question. You take his feet.'</p>
+
+<p>"We lifted the three-hundred-pound stone god, and carried him into
+the back room of the caf&eacute;&mdash;the temple, I mean&mdash;and leaned him
+against the wall. It was more work than bouncing three live ones
+from an all-night Broadway joint on New-Year's Eve.</p>
+
+<p>"Then High Jack ran out and brought in a couple of them Indian silk
+shawls and began to undress himself.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, figs!' says I. 'Is it thus? Strong drink is an adder and
+subtractor, too. Is it the heat or the call of the wild that's got
+you?'</p>
+
+<p>"But High Jack is too full of exaltation and cane-juice to reply. He
+stops the disrobing business just short of the Manhattan Beach
+rules, and then winds them red-and-white shawls around him, and goes
+out and. stands on the pedestal as steady as any platinum deity you
+ever saw. And I looks through a peek-hole to see what he is up to.</p>
+
+<p>"In a few minutes in comes the girl with the flower wreath. Danged
+if I wasn't knocked a little silly when she got close, she looked so
+exactly much like Florence Blue Feather. 'I wonder,' says I to
+myself, 'if she has been reincarcerated, too? If I could see,' says
+I to myself, 'whether she has a mole on her left&mdash;' But the next
+minute I thought she looked one-eighth of a shade darker than
+Florence; but she looked good at that. And High Jack hadn't drunk
+all the rum that had been drank.</p>
+
+<p>"The girl went up within ten feet of the bum idol, and got down and
+massaged her nose with the floor, like the rest did. Then she went
+nearer and laid the flower wreath on the block of stone at High
+Jack's feet. Rummy as I was, I thought it was kind of nice of her to
+think of offering flowers instead of household and kitchen
+provisions. Even a stone god ought to appreciate a little sentiment
+like that on top of the fancy groceries they had piled up in front
+of him.</p>
+
+<p>"And then High Jack steps down from his pedestal, quiet, and
+mentions a few words that sounded just like the hieroglyphics carved
+on the walls of the ruin. The girl gives a little jump backward, and
+her eyes fly open as big as doughnuts; but she don't beat it.</p>
+
+<p>"Why didn't she? I'll tell you why I think why. It don't seem to a
+girl so supernatural, unlikely, strange, and startling that a stone
+god should come to life for <i>her</i>. If he was to do it for one of
+them snub-nosed brown girls on the other side of the woods, now, it
+would be different&mdash;but <i>her</i>! I'll bet she said to herself:
+'Well, goodness me! you've been a long time getting on your job.
+I've half a mind not to speak to you.'</p>
+
+<p>"But she and High Jack holds hands and walks away out of the temple
+together. By the time I'd had time to take another drink and enter
+upon the scene they was twenty yards away, going up the path in the
+woods that the girl had come down. With the natural scenery already
+in place, it was just like a play to watch 'em&mdash;she looking up at
+him, and him giving her back the best that an Indian can hand, out
+in the way of a goo-goo eye. But there wasn't anything in that
+recarnification and revulsion to tintype for me.</p>
+
+<p>"'Hey! Injun!' I yells out to High Jack. 'We've got a board-bill due
+in town, and you're leaving me without a cent. Brace up and cut out
+the Neapolitan fisher-maiden, and let's go back home.'</p>
+
+<p>"But on the two goes; without looking once back until, as you might
+say, the forest swallowed 'em up. And I never saw or heard of High
+Jack Snakefeeder from that day to this. I don't know if the
+Cherokees came from the Aspics; but if they did, one of 'em went
+back.</p>
+
+<p>"All I could do was to hustle back to that Boca place and panhandle
+Major Bing. He detached himself from enough of his winnings to buy
+me a ticket home. And I'm back again on the job at Chubb's, sir, and
+I'm going to hold it steady. Come round, and you'll find the steaks
+as good as ever."</p>
+
+<p>I wondered what Hunky Magee thought about his own story; so I asked
+him if he had any theories about reincarnation and
+transmogrification and such mysteries as he had touched upon.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing like that," said Hunky, positively. "What ailed High Jack
+was too much booze and education. They'll do an Indian up every
+time."</p>
+
+<p>"But what about Miss Blue Feather?" I persisted.</p>
+
+<p>"Say," said Hunky, with a grin, "that little lady that stole High
+Jack certainly did give me a jar when I first took a look at her,
+but it was only for a minute. You remember I told you High Jack said
+that Miss Florence Blue Feather disappeared from home about a year
+ago? Well, where she landed four days later was in as neat a
+five-room flat on East Twenty-third Street as you ever walked
+sideways through&mdash;and she's been Mrs. Magee ever since."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="10"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>THE MOMENT OF VICTORY</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>Ben Granger is a war veteran aged twenty-nine&mdash;which should enable
+you to guess the war. He is also principal merchant and postmaster
+of Cadiz, a little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of
+Mexico perpetually blow.</p>
+
+<p>Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater
+Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a
+corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air
+college in which the Filipino was schooled. Now, with his bayonet
+beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal's guard of
+cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the
+matted jungles of Mindanao. Always have his interest and choice been
+for deeds rather than for words; but the consideration and digestion
+of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will
+attest.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it," he asked me one moonlit eve, as we sat among his boxes
+and barrels, "that generally makes men go through dangers, and fire,
+and trouble, and starvation, and battle, and such recourses? What
+does a man do it for? Why does he try to outdo his fellow-humans,
+and be braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his
+best friends are? What's his game? What does he expect to get out of
+it? He don't do it just for the fresh air and exercise. What would
+you say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally
+speaking, for his efforts along the line of ambition and
+extraordinary hustling in the marketplaces, forums,
+shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields, links, cinder-paths, and
+arenas of the civilized and <i>vice versa</i> places of the
+world?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Ben," said I, with judicial seriousness, "I think we might
+safely limit the number of motives of a man who seeks fame to
+three&mdash;to ambition, which is a desire for popular applause; to
+avarice, which looks to the material side of success; and to love of
+some woman whom he either possesses or desires to possess."</p>
+
+<p>Ben pondered over my words while a mocking-bird on the top of a
+mesquite by the porch trilled a dozen bars.</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon," said he, "that your diagnosis about covers the case
+according to the rules laid down in the copy-books and historical
+readers. But what I had in my mind was the case of Willie Robbins, a
+person I used to know. I'll tell you about him before I close up the
+store, if you don't mind listening.</p>
+
+<p>"Willie was one of our social set up in San Augustine. I was
+clerking there then for Brady &amp; Murchison, wholesale dry-goods
+and ranch supplies. Willie and I belonged to the same german club
+and athletic association and military company. He played the
+triangle in our serenading and quartet crowd that used to ring the
+welkin three nights a week somewhere in town.</p>
+
+<p>"Willie jibed with his name considerable. He weighed about as much
+as a hundred pounds of veal in his summer suitings, and he had a
+'Where-is-Mary?' expression on his features so plain that you could
+almost see the wool growing on him.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet you couldn't fence him away from the girls with barbed
+wire. You know that kind of young fellows&mdash;a kind of a mixture of
+fools and angels&mdash;they rush in and fear to tread at the same time;
+but they never fail to tread when they get the chance. He was always
+on hand when 'a joyful occasion was had,' as the morning paper would
+say, looking as happy as a king full, and at the same time as
+uncomfortable as a raw oyster served with sweet pickles. He danced
+like he had hind hobbles on; and he had a vocabulary of about three
+hundred and fifty words that he made stretch over four germans a
+week, and plagiarized from to get him through two ice-cream suppers
+and a Sunday-night call. He seemed to me to be a sort of a mixture
+of Maltese kitten, sensitive plant, and a member of a stranded 'Two
+Orphans' company.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll give you an estimate of his physiological and pictorial
+make-up, and then I'll stick spurs into the sides of my narrative.</p>
+
+<p>"Willie inclined to the Caucasian in his coloring and manner of
+style. His hair was opalescent and his conversation fragmentary. His
+eyes were the same blue shade as the china dog's on the right-hand
+corner of your Aunt Ellen's mantelpiece. He took things as they
+came, and I never felt any hostility against him. I let him live,
+and so did others.</p>
+
+<p>"But what does this Willie do but coax his heart out of his boots
+and lose it to Myra Allison, the liveliest, brightest, keenest,
+smartest, and prettiest girl in San Augustine. I tell you, she had
+the blackest eyes, the shiniest curls, and the most tantalizing&mdash;Oh,
+no, you're off&mdash;I wasn't a victim. I might have been, but I knew
+better. I kept out. Joe Granberry was It from the start. He had
+everybody else beat a couple of leagues and thence east to a stake
+and mound. But, anyhow, Myra was a nine-pound, full-merino,
+fall-clip fleece, sacked and loaded on a four-horse team for San
+Antone.</p>
+
+<p>"One night there was an ice-cream sociable at Mrs. Colonel
+Spraggins', in San Augustine. We fellows had a big room up-stairs
+opened up for us to put our hats and things in, and to comb our hair
+and put on the clean collars we brought along inside the sweat-bands
+of our hats&mdash;in short, a room to fix up in just like they have
+everywhere at high-toned doings. A little farther down the hall was
+the girls' room, which they used to powder up in, and so forth.
+Downstairs we&mdash;that is, the San Augustine Social Cotillion and
+Merrymakers' Club&mdash;had a stretcher put down in the parlor where our
+dance was going on.</p>
+
+<p>"Willie Robbins and me happened to be up in our&mdash;cloak-room, I
+believe we called it&mdash;when Myra Allison skipped through the hall on
+her way down-stairs from the girls' room. Willie was standing before
+the mirror, deeply interested in smoothing down the blond grass-plot
+on his head, which seemed to give him lots of trouble. Myra was
+always full of life and devilment. She stopped and stuck her head in
+our door. She certainly was good-looking. But I knew how Joe
+Granberry stood with her. So did Willie; but he kept on ba-a-a-ing
+after her and following her around. He had a system of persistence
+that didn't coincide with pale hair and light eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"'Hello, Willie!' says Myra. 'What are you doing to yourself in the
+glass?'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm trying to look fly,' says Willie.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, you never could <i>be</i> fly,' says Myra, with her special
+laugh, which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of
+an empty canteen against my saddle-horn.</p>
+
+<p>"I looked around at Willie after Myra had gone. He had a kind of a
+lily-white look on him which seemed to show that her remark had, as
+you might say, disrupted his soul. I never noticed anything in what
+she said that sounded particularly destructive to a man's ideas of
+self-consciousness; but he was set back to an extent you could
+scarcely imagine.</p>
+
+<p>"After we went down-stairs with our clean collars on, Willie never
+went near Myra again that night. After all, he seemed to be a
+diluted kind of a skim-milk sort of a chap, and I never wondered
+that Joe Granberry beat him out.</p>
+
+<p>"The next day the battleship <i>Maine</i> was blown up, and then
+pretty soon somebody&mdash;I reckon it was Joe Bailey, or Ben Tillman, or
+maybe the Government&mdash;declared war against Spain.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, everybody south of Mason &amp; Hamlin's line knew that the
+North by itself couldn't whip a whole country the size of Spain. So
+the Yankees commenced to holler for help, and the Johnny Rebs
+answered the call. 'We're coming, Father William, a hundred thousand
+strong&mdash;and then some,' was the way they sang it. And the old party
+lines drawn by Sherman's march and the Kuklux and nine-cent cotton
+and the Jim Crow street-car ordinances faded away. We became one
+undivided. country, with no North, very little East, a good-sized
+chunk of West, and a South that loomed up as big as the first
+foreign label on a new eight-dollar suit-case.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course the dogs of war weren't a complete pack without a yelp
+from the San Augustine Rifles, Company D, of the Fourteenth Texas
+Regiment. Our company was among the first to land in Cuba and strike
+terror into the hearts of the foe. I'm not going to give you a
+history of the war, I'm just dragging it in to fill out my story
+about Willie Robbins, just as the Republican party dragged it in to
+help out the election in 1898.</p>
+
+<p>"If anybody ever had heroitis, it was that Willie Robbins. From the
+minute he set foot on the soil of the tyrants of Castile he seemed
+to engulf danger as a cat laps up cream. He certainly astonished
+every man in our company, from the captain up. You'd have expected
+him to gravitate naturally to the job of an orderly to the colonel,
+or typewriter in the commissary&mdash;but not any. He created the part of
+the flaxen-haired boy hero who lives and gets back home with the
+goods, instead of dying with an important despatch in his hands at
+his colonel's feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Our company got into a section of Cuban scenery where one of the
+messiest and most unsung portions of the campaign occurred. We were
+out every day capering around in the bushes, and having little
+skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kind of
+tired-out feuds than anything else. The war was a joke to us, and of
+no interest to them. We never could see it any other way than as a
+howling farce-comedy that the San Augustine Rifles were actually
+fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes. And the blamed little
+se&ntilde;ors didn't get enough pay to make them care whether they were
+patriots or traitors. Now and then somebody would get killed. It
+seemed like a waste of life to me. I was at Coney Island when I went
+to New York once, and one of them down-hill skidding apparatuses
+they call 'roller-coasters' flew the track and killed a man in a
+brown sack-suit. Whenever the Spaniards shot one of our men, it
+struck me as just about as unnecessary and regrettable as that was.</p>
+
+<p>"But I'm dropping Willie Robbins out of the conversation.</p>
+
+<p>"He was out for bloodshed, laurels, ambition, medals,
+recommendations, and all other forms of military glory. And he
+didn't seem to be afraid of any of the recognized forms of military
+danger, such as Spaniards, cannon-balls, canned beef, gunpowder, or
+nepotism. He went forth with his pallid hair and china-blue eyes and
+ate up Spaniards like you would sardines <i>&agrave; la canopy</i>.
+Wars and rumbles of wars never flustered him. He would stand
+guard-duty, mosquitoes, hardtack, treat, and fire with equally perfect
+unanimity. No blondes in history ever come in comparison distance of
+him except the Jack of Diamonds and Queen Catherine of Russia.</p>
+
+<p>"I remember, one time, a little <i>caballard</i> of Spanish men
+sauntered out from behind a patch of sugar-cane and shot Bob Turner,
+the first sergeant of our company, while we were eating dinner. As
+required by the army regulations, we fellows went through the usual
+tactics of falling into line, saluting the enemy, and loading and
+firing, kneeling.</p>
+
+<p>"That wasn't the Texas way of scrapping; but, being a very important
+addendum and annex to the regular army, the San Augustine Rifles had
+to conform to the red-tape system of getting even.</p>
+
+<p>"By the time we had got out our 'Upton's Tactics,' turned to page
+fifty-seven, said 'one&mdash;two&mdash;three&mdash;one&mdash;two&mdash;three' a couple of
+times, and got blank cartridges into our Springfields, the Spanish
+outfit had smiled repeatedly, rolled and lit cigarettes by squads,
+and walked away contemptuously.</p>
+
+<p>"I went straight to Captain Floyd, and says to him: 'Sam, I don't
+think this war is a straight game. You know as well as I do that Bob
+Turner was one of the whitest fellows that ever threw a leg over a
+saddle, and now these wirepullers in Washington have fixed his
+clock. He's politically and ostensibly dead. It ain't fair. Why
+should they keep this thing up? If they want Spain licked, why don't
+they turn the San Augustine Rifles and Joe Seely's ranger company
+and a car-load of West Texas deputy-sheriffs onto these Spaniards,
+and let us exonerate them from the face of the earth? I never did,'
+says I, 'care much about fighting by the Lord Chesterfield ring
+rules. I'm going to hand in my resignation and go home if anybody
+else I am personally acquainted with gets hurt in this war. If you
+can get somebody in my place, Sam,' says I, 'I'll quit the first of
+next week. I don't want to work in an army that don't give its help
+a chance. Never mind my wages,' says I; 'let the Secretary of the
+Treasury keep 'em.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, Ben,' says the captain to me, 'your allegations and
+estimations of the tactics of war, government, patriotism,
+guard-mounting, and democracy are all right. But I've looked into the
+system of international arbitration and the ethics of justifiable
+slaughter a little closer, maybe, than you have. Now, you can hand
+in your resignation the first of next week if you are so minded. But
+if you do,' says Sam, 'I'll order a corporal's guard to take you
+over by that limestone bluff on the creek and shoot enough lead into
+you to ballast a submarine air-ship. I'm captain of this company,
+and I've swore allegiance to the Amalgamated States regardless of
+sectional, secessional, and Congressional differences. Have you got
+any smoking-tobacco?' winds up Sam. 'Mine got wet when I swum the
+creek this morning.'</p>
+
+<p>"The reason I drag all this <i>non ex parte</i> evidence in is
+because Willie Robbins was standing there listening to us. I was a
+second sergeant and he was a private then, but among us Texans and
+Westerners there never was as much tactics and subordination as
+there was in the regular army. We never called our captain anything
+but 'Sam' except when there was a lot of major-generals and admirals
+around, so as to preserve the discipline.</p>
+
+<p>"And says Willie Robbins to me, in a sharp construction of voice
+much unbecoming to his light hair and previous record:</p>
+
+<p>"'You ought to be shot, Ben, for emitting any such sentiments. A
+man that won't fight for his country is worse than a horse-thief. If I
+was the cap, I'd put you in the guard-house for thirty days on round
+steak and tamales. War,' says Willie, 'is great and glorious. I
+didn't know you were a coward.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm not,' says I. 'If I was, I'd knock some of the pallidness off
+of your marble brow. I'm lenient with you,' I says, 'just as I am
+with the Spaniards, because you have always reminded me of something
+with mushrooms on the side. Why, you little Lady of Shalott,' says
+I, 'you underdone leader of cotillions, you glassy fashion and
+moulded form, you white-pine soldier made in the Cisalpine Alps in
+Germany for the late New-Year trade, do you know of whom you are
+talking to? We've been in the same social circle,' says I, 'and I've
+put up with you because you seemed so meek and self-un-satisfying. I
+don't understand why you have so sudden taken a personal interest in
+chivalrousness and murder. Your nature's undergone a complete
+revelation. Now, how is it?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, you wouldn't understand, Ben,' says Willie, giving one of
+his refined smiles and turning away.</p>
+
+<p>"'Come back here!' says I, catching him by the tail of his khaki
+coat. 'You've made me kind of mad, in spite of the aloofness in
+which I have heretofore held you. You are out for making a success
+in this hero business, and I believe I know what for. You are doing
+it either because you are crazy or because you expect to catch some
+girl by it. Now, if it's a girl, I've got something here to show
+you.'</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't have done it, but I was plumb mad. I pulled a San
+Augustine paper out of my hip-pocket, and showed him an item. It was
+a half a column about the marriage of Myra Allison and Joe
+Granberry.</p>
+
+<p>"Willie laughed, and I saw I hadn't touched him.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh,' says he, 'everybody knew that was going to happen. I heard
+about that a week ago.' And then he gave me the laugh again.</p>
+
+<p>"'All right,' says I. 'Then why do you so recklessly chase the
+bright rainbow of fame? Do you expect to be elected President, or do
+you belong to a suicide club?'</p>
+
+<p>"And then Captain Sam interferes.</p>
+
+<p>"'You gentlemen quit jawing and go back to your quarters,' says he,
+'or I'll have you escorted to the guard-house. Now, scat, both of
+you! Before you go, which one of you has got any chewing-tobacco?'</p>
+
+<p>"'We're off, Sam,' says I. 'It's supper-time, anyhow. But what do
+you think of what we was talking about? I've noticed you throwing out
+a good many grappling-hooks for this here balloon called fame&mdash;What's
+ambition, anyhow? What does a man risk his life day after day
+for? Do you know of anything he gets in the end that can pay him for
+the trouble? I want to go back home,' says I. 'I don't care whether
+Cuba sinks or swims, and I don't give a pipeful of rabbit tobacco
+whether Queen Sophia Christina or Charlie Culberson rules these
+fairy isles; and I don't want my name on any list except the list of
+survivors. But I've noticed you, Sam,' says I, 'seeking the bubble
+notoriety in the cannon's larynx a number of times. Now, what do you
+do it for? Is it ambition, business, or some freckle-faced Ph&oelig;be
+at home that you are heroing for?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, Ben,' says Sam, kind of hefting his sword out from between
+his knees, 'as your superior officer I could court-martial you for
+attempted cowardice and desertion. But I won't. And I'll tell you
+why I'm trying for promotion and the usual honors of war and
+conquest. A major gets more pay than a captain, and I need the
+money.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Correct for you!' says I. 'I can understand that. Your system of
+fame-seeking is rooted in the deepest soil of patriotism. But I
+can't comprehend,' says I, 'why Willie Robbins, whose folks at home
+are well off, and who used to be as meek and undesirous of notice as
+a cat with cream on his whiskers, should all at once develop into a
+warrior bold with the most fire-eating kind of proclivities. And the
+girl in his case seems to have been eliminated by marriage to
+another fellow. I reckon,' says I, 'it's a plain case of just common
+ambition. He wants his name, maybe, to go thundering down the
+coroners of time. It must be that.'</p>
+
+<p>"Well, without itemizing his deeds, Willie sure made good as a hero.
+He simply spent most of his time on his knees begging our captain to
+send him on forlorn hopes and dangerous scouting expeditions. In
+every fight he was the first man to mix it at close quarters with
+the Don Alfonsos. He got three or four bullets planted in various
+parts of his autonomy. Once he went off with a detail of eight men
+and captured a whole company of Spanish. He kept Captain Floyd busy
+writing out recommendations of his bravery to send in to
+headquarters; and he began to accumulate medals for all kinds of
+things&mdash;heroism and target-shooting and valor and tactics and
+uninsubordination, and all the little accomplishments that look good
+to the third assistant secretaries of the War Department.</p>
+
+<p>"Finally, Cap Floyd got promoted to be a major-general, or a knight
+commander of the main herd, or something like that. He pounded
+around on a white horse, all desecrated up with gold-leaf and
+hen-feathers and a Good Templar's hat, and wasn't allowed by the
+regulations to speak to us. And Willie Robbins was made captain of
+our company.</p>
+
+<p>"And maybe he didn't go after the wreath of fame then! As far as I
+could see it was him that ended the war. He got eighteen of us
+boys&mdash;friends of his, too&mdash;killed in battles that he stirred up
+himself, and that didn't seem to me necessary at all. One night he
+took twelve of us and waded through a little rill about a hundred and
+ninety yards wide, and climbed a couple of mountains, and sneaked
+through a mile of neglected shrubbery and a couple of rock-quarries
+and into a rye-straw village, and captured a Spanish general named,
+as they said, Benny Veedus. Benny seemed to me hardly worth the
+trouble, being a blackish man without shoes or cuffs, and anxious to
+surrender and throw himself on the commissary of his foe.</p>
+
+<p>"But that job gave Willie the big boost he wanted. The San Augustine
+<i>News</i> and the Galveston, St. Louis, New York, and Kansas City
+papers printed his picture and columns of stuff about him. Old San
+Augustine simply went crazy over its 'gallant son.' The <i>News</i> had an
+editorial tearfully begging the Government to call off the regular
+army and the national guard, and let Willie carry on the rest of the
+war single-handed. It said that a refusal to do so would be
+regarded as a proof that the Northern jealousy of the South was
+still as rampant as ever.</p>
+
+<p>"If the war hadn't ended pretty soon, I don't know to what heights
+of gold braid and encomiums Willie would have climbed; but it did.
+There was a secession of hostilities just three days after he was
+appointed a colonel, and got in three more medals by registered
+mail, and shot two Spaniards while they were drinking lemonade in an
+ambuscade.</p>
+
+<p>"Our company went back to San Augustine when the war was over. There
+wasn't anywhere else for it to go. And what do you think? The old
+town notified us in print, by wire cable, special delivery, and a
+nigger named Saul sent on a gray mule to San Antone, that they was
+going to give us the biggest blow-out, complimentary, alimentary,
+and elementary, that ever disturbed the kildees on the sand-flats
+outside of the immediate contiguity of the city.</p>
+
+<p>"I say 'we,' but it was all meant for ex-Private, Captain <i>de
+facto</i>, and Colonel-elect Willie Robbins. The town was crazy about
+him. They notified us that the reception they were going to put up
+would make the Mardi Gras in New Orleans look like an afternoon tea in
+Bury St. Edmunds with a curate's aunt.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the San Augustine Rifles got back home on schedule time.
+Everybody was at the depot giving forth Roosevelt-Democrat&mdash;they
+used to be called Rebel&mdash;yells. There was two brass-bands, and the
+mayor, and schoolgirls in white frightening the street-car horses by
+throwing Cherokee roses in the streets, and&mdash;well, maybe you've seen
+a celebration by a town that was inland and out of water.</p>
+
+<p>"They wanted Brevet-Colonel Willie to get into a carriage and be
+drawn by prominent citizens and some of the city aldermen to the
+armory, but he stuck to his company and marched at the head of it up
+Sam Houston Avenue. The buildings on both sides was covered with
+flags and audiences, and everybody hollered 'Robbins!' or 'Hello,
+Willie!' as we marched up in files of fours. I never saw a
+illustriouser-looking human in my life than Willie was. He had at
+least seven or eight medals and diplomas and decorations on the
+breast of his khaki coat; he was sunburnt the color of a saddle, and
+he certainly done himself proud.</p>
+
+<p>"They told us at the depot that the courthouse was to be illuminated
+at half-past seven, and there would be speeches and chili-con-carne
+at the Palace Hotel. Miss Delphine Thompson was to read an original
+poem by James Whitcomb Ryan, and Constable Hooker had promised us a
+salute of nine guns from Chicago that he had arrested that day.</p>
+
+<p>"After we had disbanded in the armory, Willie says to me:</p>
+
+<p>"'Want to walk out a piece with me?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Why, yes,' says I, 'if it ain't so far that we can't hear the
+tumult and the shouting die away. I'm hungry myself,' says I, 'and
+I'm pining for some home grub, but I'll go with you.'</p>
+
+<p>"Willie steered me down some side streets till we came to a little
+white cottage in a new lot with a twenty-by-thirty-foot lawn
+decorated with brickbats and old barrel-staves.</p>
+
+<p>"'Halt and give the countersign,' says I to Willie. 'Don't you know
+this dugout? It's the bird's-nest that Joe Granberry built before he
+married Myra Allison. What you going there for?'</p>
+
+<p>"But Willie already had the gate open. He walked up the brick walk
+to the steps, and I went with him. Myra was sitting in a
+rocking-chair on the porch, sewing. Her hair was smoothed back kind
+of hasty and tied in a knot. I never noticed till then that she had
+freckles. Joe was at one side of the porch, in his shirt-sleeves,
+with no collar on, and no signs of a shave, trying to scrape out a
+hole among the brickbats and tin cans to plant a little fruit-tree
+in. He looked up but never said a word, and neither did Myra.</p>
+
+<p>"Willie was sure dandy-looking in his uniform, with medals strung on
+his breast and his new gold-handled sword. You'd never have taken
+him for the little white-headed snipe that the girls used to order
+about and make fun of. He just stood there for a minute, looking at
+Myra with a peculiar little smile on his face; and then he says to
+her, slow, and kind of holding on to his words with his teeth:</p>
+
+<p>"'<i>Oh, I don't know! Maybe I could if I tried!</i>'</p>
+
+<p>"That was all that was said. Willie raised his hat, and we walked
+away.</p>
+
+<p>"And, somehow, when he said that, I remembered, all of a sudden, the
+night of that dance and Willie brushing his hair before the
+looking-glass, and Myra sticking her head in the door to guy him.</p>
+
+<p>"When we got back to Sam Houston Avenue, Willie says:</p>
+
+<p>"'Well, so long, Ben. I'm going down home and get off my shoes and
+take a rest.'</p>
+
+<p>"'You?' says I. 'What's the matter with you? Ain't the court-house
+jammed with everybody in town waiting to honor the hero? And two
+brass-bands, and recitations and flags and jags and grub to follow
+waiting for you?'</p>
+
+<p>"Willie sighs.</p>
+
+<p>"'All right, Ben,' says he. 'Darned if I didn't forget all about
+that.'</p>
+
+<p>"And that's why I say," concluded Ben Granger, "that you can't tell
+where ambition begins any more than you can where it is going to
+wind up."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="11"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>THE HEAD-HUNTER</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over, I went to the
+Philippine Islands. There I remained as bush-whacker correspondent
+for my paper until its managing editor notified me that an
+eight-hundred-word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao
+over the death of an infant Moro was not considered by the office to
+be war news. So I resigned, and came home.</p>
+
+<p>On board the trading-vessel that brought me back I pondered much
+upon the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the
+yellow-brown people. The man&oelig;uvres and skirmishings of the petty
+war interested me not: I was spellbound by the outlandish and
+unreadable countenance of that race that had turned its
+expressionless gaze upon us out of an unguessable past.</p>
+
+<p>Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and
+attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as
+the head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never
+seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their
+concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through
+unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless
+chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near with the invisible
+hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such signs
+as a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make&mdash;a twig
+crackling in the awful, sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew
+showering from the screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at
+even from the rushes of a water-level&mdash;a hint of death for every mile
+and every hour&mdash;they amused me greatly, those little fellows of one
+idea.</p>
+
+<p>When you think of it, their method is beautifully and almost
+hilariously effective and simple.</p>
+
+<p>You have your hut in which you live and carry out the destiny that
+was decreed for you. Spiked to the jamb of your bamboo doorway is a
+basket made of green withes, plaited. From time to time, as vanity
+or ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move you, you creep
+forth with your snickersnee and take up the silent trail. Back from
+it you come, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of your
+victim, which you deposit with pardonable pride in the basket at the
+side of your door. It may be the head of your enemy, your friend, or
+a stranger, according as competition, jealousy, or simple
+sportiveness has been your incentive to labor.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, your reward is certain. The village men, in passing,
+stop to congratulate you, as your neighbor on weaker planes of life
+stops to admire and praise the begonias in your front yard. Your
+particular brown maid lingers, with fluttering bosom, casting soft
+tiger's eyes at the evidence of your love for her. You chew
+betel-nut and listen, content, to the intermittent soft drip from
+the ends of the severed neck arteries. And you show your teeth and
+grunt like a water-buffalo&mdash;which is as near as you can come to
+laughing&mdash;at the thought that the cold, acephalous body of your door
+ornament is being spotted by wheeling vultures in the Mindanaoan
+wilds.</p>
+
+<p>Truly, the life of the merry head-hunter captivated me. He had
+reduced art and philosophy to a simple code. To take your
+adversary's head, to basket it at the portal of your castle, to see
+it lying there, a dead thing, with its cunning and stratagems and
+power gone&mdash; Is there a better way to foil his plots, to refute his
+arguments, to establish your superiority over his skill and wisdom?</p>
+
+<p>The ship that brought me home was captained by an erratic Swede, who
+changed his course and deposited me, with genuine compassion, in a
+small town on the Pacific coast of one of the Central American
+republics, a few hundred miles south of the port to which he had
+engaged to convey me. But I was wearied of movement and exotic
+fancies; so I leaped contentedly upon the firm sands of the village
+of Mojada, telling myself I should be sure to find there the rest
+that I craved. After all, far better to linger there (I thought),
+lulled by the sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of
+palm-fronds, than to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home
+in the East, and there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and
+scourged by fatuous relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping
+neighbors sad stories of the death of colonial governors.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>When I first saw Chloe Greene she was standing, all in white, in the
+doorway of her father's tile-roofed 'dobe house. She was polishing a
+silver cup with a cloth, and she looked like a pearl laid against
+black velvet. She turned on me a flatteringly protracted but a
+wiltingly disapproving gaze, and then went inside, humming a light
+song to indicate the value she placed upon my existence.</p>
+
+<p>Small wonder: for Dr. Stamford (the most disreputable professional
+man between Juneau and Valparaiso) and I were zigzagging along the
+turfy street, tunelessly singing the words of "Auld Lang Syne" to the
+air of "Muzzer's Little Coal-Black Coon." We had come from the ice
+factory, which was Mojada's palace of wickedness, where we had been
+playing billiards and opening black bottles, white with frost, that
+we dragged with strings out of old Sandoval's ice-cold vats.</p>
+
+<p>I turned in sudden rage to Dr. Stamford, as sober as the verger of a
+cathedral. In a moment I had become aware that we were swine cast
+before a pearl.</p>
+
+<p>"You beast," I said, "this is half your doing. And the other half is
+the fault of this cursed country. I'd better have gone back to
+Sleepy-town and died in a wild orgy of currant wine and buns than to
+have had this happen."</p>
+
+<p>Stamford filled the empty street with his roaring laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"You too!" he cried. "And all as quick as the popping of a cork.
+Well, she does seem to strike agreeably upon the retina. But don't
+burn your fingers. All Mojada will tell you that Louis Devoe is the
+man.</p>
+
+<p>"We will see about that," said I. "And, perhaps, whether he is
+<i>a</i> man as well as <i>the</i> man."</p>
+
+<p>I lost no time in meeting Louis Devoe. That was easily accomplished,
+for the foreign colony in Mojada numbered scarce a dozen; and they
+gathered daily at a half-decent hotel kept by a Turk, where they
+managed to patch together the fluttering rags of country and
+civilization that were left them. I sought Devoe before I did my
+pearl of the doorway, because I had learned a little of the game of
+war, and knew better than to strike for a prize before testing the
+strength of the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>A sort of cold dismay&mdash;something akin to fear&mdash;filled me when I had
+estimated him. I found a man so perfectly poised, so charming, so
+deeply learned in the world's rituals, so full of tact, courtesy,
+and hospitality, so endowed with grace and ease and a kind of
+careless, haughty power that I almost overstepped the bounds in
+probing him, in turning him on the spit to find the weak point that
+I so craved for him to have. But I left him whole&mdash;I had to make
+bitter acknowledgment to myself that Louis Devoe was a gentleman
+worthy of my best blows; and I swore to give him them. He was a
+great merchant of the country, a wealthy importer and exporter. All
+day he sat in a fastidiously appointed office, surrounded by works
+of art and evidences of his high culture, directing through glass
+doors and windows the affairs of his house.</p>
+
+<p>In person he was slender and hardly tall. His small, well-shaped
+head was covered with thick, brown hair, trimmed short, and he wore
+a thick, brown beard also cut close and to a fine point. His manners
+were a pattern.</p>
+
+<p>Before long I had become a regular and a welcome visitor at the
+Greene home. I shook my wild habits from me like a worn-out cloak. I
+trained for the conflict with the care of a prize-fighter and the
+self-denial of a Brahmin.</p>
+
+<p>As for Chloe Greene, I shall weary you with no sonnets to her
+eyebrow. She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a
+November pippin, and no more mysterious than a window-pane. She had
+whimsical little theories that she had deduced from life, and that
+fitted the maxims of Epictetus like princess gowns. I wonder, after
+all, if that old duffer wasn't rather wise!</p>
+
+<p>Chloe had a father, the Reverend Homer Greene, and an intermittent
+mother, who sometimes palely presided over a twilight teapot. The
+Reverend Homer was a burr-like man with a life-work. He was writing
+a concordance to the Scriptures, and had arrived as far as Kings.
+Being, presumably, a suitor for his daughter's hand, I was timber
+for his literary outpourings. I had the family tree of Israel
+drilled into my head until I used to cry aloud in my sleep: "And
+Aminadab begat Jay Eye See," and so forth, until he had tackled
+another book. I once made a calculation that the Reverend Homer's
+concordance would be worked up as far as the Seven Vials mentioned
+in Revelations about the third day after they were opened.</p>
+
+<p>Louis Devoe, as well as I, was a visitor and an intimate friend of
+the Greenes. It was there I met him the oftenest, and a more
+agreeable man or a more accomplished I have never hated in my life.</p>
+
+<p>Luckily or unfortunately, I came to be accepted as a Boy. My
+appearance was youthful, and I suppose I had that pleading and
+homeless air that always draws the motherliness that is in women and
+the cursed theories and hobbies of paterfamilias.</p>
+
+<p>Chloe called me "Tommy," and made sisterly fun of my attempts to woo
+her. With Devoe she was vastly more reserved. He was the man of
+romance, one to stir her imagination and deepest feelings had her
+fancy leaned toward him. I was closer to her, but standing in no
+glamour; I had the task before me of winning her in what seems to me
+the American way of fighting&mdash;with cleanness and pluck and everyday
+devotion to break away the barriers of friendship that divided us,
+and to take her, if I could, between sunrise and dark, abetted by
+neither moonlight nor music nor foreign wiles.</p>
+
+<p>Chloe gave no sign of bestowing her blithe affections upon either of
+us. But one day she let out to me an inkling of what she preferred
+in a man. It was tremendously interesting to me, but not
+illuminating as to its application. I had been tormenting her for
+the dozenth time with the statement and catalogue of my sentiments
+toward her.</p>
+
+<p>"Tommy," said she, "I don't want a man to show his love for me by
+leading an army against another country and blowing people off the
+earth with cannons."</p>
+
+<p>"If you mean that the opposite way," I answered, "as they say women
+do, I'll see what I can do. The papers are full of this diplomatic
+row in Russia. My people know some big people in Washington who are
+right next to the army people, and I could get an artillery
+commission and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not that way," interrupted Chloe. "I mean what I say. It isn't
+the big things that are done in the world, Tommy, that count with a
+woman. When the knights were riding abroad in their armor to slay
+dragons, many a stay-at-home page won a lonesome lady's hand by
+being on the spot to pick up her glove and be quick with her cloak
+when the wind blew. The man I am to like best, whoever he shall be,
+must show his love in little ways. He must never forget, after
+hearing it once, that I do not like to have any one walk at my left
+side; that I detest bright-colored neckties; that I prefer to sit
+with my back to a light; that I like candied violets; that I must
+not be talked to when I am looking at the moonlight shining on
+water, and that I very, very often long for dates stuffed with
+English walnuts."</p>
+
+<p>"Frivolity," I said, with a frown. "Any well-trained servant would
+be equal to such details."</p>
+
+<p>"And he must remember," went on Chloe, to remind me of what I want
+when I do not know, myself, what I want."</p>
+
+<p>"You're rising in the scale," I said. "What you seem to need is a
+first-class clairvoyant."</p>
+
+<p>"And if I say that I am dying to hear a Beethoven sonata, and stamp
+my foot when I say it, he must know by that that what my soul craves
+is salted almonds; and he will have them ready in his pocket."</p>
+
+<p>"Now," said I, "I am at a loss. I do not know whether your soul's
+affinity is to be an impresario or a fancy grocer."</p>
+
+<p>Chloe turned her pearly smile upon me.</p>
+
+<p>"Take less than half of what I said as a jest," she went on. "And
+don't think too lightly of the little things, Boy. Be a paladin if
+you must, but don't let it show on you. Most women are only very big
+children, and most men are only very little ones. Please us; don't
+try to overpower us. When we want a hero we can make one out of even
+a plain grocer the third time he catches our handkerchief before it
+falls to the ground."</p>
+
+<p>That evening I was taken down with pernicious fever. That is a kind
+of coast fever with improvements and high-geared attachments. Your
+temperature goes up among the threes and fours and remains there,
+laughing scornfully and feverishly at the cinchona trees and the
+coal-tar derivatives. Pernicious fever is a case for a simple
+mathematician instead of a doctor. It is merely this formula:
+Vitality + the desire to live - the duration of the fever = the
+result.</p>
+
+<p>I took to my bed in the two-roomed thatched hut where I had been
+comfortably established, and sent for a gallon of rum. That was not
+for myself. Drunk, Stamford was the best doctor between the Andes
+and the Pacific. He came, sat at my bedside, and drank himself into
+condition.</p>
+
+<p>"My boy," said he, "my lily-white and reformed Romeo, medicine will
+do you no good. But I will give you quinine, which, being bitter,
+will arouse in you hatred and anger&mdash;two stimulants that will add ten
+per cent. to your chances. You are as strong as a caribou calf, and
+you will get well if the fever doesn't get in a knockout blow when
+you're off your guard."</p>
+
+<p>For two weeks I lay on my back feeling like a Hindoo widow on a
+burning ghat. Old Atasca, an untrained Indian nurse, sat near the
+door like a petrified statue of What's-the-Use, attending to her
+duties, which were, mainly, to see that time went by without
+slipping a cog. Sometimes I would fancy myself back in the
+Philippines, or, at worse times, sliding off the horsehair sofa in
+Sleepytown.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon I ordered Atasca to vamose, and got up and dressed
+carefully. I took my temperature, which I was pleased to find 104. I
+paid almost dainty attention to my dress, choosing solicitously a
+necktie of a dull and subdued hue. The mirror showed that I was
+looking little the worse from my illness. The fever gave brightness
+to my eyes and color to my face. And while I looked at my reflection
+my color went and came again as I thought of Chloe Greene and the
+millions of eons that had passed since I'd seen her, and of Louis
+Devoe and the time he had gained on me.</p>
+
+<p>I went straight to her house. I seemed to float rather than walk; I
+hardly felt the ground under my feet; I thought pernicious fever
+must be a great boon to make one feel so strong.</p>
+
+<p>I found Chloe and Louis Devoe sitting under the awning in front of
+the house. She jumped up and met me with a double handshake.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad, glad, glad to see you out again!" she cried, every word a
+pearl strung on the string of her sentence. "You are well, Tommy&mdash;or
+better, of course. I wanted to come to see you, but they wouldn't
+let me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes," said I, carelessly, "it was nothing. Merely a little
+fever. I am out again, as you see."</p>
+
+<p>We three sat there and talked for half an hour or so. Then Chloe
+looked out yearningly and almost piteously across the ocean. I could
+see in her sea-blue eyes some deep and intense desire. Devoe, curse
+him! saw it too.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" we asked, in unison.</p>
+
+<p>"Cocoanut-pudding," said Chloe, pathetically. "I've wanted some&mdash;oh,
+so badly, for two days. It's got beyond a wish; it's an obsession."</p>
+
+<p>"The cocoanut season is over," said Devoe, in that voice of his that
+gave thrilling interest to his most commonplace words. "I hardly
+think one could be found in Mojada. The natives never use them
+except when they are green and the milk is fresh. They sell all the
+ripe ones to the fruiterers."</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't a broiled lobster or a Welsh rabbit do as well?" I
+remarked, with the engaging idiocy of a pernicious-fever
+convalescent.</p>
+
+<p>Chloe came as near to pouting as a sweet disposition and a perfect
+profile would allow her to come.</p>
+
+<p>The Reverend Homer poked his ermine-lined face through the doorway
+and added a concordance to the conversation.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes," said he, "old Campos keeps the dried nuts in his little
+store on the hill. But it would be far better, my daughter, to
+restrain unusual desires, and partake thankfully of the daily dishes
+that the Lord has set before us."</p>
+
+<p>"Stuff!" said I.</p>
+
+<p>"How was that?" asked the Reverend Homer, sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"I say it's tough," said I, "to drop into the vernacular, that Miss
+Greene should be deprived of the food she desires&mdash;a simple thing
+like kalsomine-pudding. Perhaps," I continued, solicitously, "some
+pickled walnuts or a fricassee of Hungarian butternuts would do as
+well."</p>
+
+<p>Every one looked at me with a slight exhibition of curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>Louis Devoe arose and made his adieus. I watched him until he had
+sauntered slowly and grandiosely to the corner, around which he
+turned to reach his great warehouse and store. Chloe made her
+excuses, and went inside for a few minutes to attend to some detail
+affecting the seven-o'clock dinner. She was a passed mistress in
+housekeeping. I had tasted her puddings and bread with beatitude.</p>
+
+<p>When all had gone, I turned casually and saw a basket made of
+plaited green withes hanging by a nail outside the door-jamb. With a
+rush that made my hot temples throb there came vividly to my mind
+recollections of the head-hunters&mdash;<i>those grim, flinty, relentless
+little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the
+subtle terror of their concealed presence&#8230; From time to time,
+as vanity or ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move him, one
+creeps forth with his snickersnee and takes up the silent trail&#8230;
+Back he comes, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of his
+victim&#8230; His particular brown or white maid lingers, with
+fluttering bosom, casting soft tiger's eyes at the evidence of his
+love for her</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I stole softly from the house and returned to my hut. From its
+supporting nails in the wall I took a machete as heavy as a
+butcher's cleaver and sharper than a safety-razor. And then I
+chuckled softly to myself, and set out to the fastidiously appointed
+private office of Monsieur Louis Devoe, usurper to the hand of the
+Pearl of the Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>He was never slow at thinking; he gave one look at my face and
+another at the weapon in my hand as I entered his door, and then he
+seemed to fade from my sight. I ran to the back door, kicked it
+open, and saw him running like a deer up the road toward the wood
+that began two hundred yards away. I was after him, with a shout. I
+remember hearing children and women screaming, and seeing them
+flying from the road.</p>
+
+<p>He was fleet, but I was stronger. A mile, and I had almost come up
+with him. He doubled cunningly and dashed into a brake that extended
+into a small ca&ntilde;on. I crashed through this after him, and in
+five minutes had him cornered in an angle of insurmountable cliffs.
+There his instinct of self-preservation steadied him, as it will
+steady even animals at bay. He turned to me, quite calm, with a
+ghastly smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Rayburn!" he said, with such an awful effort at ease that I was
+impolite enough to laugh rudely in his face. "Oh, Rayburn!" said he,
+"come, let's have done with this nonsense. Of course, I know it's
+the fever and you're not yourself; but collect yourself, man&mdash;give me
+that ridiculous weapon, now, and let's go back and talk it over."</p>
+
+<p>"I will go back," said I, "carrying your head with me. We will see
+how charmingly it can discourse when it lies in the basket at her
+door."</p>
+
+<p>"Come," said he, persuasively, "I think better of you than to
+suppose that you try this sort of thing as a joke. But even the
+vagaries of a fever-crazed lunatic come some time to a limit. What
+is this talk about heads and baskets? Get yourself together and
+throw away that absurd cane-chopper. What would Miss Greene think of
+you?" he ended, with the silky cajolery that one would use toward a
+fretful child.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen," said I. "At last you have struck upon the right note. What
+would she think of me? Listen," I repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"There are women," I said, "who look upon horsehair sofas and
+currant wine as dross. To them even the calculated modulation of
+your well-trimmed talk sounds like the dropping of rotten plums
+from a tree in the night. They are the maidens who walk back and
+forth in the villages, scorning the emptiness of the baskets at the
+doors of the young men who would win them.</p>
+
+<p>"One such as they," I said, "is waiting. Only a fool would try to
+win a woman by drooling like a braggart in her doorway or by waiting
+upon her whims like a footman. They are all daughters of Herodias,
+and to gain their hearts one must lay the heads of his enemies
+before them with his own hands. Now, bend your neck, Louis Devoe. Do
+not be a coward as well as a chatterer at a lady's tea-table."</p>
+
+<p>"There, there!" said Devoe, falteringly. "You know me, don't you,
+Rayburn?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes," I said, "I know you. I know you. I know you. But the
+basket is empty. The old men of the village and the young men, and
+both the dark maidens and the ones who are as fair as pearls walk
+back and forth and see its emptiness. Will you kneel now, or must we
+have a scuffle? It is not like you to make things go roughly and
+with bad form. But the basket is waiting for your head."</p>
+
+<p>With that he went to pieces. I had to catch him as he tried to
+scamper past me like a scared rabbit. I stretched him out and got a
+foot on his chest, but he squirmed like a worm, although I appealed
+repeatedly to his sense of propriety and the duty he owed to himself
+as a gentleman not to make a row.</p>
+
+<p>But at last he gave me the chance, and I swung the machete.</p>
+
+<p>It was not hard work. He flopped like a chicken during the six or
+seven blows that it took to sever his head; but finally he lay
+still, and I tied his head in my handkerchief. The eyes opened and
+shut thrice while I walked a hundred yards. I was red to my feet
+with the drip, but what did that matter? With delight I felt under
+my hands the crisp touch of his short, thick, brown hair and
+close-trimmed beard.</p>
+
+<p>I reached the house of the Greenes and dumped the head of Louis
+Devoe into the basket that still hung by the nail in the door-jamb.
+I sat in a chair under the awning and waited. The sun was within two
+hours of setting. Chloe came out and looked surprised.</p>
+
+<p>"Where have you been, Tommy?" she asked. "You were gone when I came
+out."</p>
+
+<p>"Look in the basket," I said, rising to my feet. She looked, and
+gave a little scream&mdash;of delight, I was pleased to note.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Tommy!" she said. "It was just what I wanted you to do. It's
+leaking a little, but that doesn't matter. Wasn't I telling you?
+It's the little things that count. And you remembered."</p>
+
+<p>Little things! She held the ensanguined head of Louis Devoe in her
+white apron. Tiny streams of red widened on her apron and dripped
+upon the floor. Her face was bright and tender.</p>
+
+<p>"Little things, indeed!" I thought again. "The head-hunters are
+right. These are the things that women like you to do for them."</p>
+
+<p>Chloe came close to me. There was no one in sight. She looked tip at
+me with sea-blue eyes that said things they had never said before.</p>
+
+<p>"You think of me," she said. "You are the man I was describing. You
+think of the little things, and they are what make the world worth
+living in. The man for me must consider my little wishes, and make
+me happy in small ways. He must bring me little red peaches in
+December if I wish for them, and then I will love him till June. I
+will have no knight in armor slaying his rival or killing dragons
+for me. You please me very well, Tommy."</p>
+
+<p>I stooped and kissed her. Then a moisture broke out on my forehead,
+and I began to feel weak. I saw the red stains vanish from Chloe's
+apron, and the head of Louis Devoe turn to a brown, dried cocoanut.</p>
+
+<p>"There will be cocoanut-pudding for dinner, Tommy, boy," said Chloe,
+gayly, "and you must come. I must go in for a little while."</p>
+
+<p>She vanished in a delightful flutter.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Stamford tramped up hurriedly. He seized my pulse as though it
+were his own property that I had escaped with.</p>
+
+<p>"You are the biggest fool outside of any asylum!" he said, angrily.
+"Why did you leave your bed? And the idiotic things you've been
+doing!&mdash;and no wonder, with your pulse going like a sledge-hammer."</p>
+
+<p>"Name some of them," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"Devoe sent for me," said Stamford. "He saw you from his window go
+to old Campos' store, chase him up the hill with his own yardstick,
+and then come back and make off with his biggest cocoanut."</p>
+
+<p>"It's the little things that count, after all," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"It's your little bed that counts with you just now," said the
+doctor. "You come with me at once, or I'll throw up the case.
+'You're as loony as a loon."</p>
+
+<p>So I got no cocoanut-pudding that evening, but I conceived a
+distrust as to the value of the method of the head-hunters. Perhaps
+for many centuries the maidens of the villages may have been looking
+wistfully at the heads in the baskets at the doorways, longing for
+other and lesser trophies.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="12"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>NO STORY</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>To avoid having this book hurled into corner of the room by the
+suspicious reader, I will assert in time that this is not a
+newspaper story. You will encounter no shirt-sleeved, omniscient
+city editor, no prodigy "cub" reporter just off the farm, no scoop,
+no story&mdash;no anything.</p>
+
+<p>But if you will concede me the setting of the first scene in the
+reporters' room of the <i>Morning Beacon</i>, I will repay the favor by
+keeping strictly my promises set forth above.</p>
+
+<p>I was doing space-work on the <i>Beacon</i>, hoping to be put on a
+salary. Some one had cleared with a rake or a shovel a small space for
+me at the end of a long table piled high with exchanges, <i>Congressional
+Records</i>, and old files. There I did my work. I wrote whatever the
+city whispered or roared or chuckled to me on my diligent wanderings
+about its streets. My income was not regular.</p>
+
+<p>One day Tripp came in and leaned on my table. Tripp was something in
+the mechanical department&mdash;I think he had something to do with the
+pictures, for he smelled of photographers' supplies, and his hands
+were always stained and cut up with acids. He was about twenty-five
+and looked forty. Half of his face was covered with short, curly red
+whiskers that looked like a door-mat with the "welcome" left off. He
+was pale and unhealthy and miserable and fawning, and an assiduous
+borrower of sums ranging from twenty-five cents to a dollar. One
+dollar was his limit. He knew the extent of his credit as well as
+the Chemical National Bank knows the amount of
+H<span class="xsmall">2</span>O that collateral will show on
+analysis. When he sat on my table he held one hand with the other
+to keep both from shaking. Whiskey. He had a spurious air
+of lightness and bravado about him that deceived no one, but was
+useful in his borrowing because it was so pitifully and perceptibly
+assumed.</p>
+
+<p>This day I had coaxed from the cashier five shining silver dollars
+as a grumbling advance on a story that the Sunday editor had
+reluctantly accepted. So if I was not feeling at peace with the
+world, at least an armistice had been declared; and I was beginning
+with ardor to write a description of the Brooklyn Bridge by
+moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Tripp," said I, looking up at him rather impatiently, "how
+goes it?" He was looking to-day more miserable, more cringing and
+haggard and downtrodden than I had ever seen him. He was at that
+stage of misery where he drew your pity so fully that you longed to
+kick him.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you got a dollar?" asked Tripp, with his most fawning look and
+his dog-like eyes that blinked in the narrow space between his
+high-growing matted beard and his low-growing matted hair.</p>
+
+<p>"I have," said I; and again I said, "I have," more loudly and
+inhospitably, "and four besides. And I had hard work corkscrewing
+them out of old Atkinson, I can tell you. And I drew them," I
+continued, "to meet a want&mdash;a hiatus&mdash;a demand&mdash;a need&mdash;an
+exigency&mdash;a requirement of exactly five dollars."</p>
+
+<p>I was driven to emphasis by the premonition that I was to lose one
+of the dollars on the spot.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to borrow any," said Tripp, and I breathed again. "I
+thought you'd like to get put onto a good story," he went on. "I've
+got a rattling fine one for you. You ought to make it run a column
+at least. It'll make a dandy if you work it up right. It'll probably
+cost you a dollar or two to get the stuff. I don't want anything out
+of it myself."</p>
+
+<p>I became placated. The proposition showed that Tripp appreciated
+past favors, although he did not return them. If he had been wise
+enough to strike me for a quarter then he would have got it.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the story?" I asked, poising my pencil with a finely
+calculated editorial air.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you," said Tripp. "It's a girl. A beauty. One of the
+howlingest Amsden's Junes you ever saw. Rosebuds covered with
+dew&mdash;violets in their mossy bed&mdash;and truck like that. She's lived on
+Long Island twenty years and never saw New York City before. I ran
+against her on Thirty-fourth Street. She'd just got in on the East
+River ferry. I tell you, she's a beauty that would take the hydrogen
+out of all the peroxides in the world. She stopped me on the street
+and asked me where she could find George Brown. Asked me where she
+could find <i>George Brown in New York City!</i> What do you think
+of that?</p>
+
+<p>"I talked to her, and found that she was going to marry a young
+farmer named Dodd&mdash;Hiram Dodd&mdash;next week. But it seems that George
+Brown still holds the championship in her youthful fancy. George had
+greased his cowhide boots some years ago, and came to the city to
+make his fortune. But he forgot to remember to show up again at
+Greenburg, and Hiram got in as second-best choice. But when it comes
+to the scratch Ada&mdash;her name's Ada Lowery&mdash;saddles a nag and rides
+eight miles to the railroad station and catches the
+6.45 <span class="smallcaps">a.m.</span> train
+for the city. Looking for George, you know&mdash;you understand about
+women&mdash;George wasn't there, so she wanted him.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you know, I couldn't leave her loose in
+Wolftown-on-the-Hudson. I suppose she thought the first person she
+inquired of would say: 'George Brown?&mdash;why, yes&mdash;lemme see&mdash;he's a
+short man with light-blue eyes, ain't he? Oh yes&mdash;you'll find George
+on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, right next to the grocery.
+He's bill-clerk in a saddle-and-harness store.' That's about how
+innocent and beautiful she is. You know those little Long Island
+water-front villages like Greenburg&mdash;a couple of duck-farms for
+sport, and clams and about nine summer visitors for industries.
+That's the kind of a place she comes from. But, say&mdash;you ought to
+see her!</p>
+
+<p>"What could I do? I don't know what money looks like in the morning.
+And she'd paid her last cent of pocket-money for her railroad ticket
+except a quarter, which she had squandered on gum-drops. She was
+eating them out of a paper bag. I took her to a boarding-house on
+Thirty-second Street where I used to live, and hocked her. She's in
+soak for a dollar. That's old Mother McGinnis' price per day. I'll
+show you the house."</p>
+
+<p>"What words are these, Tripp?" said I. "I thought you said you had a
+story. Every ferryboat that crosses the East River brings or takes
+away girls from Long Island."</p>
+
+<p>The premature lines on Tripp's face grew deeper. He frowned
+seriously from his tangle of hair. He separated his hands and
+emphasized his answer with one shaking forefinger.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you see," he said, "what a rattling fine story it would make?
+You could do it fine. All about the romance, you know, and describe
+the girl, and put a lot of stuff in it about true love, and sling in
+a few stickfuls of funny business&mdash;joshing the Long Islanders about
+being green, and, well&mdash;you know how to do it. You ought to get
+fifteen dollars out of it, anyhow. And it'll cost you only about
+four dollars. You'll make a clear profit of eleven."</p>
+
+<p>"How will it cost me four dollars?" I asked, suspiciously.</p>
+
+<p>"One dollar to Mrs. McGinnis," Tripp answered, promptly, "and two
+dollars to pay the girl's fare back home."</p>
+
+<p>"And the fourth dimension?" I inquired, making a rapid mental
+calculation.</p>
+
+<p>"One dollar to me," said Tripp. "For whiskey. Are you on?"</p>
+
+<p>I smiled enigmatically and spread my elbows as if to begin writing
+again. But this grim, abject, specious, subservient, burr-like wreck
+of a man would not be shaken off. His forehead suddenly became
+shiningly moist.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you see," he said, with a sort of desperate calmness, "that
+this girl has got to be sent home to-day&mdash;not to-night nor
+to-morrow, but to-day? I can't do anything for her. You know, I'm
+the janitor and corresponding secretary of the Down-and-Out Club.
+I thought you could make a newspaper story out of it and win out a
+piece of money on general results. But, anyhow, don't you see that
+she's got to get back home before night?"</p>
+
+<p>And then I began to feel that dull, leaden, soul-depressing
+sensation known as the sense of duty. Why should that sense fall
+upon one as a weight and a burden? I knew that I was doomed that day
+to give up the bulk of my store of hard-wrung coin to the relief of
+this Ada Lowery. But I swore to myself that Tripp's whiskey dollar
+would not be forthcoming. He might play knight-errant at my expense,
+but he would indulge in no wassail afterward, commemorating my
+weakness and gullibility. In a kind of chilly anger I put on my coat
+and hat.</p>
+
+<p>Tripp, submissive, cringing, vainly endeavoring to please, conducted
+me via the street-cars to the human pawn-shop of Mother McGinnis. I
+paid the fares. It seemed that the collodion-scented Don Quixote and
+the smallest minted coin were strangers.</p>
+
+<p>Tripp pulled the bell at the door of the mouldy red-brick
+boarding-house. At its faint tinkle he paled, and crouched as a rabbit
+makes ready to spring away at the sound of a hunting-dog. I guessed
+what a life he had led, terror-haunted by the coming footsteps of
+landladies.</p>
+
+<p>"Give me one of the dollars&mdash;quick!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>The door opened six inches. Mother McGinnis stood there with white
+eyes&mdash;they were white, I say&mdash;and a yellow face, holding together at
+her throat with one hand a dingy pink flannel dressing-sack. Tripp
+thrust the dollar through the space without a word, and it bought us
+entry.</p>
+
+<p>"She's in the parlor," said the McGinnis, turning the back of her
+sack upon us.</p>
+
+<p>In the dim parlor a girl sat at the cracked marble centre-table
+weeping comfortably and eating gum-drops. She was a flawless beauty.
+Crying had only made her brilliant eyes brighter. When she crunched
+a gum-drop you thought only of the poetry of motion and envied the
+senseless confection. Eve at the age of five minutes must have been
+a ringer for Miss Ada Lowery at nineteen or twenty. I was
+introduced, and a gum-drop suffered neglect while she conveyed to me
+a na&iuml;ve interest, such as a puppy dog (a prize winner) might
+bestow upon a crawling beetle or a frog.</p>
+
+<p>Tripp took his stand by the table, with the fingers of one hand
+spread upon it, as an attorney or a master of ceremonies might have
+stood. But he looked the master of nothing. His faded coat was
+buttoned high, as if it sought to be charitable to deficiencies of
+tie and linen.</p>
+
+<p>I thought of a Scotch terrier at the sight of his shifty eyes in the
+glade between his tangled hair and beard. For one ignoble moment I
+felt ashamed of having been introduced as his friend in the presence
+of so much beauty in distress. But evidently Tripp meant to conduct
+the ceremonies, whatever they might be. I thought I detected in his
+actions and pose an intention of foisting the situation upon me as
+material for a newspaper story, in a lingering hope of extracting
+from me his whiskey dollar.</p>
+
+<p>"My friend" (I shuddered), "Mr. Chalmers," said Tripp, "will tell
+you, Miss Lowery, the same that I did. He's a reporter, and he can
+hand out the talk better than I can. That's why I brought him with
+me." (O Tripp, wasn't it the <i>silver</i>-tongued orator you wanted?)
+"He's wise to a lot of things, and he'll tell you now what's best to
+do."</p>
+
+<p>I stood on one foot, as it were, as I sat in my rickety chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;er&mdash;Miss Lowery," I began, secretly enraged at Tripp's awkward
+opening, "I am at your service, of course, but&mdash;er&mdash;as I haven't
+been apprized of the circumstances of the case, I&mdash;er&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Miss Lowery, beaming for a moment, "it ain't as bad as
+that&mdash;there ain't any circumstances. It's the first time I've ever
+been in New York except once when I was five years old, and I had no
+idea it was such a big town. And I met Mr.&mdash;Mr. Snip on the street
+and asked him about a friend of mine, and he brought me here and
+asked me to wait."</p>
+
+<p>"I advise you, Miss Lowery," said Tripp, "to tell Mr. Chalmers all.
+He's a friend of mine" (I was getting used to it by this time), "and
+he'll give you the right tip."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, certainly," said Miss Ada, chewing a gum-drop toward me.
+"There ain't anything to tell except that&mdash;well, everything's fixed
+for me to marry Hiram Dodd next Thursday evening. Hi has got two
+hundred acres of land with a lot of shore-front, and one of the best
+truck-farms on the Island. But this morning I had my horse saddled
+up&mdash;he's a white horse named Dancer&mdash;and I rode over to the station.
+I told 'em at home I was going to spend the day with Susie Adams. It
+was a story, I guess, but I don't care. And I came to New York on
+the train, and I met Mr.&mdash;Mr. Flip on the street and asked him if he
+knew where I could find G&mdash;G&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Miss Lowery," broke in Tripp, loudly, and with much bad taste,
+I thought, as she hesitated with her word, "you like this young man,
+Hiram Dodd, don't you? He's all right, and good to you, ain't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I like him," said Miss Lowery emphatically. "Hi's all
+right. And of course he's good to me. So is everybody."</p>
+
+<p>I could have sworn it myself. Throughout Miss Ada Lowery's life all
+men would be to good to her. They would strive, contrive, struggle,
+and compete to hold umbrellas over her hat, check her trunk, pick up
+her handkerchief, and buy for her soda at the fountain.</p>
+
+<p>"But," went on Miss Lowery, "last night I got to thinking about
+G&mdash;George, and I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Down went the bright gold head upon dimpled, clasped hands on the
+table. Such a beautiful April storm! Unrestrainedly she sobbed. I wished
+I could have comforted her. But I was not George. And I was glad I
+was not Hiram&mdash;and yet I was sorry, too.</p>
+
+<p>By-and-by the shower passed. She straightened up, brave and half-way
+smiling. She would have made a splendid wife, for crying only made
+her eyes more bright and tender. She took a gum-drop and began her
+story.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I'm a terrible hayseed," she said between her little gulps
+and sighs, "but I can't help it. G&mdash;George Brown and I were sweethearts
+since he was eight and I was five. When he was nineteen&mdash;that was
+four years ago&mdash;he left Greenburg and went to the city. He said
+he was going to be a policeman or a railroad president or something.
+And then he was coming back for me. But I never heard from him any
+more. And I&mdash;I&mdash;liked him."</p>
+
+<p>Another flow of tears seemed imminent, but Tripp hurled himself into
+the crevasse and dammed it. Confound him, I could see his game. He
+was trying to make a story of it for his sordid ends and profit.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on, Mr. Chalmers," said he, "and tell the lady what's the proper
+caper. That's what I told her&mdash;you'd hand it to her straight. Spiel
+up."</p>
+
+<p>I coughed, and tried to feel less wrathful toward Tripp. I saw my
+duty. Cunningly I had been inveigled, but I was securely trapped.
+Tripp's first dictum to me had been just and correct. The young lady
+must be sent back to Greenburg that day. She must be argued with,
+convinced, assured, instructed, ticketed, and returned without
+delay. I hated Hiram and despised George; but duty must be done.
+<i>Noblesse oblige</i> and only five silver dollars are not strictly
+romantic compatibles, but sometimes they can be made to jibe. It was
+mine to be Sir Oracle, and then pay the freight. So I assumed an air
+that mingled Solomon's with that of the general passenger agent of
+the Long Island Railroad.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Lowery," said I, as impressively as I could, "life is rather a
+queer proposition, after all." There was a familiar sound to these
+words after I had spoken them, and I hoped Miss Lowery had never
+heard Mr. Cohan's song. "Those whom we first love we seldom wed. Our
+earlier romances, tinged with the magic radiance of youth, often
+fail to materialize." The last three words sounded somewhat trite
+when they struck the air. "But those fondly cherished dreams," I
+went on, "may cast a pleasant afterglow on our future lives, however
+impracticable and vague they may have been. But life is full of
+realities as well as visions and dreams. One cannot live on
+memories. May I ask, Miss Lowery, if you think you could pass a
+happy&mdash;that is, a contented and harmonious life with
+Mr.&mdash;er&mdash;Dodd&mdash;if in other ways than romantic recollections he seems
+to&mdash;er&mdash;fill the bill, as I might say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Hi's all right," answered Miss Lowery. "Yes, I could get along
+with him fine. He's promised me an automobile and a motor-boat. But
+somehow, when it got so close to the time I was to marry him, I
+couldn't help wishing&mdash;well, just thinking about George. Something
+must have happened to him or he'd have written. On the day he left,
+he and me got a hammer and a chisel and cut a dime into two pieces.
+I took one piece and he took the other, and we promised to be true
+to each other and always keep the pieces till we saw each other
+again. I've got mine at home now in a ring-box in the top drawer of
+my dresser. I guess I was silly to come up here looking for him. I
+never realized what a big place it is."</p>
+
+<p>And then Tripp joined in with a little grating laugh that he had,
+still trying to drag in a little story or drama to earn the
+miserable dollar that he craved.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the boys from the country forget a lot when they come to the
+city and learn something. I guess George, maybe, is on the bum, or
+got roped in by some other girl, or maybe gone to the dogs on
+account of whiskey or the races. You listen to Mr. Chalmers and go
+back home, and you'll be all right."</p>
+
+<p>But now the time was come for action, for the hands of the clock
+were moving close to noon. Frowning upon Tripp, I argued gently and
+philosophically with Miss Lowery, delicately convincing her of the
+importance of returning home at once. And I impressed upon her the
+truth that it would not be absolutely necessary to her future
+happiness that she mention to Hi the wonders or the fact of her
+visit to the city that had swallowed up the unlucky George.</p>
+
+<p>She said she had left her horse (unfortunate Rosinante) tied to a
+tree near the railroad station. Tripp and I gave her instructions to
+mount the patient steed as soon as she arrived and ride home as fast
+as possible. There she was to recount the exciting adventure of a
+day spent with Susie Adams. She could "fix" Susie&mdash;I was sure of
+that&mdash;and all would be well.</p>
+
+<p>And then, being susceptible to the barbed arrows of beauty, I warmed
+to the adventure. The three of us hurried to the ferry, and there I
+found the price of a ticket to Greenburg to be but a dollar and
+eighty cents. I bought one, and a red, red rose with the twenty
+cents for Miss Lowery. We saw her aboard her ferryboat, and stood
+watching her wave her handkerchief at us until it was the tiniest
+white patch imaginable. And then Tripp and I faced each other,
+brought back to earth, left dry and desolate in the shade of the
+sombre verities of life.</p>
+
+<p>The spell wrought by beauty and romance was dwindling. I looked at
+Tripp and almost sneered. He looked more careworn, contemptible, and
+disreputable than ever. I fingered the two silver dollars remaining
+in my pocket and looked at him with the half-closed eyelids of
+contempt. He mustered up an imitation of resistance.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you get a story out of it?" he asked, huskily. "Some sort of
+a story, even if you have to fake part of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a line," said I. "I can fancy the look on Grimes' face if I
+should try to put over any slush like this. But we've helped the
+little lady out, and that'll have to be our only reward."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry," said Tripp, almost inaudibly. "I'm sorry you're out
+your money. Now, it seemed to me like a find of a big story, you
+know&mdash;that is, a sort of thing that would write up pretty well."</p>
+
+<p>"Let's try to forget it," said I, with a praiseworthy attempt at
+gayety, "and take the next car 'cross town."</p>
+
+<p>I steeled myself against his unexpressed but palpable desire. He
+should not coax, cajole, or wring from me the dollar he craved. I
+had had enough of that wild-goose chase.</p>
+
+<p>Tripp feebly unbuttoned his coat of the faded pattern and glossy
+seams to reach for something that had once been a handkerchief deep
+down in some obscure and cavernous pocket. As he did so I caught the
+shine of a cheap silver-plated watch-chain across his vest, and
+something dangling from it caused me to stretch forth my hand and
+seize it curiously. It was the half of a silver dime that had been
+cut in halves with a chisel.</p>
+
+<p>"What!" I said, looking at him keenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes," he responded, dully. "George Brown, alias Tripp. What's
+the use?"</p>
+
+<p>Barring the W. C. T. U., I'd like to know if anybody disapproves of
+my having produced promptly from my pocket Tripp's whiskey dollar
+and unhesitatingly laying it in his hand.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="13"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>THE HIGHER PRAGMATISM</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<h4>I<br />&nbsp;</h4>
+
+
+<p>Where to go for wisdom has become a question of serious import. The
+ancients are discredited; Plato is boiler-plate; Aristotle is
+tottering; Marcus Aurelius is reeling; &AElig;sop has been copyrighted by
+Indiana; Solomon is too solemn; you couldn't get anything out of
+Epictetus with a pick.</p>
+
+<p>The ant, which for many years served as a model of intelligence and
+industry in the school-readers, has been proven to be a doddering
+idiot and a waster of time and effort. The owl to-day is hooted at.
+Chautauqua conventions have abandoned culture and adopted diabolo.
+Graybeards give glowing testimonials to the venders of patent
+hair-restorers. There are typographical errors in the almanacs
+published by the daily newspapers. College professors have become&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But there shall be no personalities.</p>
+
+<p>To sit in classes, to delve into the encyclopedia or the
+past-performances page, will not make us wise. As the
+poet says, "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."
+Wisdom is dew, which, while we know it not, soaks into us, refreshes
+us, and makes us grow. Knowledge is a strong stream of water turned
+on us through a hose. It disturbs our roots.</p>
+
+<p>Then, let us rather gather wisdom. But how to do so requires
+knowledge. If we know a thing, we know it; but very often we are not
+wise to it that we are wise, and&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But let's go on with the story.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>II<br />&nbsp;</h4>
+
+
+<p>Once upon a time I found a ten-cent magazine lying on a bench in a
+little city park. Anyhow, that was the amount he asked me for when I
+sat on the bench next to him. He was a musty, dingy, and tattered
+magazine, with some queer stories bound in him, I was sure. He
+turned out to be a scrap-book.</p>
+
+<p>"I am a newspaper reporter," I said to him, to try him. "I have been
+detailed to write up some of the experiences of the unfortunate ones
+who spend their evenings in this park. May I ask you to what you
+attribute your downfall in&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I was interrupted by a laugh from my purchase&mdash;a laugh so rusty and
+unpractised that I was sure it had been his first for many a day.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, no," said he. "You ain't a reporter. Reporters don't talk
+that way. They pretend to be one of us, and say they've just got in
+on the blind baggage from St. Louis. I can tell a reporter on sight.
+Us park bums get to be fine judges of human nature. We sit here all
+day and watch the people go by. I can size up anybody who walks past
+my bench in a way that would surprise you."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," I said, "go on and tell me. How do you size me up?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should say," said the student of human nature with unpardonable
+hesitation, "that you was, say, in the contracting business&mdash;or
+maybe worked in a store&mdash;or was a sign-painter. You stopped in the
+park to finish your cigar, and thought you'd get a little free
+monologue out of me. Still, you might be a plasterer or a
+lawyer&mdash;it's getting kind of dark, you see. And your wife won't let
+you smoke at home."</p>
+
+<p>I frowned gloomily.</p>
+
+<p>"But, judging again," went on the reader of men, "I'd say you ain't
+got a wife."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said I, rising restlessly. "No, no, no, I ain't. But I <i>will</i>
+have, by the arrows of Cupid! That is, if&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>My voice must have trailed away and muffled itself in uncertainty
+and despair.</p>
+
+<p>"I see you have a story yourself," said the dusty
+vagrant&mdash;impudently, it seemed to me. "Suppose you take your dime
+back and spin your yarn for me. I'm interested myself in the ups and
+downs of unfortunate ones who spend their evenings in the park."</p>
+
+<p>Somehow, that amused me. I looked at the frowsy derelict with more
+interest. I did have a story. Why not tell it to him? I had told
+none of my friends. I had always been a reserved and bottled-up man.
+It was psychical timidity or sensitiveness&mdash;perhaps both. And I
+smiled to myself in wonder when I felt an impulse to confide in this
+stranger and vagabond.</p>
+
+<p>"Jack," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"Mack," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Mack," said I, "I'll tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want the dime back in advance?" said he.</p>
+
+<p>I handed him a dollar.</p>
+
+<p>"The dime," said I, "was the price of listening to <i>your</i>
+story."</p>
+
+<p>"Right on the point of the jaw," said he. "Go on."</p>
+
+<p>And then, incredible as it may seem to the lovers in the world who
+confide their sorrows only to the night wind and the gibbous moon, I
+laid bare my secret to that wreck of all things that you would have
+supposed to be in sympathy with love.</p>
+
+<p>I told him of the days and weeks and months that I had spent in
+adoring Mildred Telfair. I spoke of my despair, my grievous days and
+wakeful nights, my dwindling hopes and distress of mind. I even
+pictured to this night-prowler her beauty and dignity, the great
+sway she had in society, and the magnificence of her life as the
+elder daughter of an ancient race whose pride overbalanced the
+dollars of the city's millionaires.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you cop the lady out?" asked Mack, bringing me down to
+earth and dialect again.</p>
+
+<p>I explained to him that my worth was so small, my income so minute,
+and my fears so large that I hadn't the courage to speak to her of
+my worship. I told him that in her presence I could only blush and
+stammer, and that she looked upon me with a wonderful, maddening
+smile of amusement.</p>
+
+<p>"She kind of moves in the professional class, don't she?" asked
+Mack.</p>
+
+<p>"The Telfair family&mdash;" I began, haughtily.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean professional beauty," said my hearer.</p>
+
+<p>"She is greatly and widely admired," I answered, cautiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Any sisters?"</p>
+
+<p>"One."</p>
+
+<p>"You know any more girls?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, several," I answered. "And a few others."</p>
+
+<p>"Say," said Mack, "tell me one thing&mdash;can you hand out the dope to
+other girls? Can you chin 'em and make matin&eacute;e eyes at 'em
+and squeeze 'em? You know what I mean. You're just shy when it comes
+to this particular dame&mdash;the professional beauty&mdash;ain't that right?"</p>
+
+<p>"In a way you have outlined the situation with approximate truth," I
+admitted.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought so," said Mack, grimly. "Now, that reminds me of my own
+case. I'll tell you about it."</p>
+
+<p>I was indignant, but concealed it. What was this loafer's case or
+anybody's case compared with mine? Besides, I had given him a dollar
+and ten cents.</p>
+
+<p>"Feel my muscle," said my companion, suddenly, flexing his biceps. I
+did so mechanically. The fellows in gyms are always asking you to do
+that. His arm was as hard as cast-iron.</p>
+
+<p>"Four years ago," said Mack, "I could lick any man in New York
+outside of the professional ring. Your case and mine is just the
+same. I come from the West Side&mdash;between Thirtieth and Fourteenth&mdash;I
+won't give the number on the door. I was a scrapper when I was ten,
+and when I was twenty no amateur in the city could stand up four
+rounds with me. 'S a fact. You know Bill McCarty? No? He managed the
+smokers for some of them swell clubs. Well, I knocked out everything
+Bill brought up before me. I was a middle-weight, but could train
+down to a welter when necessary. I boxed all over the West Side at
+bouts and benefits and private entertainments, and was never put out
+once.</p>
+
+<p>"But, say, the first time I put my foot in the ring with a
+professional I was no more than a canned lobster. I dunno how it
+was&mdash;I seemed to lose heart. I guess I got too much imagination.
+There was a formality and publicness about it that kind of weakened
+my nerve. I never won a fight in the ring. Light-weights and all
+kinds of scrubs used to sign up with my manager and then walk up and
+tap me on the wrist and see me fall. The minute I seen the crowd and
+a lot of gents in evening clothes down in front, and seen a
+professional come inside the ropes, I got as weak as ginger-ale.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, it wasn't long till I couldn't get no backers, and I
+didn't have any more chances to fight a professional&mdash;or many
+amateurs, either. But lemme tell you&mdash;I was as good as most men
+inside the ring or out. It was just that dumb, dead feeling I had
+when I was up against a regular that always done me up.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir, after I had got out of the business, I got a mighty
+grouch on. I used to go round town licking private citizens and all
+kinds of unprofessionals just to please myself. I'd lick cops in
+dark streets and car-conductors and cab-drivers and draymen whenever
+I could start a row with 'em. It didn't make any difference how big
+they were, or how much science they had, I got away with 'em. If I'd
+only just have had the confidence in the ring that I had beating up
+the best men outside of it, I'd be wearing black pearls and
+heliotrope silk socks to-day.</p>
+
+<p>"One evening I was walking along near the Bowery, thinking about
+things, when along comes a slumming-party. About six or seven they
+was, all in swallowtails, and these silk hats that don't shine. One
+of the gang kind of shoves me off the sidewalk. I hadn't had a scrap
+in three days, and I just says, 'De-light-ed!' and hits him back of
+the ear.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we had it. That Johnnie put up as decent a little fight as
+you'd want to see in the moving pictures. It was on a side street,
+and no cops around. The other guy had a lot of science, but it only
+took me about six minutes to lay him out.</p>
+
+<p>"Some of the swallowtails dragged him up against some steps and
+began to fan him. Another one of 'em comes over to me and says:</p>
+
+<p>"'Young man, do you know what you've done?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, beat it,' says I. 'I've done nothing but a little punching-bag
+work. Take Freddy back to Yale and tell him to quit studying
+sociology on the wrong side of the sidewalk.'</p>
+
+<p>"'My good fellow,' says he, 'I don't know who you are, but I'd like
+to. You've knocked out Reddy Burns, the champion middle-weight of
+the world! He came to New York yesterday, to try to get a match on
+with Jim Jeffries. If you&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"But when I come out of my faint I was laying on the floor in a
+drug-store saturated with aromatic spirits of ammonia. If I'd known
+that was Reddy Burns, I'd have got down in the gutter and crawled
+past him instead of handing him one like I did. Why, if I'd ever
+been in a ring and seen him climbing over the ropes, I'd have been
+all to the sal-volatile.</p>
+
+<p>"So that's what imagination does," concluded Mack. "And, as I said,
+your case and mine is simultaneous. You'll never win out. You can't
+go up against the professionals. I tell you, it's a park bench for
+yours in this romance business."</p>
+
+<p>Mack, the pessimist, laughed harshly.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I don't see the parallel," I said, coldly. "I have only
+a very slight acquaintance with the prize-ring."</p>
+
+<p>The derelict touched my sleeve with his forefinger, for emphasis, as
+he explained his parable.</p>
+
+<p>"Every man," said he, with some dignity, "has got his lamps on
+something that looks good to him. With you, it's this dame that
+you're afraid to say your say to. With me, it was to win out in the
+ring. Well, you'll lose just like I did."</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you think I shall lose?" I asked warmly.</p>
+
+<p>"'Cause," said he, "you're afraid to go in the ring. You dassen't
+stand up before a professional. Your case and mine is just the same.
+You're a amateur; and that means that you'd better keep outside of
+the ropes."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I must be going," I said, rising and looking with elaborate
+care at my watch.</p>
+
+<p>When I was twenty feet away the park-bencher called to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Much obliged for the dollar," he said. "And for the dime. But
+you'll never get 'er. You're in the amateur class."</p>
+
+<p>"Serves you right," I said to myself, "for hobnobbing with a tramp.
+His impudence!"</p>
+
+<p>But, as I walked, his words seemed to repeat themselves over and
+over again in my brain. I think I even grew angry at the man.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll show him!" I finally said, aloud. "I'll show him that I can
+fight Reddy Burns, too&mdash;even knowing who he is."</p>
+
+<p>I hurried to a telephone-booth and rang up the Telfair residence.</p>
+
+<p>A soft, sweet voice answered. Didn't I know that voice? My hand
+holding the receiver shook.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that <i>you</i>?" said I, employing the foolish words that form
+the vocabulary of every talker through the telephone.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, this is I," came back the answer in the low, clear-cut tones
+that are an inheritance of the Telfairs. "Who is it, please?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's me," said I, less ungrammatically than egotistically. "It's
+me, and I've got a few things that I want to say to you right now
+and immediately and straight to the point."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Dear</i> me," said the voice. "Oh, it's you, Mr. Arden!"</p>
+
+<p>I wondered if any accent on the first word was intended; Mildred was
+fine at saying things that you had to study out afterward.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said I. "I hope so. And now to come down to brass tacks." I
+thought that rather a vernacularism, if there is such a word, as
+soon as I had said it; but I didn't stop to apologize. "You know, of
+course, that I love you, and that I have been in that idiotic state
+for a long time. I don't want any more foolishness about it&mdash;that
+is, I mean I want an answer from you right now. Will you marry me or
+not? Hold the wire, please. Keep out, Central. Hello, hello! Will
+you, or will you <i>not</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>That was just the uppercut for Reddy Burns' chin. The answer came
+back:</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Phil, dear, of course I will! I didn't know that you&mdash;that is,
+you never said&mdash;oh, come up to the house, please&mdash;I can't say what I
+want to over the 'phone. You are so importunate. But please come up
+to the house, won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Would I?</p>
+
+<p>I rang the bell of the Telfair house violently. Some sort of a human
+came to the door and shooed me into the drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well," said I to myself, looking at the ceiling, "any one can
+learn from any one. That was a pretty good philosophy of Mack's,
+anyhow. He didn't take advantage of his experience, but I get the
+benefit of it. If you want to get into the professional class,
+you've got to&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I stopped thinking then. Some one was coming down the stairs. My
+knees began to shake. I knew then how Mack had felt when a
+professional began to climb over the ropes.</p>
+
+<p>I looked around foolishly for a door or a window by which I might
+escape. If it had been any other girl approaching, I mightn't
+have&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But just then the door opened, and Bess, Mildred's younger sister,
+came in. I'd never seen her look so much like a glorified angel. She
+walked straight tip to me, and&mdash;and&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>I'd never noticed before what perfectly wonderful eyes and hair
+Elizabeth Telfair had.</p>
+
+<p>"Phil," she said, in the Telfair, sweet, thrilling tones, "why
+didn't you tell me about it before? I thought it was sister you
+wanted all the time, until you telephoned to me a few minutes ago!"</p>
+
+<p>I suppose Mack and I always will be hopeless amateurs. But, as the
+thing has turned out in my case, I'm mighty glad of it.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="14"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>BEST-SELLER</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<h4>I<br />&nbsp;</h4>
+
+<p>One day last summer I went to Pittsburgh&mdash;well, I had to go there on
+business.</p>
+
+<p>My chair-car was profitably well filled with people of the kind one
+usually sees on chair-cars. Most of them were ladies in brown-silk
+dresses cut with square yokes, with lace insertion, and dotted
+veils, who refused to have the windows raised. Then there was the
+usual number of men who looked as if they might be in almost any
+business and going almost anywhere. Some students of human nature
+can look at a man in a Pullman and tell you where he is from, his
+occupation and his stations in life, both flag and social; but I
+never could. The only way I can correctly judge a fellow-traveller
+is when the train is held up by robbers, or when he reaches at the
+same time I do for the last towel in the dressing-room of the
+sleeper.</p>
+
+<p>The porter came and brushed the collection of soot on the
+window-sill off to the left knee of my trousers. I removed it with
+an air of apology. The temperature was eighty-eight. One of the
+dotted-veiled ladies demanded the closing of two more ventilators,
+and spoke loudly of Interlaken. I leaned back idly in chair No. 7,
+and looked with the tepidest curiosity at the small, black,
+bald-spotted head just visible above the back of No. 9.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly No. 9 hurled a book to the floor between his chair and the
+window, and, looking, I saw that it was "The Rose-Lady and Trevelyan,"
+one of the best-selling novels of the present day. And then the
+critic or Philistine, whichever he was, veered his chair toward the
+window, and I knew him at once for John A. Pescud, of Pittsburgh,
+travelling salesman for a plate-glass company&mdash;an old acquaintance
+whom I had not seen in two years.</p>
+
+<p>In two minutes we were faced, had shaken hands, and had finished
+with such topics as rain, prosperity, health, residence, and
+destination. Politics might have followed next; but I was not so
+ill-fated.</p>
+
+<p>I wish you might know John A. Pescud. He is of the stuff that heroes
+are not often lucky enough to be made of. He is a small man with a
+wide smile, and an eye that seems to be fixed upon that little red
+spot on the end of your nose. I never saw him wear but one kind of
+necktie, and he believes in cuff-holders and button-shoes. He is as
+hard and true as anything ever turned out by the Cambria Steel
+Works; and he believes that as soon as Pittsburgh makes
+smoke-consumers compulsory, St. Peter will come down and sit at the
+foot of Smithfield Street, and let somebody else attend to the gate
+up in the branch heaven. He believes that "our" plate-glass is the
+most important commodity in the world, and that when a man is in his
+home town he ought to be decent and law-abiding.</p>
+
+<p>During my acquaintance with him in the City of Diurnal Night I had
+never known his views on life, romance, literature, and ethics. We
+had browsed, during our meetings, on local topics, and then parted,
+after Chateau Margaux, Irish stew, flannel-cakes, cottage-pudding,
+and coffee (hey, there!&mdash;with milk separate). Now I was to get more
+of his ideas. By way of facts, he told me that business had picked
+up since the party conventions, and that he was going to get off at
+Coketown.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>II<br />&nbsp;</h4>
+
+
+<p>"Say," said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his
+right shoe, "did you ever read one of these best-sellers? I mean the
+kind where the hero is an American swell&mdash;sometimes even from
+Chicago&mdash;who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is
+travelling under an alias, and follows her to her father's kingdom
+or principality? I guess you have. They're all alike. Sometimes this
+going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent, and
+sometimes he is a Van Something from New York, or a Chicago
+wheat-broker worthy fifty millions. But he's always ready to break into
+the king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens and
+princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four or the B. and
+O. There doesn't seem to be any other reason in the book for their
+being here.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said,
+and finds out who she is. He meets her on the <i>corso</i> or the
+<i>strasse</i> one evening and gives us ten pages of conversation.
+She reminds him of the difference in their stations, and that gives
+him a chance to ring in three solid pages about America's uncrowned
+sovereigns. If you'd take his remarks and set 'em to music, and then
+take the music away from 'em, they'd sound exactly like one of
+George Cohan's songs.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you know how it runs on, if you've read any of 'em&mdash;he slaps
+the king's Swiss body-guards around like everything whenever they
+get in his way. He's a great fencer, too. Now, I've known of some
+Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of
+any fencers coming from there. He stands on the first landing of the
+royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier
+in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors
+who come to massacre the said king. And then he has to fight duels
+with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian
+archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.</p>
+
+<p>"But the great scene is when his rival for the princess' hand, Count
+Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel,
+armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian
+bloodhounds. This scene is what runs the best-seller into the
+twenty-ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a
+check for the advance royalties.</p>
+
+<p>"The American hero shucks his coat and throws it over the heads of
+the bloodhounds, gives the mitrailleuse a slap with his mitt, says
+'Yah!' to the yataghan, and lands in Kid McCoy's best style on the
+count's left eye. Of course, we have a neat little prize-fight right
+then and there. The count&mdash;in order to make the go possible&mdash;seems
+to be an expert at the art of self-defence, himself; and here we
+have the Corbett-Sullivan fight done over into literature. The book
+ends with the broker and the princess doing a John Cecil Clay cover
+under the linden-trees on the Gorgonzola Walk. That winds up the
+love-story plenty good enough. But I notice that the book dodges the
+final issue. Even a best-seller has sense enough to shy at either
+leaving a Chicago grain broker on the throne of Lobsterpotsdam or
+bringing over a real princess to eat fish and potato salad in an
+Italian chalet on Michigan Avenue. What do you think about 'em?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why," said I, "I hardly know, John. There's a saying: 'Love levels
+all ranks,' you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Pescud, "but these kind of love-stories are rank&mdash;on the
+level. I know something about literature, even if I am in plate-glass.
+These kind of books are wrong, and yet I never go into a
+train but what they pile 'em up on me. No good can come out of an
+international clinch between the Old-World aristocracy and one of us
+fresh Americans. When people in real life marry, they generally hunt
+up somebody in their own station. A fellow usually picks out a girl
+that went to the same high-school and belonged to the same
+singing-society that he did. When young millionaires fall in love, they
+always select the chorus-girl that likes the same kind of sauce on
+the lobster that he does. Washington newspaper correspondents always
+many widow ladies ten years older than themselves who keep
+boarding-houses. No, sir, you can't make a novel sound right to me
+when it makes one of C. D. Gibson's bright young men go abroad and
+turn kingdoms upside down just because he's a Taft American and took
+a course at a gymnasium. And listen how they talk, too!"</p>
+
+<p>Pescud picked up the best-seller and hunted his page.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen at this," said he. "Trevelyan is chinning with the Princess
+Alwyna at the back end of the tulip-garden. This is how it
+goes:<br />&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>
+<p>"'Say not so, dearest and sweetest of earth's fairest flowers.
+Would I aspire? You are a star set high above me in a royal
+heaven; I am only&mdash;myself. Yet I am a man, and I have a heart to
+do and dare. I have no title save that of an uncrowned sovereign;
+but I have an arm and a sword that yet might free
+Schutzenfestenstein from the plots of traitors.'<br />&nbsp;</p>
+</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>"Think of a Chicago man packing a sword, and talking about freeing
+anything that sounded as much like canned pork as that! He'd be much
+more likely to fight to have an import duty put on it."</p>
+
+<p>"I think I understand you, John," said I. "You want fiction-writers
+to be consistent with their scenes and characters. They shouldn't
+mix Turkish pashas with Vermont farmers, or English dukes with Long
+Island clam-diggers, or Italian countesses with Montana cowboys, or
+Cincinnati brewery agents with the rajahs of India."</p>
+
+<p>"Or plain business men with aristocracy high above 'em," added
+Pescud. "It don't jibe. People are divided into classes, whether we
+admit it or not, and it's everybody's impulse to stick to their own
+class. They do it, too. I don't see why people go to work and buy
+hundreds of thousands of books like that. You don't see or hear of
+any such didoes and capers in real life."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>III<br />&nbsp;</h4>
+
+
+<p>"Well, John," said I, "I haven't read a best-seller in a long time.
+Maybe I've had notions about them somewhat like yours. But tell me
+more about yourself. Getting along all right with the company?"</p>
+
+<p>"Bully," said Pescud, brightening at once. "I've had my salary
+raised twice since I saw you, and I get a commission, too. I've
+bought a neat slice of real estate out in the East End, and have run
+up a house on it. Next year the firm is going to sell me some shares
+of stock. Oh, I'm in on the line of General Prosperity, no matter
+who's elected!"</p>
+
+<p>"Met your affinity yet, John?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I didn't tell you about that, did I?" said Pescud with a
+broader grin.</p>
+
+<p>"O-ho!" I said. "So you've taken time enough off from your
+plate-glass to have a romance?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," said John. "No romance&mdash;nothing like that! But I'll tell
+you about it.</p>
+
+<p>"I was on the south-bound, going to Cincinnati, about eighteen
+months ago, when I saw, across the aisle, the finest-looking girl
+I'd ever laid eyes on. Nothing spectacular, you know, but just the
+sort you want for keeps. Well, I never was up to the flirtation
+business, either handkerchief, automobile, postage-stamp, or
+door-step, and she wasn't the kind to start anything. She read a
+book and minded her business, which was to make the world prettier
+and better just by residing on it. I kept on looking out of the side
+doors of my eyes, and finally the proposition got out of the Pullman
+class into a case of a cottage with a lawn and vines running over
+the porch. I never thought of speaking to her, but I let the
+plate-glass business go to smash for a while.</p>
+
+<p>"She changed cars at Cincinnati, and took a sleeper to Louisville
+over the L. and N. There she bought another ticket, and went on
+through Shelbyville, Frankfort, and Lexington. Along there I began
+to have a hard time keeping up with her. The trains came along when
+they pleased, and didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular,
+except to keep on the track and the right of way as much as
+possible. Then they began to stop at junctions instead of towns, and
+at last they stopped altogether. I'll bet Pinkerton would outbid the
+plate-glass people for my services any time if they knew how I
+managed to shadow that young lady. I contrived to keep out of her
+sight as much as I could, but I never lost track of her.</p>
+
+<p>"The last station she got off at was away down in Virginia, about
+six in the afternoon. There were about fifty houses and four hundred
+niggers in sight. The rest was red mud, mules, and speckled hounds.</p>
+
+<p>"A tall old man, with a smooth face and white hair, looking as proud
+as Julius C&aelig;sar and Roscoe Conkling on the same post-card, was
+there to meet her. His clothes were frazzled, but I didn't notice
+that till later. He took her little satchel, and they started over
+the plank-walks and went up a road along the hill. I kept along a
+piece behind 'em, trying to look like I was hunting a garnet ring in
+the sand that my sister had lost at a picnic the previous Saturday.</p>
+
+<p>"They went in a gate on top of the hill. It nearly took my breath
+away when I looked up. Up there in the biggest grove I ever saw was
+a tremendous house with round white pillars about a thousand feet
+high, and the yard was so full of rose-bushes and box-bushes and
+lilacs that you couldn't have seen the house if it hadn't been as
+big as the Capitol at Washington.</p>
+
+<p>"'Here's where I have to trail,' says I to myself. I thought before
+that she seemed to be in moderate circumstances, at least. This must
+be the Governor's mansion, or the Agricultural Building of a new
+World's Fair, anyhow. I'd better go back to the village and get
+posted by the postmaster, or drug the druggist for some information.</p>
+
+<p>"In the village I found a pine hotel called the Bay View House. The
+only excuse for the name was a bay horse grazing in the front yard.
+I set my sample-case down, and tried to be ostensible. I told the
+landlord I was taking orders for plate-glass.</p>
+
+<p>"'I don't want no plates,' says he, 'but I do need another glass
+molasses-pitcher.'</p>
+
+<p>"By-and-by I got him down to local gossip and answering questions.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why,' says he, 'I thought everybody knowed who lived in the big
+white house on the hill. It's Colonel Allyn, the biggest man and the
+finest quality in Virginia, or anywhere else. They're the oldest
+family in the State. That was his daughter that got off the train.
+She's been up to Illinois to see her aunt, who is sick.'</p>
+
+<p>"I registered at the hotel, and on the third day I caught the young
+lady walking in the front yard, down next to the paling fence. I
+stopped and raised my hat&mdash;there wasn't any other way.</p>
+
+<p>"'Excuse me,' says I, 'can you tell me where Mr. Hinkle lives?'</p>
+
+<p>"She looks at me as cool as if I was the man come to see about the
+weeding of the garden, but I thought I saw just a slight twinkle of
+fun in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"'No one of that name lives in Birchton,' says she. 'That is,' she
+goes on, 'as far as I know. Is the gentleman you are seeking white?'</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that tickled me. 'No kidding,' says I. 'I'm not looking for
+smoke, even if I do come from Pittsburgh.'</p>
+
+<p>"'You are quite a distance from home,' says she.</p>
+
+<p>"'I'd have gone a thousand miles farther,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"'Not if you hadn't waked up when the train started in Shelbyville,'
+says she; and then she turned almost as red as one of the roses on
+the bushes in the yard. I remembered I had dropped off to sleep on a
+bench in the Shelbyville station, waiting to see which train she
+took, and only just managed to wake up in time.</p>
+
+<p>"And then I told her why I had come, as respectful and earnest as I
+could. And I told her everything about myself, and what I was
+making, and how that all I asked was just to get acquainted with her
+and try to get her to like me.</p>
+
+<p>"She smiles a little, and blushes some, but her eyes never get mixed
+up. They look straight at whatever she's talking to.</p>
+
+<p>"'I never had any one talk like this to me before, Mr. Pescud,' says
+she. 'What did you say your name is&mdash;John?'</p>
+
+<p>"'John A.,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"'And you came mighty near missing the train at Powhatan Junction,
+too,' says she, with a laugh that sounded as good as a mileage-book
+to me.</p>
+
+<p>"'How did you know?' I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"'Men are very clumsy,' said she. 'I knew you were on every train. I
+thought you were going to speak to me, and I'm glad you didn't.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then we had more talk; and at last a kind of proud, serious look
+came on her face, and she turned and pointed a finger at the big
+house.</p>
+
+<p>"'The Allyns,' says she, 'have lived in Elmcroft for a hundred
+years. We are a proud family. Look at that mansion. It has fifty
+rooms. See the pillars and porches and balconies. The ceilings in
+the reception-rooms and the ball-room are twenty-eight feet high. My
+father is a lineal descendant of belted earls.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I belted one of 'em once in the Duquesne Hotel, in Pittsburgh,'
+says I, 'and he didn't offer to resent it. He was there dividing his
+attentions between Monongahela whiskey and heiresses, and he got
+fresh.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Of course,' she goes on, 'my father wouldn't allow a drummer to
+set his foot in Elmcroft. If he knew that I was talking to one over
+the fence he would lock me in my room.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Would <i>you</i> let me come there?' says I. 'Would <i>you</i>
+talk to me if I was to call? For,' I goes on, 'if you said I might
+come and see you, the earls might be belted or suspendered, or pinned
+up with safety-pins, as far as I am concerned.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I must not talk to you,' she says, 'because we have not been
+introduced. It is not exactly proper. So I will say good-bye,
+Mr.&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"'Say the name,' says I. 'You haven't forgotten it.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Pescud,' says she, a little mad.</p>
+
+<p>"'The rest of the name!' I demands, cool as could be.</p>
+
+<p>"'John,' says she.</p>
+
+<p>"'John&mdash;what?' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'John A.,' says she, with her head high. 'Are you through, now?'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm coming to see the belted earl to-morrow,' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'He'll feed you to his fox-hounds,' says she, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"'If he does, it'll improve their running,' says I. 'I'm something
+of a hunter myself.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I must be going in now,' says she. 'I oughtn't to have spoken to
+you at all. I hope you'll have a pleasant trip back to
+Minneapolis&mdash;or Pittsburgh, was it? Good-bye!'</p>
+
+<p>"'Good-night,' says I, 'and it wasn't Minneapolis. What's your name,
+first, please?'</p>
+
+<p>"She hesitated. Then she pulled a leaf off a bush, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"'My name is Jessie,' says she.</p>
+
+<p>"'Good-night, Miss Allyn,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"The next morning at eleven, sharp, I rang the door-bell of that
+World's Fair main building. After about three-quarters of an hour an
+old nigger man about eighty showed up and asked what I wanted. I
+gave him my business card, and said I wanted to see the colonel. He
+showed me in.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, did you ever crack open a wormy English walnut? That's what
+that house was like. There wasn't enough furniture in it to fill an
+eight-dollar flat. Some old horsehair lounges and three-legged
+chairs and some framed ancestors on the walls were all that met the
+eye. But when Colonel Allyn comes in, the place seemed to light up.
+You could almost hear a band playing, and see a bunch of old-timers
+in wigs and white stockings dancing a quadrille. It was the style of
+him, although he had on the same shabby clothes I saw him wear at
+the station.</p>
+
+<p>"For about nine seconds he had me rattled, and I came mighty near
+getting cold feet and trying to sell him some plate-glass. But I got
+my nerve back pretty quick. He asked me to sit down, and I told him
+everything. I told him how I followed his daughter from Cincinnati,
+and what I did it for, and all about my salary and prospects, and
+explained to him my little code of living&mdash;to be always decent and
+right in your home town; and when you're on the road, never take
+more than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a
+twenty-five-cent limit. At first I thought he was going to throw me
+out of the window, but I kept on talking. Pretty soon I got a chance
+to tell him that story about the Western Congressman who had lost
+his pocket-book and the grass widow&mdash;you remember that story. Well,
+that got him to laughing, and I'll bet that was the first laugh
+those ancestors and horsehair sofas had heard in many a day.</p>
+
+<p>"We talked two hours. I told him everything I knew; and then he
+began to ask questions, and I told him the rest. All I asked of him
+was to give me a chance. If I couldn't make a hit with the little
+lady, I'd clear out, and not bother any more. At last he says:</p>
+
+<p>"'There was a Sir Courtenay Pescud in the time of Charles I, if I
+remember rightly.'</p>
+
+<p>"'If there was,' says I, 'he can't claim kin with our bunch. We've
+always lived in and around Pittsburgh. I've got an uncle in the
+real-estate business, and one in trouble somewhere out in Kansas.
+You can inquire about any of the rest of us from anybody in old
+Smoky Town, and get satisfactory replies. Did you ever run across
+that story about the captain of the whaler who tried to make a
+sailor say his prayers?' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"'It occurs to me that I have never been so fortunate,' says the
+colonel.</p>
+
+<p>"So I told it to him. Laugh! I was wishing to myself that he was a
+customer. What a bill of glass I'd sell him! And then he says:</p>
+
+<p>"'The relating of anecdotes and humorous occurrences has always
+seemed to me, Mr. Pescud, to be a particularly agreeable way of
+promoting and perpetuating amenities between friends. With your
+permission, I will relate to you a fox-hunting story with which I
+was personally connected, and which may furnish you some amusement.'</p>
+
+<p>"So he tells it. It takes forty minutes by the watch. Did I laugh?
+Well, say! When I got my face straight he calls in old Pete, the
+superannuated darky, and sends him down to the hotel to bring up my
+valise. It was Elmcroft for me while I was in the town.</p>
+
+<p>"Two evenings later I got a chance to speak a word with Miss Jessie
+alone on the porch while the colonel was thinking up another story.</p>
+
+<p>"'It's going to be a fine evening,' says I.</p>
+
+<p>"'He's coming,' says she. 'He's going to tell you, this time, the
+story about the old negro and the green watermelons. It always comes
+after the one about the Yankees and the game rooster. There was
+another time,' she goes on, 'that you nearly got left&mdash;it was at
+Pulaski City.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes,' says I, 'I remember. My foot slipped as I was jumping on the
+step, and I nearly tumbled off.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I know,' says she. 'And&mdash;and I&mdash;<i>I was afraid you had, John A. I
+was afraid you had.</i>'</p>
+
+<p>"And then she skips into the house through one of the big windows."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>IV<br />&nbsp;</h4>
+
+
+<p>"Coketown!" droned the porter, making his way through the slowing
+car.</p>
+
+<p>Pescud gathered his hat and baggage with the leisurely promptness of
+an old traveller.</p>
+
+<p>"I married her a year ago," said John. "I told you I built a house
+in the East End. The belted&mdash;I mean the colonel&mdash;is there, too. I
+find him waiting at the gate whenever I get back from a trip to hear
+any new story I might have picked up on the road."</p>
+
+<p>I glanced out of the window. Coketown was nothing more than a ragged
+hillside dotted with a score of black dismal huts propped up against
+dreary mounds of slag and clinkers. It rained in slanting torrents,
+too, and the rills foamed and splashed down through the black mud to
+the railroad-tracks.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't sell much plate-glass here, John," said I. "Why do you
+get off at this end-o'-the-world?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why," said Pescud, "the other day I took Jessie for a little trip
+to Philadelphia, and coming back she thought she saw some petunias
+in a pot in one of those windows over there just like some she used
+to raise down in the old Virginia home. So I thought I'd drop off
+here for the night, and see if I could dig up some of the cuttings
+or blossoms for her. Here we are. Good-night, old man. I gave you
+the address. Come out and see us when you have time."</p>
+
+<p>The train moved forward. One of the dotted brown ladies insisted on
+having windows raised, now that the rain beat against them. The
+porter came along with his mysterious wand and began to light the
+car.</p>
+
+<p>I glanced downward and saw the best-seller. I picked it up and set
+it carefully farther along on the floor of the car, where the
+rain-drops would not fall upon it. And then, suddenly, I smiled, and
+seemed to see that life has no geographical metes and bounds.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-luck to you, Trevelyan," I said. "And may you get the petunias
+for your princess!"</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="15"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>RUS IN URBE</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>Considering men in relation to money, there are three kinds whom I
+dislike: men who have more money than they can spend; men who have
+more money than they do spend; and men who spend more money than
+they have. Of the three varieties, I believe I have the least liking
+for the first. But, as a man, I liked Spencer Grenville North pretty
+well, although he had something like two or ten or thirty
+millions&mdash;I've forgotten exactly how many.</p>
+
+<p>I did not leave town that summer. I usually went down to a village
+on the south shore of Long Island. The place was surrounded by
+duck-farms, and the ducks and dogs and whippoorwills and rusty windmills
+made so much noise that I could sleep as peacefully as if I were in
+my own flat six doors from the elevated railroad in New York. But
+that summer I did not go. Remember that. One of my friends asked me
+why I did not. I replied:</p>
+
+<p>"Because, old man, New York is the finest summer resort in the
+world." You have heard that phrase before. But that is what I told
+him.</p>
+
+<p>I was press-agent that year for Binkly &amp; Bing, the theatrical
+managers and producers. Of course you know what a press-agent is.
+Well, he is not. That is the secret of being one.</p>
+
+<p>Binkly was touring France in his new C. &amp; N. Williamson car, and
+Bing had gone to Scotland to learn curling, which he seemed to
+associate in his mind with hot tongs rather than with ice. Before
+they left they gave me June and July, on salary, for my vacation,
+which act was in accord with their large spirit of liberality. But I
+remained in New York, which I had decided was the finest summer
+resort in&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But I said that before.</p>
+
+<p>On July the 10th, North came to town from his camp in the
+Adirondacks. Try to imagine a camp with sixteen rooms, plumbing,
+eiderdown quilts, a butler, a garage, solid silver plate, and a
+long-distance telephone. Of course it was in the woods&mdash;if Mr.
+Pinchot wants to preserve the forests let him give every citizen two
+or ten or thirty million dollars, and the trees will all gather
+around the summer camps, as the Birnam woods came to Dunsinane, and
+be preserved.</p>
+
+<p>North came to see me in my three rooms and bath, extra charge for
+light when used extravagantly or all night. He slapped me on the
+back (I would rather have my shins kicked any day), and greeted me
+with out-door obstreperousness and revolting good spirits. He was
+insolently brown and healthy-looking, and offensively well dressed.</p>
+
+<p>"Just ran down for a few days," said he, "to sign some papers and
+stuff like that. My lawyer wired me to come. Well, you indolent
+cockney, what are you doing in town? I took a chance and telephoned,
+and they said you were here. What's the matter with that Utopia on
+Long Island where you used to take your typewriter and your
+villainous temper every summer? Anything wrong with the&mdash;er&mdash;swans,
+weren't they, that used to sing on the farms at night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ducks," said I. "The songs of swans are for luckier ears. They swim
+and curve their necks in artificial lakes on the estates of the
+wealthy to delight the eyes of the favorites of Fortune."</p>
+
+<p>"Also in Central Park," said North, "to delight the eyes of
+immigrants and bummers. I've seen em there lots of times. But why
+are you in the city so late in the summer?"</p>
+
+<p>"New York City," I began to recite, "is the finest sum&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, you don't," said North, emphatically. "You don't spring that
+old one on me. I know you know better. Man, you ought to have gone
+up with us this summer. The Prestons are there, and Tom Volney and
+the Monroes and Lulu Stanford and the Miss Kennedy and her aunt that
+you liked so well."</p>
+
+<p>"I never liked Miss Kennedy's aunt," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't say you did," said North. "We are having the greatest time
+we've ever had. The pickerel and trout are so ravenous that I
+believe they would swallow your hook with a Montana copper-mine
+prospectus fastened on it. And we've a couple of electric launches;
+and I'll tell you what we do every night or two&mdash;we tow a rowboat
+behind each one with a big phonograph and a boy to change the discs
+in 'em. On the water, and twenty yards behind you, they are not so
+bad. And there are passably good roads through the woods where we go
+motoring. I shipped two cars up there. And the Pinecliff Inn is only
+three miles away. You know the Pinecliff. Some good people are there
+this season, and we run over to the dances twice a week. Can't you
+go back with me for a week, old man?"</p>
+
+<p>I laughed. "Northy," said I&mdash;"if I may be so familiar with a
+millionaire, because I hate both the names Spencer and
+Grenville&mdash;your invitation is meant kindly, but&mdash;the city in the
+summer-time for me. Here, while the <i>bourgeoisie</i> is away, I can
+live as Nero lived&mdash;barring, thank heaven, the fiddling&mdash;while the city
+burns at ninety in the shade. The tropics and the zones wait upon me
+like handmaidens. I sit under Florida palms and eat pomegranates
+while Boreas himself, electrically conjured up, blows upon me his
+Arctic breath. As for trout, you know, yourself, that Jean, at
+Maurice's, cooks them better than any one else in the world."</p>
+
+<p>"Be advised," said North. "My chef has pinched the blue ribbon from
+the lot. He lays some slices of bacon inside the trout, wraps it all
+in corn-husks&mdash;the husks of green corn, you know&mdash;buries them in hot
+ashes and covers them with live coals. We build fires on the bank of
+the lake and have fish suppers."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said I. "And the servants bring down tables and chairs and
+damask cloths, and you eat with silver forks. I know the kind of
+camps that you millionaires have. And there are champagne pails set
+about, disgracing the wild flowers, and, no doubt, Madame Tetrazzini
+to sing in the boat pavilion after the trout."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no," said North, concernedly, "we were never as bad as that. We
+did have a variety troupe up from the city three or four nights, but
+they weren't stars by as far as light can travel in the same length
+of time. I always like a few home comforts even when I'm roughing
+it. But don't tell me you prefer to stay in the city during summer.
+I don't believe it. If you do, why did you spend your summers there
+for the last four years, even sneaking away from town on a night
+train, and refusing to tell your friends where this Arcadian village
+was?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because," said I, "they might have followed me and discovered it.
+But since then I have learned that Amaryllis has come to town. The
+coolest things, the freshest, the brightest, the choicest, are to be
+found in the city. If you've nothing on hand this evening I will
+show you."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm free," said North, "and I have my light car outside. I suppose,
+since you've been converted to the town, that your idea of rural
+sport is to have a little whirl between bicycle cops in Central Park
+and then a mug of sticky ale in some stuffy rathskeller under a fan
+that can't stir up as many revolutions in a week as Nicaragua can in
+a day."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll begin with the spin through the Park, anyhow," I said. I was
+choking with the hot, stale air of my little apartment, and I wanted
+that breath of the cool to brace me for the task of proving to my
+friend that New York was the greatest&mdash;and so forth.</p>
+
+<p>"Where can you find air any fresher or purer than this?" I asked, as
+we sped into Central's boskiest dell.</p>
+
+<p>"Air!" said North, contemptuously. "Do you call this air?&mdash;this
+muggy vapor, smelling of garbage and gasoline smoke. Man, I wish you
+could get one sniff of the real Adirondack article in the pine woods
+at daylight."</p>
+
+<p>"I have heard of it," said I. "But for fragrance and tang and a joy
+in the nostrils I would not give one puff of sea breeze across the
+bay, down on my little boat dock on Long Island, for ten of your
+turpentine-scented tornadoes."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why," asked North, a little curiously, "don't you go there
+instead of staying cooped up in this Greater Bakery?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because," said I, doggedly, "I have discovered that New York is the
+greatest summer&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't say that again," interrupted North, "unless you've actually
+got a job as General Passenger Agent of the Subway. You can't really
+believe it."</p>
+
+<p>I went to some trouble to try to prove my theory to my friend. The
+Weather Bureau and the season had conspired to make the argument
+worthy of an able advocate.</p>
+
+<p>The city seemed stretched on a broiler directly above the furnaces
+of Avernus. There was a kind of tepid gayety afoot and awheel in the
+boulevards, mainly evinced by languid men strolling about in straw
+hats and evening clothes, and rows of idle taxicabs with their flags
+up, looking like a blockaded Fourth of July procession. The hotels
+kept up a specious brilliancy and hospitable outlook, but inside one
+saw vast empty caverns, and the footrails at the bars gleamed
+brightly from long disacquaintance with the sole-leather of
+customers. In the cross-town streets the steps of the old brownstone
+houses were swarming with "stoopers," that motley race hailing from
+sky-light room and basement, bringing out their straw door-step mats
+to sit and fill the air with strange noises and opinions.</p>
+
+<p>North and I dined on the top of a hotel; and here, for a few
+minutes, I thought I had made a score. An east wind, almost cool,
+blew across the roofless roof. A capable orchestra concealed in a
+bower of wistaria played with sufficient judgment to make the art of
+music probable and the art of conversation possible.</p>
+
+<p>Some ladies in reproachless summer gowns at other tables gave
+animation and color to the scene. And an excellent dinner, mainly
+from the refrigerator, seemed to successfully back my judgment as to
+summer resorts. But North grumbled all during the meal, and cursed
+his lawyers and prated so of his confounded camp in the woods that I
+began to wish he would go back there and leave me in my peaceful
+city retreat.</p>
+
+<p>After dining we went to a roof-garden vaudeville that was being much
+praised. There we found a good bill, an artificially cooled
+atmosphere, cold drinks, prompt service, and a gay, well-dressed
+audience. North was bored.</p>
+
+<p>"If this isn't comfortable enough for you on the hottest August
+night for five years," I said, a little sarcastically, "you might
+think about the kids down in Delancey and Hester streets lying out
+on the fire-escapes with their tongues hanging out, trying to get a
+breath of air that hasn't been fried on both sides. The contrast
+might increase your enjoyment."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't talk Socialism," said North. "I gave five hundred dollars to
+the free ice fund on the first of May. I'm contrasting these stale,
+artificial, hollow, wearisome 'amusements' with the enjoyment a man
+can get in the woods. You should see the firs and pines do skirt-dances
+during a storm; and lie down flat and drink out of a mountain
+branch at the end of a day's tramp after the deer. That's the only
+way to spend a summer. Get out and live with nature."</p>
+
+<p>"I agree with you absolutely," said I, with emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>For one moment I had relaxed my vigilance, and had spoken my true
+sentiments. North looked at me long and curiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Then why, in the name of Pan and Apollo," he asked, "have you been
+singing this deceitful p&aelig;an to summer in town?"</p>
+
+<p>I suppose I looked my guilt.</p>
+
+<p>"Ha," said North, "I see. May I ask her name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Annie Ashton," said I, simply. "She played Nannette in Binkley
+&amp; Bing's production of 'The Silver Cord.' She is to have a better
+part next season."</p>
+
+<p>"Take me to see her," said North.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Ashton lived with her mother in a small hotel. They were out of
+the West, and had a little money that bridged the seasons. As
+press-agent of Binkley &amp; Bing I had tried to keep her before the
+public. As Robert James Vandiver I had hoped to withdraw her; for if
+ever one was made to keep company with said Vandiver and smell the
+salt breeze on the south shore of Long Island and listen to the
+ducks quack in the watches of the night, it was the Ashton set forth
+above.</p>
+
+<p>But she had a soul above ducks&mdash;above nightingales; aye, even above
+birds of paradise. She was very beautiful, with quiet ways, and
+seemed genuine. She had both taste and talent for the stage, and she
+liked to stay at home and read and make caps for her mother. She was
+unvaryingly kind and friendly with Binkley &amp; Bing's press-agent.
+Since the theatre had closed she had allowed Mr. Vandiver to call in
+an unofficial r&ocirc;le. I had often spoken to her of my friend,
+Spencer Grenville North; and so, as it was early, the first turn of
+the vaudeville being not yet over, we left to find a telephone.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Ashton would be very glad to see Mr. Vandiver and Mr. North.</p>
+
+<p>We found her fitting a new cap on her mother. I never saw her look
+more charming.</p>
+
+<p>North made himself disagreeably entertaining. He was a good talker,
+and had a way with him. Besides, he had two, ten, or thirty
+millions, I've forgotten which. I incautiously admired the mother's
+cap, whereupon she brought out her store of a dozen or two, and I
+took a course in edgings and frills. Even though Annie's fingers had
+pinked, or ruched, or hemmed, or whatever you do to 'em, they palled
+upon me. And I could hear North drivelling to Annie about his odious
+Adirondack camp.</p>
+
+<p>Two days after that I saw North in his motor-car with Miss Ashton
+and her mother. On the next afternoon he dropped in on me.</p>
+
+<p>"Bobby," said he, "this old burg isn't such a bad proposition in the
+summer-time, after all. Since I've keen knocking around it looks
+better to me. There are some first-rate musical comedies and light
+operas on the roofs and in the outdoor gardens. And if you hunt up
+the right places and stick to soft drinks, you can keep about as
+cool here as you can in the country. Hang it! when you come to think
+of it, there's nothing much to the country, anyhow. You get tired
+and sunburned and lonesome, and you have to eat any old thing that
+the cook dishes up to you."</p>
+
+<p>"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" said I.</p>
+
+<p>"It certainly does. Now, I found some whitebait yesterday, at
+Maurice's, with a new sauce that beats anything in the trout line I
+ever tasted."</p>
+
+<p>"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Immense. The sauce is the main thing with whitebait."</p>
+
+<p>"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" I asked, looking him straight
+in the eye. He understood.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Bob," he said, "I was going to tell you. I couldn't help
+it. I'll play fair with you, but I'm going in to win. She is the
+'one particular' for me."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," said I. "It's a fair field. There are no rights for you
+to encroach upon."</p>
+
+<p>On Thursday afternoon Miss Ashton invited North and myself to have
+tea in her apartment. He was devoted, and she was more charming than
+usual. By avoiding the subject of caps I managed to get a word or
+two into and out of the talk. Miss Ashton asked me in a
+make-conversational tone something about the next season's tour.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said I, "I don't know about that. I'm not going to be with
+Binkley &amp; Bing next season."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I thought," said she, "that they were going to put the Number
+One road company under your charge. I thought you told me so."</p>
+
+<p>"They were," said I, "but they won't.. I'll tell you what I'm going
+to do. I'm going to the south shore of Long Island and buy a small
+cottage I know there on the edge of the bay. And I'll buy a catboat
+and a rowboat and a shotgun and a yellow dog. I've got money enough
+to do it. And I'll smell the salt wind all day when it blows from
+the sea and the pine odor when it blows from the land. And, of
+course, I'll write plays until I have a trunk full of 'em on hand.</p>
+
+<p>"And the next thing and the biggest thing I'll do will be to buy
+that duck-farm next door. Few people understand ducks. I can watch
+'em for hours. They can march better than any company in the
+National Guard, and they can play 'follow my leader' better than the
+entire Democratic party. Their voices don't amount to much, but I
+like to hear 'em. They wake you up a dozen times a night, but
+there's a homely sound about their quacking that is more musical to
+me than the cry of 'Fresh strawber-rees!' under your window in the
+morning when you want to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>"And," I went on, enthusiastically, "do you know the value of ducks
+besides their beauty and intelligence and order and sweetness of
+voice? Picking their feathers gives you an unfailing and never-ceasing
+income. On a farm that I know the feathers were sold for
+$400 in one year. Think of that! And the ones shipped to the market
+will bring in more money than that. Yes, I am for the ducks and the
+salt breeze coming over the bay. I think I shall get a Chinaman
+cook, and with him and the dog and the sunsets for company I shall
+do well. No more of this dull, baking, senseless, roaring city for
+me."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Ashton looked surprised. North laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going to begin one of my plays tonight," I said, "so I must be
+going." And with that I took my departure.</p>
+
+<p>A few days later Miss Ashton telephoned to me, asking me to call at
+four in the afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>I did.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been very good to me," she said, hesitatingly, "and I
+thought I would tell you. I am going to leave the stage."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said I, "I suppose you will. They usually do when there's so
+much money."</p>
+
+<p>"There is no money," she said, "or very little. Our money is almost
+gone."</p>
+
+<p>"But I am told," said I, "that he has something like two or ten or
+thirty millions&mdash;I have forgotten which."</p>
+
+<p>"I know what you mean," she said. "I will not pretend that I do not.
+I am not going to marry Mr. North."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why are you leaving the stage?" I asked, severely. "What else
+can you do to earn a living?"</p>
+
+<p>She came closer to me, and I can see the look in her eyes yet as she
+spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"I can pick ducks," she said.</p>
+
+<p>We sold the first year's feathers for $350.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;<a name="16"></a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>A POOR RULE</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p>I have always maintained, and asserted time to time, that woman is
+no mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and
+interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself
+upon credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong we shall see. As
+"Harper's Drawer" used to say in bygone years: "The following good
+story is told of Miss &ndash;&ndash;&ndash;&ndash;, Mr.
+&ndash;&ndash;&ndash;&ndash;, Mr. &ndash;&ndash;&ndash;&ndash;, and
+Mr. &ndash;&ndash;&ndash;&ndash;."</p>
+
+<p>We shall have to omit "Bishop X" and "the Rev.
+&ndash;&ndash;&ndash;&ndash;," for they do not belong.</p>
+
+<p>In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern
+Pacific. A reporter would have called it a "mushroom" town; but it
+was not. Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.</p>
+
+<p>The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the
+passengers both to drink and to dine. There was a new yellow-pine
+hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box
+residences. The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, "black-waxy"
+mud, and mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an
+about-to-be city. The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the
+twice-a-day train, by which you might leave, creditably sustained
+the r&ocirc;le of charity.</p>
+
+<p>The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while
+it rained, and the warmest when it shone. It was operated, owned,
+and perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come
+out of Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk
+and sorghum.</p>
+
+<p>There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which
+the family lived. From the kitchen extended a "shelter" made of
+poles covered with chaparral brush. Under this was a table and two
+benches, each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home
+carpentry. Here was set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples,
+boiled beans, soda-biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the
+Parisian menu.</p>
+
+<p>Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as "Betty," but denied
+to the eyesight, presided at the range. Pa Hinkle himself, with
+salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands. During rush hours a
+Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses,
+aided him in waiting on the guests. As is customary at Parisian
+banquets, I place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.</p>
+
+<p>Ileen Hinkle!</p>
+
+<p>The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. No doubt she
+had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography
+that Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have endorsed the
+phonography.</p>
+
+<p>Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to
+invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through
+Galveston and Del Rio. She sat on a high stool in a rough pine
+grand-stand&mdash;or was it a temple?&mdash;under the shelter at the door of
+the kitchen. There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her,
+with a little arch under which you passed your money. Heaven knows
+why the barbed wire; for every man who dined Parisianly there would
+have died in her service. Her duties were light; each meal was a
+dollar; you put it under the arch, and she took it.</p>
+
+<p>I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you. Instead,
+I must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: <i>A
+Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
+and Beautiful</i>. It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the
+primitive conceptions of beauty&mdash;roundness and smoothness, I think
+they are, according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent
+charm; as for smoothness&mdash;the more new wrinkles a woman acquires,
+the smoother she becomes.</p>
+
+<p>Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure
+Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam. She
+was a fruit-stand blonde&mdash;strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc. Her
+eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a
+storm that never comes. But it seems to me that words (at any rate
+per) are wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful. Like fancy,
+"It is engendered in the eyes." There are three kinds of beauties&mdash;I
+was foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a story.</p>
+
+<p>The first is the freckle-faced, snub-nosed girl whom you like. The
+second is Maud Adams. The third is, or are, the ladies in
+Bouguereau's paintings. Ileen Hinkle was the fourth. She was the
+mayoress of Spotless Town. There were a thousand golden apples
+coming to her as Helen of the Troy laundries.</p>
+
+<p>The Parisian Restaurant was within a radius. Even from beyond its
+circumference men rode in to Paloma to win her smiles. They got
+them. One meal&mdash;one smile&mdash;one dollar. But, with all her
+impartiality, Ileen seemed to favor three of her admirers above the
+rest. According to the rules of politeness, I will mention myself
+last.</p>
+
+<p>The first was an artificial product known as Bryan Jacks&mdash;a name
+that had obviously met with reverses. Jacks was the outcome of paved
+cities. He was a small man made of some material resembling flexible
+sandstone. His hair was the color of a brick Quaker meeting-house;
+his eyes were twin cranberries; his mouth was like the aperture
+under a drop-letters-here sign.</p>
+
+<p>He knew every city from Bangor to San Francisco, thence north to
+Portland, thence S. 45 E. to a given point in Florida. He had
+mastered every art, trade, game, business, profession, and sport in
+the world, had been present at, or hurrying on his way to, every
+headline event that had ever occurred between oceans since he was
+five years old. You might open the atlas, place your finger at
+random upon the name of a town, and Jacks would tell you the front
+names of three prominent citizens before you could close it again.
+He spoke patronizingly and even disrespectfully of Broadway, Beacon
+Hill, Michigan, Euclid, and Fifth avenues, and the St. Louis Four
+Courts. Compared with him as a cosmopolite, the Wandering Jew would
+have seemed a mere hermit. He had learned everything the world could
+teach him, and he would tell you about it.</p>
+
+<p>I hate to be reminded of Pollok's "Course of Time," and so do you;
+but every time I saw Jacks I would think of the poet's description
+of another poet by the name of G. G. Byron who "Drank early; deeply
+drank&mdash;drank draughts that common millions might have quenched; then
+died of thirst because there was no more to drink."</p>
+
+<p>That fitted Jacks, except that, instead of dying, he came to Paloma,
+which was about the same thing. He was a telegrapher and station-and
+express-agent at seventy-five dollars a month. Why a young man who
+knew everything and could do everything was content to serve in such
+an obscure capacity I never could understand, although he let out a
+hint once that it was as a personal favor to the president and
+stockholders of the S. P. Ry. Co.</p>
+
+<p>One more line of description, and I turn Jacks over to you. He wore
+bright blue clothes, yellow shoes, and a bow tie made of the same
+cloth as his shirt.</p>
+
+<p>My rival No.2 was Bud Cunningham, whose services had been engaged by
+a ranch near Paloma to assist in compelling refractory cattle to
+keep within the bounds of decorum and order. Bud was the only cowboy
+off the stage that I ever saw who looked like one on it. He wore the
+sombrero, the chaps, and the handkerchief tied at the back of his
+neck.</p>
+
+<p>Twice a week Bud rode in from the Val Verde Ranch to sup at the
+Parisian Restaurant. He rode a many-high-handed Kentucky horse at a
+tremendously fast lope, which animal he would rein up so suddenly
+under the big mesquite at the corner of the brush shelter that his
+hoofs would plough canals yards long in the loam.</p>
+
+<p>Jacks and I were regular boarders at the restaurant, of course.</p>
+
+<p>The front room of the Hinkle House was as neat a little parlor as
+there was in the black-waxy country. It was all willow rocking-chairs,
+and home-knit tidies, and albums, and conch shells in a row.
+And a little upright piano in one corner.</p>
+
+<p>Here Jacks and Bud and I&mdash;or sometimes one or two of us, according
+to our good-luck&mdash;used to sit of evenings when the tide of trade was
+over, and "visit" Miss Hinkle.</p>
+
+<p>Ileen was a girl of ideas. She was destined for higher things (if
+there can be anything higher) than taking in dollars all day through
+a barbed-wire wicket. She had read and listened and thought. Her
+looks would have formed a career for a less ambitious girl; but,
+rising superior to mere beauty, she must establish something in the
+nature of a <i>salon</i>&mdash;the only one in Paloma.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think that Shakespeare was a great writer?" she would
+ask, with such a pretty little knit of her arched brows that the
+late Ignatius Donnelly, himself, had he seen it, could scarcely have
+saved his Bacon.</p>
+
+<p>Ileen was of the opinion, also, that Boston is more cultured than
+Chicago; that Rosa Bonheur was one of the greatest of women
+painters; that Westerners are more spontaneous and open-hearted than
+Easterners; that London must be a very foggy city, and that
+California must be quite lovely in the springtime. And of many other
+opinions indicating a keeping up with the world's best thought.</p>
+
+<p>These, however, were but gleaned from hearsay and evidence: Ileen
+had theories of her own. One, in particular, she disseminated to us
+untiringly. Flattery she detested. Frankness and honesty of speech
+and action, she declared, were the chief mental ornaments of man and
+woman. If ever she could like any one, it would be for those
+qualities.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm awfully weary," she said, one evening, when we three musketeers
+of the mesquite were in the little parlor, "of having compliments on
+my looks paid to me. I know I'm not beautiful."</p>
+
+<p>(Bud Cunningham told me afterward that it was all he could do to
+keep from calling her a liar when she said that.)</p>
+
+<p>"I'm only a little Middle-Western girl," went on Ileen, "who just
+wants to be simple and neat, and tries to help her father make a
+humble living."</p>
+
+<p>(Old Man Hinkle was shipping a thousand silver dollars a month,
+clear profit, to a bank in San Antonio.)</p>
+
+<p>Bud twisted around in his chair and bent the rim of his hat, from
+which he could never be persuaded to separate. He did not know
+whether she wanted what she said she wanted or what she knew she
+deserved. Many a wiser man has hesitated at deciding. Bud decided.</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;ah, Miss Ileen, beauty, as you might say, ain't everything.
+Not sayin' that you haven't your share of good looks, I always
+admired more than anything else about you the nice, kind way you
+treat your ma and pa. Any one what's good to their parents and is a
+kind of home-body don't specially need to be too pretty."</p>
+
+<p>Ileen gave him one of her sweetest smiles. "Thank you, Mr.
+Cunningham," she said. "I consider that one of the finest
+compliments I've had in a long time. I'd so much rather hear you say
+that than to hear you talk about my eyes and hair. I'm glad you
+believe me when I say I don't like flattery."</p>
+
+<p>Our cue was there for us. Bud had made a good guess. You couldn't
+lose Jacks. He chimed in next.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure thing, Miss Ileen," he said; "the good-lookers don't always
+win out. Now, you ain't bad looking, of course&mdash;but that's
+nix-cum-rous. I knew a girl once in Dubuque with a face like a
+cocoanut, who could skin the cat twice on a horizontal bar without
+changing hands. Now, a girl might have the California peach crop
+mashed to a marmalade and not be able to do that. I've
+seen&mdash;er&mdash;worse lookers than <i>you</i>, Miss Ileen; but what I like
+about you is the business way you've got of doing things. Cool and
+wise&mdash;that's the winning way for a girl. Mr. Hinkle told me the
+other day you'd never taken in a lead silver dollar or a plugged one
+since you've been on the job. Now, that's the stuff for a
+girl&mdash;that's what catches me."</p>
+
+<p>Jacks got his smile, too.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Mr. Jacks," said Ileen. "If you only knew how I
+appreciate any one's being candid and not a flatterer! I get so
+tired of people telling me I'm pretty. I think it is the loveliest
+thing to have friends who tell you the truth."</p>
+
+<p>Then I thought I saw an expectant look on Ileen's face as she
+glanced toward me. I had a wild, sudden impulse to dare fate, and
+tell her of all the beautiful handiwork of the Great Artificer she
+was the most exquisite&mdash;that she was a flawless pearl gleaming pure
+and serene in a setting of black mud and emerald prairies&mdash;that she
+was&mdash;a&mdash;a corker; and as for mine, I cared not if she were as cruel
+as a serpent's tooth to her fond parents, or if she couldn't tell a
+plugged dollar from a bridle buckle, if I might sing, chant, praise,
+glorify, and worship her peerless and wonderful beauty.</p>
+
+<p>But I refrained. I feared the fate of a flatterer. I had witnessed
+her delight at the crafty and discreet words of Bud and Jacks. No!
+Miss Hinkle was not one to be beguiled by the plated-silver tongue
+of a flatterer. So I joined the ranks of the candid and honest. At
+once I became mendacious and didactic.</p>
+
+<p>"In all ages, Miss Hinkle," said I, "in spite of the poetry and
+romance of each, intellect in woman has been admired more than
+beauty. Even in Cleopatra, herself, men found more charm in her
+queenly mind than in her looks."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I should think so!" said Ileen. "I've seen pictures of her
+that weren't so much. She had an awfully long nose."</p>
+
+<p>"If I may say so," I went on, "you remind me of Cleopatra, Miss
+Ileen."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, my nose isn't so long!" said she, opening her eyes wide and
+touching that comely feature with a dimpled forefinger.</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;er&mdash;I mean," said I&mdash;"I mean as to mental endowments."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" said she; and then I got my smile just as Bud and Jacks had
+got theirs.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank every one of you," she said, very, very sweetly, "for being
+so frank and honest with me. That's the way I want you to be always.
+Just tell me plainly and truthfully what you think, and we'll all be
+the best friends in the world. And now, because you've been so good
+to me, and understand so well how I dislike people who do nothing
+but pay me exaggerated compliments, I'll sing and play a little for
+you."</p>
+
+<p>Of course, we expressed our thanks and joy; but we would have been
+better pleased if Ileen had remained in her low rocking-chair face
+to face with us and let us gaze upon her. For she was no Adelina
+Patti&mdash;not even on the farewellest of the diva's farewell tours.
+She had a cooing little voice like that of a turtle-dove that could
+almost fill the parlor when the windows and doors were closed, and
+Betty was not rattling the lids of the stove in the kitchen. She had
+a gamut that I estimate at about eight inches on the piano; and her
+runs and trills sounded like the clothes bubbling in your
+grandmother's iron wash-pot. Believe that she must have been
+beautiful when I tell you that it sounded like music to us.</p>
+
+<p>Ileen's musical taste was catholic. She would sing through a pile of
+sheet music on the left-hand top of the piano, laying each
+slaughtered composition on the right-hand top. The next evening she
+would sing from right to left. Her favorites were Mendelssohn, and
+Moody and Sankey. By request she always wound up with "Sweet Violets"
+and "When the Leaves Begin to Turn."</p>
+
+<p>When we left at ten o'clock the three of us would go down to Jacks'
+little wooden station and sit on the platform, swinging our feet and
+trying to pump one another for clews as to which way Miss Ileen's
+inclinations seemed to lean. That is the way of rivals&mdash;they do not
+avoid and glower at one another; they convene and converse and
+construe&mdash;striving by the art politic to estimate the strength of
+the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>One day there came a dark horse to Paloma, a young lawyer who at
+once flaunted his shingle and himself spectacularly upon the town.
+His name was C. Vincent Vesey. You could see at a glance that he was
+a recent graduate of a southwestern law school. His Prince Albert
+coat, light striped trousers, broad-brimmed soft black hat, and
+narrow white muslin bow tie proclaimed that more loudly than any
+diploma could. Vesey was a compound of Daniel Webster, Lord
+Chesterfield, Beau Brummell, and Little Jack Horner. His coming
+boomed Paloma. The next day after he arrived an addition to the town
+was surveyed and laid off in lots.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, Vesey, to further his professional fortunes, must mingle
+with the citizenry and outliers of Paloma. And, as well as with the
+soldier men, he was bound to seek popularity with the gay dogs of
+the place. So Jacks and Bud Cunningham and I came to be honored by
+his acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>The doctrine of predestination would have been discredited had not
+Vesey seen Ileen Hinkle and become fourth in the tourney.
+Magnificently, he boarded at the yellow pine hotel instead of at the
+Parisian Restaurant; but he came to be a formidable visitor in the
+Hinkle parlor. His competition reduced Bud to an inspired increase
+of profanity, drove Jacks to an outburst of slang so weird that it
+sounded more horrible than the most trenchant of Bud's imprecations,
+and made me dumb with gloom.</p>
+
+<p>For Vesey had the rhetoric. Words flowed from him like oil from a
+gusher. Hyperbole, compliment, praise, appreciation, honeyed
+gallantry, golden opinions, eulogy, and unveiled panegyric vied with
+one another for pre-eminence in his speech. We had small hopes that
+Ileen could resist his oratory and Prince Albert.</p>
+
+<p>But a day came that gave us courage.</p>
+
+<p>About dusk one evening I was sitting on the little gallery in front
+of the Hinkle parlor, waiting for Ileen to come, when I heard voices
+inside. She had come into the room with her father, and Old Man
+Hinkle began to talk to her. I had observed before that he was a
+shrewd man, and not unphilosophic.</p>
+
+<p>"Ily," said he, "I notice there's three or four young fellers that
+have been callin' to see you regular for quite a while. Is there any
+one of 'em you like better than another?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, pa," she answered, "I like all of 'em very well. I think Mr.
+Cunningham and Mr. Jacks and Mr. Harris are very nice young men.
+They are so frank and honest in everything they say to me. I haven't
+known Mr. Vesey very long, but I think he's a very nice young man,
+he's so frank and honest in everything he says to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Now, that's what I'm gittin' at," says old Hinkle. "You've always
+been sayin' you like people what tell the truth and don't go
+humbuggin' you with compliments and bogus talk. Now, suppose you
+make a test of these fellers, and see which one of 'em will talk the
+straightest to you."</p>
+
+<p>"But how'll I do it, pa?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you how. You know you sing a little bit, Ily; you took
+music-lessons nearly two years in Logansport. It wasn't long, but it
+was all we could afford then. And your teacher said you didn't have
+any voice, and it was a waste of money to keep on. Now, suppose you
+ask the fellers what they think of your singin', and see what each
+one of 'em tells you. The man that'll tell you the truth about it'll
+have a mighty lot of nerve, and 'll do to tie to. What do you
+think of the plan?"</p>
+
+<p>"All right, pa," said Ileen. "I think it's a good idea. I'll try
+it."</p>
+
+<p>Ileen and Mr. Hinkle went out of the room through the inside doors.
+Unobserved, I hurried down to the station. Jacks was at his
+telegraph table waiting for eight o'clock to come. It was Bud's
+night in town, and when he rode in I repeated the conversation to
+them both. I was loyal to my rivals, as all true admirers of all
+Ileens should be.</p>
+
+<p>Simultaneously the three of us were smitten by an uplifting thought.
+Surely this test would eliminate Vesey from the contest. He, with
+his unctuous flattery, would be driven from the lists. Well we
+remembered Ileen's love of frankness and honesty&mdash;how she treasured
+truth and candor above vain compliment and blandishment.</p>
+
+<p>Linking arms, we did a grotesque dance of joy up and down the
+platform, singing "Muldoon Was a Solid Man" at the top of our voices.</p>
+
+<p>That evening four of the willow rocking-chairs were filled besides
+the lucky one that sustained the trim figure of Miss Hinkle. Three
+of us awaited with suppressed excitement the application of the
+test. It was tried on Bud first.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Cunningham," said Ileen, with her dazzling smile, after she had
+sung "When the Leaves Begin to Turn," "what do you really think of my
+voice? Frankly and honestly, now, as you know I want you to always
+be toward me."</p>
+
+<p>Bud squirmed in his chair at his chance to show the sincerity that
+he knew was required of him.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell you the truth, Miss Ileen," he said, earnestly, "you ain't got
+much more voice than a weasel&mdash;just a little squeak, you know. Of
+course, we all like to hear you sing, for it's kind of sweet and
+soothin' after all, and you look most as mighty well sittin' on the
+piano-stool as you do faced around. But as for real singin'&mdash;I
+reckon you couldn't call it that."</p>
+
+<p>I looked closely at Ileen to see if Bud had overdone his frankness,
+but her pleased smile and sweetly spoken thanks assured me that we
+were on the right track.</p>
+
+<p>"And what do you think, Mr. Jacks?" she asked next.</p>
+
+<p>"Take it from me," said Jacks, "you ain't in the prima donna
+class. I've heard 'em warble in every city in the United
+States; and I tell you your vocal
+output don't go. Otherwise, you've got the grand opera bunch sent to
+the soap factory&mdash;in looks, I mean; for the high screechers
+generally look like Mary Ann on her Thursday out. But nix for the
+gargle work. Your epiglottis ain't a real side-stepper&mdash;its footwork
+ain't good."</p>
+
+<p>With a merry laugh at Jacks' criticism, Ileen looked inquiringly at
+me.</p>
+
+<p>I admit that I faltered a little. Was there not such a thing as
+being too frank? Perhaps I even hedged a little in my verdict; but I
+stayed with the critics.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not skilled in scientific music, Miss Ileen," I said, "but,
+frankly, I cannot praise very highly the singing-voice that Nature
+has given you. It has long been a favorite comparison that a great
+singer sings like a bird. Well, there are birds and birds. I would
+say that your voice reminds me of the thrush's&mdash;throaty and not
+strong, nor of much compass or variety&mdash;but
+still&mdash;er&mdash;sweet&mdash;in&mdash;er&mdash;its&mdash;way, and&mdash;er&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Mr. Harris," interrupted Miss Hinkle. "I knew I could
+depend upon your frankness and honesty."</p>
+
+<p>And then C. Vincent Vesey drew back one sleeve from his snowy cuff,
+and the water came down at Lodore.</p>
+
+<p>My memory cannot do justice to his masterly tribute to that
+priceless, God-given treasure&mdash;Miss Hinkle's voice. He raved over it
+in terms that, if they had been addressed to the morning stars when
+they sang together, would have made that stellar choir explode in a
+meteoric shower of flaming self-satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>He marshalled on his white finger-tips the grand opera stars of all
+the continents, from Jenny Lind to Emma Abbott, only to depreciate
+their endowments. He spoke of larynxes, of chest notes, of phrasing,
+arpeggios, and other strange paraphernalia of the throaty art. He
+admitted, as though driven to a corner, that Jenny Lind had a note
+or two in the high register that Miss Hinkle had not yet
+acquired&mdash;but&mdash;"!!!"&mdash;that was a mere matter of practice and
+training.</p>
+
+<p>And, as a peroration, he predicted&mdash;solemnly predicted&mdash;a career in
+vocal art for the "coming star of the Southwest&mdash;and one of which
+grand old Texas may well be proud," hitherto unsurpassed in the
+annals of musical history.</p>
+
+<p>When we left at ten, Ileen gave each of us her usual warm, cordial
+handshake, entrancing smile, and invitation to call again. I could
+not see that one was favored above or below another&mdash;but three of us
+knew&mdash;we knew.</p>
+
+<p>We knew that frankness and honesty had won, and that the rivals now
+numbered three instead of four.</p>
+
+<p>Down at the station Jacks brought out a pint bottle of the proper
+stuff, and we celebrated the downfall of a blatant interloper.</p>
+
+<p>Four days went by without anything happening worthy of recount.</p>
+
+<p>On the fifth, Jacks and I, entering the brush arbor for our supper,
+saw the Mexican youth, instead of a divinity in a spotless waist and
+a navy-blue skirt, taking in the dollars through the barbed-wire
+wicket.</p>
+
+<p>We rushed into the kitchen, meeting Pa Hinkle coming out with two
+cups of hot coffee in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Where's Ileen?" we asked, in recitative.</p>
+
+<p>Pa Hinkle was a kindly man. "Well, gents," said he, "it was a sudden
+notion she took; but I've got the money, and I let her have her way.
+She's gone to a corn&mdash;a conservatory in Boston for four years for to
+have her voice cultivated. Now, excuse me to pass, gents, for this
+coffee's hot, and my thumbs is tender."</p>
+
+<p>That night there were four instead of three of us sitting on the
+station platform and swinging our feet. C. Vincent Vesey was one of
+us. We discussed things while dogs barked at the moon that rose, as
+big as a five-cent piece or a flour barrel, over the chaparral.</p>
+
+<p>And what we discussed was whether it is better to lie to a woman or
+to tell her the truth.</p>
+
+<p>And as all of us were young then, we did not come to a decision.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Options, by O. Henry
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Options
+       "The Rose of Dixie"; The Third Ingredient; The Hiding of Black Bill; Schools and Schools; Thimble, Thimble; Supply and Demand; Buried Treasure; To Him Who Waits; He Also Serves; The Moment of Victory; The Head-Hunter; No Story; The Higher Pragmatism; Best-Seller; Rus in Urbe; A Poor Rule
+
+
+Author: O. Henry
+
+
+
+Release Date: December, 1998  [eBook #1583]
+[Most recently updated: October 14, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OPTIONS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Tim O'Connell and revised by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.
+
+
+
+Note: Many of the author's spellings follow older, obsolete, or
+      intentionally incorrect practice.
+
+
+
+
+
+OPTIONS
+
+by
+
+O. HENRY
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   "The Rose of Dixie"
+   The Third Ingredient
+   The Hiding of Black Bill
+   Schools and Schools
+   Thimble, Thimble
+   Supply and Demand
+   Buried Treasure
+   To Him Who Waits
+   He Also Serves
+   The Moment of Victory
+   The Head-Hunter
+   No Story
+   The Higher Pragmatism
+   Best-Seller
+   Rus in Urbe
+   A Poor Rule
+
+
+
+
+
+"THE ROSE OF DIXIE"
+
+
+When _The Rose of Dixie_ magazine was started by a stock company in
+Toombs City, Georgia, there was never but one candidate for its chief
+editorial position in the minds of its owners. Col. Aquila Telfair
+was the man for the place. By all the rights of learning, family,
+reputation, and Southern traditions, he was its foreordained, fit,
+and logical editor. So, a committee of the patriotic Georgia citizens
+who had subscribed the founding fund of $100,000 called upon Colonel
+Telfair at his residence, Cedar Heights, fearful lest the enterprise
+and the South should suffer by his possible refusal.
+
+The colonel received them in his great library, where he spent most
+of his days. The library had descended to him from his father. It
+contained ten thousand volumes, some of which had been published as
+late as the year 1861. When the deputation arrived, Colonel Telfair
+was seated at his massive white-pine centre-table, reading Burton's
+"Anatomy of Melancholy." He arose and shook hands punctiliously with
+each member of the committee. If you were familiar with _The Rose of
+Dixie_ you will remember the colonel's portrait, which appeared in it
+from time to time. You could not forget the long, carefully brushed
+white hair; the hooked, high-bridged nose, slightly twisted to the
+left; the keen eyes under the still black eyebrows; the classic mouth
+beneath the drooping white mustache, slightly frazzled at the ends.
+
+The committee solicitously offered him the position of managing editor,
+humbly presenting an outline of the field that the publication was
+designed to cover and mentioning a comfortable salary. The colonel's
+lands were growing poorer each year and were much cut up by red
+gullies. Besides, the honor was not one to be refused.
+
+In a forty-minute speech of acceptance, Colonel Telfair gave an
+outline of English literature from Chaucer to Macaulay, re-fought the
+battle of Chancellorsville, and said that, God helping him, he would
+so conduct _The Rose of Dixie_ that its fragrance and beauty would
+permeate the entire world, hurling back into the teeth of the Northern
+minions their belief that no genius or good could exist in the brains
+and hearts of the people whose property they had destroyed and whose
+rights they had curtailed.
+
+Offices for the magazine were partitioned off and furnished in the
+second floor of the First National Bank building; and it was for the
+colonel to cause _The Rose of Dixie_ to blossom and flourish or to
+wilt in the balmy air of the land of flowers.
+
+The staff of assistants and contributors that Editor-Colonel Telfair
+drew about him was a peach. It was a whole crate of Georgia peaches.
+The first assistant editor, Tolliver Lee Fairfax, had had a father
+killed during Pickett's charge. The second assistant, Keats Unthank,
+was the nephew of one of Morgan's Raiders. The book reviewer, Jackson
+Rockingham, had been the youngest soldier in the Confederate army,
+having appeared on the field of battle with a sword in one hand and a
+milk-bottle in the other. The art editor, Roncesvalles Sykes, was a
+third cousin to a nephew of Jefferson Davis. Miss Lavinia Terhune, the
+colonel's stenographer and typewriter, had an aunt who had once been
+kissed by Stonewall Jackson. Tommy Webster, the head office-boy,
+got his job by having recited Father Ryan's poems, complete, at the
+commencement exercises of the Toombs City High School. The girls who
+wrapped and addressed the magazines were members of old Southern
+families in Reduced Circumstances. The cashier was a scrub named
+Hawkins, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had recommendations and a bond
+from a guarantee company filed with the owners. Even Georgia stock
+companies sometimes realize that it takes live ones to bury the dead.
+
+Well, sir, if you believe me, _The Rose of Dixie_ blossomed five times
+before anybody heard of it except the people who buy their hooks and
+eyes in Toombs City. Then Hawkins climbed off his stool and told on
+'em to the stock company. Even in Ann Arbor he had been used to having
+his business propositions heard of at least as far away as Detroit. So
+an advertising manager was engaged--Beauregard Fitzhugh Banks, a young
+man in a lavender necktie, whose grandfather had been the Exalted High
+Pillow-slip of the Kuklux Klan.
+
+In spite of which _The Rose of Dixie_ kept coming out every month.
+Although in every issue it ran photos of either the Taj Mahal or
+the Luxembourg Gardens, or Carmencita or La Follette, a certain
+number of people bought it and subscribed for it. As a boom for it,
+Editor-Colonel Telfair ran three different views of Andrew Jackson's
+old home, "The Hermitage," a full-page engraving of the second battle
+of Manassas, entitled "Lee to the Rear!" and a five-thousand-word
+biography of Belle Boyd in the same number. The subscription list that
+month advanced 118. Also there were poems in the same issue by Leonina
+Vashti Haricot (pen-name), related to the Haricots of Charleston,
+South Carolina, and Bill Thompson, nephew of one of the stockholders.
+And an article from a special society correspondent describing a
+tea-party given by the swell Boston and English set, where a lot of
+tea was spilled overboard by some of the guests masquerading as
+Indians.
+
+One day a person whose breath would easily cloud a mirror, he was so
+much alive, entered the office of _The Rose of Dixie_. He was a man
+about the size of a real-estate agent, with a self-tied tie and a
+manner that he must have borrowed conjointly from W. J. Bryan,
+Hackenschmidt, and Hetty Green. He was shown into the editor-colonel's
+_pons asinorum_. Colonel Telfair rose and began a Prince Albert bow.
+
+"I'm Thacker," said the intruder, taking the editor's chair--"T. T.
+Thacker, of New York."
+
+He dribbled hastily upon the colonel's desk some cards, a bulky manila
+envelope, and a letter from the owners of _The Rose of Dixie_. This
+letter introduced Mr. Thacker, and politely requested Colonel Telfair
+to give him a conference and whatever information about the magazine
+he might desire.
+
+"I've been corresponding with the secretary of the magazine owners
+for some time," said Thacker, briskly. "I'm a practical magazine man
+myself, and a circulation booster as good as any, if I do say it.
+I'll guarantee an increase of anywhere from ten thousand to a hundred
+thousand a year for any publication that isn't printed in a dead
+language. I've had my eye on _The Rose of Dixie_ ever since it
+started. I know every end of the business from editing to setting up
+the classified ads. Now, I've come down here to put a good bunch of
+money in the magazine, if I can see my way clear. It ought to be made
+to pay. The secretary tells me it's losing money. I don't see why a
+magazine in the South, if it's properly handled, shouldn't get a good
+circulation in the North, too."
+
+Colonel Telfair leaned back in his chair and polished his gold-rimmed
+glasses.
+
+"Mr. Thacker," said he, courteously but firmly, "_The Rose of Dixie_
+is a publication devoted to the fostering and the voicing of Southern
+genius. Its watchword, which you may have seen on the cover, is 'Of,
+For, and By the South.'"
+
+"But you wouldn't object to a Northern circulation, would you?" asked
+Thacker.
+
+"I suppose," said the editor-colonel, "that it is customary to open
+the circulation lists to all. I do not know. I have nothing to do with
+the business affairs of the magazine. I was called upon to assume
+editorial control of it, and I have devoted to its conduct such poor
+literary talents as I may possess and whatever store of erudition I
+may have acquired."
+
+"Sure," said Thacker. "But a dollar is a dollar anywhere, North,
+South, or West--whether you're buying codfish, goober peas, or Rocky
+Ford cantaloupes. Now, I've been looking over your November number. I
+see one here on your desk. You don't mind running over it with me?
+
+"Well, your leading article is all right. A good write-up of the
+cotton-belt with plenty of photographs is a winner any time. New York
+is always interested in the cotton crop. And this sensational account
+of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, by a schoolmate of a niece of the Governor
+of Kentucky, isn't such a bad idea. It happened so long ago that most
+people have forgotten it. Now, here's a poem three pages long called
+'The Tyrant's Foot,' by Lorella Lascelles. I've pawed around a good
+deal over manuscripts, but I never saw her name on a rejection slip."
+
+"Miss Lascelles," said the editor, "is one of our most widely
+recognized Southern poetesses. She is closely related to the Alabama
+Lascelles family, and made with her own hands the silken Confederate
+banner that was presented to the governor of that state at his
+inauguration."
+
+"But why," persisted Thacker, "is the poem illustrated with a view of
+the M. & O. Railroad freight depot at Tuscaloosa?"
+
+"The illustration," said the colonel, with dignity, "shows a corner
+of the fence surrounding the old homestead where Miss Lascelles was
+born."
+
+"All right," said Thacker. "I read the poem, but I couldn't tell
+whether it was about the depot of the battle of Bull Run. Now, here's
+a short story called 'Rosies' Temptation,' by Fosdyke Piggott. It's
+rotten. What is a Piggott, anyway?"
+
+"Mr. Piggott," said the editor, "is a brother of the principal
+stockholder of the magazine."
+
+"All's right with the world--Piggott passes," said Thacker. "Well this
+article on Arctic exploration and the one on tarpon fishing might go.
+But how about this write-up of the Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville,
+and Savannah breweries? It seems to consist mainly of statistics about
+their output and the quality of their beer. What's the chip over the
+bug?"
+
+"If I understand your figurative language," answered Colonel Telfair,
+"it is this: the article you refer to was handed to me by the owners
+of the magazine with instructions to publish it. The literary quality
+of it did not appeal to me. But, in a measure, I feel impelled to
+conform, in certain matters, to the wishes of the gentlemen who are
+interested in the financial side of _The Rose_."
+
+"I see," said Thacker. "Next we have two pages of selections from
+'Lalla Rookh,' by Thomas Moore. Now, what Federal prison did Moore
+escape from, or what's the name of the F.F.V. family that he carries
+as a handicap?"
+
+"Moore was an Irish poet who died in 1852," said Colonel Telfair,
+pityingly. "He is a classic. I have been thinking of reprinting his
+translation of Anacreon serially in the magazine."
+
+"Look out for the copyright laws," said Thacker, flippantly. Who's
+Bessie Belleclair, who contributes the essay on the newly completed
+water-works plant in Milledgeville?"
+
+"The name, sir," said Colonel Telfair, "is the _nom de guerre_ of
+Miss Elvira Simpkins. I have not the honor of knowing the lady; but
+her contribution was sent to us by Congressman Brower, of her native
+state. Congressman Brower's mother was related to the Polks of
+Tennessee.
+
+"Now, see here, Colonel," said Thacker, throwing down the magazine,
+"this won't do. You can't successfully run a magazine for one
+particular section of the country. You've got to make a universal
+appeal. Look how the Northern publications have catered to the South
+and encouraged the Southern writers. And you've got to go far and
+wide for your contributors. You've got to buy stuff according to its
+quality without any regard to the pedigree of the author. Now, I'll
+bet a quart of ink that this Southern parlor organ you've been running
+has never played a note that originated above Mason & Hamlin's line.
+Am I right?"
+
+"I have carefully and conscientiously rejected all contributions from
+that section of the country--if I understand your figurative language
+aright," replied the colonel.
+
+"All right. Now I'll show you something."
+
+Thacker reached for his thick manila envelope and dumped a mass of
+typewritten manuscript on the editors desk.
+
+"Here's some truck," said he, "that I paid cash for, and brought along
+with me."
+
+One by one he folded back the manuscripts and showed their first pages
+to the colonel.
+
+Here are four short stories by four of the highest priced authors in
+the United States--three of 'em living in New York, and one commuting.
+There's a special article on Vienna-bred society by Tom Vampson.
+Here's an Italian serial by Captain Jack--no--it's the other Crawford.
+Here are three separate exposes of city governments by Sniffings, and
+here's a dandy entitled 'What Women Carry in Dress-Suit Cases'--a
+Chicago newspaper woman hired herself out for five years as a lady's
+maid to get that information. And here's a Synopsis of Preceding
+Chapters of Hall Caine's new serial to appear next June. And here's a
+couple of pounds of _vers de societe_ that I got at a rate from the
+clever magazines. That's the stuff that people everywhere want. And
+now here's a write-up with photographs at the ages of four, twelve,
+twenty-two, and thirty of George B. McClellan. It's a prognostication.
+He's bound to be elected Mayor of New York. It'll make a big hit all
+over the country. He--"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Colonel Telfair, stiffening in his chair.
+"What was the name?"
+
+"Oh, I see," said Thacker, with half a grin. Yes, he's a son of the
+General. We'll pass that manuscript up. But, if you'll excuse me,
+Colonel, it's a magazine we're trying to make go off--not the first
+gun at Fort Sumter. Now, here's a thing that's bound to get next to
+you. It's an original poem by James Whitcomb Riley. J. W. himself.
+You know what that means to a magazine. I won't tell you what I had
+to pay for that poem; but I'll tell you this--Riley can make more
+money writing with a fountain-pen than you or I can with one that lets
+the ink run. I'll read you the last two stanzas:
+
+   "'Pa lays around 'n' loafs all day,
+      'N' reads and makes us leave him be.
+   He lets me do just like I please,
+      'N' when I'm bad he laughs at me,
+   'N' when I holler loud 'n' say
+      Bad words 'n' then begin to tease
+   The cat, 'n' pa just smiles, ma's mad
+      'N' gives me Jesse crost her knees.
+         I always wondered why that wuz--
+         I guess it's cause
+            Pa never does.
+
+   "''N' after all the lights are out
+      I'm sorry 'bout it; so I creep
+   Out of my trundle bed to ma's
+      'N' say I love her a whole heap,
+   'N' kiss her, 'n' I hug her tight.
+      'N' it's too dark to see her eyes,
+   But every time I do I know
+      She cries 'n' cries 'n' cries 'n' cries.
+         I always wondered why that wuz--
+         I guess it's 'cause
+            Pa never does.'
+
+"That's the stuff," continued Thacker. "What do you think of that?"
+
+"I am not unfamiliar with the works of Mr. Riley," said the colonel,
+deliberately. "I believe he lives in Indiana. For the last ten years I
+have been somewhat of a literary recluse, and am familiar with nearly
+all the books in the Cedar Heights library. I am also of the opinion
+that a magazine should contain a certain amount of poetry. Many of the
+sweetest singers of the South have already contributed to the pages of
+_The Rose of Dixie_. I, myself, have thought of translating from the
+original for publication in its pages the works of the great Italian
+poet Tasso. Have you ever drunk from the fountain of this immortal
+poet's lines, Mr. Thacker?"
+
+"Not even a demi-Tasso," said Thacker. Now, let's come to the point,
+Colonel Telfair. I've already invested some money in this as a flyer.
+That bunch of manuscripts cost me $4,000. My object was to try a
+number of them in the next issue--I believe you make up less than a
+month ahead--and see what effect it has on the circulation. I believe
+that by printing the best stuff we can get in the North, South, East,
+or West we can make the magazine go. You have there the letter from
+the owning company asking you to co-operate with me in the plan. Let's
+chuck out some of this slush that you've been publishing just because
+the writers are related to the Skoopdoodles of Skoopdoodle County. Are
+you with me?"
+
+"As long as I continue to be the editor of The Rose," said Colonel
+Telfair, with dignity, "I shall be its editor. But I desire also to
+conform to the wishes of its owners if I can do so conscientiously."
+
+"That's the talk," said Thacker, briskly. "Now, how much of this stuff
+I've brought can we get into the January number? We want to begin
+right away."
+
+"There is yet space in the January number," said the editor, "for
+about eight thousand words, roughly estimated."
+
+"Great!" said Thacker. "It isn't much, but it'll give the readers
+some change from goobers, governors, and Gettysburg. I'll leave the
+selection of the stuff I brought to fill the space to you, as it's all
+good. I've got to run back to New York, and I'll be down again in a
+couple of weeks."
+
+Colonel Telfair slowly swung his eye-glasses by their broad, black
+ribbon.
+
+"The space in the January number that I referred to," said he,
+measuredly, "has been held open purposely, pending a decision that
+I have not yet made. A short time ago a contribution was submitted
+to _The Rose of Dixie_ that is one of the most remarkable literary
+efforts that has ever come under my observation. None but a master
+mind and talent could have produced it. It would just fill the space
+that I have reserved for its possible use."
+
+Thacker looked anxious.
+
+"What kind of stuff is it?" he asked. "Eight thousand words sounds
+suspicious. The oldest families must have been collaborating. Is there
+going to be another secession?"
+
+"The author of the article," continued the colonel, ignoring Thacker's
+allusions, "is a writer of some reputation. He has also distinguished
+himself in other ways. I do not feel at liberty to reveal to you his
+name--at least not until I have decided whether or not to accept his
+contribution."
+
+"Well," said Thacker, nervously, "is it a continued story, or an
+account of the unveiling of the new town pump in Whitmire, South
+Carolina, or a revised list of General Lee's body-servants, or what?"
+
+"You are disposed to be facetious," said Colonel Telfair, calmly.
+"The article is from the pen of a thinker, a philosopher, a lover of
+mankind, a student, and a rhetorician of high degree."
+
+"It must have been written by a syndicate," said Thacker. "But,
+honestly, Colonel, you want to go slow. I don't know of any
+eight-thousand-word single doses of written matter that are read by
+anybody these days, except Supreme Court briefs and reports of murder
+trials. You haven't by any accident gotten hold of a copy of one of
+Daniel Webster's speeches, have you?"
+
+Colonel Telfair swung a little in his chair and looked steadily from
+under his bushy eyebrows at the magazine promoter.
+
+"Mr. Thacker," he said, gravely, "I am willing to segregate the
+somewhat crude expression of your sense of humor from the solicitude
+that your business investments undoubtedly have conferred upon you.
+But I must ask you to cease your jibes and derogatory comments upon
+the South and the Southern people. They, sir, will not be tolerated
+in the office of _The Rose of Dixie_ for one moment. And before you
+proceed with more of your covert insinuations that I, the editor of
+this magazine, am not a competent judge of the merits of the matter
+submitted to its consideration, I beg that you will first present some
+evidence or proof that you are my superior in any way, shape, or form
+relative to the question in hand."
+
+"Oh, come, Colonel," said Thacker, good-naturedly. "I didn't do
+anything like that to you. It sounds like an indictment by the fourth
+assistant attorney-general. Let's get back to business. What's this
+8,000 to 1 shot about?"
+
+"The article," said Colonel Telfair, acknowledging the apology by a
+slight bow, "covers a wide area of knowledge. It takes up theories
+and questions that have puzzled the world for centuries, and disposes
+of them logically and concisely. One by one it holds up to view the
+evils of the world, points out the way of eradicating them, and then
+conscientiously and in detail commends the good. There is hardly a
+phase of human life that it does not discuss wisely, calmly, and
+equitably. The great policies of governments, the duties of private
+citizens, the obligations of home life, law, ethics, morality--all
+these important subjects are handled with a calm wisdom and confidence
+that I must confess has captured my admiration."
+
+"It must be a crackerjack," said Thacker, impressed.
+
+"It is a great contribution to the world's wisdom," said the colonel.
+"The only doubt remaining in my mind as to the tremendous advantage it
+would be to us to give it publication in _The Rose of Dixie_ is that I
+have not yet sufficient information about the author to give his work
+publicity in our magazine.
+
+"I thought you said he is a distinguished man," said Thacker.
+
+"He is," replied the colonel, "both in literary and in other more
+diversified and extraneous fields. But I am extremely careful about
+the matter that I accept for publication. My contributors are people
+of unquestionable repute and connections, which fact can be verified
+at any time. As I said, I am holding this article until I can acquire
+more information about its author. I do not know whether I will
+publish it or not. If I decide against it, I shall be much pleased,
+Mr. Thacker, to substitute the matter that you are leaving with me in
+its place."
+
+Thacker was somewhat at sea.
+
+"I don't seem to gather," said he, "much about the gist of this
+inspired piece of literature. It sounds more like a dark horse than
+Pegasus to me."
+
+"It is a human document," said the colonel-editor, confidently, "from
+a man of great accomplishments who, in my opinion, has obtained a
+stronger grasp on the world and its outcomes than that of any man
+living to-day."
+
+Thacker rose to his feet excitedly.
+
+"Say!" he said. "It isn't possible that you've cornered John D.
+Rockefeller's memoirs, is it? Don't tell me that all at once."
+
+"No, sir," said Colonel Telfair. "I am speaking of mentality and
+literature, not of the less worthy intricacies of trade."
+
+"Well, what's the trouble about running the article," asked Thacker, a
+little impatiently, "if the man's well known and has got the stuff?"
+
+Colonel Telfair sighed.
+
+"Mr. Thacker," said he, "for once I have been tempted. Nothing has
+yet appeared in _The Rose of Dixie_ that has not been from the pen of
+one of its sons or daughters. I know little about the author of this
+article except that he has acquired prominence in a section of the
+country that has always been inimical to my heart and mind. But I
+recognize his genius; and, as I have told you, I have instituted an
+investigation of his personality. Perhaps it will be futile. But I
+shall pursue the inquiry. Until that is finished, I must leave open
+the question of filling the vacant space in our January number."
+
+Thacker arose to leave.
+
+"All right, Colonel," he said, as cordially as he could. "You use your
+own judgment. If you've really got a scoop or something that will make
+'em sit up, run it instead of my stuff. I'll drop in again in about
+two weeks. Good luck!"
+
+Colonel Telfair and the magazine promoter shook hands.
+
+Returning a fortnight later, Thacker dropped off a very rocky Pullman
+at Toombs City. He found the January number of the magazine made up
+and the forms closed.
+
+The vacant space that had been yawning for type was filled by an
+article that was headed thus:
+
+
+                    SECOND MESSAGE TO CONGRESS
+
+                            Written for
+
+                         THE ROSE OF DIXIE
+
+                                 BY
+
+                    A Member of the Well-known
+
+                    BULLOCH FAMILY, OF GEORGIA
+
+                            T. Roosevelt
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE THIRD INGREDIENT
+
+
+The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an apartment-house.
+It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences
+welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the
+wraps and head-gear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the
+sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You
+may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for
+twenty dollars. Among the Vallambrosa's roomers are stenographers,
+musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students,
+wire-tappers, and other people who lean far over the banister-rail
+when the door-bell rings.
+
+This treatise shall have to do with but two of the Vallambrosians--
+though meaning no disrespect to the others.
+
+At six o'clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her third-floor
+rear $3.50 room in the Vallambrosa with her nose and chin more sharply
+pointed than usual. To be discharged from the department store where
+you have been working four years, and with only fifteen cents in your
+purse, does have a tendency to make your features appear more finely
+chiselled.
+
+And now for Hetty's thumb-nail biography while she climbs the two
+flights of stairs.
+
+She walked into the Biggest Store one morning four years before
+with seventy-five other girls, applying for a job behind the waist
+department counter. The phalanx of wage-earners formed a bewildering
+scene of beauty, carrying a total mass of blond hair sufficient to
+have justified the horseback gallops of a hundred Lady Godivas.
+
+The capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man whose task
+it was to engage six of the contestants, was aware of a feeling of
+suffocation as if he were drowning in a sea of frangipanni, while
+white clouds, hand-embroidered, floated about him. And then a sail
+hove in sight. Hetty Pepper, homely of countenance, with small,
+contemptuous, green eyes and chocolate-colored hair, dressed in a suit
+of plain burlap and a common-sense hat, stood before him with every
+one of her twenty-nine years of life unmistakably in sight.
+
+"You're on!" shouted the bald-headed young man, and was saved. And
+that is how Hetty came to be employed in the Biggest Store. The story
+of her rise to an eight-dollar-a-week salary is the combined stories
+of Hercules, Joan of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood. You
+shall not learn from me the salary that was paid her as a beginner.
+There is a sentiment growing about such things, and I want no
+millionaire store-proprietors climbing the fire-escape of my
+tenement-house to throw dynamite bombs into my skylight boudoir.
+
+The story of Hetty's discharge from the Biggest Store is so nearly a
+repetition of her engagement as to be monotonous.
+
+In each department of the store there is an omniscient, omnipresent,
+and omnivorous person carrying always a mileage book and a red
+necktie, and referred to as a "buyer." The destinies of the girls in
+his department who live on (see Bureau of Victual Statistics)--so much
+per week are in his hands.
+
+This particular buyer was a capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young,
+bald-headed man. As he walked along the aisles of his department he
+seemed to be sailing on a sea of frangipanni, while white clouds,
+machine-embroidered, floated around him. Too many sweets bring
+surfeit. He looked upon Hetty Pepper's homely countenance, emerald
+eyes, and chocolate-colored hair as a welcome oasis of green in a
+desert of cloying beauty. In a quiet angle of a counter he pinched her
+arm kindly, three inches above the elbow. She slapped him three feet
+away with one good blow of her muscular and not especially lily-white
+right. So, now you know why Hetty Pepper came to leave the Biggest
+Store at thirty minutes' notice, with one dime and a nickel in her
+purse.
+
+This morning's quotations list the price of rib beef at six cents per
+(butcher's) pound. But on the day that Hetty was "released" by the B.
+S. the price was seven and one-half cents. That fact is what makes
+this story possible. Otherwise, the extra four cents would have--
+
+But the plot of nearly all the good stories in the world is concerned
+with shorts who were unable to cover; so you can find no fault with
+this one.
+
+Hetty mounted with her rib beef to her $3.50 third-floor back. One
+hot, savory beef-stew for supper, a night's good sleep, and she would
+be fit in the morning to apply again for the tasks of Hercules, Joan
+of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood.
+
+In her room she got the granite-ware stew-pan out of the 2x4-foot
+china--er--I mean earthenware closet, and began to dig down in a
+rat's-nest of paper bags for the potatoes and onions. She came out
+with her nose and chin just a little sharper pointed.
+
+There was neither a potato nor an onion. Now, what kind of a beef-stew
+can you make out of simply beef? You can make oyster-soup without
+oysters, turtle-soup without turtles, coffee-cake without coffee, but
+you can't make beef-stew without potatoes and onions.
+
+But rib beef alone, in an emergency, can make an ordinary pine door
+look like a wrought-iron gambling-house portal to the wolf. With salt
+and pepper and a tablespoonful of flour (first well stirred in a
+little cold water) 'twill serve--'tis not so deep as a lobster a la
+Newburg nor so wide as a church festival doughnut; but 'twill serve.
+
+Hetty took her stew-pan to the rear of the third-floor hall. According
+to the advertisements of the Vallambrosa there was running water to be
+found there. Between you and me and the water-meter, it only ambled
+or walked through the faucets; but technicalities have no place here.
+There was also a sink where housekeeping roomers often met to dump
+their coffee grounds and glare at one another's kimonos.
+
+At this sink Hetty found a girl with heavy, gold-brown, artistic hair
+and plaintive eyes, washing two large "Irish" potatoes. Hetty knew the
+Vallambrosa as well as any one not owning "double hextra-magnifying
+eyes" could compass its mysteries. The kimonos were her encyclopedia,
+her "Who's What?" her clearinghouse of news, of goers and comers. From
+a rose-pink kimono edged with Nile green she had learned that the
+girl with the potatoes was a miniature-painter living in a kind of
+attic--or "studio," as they prefer to call it--on the top floor. Hetty
+was not certain in her mind what a miniature was; but it certainly
+wasn't a house; because house-painters, although they wear splashy
+overalls and poke ladders in your face on the street, are known to
+indulge in a riotous profusion of food at home.
+
+The potato girl was quite slim and small, and handled her potatoes as
+an old bachelor uncle handles a baby who is cutting teeth. She had a
+dull shoemaker's knife in her right hand, and she had begun to peel
+one of the potatoes with it.
+
+Hetty addressed her in the punctiliously formal tone of one who
+intends to be cheerfully familiar with you in the second round.
+
+"Beg pardon," she said, "for butting into what's not my business, but
+if you peel them potatoes you lose out. They're new Bermudas. You want
+to scrape 'em. Lemme show you."
+
+She took a potato and the knife, and began to demonstrate.
+
+"Oh, thank you," breathed the artist. "I didn't know. And I _did_ hate
+to see the thick peeling go; it seemed such a waste. But I thought
+they always had to be peeled. When you've got only potatoes to eat,
+the peelings count, you know."
+
+"Say, kid," said Hetty, staying her knife, "you ain't up against it,
+too, are you?"
+
+The miniature artist smiled starvedly.
+
+"I suppose I am. Art--or, at least, the way I interpret it--doesn't
+seem to be much in demand. I have only these potatoes for my dinner.
+But they aren't so bad boiled and hot, with a little butter and salt."
+
+"Child," said Hetty, letting a brief smile soften her rigid features,
+"Fate has sent me and you together. I've had it handed to me in the
+neck, too; but I've got a chunk of meat in my, room as big as a
+lap-dog. And I've done everything to get potatoes except pray for 'em.
+Let's me and you bunch our commissary departments and make a stew of
+'em. We'll cook it in my room. If we only had an onion to go in it!
+Say, kid, you haven't got a couple of pennies that've slipped down
+into the lining of your last winter's sealskin, have you? I could step
+down to the corner and get one at old Giuseppe's stand. A stew without
+an onion is worse'n a matinee without candy."
+
+"You may call me Cecilia," said the artist. "No; I spent my last penny
+three days ago."
+
+"Then we'll have to cut the onion out instead of slicing it in," said
+Hetty. "I'd ask the janitress for one, but I don't want 'em hep just
+yet to the fact that I'm pounding the asphalt for another job. But I
+wish we did have an onion."
+
+In the shop-girl's room the two began to prepare their supper.
+Cecilia's part was to sit on the couch helplessly and beg to be
+allowed to do something, in the voice of a cooing ring-dove. Hetty
+prepared the rib beef, putting it in cold salted water in the stew-pan
+and setting it on the one-burner gas-stove.
+
+"I wish we had an onion," said Hetty, as she scraped the two potatoes.
+
+On the wall opposite the couch was pinned a flaming, gorgeous
+advertising picture of one of the new ferry-boats of the P. U. F. F.
+Railroad that had been built to cut down the time between Los Angeles
+and New York City one-eighth of a minute.
+
+Hetty, turning her head during her continuous monologue, saw
+tears running from her guest's eyes as she gazed on the idealized
+presentment of the speeding, foam-girdled transport.
+
+"Why, say, Cecilia, kid," said Hetty, poising her knife, "is it as bad
+art as that? I ain't a critic; but I thought it kind of brightened
+up the room. Of course, a manicure-painter could tell it was a bum
+picture in a minute. I'll take it down if you say so. I wish to the
+holy Saint Potluck we had an onion."
+
+But the miniature miniature-painter had tumbled down, sobbing, with
+her nose indenting the hard-woven drapery of the couch. Something
+was here deeper than the artistic temperament offended at crude
+lithography.
+
+Hetty knew. She had accepted her role long ago. How scant the words
+with which we try to describe a single quality of a human being! When
+we reach the abstract we are lost. The nearer to Nature that the
+babbling of our lips comes, the better do we understand. Figuratively
+(let us say), some people are Bosoms, some are Hands, some are Heads,
+some are Muscles, some are Feet, some are Backs for burdens.
+
+Hetty was a Shoulder. Hers was a sharp, sinewy shoulder; but all her
+life people had laid their heads upon it, metaphorically or actually,
+and had left there all or half their troubles. Looking at Life
+anatomically, which is as good a way as any, she was preordained to
+be a Shoulder. There were few truer collar-bones anywhere than hers.
+
+Hetty was only thirty-three, and she had not yet outlived the little
+pang that visited her whenever the head of youth and beauty leaned
+upon her for consolation. But one glance in her mirror always served
+as an instantaneous pain-killer. So she gave one pale look into the
+crinkly old looking-glass on the wall above the gas-stove, turned down
+the flame a little lower from the bubbling beef and potatoes, went
+over to the couch, and lifted Cecilia's head to its confessional.
+
+"Go on and tell me, honey," she said. "I know now that it ain't art
+that's worrying you. You met him on a ferry-boat, didn't you? Go on,
+Cecilia, kid, and tell your--your Aunt Hetty about it."
+
+But youth and melancholy must first spend the surplus of sighs and
+tears that waft and float the barque of romance to its harbor in the
+delectable isles. Presently, through the stringy tendons that formed
+the bars of the confessional, the penitent--or was it the glorified
+communicant of the sacred flame--told her story without art or
+illumination.
+
+"It was only three days ago. I was coming back on the ferry from
+Jersey City. Old Mr. Schrum, an art dealer, told me of a rich man in
+Newark who wanted a miniature of his daughter painted. I went to see
+him and showed him some of my work. When I told him the price would
+be fifty dollars he laughed at me like a hyena. He said an enlarged
+crayon twenty times the size would cost him only eight dollars.
+
+"I had just enough money to buy my ferry ticket back to New York. I
+felt as if I didn't want to live another day. I must have looked as I
+felt, for I saw _him_ on the row of seats opposite me, looking at me
+as if he understood. He was nice-looking, but oh, above everything
+else, he looked kind. When one is tired or unhappy or hopeless,
+kindness counts more than anything else.
+
+"When I got so miserable that I couldn't fight against it any longer,
+I got up and walked slowly out the rear door of the ferry-boat cabin.
+No one was there, and I slipped quickly over the rail and dropped into
+the water. Oh, friend Hetty, it was cold, cold!
+
+"For just one moment I wished I was back in the old Vallambrosa,
+starving and hoping. And then I got numb, and didn't care. And then I
+felt that somebody else was in the water close by me, holding me up.
+_He_ had followed me, and jumped in to save me.
+
+"Somebody threw a thing like a big, white doughnut at us, and he made
+me put my arms through the hole. Then the ferry-boat backed, and they
+pulled us on board. Oh, Hetty, I was so ashamed of my wickedness in
+trying to drown myself; and, besides, my hair had all tumbled down and
+was sopping wet, and I was such a sight.
+
+"And then some men in blue clothes came around; and he gave them his
+card, and I heard him tell them he had seen me drop my purse on the
+edge of the boat outside the rail, and in leaning over to get it I had
+fallen overboard. And then I remembered having read in the papers that
+people who try to kill themselves are locked up in cells with people
+who try to kill other people, and I was afraid.
+
+"But some ladies on the boat took me downstairs to the furnace-room
+and got me nearly dry and did up my hair. When the boat landed, _he_
+came and put me in a cab. He was all dripping himself, but laughed as
+if he thought it was all a joke. He begged me, but I wouldn't tell him
+my name nor where I lived, I was so ashamed."
+
+"You were a fool, child," said Hetty, kindly. "Wait till I turn the
+light up a bit. I wish to Heaven we had an onion."
+
+"Then he raised his hat," went on Cecilia, "and said: 'Very well. But
+I'll find you, anyhow. I'm going to claim my rights of salvage.' Then
+he gave money to the cab-driver and told him to take me where I wanted
+to go, and walked away. What is 'salvage,' Hetty?"
+
+"The edge of a piece of goods that ain't hemmed," said the shop-girl.
+"You must have looked pretty well frazzled out to the little hero
+boy."
+
+"It's been three days," moaned the miniature-painter, "and he hasn't
+found me yet."
+
+"Extend the time," said Hetty. "This is a big town. Think of how many
+girls he might have to see soaked in water with their hair down before
+he would recognize you. The stew's getting on fine--but oh, for an
+onion! I'd even use a piece of garlic if I had it."
+
+The beef and potatoes bubbled merrily, exhaling a mouth-watering savor
+that yet lacked something, leaving a hunger on the palate, a haunting,
+wistful desire for some lost and needful ingredient.
+
+"I came near drowning in that awful river," said Cecilia, shuddering.
+
+"It ought to have more water in it," said Hetty; "the stew, I mean.
+I'll go get some at the sink."
+
+"It smells good," said the artist.
+
+"That nasty old North River?" objected Hetty. "It smells to me like
+soap factories and wet setter-dogs--oh, you mean the stew. Well, I
+wish we had an onion for it. Did he look like he had money?"
+
+"First, he looked kind," said Cecilia. "I'm sure he was rich; but that
+matters so little. When he drew out his bill-folder to pay the cab-man
+you couldn't help seeing hundreds and thousands of dollars in it. And
+I looked over the cab doors and saw him leave the ferry station in a
+motor-car; and the chauffeur gave him his bearskin to put on, for he
+was sopping wet. And it was only three days ago."
+
+"What a fool!" said Hetty, shortly.
+
+"Oh, the chauffeur wasn't wet," breathed Cecilia. "And he drove the
+car away very nicely."
+
+"I mean _you_," said Hetty. "For not giving him your address."
+
+"I never give my address to chauffeurs," said Cecilia, haughtily.
+
+"I wish we had one," said Hetty, disconsolately.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"For the stew, of course--oh, I mean an onion."
+
+Hetty took a pitcher and started to the sink at the end of the hall.
+
+A young man came down the stairs from above just as she was opposite
+the lower step. He was decently dressed, but pale and haggard. His
+eyes were dull with the stress of some burden of physical or mental
+woe. In his hand he bore an onion--a pink, smooth, solid, shining
+onion as large around as a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock.
+
+Hetty stopped. So did the young man. There was something
+Joan of Arc-ish, Herculean, and Una-ish in the look and pose
+of the shop-lady--she had cast off the roles of Job and
+Little-Red-Riding-Hood. The young man stopped at the foot of the
+stairs and coughed distractedly. He felt marooned, held up, attacked,
+assailed, levied upon, sacked, assessed, panhandled, browbeaten,
+though he knew not why. It was the look in Hetty's eyes that did it.
+In them he saw the Jolly Roger fly to the masthead and an able seaman
+with a dirk between his teeth scurry up the ratlines and nail it
+there. But as yet he did not know that the cargo he carried was the
+thing that had caused him to be so nearly blown out of the water
+without even a parley.
+
+"_Beg_ your pardon," said Hetty, as sweetly as her dilute acetic acid
+tones permitted, "but did you find that onion on the stairs? There was
+a hole in the paper bag; and I've just come out to look for it."
+
+The young man coughed for half a minute. The interval may have given
+him the courage to defend his own property. Also, he clutched his
+pungent prize greedily, and, with a show of spirit, faced his grim
+waylayer.
+
+"No," he said huskily, "I didn't find it on the stairs. It was given
+to me by Jack Bevens, on the top floor. If you don't believe it, ask
+him. I'll wait until you do."
+
+"I know about Bevens," said Hetty, sourly. "He writes books and things
+up there for the paper-and-rags man. We can hear the postman guy him
+all over the house when he brings them thick envelopes back. Say--do
+you live in the Vallambrosa?"
+
+"I do not," said the young man. "I come to see Bevens sometimes. He's
+my friend. I live two blocks west."
+
+"What are you going to do with the onion?--_begging_ your pardon,"
+said Hetty.
+
+"I'm going to eat it."
+
+"Raw?"
+
+"Yes: as soon as I get home."
+
+"Haven't you got anything else to eat with it?"
+
+The young man considered briefly.
+
+"No," he confessed; "there's not another scrap of anything in my
+diggings to eat. I think old Jack is pretty hard up for grub in his
+shack, too. He hated to give up the onion, but I worried him into
+parting with it."
+
+"Man," said Hetty, fixing him with her world-sapient eyes, and laying
+a bony but impressive finger on his sleeve, "you've known trouble, too,
+haven't you?"
+
+"Lots," said the onion owner, promptly. "But this onion is my own
+property, honestly come by. If you will excuse me, I must be going."
+
+"Listen," said Hetty, paling a little with anxiety. "Raw onion is a
+mighty poor diet. And so is a beef-stew without one. Now, if you're Jack
+Bevens' friend, I guess you're nearly right. There's a little lady--a
+friend of mine--in my room there at the end of the hall. Both of us
+are out of luck; and we had just potatoes and meat between us. They're
+stewing now. But it ain't got any soul. There's something lacking to it.
+There's certain things in life that are naturally intended to fit and
+belong together. One is pink cheese-cloth and green roses, and one is
+ham and eggs, and one is Irish and trouble. And the other one is beef
+and potatoes _with_ onions. And still another one is people who are up
+against it and other people in the same fix."
+
+The young man went into a protracted paroxysm of coughing. With one
+hand he hugged his onion to his bosom.
+
+"No doubt; no doubt," said he, at length. "But, as I said, I must be
+going, because--"
+
+Hetty clutched his sleeve firmly.
+
+"Don't be a Dago, Little Brother. Don't eat raw onions. Chip it in
+toward the dinner and line yourself inside with the best stew you ever
+licked a spoon over. Must two ladies knock a young gentleman down and
+drag him inside for the honor of dining with 'em? No harm shall befall
+you, Little Brother. Loosen up and fall into line."
+
+The young man's pale face relaxed into a grin.
+
+"Believe I'll go you," he said, brightening. "If my onion is good as
+a credential, I'll accept the invitation gladly."
+
+"It's good as that, but better as seasoning," said Hetty. "You come
+and stand outside the door till I ask my lady friend if she has any
+objections. And don't run away with that letter of recommendation
+before I come out."
+
+Hetty went into her room and closed the door. The young man waited
+outside.
+
+"Cecilia, kid," said the shop-girl, oiling the sharp saw of her voice
+as well as she could, "there's an onion outside. With a young man
+attached. I've asked him in to dinner. You ain't going to kick, are
+you?"
+
+"Oh, dear!" said Cecilia, sitting up and patting her artistic hair. She
+cast a mournful glance at the ferry-boat poster on the wall.
+
+"Nit," said Hetty. "It ain't him. You're up against real life now. I
+believe you said your hero friend had money and automobiles. This is
+a poor skeezicks that's got nothing to eat but an onion. But he's
+easy-spoken and not a freshy. I imagine he's been a gentleman, he's
+so low down now. And we need the onion. Shall I bring him in? I'll
+guarantee his behavior."
+
+"Hetty, dear," sighed Cecilia, "I'm so hungry. What difference does it
+make whether he's a prince or a burglar? I don't care. Bring him in if
+he's got anything to eat with him."
+
+Hetty went back into the hall. The onion man was gone. Her heart missed
+a beat, and a gray look settled over her face except on her nose and
+cheek-bones. And then the tides of life flowed in again, for she saw
+him leaning out of the front window at the other end of the hall. She
+hurried there. He was shouting to some one below. The noise of the
+street overpowered the sound of her footsteps. She looked down over his
+shoulder, saw whom he was speaking to, and heard his words. He pulled
+himself in from the window-sill and saw her standing over him.
+
+Hetty's eyes bored into him like two steel gimlets.
+
+"Don't lie to me," she said, calmly. "What were you going to do with
+that onion?"
+
+The young man suppressed a cough and faced her resolutely. His manner
+was that of one who had been bearded sufficiently.
+
+"I was going to eat it," said he, with emphatic slowness; "just as I
+told you before."
+
+"And you have nothing else to eat at home?"
+
+"Not a thing."
+
+"What kind of work do you do?"
+
+"I am not working at anything just now."
+
+"Then why," said Hetty, with her voice set on its sharpest edge, "do you
+lean out of windows and give orders to chauffeurs in green automobiles
+in the street below?"
+
+The young man flushed, and his dull eyes began to sparkle.
+
+"Because, madam," said he, in _accelerando_ tones, "I pay the
+chauffeur's wages and I own the automobile--and also this onion--this
+onion, madam."
+
+He flourished the onion within an inch of Hetty's nose. The shop-lady
+did not retreat a hair's-breadth.
+
+"Then why do you eat onions," she said, with biting contempt, "and
+nothing else?"
+
+"I never said I did," retorted the young man, heatedly. "I said I had
+nothing else to eat where I live. I am not a delicatessen store-keeper."
+
+"Then why," pursued Hetty, inflexibly, "were you going to eat a raw
+onion?"
+
+"My mother," said the young man, "always made me eat one for a cold.
+Pardon my referring to a physical infirmity; but you may have noticed
+that I have a very, very severe cold. I was going to eat the onion and
+go to bed. I wonder why I am standing here and apologizing to you for
+it."
+
+"How did you catch this cold?" went on Hetty, suspiciously.
+
+The young man seemed to have arrived at some extreme height of feeling.
+There were two modes of descent open to him--a burst of rage or a
+surrender to the ridiculous. He chose wisely; and the empty hall echoed
+his hoarse laughter.
+
+"You're a dandy," said he. "And I don't blame you for being careful. I
+don't mind telling you. I got wet. I was on a North River ferry a few
+days ago when a girl jumped overboard. Of course, I--"
+
+Hetty extended her hand, interrupting his story.
+
+"Give me the onion," she said.
+
+The young man set his jaw a trifle harder.
+
+"Give me the onion," she repeated.
+
+He grinned, and laid it in her hand.
+
+Then Hetty's infrequent, grim, melancholy smile showed itself. She took
+the young man's arm and pointed with her other hand to the door of her
+room.
+
+"Little Brother," she said, "go in there. The little fool you fished out
+of the river is there waiting for you. Go on in. I'll give you three
+minutes before I come. Potatoes is in there, waiting. Go on in, Onions."
+
+After he had tapped at the door and entered, Hetty began to peel and
+wash the onion at the sink. She gave a gray look at the gray roofs
+outside, and the smile on her face vanished by little jerks and
+twitches.
+
+"But it's us," she said, grimly, to herself, "it's _us_ that furnished
+the beef."
+
+
+
+
+THE HIDING OF BLACK BILL
+
+
+A lank, strong, red-faced man with a Wellington beak and small, fiery
+eyes tempered by flaxen lashes, sat on the station platform at Los
+Pinos swinging his legs to and fro. At his side sat another man, fat,
+melancholy, and seedy, who seemed to be his friend. They had the
+appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat--seamy
+on both sides.
+
+"Ain't seen you in about four years, Ham," said the seedy man. "Which
+way you been travelling?"
+
+"Texas," said the red-faced man. "It was too cold in Alaska for me.
+And I found it warm in Texas. I'll tell you about one hot spell I went
+through there.
+
+"One morning I steps off the International at a water-tank and lets it
+go on without me. 'Twas a ranch country, and fuller of spite-houses than
+New York City. Only out there they build 'em twenty miles away so you
+can't smell what they've got for dinner, instead of running 'em up two
+inches from their neighbors' windows.
+
+"There wasn't any roads in sight, so I footed it 'cross country. The
+grass was shoe-top deep, and the mesquite timber looked just like a
+peach orchard. It was so much like a gentleman's private estate that
+every minute you expected a kennelful of bulldogs to run out and bite
+you. But I must have walked twenty miles before I came in sight of a
+ranch-house. It was a little one, about as big as an elevated-railroad
+station.
+
+"There was a little man in a white shirt and brown overalls and a pink
+handkerchief around his neck rolling cigarettes under a tree in front
+of the door.
+
+"'Greetings,' says I. 'Any refreshment, welcome, emoluments, or even
+work for a comparative stranger?'
+
+"'Oh, come in,' says he, in a refined tone. 'Sit down on that stool,
+please. I didn't hear your horse coming.'
+
+"'He isn't near enough yet,' says I. 'I walked. I don't want to be
+a burden, but I wonder if you have three or four gallons of water
+handy.'
+
+"'You do look pretty dusty,' says he; 'but our bathing arrangements--'
+
+"'It's a drink I want,' says I. 'Never mind the dust that's on the
+outside.'
+
+"He gets me a dipper of water out of a red jar hanging up, and then
+goes on:
+
+"'Do you want work?'
+
+"'For a time,' says I. 'This is a rather quiet section of the country,
+isn't it?'
+
+"'It is,' says he. 'Sometimes--so I have been told--one sees no human
+being pass for weeks at a time. I've been here only a month. I bought
+the ranch from an old settler who wanted to move farther west.'
+
+"'It suits me,' says I. 'Quiet and retirement are good for a man
+sometimes. And I need a job. I can tend bar, salt mines, lecture, float
+stock, do a little middle-weight slugging, and play the piano.'
+
+"'Can you herd sheep?' asks the little ranchman.
+
+"'Do you mean _have_ I heard sheep?' says I.
+
+"'Can you herd 'em--take charge of a flock of 'em?' says he.
+
+"'Oh,' says I, 'now I understand. You mean chase 'em around and bark at
+'em like collie dogs. Well, I might,' says I. 'I've never exactly done
+any sheep-herding, but I've often seen 'em from car windows masticating
+daisies, and they don't look dangerous.'
+
+"'I'm short a herder,' says the ranchman. 'You never can depend on
+the Mexicans. I've only got two flocks. You may take out my bunch of
+muttons--there are only eight hundred of 'em--in the morning, if you
+like. The pay is twelve dollars a month and your rations furnished. You
+camp in a tent on the prairie with your sheep. You do your own cooking,
+but wood and water are brought to your camp. It's an easy job.'
+
+"'I'm on,' says I. 'I'll take the job even if I have to garland my brow
+and hold on to a crook and wear a loose-effect and play on a pipe like
+the shepherds do in pictures.'
+
+"So the next morning the little ranchman helps me drive the flock of
+muttons from the corral to about two miles out and let 'em graze on a
+little hillside on the prairie. He gives me a lot of instructions about
+not letting bunches of them stray off from the herd, and driving 'em
+down to a water-hole to drink at noon.
+
+"'I'll bring out your tent and camping outfit and rations in the
+buckboard before night,' says he.
+
+"'Fine,' says I. 'And don't forget the rations. Nor the camping outfit.
+And be sure to bring the tent. Your name's Zollicoffer, ain't it?"
+
+"'My name,' says he, 'is Henry Ogden.'
+
+"'All right, Mr. Ogden,' says I. 'Mine is Mr. Percival Saint Clair.'
+
+"I herded sheep for five days on the Rancho Chiquito; and then the wool
+entered my soul. That getting next to Nature certainly got next to me.
+I was lonesomer than Crusoe's goat. I've seen a lot of persons more
+entertaining as companions than those sheep were. I'd drive 'em to the
+corral and pen 'em every evening, and then cook my corn-bread and mutton
+and coffee, and lie down in a tent the size of a table-cloth, and listen
+to the coyotes and whip-poor-wills singing around the camp.
+
+"The fifth evening, after I had corralled my costly but uncongenial
+muttons, I walked over to the ranch-house and stepped in the door.
+
+"'Mr. Ogden,' says I, 'you and me have got to get sociable. Sheep are
+all very well to dot the landscape and furnish eight-dollar cotton
+suitings for man, but for table-talk and fireside companions they rank
+along with five-o'clock teazers. If you've got a deck of cards, or a
+parcheesi outfit, or a game of authors, get 'em out, and let's get on a
+mental basis. I've got to do something in an intellectual line, if it's
+only to knock somebody's brains out.'
+
+"This Henry Ogden was a peculiar kind of ranchman. He wore finger-rings
+and a big gold watch and careful neckties. And his face was calm, and
+his nose-spectacles was kept very shiny. I saw once, in Muscogee, an
+outlaw hung for murdering six men, who was a dead ringer for him. But I
+knew a preacher in Arkansas that you would have taken to be his brother.
+I didn't care much for him either way; what I wanted was some fellowship
+and communion with holy saints or lost sinners--anything sheepless would
+do.
+
+"'Well, Saint Clair,' says he, laying down the book he was reading, 'I
+guess it must be pretty lonesome for you at first. And I don't deny that
+it's monotonous for me. Are you sure you corralled your sheep so they
+won't stray out?'
+
+"'They're shut up as tight as the jury of a millionaire murderer,' says
+I. 'And I'll be back with them long before they'll need their trained
+nurse.'
+
+"So Ogden digs up a deck of cards, and we play casino. After five
+days and nights of my sheep-camp it was like a toot on Broadway. When
+I caught big casino I felt as excited as if I had made a million in
+Trinity. And when H. O. loosened up a little and told the story about
+the lady in the Pullman car I laughed for five minutes.
+
+"That showed what a comparative thing life is. A man may see so much
+that he'd be bored to turn his head to look at a $3,000,000 fire or
+Joe Weber or the Adriatic Sea. But let him herd sheep for a spell, and
+you'll see him splitting his ribs laughing at 'Curfew Shall Not Ring
+To-night,' or really enjoying himself playing cards with ladies.
+
+"By-and-by Ogden gets out a decanter of Bourbon, and then there is a
+total eclipse of sheep.
+
+"'Do you remember reading in the papers, about a month ago,' says he,
+'about a train hold-up on the M. K. & T.? The express agent was shot
+through the shoulder and about $15,000 in currency taken. And it's said
+that only one man did the job.'
+
+"'Seems to me I do,' says I. 'But such things happen so often they don't
+linger long in the human Texas mind. Did they overtake, overhaul, seize,
+or lay hands upon the despoiler?'
+
+"'He escaped,' says Ogden. 'And I was just reading in a paper to-day
+that the officers have tracked him down into this part of the country.
+It seems the bills the robber got were all the first issue of currency
+to the Second National Bank of Espinosa City. And so they've followed
+the trail where they've been spent, and it leads this way.'
+
+"Ogden pours out some more Bourbon, and shoves me the bottle.
+
+"'I imagine,' says I, after ingurgitating another modicum of the royal
+booze, 'that it wouldn't be at all a disingenuous idea for a train
+robber to run down into this part of the country to hide for a spell. A
+sheep-ranch, now,' says I, 'would be the finest kind of a place. Who'd
+ever expect to find such a desperate character among these song-birds
+and muttons and wild flowers? And, by the way,' says I, kind of
+looking H. Ogden over, 'was there any description mentioned of this
+single-handed terror? Was his lineaments or height and thickness or
+teeth fillings or style of habiliments set forth in print?'
+
+"'Why, no,' says Ogden; 'they say nobody got a good sight of him because
+he wore a mask. But they know it was a train-robber called Black Bill,
+because he always works alone and because he dropped a handkerchief in
+the express-car that had his name on it.'
+
+"'All right,' says I. 'I approve of Black Bill's retreat to the
+sheep-ranges. I guess they won't find him.'
+
+"'There's one thousand dollars reward for his capture,' says Ogden.
+
+"'I don't need that kind of money,' says I, looking Mr. Sheepman
+straight in the eye. 'The twelve dollars a month you pay me is enough.
+I need a rest, and I can save up until I get enough to pay my fare to
+Texarkana, where my widowed mother lives. If Black Bill,' I goes on,
+looking significantly at Ogden, 'was to have come down this way--say,
+a month ago--and bought a little sheep-ranch and--'
+
+"'Stop,' says Ogden, getting out of his chair and looking pretty
+vicious. 'Do you mean to insinuate--'
+
+"'Nothing,' says I; 'no insinuations. I'm stating a hypodermical case.
+I say, if Black Bill had come down here and bought a sheep-ranch and
+hired me to Little-Boy-Blue 'em and treated me square and friendly, as
+you've done, he'd never have anything to fear from me. A man is a man,
+regardless of any complications he may have with sheep or railroad
+trains. Now you know where I stand.'
+
+"Ogden looks black as camp-coffee for nine seconds, and then he laughs,
+amused.
+
+"'You'll do, Saint Clair,' says he. 'If I _was_ Black Bill I wouldn't
+be afraid to trust you. Let's have a game or two of seven-up to-night.
+That is, if you don't mind playing with a train-robber.'
+
+"'I've told you,' says I, 'my oral sentiments, and there's no strings
+to 'em.'
+
+"While I was shuffling after the first hand, I asks Ogden, as if the
+idea was a kind of a casualty, where he was from.
+
+"'Oh,' says he, 'from the Mississippi Valley.'
+
+"'That's a nice little place,' says I. 'I've often stopped over there.
+But didn't you find the sheets a little damp and the food poor? Now, I
+hail,' says I, 'from the Pacific Slope. Ever put up there?'
+
+"'Too draughty,' says Ogden. 'But if you're ever in the Middle West just
+mention my name, and you'll get foot-warmers and dripped coffee.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'I wasn't exactly fishing for your private telephone
+number and the middle name of your aunt that carried off the Cumberland
+Presbyterian minister. It don't matter. I just want you to know you are
+safe in the hands of your shepherd. Now, don't play hearts on spades,
+and don't get nervous.'
+
+"'Still harping,' says Ogden, laughing again. 'Don't you suppose that
+if I was Black Bill and thought you suspected me, I'd put a Winchester
+bullet into you and stop my nervousness, if I had any?'
+
+"'Not any,' says I. 'A man who's got the nerve to hold up a train
+single-handed wouldn't do a trick like that. I've knocked about enough
+to know that them are the kind of men who put a value on a friend. Not
+that I can claim being a friend of yours, Mr. Ogden,' says I, 'being
+only your sheep-herder; but under more expeditious circumstances we
+might have been.'
+
+"'Forget the sheep temporarily, I beg,' says Ogden, 'and cut for deal.'
+
+"About four days afterward, while my muttons was nooning on the
+water-hole and I deep in the interstices of making a pot of coffee, up
+rides softly on the grass a mysterious person in the garb of the being
+he wished to represent. He was dressed somewhere between a Kansas City
+detective, Buffalo Bill, and the town dog-catcher of Baton Rouge. His
+chin and eye wasn't molded on fighting lines, so I knew he was only a
+scout.
+
+"'Herdin' sheep?' he asks me.
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'to a man of your evident gumptional endowments, I
+wouldn't have the nerve to state that I am engaged in decorating old
+bronzes or oiling bicycle sprockets.'
+
+"'You don't talk or look like a sheep-herder to me,' says he.
+
+"'But you talk like what you look like to me,' says I.
+
+"And then he asks me who I was working for, and I shows him Rancho
+Chiquito, two miles away, in the shadow of a low hill, and he tells
+me he's a deputy sheriff.
+
+"'There's a train-robber called Black Bill supposed to be somewhere in
+these parts,' says the scout. 'He's been traced as far as San Antonio,
+and maybe farther. Have you seen or heard of any strangers around here
+during the past month?'
+
+"'I have not,' says I, 'except a report of one over at the Mexican
+quarters of Loomis' ranch, on the Frio.'
+
+"'What do you know about him?' asks the deputy.
+
+"'He's three days old,' says I.
+
+"'What kind of a looking man is the man you work for?' he asks. 'Does
+old George Ramey own this place yet? He's run sheep here for the last
+ten years, but never had no success.'
+
+"'The old man has sold out and gone West,' I tells him. 'Another
+sheep-fancier bought him out about a month ago.'
+
+"'What kind of a looking man is he?' asks the deputy again.
+
+"'Oh,' says I, 'a big, fat kind of a Dutchman with long whiskers and
+blue specs. I don't think he knows a sheep from a ground-squirrel. I
+guess old George soaked him pretty well on the deal,' says I.
+
+"After indulging himself in a lot more non-communicative information
+and two-thirds of my dinner, the deputy rides away.
+
+"That night I mentions the matter to Ogden.
+
+"'They're drawing the tendrils of the octopus around Black Bill,' says
+I. And then I told him about the deputy sheriff, and how I'd described
+him to the deputy, and what the deputy said about the matter.
+
+"'Oh, well,' says Ogden, 'let's don't borrow any of Black Bill's
+troubles. We've a few of our own. Get the Bourbon out of the cupboard
+and we'll drink to his health--unless,' says he, with his little
+cackling laugh, 'you're prejudiced against train-robbers.'
+
+"'I'll drink,' says I, 'to any man who's a friend to a friend. And I
+believe that Black Bill,' I goes on, 'would be that. So here's to Black
+Bill, and may he have good luck.'
+
+"And both of us drank.
+
+"About two weeks later comes shearing-time. The sheep had to be driven
+up to the ranch, and a lot of frowzy-headed Mexicans would snip the
+fur off of them with back-action scissors. So the afternoon before the
+barbers were to come I hustled my underdone muttons over the hill,
+across the dell, down by the winding brook, and up to the ranch-house,
+where I penned 'em in a corral and bade 'em my nightly adieus.
+
+"I went from there to the ranch-house. I find H. Ogden, Esquire,
+lying asleep on his little cot bed. I guess he had been overcome by
+anti-insomnia or diswakefulness or some of the diseases peculiar to the
+sheep business. His mouth and vest were open, and he breathed like a
+second-hand bicycle pump. I looked at him and gave vent to just a few
+musings. 'Imperial Caesar,' says I, 'asleep in such a way, might shut
+his mouth and keep the wind away.'
+
+"A man asleep is certainly a sight to make angels weep. What good is all
+his brain, muscle, backing, nerve, influence, and family connections?
+He's at the mercy of his enemies, and more so of his friends. And he's
+about as beautiful as a cab-horse leaning against the Metropolitan Opera
+House at 12.30 A.M. dreaming of the plains of Arabia. Now, a woman
+asleep you regard as different. No matter how she looks, you know it's
+better for all hands for her to be that way.
+
+"Well, I took a drink of Bourbon and one for Ogden, and started in to
+be comfortable while he was taking his nap. He had some books on his
+table on indigenous subjects, such as Japan and drainage and physical
+culture--and some tobacco, which seemed more to the point.
+
+"After I'd smoked a few, and listened to the sartorial breathing of H.
+O., I happened to look out the window toward the shearing-pens, where
+there was a kind of a road coming up from a kind of a road across a
+kind of a creek farther away.
+
+"I saw five men riding up to the house. All of 'em carried guns across
+their saddles, and among 'em was the deputy that had talked to me at my
+camp.
+
+"They rode up careful, in open formation, with their guns ready. I set
+apart with my eye the one I opinionated to be the boss muck-raker of
+this law-and-order cavalry.
+
+"'Good-evening, gents,' says I. 'Won't you 'light, and tie your horses?'
+
+"The boss rides up close, and swings his gun over till the opening in
+it seems to cover my whole front elevation.
+
+"'Don't you move your hands none,' says he, 'till you and me indulge in
+a adequate amount of necessary conversation.'
+
+"'I will not,' says I. 'I am no deaf-mute, and therefore will not have
+to disobey your injunctions in replying.'
+
+"'We are on the lookout,' says he, 'for Black Bill, the man that held up
+the Katy for $15,000 in May. We are searching the ranches and everybody
+on 'em. What is your name, and what do you do on this ranch?'
+
+"'Captain,' says I, 'Percival Saint Clair is my occupation, and my name
+is sheep-herder. I've got my flock of veals--no, muttons--penned here
+to-night. The shearers are coming to-morrow to give them a haircut--with
+baa-a-rum, I suppose.'
+
+"'Where's the boss of this ranch?' the captain of the gang asks me.
+
+"'Wait just a minute, cap'n,' says I. 'Wasn't there a kind of a reward
+offered for the capture of this desperate character you have referred
+to in your preamble?'
+
+"'There's a thousand dollars reward offered,' says the captain, 'but
+it's for his capture and conviction. There don't seem to be no provision
+made for an informer.'
+
+"'It looks like it might rain in a day or so,' says I, in a tired way,
+looking up at the cerulean blue sky.
+
+"'If you know anything about the locality, disposition, or secretiveness
+of this here Black Bill,' says he, in a severe dialect, 'you are amiable
+to the law in not reporting it.'
+
+"'I heard a fence-rider say,' says I, in a desultory kind of voice,
+'that a Mexican told a cowboy named Jake over at Pidgin's store on the
+Nueces that he heard that Black Bill had been seen in Matamoras by a
+sheepman's cousin two weeks ago.'
+
+"'Tell you what I'll do, Tight Mouth,' says the captain, after looking
+me over for bargains. 'If you put us on so we can scoop Black Bill, I'll
+pay you a hundred dollars out of my own--out of our own--pockets. That's
+liberal,' says he. 'You ain't entitled to anything. Now, what do you
+say?'
+
+"'Cash down now?' I asks.
+
+"The captain has a sort of discussion with his helpmates, and they all
+produce the contents of their pockets for analysis. Out of the general
+results they figured up $102.30 in cash and $31 worth of plug tobacco.
+
+"'Come nearer, capitan meeo,' says I, 'and listen.' He so did.
+
+"'I am mighty poor and low down in the world,' says I. 'I am working for
+twelve dollars a month trying to keep a lot of animals together whose
+only thought seems to be to get asunder. Although,' says I, 'I regard
+myself as some better than the State of South Dakota, it's a come-down
+to a man who has heretofore regarded sheep only in the form of chops.
+I'm pretty far reduced in the world on account of foiled ambitions and
+rum and a kind of cocktail they make along the P. R. R. all the way from
+Scranton to Cincinnati--dry gin, French vermouth, one squeeze of a lime,
+and a good dash of orange bitters. If you're ever up that way, don't
+fail to let one try you. And, again,' says I, 'I have never yet went
+back on a friend. I've stayed by 'em when they had plenty, and when
+adversity's overtaken me I've never forsook 'em.
+
+"'But,' I goes on, 'this is not exactly the case of a friend. Twelve
+dollars a month is only bowing-acquaintance money. And I do not consider
+brown beans and corn-bread the food of friendship. I am a poor man,'
+says I, 'and I have a widowed mother in Texarkana. You will find Black
+Bill,' says I, 'lying asleep in this house on a cot in the room to your
+right. He's the man you want, as I know from his words and conversation.
+He was in a way a friend,' I explains, 'and if I was the man I once was
+the entire product of the mines of Gondola would not have tempted me to
+betray him. But,' says I, 'every week half of the beans was wormy, and
+not nigh enough wood in camp.
+
+"'Better go in careful, gentlemen,' says I. 'He seems impatient at
+times, and when you think of his late professional pursuits one would
+look for abrupt actions if he was come upon sudden.'
+
+"So the whole posse unmounts and ties their horses, and unlimbers their
+ammunition and equipments, and tiptoes into the house. And I follows,
+like Delilah when she set the Philip Steins on to Samson.
+
+"The leader of the posse shakes Ogden and wakes him up. And then he
+jumps up, and two more of the reward-hunters grab him. Ogden was mighty
+tough with all his slimness, and he gives 'em as neat a single-footed
+tussle against odds as I ever see.
+
+"'What does this mean?' he says, after they had him down.
+
+"'You're scooped in, Mr. Black Bill,' says the captain. 'That's all.'
+
+"'It's an outrage,' says H. Ogden, madder yet.
+
+"'It was,' says the peace-and-good-will man. 'The Katy wasn't bothering
+you, and there's a law against monkeying with express packages.'
+
+"And he sits on H. Ogden's stomach and goes through his pockets
+symptomatically and careful.
+
+"'I'll make you perspire for this,' says Ogden, perspiring some himself.
+'I can prove who I am.'
+
+"'So can I,' says the captain, as he draws from H. Ogden's inside
+coat-pocket a handful of new bills of the Second National Bank
+of Espinosa City. 'Your regular engraved Tuesdays-and-Fridays
+visiting-card wouldn't have a louder voice in proclaiming your indemnity
+than this here currency. You can get up now and prepare to go with us
+and expatriate your sins.'
+
+"H. Ogden gets up and fixes his necktie. He says no more after they
+have taken the money off of him.
+
+"'A well-greased idea,' says the sheriff captain, admiring, 'to slip off
+down here and buy a little sheep-ranch where the hand of man is seldom
+heard. It was the slickest hide-out I ever see,' says the captain.
+
+"So one of the men goes to the shearing-pen and hunts up the other
+herder, a Mexican they call John Sallies, and he saddles Ogden's horse,
+and the sheriffs all ride up close around him with their guns in hand,
+ready to take their prisoner to town.
+
+"Before starting, Ogden puts the ranch in John Sallies' hands and gives
+him orders about the shearing and where to graze the sheep, just as if
+he intended to be back in a few days. And a couple of hours afterward
+one Percival Saint Clair, an ex-sheep-herder of the Rancho Chiquito,
+might have been seen, with a hundred and nine dollars--wages and
+blood-money--in his pocket, riding south on another horse belonging to
+said ranch."
+
+The red-faced man paused and listened. The whistle of a coming
+freight-train sounded far away among the low hills.
+
+The fat, seedy man at his side sniffed, and shook his frowzy head slowly
+and disparagingly.
+
+"What is it, Snipy?" asked the other. "Got the blues again?"
+
+"No, I ain't" said the seedy one, sniffing again. "But I don't like your
+talk. You and me have been friends, off and on, for fifteen year; and I
+never yet knew or heard of you giving anybody up to the law--not no one.
+And here was a man whose saleratus you had et and at whose table you had
+played games of cards--if casino can be so called. And yet you inform
+him to the law and take money for it. It never was like you, I say."
+
+"This H. Ogden," resumed the red-faced man, "through a lawyer, proved
+himself free by alibis and other legal terminalities, as I so heard
+afterward. He never suffered no harm. He did me favors, and I hated to
+hand him over."
+
+"How about the bills they found in his pocket?" asked the seedy man.
+
+"I put 'em there," said the red-faced man, "while he was asleep, when I
+saw the posse riding up. I was Black Bill. Look out, Snipy, here she
+comes! We'll board her on the bumpers when she takes water at the tank."
+
+
+
+
+SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLS
+
+
+I
+
+
+Old Jerome Warren lived in a hundred-thousand-dollar house at 35 East
+Fifty-Soforth Street. He was a downtown broker, so rich that he could
+afford to walk--for his health--a few blocks in the direction of his
+office every morning, and then call a cab.
+
+He had an adopted son, the son of an old friend named Gilbert--Cyril
+Scott could play him nicely--who was becoming a successful painter as
+fast as he could squeeze the paint out of his tubes. Another member of
+the household was Barbara Ross, a step-niece. Man is born to trouble;
+so, as old Jerome had no family of his own, he took up the burdens of
+others.
+
+Gilbert and Barbara got along swimmingly. There was a tacit and tactical
+understanding all round that the two would stand up under a floral bell
+some high noon, and promise the minister to keep old Jerome's money
+in a state of high commotion. But at this point complications must be
+introduced.
+
+Thirty years before, when old Jerome was young Jerome, there was a
+brother of his named Dick. Dick went West to seek his or somebody else's
+fortune. Nothing was heard of him until one day old Jerome had a letter
+from his brother. It was badly written on ruled paper that smelled
+of salt bacon and coffee-grounds. The writing was asthmatic and the
+spelling St. Vitusy.
+
+It appeared that instead of Dick having forced Fortune to stand and
+deliver, he had been held up himself, and made to give hostages to the
+enemy. That is, as his letter disclosed, he was on the point of pegging
+out with a complication of disorders that even whiskey had failed to
+check. All that his thirty years of prospecting had netted him was one
+daughter, nineteen years old, as per invoice, whom he was shipping East,
+charges prepaid, for Jerome to clothe, feed, educate, comfort, and
+cherish for the rest of her natural life or until matrimony should them
+part.
+
+Old Jerome was a board-walk. Everybody knows that the world is supported
+by the shoulders of Atlas; and that Atlas stands on a rail-fence; and
+that the rail-fence is built on a turtle's back. Now, the turtle has
+to stand on something; and that is a board-walk made of men like old
+Jerome.
+
+I do not know whether immortality shall accrue to man; but if not so,
+I would like to know when men like old Jerome get what is due them?
+
+They met Nevada Warren at the station. She was a little girl, deeply
+sunburned and wholesomely good-looking, with a manner that was frankly
+unsophisticated, yet one that not even a cigar-drummer would intrude
+upon without thinking twice. Looking at her, somehow you would expect
+to see her in a short skirt and leather leggings, shooting glass balls
+or taming mustangs. But in her plain white waist and black skirt she
+sent you guessing again. With an easy exhibition of strength she swung
+along a heavy valise, which the uniformed porters tried in vain to wrest
+from her.
+
+"I am sure we shall be the best of friends," said Barbara, pecking at
+the firm, sunburned cheek.
+
+"I hope so," said Nevada.
+
+"Dear little niece," said old Jerome, "you are as welcome to my home as
+if it were your father's own."
+
+"Thanks," said Nevada.
+
+"And I am going to call you 'cousin,'" said Gilbert, with his charming
+smile.
+
+"Take the valise, please," said Nevada. "It weighs a million pounds.
+It's got samples from six of dad's old mines in it," she explained to
+Barbara. "I calculate they'd assay about nine cents to the thousand
+tons, but I promised him to bring them along."
+
+
+II
+
+
+It is a common custom to refer to the usual complication between one
+man and two ladies, or one lady and two men, or a lady and a man and
+a nobleman, or--well, any of those problems--as the triangle. But
+they are never unqualified triangles. They are always isosceles--never
+equilateral. So, upon the coming of Nevada Warren, she and Gilbert and
+Barbara Ross lined up into such a figurative triangle; and of that
+triangle Barbara formed the hypotenuse.
+
+One morning old Jerome was lingering long after breakfast over the
+dullest morning paper in the city before setting forth to his down-town
+fly-trap. He had become quite fond of Nevada, finding in her much of
+his dead brother's quiet independence and unsuspicious frankness.
+
+A maid brought in a note for Miss Nevada Warren.
+
+"A messenger-boy delivered it at the door, please," she said. "He's
+waiting for an answer."
+
+Nevada, who was whistling a Spanish waltz between her teeth, and
+watching the carriages and autos roll by in the street, took the
+envelope. She knew it was from Gilbert, before she opened it, by the
+little gold palette in the upper left-hand corner.
+
+After tearing it open she pored over the contents for a while,
+absorbedly. Then, with a serious face, she went and stood at her uncle's
+elbow.
+
+"Uncle Jerome, Gilbert is a nice boy, isn't he?"
+
+"Why, bless the child!" said old Jerome, crackling his paper loudly; "of
+course he is. I raised him myself."
+
+"He wouldn't write anything to anybody that wasn't exactly--I mean that
+everybody couldn't know and read, would he?"
+
+"I'd just like to see him try it," said uncle, tearing a handful from
+his newspaper. "Why, what--"
+
+"Read this note he just sent me, uncle, and see if you think it's all
+right and proper. You see, I don't know much about city people and their
+ways."
+
+Old Jerome threw his paper down and set both his feet upon it. He took
+Gilbert's note and fiercely perused it twice, and then a third time.
+
+"Why, child," said he, "you had me almost excited, although I was sure
+of that boy. He's a duplicate of his father, and he was a gilt-edged
+diamond. He only asks if you and Barbara will be ready at four o'clock
+this afternoon for an automobile drive over to Long Island. I don't see
+anything to criticise in it except the stationery. I always did hate
+that shade of blue."
+
+"Would it be all right to go?" asked Nevada, eagerly.
+
+"Yes, yes, yes, child; of course. Why not? Still, it pleases me to see
+you so careful and candid. Go, by all means."
+
+"I didn't know," said Nevada, demurely. "I thought I'd ask you. Couldn't
+you go with us, uncle?"
+
+"I? No, no, no, no! I've ridden once in a car that boy was driving.
+Never again! But it's entirely proper for you and Barbara to go. Yes,
+yes. But I will not. No, no, no, no!"
+
+Nevada flew to the door, and said to the maid:
+
+"You bet we'll go. I'll answer for Miss Barbara. Tell the boy to say
+to Mr. Warren, 'You bet we'll go.'"
+
+"Nevada," called old Jerome, "pardon me, my dear, but wouldn't it be
+as well to send him a note in reply? Just a line would do."
+
+"No, I won't bother about that," said Nevada, gayly. "Gilbert will
+understand--he always does. I never rode in an automobile in my life;
+but I've paddled a canoe down Little Devil River through the Lost Horse
+Canon, and if it's any livelier than that I'd like to know!"
+
+
+III
+
+
+Two months are supposed to have elapsed.
+
+Barbara sat in the study of the hundred-thousand-dollar house. It was a
+good place for her. Many places are provided in the world where men and
+women may repair for the purpose of extricating themselves from divers
+difficulties. There are cloisters, wailing-places, watering-places,
+confessionals, hermitages, lawyer's offices, beauty parlors, air-ships,
+and studies; and the greatest of these are studies.
+
+It usually takes a hypotenuse a long time to discover that it is the
+longest side of a triangle. But it's a long line that has no turning.
+
+Barbara was alone. Uncle Jerome and Nevada had gone to the theatre.
+Barbara had not cared to go. She wanted to stay at home and study in
+the study. If you, miss, were a stunning New York girl, and saw every
+day that a brown, ingenuous Western witch was getting hobbles and a
+lasso on the young man you wanted for yourself, you, too, would lose
+taste for the oxidized-silver setting of a musical comedy.
+
+Barbara sat by the quartered-oak library table. Her right arm rested
+upon the table, and her dextral fingers nervously manipulated a sealed
+letter. The letter was addressed to Nevada Warren; and in the upper
+left-hand corner of the envelope was Gilbert's little gold palette.
+It had been delivered at nine o'clock, after Nevada had left.
+
+Barbara would have given her pearl necklace to know what the letter
+contained; but she could not open and read it by the aid of steam, or
+a pen-handle, or a hair-pin, or any of the generally approved methods,
+because her position in society forbade such an act. She had tried to
+read some of the lines of the letter by holding the envelope up to a
+strong light and pressing it hard against the paper, but Gilbert had
+too good a taste in stationery to make that possible.
+
+At eleven-thirty the theatre-goers returned. It was a delicious winter
+night. Even so far as from the cab to the door they were powdered
+thickly with the big flakes downpouring diagonally from the east. Old
+Jerome growled good-naturedly about villainous cab service and blockaded
+streets. Nevada, colored like a rose, with sapphire eyes, babbled of
+the stormy nights in the mountains around dad's cabin. During all
+these wintry apostrophes, Barbara, cold at heart, sawed wood--the only
+appropriate thing she could think of to do.
+
+Old Jerome went immediately up-stairs to hot-water-bottles and quinine.
+Nevada fluttered into the study, the only cheerfully lighted room,
+subsided into an arm-chair, and, while at the interminable task of
+unbuttoning her elbow gloves, gave oral testimony as to the demerits
+of the "show."
+
+"Yes, I think Mr. Fields is really amusing--sometimes," said Barbara.
+"Here is a letter for you, dear, that came by special delivery just
+after you had gone."
+
+"Who is it from?" asked Nevada, tugging at a button.
+
+"Well, really," said Barbara, with a smile, "I can only guess. The
+envelope has that queer little thing in one corner that Gilbert
+calls a palette, but which looks to me rather like a gilt heart on a
+school-girl's valentine."
+
+"I wonder what he's writing to me about" remarked Nevada, listlessly.
+
+"We're all alike," said Barbara; "all women. We try to find out what is
+in a letter by studying the postmark. As a last resort we use scissors,
+and read it from the bottom upward. Here it is."
+
+She made a motion as if to toss the letter across the table to Nevada.
+
+"Great catamounts!" exclaimed Nevada. "These centre-fire buttons are a
+nuisance. I'd rather wear buckskins. Oh, Barbara, please shuck the hide
+off that letter and read it. It'll be midnight before I get these gloves
+off!"
+
+"Why, dear, you don't want me to open Gilbert's letter to you? It's for
+you, and you wouldn't wish any one else to read it, of course!"
+
+Nevada raised her steady, calm, sapphire eyes from her gloves.
+
+"Nobody writes me anything that everybody mightn't read," she said.
+"Go on, Barbara. Maybe Gilbert wants us to go out in his car again
+to-morrow."
+
+Curiosity can do more things than kill a cat; and if emotions, well
+recognized as feminine, are inimical to feline life, then jealousy would
+soon leave the whole world catless. Barbara opened the letter, with an
+indulgent, slightly bored air.
+
+"Well, dear," said she, "I'll read it if you want me to."
+
+She slit the envelope, and read the missive with swift-travelling eyes;
+read it again, and cast a quick, shrewd glance at Nevada, who, for
+the time, seemed to consider gloves as the world of her interest, and
+letters from rising artists as no more than messages from Mars.
+
+For a quarter of a minute Barbara looked at Nevada with a strange
+steadfastness; and then a smile so small that it widened her mouth only
+the sixteenth part of an inch, and narrowed her eyes no more than a
+twentieth, flashed like an inspired thought across her face.
+
+Since the beginning no woman has been a mystery to another woman. Swift
+as light travels, each penetrates the heart and mind of another, sifts
+her sister's words of their cunningest disguises, reads her most hidden
+desires, and plucks the sophistry from her wiliest talk like hairs from
+a comb, twiddling them sardonically between her thumb and fingers before
+letting them float away on the breezes of fundamental doubt. Long ago
+Eve's son rang the door-bell of the family residence in Paradise Park,
+bearing a strange lady on his arm, whom he introduced. Eve took her
+daughter-in-law aside and lifted a classic eyebrow.
+
+"The Land of Nod," said the bride, languidly flirting the leaf of a
+palm. "I suppose you've been there, of course?"
+
+"Not lately," said Eve, absolutely unstaggered. "Don't you think the
+apple-sauce they serve over there is execrable? I rather like that
+mulberry-leaf tunic effect, dear; but, of course, the real fig goods
+are not to be had over there. Come over behind this lilac-bush while
+the gentlemen split a celery tonic. I think the caterpillar-holes have
+made your dress open a little in the back."
+
+So, then and there--according to the records--was the alliance formed
+by the only two who's-who ladies in the world. Then it was agreed that
+woman should forever remain as clear as a pane of glass--though glass
+was yet to be discovered--to other women, and that she should palm
+herself off on man as a mystery.
+
+Barbara seemed to hesitate.
+
+"Really, Nevada," she said, with a little show of embarrassment, "you
+shouldn't have insisted on my opening this. I--I'm sure it wasn't meant
+for any one else to know."
+
+Nevada forgot her gloves for a moment.
+
+"Then read it aloud," she said. "Since you've already read it, what's
+the difference? If Mr. Warren has written to me something that any one
+else oughtn't to know, that is all the more reason why everybody should
+know it."
+
+"Well," said Barbara, "this is what it says: 'Dearest Nevada--Come to
+my studio at twelve o'clock to-night. Do not fail.'" Barbara rose and
+dropped the note in Nevada's lap. "I'm awfully sorry," she said, "that
+I knew. It isn't like Gilbert. There must be some mistake. Just consider
+that I am ignorant of it, will you, dear? I must go up-stairs now, I
+have such a headache. I'm sure I don't understand the note. Perhaps
+Gilbert has been dining too well, and will explain. Good night!"
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Nevada tiptoed to the hall, and heard Barbara's door close upstairs.
+The bronze clock in the study told the hour of twelve was fifteen
+minutes away. She ran swiftly to the front door, and let herself out
+into the snow-storm. Gilbert Warren's studio was six squares away.
+
+By aerial ferry the white, silent forces of the storm attacked the city
+from beyond the sullen East River. Already the snow lay a foot deep
+on the pavements, the drifts heaping themselves like scaling-ladders
+against the walls of the besieged town. The Avenue was as quiet as a
+street in Pompeii. Cabs now and then skimmed past like white-winged
+gulls over a moonlit ocean; and less frequent motor-cars--sustaining the
+comparison--hissed through the foaming waves like submarine boats on
+their jocund, perilous journeys.
+
+Nevada plunged like a wind-driven storm-petrel on her way. She looked
+up at the ragged sierras of cloud-capped buildings that rose above the
+streets, shaded by the night lights and the congealed vapors to gray,
+drab, ashen, lavender, dun, and cerulean tints. They were so like the
+wintry mountains of her Western home that she felt a satisfaction such
+as the hundred-thousand-dollar house had seldom brought her.
+
+A policeman caused her to waver on a corner, just by his eye and weight.
+
+"Hello, Mabel!" said he. "Kind of late for you to be out, ain't it?"
+
+"I--I am just going to the drug store," said Nevada, hurrying past him.
+
+The excuse serves as a passport for the most sophisticated. Does it
+prove that woman never progresses, or that she sprang from Adam's rib,
+full-fledged in intellect and wiles?
+
+Turning eastward, the direct blast cut down Nevada's speed one-half. She
+made zigzag tracks in the snow; but she was as tough as a pinon sapling,
+and bowed to it as gracefully. Suddenly the studio-building loomed
+before her, a familiar landmark, like a cliff above some well-remembered
+canon. The haunt of business and its hostile neighbor, art, was darkened
+and silent. The elevator stopped at ten.
+
+Up eight flights of Stygian stairs Nevada climbed, and rapped firmly
+at the door numbered "89." She had been there many times before, with
+Barbara and Uncle Jerome.
+
+Gilbert opened the door. He had a crayon pencil in one hand, a green
+shade over his eyes, and a pipe in his mouth. The pipe dropped to the
+floor.
+
+"Am I late?" asked Nevada. "I came as quick as I could. Uncle and me
+were at the theatre this evening. Here I am, Gilbert!"
+
+Gilbert did a Pygmalion-and-Galatea act. He changed from a statue of
+stupefaction to a young man with a problem to tackle. He admitted
+Nevada, got a whisk-broom, and began to brush the snow from her clothes.
+A great lamp, with a green shade, hung over an easel, where the artist
+had been sketching in crayon.
+
+"You wanted me," said Nevada simply, "and I came. You said so in your
+letter. What did you send for me for?"
+
+"You read my letter?" inquired Gilbert, sparring for wind.
+
+"Barbara read it to me. I saw it afterward. It said: 'Come to my studio
+at twelve to-night, and do not fail.' I thought you were sick, of
+course, but you don't seem to be."
+
+"Aha!" said Gilbert irrelevantly. "I'll tell you why I asked you to
+come, Nevada. I want you to marry me immediately--to-night. What's a
+little snow-storm? Will you do it?"
+
+"You might have noticed that I would, long ago," said Nevada. "And I'm
+rather stuck on the snow-storm idea, myself. I surely would hate one of
+these flowery church noon-weddings. Gilbert, I didn't know you had grit
+enough to propose it this way. Let's shock 'em--it's our funeral, ain't
+it?"
+
+"You bet!" said Gilbert. "Where did I hear that expression?" he added
+to himself. "Wait a minute, Nevada; I want to do a little 'phoning."
+
+He shut himself in a little dressing-room, and called upon the
+lightnings of the heavens--condensed into unromantic numbers and
+districts.
+
+"That you, Jack? You confounded sleepyhead! Yes, wake up; this is me--or
+I--oh, bother the difference in grammar! I'm going to be married right
+away. Yes! Wake up your sister--don't answer me back; bring her along,
+too--you _must_! Remind Agnes of the time I saved her from drowning in
+Lake Ronkonkoma--I know it's caddish to refer to it, but she must come
+with you. Yes. Nevada is here, waiting. We've been engaged quite a
+while. Some opposition among the relatives, you know, and we have to
+pull it off this way. We're waiting here for you. Don't let Agnes
+out-talk you--bring her! You will? Good old boy! I'll order a carriage
+to call for you, double-quick time. Confound you, Jack, you're all
+right!"
+
+Gilbert returned to the room where Nevada waited.
+
+"My old friend, Jack Peyton, and his sister were to have been here at
+a quarter to twelve," he explained; "but Jack is so confoundedly slow.
+I've just 'phoned them to hurry. They'll be here in a few minutes. I'm
+the happiest man in the world, Nevada! What did you do with the letter
+I sent you to-day?"
+
+"I've got it cinched here," said Nevada, pulling it out from beneath
+her opera-cloak.
+
+Gilbert drew the letter from the envelope and looked it over carefully.
+Then he looked at Nevada thoughtfully.
+
+"Didn't you think it rather queer that I should ask you to come to my
+studio at midnight?" he asked.
+
+"Why, no," said Nevada, rounding her eyes. "Not if you needed me.
+Out West, when a pal sends you a hurry call--ain't that what you say
+here?--we get there first and talk about it after the row is over. And
+it's usually snowing there, too, when things happen. So I didn't mind."
+
+Gilbert rushed into another room, and came back burdened with overcoats
+warranted to turn wind, rain, or snow.
+
+"Put this raincoat on," he said, holding it for her. "We have a quarter
+of a mile to go. Old Jack and his sister will be here in a few minutes."
+He began to struggle into a heavy coat. "Oh, Nevada," he said, "just
+look at the headlines on the front page of that evening paper on the
+table, will you? It's about your section of the West, and I know it will
+interest you."
+
+He waited a full minute, pretending to find trouble in the getting on of
+his overcoat, and then turned. Nevada had not moved. She was looking at
+him with strange and pensive directness. Her cheeks had a flush on them
+beyond the color that had been contributed by the wind and snow; but her
+eyes were steady.
+
+"I was going to tell you," she said, "anyhow, before you--before
+we--before--well, before anything. Dad never gave me a day of schooling.
+I never learned to read or write a darned word. Now if--"
+
+Pounding their uncertain way up-stairs, the feet of Jack, the somnolent,
+and Agnes, the grateful, were heard.
+
+
+V
+
+
+When Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Warren were spinning softly homeward in a
+closed carriage, after the ceremony, Gilbert said:
+
+"Nevada, would you really like to know what I wrote you in the letter
+that you received to-night?"
+
+"Fire away!" said his bride.
+
+"Word for word," said Gilbert, "it was this: 'My dear Miss Warren--You
+were right about the flower. It was a hydrangea, and not a lilac.'"
+
+"All right," said Nevada. "But let's forget it. The joke's on Barbara,
+anyway!"
+
+
+
+
+THIMBLE, THIMBLE
+
+
+These are the directions for finding the office of Carteret & Carteret,
+Mill Supplies and Leather Belting:
+
+You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line,
+the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Canons of the
+Moneygrubber Tribe. Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a
+push-cart and the tongue of a two-ton four-horse dray and hop, skip,
+and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one-story synthetic
+mountain of stone and iron. In the twelfth story is the office of
+Carteret & Carteret. The factory where they make the mill supplies and
+leather belting is in Brooklyn. Those commodities--to say nothing of
+Brooklyn--not being of interest to you, let us hold the incidents within
+the confines of a one-act, one-scene play, thereby lessening the toil
+of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher. So, if you have the
+courage to face four pages of type and Carteret & Carteret's office boy,
+Percival, you shall sit on a varnished chair in the inner office and
+peep at the little comedy of the Old Nigger Man, the Hunting-Case Watch,
+and the Open-Faced Question--mostly borrowed from the late Mr. Frank
+Stockton, as you will conclude.
+
+First, biography (but pared to the quick) must intervene. I am for the
+inverted sugar-coated quinine pill--the bitter on the outside.
+
+The Carterets were, or was (Columbia College professors please rule), an
+old Virginia family. Long time ago the gentlemen of the family had worn
+lace ruffles and carried tinless foils and owned plantations and had
+slaves to burn. But the war had greatly reduced their holdings. (Of
+course you can perceive at once that this flavor has been shoplifted
+from Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, in spite of the "et" after "Carter.") Well,
+anyhow:
+
+In digging up the Carteret history I shall not take you farther back
+than the year 1620. The two original American Carterets came over in
+that year, but by different means of transportation. One brother, named
+John, came in the _Mayflower_ and became a Pilgrim Father. You've seen his
+picture on the covers of the Thanksgiving magazines, hunting turkeys in
+the deep snow with a blunderbuss. Blandford Carteret, the other brother,
+crossed the pond in his own brigantine, landed on the Virginia coast,
+and became an F.F.V. John became distinguished for piety and shrewdness
+in business; Blandford for his pride, juleps; marksmanship, and vast
+slave-cultivated plantations.
+
+Then came the Civil War. (I must condense this historical
+interpolation.) Stonewall Jackson was shot; Lee surrendered; Grant
+toured the world; cotton went to nine cents; Old Crow whiskey and Jim
+Crow cars were invented; the Seventy-ninth Massachusetts Volunteers
+returned to the Ninety-seventh Alabama Zouaves the battle flag of
+Lundy's Lane which they bought at a second-hand store in Chelsea, kept
+by a man named Skzchnzski; Georgia sent the President a sixty-pound
+watermelon--and that brings us up to the time when the story begins.
+My! but that was sparring for an opening! I really must brush op on my
+Aristotle.
+
+The Yankee Carterets went into business in New York long before the war.
+Their house, as far as Leather Belting and Mill Supplies was concerned,
+was as musty and arrogant and solid as one of those old East India
+tea-importing concerns that you read about in Dickens. There were some
+rumors of a war behind its counters, but not enough to affect the
+business.
+
+During and after the war, Blandford Carteret, F.F.V., lost his
+plantations, juleps, marksmanship, and life. He bequeathed little
+more than his pride to his surviving family. So it came to pass that
+Blandford Carteret, the Fifth, aged fifteen, was invited by the
+leather-and-mill-supplies branch of that name to come North and learn
+business instead of hunting foxes and boasting of the glory of his
+fathers on the reduced acres of his impoverished family. The boy jumped
+at the chance; and, at the age of twenty-five, sat in the office of the
+firm equal partner with John, the Fifth, of the blunderbuss-and-turkey
+branch. Here the story begins again.
+
+The young men were about the same age, smooth of face, alert, easy of
+manner, and with an air that promised mental and physical quickness.
+They were razored, blue-serged, straw-hatted, and pearl stick-pinned
+like other young New Yorkers who might be millionaires or bill clerks.
+
+One afternoon at four o'clock, in the private office of the firm,
+Blandford Carteret opened a letter that a clerk had just brought to his
+desk. After reading it, he chuckled audibly for nearly a minute. John
+looked around from his desk inquiringly.
+
+"It's from mother," said Blandford. "I'll read you the funny part of
+it. She tells me all the neighborhood news first, of course, and then
+cautions me against getting my feet wet and musical comedies. After that
+come vital statistics about calves and pigs and an estimate of the wheat
+crop. And now I'll quote some:
+
+"'And what do you think! Old Uncle Jake, who was seventy-six last
+Wednesday, must go travelling. Nothing would do but he must go to New
+York and see his "young Marster Blandford." Old as he is, he has a deal
+of common sense, so I've let him go. I couldn't refuse him--he seemed to
+have concentrated all his hopes and desires into this one adventure into
+the wide world. You know he was born on the plantation, and has never
+been ten miles away from it in his life. And he was your father's body
+servant during the war, and has been always a faithful vassal and
+servant of the family. He has often seen the gold watch--the watch that
+was your father's and your father's father's. I told him it was to be
+yours, And he begged me to allow him to take it to you and to put it
+into your hands himself.
+
+"'So he has it, carefully enclosed in a buck-skin case, and is bringing
+it to you with all the pride and importance of a king's messenger. I
+gave him money for the round trip and for a two weeks' stay in the city.
+I wish you would see to it that he gets comfortable quarters--Jake
+won't need much looking after--he's able to take care of himself. But
+I have read in the papers that African bishops and colored potentates
+generally have much trouble in obtaining food and lodging in the Yankee
+metropolis. That may be all right; but I don't see why the best hotel
+there shouldn't take Jake in. Still, I suppose it's a rule.
+
+"'I gave him full directions about finding you, and packed his valise
+myself. You won't have to bother with him; but I do hope you'll see that
+he is made comfortable. Take the watch that he brings you--it's almost a
+decoration. It has been worn by true Carterets, and there isn't a stain
+upon it nor a false movement of the wheels. Bringing it to you is the
+crowning joy of old Jake's life. I wanted him to have that little outing
+and that happiness before it is too late. You have often heard us talk
+about how Jake, pretty badly wounded himself, crawled through the
+reddened grass at Chancellorsville to where your father lay with the
+bullet in his dear heart, and took the watch from his pocket to keep it
+from the "Yanks."
+
+"'So, my son, when the old man comes consider him as a frail but worthy
+messenger from the old-time life and home.
+
+"'You have been so long away from home and so long among the people
+that we have always regarded as aliens that I'm not sure that Jake will
+know you when he sees you. But Jake has a keen perception, and I rather
+believe that he will know a Virginia Carteret at sight. I can't conceive
+that even ten years in Yankee-land could change a boy of mine. Anyhow,
+I'm sure you will know Jake. I put eighteen collars in his valise. If
+he should have to buy others, he wears a number 15-1/2. Please see that
+he gets the right ones. He will be no trouble to you at all.
+
+"'If you are not too busy, I'd like for you to find him a place to board
+where they have white-meal corn-bread, and try to keep him from taking
+his shoes off in your office or on the street. His right foot swells a
+little, and he likes to be comfortable.
+
+"'If you can spare the time, count his handkerchiefs when they come back
+from the wash. I bought him a dozen new ones before he left. He should
+be there about the time this letter reaches you. I told him to go
+straight to your office when he arrives.'"
+
+As soon as Blandford had finished the reading of this, something
+happened (as there should happen in stories and must happen on the
+stage).
+
+Percival, the office boy, with his air of despising the world's output
+of mill supplies and leather belting, came in to announce that a colored
+gentleman was outside to see Mr. Blandford Carteret.
+
+"Bring him in," said Blandford, rising.
+
+John Carteret swung around in his chair and said to Percival: "Ask him
+to wait a few minutes outside. We'll let you know when to bring him in."
+
+Then he turned to his cousin with one of those broad, slow smiles that
+was an inheritance of all the Carterets, and said:
+
+"Bland, I've always had a consuming curiosity to understand the
+differences that you haughty Southerners believe to exist between 'you
+all' and the people of the North. Of course, I know that you consider
+yourselves made out of finer clay and look upon Adam as only a
+collateral branch of your ancestry; but I don't know why. I never could
+understand the differences between us."
+
+"Well, John," said Blandford, laughing, "what you don't understand about
+it is just the difference, of course. I suppose it was the feudal way
+in which we lived that gave us our lordly baronial airs and feeling of
+superiority."
+
+"But you are not feudal, now," went on John. "Since we licked you
+and stole your cotton and mules you've had to go to work just as we
+'damyankees,' as you call us, have always been doing. And you're just as
+proud and exclusive and upper-classy as you were before the war. So it
+wasn't your money that caused it."
+
+"Maybe it was the climate," said Blandford, lightly, "or maybe our
+negroes spoiled us. I'll call old Jake in, now. I'll be glad to see the
+old villain again."
+
+"Wait just a moment," said John. "I've got a little theory I want to
+test. You and I are pretty much alike in our general appearance. Old
+Jake hasn't seen you since you were fifteen. Let's have him in and play
+fair and see which of us gets the watch. The old darky surely ought to
+be able to pick out his 'young marster' without any trouble. The alleged
+aristocratic superiority of a 'reb' ought to be visible to him at once.
+He couldn't make the mistake of handing over the timepiece to a Yankee,
+of course. The loser buys the dinner this evening and two dozen 15-1/2
+collars for Jake. Is it a go?"
+
+Blandford agreed heartily. Percival was summoned, and told to usher the
+"colored gentleman" in.
+
+Uncle Jake stepped inside the private office cautiously. He was a little
+old man, as black as soot, wrinkled and bald except for a fringe of
+white wool, cut decorously short, that ran over his ears and around his
+head. There was nothing of the stage "uncle" about him: his black suit
+nearly fitted him; his shoes shone, and his straw hat was banded with a
+gaudy ribbon. In his right hand he carried something carefully concealed
+by his closed fingers.
+
+Uncle Jake stopped a few steps from the door. Two young men sat in their
+revolving desk-chairs ten feet apart and looked at him in friendly
+silence. His gaze slowly shifted many times from one to the other. He
+felt sure that he was in the presence of one, at least, of the revered
+family among whose fortunes his life had begun and was to end.
+
+One had the pleasing but haughty Carteret air; the other had the
+unmistakable straight, long family nose. Both had the keen black eyes,
+horizontal brows, and thin, smiling lips that had distinguished both
+the Carteret of the _Mayflower_ and him of the brigantine. Old Jake had
+thought that he could have picked out his young master instantly from a
+thousand Northerners; but he found himself in difficulties. The best he
+could do was to use strategy.
+
+"Howdy, Marse Blandford--howdy, suh?" he said, looking midway between
+the two young men.
+
+"Howdy, Uncle Jake?" they both answered pleasantly and in unison. "Sit
+down. Have you brought the watch?"
+
+Uncle Jake chose a hard-bottom chair at a respectful distance, sat on
+the edge of it, and laid his hat carefully on the floor. The watch in
+its buckskin case he gripped tightly. He had not risked his life on the
+battle-field to rescue that watch from his "old marster's" foes to hand
+it over again to the enemy without a struggle.
+
+"Yes, suh; I got it in my hand, suh. I'm gwine give it to you right
+away in jus' a minute. Old Missus told me to put it in young Marse
+Blandford's hand and tell him to wear it for the family pride and
+honor. It was a mighty longsome trip for an old nigger man to make--ten
+thousand miles, it must be, back to old Vi'ginia, suh. You've growed
+mightily, young marster. I wouldn't have reconnized you but for yo'
+powerful resemblance to old marster."
+
+With admirable diplomacy the old man kept his eyes roaming in the space
+between the two men. His words might have been addressed to either.
+Though neither wicked nor perverse, he was seeking for a sign.
+
+Blandford and John exchanged winks.
+
+"I reckon you done got you ma's letter," went on Uncle Jake. "She said
+she was gwine to write to you 'bout my comin' along up this er-way.
+
+"Yes, yes, Uncle Jake," said John briskly. "My cousin and I have just
+been notified to expect you. We are both Carterets, you know."
+
+"Although one of us," said Blandford, "was born and raised in the
+North."
+
+"So if you will hand over the watch--" said John.
+
+"My cousin and I--" said Blandford.
+
+"Will then see to it--" said John.
+
+"That comfortable quarters are found for you," said Blandford.
+
+With creditable ingenuity, old Jake set up a cackling, high-pitched,
+protracted laugh. He beat his knee, picked up his hat and bent the brim
+in an apparent paroxysm of humorous appreciation. The seizure afforded
+him a mask behind which he could roll his eyes impartially between,
+above, and beyond his two tormentors.
+
+"I sees what!" he chuckled, after a while. "You gen'lemen is tryin' to
+have fun with the po' old nigger. But you can't fool old Jake. I knowed
+you, Marse Blandford, the minute I sot eyes on you. You was a po' skimpy
+little boy no mo' than about fo'teen when you lef' home to come No'th;
+but I knowed you the minute I sot eyes on you. You is the mawtal image
+of old marster. The other gen'leman resembles you mightily, suh; but you
+can't fool old Jake on a member of the old Vi'ginia family. No suh."
+
+At exactly the same time both Carterets smiled and extended a hand for
+the watch.
+
+Uncle Jake's wrinkled, black face lost the expression of amusement to
+which he had vainly twisted it. He knew that he was being teased, and
+that it made little real difference, as far as its safety went, into
+which of those outstretched hands he placed the family treasure. But it
+seemed to him that not only his own pride and loyalty but much of the
+Virginia Carterets' was at stake. He had heard down South during the war
+about that other branch of the family that lived in the North and fought
+on "the yuther side," and it had always grieved him. He had followed
+his "old marster's" fortunes from stately luxury through war to almost
+poverty. And now, with the last relic and reminder of him, blessed by
+"old missus," and intrusted implicitly to his care, he had come ten
+thousand miles (as it seemed) to deliver it into the hands of the one
+who was to wear it and wind it and cherish it and listen to it tick off
+the unsullied hours that marked the lives of the Carterets--of Virginia.
+
+His experience and conception of the Yankees had been an impression of
+tyrants--"low-down, common trash"--in blue, laying waste with fire and
+sword. He had seen the smoke of many burning homesteads almost as grand
+as Carteret Hall ascending to the drowsy Southern skies. And now he was
+face to face with one of them--and he could not distinguish him from his
+"young marster" whom he had come to find and bestow upon him the emblem
+of his kingship--even as the arm "clothed in white samite, mystic,
+wonderful" laid Excalibur in the right hand of Arthur. He saw before him
+two young men, easy, kind, courteous, welcoming, either of whom might
+have been the one he sought. Troubled, bewildered, sorely grieved at
+his weakness of judgment, old Jake abandoned his loyal subterfuges.
+His right hand sweated against the buckskin cover of the watch. He
+was deeply humiliated and chastened. Seriously, now, his prominent,
+yellow-white eyes closely scanned the two young men. At the end of his
+scrutiny he was conscious of but one difference between them. One wore a
+narrow black tie with a white pearl stickpin. The other's "four-in-hand"
+was a narrow blue one pinned with a black pearl.
+
+And then, to old Jake's relief, there came a sudden distraction. Drama
+knocked at the door with imperious knuckles, and forced Comedy to the
+wings, and Drama peeped with a smiling but set face over the footlights.
+
+Percival, the hater of mill supplies, brought in a card, which he
+handed, with the manner of one bearing a cartel, to Blue-Tie.
+
+"Olivia De Ormond," read Blue-Tie from the card. He looked inquiringly
+at his cousin.
+
+"Why not have her in," said Black-Tie, "and bring matters to a
+conclusion?"
+
+"Uncle Jake," said one of the young men, "would you mind taking that
+chair over there in the corner for a while? A lady is coming in--on some
+business. We'll take up your case afterward."
+
+The lady whom Percival ushered in was young and petulantly, decidedly,
+freshly, consciously, and intentionally pretty. She was dressed with
+such expensive plainness that she made you consider lace and ruffles as
+mere tatters and rags. But one great ostrich plume that she wore would
+have marked her anywhere in the army of beauty as the wearer of the
+merry helmet of Navarre.
+
+Miss De Ormond accepted the swivel chair at Blue-Tie's desk. Then the
+gentlemen drew leather-upholstered seats conveniently near, and spoke
+of the weather.
+
+"Yes," said she, "I noticed it was warmer. But I mustn't take up too
+much of your time during business hours. That is," she continued,
+"unless we talk business."
+
+She addressed her words to Blue-Tie, with a charming smile.
+
+"Very well," said he. "You don't mind my cousin being present, do you?
+We are generally rather confidential with each other--especially in
+business matters."
+
+"Oh no," caroled Miss De Ormond. "I'd rather he did hear. He knows all
+about it, anyhow. In fact, he's quite a material witness because he was
+present when you--when it happened. I thought you might want to talk
+things over before--well, before any action is taken, as I believe the
+lawyers say."
+
+"Have you anything in the way of a proposition to make?" asked
+Black-Tie.
+
+Miss De Ormond looked reflectively at the neat toe of one of her dull
+kid-pumps.
+
+"I had a proposal made to me," she said. "If the proposal sticks it cuts
+out the proposition. Let's have that settled first."
+
+"Well, as far as--" began Blue-Tie.
+
+"Excuse me, cousin," interrupted Black-Tie, "if you don't mind my
+cutting in." And then he turned, with a good-natured air, toward the
+lady.
+
+"Now, let's recapitulate a bit," he said cheerfully. "All three of us,
+besides other mutual acquaintances, have been out on a good many larks
+together."
+
+"I'm afraid I'll have to call the birds by another name," said Miss De
+Ormond.
+
+"All right," responded Black-Tie, with unimpaired cheerfulness; "suppose
+we say 'squabs' when we talk about the 'proposal' and 'larks' when we
+discuss the 'proposition.' You have a quick mind, Miss De Ormond. Two
+months ago some half-dozen of us went in a motor-car for a day's run
+into the country. We stopped at a road-house for dinner. My cousin
+proposed marriage to you then and there. He was influenced to do so, of
+course, by the beauty and charm which no one can deny that you possess."
+
+"I wish I had you for a press agent, Mr. Carteret," said the beauty,
+with a dazzling smile.
+
+"You are on the stage, Miss De Ormond," went on Black-Tie. "You have
+had, doubtless, many admirers, and perhaps other proposals. You must
+remember, too, that we were a party of merrymakers on that occasion.
+There were a good many corks pulled. That the proposal of marriage
+was made to you by my cousin we cannot deny. But hasn't it been your
+experience that, by common consent, such things lose their seriousness
+when viewed in the next day's sunlight? Isn't there something of a
+'code' among good 'sports'--I use the word in its best sense--that
+wipes out each day the follies of the evening previous?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Miss De Ormond. "I know that very well. And I've always
+played up to it. But as you seem to be conducting the case--with the
+silent consent of the defendant--I'll tell you something more. I've got
+letters from him repeating the proposal. And they're signed, too."
+
+"I understand," said Black-Tie gravely. "What's your price for the
+letters?"
+
+"I'm not a cheap one," said Miss De Ormond. "But I had decided to make
+you a rate. You both belong to a swell family. Well, if I _am_ on the
+stage nobody can say a word against me truthfully. And the money is only
+a secondary consideration. It isn't the money I was after. I--I believed
+him--and--and I liked him."
+
+She cast a soft, entrancing glance at Blue-Tie from under her long
+eyelashes.
+
+"And the price?" went on Black-Tie, inexorably.
+
+"Ten thousand dollars," said the lady, sweetly.
+
+"Or--"
+
+"Or the fulfillment of the engagement to marry."
+
+"I think it is time," interrupted Blue-Tie, "for me to be allowed to say
+a word or two. You and I, cousin, belong to a family that has held its
+head pretty high. You have been brought up in a section of the country
+very different from the one where our branch of the family lived. Yet
+both of us are Carterets, even if some of our ways and theories differ.
+You remember, it is a tradition of the family, that no Carteret ever
+failed in chivalry to a lady or failed to keep his word when it was
+given."
+
+Then Blue-Tie, with frank decision showing on his countenance, turned
+to Miss De Ormond.
+
+"Olivia," said he, "on what date will you marry me?"
+
+Before she could answer, Black-Tie again interposed.
+
+"It is a long journey," said he, "from Plymouth rock to Norfolk Bay.
+Between the two points we find the changes that nearly three centuries
+have brought. In that time the old order has changed. We no longer burn
+witches or torture slaves. And to-day we neither spread our cloaks on
+the mud for ladies to walk over nor treat them to the ducking-stool.
+It is the age of common sense, adjustment, and proportion. All of
+us--ladies, gentlemen, women, men, Northerners, Southerners, lords,
+caitiffs, actors, hardware-drummers, senators, hod-carriers, and
+politicians--are coming to a better understanding. Chivalry is one of
+our words that changes its meaning every day. Family pride is a thing
+of many constructions--it may show itself by maintaining a moth-eaten
+arrogance in a cobwebbed Colonial mansion or by the prompt paying of
+one's debts.
+
+"Now, I suppose you've had enough of my monologue. I've learned
+something of business and a little of life; and I somehow believe,
+cousin, that our great-great-grandfathers, the original Carterets,
+would indorse my view of this matter."
+
+Black-Tie wheeled around to his desk, wrote in a check-book and tore out
+the check, the sharp rasp of the perforated leaf making the only sound
+in the room. He laid the check within easy reach of Miss De Ormond's
+hand.
+
+"Business is business," said he. "We live in a business age. There is my
+personal check for $10,000. What do you say, Miss De Ormond--will it he
+orange blossoms or cash?"
+
+Miss De Ormond picked up the cheek carelessly, folded it indifferently,
+and stuffed it into her glove.
+
+"Oh, this'll do," she said, calmly. "I just thought I'd call and put it
+up to you. I guess you people are all right. But a girl has feelings,
+you know. I've heard one of you was a Southerner--I wonder which one of
+you it is?"
+
+She arose, smiled sweetly, and walked to the door. There, with a flash
+of white teeth and a dip of the heavy plume, she disappeared.
+
+Both of the cousins had forgotten Uncle Jake for the time. But now they
+heard the shuffling of his shoes as he came across the rug toward them
+from his seat in the corner.
+
+"Young marster," he said, "take yo' watch."
+
+And without hesitation he laid the ancient timepiece in the hand of its
+rightful owner.
+
+
+
+
+SUPPLY AND DEMAND
+
+
+Finch keeps a hats-cleaned-by-electricity-while-you-wait establishment,
+nine feet by twelve, in Third Avenue. Once a customer, you are always
+his. I do not know his secret process, but every four days your hat
+needs to be cleaned again.
+
+Finch is a leathern, sallow, slow-footed man, between twenty and forty.
+You would say he had been brought up a bushelman in Essex Street. When
+business is slack he likes to talk, so I had my hat cleaned even oftener
+than it deserved, hoping Finch might let me into some of the secrets of
+the sweatshops.
+
+One afternoon I dropped in and found Finch alone. He began to anoint my
+headpiece de Panama with his mysterious fluid that attracted dust and
+dirt like a magnet.
+
+"They say the Indians weave 'em under water," said I, for a leader.
+
+"Don't you believe it," said Finch. "No Indian or white man could stay
+under water that long. Say, do you pay much attention to politics? I see
+in the paper something about a law they've passed called 'the law of
+supply and demand.'"
+
+I explained to him as well as I could that the reference was to a
+politico-economical law, and not to a legal statute.
+
+"I didn't know," said Finch. "I heard a good deal about it a year or so
+ago, but in a one-sided way."
+
+"Yes," said I, "political orators use it a great deal. In fact, they
+never give it a rest. I suppose you heard some of those cart-tail
+fellows spouting on the subject over here on the east side."
+
+"I heard it from a king," said Finch--"the white king of a tribe of
+Indians in South America."
+
+I was interested but not surprised. The big city is like a mother's knee
+to many who have strayed far and found the roads rough beneath their
+uncertain feet. At dusk they come home and sit upon the door-step.
+I know a piano player in a cheap cafe who has shot lions in Africa,
+a bell-boy who fought in the British army against the Zulus, an
+express-driver whose left arm had been cracked like a lobster's claw for
+a stew-pot of Patagonian cannibals when the boat of his rescuers hove in
+sight. So a hat-cleaner who had been a friend of a king did not oppress
+me.
+
+"A new band?" asked Finch, with his dry, barren smile.
+
+"Yes," said I, "and half an inch wider." I had had a new band five days
+before.
+
+"I meets a man one night," said Finch, beginning his story--"a man
+brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating schweinerknuckel in
+Schlagel's. That was two years ago, when I was a hose-cart driver for
+No. 98. His discourse runs to the subject of gold. He says that certain
+mountains in a country down South that he calls Gaudymala is full of it.
+He says the Indians wash it out of the streams in plural quantities.
+
+"'Oh, Geronimo!' says I. 'Indians! There's no Indians in the South,' I
+tell him, 'except Elks, Maccabees, and the buyers for the fall dry-goods
+trade. The Indians are all on the reservations,' says I.
+
+"'I'm telling you this with reservations,' says he. 'They ain't Buffalo
+Bill Indians; they're squattier and more pedigreed. They call 'em Inkers
+and Aspics, and they was old inhabitants when Mazuma was King of Mexico.
+They wash the gold out of the mountain streams,' says the brown man,
+'and fill quills with it; and then they empty 'em into red jars till
+they are full; and then they pack it in buckskin sacks of one arroba
+each--an arroba is twenty-five pounds--and store it in a stone house,
+with an engraving of a idol with marcelled hair, playing a flute, over
+the door.'
+
+"'How do they work off this unearth increment?' I asks.
+
+"'They don't,' says the man. 'It's a case of "Ill fares the land with
+the great deal of velocity where wealth accumulates and there ain't any
+reciprocity."'
+
+"After this man and me got through our conversation, which left him
+dry of information, I shook hands with him and told him I was sorry I
+couldn't believe him. And a month afterward I landed on the coast of
+this Gaudymala with $1,300 that I had been saving up for five years. I
+thought I knew what Indians liked, and I fixed myself accordingly. I
+loaded down four pack-mules with red woollen blankets, wrought-iron
+pails, jewelled side-combs for the ladies, glass necklaces, and
+safety-razors. I hired a black mozo, who was supposed to be a
+mule-driver and an interpreter too. It turned out that he could
+interpret mules all right, but he drove the English language much too
+hard. His name sounded like a Yale key when you push it in wrong side
+up, but I called him McClintock, which was close to the noise.
+
+"Well, this gold village was forty miles up in the mountains, and it
+took us nine days to find it. But one afternoon McClintock led the other
+mules and myself over a rawhide bridge stretched across a precipice five
+thousand feet deep, it seemed to me. The hoofs of the beasts drummed
+on it just like before George M. Cohan makes his first entrance on the
+stage.
+
+"This village was built of mud and stone, and had no streets. Some few
+yellow-and-brown persons popped their heads out-of-doors, looking about
+like Welsh rabbits with Worcester sauce on em. Out of the biggest house,
+that had a kind of a porch around it, steps a big white man, red as a
+beet in color, dressed in fine tanned deerskin clothes, with a gold
+chain around his neck, smoking a cigar. I've seen United States Senators
+of his style of features and build, also head-waiters and cops.
+
+"He walks up and takes a look at us, while McClintock disembarks and
+begins to interpret to the lead mule while he smokes a cigarette.
+
+"'Hello, Buttinsky,' says the fine man to me. 'How did you get in the
+game? I didn't see you buy any chips. Who gave you the keys of the
+city?'
+
+"'I'm a poor traveller,' says I. 'Especially mule-back. You'll excuse
+me. Do you run a hack line or only a bluff?'
+
+"'Segregate yourself from your pseudo-equine quadruped,' says he, 'and
+come inside.'
+
+"He raises a finger, and a villager runs up.
+
+"'This man will take care of your outfit,' says he, 'and I'll take care
+of you.'
+
+"He leads me into the biggest house, and sets out the chairs and a kind
+of a drink the color of milk. It was the finest room I ever saw. The
+stone walls was hung all over with silk shawls, and there was red and
+yellow rugs on the floor, and jars of red pottery and Angora goat skins,
+and enough bamboo furniture to misfurnish half a dozen seaside cottages.
+
+"'In the first place,' says the man, 'you want to know who I am. I'm
+sole lessee and proprietor of this tribe of Indians. They call me the
+Grand Yacuma, which is to say King or Main Finger of the bunch. I've
+got more power here than a charge d'affaires, a charge of dynamite, and
+a charge account at Tiffany's combined. In fact, I'm the Big Stick,
+with as many extra knots on it as there is on the record run of the
+Lusitania. Oh, I read the papers now and then,' says he. 'Now, let's
+hear your entitlements,' he goes on, 'and the meeting will be open.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'I am known as one W. D. Finch. Occupation, capitalist.
+Address, 541 East Thirty-second--'
+
+"'New York,' chips in the Noble Grand. 'I know,' says he, grinning. 'It
+ain't the first time you've seen it go down on the blotter. I can tell
+by the way you hand it out. Well, explain "capitalist."'
+
+"I tells this boss plain what I come for and how I come to came.
+
+"'Gold-dust?' says he, looking as puzzled as a baby that's got a feather
+stuck on its molasses finger. 'That's funny. This ain't a gold-mining
+country. And you invested all your capital on a stranger's story?
+Well, well! These Indians of mine--they are the last of the tribe of
+Peches--are simple as children. They know nothing of the purchasing
+power of gold. I'm afraid you've been imposed on,' says he.
+
+"'Maybe so,' says I, 'but it sounded pretty straight to me.'
+
+"'W. D.,' says the King, all of a sudden, 'I'll give you a square deal.
+It ain't often I get to talk to a white man, and I'll give you a show
+for your money. It may be these constituents of mine have a few grains
+of gold-dust hid away in their clothes. To-morrow you may get out these
+goods you've brought up and see if you can make any sales. Now, I'm
+going to introduce myself unofficially. My name is Shane--Patrick Shane.
+I own this tribe of Peche Indians by right of conquest--single handed
+and unafraid. I drifted up here four years ago, and won 'em by my size
+and complexion and nerve. I learned their language in six weeks--it's
+easy: you simply emit a string of consonants as long as your breath
+holds out and then point at what you're asking for.
+
+"'I conquered 'em, spectacularly,' goes on King Shane, 'and then I went
+at 'em with economical politics, law, sleight-of-hand, and a kind of New
+England ethics and parsimony. Every Sunday, or as near as I can guess at
+it, I preach to 'em in the council-house (I'm the council) on the law of
+supply and demand. I praise supply and knock demand. I use the same text
+every time. You wouldn't think, W. D.,' says Shane, 'that I had poetry
+in me, would you?'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'I wouldn't know whether to call it poetry or not.'
+
+"'Tennyson,' says Shane, 'furnishes the poetic gospel I preach. I always
+considered him the boss poet. Here's the way the text goes:
+
+
+   "'"For, not to admire, if a man could learn it, were more
+   Than to walk all day like a Sultan of old in a garden of spice."
+
+
+"'You see, I teach 'em to cut out demand--that supply is the main
+thing. I teach 'em not to desire anything beyond their simplest needs.
+A little mutton, a little cocoa, and a little fruit brought up from
+the coast--that's all they want to make 'em happy. I've got 'em well
+trained. They make their own clothes and hats out of a vegetable fibre
+and straw, and they're a contented lot. It's a great thing,' winds up
+Shane, 'to have made a people happy by the incultivation of such simple
+institutions.'
+
+"Well, the next day, with the King's permission, I has the McClintock
+open up a couple of sacks of my goods in the little plaza of the
+village. The Indians swarmed around by the hundred and looked the
+bargain-counter over. I shook red blankets at 'em, flashed finger-rings
+and ear-bobs, tried pearl necklaces and side-combs on the women, and a
+line of red hosiery on the men. 'Twas no use. They looked on like hungry
+graven images, but I never made a sale. I asked McClintock what was the
+trouble. Mac yawned three or four times, rolled a cigarette, made one or
+two confidential side remarks to a mule, and then condescended to inform
+me that the people had no money.
+
+"Just then up strolls King Patrick, big and red 'and royal as usual,
+with the gold chain over his chest and his cigar in front of him.
+
+"'How's business, W. D.?' he asks.
+
+"'Fine,' says I. 'It's a bargain-day rush. I've got one more line of
+goods to offer before I shut up shop. I'll try 'em with safety-razors.
+I've got two gross that I bought at a fire sale.'
+
+"Shane laughs till some kind of mameluke or private secretary he carries
+with him has to hold him up.
+
+"'O my sainted Aunt Jerusha!' says he, 'ain't you one of the Babes in
+the Goods, W. D.? Don't you know that no Indians ever shave? They pull
+out their whiskers instead.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'that's just what these razors would do for 'em--they
+wouldn't have any kick coming if they used 'em once.'
+
+"Shane went away, and I could hear him laughing a block, if there had
+been any block.
+
+"'Tell 'em,' says I to McClintock, 'it ain't money I want--tell 'em I'll
+take gold-dust. Tell 'em I'll allow 'em sixteen dollars an ounce for it
+in trade. That's what I'm out for--the dust.'
+
+"Mac interprets, and you'd have thought a squadron of cops had charged
+the crowd to disperse it. Every uncle's nephew and aunt's niece of 'em
+faded away inside of two minutes.
+
+"At the royal palace that night me and the King talked it over.
+
+"'They've got the dust hid out somewhere,' says I, 'or they wouldn't
+have been so sensitive about it.'
+
+"'They haven't,' says Shane. 'What's this gag you've got about gold?
+You been reading Edward Allen Poe? They ain't got any gold.'
+
+"'They put it in quills,' says I, 'and then they empty it in jars, and
+then into sacks of twenty-five pounds each. I got it straight.'
+
+"'W. D.,' says Shane, laughing and chewing his cigar, 'I don't often see
+a white man, and I feel like putting you on. I don't think you'll get
+away from here alive, anyhow, so I'm going to tell you. Come over here.'
+
+"He draws aside a silk fibre curtain in a corner of the room and shows
+me a pile of buckskin sacks.
+
+"'Forty of 'em,' says Shane. 'One arroba in each one. In round numbers,
+$220,000 worth of gold-dust you see there. It's all mine. It belongs
+to the Grand Yacuma. They bring it all to me. Two hundred and twenty
+thousand dollars--think of that, you glass-bead peddler,' says
+Shane--'and all mine.'
+
+"'Little good it does you,' says I, contemptuously and hatefully.
+'And so you are the government depository of this gang of moneyless
+money-makers? Don't you pay enough interest on it to enable one of your
+depositors to buy an Augusta (Maine) Pullman carbon diamond worth $200
+for $4.85?'
+
+"'Listen,' says Patrick Shane, with the sweat coming out on his brow.
+'I'm confidant with you, as you have, somehow, enlisted my regards. Did
+you ever,' he says, 'feel the avoirdupois power of gold--not the troy
+weight of it, but the sixteen-ounces-to-the-pound force of it?'
+
+"'Never,' says I. 'I never take in any bad money.'
+
+"Shane drops down on the floor and throws his arms over the sacks of
+gold-dust.
+
+"'I love it,' says he. 'I want to feel the touch of it day and night.
+It's my pleasure in life. I come in this room, and I'm a king and a rich
+man. I'll be a millionaire in another year. The pile's getting bigger
+every month. I've got the whole tribe washing out the sands in the
+creeks. I'm the happiest man in the world, W. D. I just want to be near
+this gold, and know it's mine and it's increasing every day. Now, you
+know,' says he, 'why my Indians wouldn't buy your goods. They can't.
+They bring all the dust to me. I'm their king. I've taught 'em not to
+desire or admire. You might as well shut up shop.'
+
+"'I'll tell you what you are,' says I. 'You're a plain, contemptible
+miser. You preach supply and you forget demand. Now, supply,' I goes
+on, 'is never anything but supply. On the contrary,' says I, 'demand is
+a much broader syllogism and assertion. Demand includes the rights of
+our women and children, and charity and friendship, and even a little
+begging on the street corners. They've both got to harmonize equally.
+And I've got a few things up my commercial sleeve yet,' says I, 'that
+may jostle your preconceived ideas of politics and economy.
+
+"The next morning I had McClintock bring up another mule-load of goods
+to the plaza and open it up. The people gathered around the same as
+before.
+
+"I got out the finest line of necklaces, bracelets, hair-combs, and
+earrings that I carried, and had the women put 'em on. And then I played
+trumps.
+
+"Out of my last pack I opened up a half gross of hand-mirrors, with
+solid tinfoil backs, and passed 'em around among the ladies. That was
+the first introduction of looking-glasses among the Peche Indians.
+
+"Shane walks by with his big laugh.
+
+"'Business looking up any?' he asks.
+
+"'It's looking at itself right now,' says I.
+
+"By-and-by a kind of a murmur goes through the crowd. The women had
+looked into the magic crystal and seen that they were beautiful, and was
+confiding the secret to the men. The men seemed to be urging the lack
+of money and the hard times just before the election, but their excuses
+didn't go.
+
+"Then was my time.
+
+"I called McClintock away from an animated conversation with his mules
+and told him to do some interpreting.
+
+"'Tell 'em,' says I, 'that gold-dust will buy for them these befitting
+ornaments for kings and queens of the earth. Tell 'em the yellow sand
+they wash out of the waters for the High Sanctified Yacomay and Chop
+Suey of the tribe will buy the precious jewels and charms that will make
+them beautiful and preserve and pickle them from evil spirits. Tell 'em
+the Pittsburgh banks are paying four per cent. interest on deposits
+by mail, while this get-rich-frequently custodian of the public funds
+ain't even paying attention. Keep telling 'em, Mac,' says I, 'to let the
+gold-dust family do their work. Talk to 'em like a born anti-Bryanite,'
+says I. 'Remind 'em that Tom Watson's gone back to Georgia,' says I.
+
+"McClintock waves his hand affectionately at one of his mules, and then
+hurls a few stickfuls of minion type at the mob of shoppers.
+
+"A gutta-percha Indian man, with a lady hanging on his arm, with three
+strings of my fish-scale jewelry and imitation marble beads around her
+neck, stands up on a block of stone and makes a talk that sounds like
+a man shaking dice in a box to fill aces and sixes.
+
+"'He says,' says McClintock, 'that the people not know that gold-dust
+will buy their things. The women very mad. The Grand Yacuma tell them
+it no good but for keep to make bad spirits keep away.'
+
+"'You can't keep bad spirits away from money,' says I.
+
+"'They say,' goes on McClintock, 'the Yacuma fool them. They raise
+plenty row.'
+
+"'Going! Going!' says I. 'Gold-dust or cash takes the entire stock. The
+dust weighed before you, and taken at sixteen dollars the ounce--the
+highest price on the Gaudymala coast.'
+
+"Then the crowd disperses all of a sudden, and I don't know what's up.
+Mac and me packs away the hand-mirrors and jewelry they had handed back
+to us, and we had the mules back to the corral they had set apart for
+our garage.
+
+"While we was there we hear great noises of shouting, and down across
+the plaza runs Patrick Shane, hotfoot, with his clothes ripped half off,
+and scratches on his face like a cat had fought him hard for every one
+of its lives.
+
+"'They're looting the treasury, W. D.,' he sings out. 'They're going to
+kill me and you, too. Unlimber a couple of mules at once. We'll have to
+make a get-away in a couple of minutes.'
+
+"'They've found out,' says I,' the truth about the law of supply and
+demand.'
+
+"'It's the women, mostly,' says the King. 'And they used to admire me
+so!'
+
+"'They hadn't seen looking-glasses then,' says I.
+
+"'They've got knives and hatchets,' says Shane; 'hurry!'
+
+"'Take that roan mule,' says I. 'You and your law of supply! I'll ride
+the dun, for he's two knots per hour the faster. The roan has a stiff
+knee, but he may make it,' says I. 'If you'd included reciprocity in
+your political platform I might have given you the dun,' says I.
+
+"Shane and McClintock and me mounted our mules and rode across the
+rawhide bridge just as the Peches reached the other side and began
+firing stones and long knives at us. We cut the thongs that held up
+our end of the bridge and headed for the coast."
+
+
+
+A tall, bulky policeman came into Finch's shop at that moment and leaned
+an elbow on the showcase. Finch nodded at him friendly.
+
+"I heard down at Casey's," said the cop, in rumbling, husky tones, "that
+there was going to be a picnic of the Hat-Cleaners' Union over at Bergen
+Beach, Sunday. Is that right?"
+
+"Sure," said Finch. "There'll be a dandy time."
+
+"Gimme five tickets," said the cop, throwing a five-dollar bill on the
+showcase.
+
+"Why," said Finch, "ain't you going it a little too--"
+
+"Go to h----!" said the cop. "You got 'em to sell, ain't you? Somebody's
+got to buy 'em. Wish I could go along."
+
+I was glad to See Finch so well thought of in his neighborhood.
+
+And then in came a wee girl of seven, with dirty face and pure blue eyes
+and a smutched and insufficient dress.
+
+"Mamma says," she recited shrilly, "that you must give me eighty cents
+for the grocer and nineteen for the milkman and five cents for me to buy
+hokey-pokey with--but she didn't say that," the elf concluded, with a
+hopeful but honest grin.
+
+Finch shelled out the money, counting it twice, but I noticed that the
+total sum that the small girl received was one dollar and four cents.
+
+"That's the right kind of a law," remarked Finch, as he carefully broke
+some of the stitches of my hatband so that it would assuredly come off
+within a few days--"the law of supply and demand. But they've both got
+to work together. I'll bet," he went on, with his dry smile, "she'll get
+jelly beans with that nickel--she likes 'em. What's supply if there's no
+demand for it?"
+
+"What ever became of the King?" I asked, curiously.
+
+"Oh, I might have told you," said Finch. "That was Shane came in and
+bought the tickets. He came back with me, and he's on the force now."
+
+
+
+
+BURIED TREASURE
+
+
+There are many kinds of fools. Now, will everybody please sit still
+until they are called upon specifically to rise?
+
+I had been every kind of fool except one. I had expended my
+patrimony, pretended my matrimony, played poker, lawn-tennis, and
+bucket-shops--parted soon with my money in many ways. But there remained
+one rule of the wearer of cap and bells that I had not played. That was
+the Seeker after Buried Treasure. To few does the delectable furor come.
+But of all the would-be followers in the hoof-prints of King Midas none
+has found a pursuit so rich in pleasurable promise.
+
+But, going back from my theme a while--as lame pens must do--I was a
+fool of the sentimental sort. I saw May Martha Mangum, and was hers.
+She was eighteen, the color of the white ivory keys of a new piano,
+beautiful, and possessed by the exquisite solemnity and pathetic
+witchery of an unsophisticated angel doomed to live in a small, dull,
+Texas prairie-town. She had a spirit and charm that could have enabled
+her to pluck rubies like raspberries from the crown of Belgium or any
+other sporty kingdom, but she did not know it, and I did not paint the
+picture for her.
+
+You see, I wanted May Martha Mangum for to have and to hold. I wanted
+her to abide with me, and put my slippers and pipe away every day in
+places where they cannot be found of evenings.
+
+May Martha's father was a man hidden behind whiskers and spectacles. He
+lived for bugs and butterflies and all insects that fly or crawl or buzz
+or get down your back or in the butter. He was an etymologist, or words
+to that effect. He spent his life seining the air for flying fish of
+the June-bug order, and then sticking pins through 'em and calling 'em
+names.
+
+He and May Martha were the whole family. He prized her highly as a
+fine specimen of the _racibus humanus_ because she saw that he had
+food at times, and put his clothes on right side before, and kept
+his alcohol-bottles filled. Scientists, they say, are apt to be
+absent-minded.
+
+There was another besides myself who thought May Martha Mangum one to be
+desired. That was Goodloe Banks, a young man just home from college. He
+had all the attainments to be found in books--Latin, Greek, philosophy,
+and especially the higher branches of mathematics and logic.
+
+If it hadn't been for his habit of pouring out this information and
+learning on every one that he addressed, I'd have liked him pretty well.
+But, even as it was, he and I were, you would have thought, great pals.
+
+We got together every time we could because each of us wanted to pump
+the other for whatever straws we could to find which way the wind blew
+from the heart of May Martha Mangum--rather a mixed metaphor; Goodloe
+Banks would never have been guilty of that. That is the way of rivals.
+
+You might say that Goodloe ran to books, manners, culture, rowing,
+intellect, and clothes. I would have put you in mind more of baseball
+and Friday-night debating societies--by way of culture--and maybe of a
+good horseback rider.
+
+But in our talks together, and in our visits and conversation with May
+Martha, neither Goodloe Banks nor I could find out which one of us she
+preferred. May Martha was a natural-born non-committal, and knew in her
+cradle how to keep people guessing.
+
+As I said, old man Mangum was absent-minded. After a long time he found
+out one day--a little butterfly must have told him--that two young
+men were trying to throw a net over the head of the young person,
+a daughter, or some such technical appendage, who looked after his
+comforts.
+
+I never knew scientists could rise to such occasions. Old Mangum orally
+labelled and classified Goodloe and myself easily among the lowest
+orders of the vertebrates; and in English, too, without going any
+further into Latin than the simple references to _Orgetorix, Rex
+Helvetii_--which is as far as I ever went, myself. And he told us that
+if he ever caught us around his house again he would add us to his
+collection.
+
+Goodloe Banks and I remained away five days, expecting the storm to
+subside. When we dared to call at the house again May Martha Mangum and
+her father were gone. Gone! The house they had rented was closed. Their
+little store of goods and chattels was gone also.
+
+And not a word of farewell to either of us from May Martha--not a white,
+fluttering note pinned to the hawthorn-bush; not a chalk-mark on the
+gate-post nor a post-card in the post-office to give us a clew.
+
+For two months Goodloe Banks and I--separately--tried every scheme
+we could think of to track the runaways. We used our friendship and
+influence with the ticket-agent, with livery-stable men, railroad
+conductors, and our one lone, lorn constable, but without results.
+
+Then we became better friends and worse enemies than ever. We
+forgathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon every afternoon after
+work, and played dominoes, and laid conversational traps to find out
+from each other if anything had been discovered. That is the way of
+rivals.
+
+Now, Goodloe Banks had a sarcastic way of displaying his own learning
+and putting me in the class that was reading "Poor Jane Ray, her bird
+is dead, she cannot play." Well, I rather liked Goodloe, and I had
+a contempt for his college learning, and I was always regarded as
+good-natured, so I kept my temper. And I was trying to find out if he
+knew anything about May Martha, so I endured his society.
+
+In talking things over one afternoon he said to me:
+
+"Suppose you do find her, Ed, whereby would you profit? Miss Mangum has
+a mind. Perhaps it is yet uncultured, but she is destined for higher
+things than you could give her. I have talked with no one who seemed to
+appreciate more the enchantment of the ancient poets and writers and
+the modern cults that have assimilated and expended their philosophy of
+life. Don't you think you are wasting your time looking for her?"
+
+"My idea," said I, "of a happy home is an eight-room house in a grove of
+live-oaks by the side of a _charco_ on a Texas prairie. A piano," I went
+on, "with an automatic player in the sitting-room, three thousand head
+of cattle under fence for a starter, a buckboard and ponies always
+hitched at a post for 'the missus'--and May Martha Mangum to spend the
+profits of the ranch as she pleases, and to abide with me, and put my
+slippers and pipe away every day in places where they cannot be found of
+evenings. That," said I, "is what is to be; and a fig--a dried, Smyrna,
+dago-stand fig--for your curriculums, cults, and philosophy."
+
+"She is meant for higher things," repeated Goodloe Banks.
+
+"Whatever she is meant for," I answered, just now she is out of pocket.
+And I shall find her as soon as I can without aid of the colleges."
+
+"The game is blocked," said Goodloe, putting down a domino; and we had
+the beer.
+
+Shortly after that a young farmer whom I knew came into town and brought
+me a folded blue paper. He said his grandfather had just died. I
+concealed a tear, and he went on to say that the old man had jealously
+guarded this paper for twenty years. He left it to his family as part of
+his estate, the rest of which consisted of two mules and a hypotenuse of
+non-arable land.
+
+The sheet of paper was of the old, blue kind used during the rebellion
+of the abolitionists against the secessionists. It was dated June
+14, 1863, and it described the hiding-place of ten burro-loads of
+gold and silver coin valued at three hundred thousand dollars. Old
+Rundle--grandfather of his grandson, Sam--was given the information by
+a Spanish priest who was in on the treasure-burying, and who died many
+years before--no, afterward--in old Rundle's house. Old Rundle wrote it
+down from dictation.
+
+"Why didn't your father look this up?" I asked young Rundle.
+
+"He went blind before he could do so," he replied.
+
+"Why didn't you hunt for it yourself?" I asked.
+
+"Well," said he, "I've only known about the paper for ten years. First
+there was the spring ploughin' to do, and then choppin' the weeds out of
+the corn; and then come takin' fodder; and mighty soon winter was on us.
+It seemed to run along that way year after year."
+
+That sounded perfectly reasonable to me, so I took it up with young Lee
+Rundle at once.
+
+The directions on the paper were simple. The whole burro cavalcade laden
+with the treasure started from an old Spanish mission in Dolores County.
+They travelled due south by the compass until they reached the Alamito
+River. They forded this, and buried the treasure on the top of a little
+mountain shaped like a pack-saddle standing in a row between two higher
+ones. A heap of stones marked the place of the buried treasure. All the
+party except the Spanish priest were killed by Indians a few days later.
+The secret was a monopoly. It looked good to me.
+
+Lee Rundle suggested that we rig out a camping outfit, hire a surveyor
+to run out the line from the Spanish mission, and then spend the three
+hundred thousand dollars seeing the sights in Fort Worth. But, without
+being highly educated, I knew a way to save time and expense.
+
+We went to the State land-office and had a practical, what they call a
+"working," sketch made of all the surveys of land from the old mission
+to the Alamito River. On this map I drew a line due southward to the
+river. The length of lines of each survey and section of land was
+accurately given on the sketch. By these we found the point on the river
+and had a "connection" made with it and an important, well-identified
+corner of the Los Animos five-league survey--a grant made by King Philip
+of Spain.
+
+By doing this we did not need to have the line run out by a surveyor. It
+was a great saving of expense and time.
+
+So, Lee Rundle and I fitted out a two-horse wagon team with all the
+accessories, and drove a hundred and forty-nine miles to Chico, the
+nearest town to the point we wished to reach. There we picked up a
+deputy county surveyor. He found the corner of the Los Animos survey for
+us, ran out the five thousand seven hundred and twenty varas west that
+our sketch called for, laid a stone on the spot, had coffee and bacon,
+and caught the mail-stage back to Chico.
+
+I was pretty sure we would get that three hundred thousand dollars.
+Lee Rundle's was to be only one-third, because I was paying all the
+expenses. With that two hundred thousand dollars I knew I could find
+May Martha Mangum if she was on earth. And with it I could flutter the
+butterflies in old man Mangum's dovecot, too. If I could find that
+treasure!
+
+But Lee and I established camp. Across the river were a dozen little
+mountains densely covered by cedar-brakes, but not one shaped like
+a pack-saddle. That did not deter us. Appearances are deceptive. A
+pack-saddle, like beauty, may exist only in the eye of the beholder.
+
+I and the grandson of the treasure examined those cedar-covered hills
+with the care of a lady hunting for the wicked flea. We explored every
+side, top, circumference, mean elevation, angle, slope, and concavity of
+every one for two miles up and down the river. We spent four days doing
+so. Then we hitched up the roan and the dun, and hauled the remains
+of the coffee and bacon the one hundred and forty-nine miles back to
+Concho City.
+
+Lee Rundle chewed much tobacco on the return trip. I was busy driving,
+because I was in a hurry.
+
+As shortly as could be after our empty return Goodloe Banks and I
+forgathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon to play dominoes and
+fish for information. I told Goodloe about my expedition after the
+buried treasure.
+
+"If I could have found that three hundred thousand dollars," I said to
+him, "I could have scoured and sifted the surface of the earth to find
+May Martha Mangum."
+
+"She is meant for higher things," said Goodloe. "I shall find her
+myself. But, tell me how you went about discovering the spot where this
+unearthed increment was imprudently buried."
+
+I told him in the smallest detail. I showed him the draughtsman's sketch
+with the distances marked plainly upon it.
+
+After glancing over it in a masterly way, he leaned back in his chair
+and bestowed upon me an explosion of sardonic, superior, collegiate
+laughter.
+
+"Well, you _are_ a fool, Jim," he said, when he could speak.
+
+"It's your play," said I, patiently, fingering my double-six.
+
+"Twenty," said Goodloe, making two crosses on the table with his chalk.
+
+"Why am I a fool?" I asked. "Buried treasure has been found before in
+many places."
+
+"Because," said he, "in calculating the point on the river where
+your line would strike you neglected to allow for the variation. The
+variation there would be nine degrees west. Let me have your pencil."
+
+Goodloe Banks figured rapidly on the back of an envelope.
+
+"The distance, from north to south, of the line run from the Spanish
+mission," said he, "is exactly twenty-two miles. It was run by a
+pocket-compass, according to your story. Allowing for the variation,
+the point on the Alamito River where you should have searched for your
+treasure is exactly six miles and nine hundred and forty-five varas
+farther west than the place you hit upon. Oh, what a fool you are, Jim!"
+
+"What is this variation that you speak of?" I asked. "I thought figures
+never lied."
+
+"The variation of the magnetic compass," said Goodloe, "from the true
+meridian."
+
+He smiled in his superior way; and then I saw come out in his face the
+singular, eager, consuming cupidity of the seeker after buried treasure.
+
+"Sometimes," he said with the air of the oracle, "these old traditions
+of hidden money are not without foundation. Suppose you let me look over
+that paper describing the location. Perhaps together we might--"
+
+The result was that Goodloe Banks and I, rivals in love, became
+companions in adventure. We went to Chico by stage from Huntersburg,
+the nearest railroad town. In Chico we hired a team drawing a covered
+spring-wagon and camping paraphernalia. We had the same surveyor run
+out our distance, as revised by Goodloe and his variations, and then
+dismissed him and sent him on his homeward road.
+
+It was night when we arrived. I fed the horses and made a fire near the
+bank of the river and cooked supper. Goodloe would have helped, but his
+education had not fitted him for practical things.
+
+But while I worked he cheered me with the expression of great thoughts
+handed down from the dead ones of old. He quoted some translations from
+the Greek at much length.
+
+"Anacreon," he explained. "That was a favorite passage with Miss
+Mangum--as I recited it."
+
+"She is meant for higher things," said I, repeating his phrase.
+
+"Can there be anything higher," asked Goodloe, "than to dwell in the
+society of the classics, to live in the atmosphere of learning and
+culture? You have often decried education. What of your wasted efforts
+through your ignorance of simple mathematics? How soon would you have
+found your treasure if my knowledge had not shown you your error?"
+
+"We'll take a look at those hills across the river first," said I,
+"and see what we find. I am still doubtful about variations. I have
+been brought up to believe that the needle is true to the pole."
+
+The next morning was a bright June one. We were up early and had
+breakfast. Goodloe was charmed. He recited--Keats, I think it was, and
+Kelly or Shelley--while I broiled the bacon. We were getting ready to
+cross the river, which was little more than a shallow creek there, and
+explore the many sharp-peaked cedar-covered hills on the other side.
+
+"My good Ulysses," said Goodloe, slapping me on the shoulder while I was
+washing the tin breakfast-plates, "let me see the enchanted document
+once more. I believe it gives directions for climbing the hill shaped
+like a pack-saddle. I never saw a pack-saddle. What is it like, Jim?"
+
+"Score one against culture," said I. "I'll know it when I see it."
+
+Goodloe was looking at old Rundle's document when he ripped out a most
+uncollegiate swear-word.
+
+"Come here," he said, holding the paper up against the sunlight. "Look
+at that," he said, laying his finger against it.
+
+On the blue paper--a thing I had never noticed before--I saw stand out
+in white letters the word and figures: "Malvern, 1898."
+
+"What about it?" I asked.
+
+"It's the water-mark," said Goodloe. "The paper was manufactured in
+1898. The writing on the paper is dated 1863. This is a palpable fraud."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said I. "The Rundles are pretty reliable, plain,
+uneducated country people. Maybe the paper manufacturers tried to
+perpetrate a swindle."
+
+And then Goodloe Banks went as wild as his education permitted. He
+dropped the glasses off his nose and glared at me.
+
+"I've often told you you were a fool," he said. "You have let yourself
+be imposed upon by a clodhopper. And you have imposed upon me."
+
+"How," I asked, "have I imposed upon you?"
+
+"By your ignorance," said he. "Twice I have discovered serious flaws in
+your plans that a common-school education should have enabled you to
+avoid. And," he continued, "I have been put to expense that I could ill
+afford in pursuing this swindling quest. I am done with it."
+
+I rose and pointed a large pewter spoon at him, fresh from the
+dish-water.
+
+"Goodloe Banks," I said, "I care not one parboiled navy bean for your
+education. I always barely tolerated it in any one, and I despised it in
+you. What has your learning done for you? It is a curse to yourself and
+a bore to your friends. Away," I said--"away with your water-marks and
+variations! They are nothing to me. They shall not deflect me from the
+quest."
+
+I pointed with my spoon across the river to a small mountain shaped like
+a pack-saddle.
+
+"I am going to search that mountain," I went on, "for the treasure.
+Decide now whether you are in it or not. If you wish to let a
+water-mark or a variation shake your soul, you are no true adventurer.
+Decide."
+
+A white cloud of dust began to rise far down the river road. It was the
+mail-wagon from Hesperus to Chico. Goodloe flagged it.
+
+"I am done with the swindle," said he, sourly. "No one but a fool would
+pay any attention to that paper now. Well, you always were a fool, Jim.
+I leave you to your fate."
+
+He gathered his personal traps, climbed into the mail-wagon, adjusted
+his glasses nervously, and flew away in a cloud of dust.
+
+After I had washed the dishes and staked the horses on new grass,
+I crossed the shallow river and made my way slowly through the
+cedar-brakes up to the top of the hill shaped like a pack-saddle.
+
+It was a wonderful June day. Never in my life had I seen so many birds,
+so many butter-flies, dragon-flies, grasshoppers, and such winged and
+stinged beasts of the air and fields.
+
+I investigated the hill shaped like a pack-saddle from base to summit.
+I found an absolute absence of signs relating to buried treasure. There
+was no pile of stones, no ancient blazes on the trees, none of the
+evidences of the three hundred thousand dollars, as set forth in the
+document of old man Rundle.
+
+I came down the hill in the cool of the afternoon. Suddenly, out of the
+cedar-brake I stepped into a beautiful green valley where a tributary
+small stream ran into the Alamito River.
+
+
+
+And there I was startled to see what I took to be a wild man, with
+unkempt beard and ragged hair, pursuing a giant butterfly with brilliant
+wings.
+
+"Perhaps he is an escaped madman," I thought; and wondered how he had
+strayed so far from seats of education and learning.
+
+And then I took a few more steps and saw a vine-covered cottage near
+the small stream. And in a little grassy glade I saw May Martha Mangum
+plucking wild flowers.
+
+She straightened up and looked at me. For the first time since I knew
+her I saw her face--which was the color of the white keys of a new
+piano--turn pink. I walked toward her without a word. She let the
+gathered flowers trickle slowly from her hand to the grass.
+
+"I knew you would come, Jim," she said clearly. "Father wouldn't let me
+write, but I knew you would come."
+
+What followed you may guess--there was my wagon and team just across the
+river.
+
+
+
+I've often wondered what good too much education is to a man if he can't
+use it for himself. If all the benefits of it are to go to others, where
+does it come in?
+
+For May Martha Mangum abides with me. There is an eight-room house in a
+live-oak grove, and a piano with an automatic player, and a good start
+toward the three thousand head of cattle is under fence.
+
+And when I ride home at night my pipe and slippers are put away in
+places where they cannot be found.
+
+But who cares for that? Who cares--who cares?
+
+
+
+
+TO HIM WHO WAITS
+
+
+The Hermit of the Hudson was hustling about his cave with unusual
+animation.
+
+The cave was on or in the top of a little spur of the Catskills that had
+strayed down to the river's edge, and, not having a ferry ticket, had to
+stop there. The bijou mountains were densely wooded and were infested
+by ferocious squirrels and woodpeckers that forever menaced the summer
+transients. Like a badly sewn strip of white braid, a macadamized road
+ran between the green skirt of the hills and the foamy lace of the
+river's edge. A dim path wound from the comfortable road up a rocky
+height to the hermit's cave. One mile upstream was the Viewpoint Inn,
+to which summer folk from the city came; leaving cool, electric-fanned
+apartments that they might be driven about in burning sunshine,
+shrieking, in gasoline launches, by spindle-legged Modreds bearing the
+blankest of shields.
+
+Train your lorgnette upon the hermit and let your eye receive the
+personal touch that shall endear you to the hero.
+
+A man of forty, judging him fairly, with long hair curling at the ends,
+dramatic eyes, and a forked brown beard like those that were imposed
+upon the West some years ago by self-appointed "divine healers" who
+succeeded the grasshopper crop. His outward vesture appeared to be kind
+of gunny-sacking, cut and made into a garment that would have made the
+fortune of a London tailor. His long, well-shaped fingers, delicate
+nose, and poise of manner raised him high above the class of hermits
+who fear water and bury money in oyster-cans in their caves in spots
+indicated by rude crosses chipped in the stone wall above.
+
+The hermit's home was not altogether a cave. The cave was an addition
+to the hermitage, which was a rude hut made of poles daubed with clay
+and covered with the best quality of rust-proof zinc roofing.
+
+In the house proper there were stone slabs for seats, a rustic bookcase
+made of unplaned poplar planks, and a table formed of a wooden slab laid
+across two upright pieces of granite--something between the furniture of
+a Druid temple and that of a Broadway beefsteak dungeon. Hung against
+the walls were skins of wild animals purchased in the vicinity of Eighth
+Street and University Place, New York.
+
+The rear of the cabin merged into the cave. There the hermit cooked his
+meals on a rude stone hearth. With infinite patience and an old axe he
+had chopped natural shelves in the rocky walls. On them stood his stores
+of flour, bacon, lard, talcum-powder, kerosene, baking-powder, soda-mint
+tablets, pepper, salt, and Olivo-Cremo Emulsion for chaps and roughness
+of the hands and face.
+
+The hermit had hermited there for ten years. He was an asset of the
+Viewpoint Inn. To its guests he was second in interest only to the
+Mysterious Echo in the Haunted Glen. And the Lover's Leap beat him only
+a few inches, flat-footed. He was known far (but not very wide, on
+account of the topography) as a scholar of brilliant intellect who had
+forsworn the world because he had been jilted in a love affair. Every
+Saturday night the Viewpoint Inn sent to him surreptitiously a basket
+of provisions. He never left the immediate outskirts of his hermitage.
+Guests of the inn who visited him said his store of knowledge, wit, and
+scintillating philosophy were simply wonderful, you know.
+
+That summer the Viewpoint Inn was crowded with guests. So, on Saturday
+nights, there were extra cans of tomatoes, and sirloin steak, instead
+of "rounds," in the hermit's basket.
+
+Now you have the material allegations in the case. So, make way for
+Romance.
+
+Evidently the hermit expected a visitor. He carefully combed his
+long hair and parted his apostolic beard. When the ninety-eight-cent
+alarm-clock on a stone shelf announced the hour of five he picked up his
+gunny-sacking skirts, brushed them carefully, gathered an oaken staff,
+and strolled slowly into the thick woods that surrounded the hermitage.
+
+He had not long to wait. Up the faint pathway, slippery with its carpet
+of pine-needles, toiled Beatrix, youngest and fairest of the famous
+Trenholme sisters. She was all in blue from hat to canvas pumps, varying
+in tint from the shade of the tinkle of a bluebell at daybreak on a
+spring Saturday to the deep hue of a Monday morning at nine when the
+washerwoman has failed to show up.
+
+Beatrix dug her cerulean parasol deep into the pine-needles and sighed.
+The hermit, on the _q. t._, removed a grass burr from the ankle of
+one sandalled foot with the big toe of his other one. She blued--and
+almost starched and ironed him--with her cobalt eyes.
+
+"It must be so nice," she said in little, tremulous gasps, "to be a
+hermit, and have ladies climb mountains to talk to you."
+
+The hermit folded his arms and leaned against a tree. Beatrix, with a
+sigh, settled down upon the mat of pine-needles like a bluebird upon her
+nest. The hermit followed suit; drawing his feet rather awkwardly under
+his gunny-sacking.
+
+"It must be nice to be a mountain," said he, with ponderous lightness,
+"and have angels in blue climb up you instead of flying over you."
+
+"Mamma had neuralgia," said Beatrix, "and went to bed, or I couldn't
+have come. It's dreadfully hot at that horrid old inn. But we hadn't
+the money to go anywhere else this summer."
+
+"Last night," said the hermit, "I climbed to the top of that big rock
+above us. I could see the lights of the inn and hear a strain or two of
+the music when the wind was right. I imagined you moving gracefully in
+the arms of others to the dreamy music of the waltz amid the fragrance
+of flowers. Think how lonely I must have been!"
+
+The youngest, handsomest, and poorest of the famous Trenholme sisters
+sighed.
+
+"You haven't quite hit it," she said, plaintively. "I was moving
+gracefully _at_ the arms of another. Mamma had one of her periodical
+attacks of rheumatism in both elbows and shoulders, and I had to rub
+them for an hour with that horrid old liniment. I hope you didn't think
+_that_ smelled like flowers. You know, there were some West Point boys
+and a yacht load of young men from the city at last evening's weekly
+dance. I've known mamma to sit by an open window for three hours with
+one-half of her registering 85 degrees and the other half frostbitten,
+and never sneeze once. But just let a bunch of ineligibles come around
+where I am, and she'll begin to swell at the knuckles and shriek with
+pain. And I have to take her to her room and rub her arms. To see mamma
+dressed you'd be surprised to know the number of square inches of surface
+there are to her arms. I think it must be delightful to be a hermit.
+That--cassock--or gabardine, isn't it?--that you wear is so becoming.
+Do you make it--or them--of course you must have changes--yourself? And
+what a blessed relief it must be to wear sandals instead of shoes! Think
+how we must suffer--no matter how small I buy my shoes they always pinch
+my toes. Oh, why can't there be lady hermits, too!"
+
+The beautifulest and most adolescent Trenholme sister extended
+two slender blue ankles that ended in two enormous blue-silk
+bows that almost concealed two fairy Oxfords, also of one of the
+forty-seven shades of blue. The hermit, as if impelled by a kind of
+reflex-telepathic action, drew his bare toes farther beneath his
+gunny-sacking.
+
+"I have heard about the romance of your life," said Miss Trenholme,
+softly. "They have it printed on the back of the menu card at the inn.
+Was she very beautiful and charming?"
+
+"On the bills of fare!" muttered the hermit; "but what do I care for the
+world's babble? Yes, she was of the highest and grandest type. Then,"
+he continued, "_then_ I thought the world could never contain another
+equal to her. So I forsook it and repaired to this mountain fastness
+to spend the remainder of my life alone--to devote and dedicate my
+remaining years to her memory."
+
+"It's grand," said Miss Trenholme, "absolutely grand. I think a hermit's
+life is the ideal one. No bill-collectors calling, no dressing for
+dinner--how I'd like to be one! But there's no such luck for me. If I
+don't marry this season I honestly believe mamma will force me into
+settlement work or trimming hats. It isn't because I'm getting old or
+ugly; but we haven't enough money left to butt in at any of the swell
+places any more. And I don't want to marry--unless it's somebody I like.
+That's why I'd like to be a hermit. Hermits don't ever marry, do they?"
+
+"Hundreds of 'em," said the hermit, "when they've found the right one."
+
+"But they're hermits," said the youngest and beautifulest, "because
+they've lost the right one, aren't they?"
+
+"Because they think they have," answered the recluse, fatuously.
+"Wisdom comes to one in a mountain cave as well as to one in the world
+of 'swells,' as I believe they are called in the argot."
+
+"When one of the 'swells' brings it to them," said Miss Trenholme. "And
+my folks are swells. That's the trouble. But there are so many swells
+at the seashore in the summer-time that we hardly amount to more than
+ripples. So we've had to put all our money into river and harbor
+appropriations. We were all girls, you know. There were four of us. I'm
+the only surviving one. The others have been married off. All to money.
+Mamma is so proud of my sisters. They send her the loveliest pen-wipers
+and art calendars every Christmas. I'm the only one on the market now.
+I'm forbidden to look at any one who hasn't money."
+
+"But--" began the hermit.
+
+"But, oh," said the beautifulest, "of course hermits have great pots of
+gold and doubloons buried somewhere near three great oak-trees. They all
+have."
+
+"I have not," said the hermit, regretfully.
+
+"I'm so sorry," said Miss Trenholme. "I always thought they had. I think
+I must go now."
+
+Oh, beyond question, she was the beautifulest.
+
+"Fair lady--" began the hermit.
+
+"I am Beatrix Trenholme--some call me Trix," she said. "You must come
+to the inn to see me."
+
+"I haven't been a stone's-throw from my cave in ten years," said the
+hermit.
+
+"You must come to see me there," she repeated. "Any evening except
+Thursday."
+
+The hermit smiled weakly.
+
+"Good-bye," she said, gathering the folds of her pale-blue skirt. "I
+shall expect you. But not on Thursday evening, remember."
+
+What an interest it would give to the future menu cards of the Viewpoint
+Inn to have these printed lines added to them: "Only once during the
+more than ten years of his lonely existence did the mountain hermit
+leave his famous cave. That was when he was irresistibly drawn to the
+inn by the fascinations of Miss Beatrix Trenholme, youngest and most
+beautiful of the celebrated Trenholme sisters, whose brilliant marriage
+to--"
+
+Aye, to whom?
+
+The hermit walked back to the hermitage. At the door stood Bob Binkley,
+his old friend and companion of the days before he had renounced the
+world--Bob, himself, arrayed like the orchids of the greenhouse in the
+summer man's polychromatic garb--Bob, the millionaire, with his fat,
+firm, smooth, shrewd face, his diamond rings, sparkling fob-chain, and
+pleated bosom. He was two years older than the hermit, and looked five
+years younger.
+
+"You're Hamp Ellison, in spite of those whiskers and that going-away
+bathrobe," he shouted. "I read about you on the bill of fare at the inn.
+They've run your biography in between the cheese and 'Not Responsible
+for Coats and Umbrellas.' What 'd you do it for, Hamp? And ten years,
+too--gee whilikins!"
+
+"You're just the same," said the hermit. "Come in and sit down. Sit on
+that limestone rock over there; it's softer than the granite."
+
+"I can't understand it, old man," said Binkley. "I can see how you could
+give up a woman for ten years, but not ten years for a woman. Of course
+I know why you did it. Everybody does. Edith Carr. She jilted four or
+five besides you. But you were the only one who took to a hole in the
+ground. The others had recourse to whiskey, the Klondike, politics, and
+that _similia similibus_ cure. But, say--Hamp, Edith Carr was just about
+the finest woman in the world--high-toned and proud and noble, and
+playing her ideals to win at all kinds of odds. She certainly was a
+crackerjack."
+
+"After I renounced the world," said the hermit, "I never heard of her
+again."
+
+"She married me," said Binkley.
+
+The hermit leaned against the wooden walls of his ante-cave and wriggled
+his toes.
+
+"I know how you feel about it," said Binkley. "What else could she
+do? There were her four sisters and her mother and old man Carr--you
+remember how he put all the money he had into dirigible balloons? Well,
+everything was coming down and nothing going up with 'em, as you might
+say. Well, I know Edith as well as you do--although I married her. I was
+worth a million then, but I've run it up since to between five and six.
+It wasn't me she wanted as much as--well, it was about like this. She
+had that bunch on her hands, and they had to be taken care of. Edith
+married me two months after you did the ground-squirrel act. I thought
+she liked me, too, at the time."
+
+"And now?" inquired the recluse.
+
+"We're better friends than ever now. She got a divorce from me two years
+ago. Just incompatibility. I didn't put in any defence. Well, well,
+well, Hamp, this is certainly a funny dugout you've built here. But you
+always were a hero of fiction. Seems like you'd have been the very one
+to strike Edith's fancy. Maybe you did--but it's the bank-roll that
+catches 'em, my boy--your caves and whiskers won't do it. Honestly,
+Hamp, don't you think you've been a darned fool?"
+
+The hermit smiled behind his tangled beard. He was and always had been
+so superior to the crude and mercenary Binkley that even his vulgarities
+could not anger him. Moreover, his studies and meditations in his
+retreat had raised him far above the little vanities of the world. His
+little mountain-side had been almost an Olympus, over the edge of which
+he saw, smiling, the bolts hurled in the valleys of man below. Had his
+ten years of renunciation, of thought, of devotion to an ideal, of
+living scorn of a sordid world, been in vain? Up from the world had
+come to him the youngest and beautifulest--fairer than Edith--one and
+three-seventh times lovelier than the seven-years-served Rachel. So the
+hermit smiled in his beard.
+
+When Binkley had relieved the hermitage from the blot of his presence
+and the first faint star showed above the pines, the hermit got the can
+of baking-powder from his cupboard. He still smiled behind his beard.
+
+There was a slight rustle in the doorway. There stood Edith Carr, with
+all the added beauty and stateliness and noble bearing that ten years
+had brought her.
+
+She was never one to chatter. She looked at the hermit with her large,
+_thinking_, dark eyes. The hermit stood still, surprised into a pose as
+motionless as her own. Only his subconscious sense of the fitness of
+things caused him to turn the baking-powder can slowly in his hands
+until its red label was hidden against his bosom.
+
+"I am stopping at the inn," said Edith, in low but clear tones. "I heard
+of you there. I told myself that I _must_ see you. I want to ask your
+forgiveness. I sold my happiness for money. There were others to be
+provided for--but that does not excuse me. I just wanted to see you
+and ask your forgiveness. You have lived here ten years, they tell me,
+cherishing my memory! I was blind, Hampton. I could not see then that
+all the money in the world cannot weigh in the scales against a faithful
+heart. If--but it is too late now, of course."
+
+Her assertion was a question clothed as best it could be in a loving
+woman's pride. But through the thin disguise the hermit saw easily
+that his lady had come back to him--if he chose. He had won a golden
+crown--if it pleased him to take it. The reward of his decade of
+faithfulness was ready for his hand--if he desired to stretch it forth.
+
+For the space of one minute the old enchantment shone upon him with
+a reflected radiance. And then by turns he felt the manly sensations
+of indignation at having been discarded, and of repugnance at having
+been--as it were--sought again. And last of all--how strange that it
+should have come at last!--the pale-blue vision of the beautifulest of
+the Trenholme sisters illuminated his mind's eye and left him without
+a waver.
+
+"It is too late," he said, in deep tones, pressing the baking-powder
+can against his heart.
+
+Once she turned after she had gone slowly twenty yards down the path.
+The hermit had begun to twist the lid off his can, but he hid it again
+under his sacking robe. He could see her great eyes shining sadly
+through the twilight; but he stood inflexible in the doorway of his
+shack and made no sign.
+
+
+
+Just as the moon rose on Thursday evening the hermit was seized by the
+world-madness.
+
+Up from the inn, fainter than the horns of elf-land, came now and then
+a few bars of music played by the casino band. The Hudson was broadened
+by the night into an illimitable sea--those lights, dimly seen on its
+opposite shore, were not beacons for prosaic trolley-lines, but low-set
+stars millions of miles away. The waters in front of the inn were gay
+with fireflies--or were they motor-boats, smelling of gasoline and oil?
+Once the hermit had known these things and had sported with Amaryllis
+in the shade of the red-and-white-striped awnings. But for ten years
+he had turned a heedless ear to these far-off echoes of a frivolous
+world. But to-night there was something wrong.
+
+The casino band was playing a waltz--a waltz. What a fool he had
+been to tear deliberately ten years of his life from the calendar
+of existence for one who had given him up for the false joys that
+wealth--"_tum_ ti _tum_ ti _tum_ ti"--how did that waltz go? Butthose
+years had not been sacrificed--had they not brought him the star and
+pearl of all the world, the youngest and beautifulest of--
+
+"But do _not_ come on Thursday evening," she had insisted. Perhaps by
+now she would be moving slowly and gracefully to the strains of that
+waltz, held closely by West-Pointers or city commuters, while he, who
+had read in her eyes things that had recompensed him for ten lost
+years of life, moped like some wild animal in its mountain den. Why
+should--"
+
+"Damn it," said the hermit, suddenly, "I'll do it!"
+
+He threw down his Marcus Aurelius and threw off his gunny-sack toga.
+He dragged a dust-covered trunk from a corner of the cave, and with
+difficulty wrenched open its lid.
+
+Candles he had in plenty, and the cave was soon aglow. Clothes--ten
+years old in cut--scissors, razors, hats, shoes, all his discarded
+attire and belongings, were dragged ruthlessly from their renunciatory
+rest and strewn about in painful disorder.
+
+A pair of scissors soon reduced his beard sufficiently for the dulled
+razors to perform approximately their office. Cutting his own hair
+was beyond the hermit's skill. So he only combed and brushed it
+backward as smoothly as he could. Charity forbids us to consider the
+heartburnings and exertions of one so long removed from haberdashery
+and society.
+
+At the last the hermit went to an inner corner of his cave and began
+to dig in the soft earth with a long iron spoon. Out of the cavity he
+thus made he drew a tin can, and out of the can three thousand dollars
+in bills, tightly rolled and wrapped in oiled silk. He was a real
+hermit, as this may assure you.
+
+You may take a brief look at him as he hastens down the little
+mountain-side. A long, wrinkled black frock-coat reached to his
+calves. White duck trousers, unacquainted with the tailor's goose, a
+pink shirt, white standing collar with brilliant blue butterfly tie,
+and buttoned congress gaiters. But think, sir and madam--ten years!
+From beneath a narrow-brimmed straw hat with a striped band flowed his
+hair. Seeing him, with all your shrewdness you could not have guessed
+him. You would have said that he played Hamlet--or the tuba--or
+pinochle--you would never have laid your hand on your heart and said:
+"He is a hermit who lived ten years in a cave for love of one lady--to
+win another."
+
+The dancing pavilion extended above the waters of the river. Gay
+lanterns and frosted electric globes shed a soft glamour within it. A
+hundred ladies and gentlemen from the inn and summer cottages flitted
+in and about it. To the left of the dusty roadway down which the
+hermit had tramped were the inn and grill-room. Something seemed to
+be on there, too. The windows were brilliantly lighted, and music was
+playing--music different from the two-steps and waltzes of the casino
+band.
+
+A negro man wearing a white jacket came through the iron gate, with
+its immense granite posts and wrought-iron lamp-holders.
+
+"What is going on here to-night?" asked the hermit.
+
+"Well, sah," said the servitor, "dey is having de reg'lar
+Thursday-evenin' dance in de casino. And in de grill-room dere's a
+beefsteak dinner, sah."
+
+The hermit glanced up at the inn on the hillside whence burst suddenly
+a triumphant strain of splendid harmony.
+
+"And up there," said he, "they are playing Mendelssohn--what is going
+on up there?"
+
+"Up in de inn," said the dusky one, "dey is a weddin' goin' on. Mr.
+Binkley, a mighty rich man, am marryin' Miss Trenholme, sah--de young
+lady who am quite de belle of de place, sah."
+
+
+
+
+HE ALSO SERVES
+
+
+
+If I could have a thousand years--just one little thousand years--more
+of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to
+touch the hem of her robe.
+
+Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and
+garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words
+of the things they have seen and considered. The recording of their
+tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are only
+two fates I dread--deafness and writer's cramp. The hand is yet
+steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in
+the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp-follower
+of fortune.
+
+Biography shall claim you but an instant--I first knew Hunky when he
+was head-waiter at Chubb's little beefsteak restaurant and cafe on
+Third Avenue. There was only one waiter besides.
+
+Then, successively, I caromed against him in the little streets of
+the Big City after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a
+treasure-seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a
+pearl-fisher in the Arkansas River. Between these dashes into the land
+of adventure he usually came back to Chubb's for a while. Chubb's was
+a port for him when gales blew too high; but when you dined there and
+Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he would come to
+anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago. You wouldn't
+care for his description--he was soft of voice and hard of face,
+and rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any approach to a
+disturbance among Chubb's customers.
+
+One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street
+and Third Avenue after an absence of several months. In ten minutes
+we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my
+ears began to get busy. I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw
+Hunky's word-of-mouth blows--it all came to something like this:
+
+"Speaking of the next election," said Hunky, "did you ever know much
+about Indians? No? I don't mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or
+Laughing Water kind--I mean the modern Indian--the kind that takes
+Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the half-back on the other side
+in football games. The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the
+afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills
+up on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the
+ancestral wickiup.
+
+"Well, they ain't so bad. I like 'em better than most foreigners that
+have come over in the last few hundred years. One thing about the
+Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own
+vices for them of the pale-faces--and he retains all his own virtues.
+Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets
+'em loose. But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep
+their own vices--and it's going to take our whole standing army some
+day to police that gang.
+
+"But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High Jack
+Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania
+college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent
+kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with turned-back cuffs. He was
+a friend of mine. I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during
+the land boom, and we got thick. He had got all there was out of
+colleges and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt. He was a
+man of first-class style and wrote essays, and had been invited to
+visit rich guys' houses in Boston and such places.
+
+"There was a Cherokee girl in Muscogee that High Jack was foolish
+about. He took me to see her a few times. Her name was Florence Blue
+Feather--but you want to clear your mind of all ideas of squaws with
+nose-rings and army blankets. This young lady was whiter than you
+are, and better educated than I ever was. You couldn't have told her
+from any of the girls shopping in the swell Third Avenue stores. I
+liked her so well that I got to calling on her now and then when High
+Jack wasn't along, which is the way of friends in such matters. She
+was educated at the Muscogee College, and was making a specialty
+of--let's see--eth--yes, ethnology. That's the art that goes back
+and traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from
+jelly-fish through monkeys and to the O'Briens. High Jack had took
+up that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of
+riotous assemblies--Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder-parties, and
+such. Having a mutual taste for musty information like that was what
+made 'em like each other, I suppose. But I don't know! What they
+call congeniality of tastes ain't always it. Now, when Miss Blue
+Feather and me was talking together, I listened to her affidavits
+about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins german
+(well, if the Germans don't nod, who does?) to the mound-builders of
+Ohio with incomprehension and respect. And when I'd tell her about
+the Bowery and Coney Island, and sing her a few songs that I'd heard
+the Jamaica niggers sing at their church lawn-parties, she didn't look
+much less interested than she did when High Jack would tell her that
+he had a pipe that the first inhabitants of America originally arrived
+here on stilts after a freshet at Tenafly, New Jersey.
+
+"But I was going to tell you more about High Jack.
+
+"About six months ago I get a letter from him, saying he'd been
+commissioned by the Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology at Washington
+to go down to Mexico and translate some excavations or dig up the
+meaning of some shorthand notes on some ruins--or something of that
+sort. And if I'd go along he could squeeze the price into the expense
+account.
+
+"Well, I'd been holding a napkin over my arm at Chubb's about long
+enough then, so I wired High Jack 'Yes'; and he sent me a ticket, and
+I met him in Washington, and he had a lot of news to tell me. First
+of all, was that Florence Blue Feather had suddenly disappeared from
+her home and environments.
+
+"'Run away?' I asked.
+
+"'Vanished,' says High Jack. 'Disappeared like your shadow when
+the sun goes under a cloud. She was seen on the street, and then
+she turned a corner and nobody ever seen her afterward. The whole
+community turned out to look for her, but we never found a clew.'
+
+"'That's bad--that's bad,' says I. 'She was a mighty nice girl, and
+as smart as you find em.'
+
+"High Jack seemed to take it hard. I guess he must have esteemed Miss
+Blue Feather quite highly. I could see that he'd referred the matter
+to the whiskey-jug. That was his weak point--and many another man's.
+I've noticed that when a man loses a girl he generally takes to drink
+either just before or just after it happens.
+
+"From Washington we railroaded it to New Orleans, and there took a
+tramp steamer bound for Belize. And a gale pounded us all down the
+Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a
+little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula. Suppose the
+ship had run against that name in the dark!
+
+"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cyclone in the bay,' says High
+Jack Snakefeeder. So we get the captain to send us ashore in a dory
+when the squall seemed to cease from squalling.
+
+"'We will find ruins here or make 'em,' says High. 'The Government
+doesn't care which we do. An appropriation is an appropriation.'
+
+"Boca de Coacoyula was a dead town. Them biblical towns we read
+about--Tired and Siphon--after they was destroyed, they must have
+looked like Forty-second Street and Broadway compared to this Boca
+place. It still claimed 1300 inhabitants as estimated and engraved
+on the stone court-house by the census-taker in 1597. The citizens
+were a mixture of Indians and other Indians; but some of 'em was
+light-colored, which I was surprised to see. The town was huddled up
+on the shore, with woods so thick around it that a subpoena-server
+couldn't have reached a monkey ten yards away with the papers. We
+wondered what kept it from being annexed to Kansas; but we soon found
+out that it was Major Bing.
+
+"Major Bing was the ointment around the fly. He had the cochineal,
+sarsaparilla, log-wood, annatto, hemp, and all other dye-woods and
+pure food adulteration concessions cornered. He had five-sixths of
+the Boca de Thingama-jiggers working for him on shares. It was a
+beautiful graft. We used to brag about Morgan and E. H. and others
+of our wisest when I was in the provinces--but now no more. That
+peninsula has got our little country turned into a submarine without
+even the observation tower showing.
+
+"Major Bing's idea was this. He had the population go forth into the
+forest and gather these products. When they brought 'em in he gave
+'em one-fifth for their trouble. Sometimes they'd strike and demand a
+sixth. The Major always gave in to 'em.
+
+"The Major had a bungalow so close on the sea that the nine-inch
+tide seeped through the cracks in the kitchen floor. Me and him and
+High Jack Snakefeeder sat on the porch and drank rum from noon till
+midnight. He said he had piled up $300,000 in New Orleans banks, and
+High and me could stay with him forever if we would. But High Jack
+happened to think of the United States, and began to talk ethnology.
+
+"'Ruins!' says Major Bing. 'The woods are full of 'em. I don't know
+how far they date back, but they was here before I came.'
+
+"High Jack asks what form of worship the citizens of that locality are
+addicted to.
+
+"'Why,' says the Major, rubbing his nose, 'I can't hardly say. I
+imagine it's infidel or Aztec or Nonconformist or something like
+that. There's a church here--a Methodist or some other kind--with
+a parson named Skidder. He claims to have converted the people to
+Christianity. He and me don't assimilate except on state occasions.
+I imagine they worship some kind of gods or idols yet. But Skidder
+says he has 'em in the fold.'
+
+"A few days later High Jack and me, prowling around, strikes a plain
+path into the forest, and follows it a good four miles. Then a branch
+turns to the left. We go a mile, maybe, down that, and run up against
+the finest ruin you ever saw--solid stone with trees and vines and
+under-brush all growing up against it and in it and through it. All
+over it was chiselled carvings of funny beasts and people that would
+have been arrested if they'd ever come out in vaudeville that way. We
+approached it from the rear.
+
+"High Jack had been drinking too much rum ever since we landed in
+Boca. You know how an Indian is--the palefaces fixed his clock when
+they introduced him to firewater. He'd brought a quart along with
+him.
+
+"'Hunky,' says he, 'we'll explore the ancient temple. It may be that
+the storm that landed us here was propitious. The Minority Report
+Bureau of Ethnology,' says he, 'may yet profit by the vagaries of wind
+and tide.'
+
+"We went in the rear door of the bum edifice. We struck a kind of
+alcove without bath. There was a granite davenport, and a stone
+wash-stand without any soap or exit for the water, and some hardwood
+pegs drove into holes in the wall, and that was all. To go out of that
+furnished apartment into a Harlem hall bedroom would make you feel
+like getting back home from an amateur violoncello solo at an East
+Side Settlement house.
+
+"While High was examining some hieroglyphics on the wall that the
+stone-masons must have made when their tools slipped, I stepped into
+the front room. That was at least thirty by fifty feet, stone floor,
+six little windows like square port-holes that didn't let much light
+in.
+
+"I looked back over my shoulder, and sees High Jack's face three feet
+away.
+
+"'High,' says I, 'of all the--'
+
+"And then I noticed he looked funny, and I turned around.
+
+"He'd taken off his clothes to the waist, and he didn't seem to hear
+me. I touched him, and came near beating it. High Jack had turned to
+stone. I had been drinking some rum myself.
+
+"'Ossified!' I says to him, loudly. 'I knew what would happen if you
+kept it up.'
+
+"And then High Jack comes in from the alcove when he hears me
+conversing with nobody, and we have a look at Mr. Snakefeeder No. 2.
+It's a stone idol, or god, or revised statute or something, and it
+looks as much like High Jack as one green pea looks like itself. It's
+got exactly his face and size and color, but it's steadier on its
+pins. It stands on a kind of rostrum or pedestal, and you can see
+it's been there ten million years.
+
+"'He's a cousin of mine,' sings High, and then he turns solemn.
+
+"'Hunky,' he says, putting one hand on my shoulder and one on the
+statue's, 'I'm in the holy temple of my ancestors.'
+
+"'Well, if looks goes for anything,' says I, 'you've struck a twin.
+Stand side by side with buddy, and let's see if there's any
+difference.'
+
+"There wasn't. You know an Indian can keep his face as still as an
+iron dog's when he wants to, so when High Jack froze his features you
+couldn't have told him from the other one.
+
+"'There's some letters,' says I, 'on his nob's pedestal, but I can't
+make 'em out. The alphabet of this country seems to be composed of
+sometimes _a_, _e_, _i_, _o_, and _u_, but generally _z's_, _l's_,
+and _t's_.'
+
+"High Jack's ethnology gets the upper hand of his rum for a minute,
+and he investigates the inscription.
+
+"'Hunky,' says he, 'this is a statue of Tlotopaxl, one of the most
+powerful gods of the ancient Aztecs.'
+
+"'Glad to know him,' says I, 'but in his present condition he reminds
+me of the joke Shakespeare got off on Julius Caesar. We might say
+about your friend:
+
+
+   "'Imperious What's-his-name, dead and turned to stone--
+     No use to write or call him on the 'phone.'
+
+
+"'Hunky,' says High Jack Snakefeeder, looking at me funny, 'do you
+believe in reincarnation?'
+
+"'It sounds to me,' says I, 'like either a clean-up of the
+slaughter-houses or a new kind of Boston pink. I don't know.'
+
+"'I believe,' says he, 'that I am the reincarnation of Tlotopaxl.
+My researches have convinced me that the Cherokees, of all the North
+American tribes, can boast of the straightest descent from the
+proud Aztec race. That,' says he, 'was a favorite theory of mine and
+Florence Blue Feather's. And she--what if she--'
+
+"High Jack grabs my arm and walls his eyes at me. Just then he looked
+more like his eminent co-Indian murderer, Crazy Horse.
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'what if she, what if she, what if she? You're
+drunk,' says I. 'Impersonating idols and believing in--what was
+it?--recarnalization? Let's have a drink,' says I. 'It's as spooky here
+as a Brooklyn artificial-limb factory at midnight with the gas turned
+down.'
+
+"Just then I heard somebody coming, and I dragged High Jack into the
+bedless bedchamber. There was peep-holes bored through the wall, so
+we could see the whole front part of the temple. Major Bing told me
+afterward that the ancient priests in charge used to rubber through
+them at the congregation.
+
+"In a few minutes an old Indian woman came in with a big oval earthen
+dish full of grub. She set it on a square block of stone in front of
+the graven image, and laid down and walloped her face on the floor a
+few times, and then took a walk for herself.
+
+"High Jack and me was hungry, so we came out and looked it over.
+There was goat steaks and fried rice-cakes, and plantains and cassava,
+and broiled land-crabs and mangoes--nothing like what you get at
+Chubb's.
+
+"We ate hearty--and had another round of rum.
+
+"'It must be old Tecumseh's--or whatever you call him--birthday,' says
+I. 'Or do they feed him every day? I thought gods only drank vanilla
+on Mount Catawampus.'
+
+"Then some more native parties in short kimonos that showed their
+aboriginees punctured the near-horizon, and me and High had to skip
+back into Father Axletree's private boudoir. They came by ones, twos,
+and threes, and left all sorts of offerings--there was enough grub
+for Bingham's nine gods of war, with plenty left over for the Peace
+Conference at The Hague. They brought jars of honey, and bunches of
+bananas, and bottles of wine, and stacks of tortillas, and beautiful
+shawls worth one hundred dollars apiece that the Indian women weave of
+a kind of vegetable fibre like silk. All of 'em got down and wriggled
+on the floor in front of that hard-finish god, and then sneaked off
+through the woods again.
+
+"'I wonder who gets this rake-off?' remarks High Jack.
+
+"'Oh,' says I, 'there's priests or deputy idols or a committee of
+disarrangements somewhere in the woods on the job. Wherever you
+find a god you'll find somebody waiting to take charge of the burnt
+offerings.'
+
+"And then we took another swig of rum and walked out to the parlor
+front door to cool off, for it was as hot inside as a summer camp on
+the Palisades.
+
+"And while we stood there in the breeze we looks down the path and
+sees a young lady approaching the blasted ruin. She was bare-footed
+and had on a white robe, and carried a wreath of white flowers in her
+hand. When she got nearer we saw she had a long blue feather stuck
+through her black hair. And when she got nearer still me and High
+Jack Snakefeeder grabbed each other to keep from tumbling down on the
+floor; for the girl's face was as much like Florence Blue Feather's
+as his was like old King Toxicology's.
+
+"And then was when High Jack's booze drowned his system of ethnology.
+He dragged me inside back of the statue, and says:
+
+"'Lay hold of it, Hunky. We'll pack it into the other room. I felt
+it all the time,' says he. 'I'm the reconsideration of the god
+Locomotorataxia, and Florence Blue Feather was my bride a thousand
+years ago. She has come to seek me in the temple where I used to
+reign.'
+
+"'All right,' says I. 'There's no use arguing against the rum
+question. You take his feet.'
+
+"We lifted the three-hundred-pound stone god, and carried him into
+the back room of the cafe--the temple, I mean--and leaned him against
+the wall. It was more work than bouncing three live ones from an
+all-night Broadway joint on New-Year's Eve.
+
+"Then High Jack ran out and brought in a couple of them Indian silk
+shawls and began to undress himself.
+
+"'Oh, figs!' says I. 'Is it thus? Strong drink is an adder and
+subtractor, too. Is it the heat or the call of the wild that's got
+you?'
+
+"But High Jack is too full of exaltation and cane-juice to reply. He
+stops the disrobing business just short of the Manhattan Beach rules,
+and then winds them red-and-white shawls around him, and goes out and.
+stands on the pedestal as steady as any platinum deity you ever saw.
+And I looks through a peek-hole to see what he is up to.
+
+"In a few minutes in comes the girl with the flower wreath. Danged
+if I wasn't knocked a little silly when she got close, she looked
+so exactly much like Florence Blue Feather. 'I wonder,' says I to
+myself, 'if she has been reincarcerated, too? If I could see,' says I
+to myself, 'whether she has a mole on her left--' But the next minute
+I thought she looked one-eighth of a shade darker than Florence; but
+she looked good at that. And High Jack hadn't drunk all the rum that
+had been drank.
+
+"The girl went up within ten feet of the bum idol, and got down and
+massaged her nose with the floor, like the rest did. Then she went
+nearer and laid the flower wreath on the block of stone at High Jack's
+feet. Rummy as I was, I thought it was kind of nice of her to think
+of offering flowers instead of household and kitchen provisions. Even
+a stone god ought to appreciate a little sentiment like that on top of
+the fancy groceries they had piled up in front of him.
+
+"And then High Jack steps down from his pedestal, quiet, and mentions
+a few words that sounded just like the hieroglyphics carved on the
+walls of the ruin. The girl gives a little jump backward, and her
+eyes fly open as big as doughnuts; but she don't beat it.
+
+"Why didn't she? I'll tell you why I think why. It don't seem to a
+girl so supernatural, unlikely, strange, and startling that a stone
+god should come to life for _her_. If he was to do it for one of them
+snub-nosed brown girls on the other side of the woods, now, it would
+be different--but _her_! I'll bet she said to herself: 'Well, goodness
+me! you've been a long time getting on your job. I've half a mind not
+to speak to you.'
+
+"But she and High Jack holds hands and walks away out of the temple
+together. By the time I'd had time to take another drink and enter
+upon the scene they was twenty yards away, going up the path in the
+woods that the girl had come down. With the natural scenery already
+in place, it was just like a play to watch 'em--she looking up at
+him, and him giving her back the best that an Indian can hand,
+out in the way of a goo-goo eye. But there wasn't anything in that
+recarnification and revulsion to tintype for me.
+
+"'Hey! Injun!' I yells out to High Jack. 'We've got a board-bill due
+in town, and you're leaving me without a cent. Brace up and cut out
+the Neapolitan fisher-maiden, and let's go back home.'
+
+"But on the two goes; without looking once back until, as you might
+say, the forest swallowed 'em up. And I never saw or heard of High
+Jack Snakefeeder from that day to this. I don't know if the Cherokees
+came from the Aspics; but if they did, one of 'em went back.
+
+"All I could do was to hustle back to that Boca place and panhandle
+Major Bing. He detached himself from enough of his winnings to buy me
+a ticket home. And I'm back again on the job at Chubb's, sir, and I'm
+going to hold it steady. Come round, and you'll find the steaks as
+good as ever."
+
+I wondered what Hunky Magee thought about his own story; so I asked
+him if he had any theories about reincarnation and transmogrification
+and such mysteries as he had touched upon.
+
+"Nothing like that," said Hunky, positively. "What ailed High Jack
+was too much booze and education. They'll do an Indian up every
+time."
+
+"But what about Miss Blue Feather?" I persisted.
+
+"Say," said Hunky, with a grin, "that little lady that stole High Jack
+certainly did give me a jar when I first took a look at her, but it
+was only for a minute. You remember I told you High Jack said that
+Miss Florence Blue Feather disappeared from home about a year ago?
+Well, where she landed four days later was in as neat a five-room flat
+on East Twenty-third Street as you ever walked sideways through--and
+she's been Mrs. Magee ever since."
+
+
+
+
+THE MOMENT OF VICTORY
+
+
+Ben Granger is a war veteran aged twenty-nine--which should enable
+you to guess the war. He is also principal merchant and postmaster of
+Cadiz, a little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico
+perpetually blow.
+
+Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater
+Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a
+corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air
+college in which the Filipino was schooled. Now, with his bayonet
+beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal's guard of
+cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the
+matted jungles of Mindanao. Always have his interest and choice been
+for deeds rather than for words; but the consideration and digestion
+of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will
+attest.
+
+"What is it," he asked me one moonlit eve, as we sat among his boxes
+and barrels, "that generally makes men go through dangers, and fire,
+and trouble, and starvation, and battle, and such recourses? What
+does a man do it for? Why does he try to outdo his fellow-humans, and
+be braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his best
+friends are? What's his game? What does he expect to get out of it?
+He don't do it just for the fresh air and exercise. What would you
+say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for
+his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in
+the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields,
+links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and _vice versa_
+places of the world?"
+
+"Well, Ben," said I, with judicial seriousness, "I think we might
+safely limit the number of motives of a man who seeks fame to three--to
+ambition, which is a desire for popular applause; to avarice, which
+looks to the material side of success; and to love of some woman whom
+he either possesses or desires to possess."
+
+Ben pondered over my words while a mocking-bird on the top of a
+mesquite by the porch trilled a dozen bars.
+
+"I reckon," said he, "that your diagnosis about covers the case
+according to the rules laid down in the copy-books and historical
+readers. But what I had in my mind was the case of Willie Robbins, a
+person I used to know. I'll tell you about him before I close up the
+store, if you don't mind listening.
+
+"Willie was one of our social set up in San Augustine. I was clerking
+there then for Brady & Murchison, wholesale dry-goods and ranch
+supplies. Willie and I belonged to the same german club and athletic
+association and military company. He played the triangle in our
+serenading and quartet crowd that used to ring the welkin three nights
+a week somewhere in town.
+
+"Willie jibed with his name considerable. He weighed about as much
+as a hundred pounds of veal in his summer suitings, and he had a
+'Where-is-Mary?' expression on his features so plain that you could
+almost see the wool growing on him.
+
+"And yet you couldn't fence him away from the girls with barbed wire.
+You know that kind of young fellows--a kind of a mixture of fools and
+angels--they rush in and fear to tread at the same time; but they never
+fail to tread when they get the chance. He was always on hand when 'a
+joyful occasion was had,' as the morning paper would say, looking as
+happy as a king full, and at the same time as uncomfortable as a raw
+oyster served with sweet pickles. He danced like he had hind hobbles
+on; and he had a vocabulary of about three hundred and fifty words
+that he made stretch over four germans a week, and plagiarized from
+to get him through two ice-cream suppers and a Sunday-night call. He
+seemed to me to be a sort of a mixture of Maltese kitten, sensitive
+plant, and a member of a stranded 'Two Orphans' company.
+
+"I'll give you an estimate of his physiological and pictorial make-up,
+and then I'll stick spurs into the sides of my narrative.
+
+"Willie inclined to the Caucasian in his coloring and manner of style.
+His hair was opalescent and his conversation fragmentary. His eyes
+were the same blue shade as the china dog's on the right-hand corner
+of your Aunt Ellen's mantelpiece. He took things as they came, and I
+never felt any hostility against him. I let him live, and so did
+others.
+
+"But what does this Willie do but coax his heart out of his boots and
+lose it to Myra Allison, the liveliest, brightest, keenest, smartest,
+and prettiest girl in San Augustine. I tell you, she had the blackest
+eyes, the shiniest curls, and the most tantalizing--Oh, no, you're
+off--I wasn't a victim. I might have been, but I knew better. I kept
+out. Joe Granberry was It from the start. He had everybody else
+beat a couple of leagues and thence east to a stake and mound. But,
+anyhow, Myra was a nine-pound, full-merino, fall-clip fleece, sacked
+and loaded on a four-horse team for San Antone.
+
+"One night there was an ice-cream sociable at Mrs. Colonel
+Spraggins', in San Augustine. We fellows had a big room up-stairs
+opened up for us to put our hats and things in, and to comb our hair
+and put on the clean collars we brought along inside the sweat-bands
+of our hats--in short, a room to fix up in just like they have
+everywhere at high-toned doings. A little farther down the hall
+was the girls' room, which they used to powder up in, and so forth.
+Downstairs we--that is, the San Augustine Social Cotillion and
+Merrymakers' Club--had a stretcher put down in the parlor where our
+dance was going on.
+
+"Willie Robbins and me happened to be up in our--cloak-room, I believe
+we called it--when Myra Allison skipped through the hall on her way
+down-stairs from the girls' room. Willie was standing before the
+mirror, deeply interested in smoothing down the blond grass-plot on
+his head, which seemed to give him lots of trouble. Myra was always
+full of life and devilment. She stopped and stuck her head in our
+door. She certainly was good-looking. But I knew how Joe Granberry
+stood with her. So did Willie; but he kept on ba-a-a-ing after her
+and following her around. He had a system of persistence that didn't
+coincide with pale hair and light eyes.
+
+"'Hello, Willie!' says Myra. 'What are you doing to yourself in the
+glass?'
+
+"'I'm trying to look fly,' says Willie.
+
+"'Well, you never could _be_ fly,' says Myra, with her special laugh,
+which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an
+empty canteen against my saddle-horn.
+
+"I looked around at Willie after Myra had gone. He had a kind of a
+lily-white look on him which seemed to show that her remark had, as
+you might say, disrupted his soul. I never noticed anything in what
+she said that sounded particularly destructive to a man's ideas
+of self-consciousness; but he was set back to an extent you could
+scarcely imagine.
+
+"After we went down-stairs with our clean collars on, Willie never
+went near Myra again that night. After all, he seemed to be a diluted
+kind of a skim-milk sort of a chap, and I never wondered that Joe
+Granberry beat him out.
+
+"The next day the battleship _Maine_ was blown up, and then pretty soon
+somebody--I reckon it was Joe Bailey, or Ben Tillman, or maybe the
+Government--declared war against Spain.
+
+"Well, everybody south of Mason & Hamlin's line knew that the North
+by itself couldn't whip a whole country the size of Spain. So the
+Yankees commenced to holler for help, and the Johnny Rebs answered the
+call. 'We're coming, Father William, a hundred thousand strong--and
+then some,' was the way they sang it. And the old party lines drawn
+by Sherman's march and the Kuklux and nine-cent cotton and the Jim
+Crow street-car ordinances faded away. We became one undivided.
+country, with no North, very little East, a good-sized chunk of West,
+and a South that loomed up as big as the first foreign label on a new
+eight-dollar suit-case.
+
+"Of course the dogs of war weren't a complete pack without a yelp from
+the San Augustine Rifles, Company D, of the Fourteenth Texas Regiment.
+Our company was among the first to land in Cuba and strike terror
+into the hearts of the foe. I'm not going to give you a history of
+the war, I'm just dragging it in to fill out my story about Willie
+Robbins, just as the Republican party dragged it in to help out the
+election in 1898.
+
+"If anybody ever had heroitis, it was that Willie Robbins. From the
+minute he set foot on the soil of the tyrants of Castile he seemed to
+engulf danger as a cat laps up cream. He certainly astonished every
+man in our company, from the captain up. You'd have expected him
+to gravitate naturally to the job of an orderly to the colonel, or
+typewriter in the commissary--but not any. He created the part of
+the flaxen-haired boy hero who lives and gets back home with the
+goods, instead of dying with an important despatch in his hands at
+his colonel's feet.
+
+"Our company got into a section of Cuban scenery where one of the
+messiest and most unsung portions of the campaign occurred. We were
+out every day capering around in the bushes, and having little
+skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kind of
+tired-out feuds than anything else. The war was a joke to us, and
+of no interest to them. We never could see it any other way than as
+a howling farce-comedy that the San Augustine Rifles were actually
+fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes. And the blamed little
+senors didn't get enough pay to make them care whether they were
+patriots or traitors. Now and then somebody would get killed. It
+seemed like a waste of life to me. I was at Coney Island when I went
+to New York once, and one of them down-hill skidding apparatuses they
+call 'roller-coasters' flew the track and killed a man in a brown
+sack-suit. Whenever the Spaniards shot one of our men, it struck me
+as just about as unnecessary and regrettable as that was.
+
+"But I'm dropping Willie Robbins out of the conversation.
+
+"He was out for bloodshed, laurels, ambition, medals, recommendations,
+and all other forms of military glory. And he didn't seem to be
+afraid of any of the recognized forms of military danger, such as
+Spaniards, cannon-balls, canned beef, gunpowder, or nepotism. He went
+forth with his pallid hair and china-blue eyes and ate up Spaniards
+like you would sardines _a la canopy_. Wars and rumbles of wars never
+flustered him. He would stand guard-duty, mosquitoes, hardtack,
+treat, and fire with equally perfect unanimity. No blondes in history
+ever come in comparison distance of him except the Jack of Diamonds
+and Queen Catherine of Russia.
+
+"I remember, one time, a little _caballard_ of Spanish men sauntered
+out from behind a patch of sugar-cane and shot Bob Turner, the first
+sergeant of our company, while we were eating dinner. As required
+by the army regulations, we fellows went through the usual tactics
+of falling into line, saluting the enemy, and loading and firing,
+kneeling.
+
+"That wasn't the Texas way of scrapping; but, being a very important
+addendum and annex to the regular army, the San Augustine Rifles had
+to conform to the red-tape system of getting even.
+
+"By the time we had got out our 'Upton's Tactics,' turned to page
+fifty-seven, said 'one--two--three--one--two--three' a couple of
+times, and got blank cartridges into our Springfields, the Spanish
+outfit had smiled repeatedly, rolled and lit cigarettes by squads, and
+walked away contemptuously.
+
+"I went straight to Captain Floyd, and says to him: 'Sam, I don't
+think this war is a straight game. You know as well as I do that Bob
+Turner was one of the whitest fellows that ever threw a leg over a
+saddle, and now these wirepullers in Washington have fixed his clock.
+He's politically and ostensibly dead. It ain't fair. Why should they
+keep this thing up? If they want Spain licked, why don't they turn
+the San Augustine Rifles and Joe Seely's ranger company and a car-load
+of West Texas deputy-sheriffs onto these Spaniards, and let us
+exonerate them from the face of the earth? I never did,' says I,
+'care much about fighting by the Lord Chesterfield ring rules. I'm
+going to hand in my resignation and go home if anybody else I am
+personally acquainted with gets hurt in this war. If you can get
+somebody in my place, Sam,' says I, 'I'll quit the first of next week.
+I don't want to work in an army that don't give its help a chance.
+Never mind my wages,' says I; 'let the Secretary of the Treasury keep
+'em.'
+
+"'Well, Ben,' says the captain to me, 'your allegations and estimations
+of the tactics of war, government, patriotism, guard-mounting,
+and democracy are all right. But I've looked into the system of
+international arbitration and the ethics of justifiable slaughter
+a little closer, maybe, than you have. Now, you can hand in your
+resignation the first of next week if you are so minded. But if you
+do,' says Sam, 'I'll order a corporal's guard to take you over by
+that limestone bluff on the creek and shoot enough lead into you to
+ballast a submarine air-ship. I'm captain of this company, and I've
+swore allegiance to the Amalgamated States regardless of sectional,
+secessional, and Congressional differences. Have you got any
+smoking-tobacco?' winds up Sam. 'Mine got wet when I swum the creek
+this morning.'
+
+"The reason I drag all this _non ex parte_ evidence in is because Willie
+Robbins was standing there listening to us. I was a second sergeant
+and he was a private then, but among us Texans and Westerners there
+never was as much tactics and subordination as there was in the
+regular army. We never called our captain anything but 'Sam' except
+when there was a lot of major-generals and admirals around, so as to
+preserve the discipline.
+
+"And says Willie Robbins to me, in a sharp construction of voice much
+unbecoming to his light hair and previous record:
+
+"'You ought to be shot, Ben, for emitting any such sentiments. A man
+that won't fight for his country is worse than a horse-thief. If I
+was the cap, I'd put you in the guard-house for thirty days on round
+steak and tamales. War,' says Willie, 'is great and glorious. I
+didn't know you were a coward.'
+
+"'I'm not,' says I. 'If I was, I'd knock some of the pallidness off
+of your marble brow. I'm lenient with you,' I says, 'just as I am
+with the Spaniards, because you have always reminded me of something
+with mushrooms on the side. Why, you little Lady of Shalott,' says I,
+'you underdone leader of cotillions, you glassy fashion and moulded
+form, you white-pine soldier made in the Cisalpine Alps in Germany
+for the late New-Year trade, do you know of whom you are talking
+to? We've been in the same social circle,' says I, 'and I've put
+up with you because you seemed so meek and self-un-satisfying. I
+don't understand why you have so sudden taken a personal interest
+in chivalrousness and murder. Your nature's undergone a complete
+revelation. Now, how is it?'
+
+"'Well, you wouldn't understand, Ben,' says Willie, giving one of his
+refined smiles and turning away.
+
+"'Come back here!' says I, catching him by the tail of his khaki coat.
+'You've made me kind of mad, in spite of the aloofness in which I have
+heretofore held you. You are out for making a success in this hero
+business, and I believe I know what for. You are doing it either
+because you are crazy or because you expect to catch some girl by it.
+Now, if it's a girl, I've got something here to show you.'
+
+"I wouldn't have done it, but I was plumb mad. I pulled a San
+Augustine paper out of my hip-pocket, and showed him an item. It was
+a half a column about the marriage of Myra Allison and Joe Granberry.
+
+"Willie laughed, and I saw I hadn't touched him.
+
+"'Oh,' says he, 'everybody knew that was going to happen. I heard
+about that a week ago.' And then he gave me the laugh again.
+
+"'All right,' says I. 'Then why do you so recklessly chase the bright
+rainbow of fame? Do you expect to be elected President, or do you
+belong to a suicide club?'
+
+"And then Captain Sam interferes.
+
+"'You gentlemen quit jawing and go back to your quarters,' says he,
+'or I'll have you escorted to the guard-house. Now, scat, both of
+you! Before you go, which one of you has got any chewing-tobacco?'
+
+"'We're off, Sam,' says I. 'It's supper-time, anyhow. But what do
+you think of what we was talking about? I've noticed you throwing out
+a good many grappling-hooks for this here balloon called fame--What's
+ambition, anyhow? What does a man risk his life day after day for?
+Do you know of anything he gets in the end that can pay him for the
+trouble? I want to go back home,' says I. 'I don't care whether Cuba
+sinks or swims, and I don't give a pipeful of rabbit tobacco whether
+Queen Sophia Christina or Charlie Culberson rules these fairy isles;
+and I don't want my name on any list except the list of survivors.
+But I've noticed you, Sam,' says I, 'seeking the bubble notoriety in
+the cannon's larynx a number of times. Now, what do you do it for? Is
+it ambition, business, or some freckle-faced Phoebe at home that you
+are heroing for?'
+
+"'Well, Ben,' says Sam, kind of hefting his sword out from between
+his knees, 'as your superior officer I could court-martial you for
+attempted cowardice and desertion. But I won't. And I'll tell you
+why I'm trying for promotion and the usual honors of war and conquest.
+A major gets more pay than a captain, and I need the money.'
+
+"'Correct for you!' says I. 'I can understand that. Your system of
+fame-seeking is rooted in the deepest soil of patriotism. But I can't
+comprehend,' says I, 'why Willie Robbins, whose folks at home are well
+off, and who used to be as meek and undesirous of notice as a cat with
+cream on his whiskers, should all at once develop into a warrior bold
+with the most fire-eating kind of proclivities. And the girl in his
+case seems to have been eliminated by marriage to another fellow. I
+reckon,' says I, 'it's a plain case of just common ambition. He wants
+his name, maybe, to go thundering down the coroners of time. It must
+be that.'
+
+"Well, without itemizing his deeds, Willie sure made good as a hero.
+He simply spent most of his time on his knees begging our captain to
+send him on forlorn hopes and dangerous scouting expeditions. In
+every fight he was the first man to mix it at close quarters with the
+Don Alfonsos. He got three or four bullets planted in various parts
+of his autonomy. Once he went off with a detail of eight men and
+captured a whole company of Spanish. He kept Captain Floyd busy
+writing out recommendations of his bravery to send in to headquarters;
+and he began to accumulate medals for all kinds of things--heroism
+and target-shooting and valor and tactics and uninsubordination, and
+all the little accomplishments that look good to the third assistant
+secretaries of the War Department.
+
+"Finally, Cap Floyd got promoted to be a major-general, or a knight
+commander of the main herd, or something like that. He pounded around
+on a white horse, all desecrated up with gold-leaf and hen-feathers
+and a Good Templar's hat, and wasn't allowed by the regulations to
+speak to us. And Willie Robbins was made captain of our company.
+
+"And maybe he didn't go after the wreath of fame then! As far as
+I could see it was him that ended the war. He got eighteen of us
+boys--friends of his, too--killed in battles that he stirred up
+himself, and that didn't seem to me necessary at all. One night he took
+twelve of us and waded through a little rill about a hundred and ninety
+yards wide, and climbed a couple of mountains, and sneaked through a
+mile of neglected shrubbery and a couple of rock-quarries and into a
+rye-straw village, and captured a Spanish general named, as they said,
+Benny Veedus. Benny seemed to me hardly worth the trouble, being a
+blackish man without shoes or cuffs, and anxious to surrender and throw
+himself on the commissary of his foe.
+
+"But that job gave Willie the big boost he wanted. The San Augustine
+_News_ and the Galveston, St. Louis, New York, and Kansas City papers
+printed his picture and columns of stuff about him. Old San Augustine
+simply went crazy over its 'gallant son.' The _News_ had an editorial
+tearfully begging the Government to call off the regular army and
+the national guard, and let Willie carry on the rest of the war
+single-handed. It said that a refusal to do so would be regarded as a
+proof that the Northern jealousy of the South was still as rampant as
+ever.
+
+"If the war hadn't ended pretty soon, I don't know to what heights of
+gold braid and encomiums Willie would have climbed; but it did. There
+was a secession of hostilities just three days after he was appointed
+a colonel, and got in three more medals by registered mail, and shot
+two Spaniards while they were drinking lemonade in an ambuscade.
+
+"Our company went back to San Augustine when the war was over. There
+wasn't anywhere else for it to go. And what do you think? The old
+town notified us in print, by wire cable, special delivery, and a
+nigger named Saul sent on a gray mule to San Antone, that they was
+going to give us the biggest blow-out, complimentary, alimentary, and
+elementary, that ever disturbed the kildees on the sand-flats outside
+of the immediate contiguity of the city.
+
+"I say 'we,' but it was all meant for ex-Private, Captain _de facto_,
+and Colonel-elect Willie Robbins. The town was crazy about him. They
+notified us that the reception they were going to put up would make
+the Mardi Gras in New Orleans look like an afternoon tea in Bury St.
+Edmunds with a curate's aunt.
+
+"Well, the San Augustine Rifles got back home on schedule time.
+Everybody was at the depot giving forth Roosevelt-Democrat--they
+used to be called Rebel--yells. There was two brass-bands, and the
+mayor, and schoolgirls in white frightening the street-car horses by
+throwing Cherokee roses in the streets, and--well, maybe you've seen
+a celebration by a town that was inland and out of water.
+
+"They wanted Brevet-Colonel Willie to get into a carriage and be drawn
+by prominent citizens and some of the city aldermen to the armory, but
+he stuck to his company and marched at the head of it up Sam Houston
+Avenue. The buildings on both sides was covered with flags and
+audiences, and everybody hollered 'Robbins!' or 'Hello, Willie!' as
+we marched up in files of fours. I never saw a illustriouser-looking
+human in my life than Willie was. He had at least seven or eight
+medals and diplomas and decorations on the breast of his khaki coat;
+he was sunburnt the color of a saddle, and he certainly done himself
+proud.
+
+"They told us at the depot that the courthouse was to be illuminated
+at half-past seven, and there would be speeches and chili-con-carne at
+the Palace Hotel. Miss Delphine Thompson was to read an original poem
+by James Whitcomb Ryan, and Constable Hooker had promised us a salute
+of nine guns from Chicago that he had arrested that day.
+
+"After we had disbanded in the armory, Willie says to me:
+
+"'Want to walk out a piece with me?'
+
+"'Why, yes,' says I, 'if it ain't so far that we can't hear the tumult
+and the shouting die away. I'm hungry myself,' says I, 'and I'm
+pining for some home grub, but I'll go with you.'
+
+"Willie steered me down some side streets till we came to a little
+white cottage in a new lot with a twenty-by-thirty-foot lawn decorated
+with brickbats and old barrel-staves.
+
+"'Halt and give the countersign,' says I to Willie. 'Don't you know
+this dugout? It's the bird's-nest that Joe Granberry built before he
+married Myra Allison. What you going there for?'
+
+"But Willie already had the gate open. He walked up the brick walk to
+the steps, and I went with him. Myra was sitting in a rocking-chair
+on the porch, sewing. Her hair was smoothed back kind of hasty and
+tied in a knot. I never noticed till then that she had freckles. Joe
+was at one side of the porch, in his shirt-sleeves, with no collar
+on, and no signs of a shave, trying to scrape out a hole among the
+brickbats and tin cans to plant a little fruit-tree in. He looked up
+but never said a word, and neither did Myra.
+
+"Willie was sure dandy-looking in his uniform, with medals strung on
+his breast and his new gold-handled sword. You'd never have taken him
+for the little white-headed snipe that the girls used to order about
+and make fun of. He just stood there for a minute, looking at Myra
+with a peculiar little smile on his face; and then he says to her,
+slow, and kind of holding on to his words with his teeth:
+
+"'_Oh, I don't know! Maybe I could if I tried!_'
+
+"That was all that was said. Willie raised his hat, and we walked
+away.
+
+"And, somehow, when he said that, I remembered, all of a sudden,
+the night of that dance and Willie brushing his hair before the
+looking-glass, and Myra sticking her head in the door to guy him.
+
+"When we got back to Sam Houston Avenue, Willie says:
+
+"'Well, so long, Ben. I'm going down home and get off my shoes and
+take a rest.'
+
+"'You?' says I. 'What's the matter with you? Ain't the court-house
+jammed with everybody in town waiting to honor the hero? And two
+brass-bands, and recitations and flags and jags and grub to follow
+waiting for you?'
+
+"Willie sighs.
+
+"'All right, Ben,' says he. 'Darned if I didn't forget all about
+that.'
+
+"And that's why I say," concluded Ben Granger, "that you can't tell
+where ambition begins any more than you can where it is going to wind
+up."
+
+
+
+
+THE HEAD-HUNTER
+
+
+When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over, I went to the
+Philippine Islands. There I remained as bush-whacker correspondent
+for my paper until its managing editor notified me that an
+eight-hundred-word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao
+over the death of an infant Moro was not considered by the office to
+be war news. So I resigned, and came home.
+
+On board the trading-vessel that brought me back I pondered much
+upon the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the
+yellow-brown people. The manoeuvres and skirmishings of the petty war
+interested me not: I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable
+countenance of that race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon
+us out of an unguessable past.
+
+Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and
+attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as
+the head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never
+seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their
+concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through
+unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless
+chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near with the invisible
+hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such signs as
+a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make--a twig crackling
+in the awful, sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the
+screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the rushes
+of a water-level--a hint of death for every mile and every hour--they
+amused me greatly, those little fellows of one idea.
+
+When you think of it, their method is beautifully and almost
+hilariously effective and simple.
+
+You have your hut in which you live and carry out the destiny that
+was decreed for you. Spiked to the jamb of your bamboo doorway is a
+basket made of green withes, plaited. From time to time, as vanity or
+ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move you, you creep forth
+with your snickersnee and take up the silent trail. Back from it you
+come, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of your victim, which
+you deposit with pardonable pride in the basket at the side of your
+door. It may be the head of your enemy, your friend, or a stranger,
+according as competition, jealousy, or simple sportiveness has been
+your incentive to labor.
+
+In any case, your reward is certain. The village men, in passing,
+stop to congratulate you, as your neighbor on weaker planes of life
+stops to admire and praise the begonias in your front yard. Your
+particular brown maid lingers, with fluttering bosom, casting soft
+tiger's eyes at the evidence of your love for her. You chew betel-nut
+and listen, content, to the intermittent soft drip from the ends of
+the severed neck arteries. And you show your teeth and grunt like a
+water-buffalo--which is as near as you can come to laughing--at the
+thought that the cold, acephalous body of your door ornament is being
+spotted by wheeling vultures in the Mindanaoan wilds.
+
+Truly, the life of the merry head-hunter captivated me. He had
+reduced art and philosophy to a simple code. To take your adversary's
+head, to basket it at the portal of your castle, to see it lying
+there, a dead thing, with its cunning and stratagems and power gone--
+Is there a better way to foil his plots, to refute his arguments, to
+establish your superiority over his skill and wisdom?
+
+The ship that brought me home was captained by an erratic Swede, who
+changed his course and deposited me, with genuine compassion, in
+a small town on the Pacific coast of one of the Central American
+republics, a few hundred miles south of the port to which he had
+engaged to convey me. But I was wearied of movement and exotic
+fancies; so I leaped contentedly upon the firm sands of the village of
+Mojada, telling myself I should be sure to find there the rest that I
+craved. After all, far better to linger there (I thought), lulled by
+the sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of palm-fronds, than
+to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home in the East, and
+there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and scourged by fatuous
+relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping neighbors sad stories of the
+death of colonial governors.
+
+
+
+When I first saw Chloe Greene she was standing, all in white, in the
+doorway of her father's tile-roofed 'dobe house. She was polishing
+a silver cup with a cloth, and she looked like a pearl laid against
+black velvet. She turned on me a flatteringly protracted but a
+wiltingly disapproving gaze, and then went inside, humming a light
+song to indicate the value she placed upon my existence.
+
+Small wonder: for Dr. Stamford (the most disreputable professional
+man between Juneau and Valparaiso) and I were zigzagging along the
+turfy street, tunelessly singing the words of "Auld Lang Syne" to the
+air of "Muzzer's Little Coal-Black Coon." We had come from the ice
+factory, which was Mojada's palace of wickedness, where we had been
+playing billiards and opening black bottles, white with frost, that
+we dragged with strings out of old Sandoval's ice-cold vats.
+
+I turned in sudden rage to Dr. Stamford, as sober as the verger of a
+cathedral. In a moment I had become aware that we were swine cast
+before a pearl.
+
+"You beast," I said, "this is half your doing. And the other half
+is the fault of this cursed country. I'd better have gone back to
+Sleepy-town and died in a wild orgy of currant wine and buns than to
+have had this happen."
+
+Stamford filled the empty street with his roaring laughter.
+
+"You too!" he cried. "And all as quick as the popping of a cork.
+Well, she does seem to strike agreeably upon the retina. But don't
+burn your fingers. All Mojada will tell you that Louis Devoe is the
+man.
+
+"We will see about that," said I. "And, perhaps, whether he is _a_
+man as well as _the_ man."
+
+I lost no time in meeting Louis Devoe. That was easily accomplished,
+for the foreign colony in Mojada numbered scarce a dozen; and they
+gathered daily at a half-decent hotel kept by a Turk, where they
+managed to patch together the fluttering rags of country and
+civilization that were left them. I sought Devoe before I did my
+pearl of the doorway, because I had learned a little of the game of
+war, and knew better than to strike for a prize before testing the
+strength of the enemy.
+
+A sort of cold dismay--something akin to fear--filled me when I had
+estimated him. I found a man so perfectly poised, so charming, so
+deeply learned in the world's rituals, so full of tact, courtesy, and
+hospitality, so endowed with grace and ease and a kind of careless,
+haughty power that I almost overstepped the bounds in probing him, in
+turning him on the spit to find the weak point that I so craved for
+him to have. But I left him whole--I had to make bitter acknowledgment
+to myself that Louis Devoe was a gentleman worthy of my best blows;
+and I swore to give him them. He was a great merchant of the country,
+a wealthy importer and exporter. All day he sat in a fastidiously
+appointed office, surrounded by works of art and evidences of his high
+culture, directing through glass doors and windows the affairs of his
+house.
+
+In person he was slender and hardly tall. His small, well-shaped head
+was covered with thick, brown hair, trimmed short, and he wore a
+thick, brown beard also cut close and to a fine point. His manners
+were a pattern.
+
+Before long I had become a regular and a welcome visitor at the
+Greene home. I shook my wild habits from me like a worn-out cloak.
+I trained for the conflict with the care of a prize-fighter and the
+self-denial of a Brahmin.
+
+As for Chloe Greene, I shall weary you with no sonnets to her eyebrow.
+She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a November pippin,
+and no more mysterious than a window-pane. She had whimsical little
+theories that she had deduced from life, and that fitted the maxims
+of Epictetus like princess gowns. I wonder, after all, if that old
+duffer wasn't rather wise!
+
+Chloe had a father, the Reverend Homer Greene, and an intermittent
+mother, who sometimes palely presided over a twilight teapot. The
+Reverend Homer was a burr-like man with a life-work. He was writing
+a concordance to the Scriptures, and had arrived as far as Kings.
+Being, presumably, a suitor for his daughter's hand, I was timber for
+his literary outpourings. I had the family tree of Israel drilled
+into my head until I used to cry aloud in my sleep: "And Aminadab
+begat Jay Eye See," and so forth, until he had tackled another book.
+I once made a calculation that the Reverend Homer's concordance would
+be worked up as far as the Seven Vials mentioned in Revelations about
+the third day after they were opened.
+
+Louis Devoe, as well as I, was a visitor and an intimate friend of the
+Greenes. It was there I met him the oftenest, and a more agreeable
+man or a more accomplished I have never hated in my life.
+
+Luckily or unfortunately, I came to be accepted as a Boy. My
+appearance was youthful, and I suppose I had that pleading and
+homeless air that always draws the motherliness that is in women and
+the cursed theories and hobbies of paterfamilias.
+
+Chloe called me "Tommy," and made sisterly fun of my attempts to
+woo her. With Devoe she was vastly more reserved. He was the man of
+romance, one to stir her imagination and deepest feelings had her
+fancy leaned toward him. I was closer to her, but standing in no
+glamour; I had the task before me of winning her in what seems to me
+the American way of fighting--with cleanness and pluck and everyday
+devotion to break away the barriers of friendship that divided us, and
+to take her, if I could, between sunrise and dark, abetted by neither
+moonlight nor music nor foreign wiles.
+
+Chloe gave no sign of bestowing her blithe affections upon either of
+us. But one day she let out to me an inkling of what she preferred
+in a man. It was tremendously interesting to me, but not illuminating
+as to its application. I had been tormenting her for the dozenth time
+with the statement and catalogue of my sentiments toward her.
+
+"Tommy," said she, "I don't want a man to show his love for me by
+leading an army against another country and blowing people off the
+earth with cannons."
+
+"If you mean that the opposite way," I answered, "as they say women
+do, I'll see what I can do. The papers are full of this diplomatic
+row in Russia. My people know some big people in Washington who are
+right next to the army people, and I could get an artillery commission
+and--"
+
+"I'm not that way," interrupted Chloe. "I mean what I say. It isn't
+the big things that are done in the world, Tommy, that count with a
+woman. When the knights were riding abroad in their armor to slay
+dragons, many a stay-at-home page won a lonesome lady's hand by being
+on the spot to pick up her glove and be quick with her cloak when the
+wind blew. The man I am to like best, whoever he shall be, must show
+his love in little ways. He must never forget, after hearing it once,
+that I do not like to have any one walk at my left side; that I detest
+bright-colored neckties; that I prefer to sit with my back to a light;
+that I like candied violets; that I must not be talked to when I am
+looking at the moonlight shining on water, and that I very, very often
+long for dates stuffed with English walnuts."
+
+"Frivolity," I said, with a frown. "Any well-trained servant would be
+equal to such details."
+
+"And he must remember," went on Chloe, to remind me of what I want
+when I do not know, myself, what I want."
+
+"You're rising in the scale," I said. "What you seem to need is a
+first-class clairvoyant."
+
+"And if I say that I am dying to hear a Beethoven sonata, and stamp my
+foot when I say it, he must know by that that what my soul craves is
+salted almonds; and he will have them ready in his pocket."
+
+"Now," said I, "I am at a loss. I do not know whether your soul's
+affinity is to be an impresario or a fancy grocer."
+
+Chloe turned her pearly smile upon me.
+
+"Take less than half of what I said as a jest," she went on. "And
+don't think too lightly of the little things, Boy. Be a paladin if
+you must, but don't let it show on you. Most women are only very big
+children, and most men are only very little ones. Please us; don't
+try to overpower us. When we want a hero we can make one out of even
+a plain grocer the third time he catches our handkerchief before it
+falls to the ground."
+
+That evening I was taken down with pernicious fever. That is a kind
+of coast fever with improvements and high-geared attachments. Your
+temperature goes up among the threes and fours and remains there,
+laughing scornfully and feverishly at the cinchona trees and the
+coal-tar derivatives. Pernicious fever is a case for a simple
+mathematician instead of a doctor. It is merely this formula:
+Vitality + the desire to live - the duration of the fever = the
+result.
+
+I took to my bed in the two-roomed thatched hut where I had been
+comfortably established, and sent for a gallon of rum. That was not
+for myself. Drunk, Stamford was the best doctor between the Andes
+and the Pacific. He came, sat at my bedside, and drank himself into
+condition.
+
+"My boy," said he, "my lily-white and reformed Romeo, medicine will do
+you no good. But I will give you quinine, which, being bitter, will
+arouse in you hatred and anger--two stimulants that will add ten per
+cent. to your chances. You are as strong as a caribou calf, and you
+will get well if the fever doesn't get in a knockout blow when you're
+off your guard."
+
+For two weeks I lay on my back feeling like a Hindoo widow on a
+burning ghat. Old Atasca, an untrained Indian nurse, sat near the
+door like a petrified statue of What's-the-Use, attending to her
+duties, which were, mainly, to see that time went by without slipping
+a cog. Sometimes I would fancy myself back in the Philippines, or, at
+worse times, sliding off the horsehair sofa in Sleepytown.
+
+One afternoon I ordered Atasca to vamose, and got up and dressed
+carefully. I took my temperature, which I was pleased to find 104.
+I paid almost dainty attention to my dress, choosing solicitously
+a necktie of a dull and subdued hue. The mirror showed that I was
+looking little the worse from my illness. The fever gave brightness
+to my eyes and color to my face. And while I looked at my reflection
+my color went and came again as I thought of Chloe Greene and the
+millions of eons that had passed since I'd seen her, and of Louis
+Devoe and the time he had gained on me.
+
+I went straight to her house. I seemed to float rather than walk; I
+hardly felt the ground under my feet; I thought pernicious fever must
+be a great boon to make one feel so strong.
+
+I found Chloe and Louis Devoe sitting under the awning in front of the
+house. She jumped up and met me with a double handshake.
+
+"I'm glad, glad, glad to see you out again!" she cried, every word a
+pearl strung on the string of her sentence. "You are well, Tommy--or
+better, of course. I wanted to come to see you, but they wouldn't let
+me."
+
+"Oh yes," said I, carelessly, "it was nothing. Merely a little fever.
+I am out again, as you see."
+
+We three sat there and talked for half an hour or so. Then Chloe
+looked out yearningly and almost piteously across the ocean. I could
+see in her sea-blue eyes some deep and intense desire. Devoe, curse
+him! saw it too.
+
+"What is it?" we asked, in unison.
+
+"Cocoanut-pudding," said Chloe, pathetically. "I've wanted some--oh,
+so badly, for two days. It's got beyond a wish; it's an obsession."
+
+"The cocoanut season is over," said Devoe, in that voice of his that
+gave thrilling interest to his most commonplace words. "I hardly
+think one could be found in Mojada. The natives never use them except
+when they are green and the milk is fresh. They sell all the ripe
+ones to the fruiterers."
+
+"Wouldn't a broiled lobster or a Welsh rabbit do as well?" I remarked,
+with the engaging idiocy of a pernicious-fever convalescent.
+
+Chloe came as near to pouting as a sweet disposition and a perfect
+profile would allow her to come.
+
+The Reverend Homer poked his ermine-lined face through the doorway and
+added a concordance to the conversation.
+
+"Sometimes," said he, "old Campos keeps the dried nuts in his little
+store on the hill. But it would be far better, my daughter, to
+restrain unusual desires, and partake thankfully of the daily dishes
+that the Lord has set before us."
+
+"Stuff!" said I.
+
+"How was that?" asked the Reverend Homer, sharply.
+
+"I say it's tough," said I, "to drop into the vernacular, that Miss
+Greene should be deprived of the food she desires--a simple thing like
+kalsomine-pudding. Perhaps," I continued, solicitously, "some pickled
+walnuts or a fricassee of Hungarian butternuts would do as well."
+
+Every one looked at me with a slight exhibition of curiosity.
+
+Louis Devoe arose and made his adieus. I watched him until he had
+sauntered slowly and grandiosely to the corner, around which he turned
+to reach his great warehouse and store. Chloe made her excuses, and
+went inside for a few minutes to attend to some detail affecting the
+seven-o'clock dinner. She was a passed mistress in housekeeping. I
+had tasted her puddings and bread with beatitude.
+
+When all had gone, I turned casually and saw a basket made of
+plaited green withes hanging by a nail outside the door-jamb. With
+a rush that made my hot temples throb there came vividly to my mind
+recollections of the head-hunters--_those grim, flinty, relentless
+little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the
+subtle terror of their concealed presence . . . From time to time,
+as vanity or ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move him,
+one creeps forth with his snickersnee and takes up the silent
+trail . . . Back he comes, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head
+of his victim . . . His particular brown or white maid lingers, with
+fluttering bosom, casting soft tiger's eyes at the evidence of his
+love for her_.
+
+I stole softly from the house and returned to my hut. From its
+supporting nails in the wall I took a machete as heavy as a butcher's
+cleaver and sharper than a safety-razor. And then I chuckled softly
+to myself, and set out to the fastidiously appointed private office of
+Monsieur Louis Devoe, usurper to the hand of the Pearl of the Pacific.
+
+He was never slow at thinking; he gave one look at my face and another
+at the weapon in my hand as I entered his door, and then he seemed
+to fade from my sight. I ran to the back door, kicked it open, and
+saw him running like a deer up the road toward the wood that began
+two hundred yards away. I was after him, with a shout. I remember
+hearing children and women screaming, and seeing them flying from the
+road.
+
+He was fleet, but I was stronger. A mile, and I had almost come up
+with him. He doubled cunningly and dashed into a brake that extended
+into a small canon. I crashed through this after him, and in five
+minutes had him cornered in an angle of insurmountable cliffs. There
+his instinct of self-preservation steadied him, as it will steady even
+animals at bay. He turned to me, quite calm, with a ghastly smile.
+
+"Oh, Rayburn!" he said, with such an awful effort at ease that I was
+impolite enough to laugh rudely in his face. "Oh, Rayburn!" said he,
+"come, let's have done with this nonsense. Of course, I know it's the
+fever and you're not yourself; but collect yourself, man--give me that
+ridiculous weapon, now, and let's go back and talk it over."
+
+"I will go back," said I, "carrying your head with me. We will see
+how charmingly it can discourse when it lies in the basket at her
+door."
+
+"Come," said he, persuasively, "I think better of you than to suppose
+that you try this sort of thing as a joke. But even the vagaries of
+a fever-crazed lunatic come some time to a limit. What is this talk
+about heads and baskets? Get yourself together and throw away that
+absurd cane-chopper. What would Miss Greene think of you?" he ended,
+with the silky cajolery that one would use toward a fretful child.
+
+"Listen," said I. "At last you have struck upon the right note. What
+would she think of me? Listen," I repeated.
+
+"There are women," I said, "who look upon horsehair sofas and currant
+wine as dross. To them even the calculated modulation of your
+well-trimmed talk sounds like the dropping of rotten plums from a tree
+in the night. They are the maidens who walk back and forth in the
+villages, scorning the emptiness of the baskets at the doors of the
+young men who would win them.
+
+"One such as they," I said, "is waiting. Only a fool would try to win
+a woman by drooling like a braggart in her doorway or by waiting upon
+her whims like a footman. They are all daughters of Herodias, and to
+gain their hearts one must lay the heads of his enemies before them
+with his own hands. Now, bend your neck, Louis Devoe. Do not be a
+coward as well as a chatterer at a lady's tea-table."
+
+"There, there!" said Devoe, falteringly. "You know me, don't you,
+Rayburn?"
+
+"Oh yes," I said, "I know you. I know you. I know you. But the
+basket is empty. The old men of the village and the young men, and
+both the dark maidens and the ones who are as fair as pearls walk back
+and forth and see its emptiness. Will you kneel now, or must we have
+a scuffle? It is not like you to make things go roughly and with bad
+form. But the basket is waiting for your head."
+
+With that he went to pieces. I had to catch him as he tried to
+scamper past me like a scared rabbit. I stretched him out and got a
+foot on his chest, but he squirmed like a worm, although I appealed
+repeatedly to his sense of propriety and the duty he owed to himself
+as a gentleman not to make a row.
+
+But at last he gave me the chance, and I swung the machete.
+
+It was not hard work. He flopped like a chicken during the six or
+seven blows that it took to sever his head; but finally he lay still,
+and I tied his head in my handkerchief. The eyes opened and shut
+thrice while I walked a hundred yards. I was red to my feet with the
+drip, but what did that matter? With delight I felt under my hands
+the crisp touch of his short, thick, brown hair and close-trimmed
+beard.
+
+I reached the house of the Greenes and dumped the head of Louis Devoe
+into the basket that still hung by the nail in the door-jamb. I sat
+in a chair under the awning and waited. The sun was within two hours
+of setting. Chloe came out and looked surprised.
+
+"Where have you been, Tommy?" she asked. "You were gone when I came
+out."
+
+"Look in the basket," I said, rising to my feet. She looked, and gave
+a little scream--of delight, I was pleased to note.
+
+"Oh, Tommy!" she said. "It was just what I wanted you to do. It's
+leaking a little, but that doesn't matter. Wasn't I telling you?
+It's the little things that count. And you remembered."
+
+Little things! She held the ensanguined head of Louis Devoe in her
+white apron. Tiny streams of red widened on her apron and dripped
+upon the floor. Her face was bright and tender.
+
+"Little things, indeed!" I thought again. "The head-hunters are
+right. These are the things that women like you to do for them."
+
+Chloe came close to me. There was no one in sight. She looked tip at
+me with sea-blue eyes that said things they had never said before.
+
+"You think of me," she said. "You are the man I was describing. You
+think of the little things, and they are what make the world worth
+living in. The man for me must consider my little wishes, and make me
+happy in small ways. He must bring me little red peaches in December
+if I wish for them, and then I will love him till June. I will have
+no knight in armor slaying his rival or killing dragons for me. You
+please me very well, Tommy."
+
+I stooped and kissed her. Then a moisture broke out on my forehead,
+and I began to feel weak. I saw the red stains vanish from Chloe's
+apron, and the head of Louis Devoe turn to a brown, dried cocoanut.
+
+"There will be cocoanut-pudding for dinner, Tommy, boy," said Chloe,
+gayly, "and you must come. I must go in for a little while."
+
+She vanished in a delightful flutter.
+
+Dr. Stamford tramped up hurriedly. He seized my pulse as though it
+were his own property that I had escaped with.
+
+"You are the biggest fool outside of any asylum!" he said, angrily.
+"Why did you leave your bed? And the idiotic things you've been
+doing!--and no wonder, with your pulse going like a sledge-hammer."
+
+"Name some of them," said I.
+
+"Devoe sent for me," said Stamford. "He saw you from his window go to
+old Campos' store, chase him up the hill with his own yardstick, and
+then come back and make off with his biggest cocoanut."
+
+"It's the little things that count, after all," said I.
+
+"It's your little bed that counts with you just now," said the doctor.
+"You come with me at once, or I'll throw up the case. 'You're as
+loony as a loon."
+
+So I got no cocoanut-pudding that evening, but I conceived a distrust
+as to the value of the method of the head-hunters. Perhaps for many
+centuries the maidens of the villages may have been looking wistfully
+at the heads in the baskets at the doorways, longing for other and
+lesser trophies.
+
+
+
+
+NO STORY
+
+
+To avoid having this book hurled into corner of the room by the
+suspicious reader, I will assert in time that this is not a newspaper
+story. You will encounter no shirt-sleeved, omniscient city editor,
+no prodigy "cub" reporter just off the farm, no scoop, no story--no
+anything.
+
+But if you will concede me the setting of the first scene in the
+reporters' room of the _Morning Beacon_, I will repay the favor by
+keeping strictly my promises set forth above.
+
+I was doing space-work on the _Beacon_, hoping to be put on a salary.
+Some one had cleared with a rake or a shovel a small space for me at
+the end of a long table piled high with exchanges, _Congressional
+Records_, and old files. There I did my work. I wrote whatever the
+city whispered or roared or chuckled to me on my diligent wanderings
+about its streets. My income was not regular.
+
+One day Tripp came in and leaned on my table. Tripp was something in
+the mechanical department--I think he had something to do with the
+pictures, for he smelled of photographers' supplies, and his hands
+were always stained and cut up with acids. He was about twenty-five
+and looked forty. Half of his face was covered with short, curly red
+whiskers that looked like a door-mat with the "welcome" left off. He
+was pale and unhealthy and miserable and fawning, and an assiduous
+borrower of sums ranging from twenty-five cents to a dollar. One
+dollar was his limit. He knew the extent of his credit as well as the
+Chemical National Bank knows the amount of H2O that collateral will
+show on analysis. When he sat on my table he held one hand with the
+other to keep both from shaking. Whiskey. He had a spurious air of
+lightness and bravado about him that deceived no one, but was useful
+in his borrowing because it was so pitifully and perceptibly assumed.
+
+This day I had coaxed from the cashier five shining silver dollars as
+a grumbling advance on a story that the Sunday editor had reluctantly
+accepted. So if I was not feeling at peace with the world, at least
+an armistice had been declared; and I was beginning with ardor to
+write a description of the Brooklyn Bridge by moonlight.
+
+"Well, Tripp," said I, looking up at him rather impatiently, "how goes
+it?" He was looking to-day more miserable, more cringing and haggard
+and downtrodden than I had ever seen him. He was at that stage of
+misery where he drew your pity so fully that you longed to kick him.
+
+"Have you got a dollar?" asked Tripp, with his most fawning look
+and his dog-like eyes that blinked in the narrow space between his
+high-growing matted beard and his low-growing matted hair.
+
+"I have," said I; and again I said, "I have," more loudly and
+inhospitably, "and four besides. And I had hard work corkscrewing
+them out of old Atkinson, I can tell you. And I drew them," I
+continued, "to meet a want--a hiatus--a demand--a need--an exigency--a
+requirement of exactly five dollars."
+
+I was driven to emphasis by the premonition that I was to lose one of
+the dollars on the spot.
+
+"I don't want to borrow any," said Tripp, and I breathed again. "I
+thought you'd like to get put onto a good story," he went on. "I've
+got a rattling fine one for you. You ought to make it run a column
+at least. It'll make a dandy if you work it up right. It'll probably
+cost you a dollar or two to get the stuff. I don't want anything out
+of it myself."
+
+I became placated. The proposition showed that Tripp appreciated past
+favors, although he did not return them. If he had been wise enough
+to strike me for a quarter then he would have got it.
+
+"What is the story?" I asked, poising my pencil with a finely
+calculated editorial air.
+
+"I'll tell you," said Tripp. "It's a girl. A beauty. One of the
+howlingest Amsden's Junes you ever saw. Rosebuds covered with dew--
+violets in their mossy bed--and truck like that. She's lived on Long
+Island twenty years and never saw New York City before. I ran against
+her on Thirty-fourth Street. She'd just got in on the East River
+ferry. I tell you, she's a beauty that would take the hydrogen out
+of all the peroxides in the world. She stopped me on the street and
+asked me where she could find George Brown. Asked me where she could
+find _George Brown in New York City!_ What do you think of that?
+
+"I talked to her, and found that she was going to marry a young
+farmer named Dodd--Hiram Dodd--next week. But it seems that George
+Brown still holds the championship in her youthful fancy. George had
+greased his cowhide boots some years ago, and came to the city to make
+his fortune. But he forgot to remember to show up again at Greenburg,
+and Hiram got in as second-best choice. But when it comes to the
+scratch Ada--her name's Ada Lowery--saddles a nag and rides eight
+miles to the railroad station and catches the 6.45 A.M. train for
+the city. Looking for George, you know--you understand about women--
+George wasn't there, so she wanted him.
+
+"Well, you know, I couldn't leave her loose in Wolftown-on-the-Hudson.
+I suppose she thought the first person she inquired of would say:
+'George Brown?--why, yes--lemme see--he's a short man with light-blue
+eyes, ain't he? Oh yes--you'll find George on One Hundred and
+Twenty-fifth Street, right next to the grocery. He's bill-clerk in
+a saddle-and-harness store.' That's about how innocent and beautiful
+she is. You know those little Long Island water-front villages like
+Greenburg--a couple of duck-farms for sport, and clams and about nine
+summer visitors for industries. That's the kind of a place she comes
+from. But, say--you ought to see her!
+
+"What could I do? I don't know what money looks like in the morning.
+And she'd paid her last cent of pocket-money for her railroad ticket
+except a quarter, which she had squandered on gum-drops. She was
+eating them out of a paper bag. I took her to a boarding-house on
+Thirty-second Street where I used to live, and hocked her. She's in
+soak for a dollar. That's old Mother McGinnis' price per day. I'll
+show you the house."
+
+"What words are these, Tripp?" said I. "I thought you said you had a
+story. Every ferryboat that crosses the East River brings or takes
+away girls from Long Island."
+
+The premature lines on Tripp's face grew deeper. He frowned seriously
+from his tangle of hair. He separated his hands and emphasized his
+answer with one shaking forefinger.
+
+"Can't you see," he said, "what a rattling fine story it would make?
+You could do it fine. All about the romance, you know, and describe
+the girl, and put a lot of stuff in it about true love, and sling
+in a few stickfuls of funny business--joshing the Long Islanders
+about being green, and, well--you know how to do it. You ought to
+get fifteen dollars out of it, anyhow. And it'll cost you only about
+four dollars. You'll make a clear profit of eleven."
+
+"How will it cost me four dollars?" I asked, suspiciously.
+
+"One dollar to Mrs. McGinnis," Tripp answered, promptly, "and two
+dollars to pay the girl's fare back home."
+
+"And the fourth dimension?" I inquired, making a rapid mental
+calculation.
+
+"One dollar to me," said Tripp. "For whiskey. Are you on?"
+
+I smiled enigmatically and spread my elbows as if to begin writing
+again. But this grim, abject, specious, subservient, burr-like wreck
+of a man would not be shaken off. His forehead suddenly became
+shiningly moist.
+
+"Don't you see," he said, with a sort of desperate calmness, "that
+this girl has got to be sent home to-day--not to-night nor to-morrow,
+but to-day? I can't do anything for her. You know, I'm the janitor
+and corresponding secretary of the Down-and-Out Club. I thought you
+could make a newspaper story out of it and win out a piece of money
+on general results. But, anyhow, don't you see that she's got to get
+back home before night?"
+
+And then I began to feel that dull, leaden, soul-depressing sensation
+known as the sense of duty. Why should that sense fall upon one as a
+weight and a burden? I knew that I was doomed that day to give up the
+bulk of my store of hard-wrung coin to the relief of this Ada Lowery.
+But I swore to myself that Tripp's whiskey dollar would not be
+forthcoming. He might play knight-errant at my expense, but he would
+indulge in no wassail afterward, commemorating my weakness and
+gullibility. In a kind of chilly anger I put on my coat and hat.
+
+Tripp, submissive, cringing, vainly endeavoring to please, conducted
+me via the street-cars to the human pawn-shop of Mother McGinnis. I
+paid the fares. It seemed that the collodion-scented Don Quixote and
+the smallest minted coin were strangers.
+
+Tripp pulled the bell at the door of the mouldy red-brick
+boarding-house. At its faint tinkle he paled, and crouched as a
+rabbit makes ready to spring away at the sound of a hunting-dog.
+I guessed what a life he had led, terror-haunted by the coming
+footsteps of landladies.
+
+"Give me one of the dollars--quick!" he said.
+
+The door opened six inches. Mother McGinnis stood there with white
+eyes--they were white, I say--and a yellow face, holding together at
+her throat with one hand a dingy pink flannel dressing-sack. Tripp
+thrust the dollar through the space without a word, and it bought us
+entry.
+
+"She's in the parlor," said the McGinnis, turning the back of her sack
+upon us.
+
+In the dim parlor a girl sat at the cracked marble centre-table
+weeping comfortably and eating gum-drops. She was a flawless beauty.
+Crying had only made her brilliant eyes brighter. When she crunched
+a gum-drop you thought only of the poetry of motion and envied the
+senseless confection. Eve at the age of five minutes must have been
+a ringer for Miss Ada Lowery at nineteen or twenty. I was introduced,
+and a gum-drop suffered neglect while she conveyed to me a naive
+interest, such as a puppy dog (a prize winner) might bestow upon a
+crawling beetle or a frog.
+
+Tripp took his stand by the table, with the fingers of one hand spread
+upon it, as an attorney or a master of ceremonies might have stood.
+But he looked the master of nothing. His faded coat was buttoned
+high, as if it sought to be charitable to deficiencies of tie and
+linen.
+
+I thought of a Scotch terrier at the sight of his shifty eyes in the
+glade between his tangled hair and beard. For one ignoble moment I
+felt ashamed of having been introduced as his friend in the presence
+of so much beauty in distress. But evidently Tripp meant to conduct
+the ceremonies, whatever they might be. I thought I detected in his
+actions and pose an intention of foisting the situation upon me as
+material for a newspaper story, in a lingering hope of extracting from
+me his whiskey dollar.
+
+"My friend" (I shuddered), "Mr. Chalmers," said Tripp, "will tell
+you, Miss Lowery, the same that I did. He's a reporter, and he can
+hand out the talk better than I can. That's why I brought him with
+me." (O Tripp, wasn't it the _silver_-tongued orator you wanted?)
+"He's wise to a lot of things, and he'll tell you now what's best
+to do."
+
+I stood on one foot, as it were, as I sat in my rickety chair.
+
+"Why--er--Miss Lowery," I began, secretly enraged at Tripp's awkward
+opening, "I am at your service, of course, but--er--as I haven't been
+apprized of the circumstances of the case, I--er--"
+
+"Oh," said Miss Lowery, beaming for a moment, "it ain't as bad as
+that--there ain't any circumstances. It's the first time I've ever
+been in New York except once when I was five years old, and I had no
+idea it was such a big town. And I met Mr.--Mr. Snip on the street
+and asked him about a friend of mine, and he brought me here and asked
+me to wait."
+
+"I advise you, Miss Lowery," said Tripp, "to tell Mr. Chalmers all.
+He's a friend of mine" (I was getting used to it by this time), "and
+he'll give you the right tip."
+
+"Why, certainly," said Miss Ada, chewing a gum-drop toward me. "There
+ain't anything to tell except that--well, everything's fixed for me to
+marry Hiram Dodd next Thursday evening. Hi has got two hundred acres
+of land with a lot of shore-front, and one of the best truck-farms on
+the Island. But this morning I had my horse saddled up--he's a white
+horse named Dancer--and I rode over to the station. I told 'em at
+home I was going to spend the day with Susie Adams. It was a story,
+I guess, but I don't care. And I came to New York on the train, and
+I met Mr.--Mr. Flip on the street and asked him if he knew where I
+could find G--G--"
+
+"Now, Miss Lowery," broke in Tripp, loudly, and with much bad taste,
+I thought, as she hesitated with her word, "you like this young man,
+Hiram Dodd, don't you? He's all right, and good to you, ain't he?"
+
+"Of course I like him," said Miss Lowery emphatically. "Hi's all
+right. And of course he's good to me. So is everybody."
+
+I could have sworn it myself. Throughout Miss Ada Lowery's life all
+men would be to good to her. They would strive, contrive, struggle,
+and compete to hold umbrellas over her hat, check her trunk, pick up
+her handkerchief, and buy for her soda at the fountain.
+
+"But," went on Miss Lowery, "last night I got to thinking about
+G--George, and I--"
+
+Down went the bright gold head upon dimpled, clasped hands on the
+table. Such a beautiful April storm! Unrestrainedly she sobbed. I
+wished I could have comforted her. But I was not George. And I was
+glad I was not Hiram--and yet I was sorry, too.
+
+By-and-by the shower passed. She straightened up, brave and half-way
+smiling. She would have made a splendid wife, for crying only made
+her eyes more bright and tender. She took a gum-drop and began her
+story.
+
+"I guess I'm a terrible hayseed," she said between her little gulps
+and sighs, "but I can't help it. G--George Brown and I were sweethearts
+since he was eight and I was five. When he was nineteen--that was
+four years ago--he left Greenburg and went to the city. He said he was
+going to be a policeman or a railroad president or something. And then
+he was coming back for me. But I never heard from him any more. And
+I--I--liked him."
+
+Another flow of tears seemed imminent, but Tripp hurled himself into
+the crevasse and dammed it. Confound him, I could see his game. He
+was trying to make a story of it for his sordid ends and profit.
+
+"Go on, Mr. Chalmers," said he, "and tell the lady what's the proper
+caper. That's what I told her--you'd hand it to her straight. Spiel
+up."
+
+I coughed, and tried to feel less wrathful toward Tripp. I saw my
+duty. Cunningly I had been inveigled, but I was securely trapped.
+Tripp's first dictum to me had been just and correct. The young lady
+must be sent back to Greenburg that day. She must be argued with,
+convinced, assured, instructed, ticketed, and returned without delay.
+I hated Hiram and despised George; but duty must be done. _Noblesse
+oblige_ and only five silver dollars are not strictly romantic
+compatibles, but sometimes they can be made to jibe. It was mine to
+be Sir Oracle, and then pay the freight. So I assumed an air that
+mingled Solomon's with that of the general passenger agent of the
+Long Island Railroad.
+
+"Miss Lowery," said I, as impressively as I could, "life is rather a
+queer proposition, after all." There was a familiar sound to these
+words after I had spoken them, and I hoped Miss Lowery had never
+heard Mr. Cohan's song. "Those whom we first love we seldom wed. Our
+earlier romances, tinged with the magic radiance of youth, often fail
+to materialize." The last three words sounded somewhat trite when
+they struck the air. "But those fondly cherished dreams," I went
+on, "may cast a pleasant afterglow on our future lives, however
+impracticable and vague they may have been. But life is full of
+realities as well as visions and dreams. One cannot live on memories.
+May I ask, Miss Lowery, if you think you could pass a happy--that is,
+a contented and harmonious life with Mr.--er--Dodd--if in other ways
+than romantic recollections he seems to--er--fill the bill, as I might
+say?"
+
+"Oh, Hi's all right," answered Miss Lowery. "Yes, I could get along
+with him fine. He's promised me an automobile and a motor-boat. But
+somehow, when it got so close to the time I was to marry him, I
+couldn't help wishing--well, just thinking about George. Something
+must have happened to him or he'd have written. On the day he left,
+he and me got a hammer and a chisel and cut a dime into two pieces. I
+took one piece and he took the other, and we promised to be true to
+each other and always keep the pieces till we saw each other again.
+I've got mine at home now in a ring-box in the top drawer of my
+dresser. I guess I was silly to come up here looking for him. I
+never realized what a big place it is."
+
+And then Tripp joined in with a little grating laugh that he had,
+still trying to drag in a little story or drama to earn the miserable
+dollar that he craved.
+
+"Oh, the boys from the country forget a lot when they come to the city
+and learn something. I guess George, maybe, is on the bum, or got
+roped in by some other girl, or maybe gone to the dogs on account of
+whiskey or the races. You listen to Mr. Chalmers and go back home,
+and you'll be all right."
+
+But now the time was come for action, for the hands of the clock
+were moving close to noon. Frowning upon Tripp, I argued gently and
+philosophically with Miss Lowery, delicately convincing her of the
+importance of returning home at once. And I impressed upon her
+the truth that it would not be absolutely necessary to her future
+happiness that she mention to Hi the wonders or the fact of her visit
+to the city that had swallowed up the unlucky George.
+
+She said she had left her horse (unfortunate Rosinante) tied to a tree
+near the railroad station. Tripp and I gave her instructions to mount
+the patient steed as soon as she arrived and ride home as fast as
+possible. There she was to recount the exciting adventure of a day
+spent with Susie Adams. She could "fix" Susie--I was sure of that--
+and all would be well.
+
+And then, being susceptible to the barbed arrows of beauty, I warmed
+to the adventure. The three of us hurried to the ferry, and there I
+found the price of a ticket to Greenburg to be but a dollar and eighty
+cents. I bought one, and a red, red rose with the twenty cents for
+Miss Lowery. We saw her aboard her ferryboat, and stood watching her
+wave her handkerchief at us until it was the tiniest white patch
+imaginable. And then Tripp and I faced each other, brought back to
+earth, left dry and desolate in the shade of the sombre verities of
+life.
+
+The spell wrought by beauty and romance was dwindling. I looked at
+Tripp and almost sneered. He looked more careworn, contemptible, and
+disreputable than ever. I fingered the two silver dollars remaining
+in my pocket and looked at him with the half-closed eyelids of
+contempt. He mustered up an imitation of resistance.
+
+"Can't you get a story out of it?" he asked, huskily. "Some sort of
+a story, even if you have to fake part of it?"
+
+"Not a line," said I. "I can fancy the look on Grimes' face if I
+should try to put over any slush like this. But we've helped the
+little lady out, and that'll have to be our only reward."
+
+"I'm sorry," said Tripp, almost inaudibly. "I'm sorry you're out your
+money. Now, it seemed to me like a find of a big story, you know--
+that is, a sort of thing that would write up pretty well."
+
+"Let's try to forget it," said I, with a praiseworthy attempt at
+gayety, "and take the next car 'cross town."
+
+I steeled myself against his unexpressed but palpable desire. He
+should not coax, cajole, or wring from me the dollar he craved. I had
+had enough of that wild-goose chase.
+
+Tripp feebly unbuttoned his coat of the faded pattern and glossy seams
+to reach for something that had once been a handkerchief deep down in
+some obscure and cavernous pocket. As he did so I caught the shine
+of a cheap silver-plated watch-chain across his vest, and something
+dangling from it caused me to stretch forth my hand and seize it
+curiously. It was the half of a silver dime that had been cut in
+halves with a chisel.
+
+"What!" I said, looking at him keenly.
+
+"Oh yes," he responded, dully. "George Brown, alias Tripp. What's
+the use?"
+
+Barring the W. C. T. U., I'd like to know if anybody disapproves of
+my having produced promptly from my pocket Tripp's whiskey dollar and
+unhesitatingly laying it in his hand.
+
+
+
+
+THE HIGHER PRAGMATISM
+
+
+I
+
+
+Where to go for wisdom has become a question of serious import.
+The ancients are discredited; Plato is boiler-plate; Aristotle is
+tottering; Marcus Aurelius is reeling; Aesop has been copyrighted by
+Indiana; Solomon is too solemn; you couldn't get anything out of
+Epictetus with a pick.
+
+The ant, which for many years served as a model of intelligence and
+industry in the school-readers, has been proven to be a doddering
+idiot and a waster of time and effort. The owl to-day is hooted at.
+Chautauqua conventions have abandoned culture and adopted diabolo.
+Graybeards give glowing testimonials to the venders of patent
+hair-restorers. There are typographical errors in the almanacs
+published by the daily newspapers. College professors have become--
+
+But there shall be no personalities.
+
+To sit in classes, to delve into the encyclopedia or the
+past-performances page, will not make us wise. As the poet says,
+"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers." Wisdom is dew, which, while
+we know it not, soaks into us, refreshes us, and makes us grow.
+Knowledge is a strong stream of water turned on us through a hose.
+It disturbs our roots.
+
+Then, let us rather gather wisdom. But how to do so requires
+knowledge. If we know a thing, we know it; but very often we are not
+wise to it that we are wise, and--
+
+But let's go on with the story.
+
+
+II
+
+
+Once upon a time I found a ten-cent magazine lying on a bench in a
+little city park. Anyhow, that was the amount he asked me for when
+I sat on the bench next to him. He was a musty, dingy, and tattered
+magazine, with some queer stories bound in him, I was sure. He turned
+out to be a scrap-book.
+
+"I am a newspaper reporter," I said to him, to try him. "I have been
+detailed to write up some of the experiences of the unfortunate ones
+who spend their evenings in this park. May I ask you to what you
+attribute your downfall in--"
+
+I was interrupted by a laugh from my purchase--a laugh so rusty and
+unpractised that I was sure it had been his first for many a day.
+
+"Oh, no, no," said he. "You ain't a reporter. Reporters don't talk
+that way. They pretend to be one of us, and say they've just got in
+on the blind baggage from St. Louis. I can tell a reporter on sight.
+Us park bums get to be fine judges of human nature. We sit here all
+day and watch the people go by. I can size up anybody who walks past
+my bench in a way that would surprise you."
+
+"Well," I said, "go on and tell me. How do you size me up?"
+
+"I should say," said the student of human nature with unpardonable
+hesitation, "that you was, say, in the contracting business--or maybe
+worked in a store--or was a sign-painter. You stopped in the park to
+finish your cigar, and thought you'd get a little free monologue out
+of me. Still, you might be a plasterer or a lawyer--it's getting kind
+of dark, you see. And your wife won't let you smoke at home."
+
+I frowned gloomily.
+
+"But, judging again," went on the reader of men, "I'd say you ain't
+got a wife."
+
+"No," said I, rising restlessly. "No, no, no, I ain't. But I _will_
+have, by the arrows of Cupid! That is, if--"
+
+My voice must have trailed away and muffled itself in uncertainty and
+despair.
+
+"I see you have a story yourself," said the dusty vagrant--impudently,
+it seemed to me. "Suppose you take your dime back and spin your yarn
+for me. I'm interested myself in the ups and downs of unfortunate
+ones who spend their evenings in the park."
+
+Somehow, that amused me. I looked at the frowsy derelict with more
+interest. I did have a story. Why not tell it to him? I had told
+none of my friends. I had always been a reserved and bottled-up man.
+It was psychical timidity or sensitiveness--perhaps both. And I smiled
+to myself in wonder when I felt an impulse to confide in this stranger
+and vagabond.
+
+"Jack," said I.
+
+"Mack," said he.
+
+"Mack," said I, "I'll tell you."
+
+"Do you want the dime back in advance?" said he.
+
+I handed him a dollar.
+
+"The dime," said I, "was the price of listening to _your_ story."
+
+"Right on the point of the jaw," said he. "Go on."
+
+And then, incredible as it may seem to the lovers in the world who
+confide their sorrows only to the night wind and the gibbous moon, I
+laid bare my secret to that wreck of all things that you would have
+supposed to be in sympathy with love.
+
+I told him of the days and weeks and months that I had spent in
+adoring Mildred Telfair. I spoke of my despair, my grievous days
+and wakeful nights, my dwindling hopes and distress of mind. I even
+pictured to this night-prowler her beauty and dignity, the great sway
+she had in society, and the magnificence of her life as the elder
+daughter of an ancient race whose pride overbalanced the dollars of
+the city's millionaires.
+
+"Why don't you cop the lady out?" asked Mack, bringing me down to
+earth and dialect again.
+
+I explained to him that my worth was so small, my income so minute,
+and my fears so large that I hadn't the courage to speak to her of
+my worship. I told him that in her presence I could only blush and
+stammer, and that she looked upon me with a wonderful, maddening smile
+of amusement.
+
+"She kind of moves in the professional class, don't she?" asked Mack.
+
+"The Telfair family--" I began, haughtily.
+
+"I mean professional beauty," said my hearer.
+
+"She is greatly and widely admired," I answered, cautiously.
+
+"Any sisters?"
+
+"One."
+
+"You know any more girls?"
+
+"Why, several," I answered. "And a few others."
+
+"Say," said Mack, "tell me one thing--can you hand out the dope
+to other girls? Can you chin 'em and make matinee eyes at 'em and
+squeeze 'em? You know what I mean. You're just shy when it comes to
+this particular dame--the professional beauty--ain't that right?"
+
+"In a way you have outlined the situation with approximate truth," I
+admitted.
+
+"I thought so," said Mack, grimly. "Now, that reminds me of my own
+case. I'll tell you about it."
+
+I was indignant, but concealed it. What was this loafer's case or
+anybody's case compared with mine? Besides, I had given him a dollar
+and ten cents.
+
+"Feel my muscle," said my companion, suddenly, flexing his biceps. I
+did so mechanically. The fellows in gyms are always asking you to do
+that. His arm was as hard as cast-iron.
+
+"Four years ago," said Mack, "I could lick any man in New York outside
+of the professional ring. Your case and mine is just the same. I come
+from the West Side--between Thirtieth and Fourteenth--I won't give the
+number on the door. I was a scrapper when I was ten, and when I was
+twenty no amateur in the city could stand up four rounds with me. 'S
+a fact. You know Bill McCarty? No? He managed the smokers for some
+of them swell clubs. Well, I knocked out everything Bill brought up
+before me. I was a middle-weight, but could train down to a welter
+when necessary. I boxed all over the West Side at bouts and benefits
+and private entertainments, and was never put out once.
+
+"But, say, the first time I put my foot in the ring with a professional
+I was no more than a canned lobster. I dunno how it was--I seemed to
+lose heart. I guess I got too much imagination. There was a formality
+and publicness about it that kind of weakened my nerve. I never won a
+fight in the ring. Light-weights and all kinds of scrubs used to sign
+up with my manager and then walk up and tap me on the wrist and see me
+fall. The minute I seen the crowd and a lot of gents in evening clothes
+down in front, and seen a professional come inside the ropes, I got as
+weak as ginger-ale.
+
+"Of course, it wasn't long till I couldn't get no backers, and I didn't
+have any more chances to fight a professional--or many amateurs,
+either. But lemme tell you--I was as good as most men inside the ring
+or out. It was just that dumb, dead feeling I had when I was up against
+a regular that always done me up.
+
+"Well, sir, after I had got out of the business, I got a mighty grouch
+on. I used to go round town licking private citizens and all kinds of
+unprofessionals just to please myself. I'd lick cops in dark streets
+and car-conductors and cab-drivers and draymen whenever I could start
+a row with 'em. It didn't make any difference how big they were, or
+how much science they had, I got away with 'em. If I'd only just have
+had the confidence in the ring that I had beating up the best men
+outside of it, I'd be wearing black pearls and heliotrope silk socks
+to-day.
+
+"One evening I was walking along near the Bowery, thinking about
+things, when along comes a slumming-party. About six or seven they
+was, all in swallowtails, and these silk hats that don't shine. One
+of the gang kind of shoves me off the sidewalk. I hadn't had a scrap
+in three days, and I just says, 'De-light-ed!' and hits him back of
+the ear.
+
+"Well, we had it. That Johnnie put up as decent a little fight as
+you'd want to see in the moving pictures. It was on a side street,
+and no cops around. The other guy had a lot of science, but it only
+took me about six minutes to lay him out.
+
+"Some of the swallowtails dragged him up against some steps and began
+to fan him. Another one of 'em comes over to me and says:
+
+"'Young man, do you know what you've done?'
+
+"'Oh, beat it,' says I. 'I've done nothing but a little punching-bag
+work. Take Freddy back to Yale and tell him to quit studying
+sociology on the wrong side of the sidewalk.'
+
+"'My good fellow,' says he, 'I don't know who you are, but I'd like
+to. You've knocked out Reddy Burns, the champion middle-weight of the
+world! He came to New York yesterday, to try to get a match on with
+Jim Jeffries. If you--'
+
+"But when I come out of my faint I was laying on the floor in a
+drug-store saturated with aromatic spirits of ammonia. If I'd known
+that was Reddy Burns, I'd have got down in the gutter and crawled past
+him instead of handing him one like I did. Why, if I'd ever been in a
+ring and seen him climbing over the ropes, I'd have been all to the
+sal-volatile.
+
+"So that's what imagination does," concluded Mack. "And, as I said,
+your case and mine is simultaneous. You'll never win out. You can't
+go up against the professionals. I tell you, it's a park bench for
+yours in this romance business."
+
+Mack, the pessimist, laughed harshly.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't see the parallel," I said, coldly. "I have only a
+very slight acquaintance with the prize-ring."
+
+The derelict touched my sleeve with his forefinger, for emphasis, as
+he explained his parable.
+
+"Every man," said he, with some dignity, "has got his lamps on
+something that looks good to him. With you, it's this dame that
+you're afraid to say your say to. With me, it was to win out in the
+ring. Well, you'll lose just like I did."
+
+"Why do you think I shall lose?" I asked warmly.
+
+"'Cause," said he, "you're afraid to go in the ring. You dassen't
+stand up before a professional. Your case and mine is just the same.
+You're a amateur; and that means that you'd better keep outside of the
+ropes."
+
+"Well, I must be going," I said, rising and looking with elaborate
+care at my watch.
+
+When I was twenty feet away the park-bencher called to me.
+
+"Much obliged for the dollar," he said. "And for the dime. But
+you'll never get 'er. You're in the amateur class."
+
+"Serves you right," I said to myself, "for hobnobbing with a tramp.
+His impudence!"
+
+But, as I walked, his words seemed to repeat themselves over and over
+again in my brain. I think I even grew angry at the man.
+
+"I'll show him!" I finally said, aloud. "I'll show him that I can
+fight Reddy Burns, too--even knowing who he is."
+
+I hurried to a telephone-booth and rang up the Telfair residence.
+
+A soft, sweet voice answered. Didn't I know that voice? My hand
+holding the receiver shook.
+
+"Is that _you_?" said I, employing the foolish words that form the
+vocabulary of every talker through the telephone.
+
+"Yes, this is I," came back the answer in the low, clear-cut tones
+that are an inheritance of the Telfairs. "Who is it, please?"
+
+"It's me," said I, less ungrammatically than egotistically. "It's me,
+and I've got a few things that I want to say to you right now and
+immediately and straight to the point."
+
+"_Dear_ me," said the voice. "Oh, it's you, Mr. Arden!"
+
+I wondered if any accent on the first word was intended; Mildred was
+fine at saying things that you had to study out afterward.
+
+"Yes," said I. "I hope so. And now to come down to brass tacks." I
+thought that rather a vernacularism, if there is such a word, as
+soon as I had said it; but I didn't stop to apologize. "You know, of
+course, that I love you, and that I have been in that idiotic state
+for a long time. I don't want any more foolishness about it--that is,
+I mean I want an answer from you right now. Will you marry me or not?
+Hold the wire, please. Keep out, Central. Hello, hello! Will you, or
+will you _not_?"
+
+That was just the uppercut for Reddy Burns' chin. The answer came
+back:
+
+"Why, Phil, dear, of course I will! I didn't know that you--that is,
+you never said--oh, come up to the house, please--I can't say what I
+want to over the 'phone. You are so importunate. But please come up
+to the house, won't you?"
+
+Would I?
+
+I rang the bell of the Telfair house violently. Some sort of a human
+came to the door and shooed me into the drawing-room.
+
+"Oh, well," said I to myself, looking at the ceiling, "any one can
+learn from any one. That was a pretty good philosophy of Mack's,
+anyhow. He didn't take advantage of his experience, but I get the
+benefit of it. If you want to get into the professional class, you've
+got to--"
+
+I stopped thinking then. Some one was coming down the stairs. My
+knees began to shake. I knew then how Mack had felt when a
+professional began to climb over the ropes.
+
+I looked around foolishly for a door or a window by which I might
+escape. If it had been any other girl approaching, I mightn't have--
+
+But just then the door opened, and Bess, Mildred's younger sister,
+came in. I'd never seen her look so much like a glorified angel. She
+walked straight tip to me, and--and--
+
+I'd never noticed before what perfectly wonderful eyes and hair
+Elizabeth Telfair had.
+
+"Phil," she said, in the Telfair, sweet, thrilling tones, "why didn't
+you tell me about it before? I thought it was sister you wanted all
+the time, until you telephoned to me a few minutes ago!"
+
+I suppose Mack and I always will be hopeless amateurs. But, as the
+thing has turned out in my case, I'm mighty glad of it.
+
+
+
+
+BEST-SELLER
+
+
+I
+
+
+One day last summer I went to Pittsburgh--well, I had to go there on
+business.
+
+My chair-car was profitably well filled with people of the kind one
+usually sees on chair-cars. Most of them were ladies in brown-silk
+dresses cut with square yokes, with lace insertion, and dotted veils,
+who refused to have the windows raised. Then there was the usual
+number of men who looked as if they might be in almost any business
+and going almost anywhere. Some students of human nature can look at
+a man in a Pullman and tell you where he is from, his occupation and
+his stations in life, both flag and social; but I never could. The
+only way I can correctly judge a fellow-traveller is when the train is
+held up by robbers, or when he reaches at the same time I do for the
+last towel in the dressing-room of the sleeper.
+
+The porter came and brushed the collection of soot on the window-sill
+off to the left knee of my trousers. I removed it with an air of
+apology. The temperature was eighty-eight. One of the dotted-veiled
+ladies demanded the closing of two more ventilators, and spoke loudly
+of Interlaken. I leaned back idly in chair No. 7, and looked with
+the tepidest curiosity at the small, black, bald-spotted head just
+visible above the back of No. 9.
+
+Suddenly No. 9 hurled a book to the floor between his chair and the
+window, and, looking, I saw that it was "The Rose-Lady and Trevelyan,"
+one of the best-selling novels of the present day. And then the
+critic or Philistine, whichever he was, veered his chair toward the
+window, and I knew him at once for John A. Pescud, of Pittsburgh,
+travelling salesman for a plate-glass company--an old acquaintance
+whom I had not seen in two years.
+
+In two minutes we were faced, had shaken hands, and had finished with
+such topics as rain, prosperity, health, residence, and destination.
+Politics might have followed next; but I was not so ill-fated.
+
+I wish you might know John A. Pescud. He is of the stuff that heroes
+are not often lucky enough to be made of. He is a small man with a
+wide smile, and an eye that seems to be fixed upon that little red
+spot on the end of your nose. I never saw him wear but one kind of
+necktie, and he believes in cuff-holders and button-shoes. He is as
+hard and true as anything ever turned out by the Cambria Steel Works;
+and he believes that as soon as Pittsburgh makes smoke-consumers
+compulsory, St. Peter will come down and sit at the foot of
+Smithfield Street, and let somebody else attend to the gate up in
+the branch heaven. He believes that "our" plate-glass is the most
+important commodity in the world, and that when a man is in his home
+town he ought to be decent and law-abiding.
+
+During my acquaintance with him in the City of Diurnal Night I had
+never known his views on life, romance, literature, and ethics. We
+had browsed, during our meetings, on local topics, and then parted,
+after Chateau Margaux, Irish stew, flannel-cakes, cottage-pudding,
+and coffee (hey, there!--with milk separate). Now I was to get more
+of his ideas. By way of facts, he told me that business had picked
+up since the party conventions, and that he was going to get off at
+Coketown.
+
+
+II
+
+
+"Say," said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his
+right shoe, "did you ever read one of these best-sellers? I mean
+the kind where the hero is an American swell--sometimes even from
+Chicago--who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is
+travelling under an alias, and follows her to her father's kingdom
+or principality? I guess you have. They're all alike. Sometimes
+this going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent,
+and sometimes he is a Van Something from New York, or a Chicago
+wheat-broker worthy fifty millions. But he's always ready to break
+into the king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens
+and princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four or the B.
+and O. There doesn't seem to be any other reason in the book for their
+being here.
+
+"Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said, and
+finds out who she is. He meets her on the _corso_ or the _strasse_ one
+evening and gives us ten pages of conversation. She reminds him of
+the difference in their stations, and that gives him a chance to ring
+in three solid pages about America's uncrowned sovereigns. If you'd
+take his remarks and set 'em to music, and then take the music away
+from 'em, they'd sound exactly like one of George Cohan's songs.
+
+"Well, you know how it runs on, if you've read any of 'em--he slaps
+the king's Swiss body-guards around like everything whenever they
+get in his way. He's a great fencer, too. Now, I've known of some
+Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of
+any fencers coming from there. He stands on the first landing of the
+royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier
+in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors
+who come to massacre the said king. And then he has to fight duels
+with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian
+archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.
+
+"But the great scene is when his rival for the princess' hand, Count
+Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel,
+armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian
+bloodhounds. This scene is what runs the best-seller into the
+twenty-ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a
+check for the advance royalties.
+
+"The American hero shucks his coat and throws it over the heads of the
+bloodhounds, gives the mitrailleuse a slap with his mitt, says 'Yah!'
+to the yataghan, and lands in Kid McCoy's best style on the count's
+left eye. Of course, we have a neat little prize-fight right then
+and there. The count--in order to make the go possible--seems to be
+an expert at the art of self-defence, himself; and here we have the
+Corbett-Sullivan fight done over into literature. The book ends with
+the broker and the princess doing a John Cecil Clay cover under the
+linden-trees on the Gorgonzola Walk. That winds up the love-story
+plenty good enough. But I notice that the book dodges the final
+issue. Even a best-seller has sense enough to shy at either leaving a
+Chicago grain broker on the throne of Lobsterpotsdam or bringing over
+a real princess to eat fish and potato salad in an Italian chalet on
+Michigan Avenue. What do you think about 'em?"
+
+"Why," said I, "I hardly know, John. There's a saying: 'Love levels
+all ranks,' you know."
+
+"Yes," said Pescud, "but these kind of love-stories are rank--on the
+level. I know something about literature, even if I am in plate-glass.
+These kind of books are wrong, and yet I never go into a train but
+what they pile 'em up on me. No good can come out of an international
+clinch between the Old-World aristocracy and one of us fresh
+Americans. When people in real life marry, they generally hunt up
+somebody in their own station. A fellow usually picks out a girl that
+went to the same high-school and belonged to the same singing-society
+that he did. When young millionaires fall in love, they always select
+the chorus-girl that likes the same kind of sauce on the lobster that
+he does. Washington newspaper correspondents always many widow ladies
+ten years older than themselves who keep boarding-houses. No, sir,
+you can't make a novel sound right to me when it makes one of C. D.
+Gibson's bright young men go abroad and turn kingdoms upside down
+just because he's a Taft American and took a course at a gymnasium.
+And listen how they talk, too!"
+
+Pescud picked up the best-seller and hunted his page.
+
+"Listen at this," said he. "Trevelyan is chinning with the Princess
+Alwyna at the back end of the tulip-garden. This is how it goes:
+
+
+   "'Say not so, dearest and sweetest of earth's fairest flowers.
+   Would I aspire? You are a star set high above me in a royal
+   heaven; I am only--myself. Yet I am a man, and I have a heart
+   to do and dare. I have no title save that of an uncrowned
+   sovereign; but I have an arm and a sword that yet might free
+   Schutzenfestenstein from the plots of traitors.'
+
+
+"Think of a Chicago man packing a sword, and talking about freeing
+anything that sounded as much like canned pork as that! He'd be much
+more likely to fight to have an import duty put on it."
+
+"I think I understand you, John," said I. "You want fiction-writers
+to be consistent with their scenes and characters. They shouldn't
+mix Turkish pashas with Vermont farmers, or English dukes with Long
+Island clam-diggers, or Italian countesses with Montana cowboys, or
+Cincinnati brewery agents with the rajahs of India."
+
+"Or plain business men with aristocracy high above 'em," added Pescud.
+"It don't jibe. People are divided into classes, whether we admit it
+or not, and it's everybody's impulse to stick to their own class.
+They do it, too. I don't see why people go to work and buy hundreds
+of thousands of books like that. You don't see or hear of any such
+didoes and capers in real life."
+
+
+III
+
+
+"Well, John," said I, "I haven't read a best-seller in a long time.
+Maybe I've had notions about them somewhat like yours. But tell me
+more about yourself. Getting along all right with the company?"
+
+"Bully," said Pescud, brightening at once. "I've had my salary raised
+twice since I saw you, and I get a commission, too. I've bought a
+neat slice of real estate out in the East End, and have run up a
+house on it. Next year the firm is going to sell me some shares of
+stock. Oh, I'm in on the line of General Prosperity, no matter who's
+elected!"
+
+"Met your affinity yet, John?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, I didn't tell you about that, did I?" said Pescud with a broader
+grin.
+
+"O-ho!" I said. "So you've taken time enough off from your plate-glass
+to have a romance?"
+
+"No, no," said John. "No romance--nothing like that! But I'll tell
+you about it.
+
+"I was on the south-bound, going to Cincinnati, about eighteen months
+ago, when I saw, across the aisle, the finest-looking girl I'd ever
+laid eyes on. Nothing spectacular, you know, but just the sort you
+want for keeps. Well, I never was up to the flirtation business,
+either handkerchief, automobile, postage-stamp, or door-step, and she
+wasn't the kind to start anything. She read a book and minded her
+business, which was to make the world prettier and better just by
+residing on it. I kept on looking out of the side doors of my eyes,
+and finally the proposition got out of the Pullman class into a case
+of a cottage with a lawn and vines running over the porch. I never
+thought of speaking to her, but I let the plate-glass business go to
+smash for a while.
+
+"She changed cars at Cincinnati, and took a sleeper to Louisville over
+the L. and N. There she bought another ticket, and went on through
+Shelbyville, Frankfort, and Lexington. Along there I began to have
+a hard time keeping up with her. The trains came along when they
+pleased, and didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular, except to
+keep on the track and the right of way as much as possible. Then they
+began to stop at junctions instead of towns, and at last they stopped
+altogether. I'll bet Pinkerton would outbid the plate-glass people
+for my services any time if they knew how I managed to shadow that
+young lady. I contrived to keep out of her sight as much as I could,
+but I never lost track of her.
+
+"The last station she got off at was away down in Virginia, about
+six in the afternoon. There were about fifty houses and four hundred
+niggers in sight. The rest was red mud, mules, and speckled hounds.
+
+"A tall old man, with a smooth face and white hair, looking as proud
+as Julius Caesar and Roscoe Conkling on the same post-card, was there
+to meet her. His clothes were frazzled, but I didn't notice that
+till later. He took her little satchel, and they started over the
+plank-walks and went up a road along the hill. I kept along a piece
+behind 'em, trying to look like I was hunting a garnet ring in the
+sand that my sister had lost at a picnic the previous Saturday.
+
+"They went in a gate on top of the hill. It nearly took my breath
+away when I looked up. Up there in the biggest grove I ever saw was a
+tremendous house with round white pillars about a thousand feet high,
+and the yard was so full of rose-bushes and box-bushes and lilacs
+that you couldn't have seen the house if it hadn't been as big as the
+Capitol at Washington.
+
+"'Here's where I have to trail,' says I to myself. I thought before
+that she seemed to be in moderate circumstances, at least. This
+must be the Governor's mansion, or the Agricultural Building of a
+new World's Fair, anyhow. I'd better go back to the village and get
+posted by the postmaster, or drug the druggist for some information.
+
+"In the village I found a pine hotel called the Bay View House. The
+only excuse for the name was a bay horse grazing in the front yard. I
+set my sample-case down, and tried to be ostensible. I told the
+landlord I was taking orders for plate-glass.
+
+"'I don't want no plates,' says he, 'but I do need another glass
+molasses-pitcher.'
+
+"By-and-by I got him down to local gossip and answering questions.
+
+"'Why,' says he, 'I thought everybody knowed who lived in the big
+white house on the hill. It's Colonel Allyn, the biggest man and the
+finest quality in Virginia, or anywhere else. They're the oldest
+family in the State. That was his daughter that got off the train.
+She's been up to Illinois to see her aunt, who is sick.'
+
+"I registered at the hotel, and on the third day I caught the young
+lady walking in the front yard, down next to the paling fence. I
+stopped and raised my hat--there wasn't any other way.
+
+"'Excuse me,' says I, 'can you tell me where Mr. Hinkle lives?'
+
+"She looks at me as cool as if I was the man come to see about the
+weeding of the garden, but I thought I saw just a slight twinkle of
+fun in her eyes.
+
+"'No one of that name lives in Birchton,' says she. 'That is,' she
+goes on, 'as far as I know. Is the gentleman you are seeking white?'
+
+"Well, that tickled me. 'No kidding,' says I. 'I'm not looking for
+smoke, even if I do come from Pittsburgh.'
+
+"'You are quite a distance from home,' says she.
+
+"'I'd have gone a thousand miles farther,' says I.
+
+"'Not if you hadn't waked up when the train started in Shelbyville,'
+says she; and then she turned almost as red as one of the roses on
+the bushes in the yard. I remembered I had dropped off to sleep on a
+bench in the Shelbyville station, waiting to see which train she took,
+and only just managed to wake up in time.
+
+"And then I told her why I had come, as respectful and earnest as I
+could. And I told her everything about myself, and what I was making,
+and how that all I asked was just to get acquainted with her and try
+to get her to like me.
+
+"She smiles a little, and blushes some, but her eyes never get mixed
+up. They look straight at whatever she's talking to.
+
+"'I never had any one talk like this to me before, Mr. Pescud,' says
+she. 'What did you say your name is--John?'
+
+"'John A.,' says I.
+
+"'And you came mighty near missing the train at Powhatan Junction,
+too,' says she, with a laugh that sounded as good as a mileage-book to
+me.
+
+"'How did you know?' I asked.
+
+"'Men are very clumsy,' said she. 'I knew you were on every train. I
+thought you were going to speak to me, and I'm glad you didn't.'
+
+"Then we had more talk; and at last a kind of proud, serious look came
+on her face, and she turned and pointed a finger at the big house.
+
+"'The Allyns,' says she, 'have lived in Elmcroft for a hundred years.
+We are a proud family. Look at that mansion. It has fifty rooms.
+See the pillars and porches and balconies. The ceilings in the
+reception-rooms and the ball-room are twenty-eight feet high. My
+father is a lineal descendant of belted earls.'
+
+"'I belted one of 'em once in the Duquesne Hotel, in Pittsburgh,'
+says I, 'and he didn't offer to resent it. He was there dividing his
+attentions between Monongahela whiskey and heiresses, and he got
+fresh.'
+
+"'Of course,' she goes on, 'my father wouldn't allow a drummer to set
+his foot in Elmcroft. If he knew that I was talking to one over the
+fence he would lock me in my room.'
+
+"'Would _you_ let me come there?' says I. 'Would _you_ talk to me
+if I was to call? For,' I goes on, 'if you said I might come and
+see you, the earls might be belted or suspendered, or pinned up with
+safety-pins, as far as I am concerned.'
+
+"'I must not talk to you,' she says, 'because we have not been
+introduced. It is not exactly proper. So I will say good-bye, Mr.--'
+
+"'Say the name,' says I. 'You haven't forgotten it.'
+
+"'Pescud,' says she, a little mad.
+
+"'The rest of the name!' I demands, cool as could be.
+
+"'John,' says she.
+
+"'John--what?' I says.
+
+"'John A.,' says she, with her head high. 'Are you through, now?'
+
+"'I'm coming to see the belted earl to-morrow,' I says.
+
+"'He'll feed you to his fox-hounds,' says she, laughing.
+
+"'If he does, it'll improve their running,' says I. 'I'm something of
+a hunter myself.'
+
+"'I must be going in now,' says she. 'I oughtn't to have spoken to you
+at all. I hope you'll have a pleasant trip back to Minneapolis--or
+Pittsburgh, was it? Good-bye!'
+
+"'Good-night,' says I, 'and it wasn't Minneapolis. What's your name,
+first, please?'
+
+"She hesitated. Then she pulled a leaf off a bush, and said:
+
+"'My name is Jessie,' says she.
+
+"'Good-night, Miss Allyn,' says I.
+
+"The next morning at eleven, sharp, I rang the door-bell of that
+World's Fair main building. After about three-quarters of an hour an
+old nigger man about eighty showed up and asked what I wanted. I gave
+him my business card, and said I wanted to see the colonel. He showed
+me in.
+
+"Say, did you ever crack open a wormy English walnut? That's what
+that house was like. There wasn't enough furniture in it to fill an
+eight-dollar flat. Some old horsehair lounges and three-legged chairs
+and some framed ancestors on the walls were all that met the eye. But
+when Colonel Allyn comes in, the place seemed to light up. You could
+almost hear a band playing, and see a bunch of old-timers in wigs
+and white stockings dancing a quadrille. It was the style of him,
+although he had on the same shabby clothes I saw him wear at the
+station.
+
+"For about nine seconds he had me rattled, and I came mighty near
+getting cold feet and trying to sell him some plate-glass. But I got
+my nerve back pretty quick. He asked me to sit down, and I told him
+everything. I told him how I followed his daughter from Cincinnati,
+and what I did it for, and all about my salary and prospects, and
+explained to him my little code of living--to be always decent and
+right in your home town; and when you're on the road, never take more
+than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent
+limit. At first I thought he was going to throw me out of the window,
+but I kept on talking. Pretty soon I got a chance to tell him that
+story about the Western Congressman who had lost his pocket-book
+and the grass widow--you remember that story. Well, that got him to
+laughing, and I'll bet that was the first laugh those ancestors and
+horsehair sofas had heard in many a day.
+
+"We talked two hours. I told him everything I knew; and then he began
+to ask questions, and I told him the rest. All I asked of him was to
+give me a chance. If I couldn't make a hit with the little lady, I'd
+clear out, and not bother any more. At last he says:
+
+"'There was a Sir Courtenay Pescud in the time of Charles I, if I
+remember rightly.'
+
+"'If there was,' says I, 'he can't claim kin with our bunch. We've
+always lived in and around Pittsburgh. I've got an uncle in the
+real-estate business, and one in trouble somewhere out in Kansas.
+You can inquire about any of the rest of us from anybody in old
+Smoky Town, and get satisfactory replies. Did you ever run across
+that story about the captain of the whaler who tried to make a
+sailor say his prayers?' says I.
+
+"'It occurs to me that I have never been so fortunate,' says the
+colonel.
+
+"So I told it to him. Laugh! I was wishing to myself that he was a
+customer. What a bill of glass I'd sell him! And then he says:
+
+"'The relating of anecdotes and humorous occurrences has always seemed
+to me, Mr. Pescud, to be a particularly agreeable way of promoting
+and perpetuating amenities between friends. With your permission, I
+will relate to you a fox-hunting story with which I was personally
+connected, and which may furnish you some amusement.'
+
+"So he tells it. It takes forty minutes by the watch. Did I laugh?
+Well, say! When I got my face straight he calls in old Pete, the
+superannuated darky, and sends him down to the hotel to bring up my
+valise. It was Elmcroft for me while I was in the town.
+
+"Two evenings later I got a chance to speak a word with Miss Jessie
+alone on the porch while the colonel was thinking up another story.
+
+"'It's going to be a fine evening,' says I.
+
+"'He's coming,' says she. 'He's going to tell you, this time, the
+story about the old negro and the green watermelons. It always comes
+after the one about the Yankees and the game rooster. There was
+another time,' she goes on, 'that you nearly got left--it was at
+Pulaski City.'
+
+"'Yes,' says I, 'I remember. My foot slipped as I was jumping on the
+step, and I nearly tumbled off.'
+
+"'I know,' says she. 'And--and I--_I was afraid you had, John A. I
+was afraid you had._'
+
+"And then she skips into the house through one of the big windows."
+
+
+IV
+
+
+"Coketown!" droned the porter, making his way through the slowing car.
+
+Pescud gathered his hat and baggage with the leisurely promptness of
+an old traveller.
+
+"I married her a year ago," said John. "I told you I built a house in
+the East End. The belted--I mean the colonel--is there, too. I find
+him waiting at the gate whenever I get back from a trip to hear any
+new story I might have picked up on the road."
+
+I glanced out of the window. Coketown was nothing more than a ragged
+hillside dotted with a score of black dismal huts propped up against
+dreary mounds of slag and clinkers. It rained in slanting torrents,
+too, and the rills foamed and splashed down through the black mud to
+the railroad-tracks.
+
+"You won't sell much plate-glass here, John," said I. "Why do you get
+off at this end-o'-the-world?"
+
+"Why," said Pescud, "the other day I took Jessie for a little trip to
+Philadelphia, and coming back she thought she saw some petunias in
+a pot in one of those windows over there just like some she used to
+raise down in the old Virginia home. So I thought I'd drop off here
+for the night, and see if I could dig up some of the cuttings or
+blossoms for her. Here we are. Good-night, old man. I gave you the
+address. Come out and see us when you have time."
+
+The train moved forward. One of the dotted brown ladies insisted
+on having windows raised, now that the rain beat against them. The
+porter came along with his mysterious wand and began to light the car.
+
+I glanced downward and saw the best-seller. I picked it up and set it
+carefully farther along on the floor of the car, where the rain-drops
+would not fall upon it. And then, suddenly, I smiled, and seemed to
+see that life has no geographical metes and bounds.
+
+"Good-luck to you, Trevelyan," I said. "And may you get the petunias
+for your princess!"
+
+
+
+
+RUS IN URBE
+
+
+Considering men in relation to money, there are three kinds whom I
+dislike: men who have more money than they can spend; men who have
+more money than they do spend; and men who spend more money than they
+have. Of the three varieties, I believe I have the least liking for
+the first. But, as a man, I liked Spencer Grenville North pretty
+well, although he had something like two or ten or thirty millions--
+I've forgotten exactly how many.
+
+I did not leave town that summer. I usually went down to a village
+on the south shore of Long Island. The place was surrounded by
+duck-farms, and the ducks and dogs and whippoorwills and rusty
+windmills made so much noise that I could sleep as peacefully as if
+I were in my own flat six doors from the elevated railroad in New
+York. But that summer I did not go. Remember that. One of my friends
+asked me why I did not. I replied:
+
+"Because, old man, New York is the finest summer resort in the world."
+You have heard that phrase before. But that is what I told him.
+
+I was press-agent that year for Binkly & Bing, the theatrical managers
+and producers. Of course you know what a press-agent is. Well, he is
+not. That is the secret of being one.
+
+Binkly was touring France in his new C. & N. Williamson car, and Bing
+had gone to Scotland to learn curling, which he seemed to associate in
+his mind with hot tongs rather than with ice. Before they left they
+gave me June and July, on salary, for my vacation, which act was in
+accord with their large spirit of liberality. But I remained in New
+York, which I had decided was the finest summer resort in--
+
+But I said that before.
+
+On July the 10th, North came to town from his camp in the Adirondacks.
+Try to imagine a camp with sixteen rooms, plumbing, eiderdown quilts,
+a butler, a garage, solid silver plate, and a long-distance telephone.
+Of course it was in the woods--if Mr. Pinchot wants to preserve the
+forests let him give every citizen two or ten or thirty million
+dollars, and the trees will all gather around the summer camps, as the
+Birnam woods came to Dunsinane, and be preserved.
+
+North came to see me in my three rooms and bath, extra charge for
+light when used extravagantly or all night. He slapped me on the back
+(I would rather have my shins kicked any day), and greeted me with
+out-door obstreperousness and revolting good spirits. He was
+insolently brown and healthy-looking, and offensively well dressed.
+
+"Just ran down for a few days," said he, "to sign some papers and
+stuff like that. My lawyer wired me to come. Well, you indolent
+cockney, what are you doing in town? I took a chance and telephoned,
+and they said you were here. What's the matter with that Utopia on
+Long Island where you used to take your typewriter and your villainous
+temper every summer? Anything wrong with the--er--swans, weren't
+they, that used to sing on the farms at night?"
+
+"Ducks," said I. "The songs of swans are for luckier ears. They swim
+and curve their necks in artificial lakes on the estates of the
+wealthy to delight the eyes of the favorites of Fortune."
+
+"Also in Central Park," said North, "to delight the eyes of immigrants
+and bummers. I've seen em there lots of times. But why are you in
+the city so late in the summer?"
+
+"New York City," I began to recite, "is the finest sum--"
+
+"No, you don't," said North, emphatically. "You don't spring that old
+one on me. I know you know better. Man, you ought to have gone up
+with us this summer. The Prestons are there, and Tom Volney and the
+Monroes and Lulu Stanford and the Miss Kennedy and her aunt that you
+liked so well."
+
+"I never liked Miss Kennedy's aunt," I said.
+
+"I didn't say you did," said North. "We are having the greatest time
+we've ever had. The pickerel and trout are so ravenous that I believe
+they would swallow your hook with a Montana copper-mine prospectus
+fastened on it. And we've a couple of electric launches; and I'll
+tell you what we do every night or two--we tow a rowboat behind each
+one with a big phonograph and a boy to change the discs in 'em. On
+the water, and twenty yards behind you, they are not so bad. And
+there are passably good roads through the woods where we go motoring.
+I shipped two cars up there. And the Pinecliff Inn is only three
+miles away. You know the Pinecliff. Some good people are there this
+season, and we run over to the dances twice a week. Can't you go back
+with me for a week, old man?"
+
+I laughed. "Northy," said I--"if I may be so familiar with a
+millionaire, because I hate both the names Spencer and Grenville--your
+invitation is meant kindly, but--the city in the summer-time for me.
+Here, while the _bourgeoisie_ is away, I can live as Nero lived--
+barring, thank heaven, the fiddling--while the city burns at ninety
+in the shade. The tropics and the zones wait upon me like handmaidens.
+I sit under Florida palms and eat pomegranates while Boreas himself,
+electrically conjured up, blows upon me his Arctic breath. As for
+trout, you know, yourself, that Jean, at Maurice's, cooks them better
+than any one else in the world."
+
+"Be advised," said North. "My chef has pinched the blue ribbon from
+the lot. He lays some slices of bacon inside the trout, wraps it all
+in corn-husks--the husks of green corn, you know--buries them in hot
+ashes and covers them with live coals. We build fires on the bank of
+the lake and have fish suppers."
+
+"I know," said I. "And the servants bring down tables and chairs and
+damask cloths, and you eat with silver forks. I know the kind of
+camps that you millionaires have. And there are champagne pails set
+about, disgracing the wild flowers, and, no doubt, Madame Tetrazzini
+to sing in the boat pavilion after the trout."
+
+"Oh no," said North, concernedly, "we were never as bad as that. We
+did have a variety troupe up from the city three or four nights, but
+they weren't stars by as far as light can travel in the same length
+of time. I always like a few home comforts even when I'm roughing it.
+But don't tell me you prefer to stay in the city during summer. I
+don't believe it. If you do, why did you spend your summers there for
+the last four years, even sneaking away from town on a night train,
+and refusing to tell your friends where this Arcadian village was?"
+
+"Because," said I, "they might have followed me and discovered it.
+But since then I have learned that Amaryllis has come to town. The
+coolest things, the freshest, the brightest, the choicest, are to be
+found in the city. If you've nothing on hand this evening I will show
+you."
+
+"I'm free," said North, "and I have my light car outside. I suppose,
+since you've been converted to the town, that your idea of rural sport
+is to have a little whirl between bicycle cops in Central Park and
+then a mug of sticky ale in some stuffy rathskeller under a fan that
+can't stir up as many revolutions in a week as Nicaragua can in a
+day."
+
+"We'll begin with the spin through the Park, anyhow," I said. I was
+choking with the hot, stale air of my little apartment, and I wanted
+that breath of the cool to brace me for the task of proving to my
+friend that New York was the greatest--and so forth.
+
+"Where can you find air any fresher or purer than this?" I asked, as
+we sped into Central's boskiest dell.
+
+"Air!" said North, contemptuously. "Do you call this air?--this muggy
+vapor, smelling of garbage and gasoline smoke. Man, I wish you could
+get one sniff of the real Adirondack article in the pine woods at
+daylight."
+
+"I have heard of it," said I. "But for fragrance and tang and a joy
+in the nostrils I would not give one puff of sea breeze across the
+bay, down on my little boat dock on Long Island, for ten of your
+turpentine-scented tornadoes."
+
+"Then why," asked North, a little curiously, "don't you go there
+instead of staying cooped up in this Greater Bakery?"
+
+"Because," said I, doggedly, "I have discovered that New York is the
+greatest summer--"
+
+"Don't say that again," interrupted North, "unless you've actually got
+a job as General Passenger Agent of the Subway. You can't really
+believe it."
+
+I went to some trouble to try to prove my theory to my friend. The
+Weather Bureau and the season had conspired to make the argument
+worthy of an able advocate.
+
+The city seemed stretched on a broiler directly above the furnaces
+of Avernus. There was a kind of tepid gayety afoot and awheel in the
+boulevards, mainly evinced by languid men strolling about in straw
+hats and evening clothes, and rows of idle taxicabs with their flags
+up, looking like a blockaded Fourth of July procession. The hotels
+kept up a specious brilliancy and hospitable outlook, but inside one
+saw vast empty caverns, and the footrails at the bars gleamed brightly
+from long disacquaintance with the sole-leather of customers. In
+the cross-town streets the steps of the old brownstone houses were
+swarming with "stoopers," that motley race hailing from sky-light room
+and basement, bringing out their straw door-step mats to sit and fill
+the air with strange noises and opinions.
+
+North and I dined on the top of a hotel; and here, for a few minutes,
+I thought I had made a score. An east wind, almost cool, blew across
+the roofless roof. A capable orchestra concealed in a bower of
+wistaria played with sufficient judgment to make the art of music
+probable and the art of conversation possible.
+
+Some ladies in reproachless summer gowns at other tables gave
+animation and color to the scene. And an excellent dinner, mainly
+from the refrigerator, seemed to successfully back my judgment as to
+summer resorts. But North grumbled all during the meal, and cursed
+his lawyers and prated so of his confounded camp in the woods that I
+began to wish he would go back there and leave me in my peaceful city
+retreat.
+
+After dining we went to a roof-garden vaudeville that was being
+much praised. There we found a good bill, an artificially cooled
+atmosphere, cold drinks, prompt service, and a gay, well-dressed
+audience. North was bored.
+
+"If this isn't comfortable enough for you on the hottest August night
+for five years," I said, a little sarcastically, "you might think
+about the kids down in Delancey and Hester streets lying out on the
+fire-escapes with their tongues hanging out, trying to get a breath of
+air that hasn't been fried on both sides. The contrast might increase
+your enjoyment."
+
+"Don't talk Socialism," said North. "I gave five hundred dollars to
+the free ice fund on the first of May. I'm contrasting these stale,
+artificial, hollow, wearisome 'amusements' with the enjoyment a
+man can get in the woods. You should see the firs and pines do
+skirt-dances during a storm; and lie down flat and drink out of a
+mountain branch at the end of a day's tramp after the deer. That's
+the only way to spend a summer. Get out and live with nature."
+
+"I agree with you absolutely," said I, with emphasis.
+
+For one moment I had relaxed my vigilance, and had spoken my true
+sentiments. North looked at me long and curiously.
+
+"Then why, in the name of Pan and Apollo," he asked, "have you been
+singing this deceitful paean to summer in town?"
+
+I suppose I looked my guilt.
+
+"Ha," said North, "I see. May I ask her name?"
+
+"Annie Ashton," said I, simply. "She played Nannette in Binkley &
+Bing's production of 'The Silver Cord.' She is to have a better part
+next season."
+
+"Take me to see her," said North.
+
+Miss Ashton lived with her mother in a small hotel. They were out
+of the West, and had a little money that bridged the seasons. As
+press-agent of Binkley & Bing I had tried to keep her before the
+public. As Robert James Vandiver I had hoped to withdraw her; for if
+ever one was made to keep company with said Vandiver and smell the
+salt breeze on the south shore of Long Island and listen to the ducks
+quack in the watches of the night, it was the Ashton set forth above.
+
+But she had a soul above ducks--above nightingales; aye, even above
+birds of paradise. She was very beautiful, with quiet ways, and
+seemed genuine. She had both taste and talent for the stage, and she
+liked to stay at home and read and make caps for her mother. She was
+unvaryingly kind and friendly with Binkley & Bing's press-agent.
+Since the theatre had closed she had allowed Mr. Vandiver to call in
+an unofficial role. I had often spoken to her of my friend, Spencer
+Grenville North; and so, as it was early, the first turn of the
+vaudeville being not yet over, we left to find a telephone.
+
+Miss Ashton would be very glad to see Mr. Vandiver and Mr. North.
+
+We found her fitting a new cap on her mother. I never saw her look
+more charming.
+
+North made himself disagreeably entertaining. He was a good talker,
+and had a way with him. Besides, he had two, ten, or thirty millions,
+I've forgotten which. I incautiously admired the mother's cap,
+whereupon she brought out her store of a dozen or two, and I took a
+course in edgings and frills. Even though Annie's fingers had pinked,
+or ruched, or hemmed, or whatever you do to 'em, they palled upon me.
+And I could hear North drivelling to Annie about his odious Adirondack
+camp.
+
+Two days after that I saw North in his motor-car with Miss Ashton and
+her mother. On the next afternoon he dropped in on me.
+
+"Bobby," said he, "this old burg isn't such a bad proposition in the
+summer-time, after all. Since I've keen knocking around it looks
+better to me. There are some first-rate musical comedies and light
+operas on the roofs and in the outdoor gardens. And if you hunt up
+the right places and stick to soft drinks, you can keep about as cool
+here as you can in the country. Hang it! when you come to think of
+it, there's nothing much to the country, anyhow. You get tired and
+sunburned and lonesome, and you have to eat any old thing that the
+cook dishes up to you."
+
+"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" said I.
+
+"It certainly does. Now, I found some whitebait yesterday, at
+Maurice's, with a new sauce that beats anything in the trout line I
+ever tasted."
+
+"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" I said.
+
+"Immense. The sauce is the main thing with whitebait."
+
+"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" I asked, looking him straight in
+the eye. He understood.
+
+"Look here, Bob," he said, "I was going to tell you. I couldn't help
+it. I'll play fair with you, but I'm going in to win. She is the
+'one particular' for me."
+
+"All right," said I. "It's a fair field. There are no rights for you
+to encroach upon."
+
+On Thursday afternoon Miss Ashton invited North and myself to have
+tea in her apartment. He was devoted, and she was more charming
+than usual. By avoiding the subject of caps I managed to get a
+word or two into and out of the talk. Miss Ashton asked me in a
+make-conversational tone something about the next season's tour.
+
+"Oh," said I, "I don't know about that. I'm not going to be with
+Binkley & Bing next season."
+
+"Why, I thought," said she, "that they were going to put the Number
+One road company under your charge. I thought you told me so."
+
+"They were," said I, "but they won't.. I'll tell you what I'm going
+to do. I'm going to the south shore of Long Island and buy a small
+cottage I know there on the edge of the bay. And I'll buy a catboat
+and a rowboat and a shotgun and a yellow dog. I've got money enough
+to do it. And I'll smell the salt wind all day when it blows from the
+sea and the pine odor when it blows from the land. And, of course,
+I'll write plays until I have a trunk full of 'em on hand.
+
+"And the next thing and the biggest thing I'll do will be to buy that
+duck-farm next door. Few people understand ducks. I can watch 'em
+for hours. They can march better than any company in the National
+Guard, and they can play 'follow my leader' better than the entire
+Democratic party. Their voices don't amount to much, but I like to
+hear 'em. They wake you up a dozen times a night, but there's a
+homely sound about their quacking that is more musical to me than the
+cry of 'Fresh strawber-rees!' under your window in the morning when
+you want to sleep.
+
+"And," I went on, enthusiastically, "do you know the value of ducks
+besides their beauty and intelligence and order and sweetness of
+voice? Picking their feathers gives you an unfailing and never-ceasing
+income. On a farm that I know the feathers were sold for $400 in one
+year. Think of that! And the ones shipped to the market will bring
+in more money than that. Yes, I am for the ducks and the salt breeze
+coming over the bay. I think I shall get a Chinaman cook, and with him
+and the dog and the sunsets for company I shall do well. No more of
+this dull, baking, senseless, roaring city for me."
+
+Miss Ashton looked surprised. North laughed.
+
+"I am going to begin one of my plays tonight," I said, "so I must be
+going." And with that I took my departure.
+
+A few days later Miss Ashton telephoned to me, asking me to call at
+four in the afternoon.
+
+I did.
+
+"You have been very good to me," she said, hesitatingly, "and I
+thought I would tell you. I am going to leave the stage."
+
+"Yes," said I, "I suppose you will. They usually do when there's so
+much money."
+
+"There is no money," she said, "or very little. Our money is almost
+gone."
+
+"But I am told," said I, "that he has something like two or ten or
+thirty millions--I have forgotten which."
+
+"I know what you mean," she said. "I will not pretend that I do not.
+I am not going to marry Mr. North."
+
+"Then why are you leaving the stage?" I asked, severely. "What else
+can you do to earn a living?"
+
+She came closer to me, and I can see the look in her eyes yet as she
+spoke.
+
+"I can pick ducks," she said.
+
+We sold the first year's feathers for $350.
+
+
+
+
+A POOR RULE
+
+
+I have always maintained, and asserted time to time, that woman is
+no mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and
+interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself
+upon credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong we shall see. As
+"Harper's Drawer" used to say in bygone years: "The following good
+story is told of Miss ----, Mr. ----, Mr. ----, and Mr. ----."
+
+We shall have to omit "Bishop X" and "the Rev. ----," for they do not
+belong.
+
+In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern
+Pacific. A reporter would have called it a "mushroom" town; but it
+was not. Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.
+
+The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the
+passengers both to drink and to dine. There was a new yellow-pine
+hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences.
+The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, "black-waxy" mud,
+and mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an
+about-to-be city. The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the
+twice-a-day train, by which you might leave, creditably sustained
+the role of charity.
+
+The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while
+it rained, and the warmest when it shone. It was operated, owned, and
+perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out
+of Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and
+sorghum.
+
+There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which
+the family lived. From the kitchen extended a "shelter" made of poles
+covered with chaparral brush. Under this was a table and two benches,
+each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry. Here
+was set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans,
+soda-biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu.
+
+Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as "Betty," but denied
+to the eyesight, presided at the range. Pa Hinkle himself, with
+salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands. During rush hours a
+Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided
+him in waiting on the guests. As is customary at Parisian banquets, I
+place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.
+
+Ileen Hinkle!
+
+The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. No doubt she
+had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography
+that Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have endorsed the
+phonography.
+
+Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to
+invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through
+Galveston and Del Rio. She sat on a high stool in a rough pine
+grand-stand--or was it a temple?--under the shelter at the door of
+the kitchen. There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with
+a little arch under which you passed your money. Heaven knows why the
+barbed wire; for every man who dined Parisianly there would have died
+in her service. Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you
+put it under the arch, and she took it.
+
+I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you. Instead, I
+must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: _A Philosophical
+Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_.
+It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive
+conceptions of beauty--roundness and smoothness, I think they are,
+according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm; as
+for smoothness--the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother
+she becomes.
+
+Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure
+Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam. She
+was a fruit-stand blonde--strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc. Her
+eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm
+that never comes. But it seems to me that words (at any rate per) are
+wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful. Like fancy, "It is
+engendered in the eyes." There are three kinds of beauties--I was
+foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a story.
+
+The first is the freckle-faced, snub-nosed girl whom you like. The
+second is Maud Adams. The third is, or are, the ladies in Bouguereau's
+paintings. Ileen Hinkle was the fourth. She was the mayoress of
+Spotless Town. There were a thousand golden apples coming to her as
+Helen of the Troy laundries.
+
+The Parisian Restaurant was within a radius. Even from beyond its
+circumference men rode in to Paloma to win her smiles. They got them.
+One meal--one smile--one dollar. But, with all her impartiality,
+Ileen seemed to favor three of her admirers above the rest. According
+to the rules of politeness, I will mention myself last.
+
+The first was an artificial product known as Bryan Jacks--a name
+that had obviously met with reverses. Jacks was the outcome of paved
+cities. He was a small man made of some material resembling flexible
+sandstone. His hair was the color of a brick Quaker meeting-house;
+his eyes were twin cranberries; his mouth was like the aperture under
+a drop-letters-here sign.
+
+He knew every city from Bangor to San Francisco, thence north to
+Portland, thence S. 45 E. to a given point in Florida. He had mastered
+every art, trade, game, business, profession, and sport in the world,
+had been present at, or hurrying on his way to, every headline event
+that had ever occurred between oceans since he was five years old. You
+might open the atlas, place your finger at random upon the name of
+a town, and Jacks would tell you the front names of three prominent
+citizens before you could close it again. He spoke patronizingly and
+even disrespectfully of Broadway, Beacon Hill, Michigan, Euclid, and
+Fifth avenues, and the St. Louis Four Courts. Compared with him as a
+cosmopolite, the Wandering Jew would have seemed a mere hermit. He had
+learned everything the world could teach him, and he would tell you
+about it.
+
+I hate to be reminded of Pollok's "Course of Time," and so do you;
+but every time I saw Jacks I would think of the poet's description
+of another poet by the name of G. G. Byron who "Drank early; deeply
+drank--drank draughts that common millions might have quenched; then
+died of thirst because there was no more to drink."
+
+That fitted Jacks, except that, instead of dying, he came to Paloma,
+which was about the same thing. He was a telegrapher and station-and
+express-agent at seventy-five dollars a month. Why a young man who
+knew everything and could do everything was content to serve in such
+an obscure capacity I never could understand, although he let out
+a hint once that it was as a personal favor to the president and
+stockholders of the S. P. Ry. Co.
+
+One more line of description, and I turn Jacks over to you. He wore
+bright blue clothes, yellow shoes, and a bow tie made of the same
+cloth as his shirt.
+
+My rival No.2 was Bud Cunningham, whose services had been engaged by
+a ranch near Paloma to assist in compelling refractory cattle to keep
+within the bounds of decorum and order. Bud was the only cowboy off
+the stage that I ever saw who looked like one on it. He wore the
+sombrero, the chaps, and the handkerchief tied at the back of his
+neck.
+
+Twice a week Bud rode in from the Val Verde Ranch to sup at the
+Parisian Restaurant. He rode a many-high-handed Kentucky horse at a
+tremendously fast lope, which animal he would rein up so suddenly
+under the big mesquite at the corner of the brush shelter that his
+hoofs would plough canals yards long in the loam.
+
+Jacks and I were regular boarders at the restaurant, of course.
+
+The front room of the Hinkle House was as neat a little parlor as
+there was in the black-waxy country. It was all willow rocking-chairs,
+and home-knit tidies, and albums, and conch shells in a row. And a
+little upright piano in one corner.
+
+Here Jacks and Bud and I--or sometimes one or two of us, according
+to our good-luck--used to sit of evenings when the tide of trade was
+over, and "visit" Miss Hinkle.
+
+Ileen was a girl of ideas. She was destined for higher things (if
+there can be anything higher) than taking in dollars all day through a
+barbed-wire wicket. She had read and listened and thought. Her looks
+would have formed a career for a less ambitious girl; but, rising
+superior to mere beauty, she must establish something in the nature of
+a _salon_--the only one in Paloma.
+
+"Don't you think that Shakespeare was a great writer?" she would ask,
+with such a pretty little knit of her arched brows that the late
+Ignatius Donnelly, himself, had he seen it, could scarcely have saved
+his Bacon.
+
+Ileen was of the opinion, also, that Boston is more cultured than
+Chicago; that Rosa Bonheur was one of the greatest of women painters;
+that Westerners are more spontaneous and open-hearted than Easterners;
+that London must be a very foggy city, and that California must be
+quite lovely in the springtime. And of many other opinions indicating
+a keeping up with the world's best thought.
+
+These, however, were but gleaned from hearsay and evidence: Ileen
+had theories of her own. One, in particular, she disseminated to us
+untiringly. Flattery she detested. Frankness and honesty of speech
+and action, she declared, were the chief mental ornaments of man
+and woman. If ever she could like any one, it would be for those
+qualities.
+
+"I'm awfully weary," she said, one evening, when we three musketeers
+of the mesquite were in the little parlor, "of having compliments on
+my looks paid to me. I know I'm not beautiful."
+
+(Bud Cunningham told me afterward that it was all he could do to keep
+from calling her a liar when she said that.)
+
+"I'm only a little Middle-Western girl," went on Ileen, "who just
+wants to be simple and neat, and tries to help her father make a
+humble living."
+
+(Old Man Hinkle was shipping a thousand silver dollars a month, clear
+profit, to a bank in San Antonio.)
+
+Bud twisted around in his chair and bent the rim of his hat, from
+which he could never be persuaded to separate. He did not know
+whether she wanted what she said she wanted or what she knew she
+deserved. Many a wiser man has hesitated at deciding. Bud decided.
+
+"Why--ah, Miss Ileen, beauty, as you might say, ain't everything. Not
+sayin' that you haven't your share of good looks, I always admired
+more than anything else about you the nice, kind way you treat your
+ma and pa. Any one what's good to their parents and is a kind of
+home-body don't specially need to be too pretty."
+
+Ileen gave him one of her sweetest smiles. "Thank you, Mr.
+Cunningham," she said. "I consider that one of the finest compliments
+I've had in a long time. I'd so much rather hear you say that than to
+hear you talk about my eyes and hair. I'm glad you believe me when I
+say I don't like flattery."
+
+Our cue was there for us. Bud had made a good guess. You couldn't
+lose Jacks. He chimed in next.
+
+"Sure thing, Miss Ileen," he said; "the good-lookers don't always win
+out. Now, you ain't bad looking, of course--but that's nix-cum-rous.
+I knew a girl once in Dubuque with a face like a cocoanut, who could
+skin the cat twice on a horizontal bar without changing hands. Now, a
+girl might have the California peach crop mashed to a marmalade and
+not be able to do that. I've seen--er--worse lookers than _you_, Miss
+Ileen; but what I like about you is the business way you've got of
+doing things. Cool and wise--that's the winning way for a girl. Mr.
+Hinkle told me the other day you'd never taken in a lead silver dollar
+or a plugged one since you've been on the job. Now, that's the stuff
+for a girl--that's what catches me."
+
+Jacks got his smile, too.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Jacks," said Ileen. "If you only knew how I
+appreciate any one's being candid and not a flatterer! I get so tired
+of people telling me I'm pretty. I think it is the loveliest thing to
+have friends who tell you the truth."
+
+Then I thought I saw an expectant look on Ileen's face as she glanced
+toward me. I had a wild, sudden impulse to dare fate, and tell her of
+all the beautiful handiwork of the Great Artificer she was the most
+exquisite--that she was a flawless pearl gleaming pure and serene in a
+setting of black mud and emerald prairies--that she was--a--a corker;
+and as for mine, I cared not if she were as cruel as a serpent's
+tooth to her fond parents, or if she couldn't tell a plugged dollar
+from a bridle buckle, if I might sing, chant, praise, glorify, and
+worship her peerless and wonderful beauty.
+
+But I refrained. I feared the fate of a flatterer. I had witnessed
+her delight at the crafty and discreet words of Bud and Jacks. No!
+Miss Hinkle was not one to be beguiled by the plated-silver tongue of
+a flatterer. So I joined the ranks of the candid and honest. At once
+I became mendacious and didactic.
+
+"In all ages, Miss Hinkle," said I, "in spite of the poetry and
+romance of each, intellect in woman has been admired more than beauty.
+Even in Cleopatra, herself, men found more charm in her queenly mind
+than in her looks."
+
+"Well, I should think so!" said Ileen. "I've seen pictures of her
+that weren't so much. She had an awfully long nose."
+
+"If I may say so," I went on, "you remind me of Cleopatra, Miss
+Ileen."
+
+"Why, my nose isn't so long!" said she, opening her eyes wide and
+touching that comely feature with a dimpled forefinger.
+
+"Why--er--I mean," said I--"I mean as to mental endowments."
+
+"Oh!" said she; and then I got my smile just as Bud and Jacks had got
+theirs.
+
+"Thank every one of you," she said, very, very sweetly, "for being
+so frank and honest with me. That's the way I want you to be always.
+Just tell me plainly and truthfully what you think, and we'll all be
+the best friends in the world. And now, because you've been so good
+to me, and understand so well how I dislike people who do nothing but
+pay me exaggerated compliments, I'll sing and play a little for you."
+
+Of course, we expressed our thanks and joy; but we would have been
+better pleased if Ileen had remained in her low rocking-chair face to
+face with us and let us gaze upon her. For she was no Adelina Patti--
+not even on the farewellest of the diva's farewell tours. She had a
+cooing little voice like that of a turtle-dove that could almost fill
+the parlor when the windows and doors were closed, and Betty was not
+rattling the lids of the stove in the kitchen. She had a gamut that I
+estimate at about eight inches on the piano; and her runs and trills
+sounded like the clothes bubbling in your grandmother's iron wash-pot.
+Believe that she must have been beautiful when I tell you that it
+sounded like music to us.
+
+Ileen's musical taste was catholic. She would sing through a pile of
+sheet music on the left-hand top of the piano, laying each slaughtered
+composition on the right-hand top. The next evening she would sing
+from right to left. Her favorites were Mendelssohn, and Moody and
+Sankey. By request she always wound up with "Sweet Violets" and "When
+the Leaves Begin to Turn."
+
+When we left at ten o'clock the three of us would go down to Jacks'
+little wooden station and sit on the platform, swinging our feet and
+trying to pump one another for clews as to which way Miss Ileen's
+inclinations seemed to lean. That is the way of rivals--they do
+not avoid and glower at one another; they convene and converse and
+construe--striving by the art politic to estimate the strength of the
+enemy.
+
+One day there came a dark horse to Paloma, a young lawyer who at once
+flaunted his shingle and himself spectacularly upon the town. His
+name was C. Vincent Vesey. You could see at a glance that he was a
+recent graduate of a southwestern law school. His Prince Albert coat,
+light striped trousers, broad-brimmed soft black hat, and narrow white
+muslin bow tie proclaimed that more loudly than any diploma could.
+Vesey was a compound of Daniel Webster, Lord Chesterfield, Beau
+Brummell, and Little Jack Horner. His coming boomed Paloma. The next
+day after he arrived an addition to the town was surveyed and laid off
+in lots.
+
+Of course, Vesey, to further his professional fortunes, must mingle
+with the citizenry and outliers of Paloma. And, as well as with the
+soldier men, he was bound to seek popularity with the gay dogs of the
+place. So Jacks and Bud Cunningham and I came to be honored by his
+acquaintance.
+
+The doctrine of predestination would have been discredited had
+not Vesey seen Ileen Hinkle and become fourth in the tourney.
+Magnificently, he boarded at the yellow pine hotel instead of at the
+Parisian Restaurant; but he came to be a formidable visitor in the
+Hinkle parlor. His competition reduced Bud to an inspired increase
+of profanity, drove Jacks to an outburst of slang so weird that it
+sounded more horrible than the most trenchant of Bud's imprecations,
+and made me dumb with gloom.
+
+For Vesey had the rhetoric. Words flowed from him like oil from
+a gusher. Hyperbole, compliment, praise, appreciation, honeyed
+gallantry, golden opinions, eulogy, and unveiled panegyric vied with
+one another for pre-eminence in his speech. We had small hopes that
+Ileen could resist his oratory and Prince Albert.
+
+But a day came that gave us courage.
+
+About dusk one evening I was sitting on the little gallery in front
+of the Hinkle parlor, waiting for Ileen to come, when I heard voices
+inside. She had come into the room with her father, and Old Man
+Hinkle began to talk to her. I had observed before that he was a
+shrewd man, and not unphilosophic.
+
+"Ily," said he, "I notice there's three or four young fellers that
+have been callin' to see you regular for quite a while. Is there any
+one of 'em you like better than another?"
+
+"Why, pa," she answered, "I like all of 'em very well. I think Mr.
+Cunningham and Mr. Jacks and Mr. Harris are very nice young men. They
+are so frank and honest in everything they say to me. I haven't known
+Mr. Vesey very long, but I think he's a very nice young man, he's so
+frank and honest in everything he says to me."
+
+"Now, that's what I'm gittin' at," says old Hinkle. "You've always
+been sayin' you like people what tell the truth and don't go
+humbuggin' you with compliments and bogus talk. Now, suppose you
+make a test of these fellers, and see which one of 'em will talk the
+straightest to you."
+
+"But how'll I do it, pa?"
+
+"I'll tell you how. You know you sing a little bit, Ily; you took
+music-lessons nearly two years in Logansport. It wasn't long, but it
+was all we could afford then. And your teacher said you didn't have
+any voice, and it was a waste of money to keep on. Now, suppose you
+ask the fellers what they think of your singin', and see what each
+one of 'em tells you. The man that'll tell you the truth about it'll
+have a mighty lot of nerve, and 'll do to tie to. What do you think
+of the plan?"
+
+"All right, pa," said Ileen. "I think it's a good idea. I'll try
+it."
+
+Ileen and Mr. Hinkle went out of the room through the inside doors.
+Unobserved, I hurried down to the station. Jacks was at his telegraph
+table waiting for eight o'clock to come. It was Bud's night in town,
+and when he rode in I repeated the conversation to them both. I was
+loyal to my rivals, as all true admirers of all Ileens should be.
+
+Simultaneously the three of us were smitten by an uplifting thought.
+Surely this test would eliminate Vesey from the contest. He, with his
+unctuous flattery, would be driven from the lists. Well we remembered
+Ileen's love of frankness and honesty--how she treasured truth and
+candor above vain compliment and blandishment.
+
+Linking arms, we did a grotesque dance of joy up and down the
+platform, singing "Muldoon Was a Solid Man" at the top of our voices.
+
+That evening four of the willow rocking-chairs were filled besides the
+lucky one that sustained the trim figure of Miss Hinkle. Three of us
+awaited with suppressed excitement the application of the test. It
+was tried on Bud first.
+
+"Mr. Cunningham," said Ileen, with her dazzling smile, after she had
+sung "When the Leaves Begin to Turn," "what do you really think of my
+voice? Frankly and honestly, now, as you know I want you to always be
+toward me."
+
+Bud squirmed in his chair at his chance to show the sincerity that he
+knew was required of him.
+
+"Tell you the truth, Miss Ileen," he said, earnestly, "you ain't got
+much more voice than a weasel--just a little squeak, you know. Of
+course, we all like to hear you sing, for it's kind of sweet and
+soothin' after all, and you look most as mighty well sittin' on the
+piano-stool as you do faced around. But as for real singin'--I reckon
+you couldn't call it that."
+
+I looked closely at Ileen to see if Bud had overdone his frankness,
+but her pleased smile and sweetly spoken thanks assured me that we
+were on the right track.
+
+"And what do you think, Mr. Jacks?" she asked next.
+
+"Take it from me," said Jacks, "you ain't in the prima donna class.
+I've heard 'em warble in every city in the United States; and I tell
+you your vocal output don't go. Otherwise, you've got the grand
+opera bunch sent to the soap factory--in looks, I mean; for the high
+screechers generally look like Mary Ann on her Thursday out. But nix
+for the gargle work. Your epiglottis ain't a real side-stepper--its
+footwork ain't good."
+
+With a merry laugh at Jacks' criticism, Ileen looked inquiringly at
+me.
+
+I admit that I faltered a little. Was there not such a thing as being
+too frank? Perhaps I even hedged a little in my verdict; but I stayed
+with the critics.
+
+"I am not skilled in scientific music, Miss Ileen," I said, "but,
+frankly, I cannot praise very highly the singing-voice that Nature has
+given you. It has long been a favorite comparison that a great singer
+sings like a bird. Well, there are birds and birds. I would say that
+your voice reminds me of the thrush's--throaty and not strong, nor of
+much compass or variety--but still--er--sweet--in--er--its--way, and--
+er--"
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Harris," interrupted Miss Hinkle. "I knew I could
+depend upon your frankness and honesty."
+
+And then C. Vincent Vesey drew back one sleeve from his snowy cuff,
+and the water came down at Lodore.
+
+My memory cannot do justice to his masterly tribute to that priceless,
+God-given treasure--Miss Hinkle's voice. He raved over it in terms
+that, if they had been addressed to the morning stars when they sang
+together, would have made that stellar choir explode in a meteoric
+shower of flaming self-satisfaction.
+
+He marshalled on his white finger-tips the grand opera stars of all
+the continents, from Jenny Lind to Emma Abbott, only to depreciate
+their endowments. He spoke of larynxes, of chest notes, of phrasing,
+arpeggios, and other strange paraphernalia of the throaty art. He
+admitted, as though driven to a corner, that Jenny Lind had a note or
+two in the high register that Miss Hinkle had not yet acquired--but--
+"!!!"--that was a mere matter of practice and training.
+
+And, as a peroration, he predicted--solemnly predicted--a career in
+vocal art for the "coming star of the Southwest--and one of which
+grand old Texas may well be proud," hitherto unsurpassed in the annals
+of musical history.
+
+When we left at ten, Ileen gave each of us her usual warm, cordial
+handshake, entrancing smile, and invitation to call again. I could
+not see that one was favored above or below another--but three of us
+knew--we knew.
+
+We knew that frankness and honesty had won, and that the rivals now
+numbered three instead of four.
+
+Down at the station Jacks brought out a pint bottle of the proper
+stuff, and we celebrated the downfall of a blatant interloper.
+
+Four days went by without anything happening worthy of recount.
+
+On the fifth, Jacks and I, entering the brush arbor for our supper,
+saw the Mexican youth, instead of a divinity in a spotless waist and a
+navy-blue skirt, taking in the dollars through the barbed-wire wicket.
+
+We rushed into the kitchen, meeting Pa Hinkle coming out with two cups
+of hot coffee in his hands.
+
+"Where's Ileen?" we asked, in recitative.
+
+Pa Hinkle was a kindly man. "Well, gents," said he, "it was a sudden
+notion she took; but I've got the money, and I let her have her way.
+She's gone to a corn--a conservatory in Boston for four years for to
+have her voice cultivated. Now, excuse me to pass, gents, for this
+coffee's hot, and my thumbs is tender."
+
+That night there were four instead of three of us sitting on the
+station platform and swinging our feet. C. Vincent Vesey was one of
+us. We discussed things while dogs barked at the moon that rose, as
+big as a five-cent piece or a flour barrel, over the chaparral.
+
+And what we discussed was whether it is better to lie to a woman or
+to tell her the truth.
+
+And as all of us were young then, we did not come to a decision.
+
+
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+or intentionally incorrect practice.
+
+
+
+
+
+OPTIONS
+BY
+O HENRY
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+"The Rose of Dixie"
+The Third Ingredient
+The Hiding of Black Bill
+Schools and Schools
+Thimble, Thimble
+Supply and Demand
+Buried Treasure
+To Him Who Waits
+He Also Serves
+The Moment of Victory
+The Head-Hunter
+No Story
+The Higher Pragmatism
+Best-Seller
+Rus in Urbe
+A Poor Rule
+
+
+
+
+OPTIONS
+
+
+
+
+"THE ROSE OF DIXIE"
+
+
+
+When The Rose of Dixie magazine was started by a stock company in 
+Toombs City, Georgia, there was never but one candidate for its chief 
+editorial position in the minds of its owners.  Col.  Aquila Telfair 
+was the man for the place.  By all the rights of learning, family, 
+reputation, and Southern traditions, he was its foreordained, fit, and 
+logical editor.  So, a committee of the patriotic Georgia citizens who 
+had subscribed the founding fund of $100,000 called upon Colonel 
+Telfair at his residence, Cedar Heights, fearful lest the enterprise 
+and the South should suffer by his possible refusal.
+
+The colonel received them in his great library, where he spent most of 
+his days.  The library had descended to him from his father.  It 
+contained ten thousand volumes, some of which had been published as 
+late as the year 1861.  When the deputation arrived, Colonel Telfair 
+was seated at his massive white-pine centre-table, reading Burton's 
+Anatomy of Melancholy.  He arose and shook hands punctiliously with 
+each member of the committee.  If you were familiar with The Rose of 
+Dixie you will remember the colonel's portrait, which appeared in it 
+from time to time.  You could not forget the long, carefully brushed 
+white hair; the hooked, high-bridged nose, slightly twisted to the 
+left; the keen eyes under the still black eyebrows; the classic mouth 
+beneath the drooping white mustache, slightly frazzled at the ends.
+
+The committee solicitously offered him the position of managing 
+editor, humbly presenting an outline of the field that the publication 
+was designed to cover and mentioning a comfortable salary.  The 
+colonel's lands were growing poorer each year and were much cut up by 
+red gullies.  Besides, the honor was not one to be refused.
+
+In a forty-minute speech of acceptance, Colonel Telfair gave an 
+outline of English literature from Chaucer to Macaulay, re-fought the 
+battle of Chancellorsville, and said that, God helping him, he would 
+so conduct The Rose of Dixie that its fragrance and beauty would 
+permeate the entire world, hurling back into the teeth of the Northern 
+minions their belief that no genius or good could exist in the brains 
+and hearts of the people whose property they had destroyed and whose 
+rights they had curtailed.
+
+Offices for the magazine were partitioned off and furnished in the 
+second floor of the First National Bank building; and it was for the 
+colonel to cause The Rose of Dixie to blossom and flourish or to wilt 
+in the balmy air of the land of flowers.
+
+The staff of assistants and contributors that Editor-Colonel Telfair 
+drew about him was a peach.  It was a whole crate of Georgia peaches.  
+The first assistant editor, Tolliver Lee Fairfax, had had a father 
+killed during Pickett's charge.  The second assistant, Keats Unthank, 
+was the nephew of one of Morgan's Raiders.  The book reviewer, Jackson 
+Rockingham, had been the youngest soldier in the Confederate army, 
+having appeared on the field of battle with a sword in one hand and a 
+milk-bottle in the other.  The art editor, Roncesvalles Sykes, was a 
+third cousin to a nephew of Jefferson Davis.  Miss Lavinia Terhune, 
+the colonel's stenographer and typewriter, had an aunt who had once 
+been kissed by Stonewall Jackson.  Tommy Webster, the head office-boy, 
+got his job by having recited Father Ryan's poems, complete, at the 
+commencement exercises of the Toombs City High School.  The girls who 
+wrapped and addressed the magazines were members of old Southern 
+families in Reduced Circumstances.  The cashier was a scrub named 
+Hawkins, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had recommendations and a bond 
+from a guarantee company filed with the owners.  Even Georgia stock 
+companies sometimes realize that it takes live ones to bury the dead.
+
+Well, sir, if you believe me, The Rose of Dixie blossomed five times 
+before anybody heard of it except the people who buy their hooks and 
+eyes in Toombs City.  Then Hawkins climbed off his stool and told on 
+'em to the stock company.  Even in Ann Arbor he had been used to 
+having his business propositions heard of at least as far away as 
+Detroit.  So an advertising manager was engaged -- Beauregard Fitzhugh 
+Banks, a young man in a lavender necktie, whose grandfather had been 
+the Exalted High Pillow-slip of the Kuklux Klan.  
+
+In spite of which The Rose of Dixie kept coming out every month.  
+Although in every issue it ran photos of either the Taj Mahal or the 
+Luxembourg Gardens, or Carmencita or La Follette, a certain number of 
+people bought it and subscribed for it.  As a boom for it, Editor-
+Colonel Telfair ran three different views of Andrew Jackson's old 
+home, "The Hermitage," a full-page engraving of the second battle of 
+Manassas, entitled "Lee to the Rear!" and a five-thousand-word 
+biography of Belle Boyd in the same number.  The subscription list 
+that month advanced 118.  Also there were poems in the same issue by 
+Leonina Vashti Haricot (pen-name), related to the Haricots of 
+Charleston, South Carolina, and Bill Thompson, nephew of one of the 
+stockholders.  And an article from a special society correspondent 
+describing a tea-party given by the swell Boston and English set, 
+where a lot of tea was spilled overboard by some of the guests 
+masquerading as Indians.
+
+One day a person whose breath would easily cloud a mirror, he was so 
+much alive, entered the office of The Rose of Dixie.  He was a man 
+about the size of a real-estate agent, with a self-tied tie and a 
+manner that he must have borrowed conjointly from W J.  Bryan, 
+Hackenschmidt, and Hetty Green.  He was shown into the editor-
+colonel's pons asinorum.  Colonel Telfair rose and began a Prince 
+Albert bow.
+
+"I'm Thacker," said the intruder, taking the editor's chair--"T. T. 
+Thacker, of New York."
+
+He dribbled hastily upon the colonel's desk some cards, a bulky manila 
+envelope, and a letter from the owners of The Rose of Dixie.  This 
+letter introduced Mr. Thacker, and politely requested Colonel Telfair 
+to give him a conference and whatever information about the magazine 
+he might desire.
+
+"I've been corresponding with the secretary of the magazine owners for 
+some time," said Thacker, briskly.  "I'm a practical magazine man 
+myself, and a circulation booster as good as any, if I do say it.  
+I'll guarantee an increase of anywhere from ten thousand to a hundred 
+thousand a year for any publication that isn't printed in a dead 
+language.  I've had my eye on The Rose of Dixie ever since it started.  
+I know every end of the business from editing to setting up the 
+classified ads.  Now, I've come down here to put a good bunch of money 
+in the magazine, if I can see my way clear.  It ought to be made to 
+pay.  The secretary tells me it's losing money.  I don't see why a 
+magazine in the South, if it's properly handled, shouldn't get a 
+good circulation in the North, too.
+
+"Colonel Telfair leaned back in his chair and polished his gold-rimmed 
+glasses.
+
+"Mr. Thacker," said he, courteously but firmly, "The Rose of Dixie is 
+a publication devoted to the fostering and the voicing of Southern 
+genius.  Its watchword, which you may have seen on the cover, is 'Of, 
+For, and By the South.'"
+
+"But you wouldn't object to a Northern circulation, would you?" asked 
+Thacker.
+
+"I suppose," said the editor-colonel, "that it is customary to open 
+the circulation lists to all.  I do not know.  I have nothing to do 
+with the business affairs of the magazine.  I was called upon to 
+assume editorial control of it, and I have devoted to its conduct such 
+poor literary talents as I may possess and whatever store of erudition 
+I may have acquired."
+
+"Sure," said Thacker.  "But a dollar is a dollar anywhere, North, 
+South, or West--whether you're buying codfish, goober peas, or Rocky 
+Ford cantaloupes.  Now, I've been looking over your November number.  
+I see one here on your desk.  You don't mind running over it with me?
+
+"Well, your leading article is all right.  A good write-up of the 
+cotton-belt with plenty of photographs is a winner any time.  New York 
+is always interested in the cotton crop.  And this sensational account 
+of Hatfield-McCoy feud, by a schoolmate of a niece of the Governor of 
+Kentucky, isn't such a bad idea.  It happened so long ago that most 
+people have forgotten it.  Now, here's a poem three pages long called 
+'The Tyrant's Foot,' by Lorella Lascelles.  I've pawed around a good 
+deal over manuscripts, but I never saw her name on a rejection slip."
+
+"Miss Lascelles," said the editor, "is one of our most widely 
+recognized Southern poetesses.  She is closely related to the Alabama 
+Lascelles family, and made with her own hands the silken Confederate 
+banner that was presented to the governor of that state at his 
+inauguration."
+
+"But why," persisted Thacker, "is the poem illustrated with a view of 
+the M.  & 0.  Railroad freight depot at Tuscaloosa?"
+
+"The illustration," said the colonel, with dignity, "shows a corner of 
+the fence surrounding the old homestead where Miss Lascelles was 
+born."
+
+"All right," said Thacker.  "I read the poem, but I couldn't tell  
+whether it was about the depot of the battle of Bull Run.  Now, here's 
+a short story called 'Rosies' Temptation,' by Fosdyke Piggott.  It's 
+rotten.  What is a Piggott, anyway?"
+
+"Mr.  Piggott," said the editor, "is a brother of the principal 
+stockholder of the magazine."
+
+"All's right with the world--Piggott passes," said Thacker.  "Well  
+this article on Arctic exploration and the one on tarpon fishing might 
+go.  But how about this write-up of the Atlanta, New Orleans, 
+Nashville, and Savannah breweries?  It seems to consist mainly of 
+statistics about their output and the quality of their beer.  What's 
+the chip over the bug?"
+
+"If I understand your figurative language," answered Colonel Telfair, 
+"it is this: the article you refer to was handed to me by the owners 
+of the magazine with instructions to publish it.  The literary quality 
+of it did not appeal to me.  But, in a measure, I feel impelled to 
+conform, in certain matters, to the wishes of the gentlemen who are 
+interested in the financial side of The Rose."
+
+"I see," said Thacker.  "Next we have two pages of selections from 
+'Lalla Rookh,' by Thomas Moore.  Now, what Federal prison did Moore 
+escape from, or what's the name of the F.  F.  V.  family that he 
+carries as a handicap?"
+
+"Moore was an Irish poet who died in 1852," said Colonel Telfair, 
+pityingly.  "He is a classic.  I have been thinking of reprinting his 
+translation of Anacreon serially in the magazine."
+
+"Look out for the copyright laws,"  said Thacker, flippantly.   Who's 
+Bessie Belleclair, who contributes the essay on the newly completed 
+water-works plant in Milledgeville?"
+
+"The name, sir," said Colonel Telfair, "is the nom de guerre of Miss 
+Elvira Simpkins.  I have not the honor of knowing the lady; but her 
+contribution was sent to us by Congressman Brower, of her native 
+state.  Congressman Brower's mother was related to the Polks of 
+Tennessee.
+
+"Now, see here, Colonel," said Thacker, throwing down the magazine, 
+"this won't do.  You can't successfully run a magazine for one 
+particular section of the country.  You've got to make a universal 
+appeal.  Look how the Northern publications have catered to the South 
+and encouraged the Southern writers.  And you've got to go far and 
+wide for your contributors.  You've got to buy stuff according to its 
+quality without any regard to the pedigree of the author.  Now, I'll 
+bet a quart of ink that this Southern parlor organ you've been running 
+has never played a note that originated about Mason & Hamlin's line.  
+Am I right?"
+
+"I have carefully and conscientiously rejected all contributions from 
+that section of the country--if I understand your figurative language 
+aright," replied the colonel.
+
+"All right.  Now I'll show you something."
+
+Thacker reached for his thick manila envelope and dumped a mass of 
+typewritten manuscript on the editors desk.
+
+"Here's some truck," said he, "that I paid cash for, and brought along 
+with me."
+
+One by one he folded back the manuscripts and showed their first pages 
+to the colonel.
+
+Here are four short stories four of the highest priced authors in the 
+United States--three of 'em living in New York, and one commuting.  
+There's a special article on Vienna-bred society by Tom Vampson.  
+Here's an Italian serial by Captain Jack--no--it's the other Crawford.  
+Here are three separate exposes of city governments by Sniffings, and 
+here's a dandy entitled 'What Women Carry in Dress-Suit Cases'--a 
+Chicago newspaper woman hired herself out for five years as a lady's 
+maid to get that information.  And here's a Synopsis of Preceding 
+Chapters of Hall Caine's new serial to appear next June.  And here's a 
+couple of pounds of vers de societe that I got at a rate from the 
+clever magazines.  That's the stuff that people everywhere want.  And 
+now here's a writeup with photographs at the ages of four, twelve, 
+twenty-two, and thirty of George B.  McClellan.  It's a 
+prognostication.  He's bound to be elected Mayor of New York.  It '11 
+make a big hit all over the country.  He--"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Colonel Telfair, stiffening in his chair.  
+"What was the name?"
+
+"Oh, I see," said Thacker, with half a grin.  Yes, he's a son of the 
+General.  We'll pass that manuscript up.  But, if you'll excuse me, 
+Colonel, it's a magazine we're trying to make go off--not the first 
+gun at Fort Sumter.  Now, here's a thing that's bound to get next to 
+you.  It's an original poem by James Whitcomb Riley.  J.W.  himself.  
+You know what that means to a magazine.  I won't tell you what I had 
+to pay for that poem; but I'll tell you this--Riley can make more 
+money writing with a fountain-pen than you or I can with one that lets 
+the ink run.  I'll read you the last two stanzas:
+
+"'Pa lays around 'n' loafs all day,
+   'N' reads and makes us leave him be.
+He lets me do just like I please,
+   'N' when I'm in bad he laughs at me,
+'N' when I holler loud 'n' say
+   Bad words 'n' then begin to tease
+The cat, 'n' pa just smiles, ma's mad
+   'N' gives me Jesse crost her knees.
+      I always wondered why that wuz-
+      I guess it's cause
+           Pa never does.
+
+"''N' after all the lights are out
+   I'm sorry 'bout it; so I creep
+Out of my trundle bed to ma's
+   'N' say I love her a whole heap,
+'N' kiss her, 'n' I hug her tight.
+   'N' it's too dark to see her eyes,
+But every time I do I know
+   She cries 'n' cries 'n' cries 'n' cries.
+      I always wondered why that wuz-
+      I guess it's 'cause
+         Pa never does.'
+
+"That's the stuff," continued Thacker.  "What do you think of that?"
+
+"I am not unfamiliar with the works of Mr.  Riley," said the colonel, 
+deliberately.  "I believe he lives in Indiana.  For the last ten years 
+I have been somewhat of a literary recluse, and am familiar with 
+nearly all the books in the Cedar Heights library.  I am also of the 
+opinion that a magazine should contain a certain amount of poetry.  
+Many of the sweetest singers of the South have already contributed to 
+the pages of The Rose of Dixie.  I, myself, have thought of 
+translating from the original for publication in its pages the works 
+of the great Italian poet Tasso.  Have you ever drunk from the 
+fountain of this immortal poet's lines, Mr.  Thacker?"
+
+"Not even a demi-Tasso," said Thacker.
+
+Now, let's come to the point, Colonel Telfair.  I've already invested 
+some money in this as a flyer.  That bunch of manuscripts cost me 
+$4,000.  My object was to try a number of them in the next issue-I 
+believe you make up less than a month ahead--and see what effect it 
+has on the circulation.  I believe that by printing the best stuff we 
+can get in the North, South, East, or West we can make the magazine 
+go.  You have there the letter from the owning company asking you to 
+co-operate with me in the plan.  Let's chuck out some of this slush 
+that you've been publishing just because the writers are related to 
+the Skoopdoodles of Skoopdoodle County.  Are you with me?"
+
+"As long as I continue to be the editor of The Rose," said Colonel 
+Telfair, with dignity, "I shall be its editor.  But I desire also to 
+conform to the wishes of its owners if I can do so conscientiously."
+
+"That's the talk," said Thacker, briskly.  "Now, how much of this 
+stuff I've brought can we get into the January number?  We want to 
+begin right away."
+
+"There is yet space in the January number," said the editor, "for 
+about eight thousand words, roughly estimated."
+
+"Great!" said Thacker.  "It isn't much, but it'll give the readers 
+some change from goobers, governors, and Gettysburg.  I'll leave the 
+selection of the stuff I brought to fill the space to you, as it's all 
+good.  I've got to run back to New York, and I'll be down again in a 
+couple of weeks."
+
+Colonel Telfair slowly swung his eye-glasses by their broad, black 
+ribbon.
+
+"The space in the January number that I referred to," said he, 
+measuredly, "has been held open purposely, pending a decision that I 
+have not yet made.  A short time ago a contribution was submitted to 
+The Rose of Dixie that is one of the most remarkable literary efforts 
+that has ever come under my observation.  None but a master mind and 
+talent could have produced it.  It would just fill the space that I 
+have reserved for its possible use."
+
+Thacker looked anxious.
+
+"What kind of stuff is it?" he asked.  "Eight thousand words sounds 
+suspicious.  The oldest families must have been collaborating.  Is 
+there going to be another secession ?"
+
+"The author of the article," continued the colonel, ignoring Thacker's 
+allusions, "is a writer of some reputation.  He has also distinguished 
+himself in other ways.  I do not feel at liberty to reveal to you his 
+name--at least not until I have decided whether or not to accept his 
+contribution."
+
+"Well," said Thacker, nervously, "is it a continued story, or an 
+account of the unveiling of the new town pump in Whitmire, South 
+Carolina, or a revised list of General Lee's body-servants, or what?"
+
+"You are disposed to be facetious," said Colonel Telfair, calmly.  
+"The article is from the pen of a thinker, a philosopher, a lover of 
+mankind, a student, and a rhetorician of high degree."
+
+"It must have been written by a syndicate," said Thacker.  "But, 
+honestly, Colonel, you want to go slow.  I don't know of any eight-
+thousand-word single doses of written matter that are read by anybody 
+these days, except Supreme Court briefs and reports of murder trials.  
+You haven't by any accident gotten hold of a copy of one of Daniel 
+Webster's speeches, have you?"
+
+Colonel Telfair swung a little in his chair and looked steadily from 
+under his bushy eyebrows at the magazine promoter.
+
+"Mr.  Thacker," he said, gravely, "I am willing to segregate the 
+somewhat crude expression of your sense of humor from the solicitude 
+that your business investments undoubtedly have conferred upon you.  
+But I must ask you to cease your jibes and derogatory comments upon 
+the South and the Southern people.  They, sir, will not be tolerated 
+in the office of The Rose of Dixie for one moment.  And before you 
+proceed with more of your covert insinuations that I, the editor of 
+this magazine, am not a competent judge of the merits of the matter 
+submitted to its consideration, I beg that you will first present some 
+evidence or proof that you are my superior in any way, shape, or form 
+relative to the question in hand."
+
+"Oh, come, Colonel," said Thacker, good-naturedly.  "I didn't do 
+anything like that to you.  It sounds like an indictment by the fourth 
+assistant attorney-general.  Let's get back to business.  What's this 
+8,000 to 1 shot about?"
+
+"The article," said Colonel Telfair, acknowledging the apology by a 
+slight bow, "covers a wide area of knowledge.  It takes up theories 
+and questions that have puzzled the world for centuries, and disposes 
+of them logically and concisely.  One by one it holds up to view the 
+evils of the world, points out the way of eradicating them; and then 
+conscientiously and in detail comments the good.  There is hardly a 
+phase of human life that it does not discuss wisely, calmly, and 
+equitably.  The great policies of governments, the duties of private 
+citizens, the obligations of home life, law, ethics, morality--all 
+these important subjects are handled with a calm wisdom and confidence 
+that I must confess has captured my admiration."
+
+"It must be a crackerjack," said Thacker, impressed.
+
+"It is a great contribution to the world's wisdom," said the colonel.  
+"The only doubt remaining in my mind as to the tremendous advantage it 
+would be to us to give it publication in The Rose of Dixie is that I 
+have not yet sufficient information about the author to give his work 
+publicity in our magazine.
+
+"I thought you said he is a distinguished man," said Thacker.
+
+"He is," replied the colonel, "both in literary and in other more 
+diversified and extraneous fields.  But I am extremely careful about 
+the matter that I accept for publication.  My contributors are people 
+of unquestionable repute and connections, which fact can be verified 
+at any time.  As I said, I am holding this article until I can acquire 
+more information about its author.  I do not know whether I will 
+publish it or not.  If I decide against it, I shall be much pleased, 
+Mr.  Thacker, to substitute the matter that you are leaving with me in 
+its place."
+
+Thacker was somewhat at sea.
+
+"I don't seem to gather," said he, "much about the gist of this 
+inspired piece of literature.  It sounds more like a dark horse than 
+Pegasus to me."
+
+"It is a human document," said the colonel-editor, confidently, "from 
+a man of great accomplishments who, in my opinion, has obtained a 
+stronger grasp on the world and its outcomes than that of any man 
+living to-day."
+
+Thacker rose to his feet excitedly.
+
+"Say!" he said.  "It isn't possible that you've cornered John D.  
+Rockefeller's memoirs, is it?  Don't tell me that all at once."
+
+No, sir," said Colonel Telfair.  "I am speaking of mentality and 
+literature not of the less worthy intricacies of trade."
+
+Well, what's the trouble about running the article," asked Thacker, a 
+little impatiently, "if the man's well known and has got the stuff ?"
+Colonel Telfair sighed.
+
+"Mr.  Thacker," said he, "for once I have been tempted.  Nothing has 
+yet appeared in The Rose of Dixie that has not been from the pen of 
+one of its sons or daughters.  I know little about the author of this 
+article except that he has acquired prominence in a section of the 
+country that has always been inimical to my heart and mind.  But I 
+recognize his genius; and, as I have told you, I have instituted an 
+investigation of his personality.  Perhaps it will be futile.  But I 
+shall pursue the inquiry.  Until that is finished, I must leave open 
+the question of filling the vacant space in our January number."
+
+Thacker arose to leave.
+
+"All right, Colonel," he said, as cordially as he could.  "You use 
+your own judgment.  If you've really got a scoop or something that 
+will make 'em sit up, run it instead of my stuff.  I'll drop in again 
+in about two weeks.  Good luck!"
+
+Colonel Telfair and the magazine promoter shook hands.
+
+Returning a fortnight later, Thacker dropped off a very rocky Pullman 
+at Toombs City.  He found the January number of the magazine made up 
+and the forms closed.
+
+The vacant space that had been yawning for type was filled by an 
+article that was headed thus:
+
+                    SECOND MESSAGE TO CONGRESS
+
+                           Written for
+
+                         THE ROSE OF DIXIE
+
+                                 BY
+
+                    A Member of the Well-known
+
+                    BULLOCH FAMILY, OF GEORGIA
+
+                            T.  Roosevelt
+
+
+
+
+THE THIRD INGREDIENT
+
+
+
+The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an apartment-house.  
+It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences 
+welded into one.  The parlor floor of one side is gay with the wraps 
+and head-gear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the 
+sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist.  You 
+may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for 
+twenty dollars.  Among the Vallambrosa's roomers are stenographers, 
+musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students, 
+wire-tappers, and other people who lean far over the banister-rail 
+when the door-bell rings.
+
+This treatise shall have to do with but two of the Vallambrosians--
+though meaning no disrespect to the others.
+
+At six o'clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her third-floor 
+rear $3.50 room in the Vallambrosa with her nose and chin more sharply 
+pointed than usual.  To be discharged from the department store where 
+you have been working four years, and with only fifteen cents in your 
+purse, does have a tendency to make your features appear more finely 
+chiseled.
+
+And now for Hetty's thumb-nail biography while she climbs the two 
+flights of stairs.
+
+She walked into the Biggest Store one morning four years before with 
+seventy-five other girls, applying for a job behind the waist 
+department counter.  The phalanx of wage-earners formed a bewildering 
+scene of beauty, carrying a total mass of blond hair sufficient to 
+have justified the horseback gallops of a hundred Lady Godivas.
+
+The capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man whose task 
+it was to engage six of the contestants, was aware of a feeling of 
+suffocation as if he were drowning in a sea of frangipanni, while 
+white clouds, hand-embroidered, floated about him.  And then a sail 
+hove in sight.  Hetty Pepper, homely of countenance, with small, 
+contemptuous, green eyes and chocolate-colored hair, dressed in a suit 
+of plain burlap and a common-sense hat, stood before him with every 
+one of her twenty-nine years of life unmistakably in sight.
+
+"You're on!." shouted the bald-headed young man, and was saved.  And 
+that is how Hetty came to be employed in the Biggest Store.  The story 
+of her rise to an eight-dollar-a-week salary is the combined stories 
+of Hercules, Joan of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood.  You 
+shall not learn from me the salary that was paid her as a beginner.  
+There is a sentiment growing about such things, and I want no 
+millionaire store-proprietors climbing the fire-escape of my tenement-
+house to throw dynamite bombs into my skylight boudoir.
+
+The story of Hetty's discharge from the Biggest Store is so nearly a 
+repetition of her engagement as to be monotonous.
+
+In each department of the store there is an omniscient, omnipresent, 
+and omnivorous person carrying always a mileage book and a red 
+necktie, and referred to as a "buyer."  The destinies of the girls in 
+his department who live on (see Bureau of Victual Statistics)--so much 
+per week are in his hands.
+
+This particular buyer was a capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, 
+bald-headed man.  As he walked along the aisles of his department lie 
+seemed to be sailing on a sea of frangipanni, while white clouds, 
+machine-embroidered, floated around him.  Too many sweets bring 
+surfeit.  He looked upon Hetty Pepper's homely countenance, emerald 
+eyes, and chocolate-colored hair as a welcome oasis of green in a 
+desert of cloying beauty.  In a quiet angle of a counter he pinched 
+her arm kindly, three inches above the elbow.  She slapped him three 
+feet away with one good blow of her muscular and not especially lily-
+white right.  So, now you know why Hetty Pepper came to leave the 
+Biggest Store at thirty minutes' notice, with one dime and a nickel in 
+her purse.
+
+This morning's quotations list the price of rib beef at six cents per 
+(butcher's) pound.  But on the day that Hetty was "released" by the B.  
+S.  the price was seven and one-half cents.  That fact is what makes 
+this story possible.  Otherwise, the extra  four cents would have--
+
+But the plot of nearly all the good stories in the world is concerned 
+with shorts who were unable to cover; so you can find no fault with 
+this one.
+
+Hetty mounted with her rib beef to her $3.50 third-floor back.  One 
+hot, savory beef-stew for supper, a night's good sleep, and she would 
+be fit in the morning to apply again for the tasks of Hercules, Joan 
+of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood.
+
+In her room she got the granite-ware stew-pan out of the 2x4-foot 
+china--er--I mean earthenware closet, and began to dig down in a 
+rats'-nest of paper bags for the potatoes and onions.  She came out 
+with her nose and chin just a little sharper pointed.
+
+There was neither a potato nor an onion.  Now, what kind of a beef-
+Stew can you make out of simply beef?  You can make oyster-soup 
+without oysters, turtle-soup without turtles, coffee-cake without 
+coffee, but you can't make beef-stew without potatoes and onions.
+
+But rib beef alone, in an emergency, can make an ordinary pine door 
+look like a wrought-iron gambling-house portal to the wolf.  With salt 
+and pepper and a tablespoonful of flour (first well stirred in a 
+little cold water) 'twill serve--'tis not so deep as a lobster a la 
+Newburg nor so wide as a church festival doughnut; but 'twill serve.
+
+Hetty took her stew-pan to the rear of the third-floor hall.  
+According to the advertisements of the Vallambrosa there was running 
+water to be found there.  Between you and me and the water-meter, it 
+only ambled or walked through the faucets; but technicalities have no 
+place here.  There was also a sink where housekeeping roomers often 
+met to dump their coffee grounds and glare at one another's kimonos.
+
+At this sink Hetty found a girl with heavy, gold-brown, artistic hair 
+and plaintive eyes, washing two large "Irish" potatoes.  Hetty knew 
+the Vallambrosa as well as any one not owning "double hextra-
+magnifying eyes" could compass its mysteries.  The kimonos were her 
+encyclopedia, her "Who's What?" her clearinghouse of news, of goers 
+and comers.  From a rose-pink kimono edged with Nile green she had 
+learned that the girl with the potatoes was a miniature-painter living 
+in a kind of attic--or "studio," as they prefer to call it--on the top 
+floor.  Hetty was not certain in her mind what a miniature was; but it 
+certainly wasn't a house; because house-painters, although they wear 
+splashy overalls and poke ladders in your face on the street, are 
+known to indulge in a riotous profusion of food at home.
+
+The potato girl was quite slim and small, and handled her potatoes as 
+an old bachelor uncle handles a baby who is cutting teeth.  She had a 
+dull shoemaker's knife in her right hand, and she had begun to peel 
+one of the potatoes with it.
+
+Hetty addressed her in the punctiliously formal tone of one who 
+intends to be cheerfully familiar with you in the second round.
+
+"Beg pardon," she said, "for butting into what's not my business, but 
+if you peel them potatoes you lose out.  They're new Bermudas.  You 
+want to scrape 'em.  Lemme show you."
+
+She took a potato and the knife, and began to demonstrate.
+
+"Oh, thank you," breathed the artist.  "I didn't know.  And I did hate 
+to see the thick peeling go; it seemed such a waste.  But I thought 
+they always had to be peeled.  When you've got only potatoes to eat, 
+the peelings count, you know."
+
+"Say, kid," said Hetty, staying her knife, "you ain't up against it, 
+too, are you?"
+
+The miniature artist smiled starvedly.
+
+"I suppose I am.  Art--or, at least, the way I interpret it--doesn't 
+seem to be much in demand.  I have only these potatoes for my dinner.  
+But they aren't so bad boiled and hot, with a little butter and salt."
+
+"Child," said Hetty, letting a brief smile soften her rigid features, 
+"Fate has sent me and you together.  I've had it handed to me in the 
+neck, too; but I've got a chunk of meat in my, room as big as a lap-dog.
+And I've done everything to get potatoes  except pray for 'em.  
+Let's me and you bunch our commissary  departments and make a stew of 'em.
+We'll cook it in my room.  If we  only had an onion to go in it!  
+Say, kid, you haven't got a couple of pennies that've slipped down 
+into the lining of your last winter's sealskin, have you?  
+I could step down to the corner and get one at old Giuseppe's stand.
+A stew without an onion is worse'n a matinee without candy."
+
+"You may call me Cecilia," said the artist.  "No; I spent my last 
+penny three days ago."
+
+"Then we'll have to cut the onion out instead of slicing it in," said 
+Hetty.  "I'd ask the janitress for one, but I don't want 'em hep just 
+yet to the fact that I'm pounding the asphalt for another job.  But I 
+wish we did have an onion."
+
+In the shop-girl's room the two began to prepare their supper.  
+Cecilia's part was to sit on the couch helplessly and beg to be 
+allowed to do something, in the voice of a cooing ring-dove.  Hetty 
+prepared the rib beef, putting it in cold salted water in the stew-pan 
+and setting it on the one-burner gas-stove.
+
+"I wish we had an onion," said Hetty, as she scraped the two potatoes.
+
+On the wall opposite the couch was pinned a flaming, gorgeous 
+advertising picture of one of the new ferry-boats of the P.  U.  F.  
+F.  Railroad that had been built to cut down the time between Los 
+Angeles and New York City one-eighth of a minute.
+
+Hetty, turning her head during her continuous monologue, saw tears 
+running from her guest's eyes as she gazed on the idealized 
+presentment of the speeding, foam-girdled transport.
+
+"Why, say, Cecilia, kid," said Hetty, poising her knife, "is it as bad 
+art as that?  I ain't a critic; but I thought it kind of brightened up 
+the room.  Of course, a manicure-painter could tell it was a bum 
+picture in a minute.  I'll take it down if you say so.  I wish to the 
+holy Saint Potluck we had an onion."
+
+But the miniature miniature-painter had tumbled down, sobbing, with 
+her nose indenting the hard-woven drapery of the couch.  Something was 
+here deeper than the artistic temperament offended at crude 
+lithography.
+
+Hetty knew.  She had accepted her role long ago.  How scant the words 
+with which we try to describe a single quality of a human being! When 
+we reach the abstract we are lost.  The nearer to Nature that the 
+babbling of our lips comes, the better do we understand.  Figuratively 
+(let us say), some people are Bosoms, some are Hands, some are Heads, 
+some are Muscles, some are Feet, some are Backs for burdens.
+
+Hetty was a Shoulder.  Hers was a sharp, sinewy shoulder; but all her 
+life people had laid their heads upon it, metaphorically or actually, 
+and had left there all or half their troubles.  Looking at Life 
+anatomically, which is as good a way as any, she was preordained to be 
+a Shoulder.  There were few truer collar-bones anywhere than hers.
+
+Hetty was only thirty-three, and she had not yet outlived the little 
+pang that visited her whenever the head of youth and beauty leaned 
+upon her for consolation.  But one glance in her mirror always served 
+as an instantaneous pain-killer.  So she gave one pale look into the 
+crinkly old looking-glass on the wall above the gas-stove, turned down 
+the flame a little lower from the bubbling beef and potatoes, went 
+over to the couch, and lifted Cecilia's head to its confessional.
+
+"Go on and tell me, honey," she said.  "I know now that it ain't art 
+that's worrying you.  You met him on a ferry-boat, didn't you? Go on, 
+Cecilia, kid, and tell your--your Aunt Hetty about it."
+
+But youth and melancholy must first spend the surplus of sighs and 
+tears that waft and float the barque of romance to its harbor in the 
+delectable isles.  Presently, through the stringy tendons that formed 
+the bars of the confessional, the penitent--or was it the glorified 
+communicant of the sacred flame--told her story without art or 
+illumination.
+
+"It was only three days ago.  I was coming back on the ferry from 
+Jersey City.  Old Mr.  Schrum, an art dealer, told me of a rich man in 
+Newark who wanted a miniature of his daughter painted.  I went to see 
+him and showed him some of my work.  When I told him the price would 
+be fifty dollars he laughed at me like a hyena.  He said an enlarged 
+crayon twenty times the size would cost him only eight dollars.
+
+"I had just enough money to buy my ferry ticket back to New York.  I 
+felt as if I didn't want to live another day.  I must have looked as I 
+felt, for I saw him on the row of seats opposite me, looking at me as 
+if he understood.  He was nice-looking, but oh, above everything else, 
+he looked kind.  When one is tired or unhappy or hopeless, kindness 
+counts more than anything else.
+
+"When I got so miserable that I couldn't fight against it any longer, 
+I got up and walked slowly out the rear door of the ferry-boat cabin.  
+No one was there, and I slipped quickly over the rail and dropped into 
+the water.  Oh, friend Hetty, it was cold, cold!
+
+"For just one moment I wished I was back in the old Vallambrosa, 
+starving and hoping.  And then I got numb, and didn't care.  And then 
+I felt that somebody else was in the water close by me, holding me up.  
+He had followed me, and jumped in to save me.
+
+"Somebody threw a thing like a big, white doughnut at us, and he made 
+me put my arms through the hole.  Then the ferry-boat backed, and they 
+pulled us on board.  Oh, Hetty, I was so ashamed of my wickedness in 
+trying to drown myself; and, besides, my hair had all tumbled down and 
+was sopping wet, and I was such a sight.
+
+"And then some men in blue clothes came around; and he gave them his 
+card, and I heard him tell them he had seen me drop my purse on the 
+edge of the boat outside the rail, and in leaning over to get it I had 
+fallen overboard.
+
+And then I remembered having read in the papers that people who try to 
+kill themselves are locked up in cells with people who try to kill 
+other people, and I was afraid.
+
+"But some ladies on the boat took me downstairs to the furnace-room 
+and got me nearly dry and did up my hair.  When the boat landed, he 
+came and put me in a cab.  He was all dripping himself, but laughed as 
+if he thought it was all a joke.  He begged me, but I wouldn't tell 
+him my name nor where I lived, I was so ashamed."
+
+"You were a fool, child," said Hetty, kindly.  "Wait till I turn the 
+light up a bit.  I wish to Heaven we had an onion."
+
+"Then he raised his hat," went on Cecilia, "and said: 'Very well.  But 
+I'll find you, anyhow.  I'm going to claim my rights of salvage.'  
+Then he gave money to the cab-driver and told him to take me where I 
+wanted to go, and walked away.  What is 'salvage,' Hetty?"
+
+"The edge of a piece of goods that ain't hemmed," said the shop-girl.  
+"You must have looked pretty well frazzled out to the little hero 
+boy."
+
+"It's been three days," moaned the miniature-painter, "and he hasn't 
+found me yet."
+
+"Extend the time," said Hetty.  "This is a big town.  Think of how 
+many girls he might have to see soaked in water with their hair down 
+before he would recognize you.  The stew's getting on fine--but oh, 
+for an onion!  I'd even use a piece'of garlic if I had it."
+
+The beef and potatoes bubbled merrily, exhaling a mouth-watering savor 
+that yet lacked something, leaving a hunger on the palate, a haunting, 
+wistful desire for some lost and needful ingredient.
+
+"I came near drowning in that awful river," said Cecilia, shuddering.
+
+"It ought to have more water in it," said Hetty; "the stew, I mean.  
+I'll go get some at the sink."
+
+"It smells good," said the artist.
+
+"That nasty old North River?"  objected Hetty.  "It smells to me like 
+soap factories and wet setter-dogs--oh, you mean the stew.  Well, I 
+wish we had an onion for it.  Did he look like he had money?"
+
+"First, he looked kind,'' said Cecilia.  "I'm sure he was rich; but 
+that matters so little.  When he drew out his bill-folder to pay the 
+cab-man you couldn't help seeing hundreds and thousands of dollars in 
+it.  And I looked over the cab doors and saw him leave the ferry 
+station in a motor-car; and the chauffeur gave him his bearskin to put 
+on, for he was sopping wet.  And it was only three days ago."
+
+"What a fool!" said Hetty, shortly.
+
+"Oh, the chauffeur wasn't wet," breathed Cecilia.  "And he drove the 
+car away very nicely."
+
+"I mean you," said Hetty.  "For not giving him your address."
+
+"I never give my address to chauffeurs," said Cecilia, haughtily.
+
+"I wish we had one," said Hetty, disconsolately.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"For the stew, of course--oh, I mean an onion."
+
+Hetty took a pitcher and started to the sink at the end of the hall.
+
+A young man came down the stairs from above just as she was opposite 
+the lower step.  He was decently dressed, but pale and haggard.  His 
+eyes were dull with the stress of some burden of physical or mental 
+woe.  In his hand he bore an onion--a pink, smooth, solid, shining 
+onion as large around as a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock.
+
+Hetty stopped.  So did the young man.  There was something Joan of 
+Arc-ish, Herculean, and Una-ish in the look and pose of the shoplady--
+she had cast off the roles of Job and Little-Red-Riding-Hood.  The 
+young man stopped at the foot of the stairs and coughed distractedly.  
+He felt marooned, held up, attacked, assailed, levied upon, sacked, 
+assessed, panhandled, browbeaten, though he knew not why.  It was the 
+look in Hetty's eyes that did it.  In them he saw the Jolly Roger fly 
+to the masthead and an able seaman with a dirk between his teeth 
+scurry up the ratlines and nail it there.  But as yet he did not know 
+that the cargo he carried was the thing that had caused him to be so 
+nearly blown out of the water without even a parley.
+
+"Beg your pardon," said Hetty, as sweetly as her dilute acetic acid 
+tones permitted, "but did you find that onion on the stairs?  There 
+was a hole in the paper bag; and I've just come out to look for it."
+
+The young man coughed for half a minute.  The interval may have given 
+him the courage to defend his own property.  Also, he clutched his 
+pungent prize greedily, and, with a show of spirit, faced his grim 
+waylayer.
+
+"No," he said huskily, "I didn't find it on the stairs.  It was given 
+to me by Jack Bevens, on the top floor.  If you don't believe it, ask 
+him.  I'll wait until you do."
+
+"I know about Bevens," said Hetty, sourly.  "He writes books and 
+things up there for the paper-and-rags man.  We can hear the postman 
+guy him all over the house when he brings them thick envelopes back.  
+Say--do you live in the Vallambrosa?"
+
+"I do not," said the young man.  "I come to see Bevens sometimes.  
+He's my friend.  I live two blocks west."
+
+"What are you going to do with the onion?
+
+--begging your pardon," said Hetty.
+
+"I'm going to eat it."
+
+"Raw?"
+
+"Yes: as soon as I get home."
+
+"Haven't you got anything else to eat with it?"
+
+The young man considered briefly.
+
+"No," he confessed; "there's not another scrap of anything in my 
+diggings to eat.  I think old Jack is pretty hard up for grub in his 
+shack, too.  He hated to give up the onion, but I worried him into 
+parting with it."
+
+"Man," said Hetty, fixing him with her world-sapient eyes, and laying 
+a bony but impressive finger on his sleeve, "you've known trouble, 
+too, haven't you?"
+
+"Lots," said the onion owner, promptly.  "But this onion is my own 
+property, honestly come by.  If you will excuse me, I must be going."
+
+"Listen," said Hetty, paling a little with anxiety.  "Raw onion is a 
+mighty poor diet.  And so is a beef-stew without one.  Now, if you're 
+Jack Bevens' friend, I guess you're nearly right.  There's a little 
+lady--a friend of mine--in my room there at the end of the hall.  Both 
+of us are out of luck; and we had just potatoes and meat between us.  
+They're stewing now.  But it ain't got any soul.  There's something 
+lacking to it.  There's certain things in life that are naturally 
+intended to fit and belong together.  One is pink cheese-cloth and 
+green roses, and one is ham and eggs, and one is Irish and trouble.  
+And the other one is beef and potatoes with onions.  And still another 
+one is people who are up against it and other people in the same fix."
+
+The young man went into a protracted paroxysm of coughing.  With one 
+hand he hugged his onion to his bosom.
+
+"No doubt; no doubt," said he, at length.  "But, as I said, I must be 
+going, because--"
+
+Hetty clutched his sleeve firmly.
+
+"Don't be a Dago, Little Brother.  Don't cat raw onions.  Chip it in 
+toward the dinner and line yourself inside with the best stew you ever 
+licked a spoon over.  Must two ladies knock a young gentleman down and 
+drag him inside for the honor of dining with 'em?  No harm shall 
+befall you, Little Brother.  Loosen up and fall into line."
+
+The young man's pale face relaxed into a grin.
+
+"Believe I'll go you," he said, brightening.  "If my onion is good as 
+a credential, I'll accept the invitation gladly."
+
+"It's good as that, but better as seasoning," said Hetty.  "You come 
+and stand outside the door till I ask my lady friend if she has any 
+objections.  And don't run away with that letter of recommendation 
+before I come out."
+
+Hetty went into her room and closed the door.  The young man waited 
+outside.
+
+"Cecilia, kid," said the shop-girl, oiling the sharp saw of her voice 
+as well as she could, "there's an onion outside.  With a young man 
+attached.  I've asked him in to dinner.  You ain't going to kick, are 
+you?"
+
+"Oh, dear!" said Cecilia, sitting up and patting her artistic hair.  
+She cast a mournful glance at the ferry-boat poster on the wall.
+
+"Nit," said Hetty.  "It ain't him.  You're up against real life now.  
+I believe you said your hero friend had money and automobiles.  This 
+is a poor skeezicks that's got nothing to eat but an onion.  But he's 
+easy-spoken and not a freshy.  I imagine he's been a gentleman, he's 
+so low down now.  And we need the onion.  Shall I bring him in?  I'll 
+guarantee his behavior."
+
+"Hetty, dear," sighed Cecilia, "I'm so hungry.  What difference does 
+it make whether he's a prince or a burglar?  I don't care.  Bring him 
+in if he's got anything to eat with him."
+
+Hetty went back into the hall.  The onion man was gone.  Her heart 
+missed a beat, and a gray look settled over her face except on her 
+nose and cheek-bones.  And then the tides of life flowed in again, for 
+she saw him leaning out of the front window at the other end of the 
+hall.  She hurried there.  He was shouting to some one below.  The 
+noise of the street overpowered the sound of her footsteps.  She 
+looked down over his shoulder, saw whom he was speaking to, and heard 
+his words.  He pulled himself in from the window-sill and saw her 
+standing over him.
+
+Hetty's eyes bored into him like two steel gimlets.
+
+"Don't lie to me," she said, calmly.  "What were you going to do with 
+that onion?"
+
+The young man suppressed a cough and faced her resolutely.  His manner 
+was that of one who had been bearded sufficiently.
+
+"I was going to eat it," said he, with emphatic slowness; "just as I 
+told you before."
+
+"And you have nothing else to eat at home?"
+
+"Not a thing."
+
+"What kind of work do you do?"
+
+"I am not working at anything just now."
+
+"Then why," said Hetty, with her voice set on its sharpest edge, "do 
+you lean out of windows and give orders to chauffeurs in green 
+automobiles in the street below?"
+
+The young man flushed, and his dull eyes began to sparkle.
+
+"Because, madam," said he, in accelerando tones, "I pay the 
+chauffeur's wages and I own the automobile--and also this onion--this 
+onion, madam."
+
+He flourished the onion within an inch of Hetty's nose.  The shop-lady 
+did not retreat a hair's-breadth.
+
+"Then why do you eat onions," she said, with biting contempt, "and 
+nothing else?"
+
+"I never said I did," retorted the young man, heatedly.  "I said I had 
+nothing else to eat where I live.  I am not a delicatessen store-
+keeper."
+
+"Then why," pursued Hetty, inflexibly, "were you going to eat a raw 
+onion?"
+
+"My mother," said the young man, "always made me eat one for a cold.  
+Pardon my referring to a physical infirmity; but you may have noticed 
+that I have a very, very severe cold.  I was going to eat the onion 
+and go to bed.  I wonder why I am standing here and apologizing to you 
+for it."
+
+"How did you catch this cold?" went on Hetty, suspiciously.
+
+The young man seemed to have arrived at some extreme height of 
+feeling.  There were two modes of descent open to him--a burst of rage 
+or a surrender to the ridiculous.  He chose wisely; and the empty hall 
+echoed his hoarse laughter.
+
+"You're a dandy," said he.  "And I don't blame you for being careful.  
+I don't mind telling you.  I got wet.  I was on a North River ferry a 
+few days ago when a girl jumped overboard.  Of course, I--"
+
+Hetty extended her hand, interrupting his story.
+
+"Give me the onion," she said.
+
+The young man set his jaw a trifle harder.
+
+"Give me the onion," she repeated.
+
+He grinned, and laid it in her hand.
+
+Then Hetty's infrequent, grim, melancholy smile showed itself.  She 
+took the young man's arm and pointed with her other hand to the door 
+of her room.
+
+"Little Brother," she said, "go in there.  The little fool you fished 
+out of the river is there waiting for you.  Go on in.  I'll give you 
+three minutes before I come.  Potatoes is in there, waiting.  Go on 
+in, Onions."
+
+After he had tapped at the door and entered, Hetty began to peel and 
+wash the onion at the sink.  She gave a gray look at the gray roofs 
+outside, and the smile on her face vanished by little jerks and 
+twitches.
+
+"But it's us," she said, grimly, to herself, "it's us that furnishes 
+the beef."
+
+
+
+
+THE HIDING OF BLACK BILL
+
+
+
+A lank, strong, red-faced man with a Wellington beak and small, fiery 
+eyes tempered by flaxen lashes, sat on the station platform at Los 
+Pinos swinging his legs to and fro.  At his side sat another man, fat, 
+melancholy, and seedy, who seemed to be his friend.  They had the 
+appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat--
+seamy on both sides.
+
+"Ain't seen you in about four years, Ham," said the seedy man.  "Which 
+way you been travelling?"
+
+"Texas," said the red-faced man.  "It was too cold in Alaska for me.  
+And I found it warm in Texas.  I'll tell you about one hot spell I 
+went through there.
+
+"One morning I steps off the International at a water-tank and lets it 
+go on without me.  'Twas a ranch country, and fuller of spite-houses 
+than New York City.  Only out there they build 'em twenty miles away 
+so you can't smell what they've got for dinner, instead of running 'em 
+up two inches from their neighbors' windows.
+
+"There wasn't any roads in sight, so I footed it 'cross country.  The 
+grass was shoe-top deep, and the mesquite timber looked just like a 
+peach orchard.  It was so much like a gentleman's private estate that 
+every minute you expected a kennelful of bulldogs to run out and bite 
+you.  But I must have walked twenty miles before I came in sight of a 
+ranch-house.  It was a little one, about as big as an elevated-
+railroad station.
+
+"There was a little man in a white shirt and brown overalls and a pink 
+handkerchief around his neck rolling cigarettes under a tree in front 
+of the door.
+
+"'Greetings,' says I.  'Any refreshment, welcome, emoluments, or even 
+work for a comparative stranger?'
+
+"'Oh, come in,' says he, in a refined tone.  'Sit down on that stool, 
+please.  I didn't hear your horse coming.'
+
+"'He isn't near enough yet,' says I.  'I walked.  I don't want to be a 
+burden, but I wonder if you have three or four gallons of water 
+handy.'
+
+"'You do look pretty dusty,' says he; 'but our bathing arrangements--'
+
+"'It's a drink I want,' says I.  'Never mind the dust that's on the 
+outside.'
+
+"He gets me a dipper of water out of a red jar hanging up, and then 
+goes on:
+
+"'Do you want work?'
+
+"'For a time,' says I.  'This is a rather quiet section of the 
+country, isn't it?'
+
+"'It is,' says he.  'Sometimes--so I have been told--one sees no human 
+being pass for weeks at a time.  I've been here only a month.  I 
+bought the ranch from an old settler who wanted to move farther west.'
+
+"'It suits me,' says I.  'Quiet and retirement are good for a man 
+sometimes.  And I need a job.  I can tend bar, salt mines, lecture, 
+float stock, do a little middle-weight slugging, and play the piano.'
+
+"'Can you herd sheep ?' asks the little ranch-man.
+
+"'Do you mean have I heard sheep?' says I.  
+
+"'Can you herd 'em--take charge of a flock of 'em ?' says he.
+
+"'Oh,' says I, 'now I understand.  You mean chase 'em around and bark 
+at 'em like collie dogs.  Well, I might,' says I.  'I've never exactly 
+done any sheep-herding, but I've often seen 'em from car windows 
+masticating daisies, and they don't look dangerous.'
+
+"'I'm short a herder,' says the ranchman.  'You never can depend on 
+the Mexicans.  I've only got two flocks.  You may take out my bunch of 
+muttons--there are only eight hundred of 'em--in the morning, if you 
+like.  The pay is twelve dollars a month and your rations furnished.  
+You camp in a tent on the prairie with your sheep.  You do your own 
+cooking, but wood and water are brought to your camp.  It's an easy 
+job.'
+
+"'I'm on,' says I.  'I'll take the job even if I have to garland my 
+brow and hold on to a crook and wear a loose-effect and play on a pipe 
+like the shepherds do in pictures.'
+
+"So the next morning the little ranchman helps me drive the flock of 
+muttons from the corral to about two miles out and let 'em graze on a 
+little hillside on the prairie.  He gives me a lot of instructions 
+about not letting bunches of them stray off from the herd, and driving 
+'em down to a water-hole to drink at noon.
+
+"'I'll bring out your tent and camping outfit and rations in the 
+buckboard before night,' says he.
+
+"'Fine,' says I.  'And don't forget the rations.  Nor the camping 
+outfit.  And be sure to bring the tent.  Your name's Zollicoffer, 
+ain't it?"
+
+"'My name,' says he, 'is Henry Ogden.'
+
+"'All right, Mr.  Ogden,' says I.  'Mine is Mr.  Percival Saint 
+Clair.'
+
+"I herded sheep for five days on the Rancho Chiquito; and then the 
+wool entered my soul.  That getting next to Nature certainly got next 
+to me.  I was lonesomer than Crusoe's goat.  I've seen a lot of 
+persons more entertaining as companions than those sheep were.  I'd 
+drive 'em to the corral and pen 'em every evening, and then cook my 
+corn-bread and mutton and coffee, and lie down in a tent the size of a 
+table-cloth, and listen to the coyotes and whippoorwills singing 
+around the camp.
+
+"The fifth evening, after I had corralled my costly but uncongenial 
+muttons, I walked over to the ranch-house and stepped in the door.
+
+"'Mr.  Ogden,' says I, 'you and me have got to get sociable.  Sheep 
+are all very well to dot the landscape and furnish eight-dollar cotton 
+suitings for man, but for table-talk and fireside companions they rank 
+along with five-o'clock teazers.  If you've got a deck of cards, or a 
+parcheesi outfit, or a game of authors, get 'em out, and let's get on 
+a mental basis.  I've got to do something in an intellectual line, if 
+it's only to knock somebody's brains out.'
+
+"This Henry Ogden was a peculiar kind of ranchman.  He wore finger-
+rings and a big gold watch and careful neckties.  And his face was 
+calm, and his nose-spectacles was kept very shiny.  I saw once, in 
+Muscogee, an outlaw hung for murdering six men, who was a dead ringer 
+for him.  But I knew a preacher in Arkansas that you would have taken 
+to be his brother.  I didn't care much for him  either way; what I 
+wanted was some fellowship and communion with holy saints or lost 
+sinners--anything sheepless would do.
+
+"'Well, Saint Clair,' says he, laying down the book he was reading, 'I 
+guess it must be pretty lonesome for you at first.  And I don't deny 
+that it's monotonous for me.  Are you sure you corralled your sheep so 
+they won't stray out ?
+
+"'They're shut up as tight as the jury of a millionaire murderer,' 
+says I.  'And I'll be back with them long before they'll need their 
+trained nurse.'
+
+"So Ogden digs up a deck of cards, and we play casino.  After five 
+days and nights of my sheep-camp it was like a toot on Broadway.  When 
+I caught big casino I felt as excited as if I had made a million in 
+Trinity.  And when H.  O.  loosened up a little and told the story 
+about the lady in the Pullman car I laughed for five minutes.
+
+"That showed what a comparative thing life is.  A man may see so much 
+that he'd be bored to turn his head to look at a $3,000,000 fire or 
+Joe Weber or the Adriatic Sea.  But let him herd sheep for a spell, 
+and you'll see him splitting his ribs laughing at 'Curfew Shall Not 
+Ring To-night,' or really enjoying himself playing cards with ladies.
+
+"By-and-by Ogden gets out a decanter of Bourbon, and then there is a 
+total eclipse of sheep.
+
+"'Do you remember reading in the papers, about a month ago,' says he, 
+'about a train hold-up on the M.  K.  & T.?  The express agent was 
+shot through the shoulder, and about $15,000 in currency taken.  And 
+it's said that only one man did the job.'
+
+"'Seems to me I do,' says I.  'But such things happen so often they 
+don't linger long in the human Texas mind.  Did they overtake, 
+overhaul, seize, or lay hands upon the despoiler?'
+
+"'He escaped,' says Ogden.  'And I was just reading in a paper to-day 
+that the officers have tracked him down into this part of the country.  
+It seems the bills the robber got were all the first issue of currency 
+to the Second National Bank of Espinosa City.  And so they've followed 
+the trail where they've been spent, and it leads this way.'
+
+"Ogden pours out some more Bourbon, and shoves me the bottle.
+
+"'I imagine,' says I, after ingurgitating another modicum of the royal 
+boose, 'that it wouldn't be at all a disingenuous idea for a train 
+robber to run down into this part of the country to hide for a spell.  
+A sheep-ranch, now,' says I, would be the finest kind of a place.  
+Who'd ever expect to find such a desperate character among these song-
+birds and muttons and wild flowers?  And, by the way,' says I, kind of 
+looking H.  Ogden over, 'was there any description mentioned of this 
+single-handed terror?  Was his lineaments or height and thickness or 
+teeth fillings or style of habiliments set forth in print ?'
+
+"'Why, no,' says Ogden; 'they say nobody got a good sight of him 
+because he wore a mask.  But they know it was a train-robber called 
+Black Bill, because he always works alone and because he dropped a 
+handkerchief in the express-car that had his name on it.'
+
+"'All right,' says I.  'I approve of Black Bill's retreat to the 
+sheep-ranges.  I guess they won't find him.'
+
+"'There's one thousand dollars reward for his capture,' says Ogden.
+
+"'I don't need that kind of money,' says I, looking Mr.  Sheepman 
+straight in the eye.  'The twelve dollars a month you pay me is 
+enough.  I need a rest, and I can save up until I get enough to pay my 
+fare to Texarkana, where my widowed mother lives.  If Black Bill,' I 
+goes on, looking significantly at Ogden, was to have come down this 
+way--say, a month ago--and bought a little sheep-ranch and--'
+
+"'Stop,' says Ogden, getting out of his chair and looking pretty 
+vicious.  'Do you mean to insinuate--'
+
+"'Nothing,' says I; 'no insinuations.  I'm stating a hypodermical 
+case.  I say, if Black Bill had come down here and bought a sheep-
+ranch and hired me to Little-Boy-Blue 'em and treated me square and 
+friendly, as you've done, he'd never have anything to fear from me.  A 
+man is a man, regardless of any complications he may have with sheep 
+or railroad trains.  Now you know where I stand.'
+
+"Ogden looks black as camp-coffee for nine seconds, and then he 
+laughs, amused.
+
+"'You'll do, Saint Clair,' says he.  'If I was Black Bill I wouldn't 
+be afraid to trust you.  Let's have a game or two of seven-up to-
+night.  That is, if you don't mind playing with a train-robber.'
+
+"'I've told you,' says I, 'my oral sentiments, and there's no strings 
+to 'em.'
+
+"While I was shuffling after the first hand, I asks Ogden, as if the 
+idea was a kind of a casualty, where he was from.
+
+"'Oh,' says he, 'from the Mississippi Valley.'
+
+"'That's a nice little place,' says I.  'I've often stopped over 
+there.  But didn't you find the sheets a little damp and the food 
+poor? Now, I hail,' says I, 'from the Pacific Slope.  Ever put up 
+there?'
+
+"'Too draughty,' says Ogden.  'But if you've ever in the Middle West 
+just mention my name, and you'll get foot-warmers and dripped coffee.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'I wasn't exactly fishing for your private telephone 
+number and the middle name of your aunt that carried off the 
+Cumberland Presbyterian minister.  It don't matter.  I just want you 
+to know you are safe in the hands of your shepherd.  Now, don't play 
+hearts on spades, and don't get nervous.'
+
+"'Still harping,' says Ogden, laughing again.  'Don't you suppose that 
+if I was Black Bill and thought you suspected me, I'd put a Winchester 
+bullet into you and stop my nervousness, if I had any?'
+
+"'Not any,' says I.  'A man who's got the nerve to hold up a train 
+single-handed wouldn't do a trick like that.  I've knocked about 
+enough to know that them are the kind of men who put a value on a 
+friend.  Not that I can claim being a friend of yours, Mr.  Ogden,' 
+says I, 'being only your sheep-herder; but under more expeditious 
+circumstances we might have been.'
+
+"'Forget the sheep temporarily, I beg,' says Ogden, 'and cut for 
+deal.'
+
+"About four days afterward, while my muttons was nooning on the water-
+hole and I deep in the interstices of making a pot of coffee, up rides 
+softly on the grass a mysterious person in the garb of the being he 
+wished to represent.  He was dressed somewhere between a Kansas City 
+detective, Buffalo Bill, and the town dog-catcher of Baton Rouge.  His 
+chin and eye wasn't molded on fighting lines, so I knew he was only a 
+scout.
+
+"'Herdin' sheep?' he asks me.
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'to a man of your evident gumptional endowments, I 
+wouldn't have the nerve to state that I am engaged in decorating old 
+bronzes or oiling bicycle sprockets.'
+
+"'You don't talk or look like a sheep-herder to me,' says he.
+
+"'But you talk like what you look like to me,' says I.
+
+"And then he asks me who I was working for, and I shows him Rancho 
+Chiquito, two miles away, in the shadow of a low hill, and he tells me 
+he's a deputy sheriff.
+
+"'There's a train-robber called Black Bill supposed to be somewhere in 
+these parts,' says the scout.  'He's been traced as far as San 
+Antonio, and maybe farther.  Have you seen or heard of any strangers 
+around here during the past month?'
+
+"'I have not,' says I, 'except a report of one over at the Mexican 
+quarters of Loomis' ranch, on the Frio.'
+
+"'What do you know about him?' asks the deputy.
+
+"'He's three days old,' says I.
+
+"'What kind of a looking man is the man you work for ?' he asks.  
+'Does old George Ramey own this place yet?  He's run sheep here for 
+the last ten years, but never had no success.'
+
+"'The old man has sold out and gone West,' I tells him.  'Another 
+sheep-fancier bought him out about a month ago.'
+
+"'What kind of a looking man is he ?' asks the deputy again.
+
+"'Oh,' says I, ' a big, fat kind of a Dutchman with long whiskers and 
+blue specs.  I don't think he knows a sheep from a ground-squirrel.  I 
+guess old George soaked him pretty well on the deal,' says I.
+
+"After indulging himself in a lot more non-communicative information 
+and two-thirds of my dinner, the deputy rides away.
+
+"That night I mentions the matter to Ogden.  "'They're drawing the 
+tendrils of the octopus around Black Bill,' says I.  And then I told 
+him about the deputy sheriff, and how I'd described him to the deputy, 
+and what the deputy said about the matter.
+
+"'Oh, well,' says Ogden, 'let's don't borrow any of Black Bill's 
+troubles.  We've a few of our own.  Get the Bourbon out of the 
+cupboard and we'll drink to his health--unless,' says he, with his 
+little cackling laugh, 'you're prejudiced against train-robbers.'
+
+"'I'll drink,' says I, 'to any man who's a friend to a friend.  And I 
+believe that Black Bill,' I goes on, 'would be that.  So here's to 
+Black Bill, and may he have good luck.'
+
+"And both of us drank.
+
+"About two weeks later comes shearing-time.  The sheep had to be 
+driven up to the ranch, and a lot of frowzy-headed Mexicans would snip 
+the fur off of them with back-action scissors.  So the afternoon 
+before the barbers were to come I hustled my underdone muttons over 
+the hill, across the dell, down by the winding brook, and up to the 
+ranch-house, where I penned 'em in a corral and bade 'em my nightly 
+adieus.
+
+"I went from there to the ranch-house.  I find H.  Ogden, Esquire, 
+lying asleep on his little cot bed.  I guess he had been overcome by 
+anti-insomnia or diswakefulness or some of the diseases peculiar to 
+the sheep business.  His mouth and vest were open, and he breathed 
+like a second-hand bicycle pump.  I looked at him and gave vent to 
+just a few musings.  'Imperial Caesar,' says I, 'asleep in such a way, 
+might shut his mouth and keep the wind away.'
+
+A man asleep is certainly a sight to make angels weep.  What good is 
+all his brain, muscle, backing, nerve, influence, and family 
+connections?  He's at the mercy of his enemies, and more so of his 
+friends.  And he's about as beautiful as a cab-horse leaning against 
+the Metropolitan Opera House at 12.30 A.M.  dreaming of the plains of 
+Arabia.  Now, a woman asleep you regard as different.  No matter how 
+she looks, you know it's better for all hands for her to be that way.
+
+"Well, I took a drink of Bourbon and one for Ogden, and started in to 
+be comfortable while he was taking his nap.  He had some books on his 
+table on indigenous subjects, such as Japan and drainage and physical 
+culture--and some tobacco, which seemed more to the point.
+
+"After I'd smoked a few, and listened to the sartorial breathing of H.  
+O., I happened to look out the window toward the shearing-pens, where 
+there was a kind of a road coming up from a kind of a road across a 
+kind of a creek farther away.
+
+"I saw five men riding up to the house.  All of 'em carried guns 
+across their saddles, and among 'em was the deputy that had talked to 
+me at my camp.
+
+"They rode up careful, in open formation, with their guns ready.  I 
+set apart with my eye the one I opinionated to be the boss muck-raker 
+of this law-and-order cavalry.
+
+"'Good-evening, gents,' says I.  'Won't you 'light, and tie your 
+horses?'
+
+"The boss rides up close, and swings his gun over till the opening in 
+it seems to cover my whole front elevation.
+
+"'Don't you move your hands none,' says he, 'till you and me indulge 
+in a adequate amount of necessary conversation.'
+
+"'I will not,' says I.  'I am no deaf-mute, and therefore will not 
+have to disobey your injunctions in replying.'
+
+"'We are on the lookout,' says he, 'for Black Bill, the man that held 
+up the Katy for $15,000 in May.  We are searching the ranches and 
+everybody on 'em.  What is your name, and what do you do on this 
+ranch?'
+
+"'Captain,' says I, 'Percival Saint Clair is my occupation, and my 
+name is sheep-herder.  I've got my flock of veals--no, muttons--penned 
+here to-night.  The shearers are coming to-morrow to give them a hair-
+cut--with baa-a-rum, I suppose.'
+
+"'Where's the boss of this ranch?' the captain of the gang asks me.
+
+"'Wait just a minute, cap'n,' says I.  'Wasn't there a kind of a 
+reward offered for the capture of this desperate character you have 
+referred to in your preamble?'
+
+"'There's a thousand dollars reward offered,' says the captain, 'but 
+it's for his capture and conviction.  There don't seem to be no 
+provision made for an informer.'
+
+"'It looks like it might rain in a day or so,' says I, in a tired way, 
+looking up at the cerulean blue sky.
+
+"'If you know anything about the locality, disposition, or 
+secretiveness of this here Black Bill,' says he, in a severe dialect, 
+'you are amiable to the law in not reporting it.'
+
+"'I heard a fence-rider say,' says I, in a desultory kind of voice, 
+'that a Mexican told a cowboy named Jake over at Pidgin's store on the 
+Nueces that he heard that Black Bill had been seen in Matamoras by a 
+sheepman's cousin two weeks ago.'
+
+"'Tell you what I'll do, Tight Mouth,' says the captain, after looking 
+me over for bargains.  'If you put us on so we can scoop Black Bill, 
+I'll pay you a hundred dollars out of my own--out of our own--pockets.  
+That's liberal,' says he.  'You ain't entitled to anything.  Now, what 
+do you say?'
+
+"'Cash down now?' I asks.
+
+"The captain has a sort of discussion with his helpmates, and they all 
+produce the contents of their pockets for analysis.  Out of the 
+general results they figured up $102.30 in cash and $31 worth of plug 
+tobacco.
+
+"'Come nearer, capitan meeo,' says I, 'and listen.'  He so did.
+
+"'I am mighty poor and low down in the world,' says I.  'I am working 
+for twelve dollars a month trying to keep a lot of animals together 
+whose only thought seems to be to get asunder.  Although,' says I, 'I 
+regard myself as some better than the State of South Dakota, it's a 
+come-down to a man who has heretofore regarded sheep only in the form 
+of chops.  I'm pretty far reduced in the world on account of foiled 
+ambitions and rum and a kind of cocktail they make along the P.  R.  
+R.  all the way from Scranton to Cincinnati--dry gin, French vermouth, 
+one squeeze of a lime, and a good dash of orange bitters.  If you're 
+ever up that way, don't fail to let one try you.  And, again,' says I, 
+'I have never yet went back on a friend.  I've stayed by 'em when
+they had plenty, and when adversity's overtaken me I've never forsook 'em.
+
+"'But,' I goes on, 'this is not exactly the case of a friend.  Twelve 
+dollars a month is only bowing-acquaintance money.  And I do not 
+consider brown beans and corn-bread the food of friendship.  I am a 
+poor man,' says I, 'and I have a widowed mother in Texarkana.  You 
+will find Black Bill,' says I, 'lying asleep in this house on a cot in 
+the room to your right.  He's the man you want, as I know from his 
+words and conversation.  He was in a way a friend,' I explains, 'and 
+if I was the man I once was the entire product of the mines of Gondola 
+would not have tempted me to betray him.  But,' says I, 'every week 
+half of the beans was wormy, and not nigh enough wood in camp.
+
+"'Better go in careful, gentlemen,' says I.  'He seems impatient at 
+times, and when you think of his late professional pursuits one would 
+look for abrupt actions if he was come upon sudden.'
+
+"So the whole posse unmounts and ties their horses, and unlimbers 
+their ammunition and equipments, and tiptoes into the house.  And I 
+follows, like Delilah when she set the Philip Stein on to Samson.
+
+"The leader of the posse shakes Ogden and wakes him up.  And then he 
+jumps up, and two more of the reward-hunters grab him.  Ogden was 
+mighty tough with all his slimness, and he gives 'em as neat a single-
+footed tussle against odds as I ever see.
+
+"'What does this mean?' he says, after they had him down.
+
+"'You're scooped in, Mr.  Black Bill,' says the captain.  'That's 
+all.'
+
+"'It's an outrage,' says H.  Ogden, madder yet.
+
+"'It was,' says the peace-and-good-will man.  'The Katy wasn't 
+bothering you, and there's a law against monkeying with express 
+packages.'
+
+"And he sits on H.  Ogden's stomach and goes through his pockets 
+symptomatically and careful.
+
+"'I'll make you perspire for this,' says Ogden, perspiring some 
+himself.  'I can prove who I am.'
+
+"'So can I,' says the captain, as he draws from H.  Ogden's inside 
+coat-pocket a handful of new bills of the Second National Bank of 
+Espinosa City.  'Your regular engraved Tuesdays-and-Fridays visiting-
+card wouldn't have a louder voice in proclaiming your indemnity than 
+this here currency.  You can get up now and prepare to go with us and 
+expatriate your sins.
+
+"H.  Ogden gets up and fixes his necktie.  He says no more after they 
+have taken the money off of him.
+
+"'A well-greased idea,' says the sheriff captain, admiring, 'to slip 
+off down here and buy a little sheep-ranch where the hand of man is 
+seldom heard.  It was the slickest hide-out I ever see,' says the 
+captain.
+
+"So one of the men goes to the shearing-pen and hunts up the other 
+herder, a Mexican they call John Sallies, and he saddles Ogden's 
+horse, and the sheriffs all ride tip close around him with their guns 
+in hand, ready to take their prisoner to town.
+
+"Before starting, Ogden puts the ranch in John Sallies' hands and 
+gives him orders about the shearing and where to graze the sheep, just 
+as if he intended to be back in a few days.  And a couple of hours 
+afterward one Percival Saint Clair, an ex-sheep-herder of the Rancho 
+Chiquito, might have been seen, with a hundred and nine dollars--wages 
+and blood-money--in his pocket, riding south on another horse 
+belonging to said ranch."
+
+The red-faced man paused and listened.  The whistle of a coming 
+freight-train sounded far away among the low hills.
+
+The fat, seedy man at his side sniffed, and shook his frowzy head 
+slowly and disparagingly.
+
+"What is it, Snipy?" asked the other.  "Got the blues again?"
+
+"No, I ain't" said the seedy one, sniffing again.  "But I don't like 
+your talk.  You and me have been friends, off and on, for fifteen 
+year; and I never yet knew or heard of you giving anybody up to the 
+law--not no one.  And here was a man whose saleratus you had et and at 
+whose table you had played games of cards--if casino can be so called.  
+And yet you inform him to the law and take money for it.  It never was 
+like you, I say."
+
+"This H.  Ogden," resumed the red-faced man, "through a lawyer, proved 
+himself free by alibis and other legal terminalities, as I so heard 
+afterward.  He never suffered no harm.  He did me favors, and I hated 
+to hand him over."
+
+"How about the bills they found in his pocket?" asked the seedy man.
+
+"I put 'em there," said the red-faced man, "while he was asleep, when 
+I saw the posse riding up.  I was Black Bill.  Look out, Snipy, here 
+she comes!  We'll board her on the bumpers when she takes water at the 
+tank."
+
+
+
+
+SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLS
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Old Jerome Warren lived in a hundred-thousand-dollar house at 35 East 
+Fifty-Soforth Street.  He was a down-town broker, so rich that he 
+could afford to walk--for his health--a few blocks in the direction of 
+his office every morning, and then call a cab.
+
+He had an adopted son, the son of an old friend named Gilbert--Cyril 
+Scott could play him nicely--who was becoming a successful painter as 
+fast as he could squeeze the paint out of his tubes.  Another member 
+of the household was Barbara Ross, a stepniece.  Man is born to 
+trouble; so, as old Jerome had no family of his own, he took up the 
+burdens of others.
+
+Gilbert and Barbara got along swimmingly.  There was a tacit and 
+tactical understanding all round that the two would stand up under a 
+floral bell some high noon, and promise the minister to keep old 
+Jerome's money in a state of high commotion.  But at this point 
+complications must be introduced.
+
+Thirty years before, when old Jerome was young Jerome, there was a 
+brother of his named Dick.  Dick went West to seek his or somebody 
+else's fortune.  Nothing was heard of him until one day old Jerome had 
+a letter from his brother.  It was badly written on ruled paper that 
+smelled of salt bacon and coffee-grounds.  The writing was asthmatic 
+and the spelling St.  Vitusy.
+
+It appeared that instead of Dick having forced Fortune to stand and 
+deliver, he had been held up himself, and made to give hostages to the 
+enemy.  That is, as his letter disclosed, he was on the point of 
+pegging out with a complication of disorders that even whiskey had 
+failed to check.  All that his thirty years of prospecting had netted 
+him was one daughter, nineteen years old, as per invoice, whom he was 
+shipping East, charges prepaid, for Jerome to clothe, feed, educate, 
+comfort, and cherish for the rest of her natural life or until 
+matrimony should them part.
+
+Old Jerome was a board-walk.  Everybody knows that the world is 
+supported by the shoulders of Atlas; and that Atlas stands on a rail-
+fence; and that the rail-fence is built on a turtle's back.  Now, the 
+turtle has to stand on something; and that is a board-walk made of men 
+like old Jerome.
+
+I do not know whether immortality shall accrue to man; but if not so, 
+I would like to know when men like old Jerome get what is due them?
+
+They met Nevada Warren at the station.  She was a little girl, deeply 
+sunburned and wholesomely good-looking, with a manner that was frankly 
+unsophisticated, yet one that not even a cigar-drummer would intrude 
+upon without thinking twice.  Looking at her, somehow you would expect 
+to see her in a short skirt and leather leggings, shooting glass balls 
+or taming mustangs.  But in her plain white waist and black skirt she 
+sent you guessing again.  With an easy exhibition of strength she 
+swung along a heavy valise, which the uniformed porters tried in vain 
+to wrest from her.
+
+"I am sure we shall be the best of friends," said Barbara, pecking at 
+the firm, sunburned cheek.
+
+"I hope so," said Nevada.
+
+"Dear little niece," said old Jerome, "you are as welcome to my home 
+as if it were your father's own."
+
+"Thanks," said Nevada.
+
+"And I am going to call you 'cousin,'" said Gilbert, with his charming 
+smile.
+
+"Take the valise, please," said Nevada.  "It weighs a million pounds.  
+It's got samples from six of dad's old mines in it," she explained to 
+Barbara.  "I calculate they'd assay about nine cents to the thousand 
+tons, but I promised him to bring them along."
+
+
+II
+
+
+It is a common custom to refer to the usual complication between one 
+man and two ladies, or one lady and two men, or a lady and a man and a 
+nobleman, or--well, any of those problems--as the triangle.  But they 
+are never unqualified triangles.  They are always isosceles--never 
+equilateral.  So, upon the coming of Nevada Warren, she and Gilbert 
+and Barbara Ross lined up into such a figurative triangle; and of that 
+triangle Barbara formed the hypotenuse.
+
+One morning old Jerome was lingering long after breakfast over the 
+dullest morning paper in the city before setting forth to his down-
+town fly-trap.  He had become quite fond of Nevada, finding in her 
+much of his dead brother's quiet independence and unsuspicious 
+frankness.
+
+A maid brought in a note for Miss Nevada Warren.
+
+"A messenger-boy delivered it at the door, please," she said.  "He's 
+waiting for an answer."
+
+Nevada, who was whistling a Spanish waltz between her teeth, and 
+watching  the carriages and autos roll by in the street, took the 
+envelope.  She knew it was from Gilbert, before she opened it, by the 
+little gold palette in the upper left-hand corner.
+
+After tearing it open she pored over the contents for a while, 
+absorbedly.  Then, with a serious face, she went and stood at her 
+uncle's elbow.
+
+"Uncle Jerome, Gilbert is a nice boy, isn't he?"
+
+"Why, bless the child!" said old Jerome, crackling his paper loudly; 
+"of course he is.  I raised him myself."
+
+"He wouldn't write anything to anybody that wasn't exactly--I mean 
+that everybody couldn't know and read, would he?"
+
+"I'd just like to see him try it," said uncle, tearing a handful from 
+his newspaper.  "Why, what--"
+
+"Read this note he just sent me, uncle, and see if you think it's all 
+right and proper.  You see, I don't know much about city people and 
+their ways."
+
+Old Jerome threw his paper down and set both his feet upon it.  He 
+took Gilbert's note and fiercely perused it twice, and then a third 
+time.
+
+"Why, child," said he, "you had me almost excited, although I was sure 
+of that boy.  He's a duplicate of his father, and he was a gilt-edged 
+diamond.  He only asks if you and Barbara will be ready at four 
+o'clock this afternoon for an automobile drive over to Long Island.  I 
+don't see anything to criticise in it except the stationery.  I always 
+did hate that shade of blue."
+
+"Would it be all right to go?" asked Nevada, eagerly.
+
+"Yes, yes, yes, child; of course.  Why not?  Still, it pleases me to 
+see you so careful and candid.  Go, by all means."
+
+"I didn't know," said Nevada, demurely.  "I thought I'd ask you.  
+Couldn't you go with us, uncle?"
+
+"I?  No, no, no, no!  I've ridden once in a car that boy was driving.  
+Never again! But it's entirely proper for you and Barbara to go.  Yes, 
+yes.  But I will not.  No, no, no, no!"
+
+Nevada flew to the door, and said to the maid:
+
+"You bet we'll go.  I'll answer for Miss Barbara.  Tell the boy to say 
+to Mr.  Warren, 'You bet we'll go.'"
+
+"Nevada," called old Jerome, "pardon me, my dear, but wouldn't it be 
+as well to send him a note in reply?  Just a line would do."
+
+"No, I won't bother about that," said Nevada, gayly.  "Gilbert will 
+understand--he always does.  I never rode in an automobile in my life; 
+but I've paddled a canoe down Little Devil River through the Lost 
+Horse Canon, and if it's any livelier than that I'd like to know!"
+
+
+III
+
+
+Two months are supposed to have elapsed.
+
+Barbara sat in the study of the hundred-thousand-dollar house.  It was 
+a good place for her.  Many places are provided in the world where men 
+and women may repair for the purpose of extricating themselves from 
+divers difficulties.  There are cloisters,  wailing-places, watering-
+places, confessionals, hermitages, lawyer's offices, beauty parlors, 
+air-ships, and studies; and the greatest of these are studies.
+
+It usually takes a hypotenuse a long time to discover that it is the 
+longest side of a triangle.  But it's a long 
+line that has no turning.
+
+Barbara was alone.  Uncle Jerome and Nevada had gone to the theatre.  
+Barbara had not cared to go.  She wanted to stay at home and study in 
+the study.  If you, miss, were a stunning New York girl, and saw every 
+day that a brown, ingenuous Western witch was getting hobbles and a 
+lasso on the young man you wanted for yourself, you, too, would lose 
+taste for the oxidized-silver setting of a musical comedy.
+
+Barbara sat by the quartered-oak library table.  Her right arm rested 
+upon the table, and her dextral fingers nervously manipulated a sealed 
+letter.  The letter was addressed to Nevada Warren; and in the upper 
+left-hand corner of the envelope was Gilbert's little gold palette.  
+It had been delivered at nine o'clock, after Nevada had left.
+
+Barbara would have given her pearl necklace to know what the letter 
+contained; but she could not open and read it by the aid of steam, or 
+a pen-handle, or a hair-pin, or any of the generally approved methods, 
+because her position in society forbade such an act.  She had tried to 
+read some of the lines of the letter by holding the envelope up to a 
+strong light and pressing it hard against the paper, but Gilbert had 
+too good a taste in stationery to make that possible.
+
+At eleven-thirty the theatre-goers returned.  it was a delicious 
+winter night.  Even so far as from the cab to the door they were 
+powdered thickly with the big flakes downpouring diagonally from the 
+cast.  Old Jerome growled good-naturedly about villanous cab service 
+and blockaded streets.  Nevada, colored like a rose, with sapphire 
+eyes, babbled of the stormy nights in the mountains around dad's 
+cabin.  During all these wintry apostrophes, Barbara, cold at heart, 
+sawed wood--the only appropriate thing she could think of to do.
+
+Old Jerome went immediately up-stairs to hot-water-bottles and 
+quinine.  Nevada fluttered into the study, the only cheerfully lighted 
+room, subsided into an arm-chair, and, while at the interminable task 
+of unbuttoning her elbow gloves, gave oral testimony as to the 
+demerits of the "show."
+
+"Yes, I think Mr.  Fields is really amusing--sometimes," said Barbara.  
+"Here is a letter for you, dear, that came by special delivery just 
+after you had gone."
+
+"Who is it from?" asked Nevada, tugging at a button.
+
+"Well, really," said Barbara, with a smile, "I can only guess.  The 
+envelope has that queer little thing in one corner that Gilbert calls 
+a palette, but which looks to me rather like a gilt heart on a school-
+girl's valentine."
+
+"I wonder what he's writing to me about" remarked Nevada, listlessly.
+
+"We're all alike," said Barbara; "all women.  We try to find out what 
+is in a letter by studying the postmark.  As a last resort we use 
+scissors, and read it from the bottom upward.  Here it is."
+
+She made a motion as if to toss the letter across the table to Nevada.
+
+"Great catamounts!" exclaimed Nevada.  "These centre-fire buttons are 
+a nuisance.  I'd rather wear buckskins.  Oh, Barbara, please shuck the 
+hide off that letter and read it.  It'll be midnight before I get 
+these gloves off!"
+
+"Why, dear, you don't want me to open Gilbert's letter to you?  It's 
+for you, and you wouldn't wish any one else to read it, of course!"
+
+Nevada raised her steady, calm, sapphire eyes from her gloves.
+
+"Nobody writes me anything that everybody mightn't read," she said.  
+"Go on, Barbara.  Maybe Gilbert wants us to go out in his car again 
+to-morrow."
+
+Curiosity can do more things than kill a cat; and if emotions, well 
+recognized as feminine, are inimical to feline life, then jealousy 
+would soon leave the whole world catless.  Barbara opened the letter, 
+with an indulgent, slightly bored air.
+
+"Well, dear," said she, "I'll read it if you want me to."
+
+She slit the envelope, and read the missive with swift-travelling 
+eyes; read it again, and cast a quick, shrewd glance at Nevada, who, 
+for the time, seemed to consider gloves as the world of her interest, 
+and letters from rising artists as no more than messages from Mars.
+
+For a quarter of a minute Barbara looked at Nevada with a strange 
+steadfastness; and then a smile so small that it widened her mouth 
+only the sixteenth part of an inch, and narrowed her eyes no more than 
+a twentieth, flashed like an inspired thought across her face.
+
+Since the beginning no woman has been a mystery to another woman  
+Swift as light travels, each penetrates the heart and mind of another, 
+sifts her sister's words of their cunningest disguises, reads her most 
+hidden desires, and plucks the sophistry from her wiliest talk like 
+hairs from a comb, twiddling them sardonically between her thumb and 
+fingers before letting them float away on the breezes of fundamental 
+doubt.  Long ago Eve's son rang the door-bell of the family residence 
+in Paradise Park, bearing a strange lady on his arm, whom he 
+introduced.  Eve took her daughter-in-law aside and lifted a classic 
+eyebrow.
+
+"The Land of Nod," said the bride, languidly flirting the leaf of a 
+palm.  ''I suppose you've been there, of course?"
+
+"Not lately," said Eve, absolutely unstaggered.  "Don't you think the 
+apple-sauce they serve over there is execrable?  I rather like that 
+mulberry-leaf tunic effect, dear; but, of course, the real fig goods 
+are not to be had over there.  Come over behind this lilac-bush while 
+the gentlemen split a celery tonic.  I think the caterpillar-holes 
+have made your dress open a little in the back."
+
+So, then and there--according to the records--was the alliance formed 
+by the only two who's-who ladies in the world.  Then it was agreed 
+that woman should forever remain as clear as a pane of glass-though 
+glass was yet to be discovered-to other women, and that she should 
+palm herself off on man as a mystery.
+
+Barbara seemed to hesitate.
+
+"Really, Nevada," she said, with a little show of embarrassment, "you 
+shouldn't have insisted on my opening this.  I-I'm sure it wasn't 
+meant for any one else to know."
+
+Nevada forgot her gloves for a moment.
+
+"Then read it aloud," she said.  "Since you've already read it, what's 
+the difference?  If Mr.  Warren has written to me something that any 
+one else oughtn't to know, that is all the more reason why everybody 
+should know it."
+
+"Well," said Barbara, "this is what it says:
+
+'Dearest Nevada--Come to my studio at twelve o'clock to-night.  Do not 
+fail.'"  Barbara rose and dropped the note in Nevada's lap.  "I'm 
+awfully sorry," she said, "that I knew.  It isn't like Gilbert.  There 
+must be some mistake.  Just consider that I am ignorant of it, will 
+you, dear? I must go up-stairs now, I have such a headache.  I'm sure 
+I don't understand the note.  Perhaps Gilbert has been dining too 
+well, and will explain.  Good night!"
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Nevada tiptoed to the hall, and heard Barbara's door close upstairs.  
+The bronze clock in the study told the hour of twelve was fifteen 
+minutes away.  She ran swiftly to the front door, and let herself out 
+into the snow-storm.  Gilbert Warren's studio was six squares away.
+
+By aerial ferry the white, silent forces of the storm attacked the 
+city from beyond the sullen East River.  Already the snow lay a foot 
+deep on the pavements, the drifts heaping themselves like scaling-
+ladders against the walls of the besieged town.  The Avenue was as 
+quiet as a street in Pompeii.  Cabs now and then skimmed past like 
+white-winged gulls over a moonlit ocean; and less frequent motor-cars-
+-sustaining the comparison--hissed through the foaming waves like 
+submarine boats on their jocund, perilous journeys.
+
+Nevada plunged like a wind-driven storm-petrel on her way.  She looked 
+up at the ragged sierras of cloud-capped buildings that rose above the 
+streets, shaded by the night lights and the congealed vapors to gray, 
+drab, ashen, lavender, dun, and cerulean tints.  They were so like the 
+wintry mountains of her Western home that she felt a satisfaction such 
+as the hundred-thousand-dollar house had seldom brought her.
+
+A policeman caused her to waver on a corner, just by his eye and 
+weight.
+
+"Hello, Mabel!" said he.  "Kind of late for you to be out, ain't it?"
+
+"I--I am just going to the drug store," said Nevada, hurrying past 
+him.
+
+The excuse serves as a passport for the most sophisticated.  Does it 
+prove that woman never progresses, or that she sprang from Adam's rib, 
+full-fledged in intellect and wiles?
+
+Turning eastward, the direct blast cut down Nevada's speed one-half.  
+She made zigzag tracks in the snow; but she was as tough as a pinon 
+sapling, and bowed to it as gracefully.  Suddenly the studio-building 
+loomed before her, a familiar landmark, like a cliff above some well-
+remembered canon.  The haunt of business and its hostile neighbor, 
+art, was darkened and silent.  The elevator stopped at ten.
+
+Up eight flights of Stygian stairs Nevada climbed, and rapped firmly 
+at the door numbered "89."  She had been there many times before, with 
+Barbara and Uncle Jerome.
+
+Gilbert opened the door.  He had a crayon pencil in one hand, a green 
+shade over his eyes, and a pipe in his mouth.  The pipe dropped to the 
+floor.
+
+"Am I late?" asked Nevada.  "I came as quick as I could.  Uncle and me 
+were at the theatre this evening.  Here I am, Gilbert!"
+
+Gilbert did a Pygmalion-and-Galatea act.  He changed from a statue of 
+stupefaction to a young man with a problem to tackle.  He admitted 
+Nevada, got a whiskbroom, and began to brush the snow from her 
+clothes.  A great lamp, with a green shade, hung over an easel, where 
+the artist had been sketching in crayon.
+
+"You wanted me," said Nevada simply, " and I came.  You said so in 
+your letter.  What did you send for me for?"
+
+"You read my letter?" inquired Gilbert, sparring for wind.
+
+"Barbara read it to me.  I saw it afterward.  It said: 'Come to my 
+studio at twelve to-night, and do not fail.'  I thought you were sick, 
+of course, but you don't seem to be."
+
+"Aha!" said Gilbert irrelevantly.  "I'll tell you why I asked you to 
+come, Nevada.  I want you to marry me immediately -- to-night.  What's 
+a little snow-storm?  Will you do it?"
+
+"You might have noticed that I would, long ago," said Nevada.  "And 
+I'm rather stuck on the snow-storm idea, myself.  I surely would hate 
+one of these flowery church noon-weddings.  Gilbert, I didn't know you 
+had grit enough to propose it this way.  Let's shock 'em--it's our 
+funeral, ain't it?"
+
+"You bet!" said Gilbert.  "Where did I hear that expression?" he added 
+to himself.  "Wait a minute, Nevada; I want to do a little 'phoning."
+
+He shut himself in a little dressing-room, and called upon the 
+lightnings of tile heavens--condensed into unromantic numbers and 
+districts.
+
+"That you, Jack?  You confounded sleepyhead!  Yes, wake up; this is 
+me--or I--oh, bother the difference in grammar!  I'm going to be 
+married right away.  Yes!  Wake up your sister--don't answer me back; 
+bring her along, too--you must!.  Remind Agnes of the time I saved her 
+from drowning in Lake Ronkonkoma--I know it's caddish to refer to it, 
+but she must come with you.  Yes.  Nevada is here, waiting.  We've 
+been engaged quite a while.  Some opposition among the relatives, you 
+know, and we have to pull it off this way.  We're waiting here for 
+you.  Don't let Agnes out-talk you--bring her!  You will?  Good old 
+boy!  I'll order a carriage to call for you, double-quick time.  
+Confound you, Jack, you're all right!"
+
+Gilbert returned to the room where Nevada waited.
+
+"My old friend, Jack Peyton, and his sister were to have been here at 
+a quarter to twelve," he explained; "but Jack is so confoundedly slow.  
+I've just 'phoned them to hurry.  They'll be here in a few minutes.  
+I'm the happiest man in the world, Nevada!  What did you do with the 
+letter I sent you to-day ?"
+
+"I've got it cinched here," said Nevada, pulling it out from beneath 
+her opera-cloak.
+
+Gilbert drew the letter from the envelope and looked it over 
+carefully.  Then he looked at Nevada thoughtfully.
+
+"Didn't you think it rather queer that I should ask you to come to my 
+studio at midnight?" he asked.
+"Why, no," said Nevada, rounding her eyes.  "Not if you needed me.  
+Out West, when a pal sends you a hurry call--ain't that what you say 
+here ?--we get there first and talk about it after the row is over.  
+And it's usually snowing there, too, when things happen.  So I didn't 
+mind."
+
+Gilbert rushed into another room, and came back burdened with 
+overcoats warranted to turn wind, rain, or snow.
+
+"Put this raincoat on," he said, holding it for her.  "We have a 
+quarter of a mile to go.  Old Jack and his sister will be here in a 
+few minutes."  He began to struggle into a heavy coat.  "Oh, Nevada," 
+he said, "just look at the head-lines on the front page of that 
+evening paper on the table, will you?  It's about your section of the 
+West, and I know it will interest you."
+
+He waited a full minute, pretending to find trouble in the getting on 
+of his overcoat, and then turned.  Nevada had not moved.  She was 
+looking at him with strange and pensive directness.  Her cheeks had a 
+flush on them beyond the color that had been contributed by the wind 
+and snow; but her eyes were steady.
+
+"I was going to tell you," she said, "anyhow, before you--before we--
+before-well, before anything.  Dad never gave me a day of schooling.  
+I never learned to read or write a darned word.  Now if--"
+Pounding their uncertain way up-stairs, the feet of Jack, the 
+somnolent, and Agnes, the grateful, were heard.
+
+
+V
+
+
+When Mr.  and Mrs.  Gilbert Warren were spinning softly homeward in a 
+closed carriage, after the ceremony, Gilbert s said:
+
+"Nevada, would you really like to know what I wrote you in the letter 
+that you received to-night?"
+
+"Fire away!" said his bride.
+
+"Word for word," said Gilbert, "it was this: 'My dear Miss Warren-You 
+were right about the flower.  It was a hydrangea, and not a lilac.'
+
+"All right," said Nevada.  "But let's forget it.  The joke's on 
+Barbara, anyway!"
+
+
+
+
+THIMBLE, THIMBLE
+
+
+
+These are the directions for finding the I office of Carteret & 
+Carteret, Mill Supplies and Leather Belting:
+You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line, 
+the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Canons of the 
+Moneygrubber Tribe.  Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a 
+push-cart and the tongue of a two-ton, four-horse dray and hop, skip, 
+and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one-story 
+synthetic mountain of stone and iron.  In the twelfth story is the 
+office of Carteret & Carteret.  The factory where they make the mill 
+supplies and leather belting is in Brooklyn.  Those commodities--to 
+say nothing of Brooklyn--not being of interest to you, let us hold the 
+incidents within the confines of a one-act, one-scene play, thereby 
+lessening the toil of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher.  
+So, if you have the courage to face four pages of type and Carteret & 
+Carteret's office boy, Percival, you shall sit on a varnished chair in 
+the inner office and peep at the little comedy of the Old Nigger Man, 
+the Hunting-Case Watch, and the Open-Faced Question--mostly borrowed 
+from the late Mr.  Frank Stockton, as you will conclude.
+
+First, biography (but pared to the quick) must intervene.  I am for 
+the inverted sugar-coated quinine pill--the bitter on the outside.
+
+The Carterets were, or was (Columbia College professors please rule), 
+an old Virginia family.  Long time ago the gentlemen of the family had 
+worn lace ruffles and carried tinless foils and owned plantations and 
+had slaves to burn.  But the war had greatly reduced their holdings.  
+(Of course you can perceive at once that this flavor has been 
+shoplifted from Mr.  F.  Hopkinson Smith, in spite of the "et" after 
+"Carter.")  Well, anyhow:
+
+In digging up the Carteret history I shall not take you farther back 
+than the year 1620.  The two original American Carterets came over in 
+that year, but by different means of transportation.  One brother, 
+named John, came in the Mayflower and became a Pilgrim Father.  You've 
+seen his picture on the covers of the Thanksgiving magazines, hunting 
+turkeys in the deep snow with a blunderbuss.  Blandford Carteret, the 
+other brother, crossed the pond in his own brigantine, landed on the 
+Virginia coast, and became an F.F.V.  John became distinguished for 
+piety and shrewdness in business; Blandford for his pride, juleps; 
+marksmanship, and vast slave-cultivated plantations.
+
+Then came the Civil War.  (I must condense this historical 
+interpolation.)  Stonewall Jackson was shot; Lee surrendered; Grant 
+
+toured the world; cotton went to nine cents; Old Crow whiskey and Jim 
+Crow cars were invented; the Seventy-ninth Massachusetts Volunteers 
+returned to the Ninety-seventh Alabama Zouaves the battle flag of 
+Lundy's Lane which they bought at a second-hand store in Chelsea kept 
+by a man named Skzchnzski; Georgia sent the President a sixty-pound 
+watermelon--and that brings us up to the time when the story begins.  
+My! but that was sparring for an opening!  I really must brush op on 
+my Aristotle.
+
+The Yankee Carterets went into business in New York long before the 
+war.  Their house, as far as Leather Belting and Mill Supplies was 
+concerned, was as musty and arrogant and solid as one of those old 
+East India tea-importing concerns that you read about in Dickens.  
+There were some rumors of a war behind its counters, but not enough to 
+affect the business.
+
+During and after the war, Blandford Carteret, F.F.V., lost his 
+plantations, juleps, marksmanship, and life.  He bequeathed little 
+more than his pride to his surviving family.  So it came to pass that 
+Blandford Carteret, the Fifth, aged fifteen, was invited by the 
+leather-and-millsupplies branch of that name to come North and learn 
+business instead of hunting foxes and boasting of the glory of his 
+fathers on the reduced acres of his impoverished family.  The boy 
+jumped at the chance; and, at the age of twenty-five, sat in the 
+office of the firm equal partner with John, the Fifth, of the 
+blunderbuss-and-turkey branch.  Here the story begins again.
+
+The young men were about the same age, smooth of face, alert, easy of 
+manner, and with an air that promised mental and physical quickness.  
+They were razored, blue-serged, straw-hatted, and pearl stick-pinned 
+like other young New Yorkers who might be millionaires or bill clerks.
+
+One afternoon at four o'clock, in the private office of the firm, 
+Blandford Carteret opened a letter that a clerk had just brought to 
+his desk.  After reading it, he chuckled audibly for nearly a minute.  
+John looked around from his desk inquiringly.
+
+"It's from mother," said Blandford.  "I'll read you the funny part of 
+it.  She tells me all the neighborhood news first, of course, and then 
+cautions me against getting my feet wet and musical comedies.  After 
+that come some vital statistics about calves and pigs and an estimate 
+of the wheat crop.  And now I'll quote some:
+
+"'And what do you think! Old Uncle Jake, who was seventy-six last 
+Wednesday, must go travelling.  Nothing would do but he must go to New 
+York and see his "young Marster Blandford."  Old as he is, he has a 
+deal of common sense, so I've let him go.  I couldn't refuse him--he 
+seemed to have concentrated all his hopes and desires into this one 
+adventure into the wide world.  You know he was born on the 
+plantation, and has never been ten miles away from it in his life.  
+And he was your father's body servant during the war, and has been 
+always a faithful vassal and servant of the family.  He has often seen 
+the gold watch--the watch that was your father's and your father's 
+father's.  I told him it was to be yours, And he begged me to allow 
+him to take it to you and to put it into your hands himself.
+
+"'So he has it, carefully inclosed in a buck-skin case, and is 
+bringing it to you with all the pride and importance of a king's 
+messenger.  I gave him money for the round trip and for a two weeks' 
+stay in the city.  I wish you would see to it that he gets comfortable 
+quarters--Jake won't need much looking after--he's able to take care 
+of himself.  But I have read in the papers that African bishops and 
+colored potentates generally have much trouble in obtaining food and 
+lodging in the Yankee metropolis.  That may be all right; but I don't 
+see why the best hotel there shouldn't take Jake in.  Still, I suppose 
+it's a rule.
+
+"'I gave him full directions about finding you, and packed his valise 
+myself.  You won't have to bother with him; but I do hope you'll see 
+that he is made comfortable.  Take the watch that he brings you--it's 
+almost a decoration.  It has been worn by true Carterets, and there 
+isn't a stain upon it nor a false movement of the wheels.  Bringing it 
+to you is the crowning joy of old Jake's life.  I wanted him to have 
+that little outing and that happiness before it is too late.  You have 
+often heard us talk about how Jake, pretty badly wounded himself, 
+crawled through the reddened grass at Chancellorsville to where your 
+father lay with the bullet in his dear heart, and took the watch from 
+his pocket to keep it from the "Yanks."
+
+"'So, my son, when the old man comes consider him as a frail but 
+worthy messenger from the old-time life and home.
+
+"'You have been so long away from home and so long among the people 
+that we have always regarded as aliens that I'm not sure that Jake 
+will know you when he sees you.  But Jake has a keen perception, and I 
+rather believe that he will know a Virginia Carteret at sight.  I 
+can't conceive that even ten years in Yankee-land could change a boy 
+of mine.  Anyhow, I'm sure you will know Jake.  I put eighteen collars 
+in his valise.  If he should have to buy others, he wears a number 15 
+1/2.  Please see that he gets the right ones.  He will be no trouble 
+to you at all.
+
+"'If you are not too busy, I'd like for you to find him a place to 
+board where they have white-meal corn-bread, and try to keep him from 
+taking his shoes off in your office or on the street.  His right foot 
+swells a little, and he likes to be comfortable.
+
+"'If you can spare the time, count his handkerchiefs when they come 
+back from the wash.  I bought him a dozen new ones before he left.  He 
+should be there about the time this letter reaches you.  I told him to 
+go straight to your office when he arrives.'"
+
+As soon as Blandford had finished the reading of this, something 
+happened (as there should happen in stories and must happen on the 
+stage).
+
+Percival, the office boy, with his air of despising the world's output 
+of mill supplies and leather belting, came in to announce that a 
+colored gentleman was outside to see Mr.  Blandford Carteret.
+
+"Bring him in," said Blandford, rising.
+
+John Carteret swung around in his chair and said to Percival:  "Ask 
+him to wait a few minutes outside.  We'll let you know when to bring 
+him in."
+
+Then he turned to his cousin with one of those broad, slow smiles that 
+was an inheritance of all the Carterets, and said:
+
+"Bland,  I've  always had a consuming curiosity to understand the 
+differences that you haughty Southerners believe to exist between 'you 
+all ' and the people of the North.  Of course, I know that you 
+consider yourselves made out of finer clay and look upon Adam as only 
+a collateral branch of your ancestry; but I don't know why.  I never 
+could understand the differences between us."
+
+"Well, John," said Blandford, laughing, "what you don't understand 
+about it is just the difference, of course.  I suppose it was the 
+feudal way in which we lived that gave us our lordly baronial airs and 
+feeling of superiority."
+
+"But you are not feudal, now," went on John.  "Since we licked you and 
+stole your cotton and mules you've had to go to work just as we 
+'damyankees,' as you call us, have always been doing.  And you're just 
+as proud and exclusive and upper-classy as you were before the war.  
+So it wasn't your money that caused it."
+
+"Maybe it was the climate," said Blandford, lightly, "or maybe our 
+negroes spoiled us.  I'll call old Jake in, now.  I'll be glad to see 
+the old villain again."
+
+"Wait just a moment," said John.  "I've got a little theory I want to 
+test.  You and I are pretty much alike in our general appearance.  Old 
+Jake hasn't seen you since you were fifteen.  Let's have him in and 
+play fair and see which of us gets the watch.  The old darky surrey 
+ought to be able to pick out his 'young marster' without any trouble.  
+The alleged aristocratic superiority of a 'reb' ought to be visible to 
+him at once.  He couldn't make the mistake of handing over the 
+timepiece to a Yankee, of course.  The loser buys the dinner this 
+evening and two dozen 15 1/2 collars for Jake.  Is it a go?"
+
+Blandford agreed heartily.  Percival was summoned, and told to usher 
+the "colored gentleman" in.
+
+Uncle Jake stepped inside the private office cautiously.  He was a 
+little old man, as black as soot, wrinkled and bald except for a 
+fringe of white wool, cut decorously short, that ran over his ears and 
+around his head.  There was nothing of the stage "uncle" about him: 
+his black suit nearly fitted him; his shoes shone, and his straw hat 
+was banded with a gaudy ribbon.  In his right hand he carried 
+something carefully concealed by his closed fingers.
+
+Uncle Jake stopped a few steps from the door.  Two young men sat in 
+their revolving desk-chairs ten feet apart and looked at him in 
+friendly silence.  His gaze slowly shifted many times from one to the 
+other.  He felt sure that he was in the presence of one, at least, of 
+the revered family among whose fortunes his life had begun and was to 
+end.
+
+One had the pleasing but haughty Carteret air; the other had the 
+unmistakable straight, long family nose.  Both had the keen black 
+eyes, horizontal brows, and thin, smiling lips that had distinguished 
+both the Carteret of the Mayflower and him of the brigantine.  Old 
+Jake had thought that he could have picked out his young master 
+instantly from a thousand Northerners; but he found himself in 
+difficulties.  The best he could do was to use strategy.
+
+"Howdy, Marse Blandford--howdy, suh ?" he said, looking midway between 
+the two young men.
+
+"Howdy, Uncle Jake?" they both answered pleasantly and in unison.  
+"Sit down.  Have you brought the watch ?"
+
+Uncle Jake chose a hard-bottom chair at a respectful distance, sat on 
+the edge of it, and laid his hat carefully on the floor.  The watch in 
+its buckskin case he gripped tightly.  He had not risked his life on 
+the battle-field to rescue that watch from his "old marster's" foes to 
+hand it over again to the enemy without a struggle.
+
+"Yes, suh; I got it in my hand, suh.  I'm gwine give it to you right 
+away in jus' a minute.  Old Missus told me to put it in young Marse 
+Blandford's hand and tell him to wear it for the family pride and 
+honor.  It was a mighty longsome trip for an old nigger man to make--
+ten thousand miles, it must be, back to old Vi'ginia, suh.  You've 
+growed mightily, young marster.  I wouldn't have reconnized you but 
+for yo' powerful resemblance to old marster."
+
+With admirable diplomacy the old man kept his eyes roaming in the 
+space between the two men.  His words might have been addressed to 
+either.  Though neither wicked nor perverse, he was seeking for a 
+sign.
+
+Blandford and John exchanged winks.
+
+"I reckon you done got you ma's letter," went on Uncle Jake.  "She 
+said she was gwine to write to you 'bout my comin' along up this er-
+way.
+
+"Yes, yes, Uncle Jake," said John briskly.  "My cousin and I have just 
+been notified to expect you.  We are both Carterets, you know."
+
+"Although one of us," said Blandford, "was born and raised in the 
+North."
+
+"So if you will hand over the watch--" said John.
+
+"My cousin and I-" said Blandford.
+
+'Will then see to it--" said John.
+
+"That comfortable quarters are found for you," said Blandford.
+
+With creditable ingenuity, old Jake set up a cackling, high-pitched, 
+protracted laugh.  He beat his knee, picked up his hat and bent the 
+brim in an apparent paroxysm of humorous appreciation.  The seizure 
+afforded him a mask behind which he could roll his eyes impartially 
+between, above, and beyond his two tormentors.
+
+"I sees what!" he chuckled, after a while.  "You gen'lemen is tryin' 
+to have fun with the po' old nigger.  But you can't fool old Jake.  I 
+knowed you, Marse Blandford, the minute I sot eyes on you.  You was a 
+po' skimpy little boy no mo' than about fo'teen when you lef' home to 
+come No'th; but I knowed you the minute I sot eyes on you.  You is the 
+mawtal image of old marster.  The other gen'leman resembles you 
+mightily, suh; but you can't fool old Jake on a member of the old 
+Vi'ginia family.  No suh."
+
+At exactly the same time both Carterets smiled and extended a hand for 
+the watch.
+
+Uncle Jake's wrinkled, black face lost the expression of amusement to 
+which he had vainly twisted it.  He knew that he was being teased, and 
+that it made little real difference, as far as its safety went, into 
+which of those outstretched hands he placed the family treasure.  But 
+it seemed to him that not only his own pride and loyalty but much of 
+the Virginia Carterets' was at stake.  He had heard down South during 
+the war about that other branch of the family that lived in the North 
+and fought on "the yuther side," and it had always grieved him.  He 
+had followed his "old marster's" fortunes from stately luxury through 
+war to almost poverty.  And now, with the last relic and reminder of 
+him, blessed by "old missus," and intrusted implicitly to his care, he 
+had come ten thousand miles (as it seemed) to deliver it into the 
+hands of the one who was to wear it and wind it and cherish it and 
+listen to it tick off the unsullied hours that marked the lives of the 
+Carterets--of Virginia.
+
+His experience and conception of the Yankees had been an impression of 
+tyrants--"low-down, common trash"--in blue, laying waste with fire and 
+sword.  He had seen the smoke of many burning homesteads almost as 
+grand as Carteret Hall ascending to the drowsy Southern skies.  And 
+now he was face to face with one of them--and he could not distinguish 
+him from his "young marster" whom he had come to find and bestow upon 
+him the emblem of his kingship--even as the arm "clothed in white 
+samite, mystic, wonderful" laid Excalibur in the right hand of Arthur.  
+He saw before him two young men, easy, kind, courteous, welcoming, 
+either of whom might have been the one he sought.  Troubled, 
+bewildered, sorely grieved at his weakness of judgment, old Jake 
+abandoned his loyal subterfuges.  His right hand sweated against the 
+buckskin cover of the watch.  He was deeply humiliated and chastened.  
+Seriously, now, his prominent, yellow-white eyes closely scanned the 
+two young men.  At the end of his scrutiny he was conscious of but one 
+difference between them.  One wore a narrow black tie with a white 
+pearl stickpin.  The other's "four-in-hand " was a narrow blue one 
+pinned with a black pearl.
+
+And then, to old Jake's relief, there came a sudden distraction.  
+Drama knocked at the door with imperious knuckles, and forced Comedy 
+to the wings, and Drama peeped with a smiling but set face over the 
+footlights.
+
+Percival, the hater of mill supplies, brought in a card, which he 
+handed, with the manner of one bearing a cartel, to Blue-Tie.
+
+"'Olivia De Ormond,'" read Blue-Tie from the card.  He looked 
+inquiringly at his cousin.
+
+"Why not have her in," said Black-Tie, "and bring matters to a 
+conclusion?"
+
+"Uncle Jake," said one of the young men, "would you mind taking that 
+chair over there in the corner for a while?  A lady is coming in--on 
+some business.  We'll take up your case afterward."
+
+The lady whom Percival ushered in was young and petulantly, decidedly, 
+freshly, consciously, and intentionally pretty.  She was dressed with 
+such expensive plainness that she made you consider lace and ruffles 
+as mere tatters and rags.  But one great ostrich plume that she wore 
+would have marked her anywhere in the army of beauty as the wearer of 
+the merry helmet of Navarre.
+
+Miss De Ormond accepted the swivel chair at Blue-Tie's desk.  Then the 
+gentlemen drew leather-upholstered seats conveniently near, and spoke 
+of the weather.
+
+"Yes," said she, "I noticed it was warmer.  But I mustn't take up too 
+much of your time during business hours.  That is," she continued, 
+"unless we talk business."
+
+She addressed her words to Blue-Tie, with a charming smile.
+
+"Very well," said he.  "You don't mind my cousin being present, do 
+you?  We are generally rather confidential with each other-especially 
+in business matters."
+
+"Oh no," caroled Miss De Ormond.  "I'd rather he did hear.  He knows 
+all about it, anyhow.  In fact, he's quite a material witness because 
+he was present when you--when it happened.  I thought you might want 
+to talk things over before--well, before any action is taken, as I 
+believe the lawyers say."
+
+"Have you anything in the way of a proposition to make?" asked Black-
+Tie.
+
+Miss De Ormond looked reflectively at the neat toe of one of her dull 
+kid-pumps.
+
+"I had a proposal made to me," she said.  "If the proposal sticks it 
+cuts out the proposition.  Let's have that settled first."
+
+"Well, as far as--" began Blue-Tie.
+
+"Excuse me, cousin," interrupted Black-Tie, "if you don't mind my 
+cutting in."  And then he turned, with a good-natured air, toward the 
+lady.
+
+"Now, let's recapitulate a bit," he said cheerfully.  "All three of 
+us, besides other mutual acquaintances, have been out on a good many 
+larks together."
+
+"I'm afraid I'll have to call the birds by another name," said Miss De 
+Ormond.
+
+"All right," responded Black-Tie, with unimpaired cheerfulness; 
+"suppose we say 'squabs' when we talk about the 'proposal' and 'larks' 
+when we discuss the 'proposition.'  You have a quick mind, Miss De 
+Ormond.  Two months ago some half-dozen of us went in a motor-car for 
+day's run into the country.  We stopped at a road-house for dinner.  
+My cousin proposed marriage to you then and there.  He was influenced 
+to do so, of course, by the beauty and charm which no one can deny 
+that you possess."
+
+"I wish I had you for a press agent, Mr.  Carteret," said the beauty, 
+with a dazzling smile.
+
+"You are on the stage, Miss De Ormond," went on Black-Tie.  "You have 
+had, doubtless, many admirers, and perhaps other proposals.  You must 
+remember, too, that we were a party of merrymakers on that occasion.  
+There were a good many corks pulled.  That the proposal of marriage 
+was made to you by my cousin we cannot deny.  But hasn't it been your 
+experience that, by common consent, such things lose their seriousness 
+when viewed in the next day's sunlight?  Isn't there something of a 
+'code' among good 'sports'--I use the word in its best sense--that 
+wipes out each day the follies of the evening previous?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Miss De Ormond.  "I know that very well.  And I've 
+always played up to it.  But as you seem to be conducting the case--
+with the silent consent of the defendant--I'll tell you something 
+more.  I've got letters from him repeating the proposal.  And they're 
+signed, too."
+
+"I understand," said Black-Tie gravely.  "What's your price for the 
+letters?"
+
+"I'm not a cheap one," said Miss De Ormond.  "But I had decided to 
+make you a rate.  You both belong to a swell family.  Well, if I am on 
+the stage nobody can say a word against me truthfully.  And the money 
+is only a secondary consideration.  It isn't the money I was after.  
+I--I believed him--and--and I liked him."
+
+She cast a soft, entrancing glance at Blue-Tie from under her long 
+eyelashes.
+
+"And the price?" went on Black-Tie, inexorably.
+
+"Ten thousand dollars," said the lady, sweetly.
+
+"Or--"
+
+"Or the fulfillment of the engagement to marry."
+
+"I think it is time," interrupted Blue-Tie, "for me to be allowed to 
+say a word or two.  You and I, cousin, belong to a family that has 
+held its head pretty high.  You have been brought up in a section of 
+the country very different from the one where our branch of the family 
+lived.  Yet both of us are Carterets, even if some of our ways and 
+theories differ.  You remember, it is a tradition of the family, that 
+no Carteret ever failed in chivalry to a lady or failed to keep his 
+word when it was given."
+
+Then Blue-Tie, with frank decision showing on his countenance, turned 
+to Miss De Ormond.
+
+"Olivia," said he, "on what date will you marry me?"
+
+Before she could answer, Black-Tie again interposed.
+
+"It is a long journey," said he, "from Plymouth rock to Norfolk Bay.  
+Between the two points we find the changes that nearly three centuries 
+have brought.  In that time the old order has changed.  We no longer 
+burn witches or torture slaves.  And to-day we neither spread our 
+cloaks on the mud for ladies to walk over nor treat them to the 
+ducking-stool.  It is the age of common sense, adjustment, and 
+proportion.  All of us--ladies, gentlemen, women, men, Northerners, 
+Southerners, lords, caitiffs, actors, hardware-drummers, senators, 
+hodcarriers, and politicians--are coming to a better understanding.  
+Chivalry is one of our words that changes its meaning every day.  
+Family pride is a thing of many constructions--it may show itself by 
+maintaining a moth-eaten arrogance in cobwebbed Colonial mansion or by 
+the prompt paying of one's debts.
+
+"Now, I suppose you've had enough of my monologue.  I've learned 
+something of business and a little of life; and I somehow believe, 
+cousin, that our great-great-grandfathers, the original Carterets, 
+would indorse my view of this matter."
+
+Black-Tie wheeled around to his desk, wrote in a check-book and tore 
+out the check, the sharp rasp of the perforated leaf making the only 
+sound in the room.  He laid the check within easy reach of Miss De 
+Ormond's hand.
+
+"Business is business," said he.  "We live in a business age.  There 
+is my personal check for $10,000.  What do you say, Miss De Ormond--
+will it he orange blossoms or cash ?"
+
+Miss De Ormond picked up the cheek carelessly, folded it 
+indifferently, and stuffed it into her glove.
+
+"Oh, this '11 do," she said, calmly.  "I just thought I'd call and put 
+it up to you.  I guess you people are all right.  But a girl has 
+feelings, you know.  I've heard one of you was a Southerner--I wonder 
+which one of you it is?"
+
+She arose, smiled sweetly, and walked to the door.  There, with a 
+flash of white teeth and a dip of the heavy plume, she disappeared.
+
+Both of the cousins had forgotten Uncle Jake for the time.  But now 
+they heard the shuffling of his shoes as he came across the rug toward 
+them from his seat in the corner.
+
+"Young marster," he said, "take yo' watch."  And without hesitation he 
+laid the ancient timepiece in the hand of its rightful owner.
+
+Finch keeps a hats-cleaned-by-electricity-while-you-wait 
+establishment, nine feet by twelve, in Third Avenue.  Once a customer, 
+you are always his.  I do not know his secret process, but every four 
+days your hat needs to be cleaned again.
+
+Finch is a leathern, sallow, slowfooted man, between twenty and forty.  
+You would say he had been brought up a bushelman in Essex Street.  
+When business is slack he likes to talk, so I had my hat cleaned even 
+oftener than it deserved, hoping Finch might let me into some of the 
+secrets of the sweatshops.
+
+One afternoon I dropped in and found Finch alone.  He began to anoint 
+my headpiece de Panama with his mysterious fluid that attracted dust 
+and dirt like a magnet.
+
+"They say the Indians weave 'em under water," said I, for a leader.
+
+"Don't you believe it," said Finch.  "No Indian or white man could 
+stay under water that long.  Say, do you pay much attention to 
+politics?  I see in the paper something about a law they've passed 
+called 'the law of supply and demand.'"
+
+I explained to him as well as I could that the reference was to a 
+politico-economical law, and not to a legal statute.
+
+"I didn't know," said Finch.  "I heard a good deal about it a year or 
+so ago, but in a one-sided way."
+
+"Yes," said I, "political orators use it a great deal.  In fact, they 
+never give it a rest.  I suppose you heard some of those cart-tail 
+fellows spouting on the subject over here on the east side."
+
+"I heard it from a king," said Finch--"the white king of a tribe of 
+Indians in South America."
+
+I was interested but not surprised.  The big city is like a mother's 
+knee to many who have strayed far and found the roads rough beneath 
+their uncertain feet.  At dusk they come home and sit upon the door-
+step.  I know a piano player in a cheap cafe who has shot lions in 
+Africa, a bell-boy who fought in the British army against the Zulus, 
+an express-driver whose left arm had been cracked like a lobster's 
+claw for a stew-pot of Patagonian cannibals when the boat of his 
+rescuers hove in sight.  So a hat-cleaner who had been a friend of a 
+king did not oppress me.
+
+"A new band ?" asked Finch, with his dry, barren smile.
+
+"Yes," said I, "and half an inch wider."  I had had a new band five 
+days before.
+
+"I meets a man one night," said Finch, beginning his story--"a man 
+brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating schweinerknuckel in 
+Schlagel's.  That was two years ago, when I was a hose-cart driver for 
+No.  98.  His discourse runs to the subject of gold.  He says that 
+certain mountains in a country down South that he calls Gaudymala is 
+full of it.  He says the Indians wash it out of the streams in plural 
+quantities.
+
+"'Oh, Geronimo!' says I.  'Indians! There's no Indians in the South,' 
+I tell him, 'except Elks, Maccabees, and the buyers for the fall dry-
+goods trade.  The Indians are all on the reservations,' says I.
+
+"'I'm telling you this with reservations,' says he.  'They ain't 
+Buffalo Bill Indians; they're squattier and more pedigreed.  They call 
+'em Inkers and Aspics, and they was old inhabitants when Mazuma was 
+King of Mexico.  They wash the gold out of the mountain streams,' says 
+the brown man, 'and fill quills with it; and then they empty 'em into 
+red jars till they are full; and then they pack it in buckskin sacks 
+of one arroba each--an arroba is twenty-five pounds--and store it in a 
+stone house, with an engraving of a idol with marcelled hair, playing 
+a flute, over the door.'
+
+"'how do they work off this unearth increment?' I asks.
+
+"'They don't,' says the man.  'It's a case of "Ill fares the land with 
+the great deal of velocity where wealth accumulates and there ain't 
+any reciprocity."'
+
+"After this man and me got through our conversation, which left him 
+dry of information, I shook hands with him and told him I was sorry I 
+couldn't believe him.  And a month afterward I landed on the coast of 
+this Gaudymala with $1,300 that I had been saving up for five years.  
+I thought I knew what Indians liked, and I fixed myself accordingly.  
+I loaded down four pack-mules with red woollen blankets, wrought-iron 
+pails, jewelled side-combs for the ladies, glass necklaces, and 
+safety-razors.  I hired a black mozo, who was supposed to be a mule-
+driver and an interpreter too.  It turned out that he could interpret 
+mules all right, but he drove the English language much too hard.  His 
+name sounded like a Yale key when you push it in wrong side up, but I 
+called him McClintock, which was close to the noise.
+
+"Well, this gold village was forty miles up in the mountains, and it 
+took us nine days to find it.  But one afternoon McClintock led the 
+other mules and myself over a rawhide bridge stretched across a 
+precipice five thousand feet deep, it seemed to me.  The hoofs of the 
+beasts drummed on it just like before George M.  Cohan makes his first 
+entrance on the stage.
+
+"This village was built of mud and stone, and had no streets.  Some 
+few yellow-and-brown persons popped their heads out-of-doors, looking 
+about like Welsh rabbits with Worcester sauce on em.  Out of the 
+biggest house, that had a kind of a porch around it, steps a big white 
+man, red as a beet in color, dressed in fine tanned deerskin clothes, 
+with a gold chain around his neck, smoking a cigar.  I've seen United 
+States Senators of his style of features and build, also head-waiters 
+and cops.
+
+"He walks up and takes a look at us, while McClintock disembarks and 
+begins to interpret to the lead mule while he smokes a cigarette.
+
+"'Hello, Buttinsky,' says the fine man to me.  'How did you get in the 
+game?  I didn't see you buy any chips.  Who gave you the keys of the 
+city?'
+
+"'I'm a poor traveller,' says I.  'Especially mule-back.  You'll 
+excuse me.  Do you run a hack line or only a bluff?'
+
+"'Segregate yourself from your pseudo-equine quadruped,' says he, 'and 
+come inside.'
+
+"He raises a finger, and a villager runs up.
+
+"'This man will take care of your outfit,' says he, 'and I'll take 
+care of you.'
+
+"He leads me into the biggest house, and sets out the chairs and a 
+kind of a drink the color of milk.  It was the finest room I ever saw.  
+The stone walls was hung all over with silk shawls, and there was red 
+and yellow rugs on the floor, and jars of red pottery and Angora goat 
+skins, and enough bamboo furniture to misfurnish half a dozen seaside 
+cottages.
+
+"'In the first place,' says the man, 'you want to know who I am.  I'm 
+sole lessee and proprietor of this tribe of Indians.  They call me the 
+Grand Yacuma, which is to say King or Main Finger of the bunch.  I've 
+got more power here than a charge d'affaires, a charge of dynamite, 
+and a charge account at Tiffany's combined.  In fact, I'm the Big 
+Stick, with as many extra knots on it as there is on the record run of 
+the Lusitania.  Oh, I read the papers now and then,' says he.  'Now, 
+let's hear your entitlements,' he goes on, 'and the meeting will be 
+open.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'I am known as one W.  D.  Finch.  Occupation, 
+capitalist.  Address, 54' East Thirty-second--'
+
+"'New York,' chips in the Noble Grand.  'I know,' says he, grinning.  
+'It ain't the first time you've seen it go down on the blotter.  I can 
+tell by the way you hand it out.  Well, explain "capitalist."'
+
+"I tells this boss plain what I come for and how I come to came.
+
+"'Gold-dust ?' says he, looking as puzzled as a baby that's got a 
+feather stuck on its molasses finger.  'That's funny.  This ain't a 
+gold-mining country.  And you invested all your capital on a 
+stranger's story?  Well, well!  These Indians of mine--they are the 
+last of the tribe of Peehes--are simple as children.  They know 
+nothing of the purchasing power of gold.  I'm afraid you've been 
+imposed on,' says he.
+
+"'Maybe so,' says I, 'but it sounded pretty straight to me.'
+
+"'W.  D.,' says the King, all of a sudden, 'I'll give you a square 
+deal.  It ain't often I get to talk to a white man, and I'll give you 
+a show for your money.  It may be these constituents of mine have a 
+few grains of gold-dust hid away in their clothes.  To-morrow you may 
+get out these goods you've brought up and see if you can make any 
+sales.  Now, I'm going to introduce myself unofficially.  My name is 
+Shane--Patrick Shane.  I own this tribe of Peche Indians by right of 
+conquest--single handed and unafraid.  I drifted up here four years 
+ago, and won 'em by my size and complexion and nerve.  I learned their 
+language in six weeks-it's easy: you simply emit a string of 
+consonants as long as your breath holds out and then point at what 
+you're asking for.
+
+"'I conquered 'em, spectacularly,' goes on King Shane, 'and then I 
+went at 'em with economical politics, law, sleight-of-hand, and a kind 
+of New England ethics and parsimony.  Every Sunday, or as near as I 
+can guess at it, I preach to 'em in the council-house (I'm the 
+council) on the law of supply and demand.  I praise supply and knock 
+demand.  I use the same text every time.  You wouldn't think, W.  D.,' 
+says Shane, 'that I had poetry in me, would you?'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'I wouldn't know whether to call it poetry or not.'
+
+"'Tennyson,' says Shane,  'furnishes the poetic gospel I preach.  I 
+always considered him the boss poet.  Here's the way the text goes:
+
+
+"For, not to admire, if a man could learn it, were more
+Than to walk all day like a Sultan of old in a garden of spice."
+
+
+"'You see, I teach 'em to cut out demand--that supply is the main 
+thing.  I teach 'em not to desire anything beyond their simplest 
+needs.  A little mutton, a little cocoa, and a little fruit brought up 
+from the coast--that's all they want to make 'cm happy.  I've got 'em 
+well trained.  They make their own clothes and hats out of a vegetable 
+fibre and straw, and they're a contented lot.  It's a great thing,' 
+winds up Shane, 'to have made a people happy by the incultivation of 
+such simple institutions.'
+
+"Well, the next day, with the King's permission, I has the McClintock 
+open up a couple of sacks of my goods in the little plaza of the 
+village.  The Indians swarmed around by the hundred and looked the 
+bargain-counter over.  I shook red blankets at 'em, flashed finger-
+rings and ear-bobs, tried pearl necklaces and sidecombs on the women, 
+and a line of red hosiery on the men.  'Twas no use.  They looked on 
+like hungry graven images, but I never made a sale.  I asked 
+McClintock what was the trouble.  Mac yawned three or four times, 
+rolled a cigarette, made one or two confidential side remarks to a 
+mule, and then condescended to inform me that the people had no money.
+
+"Just then up strolls King Patrick, big and red 'and royal as usual, 
+with the gold chain over his chest and his cigar in front of him.
+
+"'How's business, W.  D.?' he asks.
+
+"'Fine,' says I.  'It's a bargain-day rush.  I've got one more line of 
+goods to offer before I shut up shop.  I'll try 'em with safety-
+razors.  I've' got two gross that I bought at 'a fire sale.'
+
+"Shane laughs till some kind of mameluke or private secretary he 
+carries with him has to hold him up.
+
+"'0 my sainted Aunt Jerusha!' says he, 'ain't you one of the Babes in 
+the Goods, W.  D.?  Don't you know that no Indians ever shave? They 
+pull out their whiskers instead.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'that's just what these razors would do for 'em--they 
+wouldn't have any kick coming if they used 'em once.'
+
+"Shane went away, and I could hear him laughing a block, if there had 
+been any block.
+
+"'Tell 'em,' says I to McClintock, 'it ain't money I want--tell 'em 
+I'll take gold-dust.  Tell 'em I'll allow 'em sixteen dollars an ounce 
+for it in trade.  That's what I'm out for--the dust.'
+
+"Mac interprets, and you'd have thought a squadron of cops had charged 
+the crowd to disperse it.  Every uncle's nephew and aunt's niece of 
+'em faded away inside of two minutes.
+
+"At the royal palace that night me and the King talked it over.
+
+"'They've got the dust hid out somewhere,' says I, 'or they wouldn't 
+have been so sensitive about it.'
+
+"'They haven't,' says Shane.  'What's this gag you've got about gold?  
+You been reading Edward Allen Poe?  They ain't got any gold.'
+
+"'They put it in quills,' says I, 'and then they empty it in jars, and 
+then into sacks of twenty-five pounds each.  I got it straight.'
+
+"'W.  D.,' says Shane, laughing and chewing his cigar, 'I don't often 
+see a white man, and I feel like putting you on.  I don't think you'll 
+get away from here alive, anyhow, so I'm going to tell you.  Come over 
+here.'
+
+''He draws aside a silk fibre curtain in a corner of the room and 
+shows me a pile of buckskin sacks.
+
+"'Forty of 'em,' says Shane.  'One arroba in each one.  In round 
+numbers, $220,000 worth of gold-dust you see there.  It's all mine.  
+It belongs to the Grand Yacuma.  They bring it all to me.  Two hundred 
+and twenty thousand dollars--think of that, you glass-bead peddler,' 
+says Shane--' and all mine.'
+
+"'Little good it does you,' says I, contemptuously and hatefully.  
+'And so you are the government depository of this gang of money-less 
+money-makers?  Don't you pay enough interest on it to enable one of 
+your depositors to buy an Augusta (Maine) Pullman carbon diamond worth 
+$200 for $4.85 ?'
+
+"'Listen,' says Patrick Shane, with the sweat coming out on his brow.  
+' I'm confidant with you, as you have, somehow, enlisted my regards.  
+Did you ever,' he says, 'feel the avoirdupois power of gold--not the 
+troy weight of it, but the sixteen-ounces-to-the-pound force of it?'
+
+"'Never,' says I.  'I never take in any bad money.'
+
+"Shane drops down on the floor and throws his arms over the sacks of 
+gold-dust.
+
+"'I love it,, says he.  'I want to feel the touch of it day and night.  
+It's my pleasure in life.  I come in this room, and I'm a king and a 
+rich man.  I'll be a millionaire in another year.  The pile's getting 
+bigger every month.  I've got the whole tribe washing out the sands in 
+the creeks.  I'm the happiest man in the world, W.  D.  I just want to 
+be near this gold, and know it's mine and it's increasing every day.  
+Now, you know,' says he, 'why my Indians wouldn't buy your goods.  
+They can't.  They bring all the dust to me.  I'm their king.  I've 
+taught 'em not to desire or admire.  You might as well shut up shop.'
+
+"'I'll tell you what you are,' says I.  'You're a plain, contemptible 
+miser.  You preach supply and you forget demand.  Now, supply,' I goes 
+on, 'is never anything but supply.  On the contrary,' says I, 'demand 
+is a much broader syllogism and assertion.  Demand includes the rights 
+of our women and children, and charity and friendship, and even a 
+little begging on the street corners.  They've both got to harmonize 
+equally.  And I've got a few things up my commercial sleeve yet,' says 
+I, 'that may jostle your preconceived ideas of politics and economy.
+
+"The next morning I had McClintock bring tip another mule-load of 
+goods to the plaza and open it up.  The people gathered around the 
+same as before.
+
+"I got out the finest line of necklaces, bracelets, hair-combs, and 
+earrings that I carried, and had the women put 'em on.  And then I 
+played trumps.
+
+"Out of my last pack I opened up a half gross of hand-mirrors, with 
+solid tinfoil backs, and passed 'em around among the ladies.  That was 
+the first introduction of looking-glasses among the Peche Indians.
+
+"Shane walks by with his big laugh.
+
+"'Business looking up any?' he asks.
+
+"'It's looking at itself right now,' says I.
+
+"By-and-by a kind of a murmur goes through the crowd.  The women had 
+looked into the magic crystal and seen that they were beautiful, and 
+was confiding the secret to the men.  The men seemed to be urging the 
+lack of money and the hard times just before the election, but their 
+excuses didn't go.
+
+"Then was my time.
+
+"I called McClintock away from an animated conversation with his mules 
+and told him to do some interpreting.
+
+"'Tell 'em,' says I, 'that gold-dust will buy for them these befitting 
+ornaments for kings and queens of the earth.  Tell 'em the yellow sand 
+they wash out of the waters for the High Sanctified Yacomay and Chop 
+Suey of the tribe will buy the precious jewels and charms that will 
+make them beautiful and preserve and pickle them from evil spirits.  
+Tell 'em the Pittsburg banks are paying four per cent.  interest on 
+deposits by mail, while this get-rich-frequently custodian of the 
+public funds ain't even paying attention.  Keep telling 'em, Mac,' 
+says I, 'to let the gold-dust family do their work.  Talk to 'em like 
+a born anti-Bryanite,' says I.  'Remind 'em that Tom Watson's gone 
+back to Georgia,' says I.
+
+"McClintock waves his hand affectionately at one of his mules, and 
+then hurls a few stickfuls of minion type at the mob of shoppers.
+
+"A gutta-percha Indian man, with a lady hanging on his arm, with three 
+strings of my fish-scale jewelry and imitation marble beads around her 
+neck, stands up on a block of stone and makes a talk that sounds like 
+a man shaking dice in a box to fill aces and sixes.
+
+"'He says,' says McClintock, 'that the people not know that gold-dust 
+will buy their things.  The women very mad.  The Grand Yacuma tell 
+them it no good but for keep to make bad spirits keep away.'
+
+"'You can't keep bad spirits away from money,' says I.
+
+"'They say,' goes on McClintock, 'the Yacuma fool them.  They raise 
+plenty row.'
+
+"'Going! Going!' says I.  'Gold-dust or cash takes the entire stock.  
+The dust weighed before you, and taken at sixteen dollars the ounce--
+the highest price on the Gaudymala coast.'
+
+"Then the crowd disperses all of a sudden, and I don't know what's up.  
+Mac and me packs away the hand-mirrors and jewelry they had handed 
+back to us, and we had the mules back to the corral they had set apart 
+for our garage.
+
+"While we was there we hear great noises of shouting, and down across 
+the plaza runs Patrick Shane, hotfoot, with his clothes ripped half 
+off, and scratches on his face like a cat had fought him hard for 
+every one of its lives.
+
+"'They're looting the treasury, W.  D.,' he sings out.  'They're going 
+to kill me and you, too.  Unlimber a couple of mules at once.  We'll 
+have to make a get-away in a couple of minutes.'
+
+"'They've found out,' says I,' the truth about the law of supply and 
+demand.'
+
+"'It's the women, mostly,' says the King.  'And they used to admire me 
+so!'
+
+"'They hadn't seen looking-glasses then,' says I.
+
+"'They've got knives and hatchets,' says Shane; 'hurry !'
+
+"'Take that roan mule,' says I.  'You and your law of supply!  I'll 
+ride the dun, for he's two knots per hour the faster.  The roan has a 
+stiff knee, but he may make it,' says I.  'If you'd included 
+reciprocity in your political platform I might have given you the 
+dun,' says I.
+
+"Shane and McClintock and me mounted our mules and rode across the 
+rawhide bridge just as the Peches reached the other side and began 
+firing stones and long knives at us.  We cut the thongs that held up 
+our end of the bridge and headed for the coast."
+
+A tall, bulky policeman came into Finch's
+shop at that moment and leaned an elbow on the showcase.  Finch nodded 
+at him friendly.
+
+"I heard down at Casey's," said the cop, in rumbling, husky tones, 
+"that there was going to be a picnic of the Hat-Cleaners' Union over 
+at Bergen Beach, Sunday.  Is that right?"
+
+"Sure," said Finch.  "There'll be a dandy time."
+
+"Gimme five tickets," said the cop, throwing a five-dollar bill on the 
+showcase.
+
+"Why,'' said Finch, "ain't you going it a little too--"
+
+"Go to h--!" said the cop.  "You got 'em to sell, ain't you?  
+Somebody's got to buy 'em.  Wish I could go along."
+
+I was glad to See Finch so well thought of in his neighborhood.
+
+And then in came a wee girl of seven, with dirty face and pure blue 
+eyes and a smutched and insufficient dress.
+
+"Mamma says," she recited shrilly, "that you must give me eighty cents 
+for the grocer and nineteen for the milkman and five cents for me to 
+buy hokey-pokey with--but she didn't say that," the elf concluded, 
+with a hopeful but honest grin.
+
+Finch shelled out the money, counting it twice, but I noticed that the 
+total sum that the small girl received was one dollar and four cents.
+
+"That's the right kind of a law," remarked Finch, as he carefully 
+broke some of the stitches of my hatband so that it would assuredly 
+come off within a few days--"the law of supply and demand.  But 
+they've both got to work together.  I'll bet," he went on, with his 
+dry smile, "she'll get jelly beans with that nickel--she likes 'em.  
+What's supply if there's no demand for it?"
+
+"What ever became of the King?" I asked, curiously.
+''Oh, I might have told you," said Finch.  "That was Shane came in and 
+bought the tickets.  He came back with me, and he's on the force now."
+
+
+
+
+BURIED TREASURE
+
+
+
+There are many kinds of fools.  Now, will everybody please sit still 
+until they are called upon specifically to rise?
+
+I had been every kind of fool except one.  I had expended my 
+patrimony, pretended my matrimony, played poker, lawn-tennis, and 
+bucket-shops--parted soon with my money in many ways.  But there 
+remained one rule of the wearer of cap and bells that I had not 
+played.  That was the Seeker after Buried Treasure.  To few does the 
+delectable furor come.  But of all the would-be followers in the hoof-
+prints of King Midas none has found a pursuit so rich in pleasurable 
+promise.
+
+But, going back from my theme a while--as lame pens must do--I was a 
+fool of the sentimental soft.  I saw May Martha Mangum, and was hers.  
+She was eighteen, the color of the white ivory keys of a new piano, 
+beautiful, and possessed by the exquisite solemnity and pathetic 
+witchery of an unsophisticated angel doomed to live in a small, dull, 
+Texas prairie-town.  She had a spirit and charm that could have 
+enabled her to pluck rubies like raspberries from the crown of Belgium 
+or any other sporty kingdom, but she did not know it, and I did not 
+paint the picture for her.
+
+You see, I wanted May Martha Mangum for to have and to hold.  I wanted 
+her to abide with me, and put my slippers and pipe away every day in 
+places where they cannot be found of evenings.
+
+May Martha's father was a man hidden behind whiskers and spectacles.  
+He lived for bugs and butterflies and all insects that fly or crawl or 
+buzz or get down your back or in the butter.  He was an etymologist, 
+or words to that effect.  He spent his life seining the air for flying 
+fish of the June-bug order, and then sticking pins through 'em and 
+calling 'em names.
+
+He and May Martha were the whole family.  He prized her highly as a 
+fine specimen of the racibus humanus because she saw that he had food 
+at times, and put his clothes on right side before, and kept his 
+alcohol-bottles filled.  Scientists, they say, are apt to be absent-
+minded.
+
+There was another besides myself who thought May Martha Mangum one to 
+be desired.  That was Goodloe Banks, a young man just home from 
+college.  He had all the attainments to be found in books--Latin, 
+Greek, philosophy, and especially the higher branches of mathematics 
+and logic.
+
+If it hadn't been for his habit of pouring out this information and 
+learning on every one that he addressed, I'd have liked him pretty 
+well.  But, even as it was, he and I were, you would have thought, 
+great pals.
+
+We got together every time we could because each of us wanted to pump 
+the other for whatever straws we could to find which way the wind blew 
+from the heart of May Martha Mangum--rather a mixed metaphor; Goodloe 
+Banks would never have been guilty of that.  That is the way of 
+rivals.
+
+You might say that Goodloe ran to books, manners, culture, rowing, 
+intellect, and clothes.  I would have put you in mind more of baseball 
+and Friday-night debating societies--by way of culture--and maybe of a 
+good horseback rider.
+
+But in our talks together, and in our visits and conversation with May 
+Martha, neither Goodloe Banks nor I could find out which one of us she 
+preferred.  May Martha was a natural-born non-committal, and knew in 
+her cradle how to keep people guessing.
+
+As I said, old man Mangum was absentminded.  After a long time he 
+found out one day--a little butterfly must have told him-that two 
+young men were trying to throw a net over the head of the young 
+person, a daughter, or some such technical appendage, who looked after 
+his comforts.
+
+I never knew scientists could rise to such occasions.  Old Mangum 
+orally labelled and classified Goodloe and myself easily among the 
+lowest orders of the vertebrates; and in English, too, without going 
+any further into Latin than the simple references to Orgetorix, Rex 
+Helvetii--which is as far as I ever went, myself.  And he told us that 
+if he ever caught us around his house again he would add us to his 
+collection.
+
+Goodloe Banks and I remained away five days, expecting the storm to 
+subside.  When we dared to call at the house again May Martha Mangum 
+and her father were gone.  Gone!  The house they had rented was 
+closed.  Their little store of goods and chattels was gone also.
+
+And not a word of farewell to either of us from May Martha--not a 
+white, fluttering note pinned to the hawthorn-bush; not a chalk-mark 
+on the gate-post nor a post-card in the post-office to give us a clew.
+
+For two months Goodloe Banks and I--separately--tried every scheme we 
+could think of to track the runaways.  We used our friendship and 
+influence with the ticket-agent, with livery-stable men, railroad 
+conductors, and our one lone, lorn constable, but without results.
+
+Then we became better friends and worse enemies than ever.  We 
+forgathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon every afternoon after 
+work, and played dominoes, and laid conversational traps to find out 
+from each other if anything had been discovered.  That is the way of 
+rivals.
+
+Now, Goodloe Banks had a sarcastic way of displaying his own learning 
+and putting me in the class that was reading "Poor Jane Ray, her bird 
+is dead, she cannot play."  Well, I rather liked Goodloe, and I had a 
+contempt for his college learning, and I was always regarded as good-
+natured, so I kept my temper.  And I was trying to find out if he knew 
+anything about May Martha, so I endured his society.
+
+In talking things over one afternoon he said to me:
+
+"Suppose you do find her, Ed, whereby would you profit?  Miss Mangum 
+has a mind.  Perhaps it is yet uncultured, but she is destined for 
+higher things than you could give her.  I have talked with no one who 
+seemed to appreciate more the enchantment of the ancient poets and 
+writers and the modern cults that have assimilated and expended their 
+philosophy of life.  Don't you think you are wasting your time looking 
+for her?"
+
+"My idea," said I, "of a happy home is an eight-room house in a grove 
+of live-oaks by the side of a charco on a Texas prairie.  A piano," I 
+went on, "with an automatic player in the sitting-room, three thousand 
+head of cattle under fence for a starter, a buckboard and ponies 
+always hitched at a post for 'the missus '--and May Martha Mangum to 
+spend the profits of the ranch as she pleases, and to abide with me, 
+and put my slippers and pipe away every day in places where they 
+cannot be found of evenings.  That," said I, "is what is to be; and a 
+fig--a dried, Smyrna, dago-stand fig--for your curriculums, cults, and 
+philosophy."
+
+"She is meant for higher things," repeated Goodloe Banks.
+
+"Whatever she is meant for," I answered, just now she is out of 
+pocket.  And I shall find her as soon as I can without aid of the 
+colleges."
+
+"The game is blocked," said Goodloe, putting down a domino and we had 
+the beer.
+
+Shortly after that a young farmer whom I knew came into town and 
+brought me a folded blue paper.  He said his grandfather had just 
+died.  I concealed a tear, and he went on to say that the old man had 
+jealously guarded this paper for twenty years.  He left it to his 
+family as part of his estate, the rest of which consisted of two mules 
+and a hypotenuse of non-arable land.
+
+The sheet of paper was of the old, blue kind used during the rebellion 
+of the abolitionists against the secessionists.  It was dated June 14, 
+1863, and it described the hiding-place of ten burro-loads of gold and 
+silver coin valued at three hundred thousand dollars.  Old Rundle--
+grandfather of his grandson, Sam--was given the information by a 
+Spanish priest who was in on the treasure-burying, and who died many 
+years before--no, afterward--in old Rundle's house.  Old Rundle wrote 
+it down from dictation.
+
+"Why didn't your father look this up?" I asked young Rundle.
+
+"He went blind before he could do so," he replied.
+
+"Why didn't you hunt for it yourself?" I asked.
+
+"Well," said he, "I've only known about the paper for ten years.  
+First there was the spring ploughin' to do, and then choppin' the 
+weeds out of the corn; and then come takin' fodder; and mighty soon 
+winter was on us.  It seemed to run along that way year after year."
+
+That sounded perfectly reasonable to me, so I took it up with young 
+Lee Rundle at once.
+
+The directions on the paper were simple.  The whole burro cavalcade 
+laden with the treasure started from an old Spanish mission in Dolores 
+County.  They travelled due south by the compass until they reached 
+the Alamito River.  They forded this, and buried the treasure on the 
+top of a little mountain shaped like a pack-saddle standing in a row 
+between two higher ones.  A heap of stones marked the place of the 
+buried treasure.  All the party except the Spanish priest were killed 
+by Indians a few days later.  The secret was a monopoly.  It looked 
+good to me.
+
+Lee Rundle suggested that we rig out a camping outfit, hire a surveyor 
+to run out the line from the Spanish mission, and then spend the three 
+hundred thousand dollars seeing the sights in Fort Worth.  But, 
+without being highly educated, I knew a way to save time and expense.
+
+We went to the State land-office and had a practical, what they call a 
+"working," sketch made of all the surveys of land from the old mission 
+to the Alamito River.  On this map I drew a line due southward to the 
+river.  The length of lines of each survey and section of land was 
+accurately given on the sketch.  By these we found the point on the 
+river and had a "connection" made with it and an important, well-
+identified corner of the Los Animos five-league survey--a grant made 
+by King Philip of Spain.
+
+By doing this we did not need to have the line run out by a surveyor.  
+It was a great saving of expense and time.
+
+So, Lee Rundle and I fitted out a two-horse wagon team with all the 
+accessories, and drove a hundred and forty-nine miles to Chico, the 
+nearest town to the point we wished to reach.  There we picked up a 
+deputy county surveyor.  He found the corner of the Los Animos survey 
+for us, ran out the five thousand seven hundred and twenty varas west 
+that our sketch called for, laid a stone on the spot, had coffee and 
+bacon, and caught the mail-stage back to Chico.
+
+I was pretty sure we would get that three hundred thousand dollars.  
+Lee Rundle's was to be only one-third, because I was paying all the 
+expenses.  With that two hundred thousand dollars I knew I could find 
+May Martha Mangum if she was on earth.  And with it I could flutter 
+the butterflies in old man Mangum's dove-cot, too.  If I could find 
+that treasure!
+
+But Lee and I established camp.  Across the river were a dozen little 
+mountains densely covered by cedar-brakes, but not one shaped like a 
+pack-saddle.  That did not deter us.  Appearances are deceptive.  A 
+pack-saddle, like beauty, may exist only in the eye of the beholder.
+
+I and the grandson of the treasure examined those cedar-covered hills 
+with the care of a lady hunting for the wicked flea.  We explored 
+every side, top, circumference, mean elevation, angle, slope, and 
+concavity of every one for two miles up and down the river.  We spent 
+four days doing so.  Then we hitched up the roan and the dun, and 
+hauled the remains of the coffee and bacon the one hundred and forty-
+nine miles back to Concho City.
+
+Lee Rundle chewed much tobacco on the return trip.  I was busy 
+driving, because I was in a hurry.
+
+As shortly as could be after our empty return Goodloe Banks and I 
+forgathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon to play dominoes and 
+fish for information.  I told Goodloe about my expedition after the 
+buried treasure.
+
+"If I could have found that three hundred thousand dollars," I said to 
+him, "I could have scoured and sifted the surface of the earth to find 
+May Martha Mangum."
+
+"She is meant for higher things," said Goodloe.  "I shall find her 
+myself.  But, tell me how you went about discovering the spot where 
+this unearthed increment was imprudently buried."
+
+I told him in the smallest detail.  I showed him the draughtsman's 
+sketch with the distances marked plainly upon it.
+
+After glancing over it in a masterly way, he leaned back in his chair 
+and bestowed upon me an explosion of sardonic, superior, collegiate 
+laughter.
+
+"Well, you are a fool, Jim," he said, when he could speak.
+
+"It's your play," said I, patiently, fingering my double-six.
+
+"Twenty," said Goodloe, making two crosses on the table with his 
+chalk.
+
+"Why am I a fool?" I asked.  "Buried treasure has been found before in 
+many places."
+
+"Because," said he, "in calculating the point on the river where your 
+line would strike you neglected to allow for the variation.  The 
+variation there would be nine degrees west.  Let me have your pencil."
+
+Goodloe Banks figured rapidly on the back of an envelope.
+
+"The distance, from north to south, of the line run from the Spanish 
+mission," said he, "is exactly twenty-two miles.  It was run by a 
+pocket-compass, according to your story.  Allowing for the variation, 
+the point on the Alamito River where you should have searched for your 
+treasure is exactly six miles and nine hundred and forty-five varas 
+farther west than the place you hit upon.  Oh, what a fool you are, 
+Jim!"
+
+"What is this variation that you speak of?" I asked.  "I thought 
+figures never lied."
+
+"The variation of the magnetic compass," said Goodloe, "from the true 
+meridian."
+
+He smiled in his superior way; and then I saw come out in his face the 
+singular, eager, consuming cupidity of the seeker after buried 
+treasure.
+
+"Sometimes," he said with the air of the oracle, "these old traditions 
+of hidden money are not without foundation.  Suppose you let me look 
+over that paper describing the location.  Perhaps together we might--"
+
+The result was that Goodloe Banks and I, rivals in love, became 
+companions in adventure.  We went to Chico by stage from Huntersburg, 
+the nearest railroad town.  In Chico we hired a team drawing a covered 
+spring-wagon and camping paraphernalia.  We had the same surveyor run 
+out our distance, as revised by Goodloe and his variations, and then 
+dismissed him and sent him on his homeward road.
+
+It was night when we arrived.  I fed the horses and made a fire near 
+the bank of the river and cooked supper.  Goodloe would have helped, 
+but his education had not fitted him for practical things.
+
+But while I worked he cheered me with the expression of great thoughts 
+handed down from the dead ones of old.  He quoted some translations 
+from the Greek at much length.
+
+"Anacreon," he explained.  "That was a favorite passage with Miss 
+Mangum--as I recited it."
+
+"She is meant for higher things," said I, repeating his phrase.
+
+"Can there be anything higher," asked Goodloe, "than to dwell in the 
+society of the classics, to live in the atmosphere of learning and 
+culture?  You have often decried education.  What of your wasted 
+efforts through your ignorance of simple mathematics?  How soon would 
+you have found your treasure if my knowledge had not shown you your 
+error?"
+
+"We'll take a look at those hills across the river first," said I, 
+"and see what we find.  I am still doubtful about variations.  I have 
+been brought up to believe that the needle is true to the pole."
+
+The next morning was a bright June one.  We were up early and had 
+breakfast.  Goodloe was charmed.  He recited--Keats, I think it was, 
+and Kelly or Shelley--while I broiled the bacon.  We were getting 
+ready to cross the river, which was little more than a shallow creek 
+there, and explore the many sharp-peaked cedar-covered hills on the 
+other side.
+
+"My good Ulysses," said Goodloe, slapping me on the shoulder while I 
+was washing the tin breakfast-plates, "let me see the enchanted 
+document once more.  I believe it gives directions for climbing the 
+hill shaped like a pack-saddle.  I never saw a pack-saddle.  What is 
+it like, Jim?"
+
+"Score one against culture," said I.  "I'll know it when I see it."
+
+Goodloe was looking at old Rundle's document when he ripped out a most 
+uncollegiate swear-word.
+
+"Come here," he said, holding the paper up against the sunlight.  
+"Look at that," he said, laying his finger against it.
+
+On the blue paper--a thing I had never noticed before--I saw stand out 
+in white letters the word and figures : "Malvern, 1898."
+
+"What about it?" I asked.
+
+"It's the water-mark," said Goodloe.  "The paper was manufactured in 
+1898.  The writing on the paper is dated 1863.  This is a palpable 
+fraud."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said I.  "The Rundles are pretty reliable, plain, 
+uneducated country people.  Maybe the paper manufacturers tried to 
+perpetrate a swindle."
+
+And then Goodloe Banks went as wild as his education permitted.  He 
+dropped the glasses off his nose and glared at me.
+
+"I've often told you you were a fool," he said.  "You have let 
+yourself be imposed upon by a clodhopper.  And you have imposed upon 
+me."
+
+"How," I asked, "have I imposed upon you ?"
+
+"By your ignorance," said he.  "Twice I have discovered serious flaws 
+in your plans that a common-school education should have enabled you 
+to avoid.  And," he continued, "I have been put to expense that I 
+could ill afford in pursuing this swindling quest.  I am done with 
+it."
+
+I rose and pointed a large pewter spoon at him, fresh from the dish-
+water.
+
+"Goodloe Banks," I said, "I care not one parboiled navy bean for your 
+education.  I always barely tolerated it in any one, and I despised it 
+in you.  What has your learning done for you?  It is a curse to 
+yourself and a bore to your friends.  Away," I said--"away with your 
+water-marks and variations!  They are nothing to me.  They shall not 
+deflect me from the quest."
+
+I pointed with my spoon across the river to a small mountain shaped 
+like a pack-saddle.
+
+"I am going to search that mountain," I went on, "for the treasure.  
+Decide now whether you are in it or not.  If you wish to let a water-
+mark or a variation shake your soul, you are no true adventurer.  
+Decide."
+
+A white cloud of dust began to rise far down the river road.  It was 
+the mail-wagon from Hesperus to Chico.  Goodloe flagged it.
+
+"I am done with the swindle," said he, sourly.  "No one but a fool 
+would pay any attention to that paper now.  Well, you always were a 
+fool, Jim.  I leave you to your fate."
+
+He gathered his personal traps, climbed into the mail-wagon, adjusted 
+his glasses nervously, and flew away in a cloud of dust.
+
+After I had washed the dishes and staked the horses on new grass, I 
+crossed the shallow river and made my way slowly through the cedar-
+brakes up to the top of the hill shaped like a pack-saddle.
+
+It was a wonderful June day.  Never in my life had I seen so many 
+birds, so many butter-flies, dragon-flies, grasshoppers, and such 
+winged and stinged beasts of the air and fields.
+
+I investigated the hill shaped like a pack-saddle from base to summit.  
+I found an absolute absence of signs relating to buried treasure.  
+There was no pile of stones, no ancient blazes on the trees, none of 
+the evidences of the three hundred thousand dollars, as set forth in 
+the document of old man Rundle.
+
+I came down the hill in the cool of the afternoon.  Suddenly, out of 
+the cedar-brake I stepped into a beautiful green valley where a 
+tributary small stream ran into the Alamito River.
+
+And there I was started to see what I took to be a wild man, with 
+unkempt beard and ragged hair, pursuing a giant butterfly with 
+brilliant wings.
+
+"Perhaps he is an escaped madman," I thought; and wondered how he had 
+strayed so far from seats of education and learning.
+
+And then I took a few more steps and saw a vine-covered cottage near 
+the small stream.  And in a little grassy glade I saw May Martha 
+Mangum plucking wild flowers.
+
+She straightened up and looked at me.  For the first time since I knew 
+her I saw her face--which was the color of the white keys of a new 
+piano--turn pink.  I walked toward her without a word.  She let the 
+gathered flowers trickle slowly from her hand to the grass.
+
+"I knew you would come, Jim," she said clearly.  "Father wouldn't let 
+me write, but I knew you would come.
+
+What followed you may guess--there was my wagon and team just across 
+the river.
+
+
+I've often wondered what good too much education is to a man if he 
+can't use it for himself.  If all the benefits of it are to go to 
+others, where does it come in?
+
+For May Martha Mangum abides with me.  There is an eight-room house in 
+a live-oak grove, and a piano with an automatic player, and a good 
+start toward the three thousand head of cattle is under fence.
+
+And when I ride home at night my pipe and slippers are put away in 
+places where they cannot be found.
+
+But who cares for that? Who cares--who cares?
+
+
+
+
+TO HIM WHO WAITS
+
+
+
+The Hermit of the Hudson was hustling about his cave with unusual 
+animation.
+
+The cave was on or in the top of a little spur of the Catskills that 
+had strayed down to the river's edge, and, not having a ferry ticket, 
+had to stop there.  The bijou mountains were densely wooded and were 
+infested by ferocious squirrels and woodpeckers that forever menaced 
+the summer transients.  Like a badly sewn strip of white braid, a 
+macadamized road ran between the green skirt of the hills and the 
+foamy lace of the river's edge.  A dim path wound from the comfortable 
+road up a rocky height to the hermit's cave.  One mile upstream was 
+the Viewpoint Inn, to which summer folk from the city came; leaving 
+cool, electric-fanned apartments that they might be driven about in 
+burning sunshine, shrieking, in gasoline launches, by spindle-legged 
+Modreds bearing the blankest of shields.
+
+Train your lorgnette upon the hermit and let your eye receive the 
+personal touch that shall endear you to the hero.
+
+A man of forty, judging him fairly, with long hair curling at the 
+ends, dramatic eyes, and a forked brown beard like those that were 
+imposed upon the West some years ago by self-appointed "divine 
+healers" who succeeded the grasshopper crop.  His outward vesture 
+appeared to be kind of gunny-sacking cut and made into a garment that 
+would have made the fortune of a London tailor.  His long, well-shaped 
+fingers, delicate nose, and poise of manner raised him high above the 
+class of hermits who fear water and bury money in oyster-cans in their 
+caves in spots indicated by rude crosses chipped in the stone wall 
+above.
+
+The hermit's home was not altogether a cave.  The cave was an addition 
+to the hermitage, which was a rude hut made of poles daubed with clay 
+and covered with the best quality of rust-proof zinc roofing.
+
+In the house proper there were stone slabs for seats, a rustic 
+bookcase made of unplaned poplar planks, and a table formed of a 
+wooden slab laid across two upright pieces of granite--something 
+between the furniture of a Druid temple and that of a Broadway 
+beefsteak dungeon.  Hung against the walls were skins of wild animals 
+purchased in the vicinity of Eighth Street and University Place, New 
+York.
+
+The rear of the cabin merged into the cave.  There the hermit cooked 
+his meals on a rude stone hearth.  With infinite patience and an old 
+axe he had chopped natural shelves in the rocky walls.  On them stood 
+his stores of flour, bacon, lard, talcum-powder, kerosene, baking-
+powder, soda-mint tablets, pepper, salt, and Olivo-Cremo Emulsion for 
+chaps and roughness of the hands and face.
+
+The hermit had hermited there for ten years.  He was an asset of the 
+Viewpoint Inn.  To its guests he was second in interest only to the 
+Mysterious Echo in the Haunted Glen.  And the Lover's Leap beat him 
+only a few inches, flat-footed.  He was known far (but not very wide, 
+on account of the topography) as a.  scholar of brilliant intellect 
+who had forsworn the world because he had been jilted in a love 
+affair.  Every Saturday night the Viewpoint Inn sent to him 
+surreptitiously a basket of provisions.  He never left the immediate 
+outskirts of his hermitage.  Guests of the inn who visited him said 
+his store of knowledge, wit, and scintillating philosophy were simply 
+wonderful, you know.
+
+That summer the Viewpoint Inn was crowded with guests.  So, on 
+Saturday nights, there were extra cans of tomatoes, and sirloin steak, 
+instead of "rounds," in the hermit's basket.
+
+Now you have the material allegations in the case.  So, make way for 
+Romance.
+
+Evidently the hermit expected a visitor.  He carefully combed his long 
+hair and parted his apostolic beard.  When the ninety-eight-cent 
+alarm-clock on a stone shelf announced the hour of five he picked up 
+his gunny-sacking skirts, brushed them carefully, gathered an oaken 
+staff, and strolled slowly into the thick woods that surrounded the 
+hermitage.
+
+He had not long to wait.  Up the faint pathway, slippery with its 
+carpet of pine-needles, toiled Beatrix, youngest and fairest of the 
+famous Trenholme sisters.  She was all in blue from hat to canvas 
+pumps, varying in tint from the shade of the tinkle of a bluebell at 
+daybreak on a spring Saturday to the deep hue of a Monday morning at 
+nine when the washer-woman has failed to show up.
+
+Beatrix dug her cerulean parasol deep into the pine-needles and 
+sighed.  The hermit, on the q.  t., removed a grass burr from the 
+ankle of one sandalled foot with the big toe of his other one.
+
+She blued--and almost starched and ironed him--with her cobalt eyes.
+
+"It must be so nice," she said in little, tremulous gasps, "to be a 
+hermit, and have ladies climb mountains to talk to you."
+
+The hermit folded his arms and leaned against a tree.  Beatrix, with a 
+sigh, settled down upon the mat of pine-needles like a bluebird upon 
+her nest.  The hermit followed suit; drawing his feet rather awkwardly 
+under his gunny-sacking.
+
+"It must be nice to be a mountain," said he, with ponderous lightness, 
+"and have angels in blue climb up you instead of flying over you."
+
+"Mamma had neuralgia," said Beatrix, "and went to bed, or I couldn't 
+have come.  It's dreadfully hot at that horrid old inn.  But we hadn't 
+the money to go anywhere else this summer."
+
+"Last night," said the hermit, "I climbed to the top of that big rock 
+above us.  I could see the lights of the inn and hear a strain or two 
+of the music when the wind was right.  I imagined you moving 
+gracefully in the arms of others to the dreamy music of the waltz amid 
+the fragrance of flowers.  Think how lonely I must have been!"
+
+The youngest, handsomest, and poorest of the famous Trenholme sisters 
+sighed.
+
+"You haven't quite hit it," she said, plaintively.  "I was moving 
+gracefully at the arms of another.  Mamma had one of her periodical 
+attacks of rheumatism in both elbows and shoulders, and I had to rub 
+them for an hour with that horrid old liniment.  I hope you didn't 
+think that smelled like flowers.  You know, there were some West Point 
+boys and a yachtload of young men from the city at last evening's 
+weekly dance.  I've known mamma to sit by an open window for three 
+hours with one-half of her registering 85 degrees and the other half 
+frostbitten, and never sneeze once.  But just let a bunch of 
+ineligibles come around where I am, and she'll begin to swell at the 
+knuckles and shriek with pain.  And I have to take her to her room and 
+rub her arms.  To see mamma dressed you'd be surprised to know the 
+number of square inches of surface there are to her arms.  I think it 
+must be delightful to be a hermit.  That--cassock-- gabardine, isn't 
+it?--that you wear is so becoming.  Do you make it--or them--of course 
+you must have changes- yourself?  And what a blessed relief it must be 
+to wear sandals instead of shoes!  Think how we must suffer--no matter 
+how small I buy my shoes they always pinch my toes.  Oh, why can't 
+there be lady hermits, too!"
+
+The beautifulest and most adolescent Trenholme sister extended two 
+slender blue ankles that ended in two enormous blue-silk bows that 
+almost concealed two fairy Oxfords, also of one of the forty-seven 
+shades of blue.  The hermit, as if impelled by a kind of reflex-
+telepathic action, drew his bare toes farther beneath his gunny-
+sacking.
+
+"I have heard about the romance of your life," said Miss Trenholme, 
+softly.  "They have it printed on the back of the menu card at the 
+inn.  Was she very beautiful and charming?"
+
+"On the bills of fare!" muttered the hermit; "but what do I care for 
+the world's babble?  Yes, she was of the highest and grandest type.  
+Then," he continued, "then I thought the world could never contain 
+another equal to her.  So I forsook it and repaired to this mountain 
+fastness to spend the remainder of my life alone--to devote and 
+dedicate my remaining years to her memory."
+
+"It's grand," said Miss Trenholme, "absolutely grand.  I think a 
+hermit's life is the ideal one.  No bill-collectors calling, no 
+dressing for dinner--how I'd like to be one!  But there's no such luck 
+for me.  If I don't marry this season I honestly believe mamma will 
+force me into settlement work or trimming hats.  It isn't because I'm 
+getting old or ugly; but we haven't enough money left to butt in at 
+any of the swell places any more.  And I don't want to marry--unless 
+it's somebody I like.  That's why I'd like to be a hermit.  Hermits 
+don't ever marry, do they ?"
+
+"Hundreds of 'em," said the hermit, "when they've found the right 
+one."
+
+"But they're hermits," said the youngest and beautifulest, "because 
+they've lost the right one, aren't they?"
+
+"Because they think they have," answered the recluse, fatuously.  
+"Wisdom comes to one in a mountain cave as well as to one in the world 
+of 'swells,' as I believe they are called in the argot."
+
+"When one of the 'swells' brings it to them," said Miss Trenholme.  
+"And my folks are swells.  That's the trouble.  But there are so many 
+swells at the seashore in the summer-time that we hardly amount to 
+more than ripples.  So we've had to put all our money into river and 
+harbor appropriations.  We were all girls, you know.  There were four 
+of us.  I'm the only surviving one.  The others have been married off.  
+All to money.  Mamma is so proud of my sisters.  They send her the 
+loveliest pen-wipers and art calendars every Christmas.  I'm the only 
+one on the market now.  I'm forbidden to look at any one who hasn't 
+money."
+
+"But--" began the hermit.
+
+"But, oh," said the beautifulest "of course hermits have great pots of 
+gold and doubloons buried somewhere near three great oak-trees.  They 
+all have."
+
+"I have not," said the hermit, regretfully.
+
+"I'm so sorry," said Miss Trenholme.  "I always thought they had.  I 
+think I must go now."
+
+Oh, beyond question, she was the beautifulest.
+
+"Fair lady--" began the hermit.
+
+"I am Beatrix Trenholme--some call me Trix," she said.  "You must come 
+to the inn to see me."
+
+"I haven't been a stone's--throw from my cave in ten years," said the 
+hermit.
+
+"You must come to see me there," she repeated.  "Any evening except 
+Thursday."
+
+The hermit smiled weakly.
+
+"Good-bye," she said, gathering the folds of her pale-blue skirt.  "I 
+shall expect you.  But not on Thursday evening, remember."
+
+What an interest it would give to the future menu cards of the 
+Viewpoint Inn to have these printed lines added to them: "Only once 
+during the more than ten years of his lonely existence did the 
+mountain hermit leave his famous cave.  That was when he was 
+irresistibly drawn to the inn by the fascinations of Miss Beatrix 
+Trenholme, youngest and most beautiful of the celebrated Trenholme 
+sisters, whose brilliant marriage to--"
+
+Aye, to whom?
+
+The hermit walked back to the hermitage.  At the door stood Bob 
+Binkley, his old friend and companion of the days before he had 
+renounced the world--Bob, himself, arrayed like the orchids of the 
+greenhouse in the summer man's polychromatic garb--Bob, the 
+millionaire, with his fat, firm, smooth, shrewd face, his diamond 
+rings, sparkling fob-chain, and pleated bosom.  He was two years older 
+than the hermit, and looked five years younger.
+
+"You're Hamp Ellison, in spite of those whiskers and that going-away 
+bathrobe," he shouted.  "I read about you on the bill of fare at the 
+inn.  They've run your biography in between the cheese and 'Not 
+Responsible for Coats and Umbrellas.'  What 'd you do it for, Hamp?  
+And ten years, too--geewhilikins!"
+
+"You're just the same," said the hermit.  "Come in and sit down.  Sit 
+on that limestone rock over there; it's softer than the granite."
+
+"I can't understand it, old man," said Binkley.  "I can see how you 
+could give up a woman for ten years, but not ten years for a woman.  
+Of course I know why you did it.  Everybody does.  Edith Carr.  She 
+jilted four or five besides you.  But you were the only one who took 
+to a hole in the ground.  The others had recourse to whiskey, the 
+Klondike, politics, and that similia similibus cure.  But, say--Hamp, 
+Edith Carr was just about the finest woman in the world--high-toned 
+and proud and noble, and playing her ideals to win at all kinds of 
+odds.  She certainly was a crackerjack."
+
+"After I renounced the world," said the hermit, "I never heard of her 
+again."
+
+"She married me," said Binkley.
+
+The hermit leaned against the wooden walls of his ante-cave and 
+wriggled his toes.
+
+"I know how you feel about it," said Binkley.  "What else could she 
+do?  There were her four sisters and her mother and old man Carr--you 
+remember how he put all the money he had into dirigible balloons? 
+Well,  everything was coming down and nothing going up with 'em, as 
+you might say.  Well, I know Edith as well as you do--although I 
+married her.  I was worth a million then, but I've run it up since to 
+between five and six.  It wasn't me she wanted as much as--well, it 
+was about like this.  She had that bunch on her hands, and they had to 
+be taken care of.  Edith married me two months after you did the 
+ground-squirrel act.  I thought she liked me, too, at the time."
+
+"And now?" inquired the recluse.
+
+"We're better friends than ever now.  She got a divorce from me two 
+years ago.  Just incompatibility.  I didn't put in any defence.  Well, 
+well, well, Hamp, this is certainly a funny dugout you've built here.  
+But you always were a hero of fiction.  Seems like you'd have been the 
+very one to strike Edith's fancy.  Maybe you did--but it's the bank - 
+roll that catches 'em, my boy--your caves and whiskers won't do it.  
+Honestly, Hamp, don't you think you've been a darned fool?"
+
+The hermit smiled behind his tangled beard.  He was and always had 
+been so superior to the crude and mercenary Binkley that even his 
+vulgarities could not anger him.  Moreover, his studies and 
+meditations in his retreat had raised him far above the little 
+vanities of the world.  His little mountain-side had been almost an 
+Olympus, over the edge of which he saw, smiling, the bolts hurled in 
+the valleys of man below.  Had his ten years of renunciation, of 
+thought, of devotion to an ideal, of living scorn of a sordid world, 
+been in vain?  Up from the world had come to him the youngest and 
+beautifulest--fairer than Edith--one and three-seventh times lovelier 
+than the seven-years-served Rachel.  So the hermit smiled in his 
+beard.
+
+When Binkley had relieved the hermitage from the blot of his presence 
+and the first faint star showed above the pines, the hermit got the 
+can of baking-powder from his cupboard.  He still smiled behind his 
+beard.
+
+There was a slight rustle in the doorway.  There stood Edith Carr, 
+with all the added beauty and stateliness and noble bearing that ten 
+years had brought her.
+
+She was never one to chatter.  She looked at the hermit with her 
+large, thinking, dark eyes.  The hermit stood still, surprised into a 
+pose as motionless as her own.  Only his subconscious sense of the 
+fitness of things caused him to turn the baking-powder can slowly in 
+his hands until its red label was hidden against his bosom.
+
+"I am stopping at the inn," said Edith, in low but clear tones.  "I 
+heard of you there.  I told myself that I must see you.  I want to ask 
+your forgiveness.  I sold my happiness for money.  There were others 
+to be provided for--but that does not excuse me.  I just wanted to see 
+you and ask your forgiveness.  You have lived here ten years, they 
+tell me, cherishing my memory!  I was blind, Hampton.  I could not see 
+then that all the money in the world cannot weigh in the scales 
+against a faithful heart.  If--but it is too late now, of course."
+
+Her assertion was a question clothed as best it could be in a loving 
+woman's pride.  But through the thin disguise the hermit saw easily 
+that his lady had come back to him--if he chose.  He had won a golden 
+crown--if it pleased him to take it.  The reward of his decade of 
+faithfulness was ready for his hand--if he desired to stretch it 
+forth.
+
+
+For the space of one minute the old enchantment shone upon him with a 
+reflected radiance.  And then by turns he felt the manly sensations of 
+indignation at having been discarded, and of repugnance at having 
+been--as it were--sought again.  And last of all--how strange that it 
+should have come at last!--the pale-blue vision of the beautifulest of 
+the Trenholme sisters illuminated his mind's eye and left him without 
+a waver.
+
+"It is too late," he said, in deep tones, pressing the baking-powder 
+can against his heart.
+
+Once she turned after she had gone slowly twenty yards down the path.  
+The hermit had begun to twist the lid off his can, but he hid it again 
+under his sacking robe.  He could see her great eyes shining sadly 
+through the twilight; but he stood inflexible in the doorway of his 
+shack and made no sign.
+
+
+Just as the moon rose on Thursday evening the hermit was seized by the 
+world-madness.
+
+Up from the inn, fainter than the horns of elf-land, came now and then 
+a few bars of music played by the casino band.  The Hudson was 
+broadened by the night into an illimitable sea--those lights, dimly 
+seen on its opposite shore, were not beacons for prosaic trolley-
+lines, but low-set stars millions of miles away.  The waters in front 
+of the inn were gay with fireflies--or were they motor-boats, smelling 
+of gasoline and oil?  Once the hermit had known these things and had 
+sported with Amaryllis in the shade of the red-and-white-striped 
+awnings.  But for ten years he had turned a heedless ear to these far-
+off echoes of a frivolous world.  But to-night there was something 
+wrong.
+
+The casino band was playing a waltz--a waltz.  What a fool he had been 
+to tear deliberately ten years of his life from the calendar of 
+existence for one who had given him up for the false joys that wealth-
+-"tum ti tum ti tum ti"--how did that waltz go?  But those years had 
+not been sacrificed--had they not brought him the star and pearl of 
+all the world, the youngest and beautifulest of--
+"But do not come on Thursday evening," she had insisted.  Perhaps by 
+now she would be moving slowly and gracefully to the strains of that 
+waltz, held closely by West-Pointers or city commuters, while he, who 
+had read in her eyes things that had recompensed him for ten lost 
+years of life, moped like some wild animal in its mountain den.  Why 
+should--"
+
+"Damn it," said the hermit, suddenly, "I'll do it!"
+
+He threw down his Marcus Aurelius and threw off his gunny-sack toga.  
+he dragged a dust-covered trunk from a corner of the cave, and with 
+difficulty wrenched open its lid.
+
+Candles he had in plenty, and the cave was soon aglow.  Clothes--ten 
+years old in cut--scissors, razors, hats, shoes, all his discarded 
+attire and belongings, were dragged ruthlessly from their renunciatory 
+rest and strewn about in painful disorder.
+
+A pair of scissors soon reduced his beard sufficiently for the dulled 
+razors to perform approximately their office.  Cutting his own hair 
+was beyond the hermit's skill.  So he only combed and brushed it 
+backward as smoothly as he could.  Charity forbids us to consider the 
+heartburnings and exertions of one so long removed from haberdashery 
+and society.
+
+At the last the hermit went to an inner corner of his cave and began 
+to dig in the soft earth with a long iron spoon.  Out of the cavity he 
+thus made he drew a tin can, and out of the can three thousand dollars 
+in bills, tightly rolled and wrapped in oiled silk.  He was a real 
+hermit, as this may assure you.
+
+You may take a brief look at him as he hastens down the little 
+mountain-side.  A long, wrinkled black frock-coat reached to his 
+calves.  White duck trousers, unacquainted with the tailor's goose, a 
+pink shirt, white standing collar with brilliant blue butterfly tie, 
+and buttoned congress gaiters.  But think, sir and madam--ten years!  
+>From beneath a narrow-brimmed straw hat with a striped band flowed his 
+hair.  Seeing him, with all your shrewdness you could not have guessed 
+him.  You would have said that he played Hamlet--or the tuba--or 
+pinochle--you would never have laid your hand on your heart and said: 
+"He is a hermit who lived ten years in a cave for love of one lady--to 
+win another."
+
+The dancing pavilion extended above the waters of the river.  Gay 
+lanterns and frosted electric globes shed a soft glamour within it.  A 
+hundred ladies and gentlemen from the inn and summer cottages flitted 
+in and about it.  To the left of the dusty roadway down which the 
+hermit had tramped were the inn and grill-room.  Something seemed to 
+be on there, too.  The windows were brilliantly lighted, and music was 
+playing--music different from the two-steps and waltzes of the casino 
+band.
+
+A negro man wearing a white jacket came through the iron gate, with 
+its immense granite posts and wrought-iron lamp-holders.
+
+"What is going on here to-night?" asked the hermit.
+
+"Well, sah," said the servitor, "dey is having de reg'lar Thursday-
+evenin' dance in de casino.  And in de grill-room dere's a beefsteak 
+dinner, sah."
+
+The hermit glanced up at the inn on the hillside whence burst suddenly 
+a triumphant strain of splendid harmony.
+
+"And up there," said he, "they are playing Mendelssohn--what is going 
+on up there?"
+
+"Up in de inn," said the dusky one, "dey is a weddin' goin' on.  Mr.  
+Binkley, a mighty rich man, am marryin' Miss Trenholme, sah--de young 
+lady who am quite de belle of de place, sah."
+
+
+
+
+HE ALSO SERVES
+
+
+
+If I could have a thousand years--just one little thousand years--more 
+of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to 
+touch the hem of her robe.
+
+Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and 
+garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of 
+the things they have seen and considered.  The recording of their 
+tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers.  There are only 
+two fates I dread--deafness and writer's cramp.  The hand is yet 
+steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in 
+the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp-follower 
+of fortune.
+
+Biography shall claim you but an instant--I first knew Hunky when he 
+was head-waiter at Chubb's little beefsteak restaurant and cafe on 
+Third Avenue.  There was only one waiter besides.
+
+Then, successively, I caromed against him in the little streets of the 
+Big City after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a treasure-
+seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a pearl-fisher 
+in the Arkansas River.  Between these dashes into the land of 
+adventure he usually came back to Chubb's for a while.  Chubb's was a 
+port for him when gales blew too high; but when you dined there and 
+Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he would come to 
+anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago.  You wouldn't 
+care for his description--he was soft of voice and hard of face, and 
+rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any approach to a 
+disturbance among Chubb's customers.
+
+One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street 
+and Third Avenue after an absence of several months.  In ten minutes 
+we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my ears 
+began to get busy.  I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw 
+Hunky's word-of-mouth blows--it all came to something like this:
+
+"Speaking of the next election," said Hunky, "did you ever know much 
+about Indians? No? I don't mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or 
+Laughing Water kind-I mean the modern Indian--the kind that takes 
+Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the half-back on the other side in 
+football games.  The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the 
+afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills up 
+on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the 
+ancestral wickiup.
+
+"Well, they ain't so bad.  I like 'em better than most foreigners that 
+have come over in the last few hundred years.  One thing about the 
+Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own 
+vices for them of the pale-faces--and he retains all his own virtues.  
+Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets 
+'em loose.  But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep 
+their own vices--and it's going to take our whole standing army some 
+day to police that gang.
+
+"But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High jack 
+Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania 
+college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent 
+kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with turned-back cuffs.  He was 
+a friend of mine.  I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during 
+the land boom, and we got thick.  He had got all there was out of 
+colleges and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt.  He was a 
+man of first-class style and wrote essays, and had been invited to 
+visit rich guys' houses in Boston and such places.
+
+"There was a Cherokee girl in Muscogee that High Jack was foolish 
+about.  He took me to see her a few times.  Her name was Florence Blue 
+Feather--but you want to clear your mind of all ideas of squaws with 
+nose-rings and army blankets.  This young lady was whiter than you 
+are, and better educated than I ever was.  You couldn't have told her 
+from any of the girls shopping in the swell Third Avenue stores.  I 
+liked her so well that, I got to calling on her now and then when High 
+Jack wasn't along, which is the way of friends in such matters.  She 
+was educated at the Muscogee College, and was making a specialty of--
+let's see--eth--yes, ethnology.  That's the art that goes back and 
+traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from 
+jelly-fish through monkeys and to the O'Briens.  High Jack had took up 
+that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of 
+riotous assemblies--Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder-parties, and 
+such.  Having a mutual taste for musty information like that was what 
+made 'em like each other, I suppose.  But I don't know!  What they 
+call congeniality of tastes ain't always it.  Now, when Miss Blue 
+Feather and me was talking together, I listened to her affidavits 
+about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins german 
+(well, if the Germans don't nod, who does?) to the mound-builders of 
+Ohio with incomprehension and respect.  And when I'd tell her about 
+the Bowery and Coney Island, and sing her a few songs that I'd heard 
+the Jamaica niggers sing at their church lawn-parties, she didn't look 
+much less interested than she did when High Jack would tell her that 
+he had a pipe that the first inhabitants of America originally arrived 
+here on stilts after a freshet at Tenafly, New Jersey.
+
+"But I was going to tell you more about High Jack.
+
+"About six months ago I get a letter from him, saying he'd been 
+commissioned by the Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology at Washington 
+to go down to Mexico and translate some excavations or dig up the 
+meaning of some shorthand notes on some ruins--or something of that 
+sort.  And if I'd go along he could squeeze the price into the expense 
+account.
+
+"Well, I'd been holding a napkin over my arm at Chubb's about long 
+enough then, so I wired High Jack 'Yes'; and he sent me a ticket, and 
+I met him in Washington, and he had a lot of news to tell me.  First 
+of all, was that Florence Blue Feather had suddenly disappeared from 
+her home and environments.
+
+"'Run away?' I asked.
+
+"'Vanished,' says High Jack.  'Disappeared like your shadow when the 
+sun goes under a cloud.  She was seen on the street, and then she 
+turned a corner and nobody ever seen her afterward.  The whole 
+community turned out to look for her, but we never found a clew.'
+
+"'That's bad--that's bad,' says I.  'She was a mighty nice girl, and 
+as smart as you find em.
+
+"High Jack seemed to take it hard.  I guess he must have esteemed Miss 
+Blue Feather quite highly.  I could see that he'd referred the matter 
+to the whiskey-jug.  That was his weak point--and many another man's.  
+I've noticed that when a man loses a girl he generally takes to drink 
+either just before or just after it happens.
+
+"From Washington we railroaded it to New Orleans, and there took a 
+tramp steamer bound for Belize.  And a gale pounded us all down the 
+Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a 
+little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula.   Suppose the 
+ship had run against that name in the dark!
+
+"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cyclone in the bay,' says High 
+Jack Snakefeeder.  So we get the captain to send us ashore in a dory 
+when the squall seemed to cease from squalling.
+
+"'We will find ruins here or make 'em,' says High.  'The Government 
+doesn't care which we do.  An appropriation is an appropriation.'
+
+"Boca de Coacoyula was a dead town.  Them biblical towns we read 
+about--Tired and Siphon--after they was destroyed, they must have 
+looked like Forty-second Street and Broadway compared to this Boca 
+place.  It still claimed 1300 inhabitants as estimated and engraved on 
+the stone court-house by the census-taker in 1597.  The citizens were 
+a mixture of Indians and other Indians; but some of 'em was light-
+colored, which I was surprised to see.  The town was huddled up on the 
+shore, with woods so thick around it that a subpoena-server couldn't 
+have reached a monkey ten yards away with the papers.  We wondered 
+what kept it from being annexed to Kansas; but we soon found out that 
+it was Major Bing.
+
+"Major Bing was the ointment around the fly.  He had the cochineal, 
+sarsaparilla, log-wood, annatto, hemp, and all other dye-woods and 
+pure food adulteration concessions cornered.  He had five-sixths of 
+the Boca de Thingama jiggers working for him on shares.  It was a 
+beautiful graft.  We used to brag about Morgan and E.  H.  and others 
+of our wisest when I was in the provinces--but now no more.  That 
+peninsula has got our little country turned into a submarine without 
+even the observation tower showing.
+
+"Major Bing's idea was this.  He had the population go forth into the 
+forest and gather these products.  When they brought 'em in he gave 
+'em one-fifth for their trouble.  Sometimes they'd strike and demand a 
+sixth.  The Major always gave in to 'em.
+
+"The Major had a bungalow so close on the sea that the nine-inch tide 
+seeped through the cracks in the kitchen floor.  Me and him and High 
+Jack Snakefeeder sat on the porch and drank rum from noon till 
+midnight.  He said he had piled up $300,000 in New Orleans banks, and 
+High and me could stay with him forever if we would.  But High Jack 
+happened to think of the United States, and began to talk ethnology.
+
+"'Ruins!' says Major Bing.  'The woods are full of 'em.  I don't know 
+how far they date back, but they was here before I came.'
+
+"High Jack asks what form of worship the citizens of that locality are 
+addicted to.
+
+"'Why,' says the Major, rubbing his nose, 'I can't hardly say.  I 
+imagine it's infidel or Aztec or Nonconformist or something like that.  
+There's a church here--a Methodist or some other kind--with a parson 
+named Skidder.  He claims to have converted the people to 
+Christianity.  He and me don't assimilate except on state occasions.  
+I imagine they worship some kind of gods or idols yet.  But Skidder 
+says he has 'em in the fold.'
+
+"A few days later High Jack and me, prowling around, strikes a plain 
+path into the forest, and follows it a good four miles.  Then a branch 
+turns to the left.  We go a mile, maybe, down that, and run up against 
+the finest ruin you ever saw--solid stone with trees and vines and 
+under-brush all growing up against it and in it and through it.  All 
+over it was chiselled carvings of funny beasts and people that would 
+have been arrested if they'd ever come out in vaudeville that way.  We 
+approached it from the rear.
+
+"High Jack had been drinking too much rum ever since we landed in 
+Boca.  You know how an Indian is--the palefaces fixed his clock when 
+they introduced him to firewater.  He'd brought a quart along with 
+him.
+
+"'Hunky,' says he, 'we'll explore the ancient temple.  It may be that 
+the storin that landed us here was propitious.  The Minority Report 
+Bureau of Ethnology,' says he, 'may yet profit by the vagaries of wind 
+and tide.'
+
+"We went in the rear door of the bum edifice.  We struck a kind of 
+alcove without bath.  There was a granite davenport, and a stone wash-
+stand without any soap or exit for the water, and some hardwood pegs 
+drove into holes in the wall, and that was all.  To go out of that 
+furnished apartment into a Harlem hall bedroom would make you feel 
+like getting back home from an amateur violoncello solo at an East 
+Side Settlement house.
+
+"While High was examining some hieroglyphics on the wall that the 
+stone-masons must have made when their tools slipped, I stepped into 
+the front room.  That was at least thirty by fifty feet, stone floor, 
+six little windows like square port-holes that didn't let much light 
+in.
+
+"I looked back over my shoulder, and sees High Jack's face three feet 
+away.
+
+"'High,' says I, 'of all the--'
+
+"And then I noticed he looked funny, and I turned around.
+
+"He'd taken off his clothes to the waist, and he didn't seem to hear 
+me.  I touched him, and came near beating it.  High Jack had turned to 
+stone.  I had been drinking some rum myself.
+
+"'Ossified!' I says to him, loudly.  'I knew what would happen if you 
+kept it up.'
+
+"And then High Jack comes in from the alcove when he hears me 
+conversing with nobody, and we have a look at Mr.  Snakefeeder No.  2.  
+It's a stone idol, or god, or revised statute or something, and it 
+looks as much like High Jack as one green pea looks like itself.  It's 
+got exactly his face and size and color, but it's steadier on its 
+pins.  It stands on a kind of rostrum or pedestal, and you can see 
+it's been there ten million years.
+
+"'He's a cousin of mine,' sings High, and then he turns solemn.
+
+"'Hunky,' he says, putting one hand on my shoulder and one on the 
+statue's, 'I'm in the holy temple of my ancestors.'
+
+"'Well, if looks goes for anything,' says I, 'you've struck a twin.  
+Stand side by side with buddy, and let's see if there's any 
+diff'erence.'
+
+"There wasn't.  You know an Indian can keep his face as still as an 
+iron dog's when he wants to, so when High Jack froze his features you 
+couldn't have told him from the other one.
+
+"'There's some letters,' says I, 'on his nob's pedestal, but I can't 
+make 'em out.  The alphabet of this country seems to be composed of 
+sometimes a, e, I, o, and u, but generally z's, l's, and t's.'
+
+"High Jack's ethnology gets the upper hand of his rum for a minute, 
+and he investigates the inscription.
+
+"'Hunky,' says he, 'this is a statue of Tlotopaxl, one of the most 
+powerful gods of the ancient Aztecs.'
+
+"'Glad to know him,' says I, 'but in his present condition he reminds 
+me of the joke Shakespeare got off on Julius Caesar.  We might say 
+about your friend:
+
+  "'Imperious what's-his-name, dead and tunied to stone--
+  No use to write or call him on the 'phone.'
+
+"'Hunky,' says High Jack Snakefeeder, looking at me funny, 'do you 
+believe in reincarnation?'
+
+"'It sounds to me,' says I, 'like either a clean-up of the slaughter-
+houses or a new kind of Boston pink.  I don't know.'
+
+"'I believe,' says he, 'that I am the reincarnation of Tlotopaxl.  My 
+researches have convinced me that the Cherokees, of all the North 
+American tribes, can boast of the straightest descent from the proud 
+Aztec race.  That,' says he, 'was a favorite theory of mine and 
+Florence Blue Feather's.  And she--what' if she--!'
+
+"High Jack grabs my arm and walls his eyes at me.  Just then he looked 
+more like his eminent co-Indian murderer, Crazy Horse.
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'what if she, what if she, what if she? You're 
+drunk,' says I.  'Impersonating idols and believing in--what was it ?-
+-recarnalization?  Let's have a drink,' says I.  'It's as spooky here 
+as a Brooklyn artificial-limb factory at midnight with the gas turned 
+down.'
+
+"Just then I heard somebody coming, and I dragged High Jack into the 
+bedless bedchamber.  There was peep-holes bored through the wall, so 
+we could see the whole front part of the temple.
+
+Major Bing told me afterward that the ancient priests in charge used 
+to rubber through them at the congregation.
+
+"In a few minutes an old Indian woman came in with a' big oval earthen 
+dish full of grub.  She set it on a square block of stone in front of 
+the graven image, and laid down and walloped her face on the floor a 
+few times, and then took a walk for herself.
+
+"High Jack and me was hungry, so we came out and looked it over.  
+There was goat steaks and fried rice-cakes, and plantains and cassava, 
+and broiled land-crabs and mangoes--nothing like what you get at 
+Chubb's.
+
+"We ate hearty--and had another round of rum.
+
+"'It must be old Tecumseh's--or whatever you call him--birthday,' says 
+I.  'Or do they feed him every day?  I thought gods only drank vanilla 
+on Mount Catawampus.'
+
+"Then some more native parties in short kimonos that showed their 
+aboriginees punctured the near-horizon, and me and High had to skip 
+back into Father Axletree's private boudoir.  They came by ones, twos, 
+and threes, and left all sorts of offerings--there was enough grub for 
+Bingham's nine gods of war, with plenty left over for the Peace 
+Conference at The Hague.  They brought jars of honey, and bunches of 
+bananas, and bottles of wine, and stacks of tortillas, and beautiful 
+shawls worth one hundred dollars apiece that the Indian women weave of 
+a kind of vegetable fibre like silk.  All of 'em got down and wriggled 
+on the floor in front of that hard-finish god, and then sneaked off 
+through the woods again.
+
+"'I wonder who gets this rake-off?' remarks High Jack.
+
+"'Oh,' says I, 'there's priests or deputy idols or a committee of 
+disarrangements somewhere in the woods on the job.  Wherever you find 
+a god you'll find somebody waiting to take charge of the burnt 
+offerings.'
+
+"And then we took another swig of rum and walked out to the parlor 
+front door to cool off, for it was as hot inside as a summer camp on 
+the Palisades.
+
+"And while we stood there in the breeze we looks down the path and 
+sees a young lady approaching the blasted ruin.  She was bare-footed 
+and had on a white robe, and carried a wreath of white flowers in her 
+hand.  When she got nearer we saw she had a long blue feather stuck 
+through her black hair.  And when she got nearer still me and High 
+Jack Snakefeeder grabbed each other to keep from tumbling down on the 
+floor; for the girl's face was as much like Florence Blue Feather's as 
+his was like old King Toxicology's.
+
+"And then was when High Jack's booze drowned his system of ethnology.  
+He dragged me inside back of the statue, and says:
+
+"'Lay hold of it, Hunky.  We'll pack it into the other room.  I felt 
+it all the time,' says he.  'I'm the reconsideration of the god 
+Locomotorataxia, and Florence Blue Feather was my bride a thousand 
+years ago.  She has come to seek me in the temple where I used to 
+reign.'
+
+"'All right,' says I.  'There's no use arguing against the rum 
+question.  You take his feet.'
+
+"We lifted the three-hundred-pound stone god, and carried him into the 
+back room of the cafe--the temple, I mean--and leaned him against the 
+wall.  It was more work than bouncing three live ones from an all-
+night Broadway joint on New-Year's Eve.
+
+"Then High Jack ran out and brought in a couple of them Indian silk 
+shawls and began to undress himself.
+
+"'Oh, figs!' says I.  'Is it thus?  Strong drink is an adder and 
+subtractor, too.  Is it the heat or the call of the wild that's got 
+you ?'
+
+"But High Jack is too full of exaltation and cane-juice to reply.  He 
+stops the disrobing business just short of the Manhattan Beach rules, 
+and then winds them red-and-white shawls around him, and goes out and.  
+stands on the pedestal as steady as any platinum deity you ever saw.  
+And I looks through a peek-hole to see what he is up to.
+
+"In a few minutes in comes the girl with the flower wreath.  Danged if 
+I wasn't knocked a little silly when she got close, she looked so 
+exactly much like Florence Blue Feather.  'I wonder,' says I to 
+myself, 'if she has been reincarcerated, too?  If I could see,' says I 
+to myself, 'whether she has a mole on her left--' But the next minute 
+I thought she looked one-eighth of a shade darker than Florence; but 
+she looked good at that.  And High Jack hadn't drunk all the rum that 
+had been drank.
+
+"The girl went up within ten feet of the bum idol, and got down and 
+massaged her nose with the floor, like the rest did.  Then she went 
+nearer and laid the flower wreath on the block of stone at High Jack's 
+feet.  Rummy as I was, I thought it was kind of nice of her to think 
+of offering flowers instead of household and kitchen provisions.  Even 
+a stone god ought to appreciate a little sentiment like that on top of 
+the fancy groceries they had piled up in front of him.
+
+"And then High Jack steps down from his pedestal, quiet, and mentions 
+a few words that sounded just like the hieroglyphics carved on the 
+walls of the ruin.  The girl gives a little jump backward, and her 
+eyes fly open as big as doughnuts; but she don't beat it.
+
+"Why didn't she?  I'll tell you why I think why.  It don't seem to a 
+girl so supernatural, unlikely, strange, and startling that a stone 
+god should come to life for her.  If he was to do it for one of them 
+snub-nosed brown girls on the other side of the woods, now, it would 
+be different--but her!  I'll bet she said to herself:
+
+'Well, goodness me! you've been a long time getting on your job.  I've 
+half a mind not to speak to you.'
+
+"But she and High Jack holds hands and walks away out of the temple 
+together.  By the time I'd had time to take another drink and enter 
+upon the scene they was twenty yards away, going up the path in the 
+woods that the girl had come down.  With the natural scenery already 
+in place, it was just like a play to watch 'em--she looking up at him, 
+and him giving her back the best that an Indian can hand, out in the 
+way of a goo-goo eye.  But there wasn't anything in that 
+recarnification and revulsion to tintype for me.
+
+"'Hey! Injun!' I yells out to High Jack.
+
+'We've got a board-bill due in town, and you're leaving me without a 
+cent.  Brace up and cut out the Neapolitan fisher-maiden, and let's go 
+back home.'
+
+"But on the two goes; without looking once back until, as you might 
+say, the forest swallowed 'em up.  And I never saw or heard of High 
+Jack Snakefeeder from that day to this.  I don't know if the Cherokees 
+came from the Aspics; but if they did, one of 'em went back.
+
+"All I could do was to hustle back to that Boca place and panhandle 
+Major Bing.  He detached himself from enough of his winnings to buy me 
+a ticket home.  And I'm back again on the job at Chubb's, sir, and I'm 
+going to hold it steady.  Come round, and you'll find the steaks as 
+good as ever."
+
+I wondered what Hunky Magee thought about his own story; so I asked 
+him if he had any theories about reincarnation and transmogrification 
+and such mysteries as he had touched upon.
+
+"Nothing like that," said Hunky, positively.  "What ailed High Jack 
+was too much booze and education.  They'll do an Indian up every 
+time."
+
+"But what about Miss Blue Feather?" I persisted.
+
+"Say," said Hunky, with a grin, "that little lady that stole High Jack 
+certainly did give me a jar when I first took a look at her, but it 
+was only for a minute.  You remember I told you High Jack said that 
+Miss Florence Blue Feather disappeared from home about a year ago?  
+Well, where she landed four days later was in as neat a five-room flat 
+on East Twenty-third Street as you ever walked sideways through--and 
+she's been Mrs.  Magee ever since."
+
+
+
+
+THE MOMENT OF VICTORY
+
+
+
+Ben Granger is a war veteran aged twenty-nine--which should enable you 
+to guess the war.  He is also principal merchant and postmaster of 
+Cadiz, a little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico 
+perpetually blow.
+
+Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater 
+Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a 
+corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air 
+college in which the Filipino was schooled.  Now, with his bayonet 
+beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal's guard of 
+cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the 
+matted jungles of Mindanao.  Always have his interest and choice been 
+for deeds rather than for words; but the consideration and digestion 
+of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will 
+attest.
+
+"What is it," he asked me one moonlit eve, as we sat among his boxes 
+and barrels, "that generally makes men go through dangers, and fire, 
+and trouble, and starvation, and battle, and such rucouses?  What does 
+a man do it for?  Why does he try to outdo his fellow-humans, and be 
+braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his best 
+friends are?  What's his game?  What does he expect to get out of it?  
+He don't do it just for the fresh air and exercise.  What would you 
+say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for 
+his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in 
+the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields, 
+links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and vice versa places 
+of the world?"
+
+"Well, Ben," said I, with judicial seriousness, "I think we might 
+safely limit the number of motives of a man who seeks fame to three-to 
+ambition, which is a desire for popular applause; to avarice, which 
+looks to the material side of success; and to love of some woman whom 
+he either possesses or desires to possess."
+
+Ben pondered over my words while a mocking-bird on the top of a 
+mesquite by the porch trilled a dozen bars.
+
+"I reckon," said he, "that your diagnosis about covers the case 
+according to the rules laid down in the copy-books and historical 
+readers.  But what I had in my mind was the case of Willie Robbins, a 
+person I used to know.  I'll tell you about him before I close up the 
+store, if you don't mind listening.
+
+"Willie was one of our social set up in San Augustine.  I was clerking 
+there then for Brady & Murchison, wholesale dry-goods and ranch 
+supplies.  Willie and I belonged to the same german club and athletic 
+association and military company.  He played the triangle in our 
+serenading and quartet crowd that used to ring the welkin three nights 
+a week somewhere in town.
+
+"Willie jibed with his name considerable.  He weighed about as much as 
+a hundred pounds of veal in his summer suitings, and he had a 'where-
+is-Mary?' expression on his features so plain that you could almost 
+see the wool growing on him.
+
+"And yet you couldn't fence him away from the girls with barbed wire.  
+You know that kind of young fellows-a kind of a mixture of fools and 
+angels-they rush in and fear to tread at the same time; but they never 
+fail to tread when they get the chance.  He was always on hand when 'a 
+joyful occasion was had,' as the morning paper would say, looking as 
+happy as a king full, and at the same time as uncomfortable as a raw 
+oyster served with sweet pickles.  He danced like he had hind hobbles 
+on; and he had a vocabulary of about three hundred and fifty words 
+that he made stretch over four germans a week, and plagiarized from to 
+get him through two ice-cream suppers and a Sunday-night call.  He 
+seemed to me to be a sort of a mixture of Maltese kitten, sensitive 
+plant, and a member of a stranded Two Orphans company.
+
+"I'll give you an estimate of his physiological and pictorial make-up, 
+and then I'll stick spurs into the sides of my narrative.
+
+"Willie inclined to the Caucasian in his coloring and manner of style.  
+His hair was opalescent and his conversation fragmentary.  His eyes 
+were the same blue shade as the china dog's on the right-hand corner 
+of your Aunt Ellen's mantelpiece.  He took things as they come, and I 
+never felt any hostility against him.  I let him live, and so did 
+others.
+
+"But what does this Willie do but coax his heart out of his boots and 
+lose it to Myra Allison, the liveliest, brightest, keenest, smartest, 
+and prettiest girl in San Augustine.  I tell you, she had the blackest 
+eyes, the shiniest curls, and the most tantalizing-- Oh, no, you're 
+off--I wasn't a victim.  I might have been, but I knew better.  I kept 
+out.  Joe Granberry was It from the start.  He had everybody else beat 
+a couple of leagues and thence east to a stake and mound.  But, 
+anyhow, Myra was a nine-pound, full-merino, fall-clip fleece, sacked 
+and loaded on a four-horse team for San Antone.
+
+"One night there was an ice-cream sociable at Mrs.  Colonel 
+Spraggins', in San Augustine.  We fellows had a big room up-stairs 
+opened up for us to put our hats and things in, and to comb our hair 
+and put on the clean collars we brought along inside the sweat-bands 
+of our hats-in short, a room to fix up in just like they have 
+everywhere at high-toned doings.  A little farther down the hall was 
+the girls' room, which they used to powder up in, and so forth.  
+Downstairs we--that is, the San Augustine Social Cotillion and 
+Merrymakers' Club--had a stretcher put down in the parlor where our 
+dance was going on.
+
+"Willie Robbins and me happened to be up in our--cloak-room, I believe 
+we called it when Myra Allison skipped through the hall on her way 
+down-stairs from the girls' room.  Willie was standing before the 
+mirror, deeply interested in smoothing down the blond grass-plot on 
+his head, which seemed to give him lots of trouble.  Myra was always 
+full of life and devilment.  She stopped and stuck her head in our 
+door.  She certainly was good-looking.  But I knew how Joe Granberry 
+stood with her.  So did Willie; but he kept on ba-a-a-ing after her 
+and following her around.  He had a system of persistence that didn't 
+coincide with pale hair and light eyes.
+
+"'Hello, Willie!' says Myra.  'What are you doing to yourself in the 
+glass?'
+
+"I'm trying to look fly,' says Willie.
+
+"'Well, you never could be fly,' says Myra, with her special laugh, 
+which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an 
+empty canteen against my saddle-horn.
+
+"I looked around at Willie after Myra had gone.  He had a kind of a 
+lily-white look on him which seemed to show that her remark had, as 
+you might say, disrupted his soul.  I never noticed anything in what 
+she said that sounded particularly destructive to a man's ideas of 
+self-consciousness; but he was set back to an extent you could 
+scarcely imagine.
+
+"After we went down-stairs with our clean collars on, Willie never 
+went near Myra again that night.  After all, he seemed to be a diluted 
+kind of a skim-milk sort of a chap, and I never wondered that Joe 
+Granberry beat him out.
+
+"The next day the battleship Maine was blown up, and then pretty soon 
+somebody-I reckon it was Joe Bailey, or Ben Tillman, or maybe the 
+Government-declared war against Spain.
+
+"Well, everybody south of Mason & Hamlin's line knew that the North by 
+itself couldn't whip a whole country the size of Spain.  So the 
+Yankees commenced to holler for help, and the Johnny Rebs answered the 
+call.  'We're coming, Father William, a hundred thousand strong--and 
+then some,' was the way they sang it.  And the old party lines drawn 
+by Sherman's march and the Kuklux and nine-cent cotton and the Jim 
+Crow street-car ordinances faded away.  We became one undivided.  
+country, with no North, very little East, a good-sized chunk of West, 
+and a South that loomed up as big as the first foreign label on a new 
+eight-dollar suit-case.
+
+"Of course the dogs of war weren't a complete pack without a yelp from 
+the San Augustine Rifles, Company D, of the Fourteenth Texas Regiment.  
+Our company was among the first to land in Cuba and strike terror into 
+the hearts of the foe.  I'm not going to give you a history of the 
+war, I'm just dragging it in to fill out my story about Willie 
+Robbins, just as the Republican party dragged it in to help out the 
+
+election in 1898.
+
+"If anybody ever had heroitis, it was that Willie Robbins.  From the 
+minute he set foot on the soil of the tyrants of Castile he seemed to 
+engulf danger as a cat laps up cream.  He certainly astonished every 
+man in our company, from the captain up.  You'd have expected him to 
+gravitate naturally to the job of an orderly to the colonel, or 
+typewriter in the commissary--but not any.  He created the part of the 
+flaxen-haired boy hero who lives and gets back home with the goods, 
+instead of dying with an important despatch in his hands at his 
+colonel's feet.
+
+"Our company got into a section of Cuban scenery where one of the 
+messiest and most unsung portions of the campaign occurred.  We were 
+out every day capering around in the bushes, and having little 
+skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kind of 
+tired-out feuds than anything else.  The war was a joke to us, and of 
+no interest to them.  We never could see it any other way than as a 
+howling farce-comedy that the San Augustine Rifles were actually 
+fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes.  And the blamed little 
+senors didn't get enough pay to make them care whether they were 
+patriots or traitors.  Now and then somebody would get killed.  It 
+seemed like a waste of life to me.  I was at Coney Island when I went 
+to New York once, and one of them down-hill skidding apparatuses they 
+call 'roller-coasters' flew the track and killed a man in a brown 
+sack-suit.  Whenever the Spaniards shot one of our men, it struck me 
+as just about as unnecessary and regrettable as that was.
+
+"But I'm dropping Willie Robbins out of the conversation.
+
+"He was out for bloodshed, laurels, ambition, medals, recommendations, 
+and all other forms of military glory.  And he didn't seem to be 
+afraid of any of the recognized forms of military danger, such as 
+Spaniards, cannon-balls, canned beef, gunpowder, or nepotism.  He went 
+forth with his pallid hair and china-blue eyes and ate up Spaniards 
+like you would sardines a la canopy.  Wars and rumbles of wars never 
+flustered him.  He would stand guard-duty, mosquitoes, hardtack, 
+treat, and fire with equally perfect unanimity.  No blondes in history 
+ever come in comparison distance of him except the Jack of Diamonds 
+and Queen Catherine of Russia.
+
+"I remember, one time, a little caballard of Spanish men sauntered out 
+from behind a patch of sugar-cane and shot Bob Turner, the first 
+sergeant of our company, while we were eating dinner.  As required by 
+the army regulations, we fellows went through the usual tactics of 
+falling into line, saluting the enemy, and loading and firing, 
+kneeling.
+
+"That wasn't the Texas way of scrapping; but, being a very important 
+addendum and annex to the regular army, the San Augustine Rifles had 
+to conform to the red-tape system of getting even.
+
+"By the time we had got out our 'Upton's Tactics,' turned to page 
+fifty-seven, said 'one--two--three--one--two--three' a couple of 
+times, and got blank cartridges into our Springfields, the Spanish 
+outfit had smiled repeatedly, rolled and lit cigarettes by squads, and 
+walked away contemptuously.
+
+"I went straight to Captain Floyd, and says to him: 'Sam, I don't 
+think this war is a straight game.  You know as well as I do that Bob 
+Turner was one of the whitest fellows that ever threw a leg over a 
+saddle, and now these wirepullers in Washington have fixed his clock.  
+He's politically and ostensibly dead.  It ain't fair.  Why should they 
+keep this thing up?  If they want Spain licked, why don't they turn 
+the San Augustine Rifles and Joe Seely's ranger company and a car-load 
+of West Texas deputy-sheriffs onto these Spaniards, and let us 
+exonerate them from the face of the earth?  I never did,' says I, 
+'care much about fighting by the Lord Chesterfield ring rules.  I'm 
+going to hand in my resignation and go home if anybody else I am 
+personally acquainted with gets hurt in this war.  If you can get 
+somebody in my place, Sam,' says I, 'I'll quit the first of next week.  
+I don't want to work in an army that don't give its help a chance.  
+Never mind my wages,' says I; 'let the Secretary of the Treasury keep 
+'em.'
+
+"'Well, Ben,' says the captain to me, 'your allegations and 
+estimations of the tactics of war, government, patriotism, guard-
+mounting, and democracy are all right.  But I've looked into the 
+system of international arbitration and the ethics of justifiable 
+slaughter a little closer, maybe, than you have.  Now, you can hand in 
+your resignation the first of next week if you are so minded.  But if 
+you do,' says Sam, 'I'll order a corporal's guard to take you over by 
+that limestone bluff on the creek and shoot enough lead into you to 
+ballast a submarine air-ship.  I'm captain of this company, and I've 
+swore allegiance to the Amalgamated States regardless of sectional, 
+secessional, and Congressional differences.  Have you got any smoking-
+tobacco?' winds up Sam.  'Mine got wet when I swum the creek this 
+morning.'
+
+"The reason I drag all this non ex parte evidence in is because Willie 
+Robbins was standing there listening to us.  I was a second sergeant 
+and he was a private then, but among us Texans and Westerners there 
+never was as much tactics and subordination as there was in the 
+regular army.  We never called our captain anything but 'Sam' except 
+when there was a lot of major-generals and admirals around, so as to 
+preserve the discipline.
+
+"And says Willie Robbins to me, in a sharp construction of voice much 
+unbecoming to his light hair and previous record:
+
+"'You ought to be shot, Ben, for emitting any such sentiments.  A man 
+that won't fight for his country is worse than a, horse-thief.  If I 
+was the cap, I'd put you in the guard-house for thirty days on round 
+steak and tamales.  War,' says Willie, 'is great and glorious.  I 
+didn't know you were a coward.'
+
+"'I'm not,' says I.  'If I was, I'd knock some of the pallidness off 
+of your marble brow.  I'm lenient with you,' I says, 'just as I am 
+with the Spaniards, because you have always reminded me of something 
+with mushrooms on the side.  Why, you little Lady of Shalott,' says I, 
+'you underdone leader of cotillions, you glassy fashion and moulded 
+form, you white-pine soldier made in the Cisalpine Alps in Germany for 
+the late New-Year trade, do you know of whom you are talking to?  
+We've been in the same social circle,' says I, 'and I've put up with 
+you because you seemed so meek and self-un-satisfying.  I don't 
+understand why you have so sudden taken a personal interest in 
+chivalrousness and murder.  Your nature's undergone a complete 
+revelation.  Now, how is it?'
+
+"'Well, you wouldn't understand, Ben,' says Willie, giving one of his 
+refined smiles and turning away.
+
+"'Come back here!' says I, catching him by the tail of his khaki coat.  
+'You've made me kind of mad, in spite of the aloofness in which I have 
+heretofore held you.  You are out for making a success in this hero 
+business, and I believe I know what for.  You are doing it either 
+because you are crazy or because you expect to catch some girl by it.  
+Now, if it's a girl, I've got something here to show you.'
+
+"I wouldn't have done it, but I was plumb mad.  I pulled a San 
+Augustine paper out of my hip-pocket, and showed him an item.  It was 
+a half a column about the marriage of Myra Allison and Joe Granberry.
+
+"Willie laughed, and I saw I hadn't touched him.
+
+"'Oh,' says he, 'everybody knew that was going to happen.  I heard 
+about that a week ago.'  And then he gave me the laugh again.
+
+"'All right,' says I.  'Then why do you so recklessly chase the bright 
+rainbow of fame? Do you expect to be elected President, or do you 
+belong to a suicide club ?'
+
+"And then Captain Sam interferes.
+
+"'You gentlemen quit jawing and go back to your quarters,' says he, 
+'or I'll have you escorted to the guard-house.  Now, scat, both of 
+you!  Before you go, which one of you has got any chewing-tobacco?'
+
+"'We're off, Sam,' says I.  'It's supper-time, anyhow.  But what do 
+you think of what we was talking about?  I've noticed you throwing out 
+a good many grappling-hooks for this here balloon called fame--  
+What's ambition, anyhow?  What does a man risk his life day after day 
+for?  Do you know of anything he gets in the end that can pay him for 
+the trouble?  I want to go back home,' says I.  'I don't care whether 
+Cuba sinks or swims, and I don't give a pipeful of rabbit tobacco 
+whether Queen Sophia Christina or Charlie Culberson rules these fairy 
+isles; and I don't want my name on any list except the list of 
+survivors.  But I've noticed you, Sam,' says I, 'seeking the bubble 
+notoriety in the cannon's larynx a number of times.  Now, what do you 
+do it for?  Is it ambition, business, or some freckle-faced Pheebe at 
+home that you are heroing for ?'
+
+"'Well, Ben,' says Sam, kind of hefting his sword out from between his 
+knees, 'as your superior officer I could court-martial you for 
+attempted cowardice and desertion.  But I won't.  And I'll tell you 
+why I'm trying for promotion and the usual honors of war and conquest.  
+A major gets more pay than a captain, and I need the money.'
+
+"'Correct for you!' says I.  'I can understand that.  Your system of 
+fame-seeking is rooted in the deepest soil of patriotism.  But I can't 
+comprehend,' says I, 'why Willie Robbins, whose folks at home are well 
+off, and who used to be as meek and undesirous of notice as a cat with 
+cream on his whiskers, should all at once develop into a warrior bold 
+with the most fire-eating kind of proclivities.  And the girl in his 
+case seems to have been eliminated by marriage to another fellow.  I 
+reckon,' says I, 'it's a plain case of just common ambition.  He wants 
+his name, maybe, to go thundering down the coroners of time.  It must 
+be that.'
+
+"Well, without itemizing his deeds, Willie sure made good as a hero.  
+He simply spent most of his time on his knees begging our captain to 
+send him on forlorn hopes and dangerous scouting expeditions.  In 
+every fight he was the first man to mix it at close quarters with the 
+Don Alfonsos.  He got three or four bullets planted in various parts 
+of his autonomy.  Once he went off with a detail of eight men and 
+captured a whole company of Spanish.  He kept Captain Floyd busy 
+writing out recommendations of his bravery to send in to head-
+quarters; and he began to accumulate medals for all kinds of things-
+heroism and target-shooting and valor and tactics and 
+uninsubordination, and all the little accomplishments that look good 
+to the third assistant secretaries of the War Department.
+
+"Finally, Cap Floyd got promoted to be a major-general, or a knight 
+commander of the main herd, or something like that.  He pounded around 
+on a white horse, all desecrated up with gold-leaf and hen-feathers 
+and a Good Templar's hat, and wasn't allowed by the regulations to 
+speak to us.  And Willie Robbins was made captain of our company.
+
+"And maybe he didn't go after the wreath of fame then!  As far as I 
+could see it was him that ended the war.  He got eighteen of us boys--
+friends of his, too--killed in battles that he stirred up himself, and 
+that didn't seem to me necessary at all.  One night he took twelve of 
+us and waded through a little nil about a hundred and ninety yards 
+wide, and climbed a couple of mountains, and sneaked through a mile of 
+neglected shrubbery and a couple of rock-quarries and into a rye-straw 
+village, and captured a Spanish general named, as they said, Benny 
+Veedus.  Benny seemed to me hardly worth the trouble, being a blackish 
+man without shoes or cuffs, and anxious to surrender and throw himself 
+on the commissary of his foe.
+
+"But that job gave Willie the big boost he wanted.  The San Augustine 
+News and the Galveston, St.  Louis, New York, and Kansas City papers 
+printed his picture and columns of stuff about him.  Old San Augustine 
+simply went crazy over its 'gallant son.'  The News had an editorial 
+tearfully begging the Government to call off the regular army and the 
+national guard, and let Willie carry on the rest of the war single-
+handed.  It said that a refusal to do so would be regarded as a proof 
+that the Northern jealousy of the South was still as rampant as ever.
+
+"If the war hadn't ended pretty soon, I don't know to what heights of 
+gold braid and encomiums Willie would have climbed; but it did.  There 
+was a secession of hostilities just three days after he was appointed 
+a colonel, and got in three more medals by registered mail, and shot 
+two Spaniards while they were drinking lemonade in an ambuscade.
+
+"Our company went back to San Augustine when the war was over.  There 
+wasn't anywhere else for it to go.  And what do you think?  The old 
+town notified us in print, by wire cable, special delivery, and a 
+nigger named Saul sent on a gray mule to San Antone, that they was 
+going to give us the biggest blow-out, complimentary, alimentary, and 
+elementary, that ever disturbed the kildees on the sand-flats outside 
+of the immediate contiguity of the city.
+
+"I say 'we,' but it was all meant for ex-Private, Captain de facto, 
+and Colonel-elect Willie Robbins.  The town was crazy about him.  They 
+notified us that the reception they were going to put up would make 
+the Mardi Gras in New Orleans look like an afternoon tea in Bury St.  
+Edmunds with a curate's aunt.
+
+"Well, the San Augustine Rifles got back home on schedule time.  
+Everybody was at the depot giving forth Roosevelt-Democrat--they used 
+to be called Rebel--yells.  There was two brass-bands, and the mayor, 
+and schoolgirls in white frightening the street-car horses by throwing 
+Cherokee roses in the streets, and-well, maybe you've seen a 
+celebration by a town that was inland and out of water.
+
+"They wanted Brevet-Colonel Willie to get into a carriage and be drawn 
+by prominent citizens and some of the city aldermen to the armory, but 
+he stuck to his company and marched at the head of it up Sam Houston 
+Avenue.  The buildings on both sides was covered with flags and 
+audiences, and everybody hollered 'Robbins!' or 'Hello, Willie!' as we 
+marched up in files of fours.  I never saw a illustriouser-looking 
+human in my life than Willie was.  He had at least seven or eight 
+medals and diplomas and decorations on the breast of his khaki coat; 
+he was sunburnt the color of a saddle, and he certainly done himself 
+proud.
+
+"They told us at the depot that the courthouse was to be illuminated 
+at half-past seven, and there would be speeches and chili-con-came at 
+the Palace Hotel.  Miss Delphine Thompson was to read an original poem 
+by James Whitcomb Ryan, and Constable Hooker had promised us a salute 
+of nine guns from Chicago that he had arrested that day.
+
+"After we had disbanded in the armory, Willie says to me:
+
+"'Want to walk out a piece with me?'
+
+"'Why, yes,' says I, 'if it ain't so far that we can't hear the tumult 
+and the shouting die away.  I'm hungry myself,' says I, 'and I'm 
+pining for some home grub, but I'll go with you.'
+
+"Willie steered me down some side streets till we came to a little 
+white cottage in a new lot with a twenty-by-thirty-foot lawn decorated 
+with brickbats and old barrel-staves.
+
+"'Halt and give the countersign,' says I to Willie.  'Don't you know 
+this dugout?  It's the bird's-nest that Joe Granberry built before he 
+married Myra Allison.  What you going there for?'
+
+"But Willie already had the gate open.  He walked up the brick walk to 
+the steps, and I went with him.  Myra was sitting in a rocking-chair 
+on the porch, sewing.  Her hair was smoothed back kind of hasty and 
+tied in a knot.  I never noticed till then that she had freckles.  Joe 
+was at one side of the porch, in his shirtsleeves, with no collar on, 
+and no signs of a shave, trying to scrape out a hole among the 
+brickbats and tin cans to plant a little fruit-tree in.  He looked up 
+but never said a word, and neither did Myra.
+
+"Willie was sure dandy-looking in his uniform, with medals strung on 
+his breast and his new gold-handled sword.  You'd never have taken him 
+for the little white-headed snipe that the girls used to order about 
+and make fun of.  He just stood there for a minute, looking at Myra 
+with a peculiar little smile on his face; and then he says to her, 
+slow, and kind of holding on to his words with his teeth:
+
+"'Oh, I don't know!  Maybe I could if I tried!'
+
+"That was all that was said.  Willie raised his hat, and we walked 
+away.
+
+"And, somehow, when he said that, I remembered, all of a sudden, the 
+night of that dance and Willie brushing his hair before the looking-
+glass, and Myra sticking her head in the door to guy him.
+
+"When we got back to Sam Houston Avenue, Willie says:
+
+"'Well, so long, Ben.  I'm going down home and get off my shoes and 
+take a rest.'
+
+"'You?' says I.  'What's the matter with you?  Ain't the court-house 
+jammed with everybody in town waiting to honor the hero?  And two 
+brass-bands, and recitations and flags and jags and grub to follow 
+waiting for you?'
+
+"Willie sighs.
+
+"'All right, Ben,' says he.  'Darned if I didn't forget all about 
+that.'
+
+"And that's why I say," concluded Ben Granger, "that you can't tell 
+where ambition begins any more than you can where it is going to wind 
+up."
+
+
+
+
+THE HEAD-HUNTER
+
+
+
+When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over, I went to the 
+Philippine Islands.  There I remained as bushwhacker correspondent for 
+my paper until its managing editor notified me that an eight-hundred-
+word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao over the death of 
+an infant Moro was not considered by the office to be war news.  So I 
+resigned, and came home.
+
+On board the trading-vessel that brought me back I pondered much upon 
+the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the 
+yellow-brown people.  The manoeuvres and skirmishings of the petty war 
+interested me not: I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable 
+countenance of that race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon 
+us out of an unguessable past.
+
+Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and 
+attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the 
+head-hunters.  Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, 
+but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their 
+concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through 
+unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless 
+chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near with the invisible 
+hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such signs as 
+a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make-a twig crackling in 
+the awful, sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the 
+screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the rushes 
+of a water-level-a hint of death for every mile and every hour-they 
+amused me greatly, those little fellows of one idea.
+
+When you think of it, their method is beautifully and almost 
+hilariously effective and simple.
+
+You have your hut in which you live and carry out the destiny that was 
+decreed for you.  Spiked to the jamb of your bamboo doorway is a 
+basket made of green withes, plaited.  From time to time, as vanity or 
+ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move you, you creep forth 
+with your snickersnee and take up the silent trail.  Back from it you 
+come, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of your victim, which 
+you deposit with pardonable pride in the basket at the side of your 
+door.  It may be the head of your enemy, your friend, or a stranger, 
+according as competition, jealousy, or simple sportiveness has been 
+your incentive to labor.
+
+In any case, your reward is certain.  The village men, in passing, 
+stop to congratulate you, as your neighbor on weaker planes of life 
+stops to admire and praise the begonias in your front yard.  Your 
+particular brown maid lingers, with fluttering bosom, casting soft 
+tiger's eyes at the evidence of your love for her.  You chew betel-nut 
+and listen, content, to the intermittent soft drip from the ends of 
+the severed neck arteries.  And you show your teeth and grunt like a 
+water-buffalo--which is as near as you can come to laughing-at the 
+thought that the cold, acephalous body of your door ornament is being 
+spotted by wheeling vultures in the Mindanaoan wilds.
+
+Truly, the life of the merry head-hunter captivated me.  He had 
+reduced art and philosophy to a simple code.  To take your adversary's 
+head, to basket it at the portal of your castle, to see it lying 
+there, a dead thing, with its cunning and stratagems and power gone--  
+Is there a better way to foil his plots, to refute his arguments, to 
+establish your superiority over his skill and wisdom?
+
+The ship that brought me home was captained by an erratic Swede, who 
+changed his course and deposited me, with genuine compassion, in a 
+small town on the Pacific coast of one of the Central American 
+republics, a few hundred miles south of the port to which he had 
+engaged to convey me.  But I was wearied of movement and exotic 
+fancies; so I leaped contentedly upon the firm sands of the village of 
+Mojada, telling myself I should be sure to find there the rest that I 
+craved.  After all, far better to linger there (I thought), lulled by 
+the sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of palm-fronds, than 
+to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home in the East, and 
+there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and scourged by fatuous 
+relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping neighbors sad stories of the 
+death of colonial governors.
+
+
+When I first saw Chloe Greene she was standing, all in white, in the 
+doorway of her father's tile-roofed 'dobe house.  She was polishing a 
+silver cup with a cloth, and she looked like a pearl laid against 
+black velvet.  She turned on me a flatteringly protracted but a 
+wiltingly disapproving gaze, and then went inside, humming a light 
+song to indicate the value she placed upon my existence.
+
+Small wonder: for Dr.  Stamford (the most disreputable professional 
+man between Juneau and Valparaiso) and I were zigzagging along the 
+turfy street, tunelessly singing the words of Auld Lang Syne to the 
+air of Muzzer's Little Coal-Black Coon.  We had come from the ice 
+factory, which was Mojada's palace of wickedness, where we had been 
+playing billiards and opening black bottles, white with frost, that we 
+dragged with strings out of old Sandoval's ice-cold vats.
+
+I turned in sudden rage to Dr.  Stamford, as sober as the verger of a 
+cathedral.  In a moment I had become aware that we were swine cast 
+before a pearl.
+
+"You beast," I said, "this is half your doing.  And the other half is 
+the fault of this cursed country.  I'd better have gone back to 
+Sleepy-town and died in a wild orgy of currant wine and buns than to 
+have had this happen."
+
+Stamford filled the empty street with his roaring laughter.
+
+"You too!" he cried.  "And all as quick as the popping of a cork.  
+Well, she does seem to strike agreeably upon the retina.  But don't 
+burn your fingers.  All Mojada will tell you that Louis Devoe is the 
+man.
+
+"We will see about that," said I.  "And, perhaps, whether he is a man 
+as well as the man."
+
+I lost no time in meeting Louis Devoe.  That was easily accomplished, 
+for the foreign colony in Mojada numbered scarce a dozen; and they 
+gathered daily at a half-decent hotel kept by a Turk, where they 
+managed to patch together the fluttering rags of country and 
+civilization that were left them.  I sought Devoe before I did my 
+pearl of the doorway, because I had learned a little of the game of 
+war, and knew better than to strike for a prize before testing the 
+strength of the enemy.
+
+A sort of cold dismay-something akin to fear-filled me when I had 
+estimated him.  I found a man so perfectly poised, so charming, so 
+deeply learned in the world's rituals, so full of tact, courtesy, and 
+hospitality, so endowed with grace and ease and a kind of careless, 
+haughty power that I almost overstepped the bounds in probing him, in 
+turning him on the spit to find the weak point that I so craved for 
+him to have.  But I left him whole-I had to make bitter acknowledgment 
+to myself that Louis Devoe was a gentleman worthy of my best blows; 
+and I swore to give him them.  He was a great merchant of the country, 
+a wealthy importer and exporter.  All day he sat in a fastidiously 
+appointed office, surrounded by works of art and evidences of his high 
+culture, directing through glass doors and windows the affairs of his 
+house.
+
+In person he was slender and hardly tall.  His small, well-shaped head 
+was covered with thick, brown hair, trimmed short, and he wore a 
+thick, brown beard also cut close and to a fine point.  His manners 
+were a pattern.
+
+Before long I had become a regular and a welcome visitor at the Greene 
+home.  I shook my wild habits from me like a worn-out cloak.  I 
+trained for the conflict with the care of a prize-fighter and the 
+self-denial of a Brahmin.
+
+As for Chloe Greene, I shall weary you with no sonnets to her eyebrow.  
+She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a November pippin, 
+and no more mysterious than a windowpane.  She had whimsical little 
+theories that she had deduced from life, and that fitted the maxims of 
+Epictetus like princess gowns.  I wonder, after all, if that old 
+duffer wasn't rather wise!
+
+Chloe had a father, the Reverend Homer Greene, and an intermittent 
+mother, who sometimes palely presided over a twilight teapot.  The 
+Reverend Homer was a burr-like man with a life-work.  He was writing a 
+concordance to the Scriptures, and had arrived as far as Kings.  
+Being, presumably, a suitor for his daughter's hand, I was timber for 
+his literary outpourings.  I had the family tree of Israel drilled 
+into my head until I used to cry aloud in my sleep: "And Aminadab 
+begat Jay Eye See," and so forth, until he had tackled another book.  
+I once made a calculation that the Reverend Homer's concordance would 
+be worked up as far as the Seven Vials mentioned in Revelations about 
+the third day after they were opened.
+
+Louis Devoe, as well as I, was a visitor and an intimate friend of the 
+Greenes.  It was there I met him the oftenest, and a more agreeable' 
+man or a more accomplished I have never hated in my life.
+
+Luckily or unfortunately, I came to be accepted as a Boy.  My 
+appearance was youthful, and I suppose I had that pleading and 
+homeless air that always draws the motherliness that is in women and 
+the cursed theories and hobbies of pater-familiases.
+
+Chloe called me "Tommy," and made sisterly fun of my attempts to woo 
+her.  With Devoe she was vastly more reserved.  He was the man of 
+romance, one to stir her imagination and deepest feelings had her 
+fancy leaned toward him.  I was closer to her, but standing in no 
+glamour; I had the task before me of winning her in what seems to me 
+the American way of fighting--with cleanness and pluck and everyday 
+devotion to break away the barriers of friendship that divided us, and 
+to take her, if I could, between sunrise and dark, abetted by neither 
+moonlight nor music nor foreign wiles.
+
+Chloe gave no sign of bestowing her blithe affections upon either of 
+us.  But one day she let out to me an inkling of what she preferred in 
+a man.  It was tremendously interesting to me, but not illuminating as 
+to its application.  I had been tormenting her for the dozenth time 
+with the statement and catalogue of my sentiments toward her.
+
+"Tommy," said she, "I don't want a man to show his love for me by 
+leading an army against another country and blowing people off the 
+earth with cannons."
+
+"If you mean that the opposite way," I answered, "as they say women 
+do, I'll see what I can do.  The papers are full of this diplomatic 
+row in Russia.  My people know some big people in Washington who are 
+right next to the army people, and I could get an artillery commission 
+and--"
+
+"I'm not that way," interrupted Chloe.  "I mean what I say.  It isn't 
+the big things that are done in the world, Tommy, that count with a 
+woman.  When the knights were riding abroad in their armor to slay 
+dragons, many a stay-at-home page won a lonesome lady's hand by being 
+on the spot to pick up her glove and be quick with her cloak when the 
+wind blew.  The man I am to like best, whoever he shall be, must show 
+his love in little ways.  He must never forget, after hearing it once, 
+that I do not like to have any one walk at my left side; that I detest 
+bright-colored neckties; that I prefer to sit with my back to a light; 
+that I like candied violets; that I must not be talked to when I am 
+looking at the moonlight shining on water, and that I very, very often 
+long for dates stuffed with English walnuts."
+
+"Frivolity," I said, with a frown.  "Any well-trained servant would be 
+equal to such details."
+
+"And he must remember," went on Chloe, to remind me of what I want 
+when I do not know, myself, what I want."
+
+"You're rising in the scale," I said.  "What you seem to need is a 
+first-class clairvoyant."
+
+"And if I say that I am dying to hear a Beethoven sonata, and stamp my 
+foot when I say it, he must know by that that what my soul craves is 
+salted almonds; and he will have them ready in his pocket."
+
+"Now," said I, "I am at a loss.  I do not know whether your soul's 
+affinity is to be an impresario or a fancy grocer."
+
+Chole turned her pearly smile upon me.
+
+"Take less than half of what I said as a jest," she went on.  "And 
+don't think too lightly of the little things, Boy.  Be a paladin if 
+you must, but don't let it show on you.  Most women are only very big 
+children, and most men are only very little ones.  Please us; don't 
+try to overpower us.  When we want a hero we can make one out of even 
+a plain grocer the third time he catches our handkerchief before it 
+falls to the ground."
+
+That evening I was taken down with pernicious fever.  That is a kind 
+of coast fever with improvements and high-geared attachments.  Your 
+temperature goes up among the threes and fours and remains there, 
+laughing scornfully and feverishly at the cinchona trees and the coal-
+tar derivatives.  Pernicious fever is a case for a simple 
+mathematician instead of a doctor.  It is merely this formula:  
+Vitality + the desire to live--the duration of the fever the result.
+
+I took to my bed in the two-roomed thatched hut where I had been 
+comfortably established, and sent for a gallon of rum.  That was not 
+for myself.  Drunk, Stamford was the best doctor between the Andes and 
+the Pacific.  He came, sat at my bedside, and drank himself into 
+condition.
+
+"My boy," said he, "my lily-white and reformed Romeo, medicine will do 
+you no good.  But I will give you quinine, which, being bitter, will 
+arouse in you hatred and anger-two stimulants that will add ten per 
+cent.  to your chances.  You are as strong as a caribou calf, and you 
+will get well if the fever doesn't get in a knockout blow when you're 
+off your guard."
+
+For two weeks I lay on my back feeling like a Hindoo widow on a 
+burning ghat.  Old Atasca, an untrained Indian nurse, sat near the 
+door like a petrified statue of What's-the-Use, attending to her 
+duties, which were, mainly, to see that time went by without slipping 
+a cog.  Sometimes I would fancy myself back in the Philippines, or, at 
+worse times, sliding off the horsehair sofa in Sleepytown.
+
+One afternoon I ordered Atasca to vamose, and got up and dressed 
+carefully.  I took my temperature, which I was pleased to find 104.  I 
+paid almost dainty attention to my dress, choosing solicitously a 
+necktie of a dull and subdued hue.  The mirror showed that I was 
+looking little the worse from my illness.  The fever gave brightness 
+to my eyes and color to my face.  And while I looked at my reflection 
+my color went and came again as I thought of Chloe Greene and the 
+millions of eons that had passed since I'd seen her, and of Louis 
+Devoe and the time he had gained on me.
+
+I went straight to her house.  I seemed to float rather than walk; I 
+hardly felt the ground under my feet; I thought pernicious fever must 
+be a great boon to make one feel so strong.
+
+I found Chloe and Louis Devoe sitting under the awning in front of the 
+house.  She jumped up and met me with a double handshake.
+
+"I'm glad, glad, glad to see you out again!" she cried, every word a 
+pearl strung on the string of her sentence.  "You are well, Tommy--or 
+better, of course.  I wanted to come to see you, but they wouldn't let 
+me.
+
+"Oh yes," said I, carelessly, "it was nothing.  Merely a little fever.  
+I am out again, as you see."
+
+We three sat there and talked for half an hour or so.  Then Chloe 
+looked out yearningly and almost piteously across the ocean.  I could 
+see in her sea-blue eyes some deep and intense desire.  Devoe, curse 
+him! saw it too.
+
+"What is it?" we asked, in unison.
+
+"Cocoanut-pudding," said Chloe, pathetically.  "I've wanted some--oh, 
+so badly, for two days.  It's got beyond a wish; it's an obsession.
+
+"The cocoanut season is over," said Devoe, in that voice of his that 
+gave thrilling interest to his most commonplace words.  "I hardly 
+think one could be found in Mojada.  The natives never use them except 
+when they are green and the milk is fresh.  They sell all the ripe 
+ones to the fruiterers."
+
+"Wouldn't a broiled lobster or a Welsh rabbit do as well?" I remarked, 
+with the engaging idiocy of a pernicious-fever convalescent.
+
+Chloe came as near to pouting as a sweet disposition and a perfect 
+profile would allow her to come.
+
+The Reverend Homer poked his ermine-lined face through the doorway and 
+added a concordance to the conversation.
+
+"Sometimes," said he, "old Campos keeps the dried nuts in his little 
+store on the hill.  But it would be far better, my daughter, to 
+restrain unusual desires, and partake thankfully of the daily dishes 
+that the Lord has set before us."
+
+"Stuff!" said I.
+
+"How was that?" asked the Reverend Homer, sharply.
+
+"I say it's tough," said I, "to drop into the vernacular, that Miss 
+Greene should be deprived of the food she desires-a simple thing like 
+kalsomine-pudding.  Perhaps," I continued, solicitously, "some pickled 
+walnuts or a fricassee of Hungarian butternuts would do as well."
+
+Every one looked at me with a slight exhibition of curiosity.
+
+Louis Devoe arose and made his adieus.  I watched him until he had 
+sauntered slowly and grandiosely to the corner, around which he turned 
+to reach his great warehouse and store.  Chloe made her excuses, and 
+went inside for a few minutes to attend to some detail affecting the 
+seven-o'clock dinner.  She was a passed mistress in housekeeping.  I 
+had tasted her puddings and bread with beatitude.
+
+When all had gone, I turned casually and saw a basket made of plaited 
+green withes hanging by a nail outside the door-jamb.  With a rush 
+that made my hot temples throb there came vividly to my mind 
+recollections of the head-hunters--those grim, flinty, relentless 
+little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle 
+terror of their concealed presence.  .  .  .  From time to time, as 
+vanity or ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move him, one 
+creeps forth with his snickersnee and takes up the silent trail.  .  .  
+.  Back he comes, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of his 
+victim .  .  .  His particular brown or white maid lingers, with 
+fluttering bosom, casting soft tiger's eyes at the evidence of his 
+love for her.
+
+I stole softly from the house and returned to my hut.  From its 
+supporting nails in the wall I took a machete as heavy as a butcher's 
+cleaver and sharper than a safety-razor.  And then I chuckled softly 
+to myself, and set out to the fastidiously appointed private office of 
+Monsieur Louis Devoe, usurper to the hand of the Pearl of the Pacific.
+
+He was never slow at thinking; he gave one look at my face and another 
+at the weapon in my hand as I entered his door, and then he seemed to 
+fade from my sight.  I ran to the back door, kicked it open, and saw 
+him running like a deer up the road toward the wood that began two 
+hundred yards away.  I was after him, with a shout.  I remember 
+hearing children and women screaming, and seeing them flying from the 
+road.
+
+He was fleet, but I was stronger.  A mile, and I had almost come up 
+with him.  He doubled cunningly and dashed into a brake that extended 
+into a small canon.  I crashed through this after him, and in five 
+minutes had him cornered in an angle of insurmountable cliffs.  There 
+his instinct of self-preservation steadied him, as it will steady even 
+animals at bay.  He turned to me, quite calm, with a ghastly smile.
+
+"Oh, Rayburn!" he said, with such an awful effort at ease that I was 
+impolite enough to laugh rudely in his face.  "Oh, Rayburn!" said he, 
+"come, let's have done with this nonsense.  Of course, I know it's the 
+fever and you're not yourself; but collect yourself, man-give me that 
+ridiculous weapon, now, and let's go back and talk it over."
+
+"I will go back," said I, "carrying your head with me.  We will see 
+how charmingly it can discourse when it lies in the basket at her 
+door."
+
+"Come," said he, persuasively, "I think better of you than to suppose 
+that you try this sort of thing as a joke.  But even the vagaries of a 
+fever-crazed lunatic come some time to a limit.  What is this talk 
+about heads and baskets?  Get yourself together and throw away that 
+absurd cane-chopper.  What would Miss Greene think of you?" he ended, 
+with the silky cajolery that one would use toward a fretful child.
+
+"Listen," said I.  "At last you have struck upon the right note.  What 
+would she think of me? Listen," I repeated.
+
+"There are women," I said, "who look upon horsehair sofas and currant 
+wine as dross.  To them even the calculated modulation of your well-
+trimmed talk sounds like the dropping of rotten plums from a tree in 
+the night.  They are the maidens who walk back and forth in the 
+villages, scorning the emptiness of the baskets at the doors of the 
+young men who would win them.
+
+One such as they," I said, "is waiting.  Only a fool would try to win 
+a woman by drooling like a braggart in her doorway or by waiting upon 
+her whims like a footman.  They are all daughters of Herodias, and to 
+gain their hearts one must lay the heads of his enemies before them 
+with his own hands.  Now, bend your neck, Louis Devoe.  Do not be a 
+coward as well as a chatterer at a lady's tea-table."
+
+"There, there!" said Devoe, falteringly.  "You know me, don't you, 
+Rayburn?"
+
+"Oh yes," I said, "I know you.  I know you.  I know you.  But the 
+basket is empty.  The old men of the village and the young men, and 
+both the dark maidens and the ones who are as fair as pearls walk back 
+and forth and see its emptiness.  Will you kneel now, or must we have 
+a scuffle?  It is not like you to make things go roughly and with bad 
+form.  But the basket is waiting for your head."
+
+With that he went to pieces.  I had to catch him as he tried to 
+scamper past me like a scared rabbit.  I stretched him out and got a 
+foot on his chest, but he squirmed like a worm, although I appealed 
+repeatedly to his sense of propriety and the duty he owed to himself 
+as a gentleman not to make a row.
+
+But at last he gave me the chance, and I swung the machete.
+
+It was not hard work.  He flopped like a chicken during the six or 
+seven blows that it took to sever his head; but finally he lay still, 
+and I tied his head in my handkerchief.  The eyes opened and shut 
+thrice while I walked a hundred yards.  I was red to my feet with the 
+drip, but what did that matter?  With delight I felt under my hands 
+the crisp touch of his short, thick, brown hair and close-trimmed 
+beard.
+
+I reached the house of the Greenes and dumped the head of Louis Devoe 
+into the basket that still hung by the nail in the door-jamb.  I sat 
+in a chair under the awning and waited.  The sun was within two hours 
+of setting.  Chloe came out and looked surprised.
+
+"Where have you been, Tommy?" she asked.  "You were gone when I came 
+out."
+
+"Look in the basket," I said, rising to my feet.  She looked, and gave 
+a little scream--of delight, I was pleased to note.
+
+"Oh, Tommy!" she said.  "It was just what I wanted you to do.  It's 
+leaking a little, but that doesn't matter.  Wasn't I telling you?  
+It's the little things that count.  And you remembered."
+
+Little things!  She held the ensanguined head of Louis Devoe in her 
+white apron.  Tiny streams of red widened on her apron and dripped 
+upon the floor.  Her face was bright and tender.
+
+"Little things, indeed!" I thought again.  "The head-hunters are 
+right.  These are the things that women like you to do for them."
+
+Chloe came close to me.  There was no one in sight.  She looked tip at 
+me with sea-blue eyes that said things they had never said before.
+
+"You think of me," she said.  "You are the man I was describing.  You 
+think of the little things, and they are what make the world worth 
+living in.  The man for me must consider my little wishes, and make me 
+happy in small ways.  He must bring me little red peaches in December 
+if I wish for them, and then I will love him till June.  I will have 
+no knight in armor slaying his rival or killing dragons for me.  You 
+please me very well, Tommy."
+
+I stooped and kissed her.  Then a moisture broke out on my forehead, 
+and I began to feel weak.  I saw the red stains vanish from Chloe's 
+apron, and the head of Louis Devoe turn to a brown, dried cocoanut.
+
+"There will be cocoanut-pudding for dinner, Tommy, boy," said Chloe, 
+gayly, "and you must come.  I must go in for a little while."
+
+She vanished in a delightful flutter.
+
+Dr.  Stamford tramped up hurriedly.  He seized my pulse as though it 
+were his own property that I had escaped with.
+
+"You are the biggest fool outside of any asylum!" he said, angrily.  
+"Why did you leave your bed?  And the idiotic things you've been 
+doing!--and no wonder, with your pulse going like a sledge-hammer."
+
+"Name some of them," said I.
+
+"Devoe sent for me," said Stamford.  "He saw you from his window go to 
+old Campos' store, chase him up the hill with his own yardstick, and 
+then come back and make off with his biggest cocoanut."
+
+"It's the little things that count, after all," said I.
+
+"It's your little bed that counts with you just now," said the doctor.  
+"You come with me at once, or I'll throw up the case.  'You're as 
+loony as a loon."
+
+So I got no cocoanut-pudding that evening, but I conceived a distrust 
+as to the value of the method of the head-hunters.  Perhaps for many 
+centuries the maidens of the villages may have been looking wistfully 
+at the heads in the baskets at the doorways, longing for other and 
+lesser trophies.
+
+
+
+
+NO STORY
+
+
+
+To avoid having this book hurled into corner of the room by the 
+suspicious reader, I will assert in time that this is not a newspaper 
+story.  You will encounter no shirt-sleeved, omniscient city editor, 
+no prodigy "cub" reporter just off the farm, no scoop, no story--no 
+anything.
+
+But if you will concede me the setting of the first scene in the 
+reporters' room of the Morning Beacon, I will repay the favor by 
+keeping strictly my promises set forth above.
+
+I was doing space-work on the Beacon, hoping to be put on a salary.  
+Some one had cleared with a rake or a shovel a small space for me at 
+the end of a long table piled high with exchanges, Congressional 
+Records, and old files.  There I did my work.  I wrote whatever the 
+city whispered or roared or chuckled to me on my diligent wanderings 
+about its streets.  My income was not regular.
+
+One day Tripp came in and leaned on my table.  Tripp was something in 
+the mechanical department--I think he had something to do with the 
+pictures, for he smelled of photographers' supplies, and his hands 
+were always stained and cut up with acids.  He was about twenty-five 
+and looked forty.  Half of his face was covered with short, curly red 
+
+whiskers that looked like a door-mat with the "welcome" left off.  He 
+was pale and unhealthy and miserable and fawning, and an assiduous 
+borrower of sums ranging from twenty-five cents to a dollar.  One 
+dollar was his limit.  He knew the extent of his credit as well as the 
+Chemical National Bank knows the amount of H20 that collateral will 
+show on analysis.  When he sat on my table he held one hand with the 
+other to keep both from shaking.  Whiskey.  He had a spurious air of 
+lightness and bravado about him that deceived no one, but was useful 
+in his borrowing because it was so pitifully and perceptibly assumed.
+
+This day I had coaxed from the cashier five shining silver dollars as 
+a grumbling advance on a story that the Sunday editor had reluctantly 
+accepted.  So if I was not feeling at peace with the world, at least 
+an armistice had been declared; and I was beginning with ardor to 
+write a description of the Brooklyn Bridge by moonlight.
+
+"Well, Tripp," said I, looking up at him rather impatiently, "how goes 
+it?"  He was looking to-day more miserable, more cringing and haggard 
+and downtrodden than I had ever seen him.  He was at that stage of 
+misery where he drew your pity so fully that you longed to kick him.
+
+"Have you got a dollar?" asked Tripp, with his most fawning look and 
+his dog-like eyes that blinked in the narrow space between his high-
+growing matted beard and his low-growing matted hair.
+
+"I have," said I; and again I said, "I have," more loudly and 
+inhospitably, "and four besides.  And I had hard work corkscrewing 
+them out of old Atkinson, I can tell you.  And I drew them," I 
+continued, "to meet a want--a hiatus--a demand--a need--an exigency--a 
+requirement of exactly five dollars."
+
+I was driven to emphasis by the premonition that I was to lose one of 
+the dollars on the spot.
+
+"I don't want to borrow any," said Tripp, and I breathed again.  "I 
+thought you'd like to get put onto a good story," he went on.  "I've 
+got a rattling fine one for you.  You ought to make it run a column at 
+least.  It'll make a dandy if you work it up right.  It'll probably 
+cost you a dollar or two to get the stuff.  I don't want anything out 
+of it myself."
+
+I became placated.  The proposition showed that Tripp appreciated past 
+favors, although he did not return them.  If he had been wise enough 
+to strike me for a quarter then he would have got it.
+
+"What is the story ?" I asked, poising my pencil with a finely 
+calculated editorial air.
+
+"I'll tell you," said Tripp.  "It's a girl.  A beauty.  One of the 
+howlingest Amsden's Junes you ever saw.  Rosebuds covered with dew-
+violets in their mossy bed--and truck like that.  She's lived on Long 
+Island twenty years and never saw New York City before.  I ran against 
+her on Thirty-fourth Street.  She'd just got in on the East River 
+ferry.  I tell you, she's a beauty that would take the hydrogen out of 
+all the peroxides in the world.  She stopped me on the street and 
+asked me where she could find George Brown.  Asked me where she could 
+find George Brown in New York City!  What do you think of that?
+
+"I talked to her, and found that she was going to marry a young farmer 
+named Dodd--Hiram Dodd--next week.  But it seems that George Brown 
+still holds the championship in her youthful fancy.  George had 
+greased his cowhide boots some years ago, and came to the city to make 
+his fortune.  But he forgot to remember to show up again at Greenburg, 
+and Hiram got in as second-best choice.  But when it comes to the 
+scratch Ada--her name's Ada Lowery--saddles a nag and rides eight 
+miles to the railroad station and catches the 6.45 A.M.  train for the 
+city.  Looking for George, you know--you understand about women--
+George wasn't there, so she wanted him.
+
+"Well, you know, I couldn't leave her loose in Wolftown-on-the-Hudson.  
+I suppose she thought the first person she inquired of would say: 
+'George Brown ?--why, yes--lemme see--he's a short man with light-blue 
+eyes, ain't he?  Oh yes--you'll find George on One Hundred and Twenty-
+fifth Street, right next to the grocery.  He's bill-clerk in a saddle-
+and-harness store.'  That's about how innocent and beautiful she is.  
+You know those little Long Island water-front villages like Greenburg-
+-a couple of duck-farms for sport, and clams and about nine summer 
+visitors for industries.  That's the kind of a place she comes from.  
+But, say--you ought to see her!
+
+"What could I do? I don't know what money looks like in the morning.  
+And she'd paid her last cent of pocket-money for her railroad ticket 
+except a quarter, which she had squandered on gum-drops.  She was 
+eating them out of a paper bag.  I took her to a boarding-house on 
+Thirty-second Street where I used to live, and hocked her.  She's in 
+soak for a dollar.  That's old Mother McGinnis' price per day.  I'll 
+show you the house."
+
+"What words are these, Tripp?" said I.  "I thought you said you had a 
+story.  Every ferryboat that crosses the East River brings or takes 
+away girls from Long Island."
+
+The premature lines on Tripp's face grew deeper.  He frowned seriously 
+from his tangle of hair.  He separated his hands and emphasized his 
+answer with one shaking forefinger.
+
+"Can't you see," he said, "what a rattling fine story it would make?  
+You could do it fine.  All about the romance, you know, and describe 
+the girl, and put a lot of stuff in it about true love, and sling in a 
+few stickfuls of funny business--joshing the Long Islanders about 
+being green, and, well--you know how to do it.  You ought to get 
+fifteen dollars out of it, anyhow.  And it'll.  cost you only about 
+four dollars.  You'll make a clear profit of eleven."
+
+"How will it cost me four dollars?" I asked, suspiciously.
+
+"One dollar to Mrs.  McGinnis," Tripp answered, promptly, "and two 
+dollars to pay the girl's fare back home."
+
+"And the fourth dimension?" I inquired, making a rapid mental 
+calculation.
+
+"One dollar to me," said Tripp.  "For whiskey.  Are you on?"
+
+I smiled enigmatically and spread my elbows as if to begin writing 
+again.  But this grim, abject, specious, subservient, burr-like wreck 
+of a man would not be shaken off.  His forehead suddenly became 
+shiningly moist.
+
+"Don't you see," he said, with a sort of desperate calmness, "that 
+this girl has got to be sent home to-day--not to-night nor to-morrow, 
+but to-day?  I can't do anything for her.  You know, I'm the janitor 
+and corresponding secretary of the Down-and-Out Club..  I thought you 
+could make a newspaper story out of it and win out a piece of money on 
+general results.  But, anyhow, don't you see that she's got to get 
+back home before night?"
+
+And then I began to feel that dull, leaden, soul-depressing sensation 
+known as the sense of duty.  Why should that sense fall upon one as a 
+weight and a burden?  I knew that I was doomed that day to give up the 
+bulk of my store of hard-wrung coin to the relief of this Ada Lowery.  
+But I swore to myself that Tripp's whiskey dollar would not be 
+forthcoming.  He might play knight-errant at my expense, but he would 
+indulge in no wassail afterward, commemorating my weakness and 
+gullibility.  In a kind of chilly anger I put on my coat and hat.
+
+Tripp, submissive, cringing, vainly endeavoring to please, conducted 
+me via the street-cars to the human pawn-shop of Mother McGinnis.  I 
+paid the fares.  It seemed that the collodion-scented Don Quixote and 
+the smallest minted coin were strangers.
+
+Tripp pulled the bell at the door of the mouldly red-brick boarding-
+house.  At its faint tinkle he paled, and crouched as a rabbit makes 
+ready to spring away at the sound of a hunting-dog.  I guessed what a 
+life he had led, terror-haunted by the coming footsteps of landladies.
+
+"Give me one of the dollars--quick!" he said.
+
+The door opened six inches.  Mother McGinnis stood there with white 
+eyes--they were white, I say--and a yellow face, holding together at 
+her throat with one hand a dingy pink flannel dressing-sack.  Tripp 
+thrust the dollar through the space without a word, and it bought us 
+entry.
+
+"She's in the parlor," said the McGinnis, turning the back of her sack 
+upon us.
+
+In the dim parlor a girl sat at the cracked marble centre-table 
+weeping comfortably and eating gum-drops.  She was a flawless beauty.  
+Crying had only made her brilliant eyes brighter.  When she crunched a 
+gum-drop you thought only of the poetry of motion and envied the 
+senseless confection.  Eve at the age of five minutes must have been a 
+ringer for Miss Ada Lowery at nineteen or twenty.  I was introduced, 
+and a gum-drop suffered neglect while she conveyed to me a naive 
+interest, such as a puppy dog (a prize winner) might bestow upon a 
+crawling beetle or a frog.
+
+Tripp took his stand by the table, with the fingers of one hand spread 
+upon it, as an attorney or a master of ceremonies might have stood.  
+But he looked the master of nothing.  His faded coat was buttoned 
+high, as if it sought to be charitable to deficiencies of tie and 
+linen.
+
+I thought of a Scotch terrier at the sight of his shifty eyes in the 
+glade between his tangled hair and beard.  For one ignoble moment I 
+felt ashamed of having been introduced as his friend in the presence 
+of so much beauty in distress.  But evidently Tripp meant to conduct 
+the ceremonies, whatever they might be.  I thought I detected in his 
+actions and pose an intention of foisting the situation upon me as 
+material for a newspaper story, in a lingering hope of extracting from 
+me his whiskey dollar.
+
+"My friend" (I shuddered), "Mr.  Chalmers," said Tripp, "will tell 
+you, Miss Lowery, the same that I did.  He's a reporter, and he can 
+hand out the talk better than I can.  That's why I brought him with 
+me."  (0 Tripp, wasn't it the silver-tongued orator you wanted?)  
+"He's wise to a lot of things, and he'll tell you now what's best to 
+do."
+
+I stood on one foot, as it were, as I sat in my rickety chair.
+
+"Why--er--Miss Lowery," I began, secretly enraged at Tripp's awkward 
+opening, "I am at your service, of course, but--er--as I haven't been 
+apprized of the circumstances of the case, I--er--"
+
+"Oh," said Miss Lowery, beaming for a moment, "it ain't as bad as 
+that--there ain't any circumstances.  It's the first time I've ever 
+been in New York except once when I was five years old, and I had no 
+idea it was such a big town.  And I met Mr.--Mr.  Snip on the street 
+and asked him about a friend of mine, and he brought me here and asked 
+me to wait."
+
+"I advise you, Miss Lowery," said Tripp, "to tell Mr.  Chalmers all.  
+He's a friend of mine" (I was getting used to it by this time), "and 
+he'll give you the right tip."
+
+"Why, certainly," said Miss Ada, chewing a gum-drop toward me.  "There 
+ain't anything to tell except that--well, everything's fixed for me to 
+marry Hiram Dodd next Thursday evening.  Hi has got two hundred acres 
+of land with a lot of shore-front, and one of the best truck-farms on 
+the Island.  But this morning I had my horse saddled up--he's a white 
+horse named Dancer--and I rode over to the station.  I told 'em at 
+home I was going to spend the day with Susie Adams.  It was a story, I 
+guess, but I don't care.  And I came to New York on the train, and I 
+met Mr.--Mr.  Flip on the street and asked him if he knew where I 
+could find G--G--"
+
+"Now, Miss Lowery," broke in Tripp, loudly, and with much bad taste, I 
+thought, as she hesitated with her word, "you like this young man, 
+Hiram Dodd, don't you?  He's all right, and good to you, ain't he?"
+
+"Of course I like him," said Miss Lowery emphatically.  "Hi's all 
+right.  And of course he's good to me.  So is everybody."
+
+I could have sworn it myself.  Throughout Miss Ada Lowery's life all 
+men would be to good to her.  They would strive, contrive, struggle, 
+and compete to hold umbrellas over her hat, check her trunk, pick up 
+her handkerchief, buy for her soda at the fountain.
+
+"But," went on Miss Lowery, "last night got to thinking about G--
+George, and I--"
+
+Down went the bright gold head upon dimpled, clasped hands on the 
+table.  Such a beautiful April storm!  Unrestrainedly sobbed.  I 
+wished I could have comforted her.  But I was not George.  And I was 
+glad I was not Hiram--and yet I was sorry, too.
+
+By-and-by the shower passed.  She straightened up, brave and half-way 
+smiling.  She would have made a splendid wife, for crying only made 
+her eyes more bright and tender.  She took a gum-drop and began her 
+story.
+
+"I guess I'm a terrible hayseed," she said between her little gulps 
+and sighs, "but I can't help it.  G--George Brown and I were sweet-
+hearts since he was eight and I was five.  When he was nineteen--that 
+was four years ago--he left Greenburg and went to the city.  He said 
+he was going to be a policeman or a railroad president or something.  
+And then he was coming back for me.  But I never heard from him any 
+more.  And I--I--liked him."
+
+Another flow of tears seemed imminent, but Tripp hurled himself into 
+the crevasse and dammed it.  Confound him, I could see his game.  He 
+was trying to make a story of it for his sordid ends and profit.
+
+"Go on, Mr.  Chalmers," said he, "and tell the lady what's the proper 
+caper.  That's what I told her--you'd hand it to her straight.  Spiel 
+up."
+
+I coughed, and tried to feel less wrathful toward Tripp.  I saw my 
+duty.  Cunningly I had been inveigled, but I was securely trapped.  
+Tripp's first dictum to me had been just and correct.  The young lady 
+must be sent back to Greenburg that day.  She must be argued with, 
+convinced, assured, instructed, ticketed, and returned without delay.  
+I hated Hiram and despised George; but duty must be done.
+
+Noblesse oblige and only five silver dollars are not strictly romantic 
+compatibles, but sometimes they can be made to jibe.  It was mine to 
+be Sir Oracle, and then pay the freight.  So I assumed an air that 
+mingled Solomon's with that of the general passenger agent of the Long 
+Island Railroad.
+
+"Miss Lowery," said I, as impressively as I could, "life is rather a 
+queer proposition, after all."  There was a familiar sound to these 
+words after I had spoken them, and I hoped Miss Lowery had never heard 
+Mr.  Cohan's song.  "Those whom we first love we seldom wed.  Our 
+earlier romances, tinged with the magic radiance of youth, often fail 
+to materialize."  The last three words sounded somewhat trite when 
+they struck the air.  "But those fondly cherished dreams," I went on, 
+"may cast a pleasant afterglow on our future lives, however 
+impracticable and vague they may have been.  But life is full of 
+realities as well as visions and dreams.  One cannot live on memories.  
+May I ask, Miss Lowery, if you think you could pass a happy--that is, 
+a contented and harmonious life with Mr.-er--Dodd--if in other ways 
+than romantic recollections he seems to--er--fill the bill, as I might 
+say?"
+
+"Oh, Hi's all right," answered Miss Lowery.  "Yes, I could get along 
+with him fine.  He's promised me an automobile and a motor-boat.  But 
+somehow, when it got so close to the time I was to marry him, I 
+couldn't help wishing--well, just thinking about George.  Something 
+must have happened to him or he'd have written.  On the day he left, 
+he and me got a hammer and a chisel and cut a dime into two pieces.  I 
+took one piece and he took the other, and we promised to be true to 
+each other and always keep the pieces till we saw each other again.  
+I've got mine at home now in a ring-box in the top drawer of my 
+dresser.  I guess I was silly to come up here looking for him.  I 
+never realized what a big place it is."
+
+And then Tripp joined in with a little grating laugh that he had, 
+still trying to drag in a little story or drama to earn the miserable 
+dollar that he craved.
+
+"Oh, the boys from the country forget a lot when they come to the city 
+and learn something.  I guess George, maybe, is on the bum, or got 
+roped in by some other girl, or maybe gone to the dogs on account of 
+whiskey or the races.  You listen to Mr.  Chalmers and go back home, 
+and you'll be all right."
+
+But now the time was come for action, for the hands of the clock were 
+moving close to noon.  Frowning upon Tripp, I argued gently and 
+philosophically with Miss Lowery, delicately convincing her of the 
+importance of returning home at once.  And I impressed upon her the 
+truth that it would not be absolutely necessary to her future 
+happiness that she mention to Hi the wonders or the fact of her visit 
+to the city that had swallowed up the unlucky George.
+
+She said she had left her horse (unfortunate Rosinante) tied to a tree 
+near the railroad station.  Tripp and I gave her instructions to mount 
+the patient steed as soon as she arrived and ride home as fast as 
+possible.  There she was to recount the exciting adventure of a day 
+spent with Susie Adams.  She could "fix" Susie--I was sure of that--
+and all would be well.
+
+And then, being susceptible to the barbed arrows of beauty, I warmed 
+to the adventure.  The three of us hurried to the ferry, and there I 
+found the price of a ticket to Greenburg to be but a dollar and eighty 
+cents.  I bought one, and a red, red rose with the twenty cents for 
+Miss Lowery.  We saw her aboard her ferryboat, and stood watching her 
+wave her handkerchief at us until it was the tiniest white patch 
+imaginable.  And then Tripp and I faced each other, brought back to 
+earth, left dry and desolate in the shade of the sombre verities of 
+life.
+
+The spell wrought by beauty and romance was dwindling.  I looked at 
+Tripp and almost sneered.  He looked more careworn, contemptible, and 
+disreputable than ever.  I fingered the two silver dollars remaining 
+in my pocket and looked at him with the half-closed eyelids of 
+contempt.  He mustered up an imitation of resistance.
+
+"Can't you get a story out of it?" he asked, huskily.  "Some sort of a 
+story, even if you have to fake part of it?"
+
+"Not a line," said I.  "I can fancy the look on Grimes' face if I 
+should try to put over any slush like this.  But we've helped the 
+little lady out, and that'll have to be our only reward."
+
+"I'm sorry," said Tripp, almost inaudibly.  "I'm sorry you're out your 
+money.  Now, it seemed to me like a find of a big story, you know--
+that is, a sort of thing that would write up pretty well."
+
+"Let's try to forget it," said I, with a praiseworthy attempt at 
+gayety, "and take the next car 'cross town."
+
+I steeled myself against his unexpressed but palpable desire.  He 
+should not coax, cajole, or wring from me the dollar he craved.  I had 
+had enough of that wild-goose chase.
+
+Tripp feebly unbuttoned his coat of the faded pattern and glossy seams 
+to reach for something that had once been a handkerchief deep down in 
+some obscure and cavernous pocket.  As he did so I caught the shine of 
+a cheap silver-plated watch-chain across his vest, and something 
+dangling from it caused me to stretch forth my hand and seize it 
+curiously.  It was the half of a silver dime that had been cut in 
+halves with a chisel.
+"What!" I said, looking at him keenly.
+
+"Oh yes," he responded, dully.  "George Brown, alias Tripp.  what's 
+the use?"
+
+Barring the W.  C.  T.  U., I'd like to know if anybody disapproves of 
+my having produced promptly from my pocket Tripp's whiskey dollar and 
+unhesitatingly laying it in his hand.
+
+
+
+
+THE HIGHER PRAGMATISM
+
+
+I
+
+
+Where to go for wisdom has become a question of serious import.  The 
+ancients are discredited; Plato is boiler-plate; Aristotle is 
+tottering; Marcus Aurelius is reeling; Aesop has been copyrighted by 
+Indiana; Solomon is too solemn; you couldn't get anything out of 
+Epictetus with a pick.
+
+The ant, which for many years served as a model of intelligence and 
+industry in the school-readers, has been proven to be a doddering 
+idiot and a waster of time and effort.  The owl to-day is hooted at.  
+Chautauqua conventions have abandoned culture and adopted diabolo.  
+Graybeards give glowing testimonials to the venders of patent hair-
+restorers.  There are typographical errors in the almanacs published 
+by the daily newspapers.  College professors have become--
+
+But there shall be no personalities.  To sit in classes, to delve into 
+the encyclopedia or the past-performances page, will not make us wise.  
+As the poet says, "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."  Wisdom is 
+dew, which, while we know it not, soaks into us, refreshes us, and 
+makes us grow.  Knowledge is a strong stream of water turned on us 
+through a hose.  It disturbs our roots.
+
+Then, let us rather gather wisdom.  But how to do so requires 
+knowledge.  If we know a thing, we know it; but very often we are not 
+wise to it that we are wise, and--
+
+But let's go on with the story.
+
+
+II
+
+
+Once upon a time I found a ten-cent magazine lying on a bench in a 
+little city park.  Anyhow, that was the amount he asked me for when I 
+sat on the bench next to him.  He was a musty, dingy, and tattered 
+magazine, with some queer stories bound in him, I was sure.  He turned 
+out to be a scrap-book.
+
+"I am a newspaper reporter," I said to him, to try him.  "I have been 
+detailed to write up some of the experiences of the unfortunate ones 
+who spend their evenings in this park.  May I ask you to what you 
+attribute your downfall in--"
+
+I was interrupted by a laugh from my purchase--a laugh so rusty and 
+unpractised that I was sure it had been his first for many a day.
+
+"Oh, no, no," said he.  "You ain't a reporter.  Reporters don't talk 
+that way.  They pretend to be one of us, and say they've just got in 
+on the blind baggage from St.  Louis.  I can tell a reporter on sight.  
+Us park bums get to be fine judges of human nature.  We sit here all 
+day and watch the people go by.  I can size up anybody who walks past 
+my bench in a way that would surprise you."
+
+"Well," I said, "go on and tell me.  How do you size me up?"
+
+"I should say," said the student of human nature with unpardonable 
+hesitation, "that you was, say, in the contracting business--or maybe 
+worked in a store--or was a sign-painter.  You stopped in the park to 
+finish your cigar, and thought you'd get a little free monologue out 
+of me.  Still, you might be a plasterer or a lawyer--it's getting kind 
+of dark, you see.  And your wife won't let you smoke at home."
+
+I frowned gloomily.
+
+"But, judging again," went on the reader of men, "I'd say you ain't 
+got a wife."
+
+"No," said I, rising restlessly.  "No, no, no, I ain't.  But I will 
+have, by the arrows of Cupid! That is, if--"
+
+My voice must have trailed away and muffled itself in uncertainty and 
+despair.
+
+"I see you have a story yourself," said the dusty vagrant--impudently, 
+it seemed to me.  "Suppose you take your dime back and spin your yarn 
+for me.  I'm interested myself in the ups and downs of unfortunate 
+ones who spend their evenings in the park."
+
+Somehow, that amused me.  I looked at the frowsy derelict with more 
+interest.  I did have a story.  Why not tell it to him?  I had told 
+none of my friends.  I had always been a reserved and bottled-up man.  
+It was psychical timidity or sensitiveness-perhaps both.  And I smiled 
+to myself in wonder when I felt an impulse to confide in this stranger 
+and vagabond.
+
+"Jack," said I.
+
+"Mack," said he.
+
+"Mack," said I, "I'll tell you."
+
+"Do you want the dime back in advance ?" said he.
+
+I handed him a dollar.
+
+"The dime," said I, "was the price of listening to your story."
+
+"Right on the point of the jaw," said he.  "Go on."
+
+And then, incredible as it may seem to the lovers in the world who 
+confide their sorrows only to the night wind and the gibbous moon, I 
+laid bare my secret to that wreck of all things that you would have 
+supposed to be in sympathy with love.
+
+I told him of the days and weeks and months that I had spent in 
+adoring Mildred Telfair.  I spoke of my despair, my grievous days and 
+wakeful nights, my dwindling hopes and distress of mind.  I even 
+pictured to this night-prowler her beauty and dignity, the great sway 
+she had in society, and the magnificence of her life as the elder 
+daughter of an ancient race whose pride overbalanced the dollars of 
+the city's millionaires.
+
+"Why don't you cop the lady out?" asked Mack, bringing me down to 
+earth and dialect again.
+
+I explained to him that my worth was so small, my income so minute, 
+and my fears so large that I hadn't the courage to speak to her of my 
+worship.  I told him that in her presence I could only blush and 
+stammer, and that she looked upon me with a wonderful, maddening smile 
+of amusement.
+
+"She kind of moves in the professional class, don't she?" asked Mack.
+
+"The Telfair family--" I began, haughtily.
+
+"I mean professional beauty," said my hearer.
+
+"She is greatly and widely admired," I answered, cautiously.
+
+"Any sisters?"
+
+"One."
+
+"You know any more girls?"
+
+"Why, several," I answered.  "And a few others."
+
+"Say," said Mack, "tell me one thing--can you hand out the dope to 
+other girls?  Can you chin 'em and make matinee eyes at 'em and 
+squeeze 'em?  You know what I mean.  You're just shy when it comes to 
+this particular dame--the professional beauty--ain't that right ?"
+
+"In a way you have outlined the situation with approximate truth," I 
+admitted.
+
+"I thought so," said Mack, grimly.  "Now, that reminds me of my own 
+case.  I'll tell you about it."
+
+I was indignant, but concealed it.  What was this loafer's case or 
+anybody's case compared with mine?  Besides, I had given him a dollar 
+and ten cents.
+
+"Feel my muscle," said my companion, suddenly, flexing his biceps.  I 
+did so mechanically.  The fellows in gyms are always asking you to do 
+that.  His arm was as hard as cast-iron.
+
+"Four years ago," said Mack, "I could lick any man in New York outside 
+of the professional ring.  Your case and mine is just the same.  I 
+come from the West Side--between Thirtieth and Fourteenth--I won't 
+give the number on the door.  I was a scrapper when I was ten, and 
+when I was twenty no amateur in the city could stand up four rounds 
+with me.  'S a fact.  You know Bill McCarty?  No?  He managed the 
+smokers for some of them swell clubs.  Well, I knocked out everything 
+Bill brought up before me.  I was a middle-weight, but could train 
+down to a welter when necessary.  I boxed all over the West Side at 
+bouts and benefits and private entertainments, and was never put out 
+once.
+
+"But, say, the first time I put my foot in the ring with a 
+professional I was no more than a canned lobster.  I dunno how it was-
+-I seemed to lose heart.  I guess I got too much imagination.  There 
+was a formality and publieness about it that kind of weakened my 
+nerve.  I never won a fight in the ring.  Light-weights and all kinds 
+of scrubs used to sign up with my manager and then walk up and tap me 
+on the wrist and see me fall.  The minute I seen the crowd and a lot 
+of gents in evening clothes down in front, and seen a professional 
+come inside the ropes, I got as weak as ginger-ale.
+
+"Of course, it wasn't long till I couldn't get no backers, and I 
+didn't have any more chances to fight a professional--or many 
+amateurs, either.  But lemme tell you--I was as good as most men 
+inside the ring or out.  It was just that dumb, dead feeling I had 
+when I was up against a regular that always done me up.
+
+"Well, sir, after I had got out of the business, I got a mighty grouch 
+on.  I used to go round town licking private citizens and all kinds of 
+unprofessionals just to please myself.  I'd lick cops in dark streets 
+and car-conductors and cab-drivers and draymen whenever I could start 
+a row with 'em.  It didn't make any difference how big they were, or 
+how much science they had, I got away with 'em.  If I'd only just have 
+had the confidence in the ring that I had beating up the best men 
+outside of it, I'd be wearing black pearls and heliotrope silk socks 
+to-day.
+
+"One evening I was walking along near the Bowery, thinking about 
+things, when along comes a slumming-party.  About six or seven they 
+was, all in swallowtails, and these silk hats that don't shine.  One 
+of the gang kind of shoves me off the sidewalk.  I hadn't had a scrap 
+in three days, and I just says, 'De-lighted!' and hits him back of the 
+ear.
+
+"Well, we had it.  That Johnnie put up as decent a little fight as 
+you'd want to see in the moving pictures.  It was on a side street, 
+and no cops around.  The other guy had a lot of science, but it only 
+took me about six minutes to lay him out.
+
+"Some of the swallowtails dragged him up against some steps and began 
+to fan him.  Another one of 'em comes over to me and says:
+
+"'Young man, do you know what you've done?'
+
+"'Oh, beat it,' says I.  'I've done nothing but a little punching-bag 
+work.  Take Freddy back to Yale and tell him to quit studying 
+sociology on the wrong side of the sidewalk.'
+
+"'My good fellow,' says he, 'I don't know who you are, but I'd like 
+to.  You've knocked out Reddy Burns, the champion middle-weight of the 
+world!  He came to New York yesterday, to try to get a match on with 
+Jim Jeifries.  If you--'
+
+"But when I come out of my faint I was laying on the floor in a drug-
+store saturated with aromatic spirits of ammonia.  If I'd known that 
+was Reddy Burns, I'd have got down in the gutter and crawled past him 
+instead of handing him one like I did.  Why, if I'd ever been in a 
+ring and seen him climbing over the ropes, I'd have been all to the 
+sal volatile.
+
+"So that's what imagination does," concluded Mack.  "And, as I said, 
+your case and mine is simultaneous.  You'll never win out.  You can't 
+go up against the professionals.  I tell you, it's a park bench for 
+yours in this romance business."
+
+Mack, the pessimist, laughed harshly.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't see the parallel," I said, coldly.  "I have only a 
+very slight acquaintance with the prize-ring."
+
+The derelict touched my sleeve with his forefinger, for emphasis, as 
+he explained his parable.
+
+"Every man," said he, with some dignity, "has got his lamps on 
+something that looks good to him.  With you, it's this dame that 
+you're afraid to say your say to.  With me, it was to win out in the 
+ring.  Well, you'll lose just like I did."
+
+"Why do you think I shall lose?" I asked warmly.
+
+"'Cause," said he, "you're afraid to go in the ring.  You dassen't 
+stand up before a professional.  Your case and mine is just the same.  
+You're a amateur; and that means that you'd better keep outside of the 
+ropes."
+
+"Well, I must be going," I said, rising and looking with elaborate 
+care at my watch.
+
+When I was twenty feet away the park-bencher called to me.
+
+"Much obliged for the dollar," he said.  "And for the dime.  But 
+you'll never get 'er.  You're in the amateur class."
+
+"Serves you right," I said to myself, "for hobnobbing with a tramp.  
+His impudence!"
+
+But, as I walked, his words seemed to repeat themselves over and over 
+again in my brain.  I think I even grew angry at the man.
+
+"I'll show him!" I finally said, aloud.  "I'll show him that I can 
+fight Reddy Burns, too--even knowing who he is."
+
+I hurried to a telephone-booth and rang up the Telfair residence.
+
+A soft, sweet voice answered.  Didn't I know that voice?  My hand 
+holding the receiver shook.
+
+"Is that you?" said I, employing the foolish words that form the 
+vocabulary of every talker through the telephone.
+
+"Yes, this is I," came back the answer in the low, clear-cut tones 
+that are an inheritance of the Telfairs.  "Who is it, please?"
+
+"It's me," said I, less ungrammatically than egotistically.  "It's me, 
+and I've got a few things that I want to say to you right now and 
+immediately and straight to the point."
+
+"Dear me," said the voice.  "Oh, it's you, Mr.  Arden!"
+
+I wondered if any accent on the first word was intended; Mildred was 
+fine at saying things that you had to study out afterward.
+
+"Yes," said I.  "I hope so.  And now to come down to brass tacks."  I 
+thought that rather a vernacularism, if there is such a word, as soon 
+as I had said it; but I didn't stop to apologize.  "You know, of 
+course, that I love you, and that I have been in that idiotic state 
+for a long time.  I don't want any more foolish
+ness about it--that is, I mean I want an answer from you right now.  
+Will you marry me or not?  Hold the wire, please.  Keep out, Central.  
+Hello, hello!  Will you, or will you not.?"
+
+That was just the uppercut for Reddy Burns' chin.  The answer came 
+back:
+
+"Why, Phil, dear, of course I will!  I didn't know that you--that is, 
+you never said--oh, come up to the house, please--I can't say what I 
+want to over the 'phone.  You are so importunate.  But please come up 
+to the house, won't you?"
+
+Would I?
+
+I rang the bell of the Telfair house violently.  Some sort of a human 
+came to the door and shooed me into the drawing-room.
+
+"Oh, well," said I to myself, looking at the ceiling, "any one can 
+learn from any one.  That was a pretty good philosophy of Mack's, 
+anyhow.  He didn't take advantage of his experience, but I get the 
+benefit of it.  If you want to get into the professional class, you've 
+got to--"
+
+I stopped thinking then.  Some one was coming down the stairs.  My 
+knees began to shake.  I knew then how Mack had felt when a 
+professional began to climb over the ropes.
+
+I looked around foolishly for a door or a window by which I might 
+escape.  If it had been any other girl approaching, I mightn't have--
+But just then the door opened, and Bess, Mildred's younger sister, 
+came in.  I'd never seen her look so much like a glorified angel.  She 
+walked straight tip to me, and--and--I'd never noticed before what 
+perfectly wonderful eyes and hair Elizabeth Telfair had.
+
+"Phil," she said, in the Telfair, sweet, thrilling tones, "why didn't 
+you tell me about it before?  I thought it was sister you wanted all 
+the time, until you telephoned to me a few minutes ago!"
+
+I suppose Mack and I always will be hopeless amateurs.  But, as the 
+thing has turned out in my case, I'm mighty glad of it.
+
+
+
+
+BEST-SELLER
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+One day last summer I went to Pittsburgh--well, I had to go there on 
+business.
+
+My chair-car was profitably well filled with people of the kind one 
+usually sees on chair-cars.  Most of them were ladies in brown-silk 
+dresses cut with square yokes, with lace insertion, and dotted veils, 
+who refused to have the windows raised.  Then there was the usual 
+number of men who looked as if they might be in almost any business 
+and going almost anywhere.  Some students of human nature can look at 
+a man in a Pullman and tell you where he is from, his occupation and 
+his stations in life, both flag and social; but I never could.  The 
+only way I can correctly judge a fellow-traveller is when the train is 
+held up by robbers, or when he reaches at the same time I do for the 
+last towel in the dressing-room of the sleeper.
+
+The porter came and brushed the collection of soot on the window-sill 
+off to the left knee of my trousers.  I removed it with an air of 
+apology.  The temperature was eighty-eight.  One of the dotted-veiled 
+ladies demanded the closing of two more ventilators, and spoke loudly 
+of Interlaken.  I leaned back idly in chair No.  7, and looked with 
+the tepidest curiosity at the small, black, bald-spotted head just 
+visible above the back of No.  9.
+
+Suddenly No.  9 hurled a book to the floor between his chair and the 
+window, and, looking, I saw that it was The Rose-Lady and Trevelyan, 
+one of the best-selling novels of the present day.  And then the 
+critic or Philistine, whichever he was, veered his chair toward the 
+window, and I knew him at once for John A.  Pescud, of Pittsburgh, 
+travelling salesman for a plate-glass company--an old acquaintance 
+whom I had not seen in two years.
+
+In two minutes we were faced, had shaken hands, and had finished with 
+such topics as rain, prosperity, health, residence, and destination.  
+Politics might have followed next; but I was not so ill-fated.
+
+I wish you might know John A.  Pescud.  He is of the stuff that heroes 
+are not often lucky enough to be made of.  He is a small man with a 
+wide smile, and an eye that seems to be fixed upon that little red 
+spot on the end of your nose.  I never saw him wear but one kind of 
+necktie, and he believes in cuff-holders and button-shoes.  He is as 
+hard and true as anything ever turned out by the Cambria Steel Works; 
+and he believes that as soon as Pittsburgh makes smoke-consumers 
+compulsory, St.  Peter will come down and sit at the foot of 
+Smithfield Street, and let somebody else attend to the gate up in the 
+branch heaven.  He believes that "our" plate-glass is the most 
+important commodity in the world, and that when a man is in his home 
+town he ought to be decent and law-abiding.
+
+During my acquaintance with him in the City of Diurnal Night I had 
+never known his views on life, romance, literature, and ethics.  We 
+had browsed, during our meetings, on local topics, and then parted, 
+after Chateau Margaux, Irish stew, flannel-cakes, cottage-pudding, and 
+coffee (hey, there!--with milk separate).  Now I was to get more of 
+his ideas.  By way of facts, he told me that business had picked up 
+since the party conventions, and that he was going to get off at 
+Coketown.
+
+
+II
+
+
+"Say," said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his 
+right shoe, "did you ever read one of these best-sellers?  I mean the 
+kind where the hero is an American swell--sometimes even from Chicago-
+-who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is travelling 
+under an alias, and follows her to her father's kingdom or 
+principality?  I guess you have.  They're all alike.  Sometimes this 
+going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent, and 
+sometimes he is a Van Something from New York, or a Chicago wheat-
+broker worthy fifty millions.  But he's always ready to break into the 
+king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens and 
+princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four or the B.  and 
+0.  There doesn't seem to be any other reason in the book for their 
+being here.
+
+"Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said, and 
+finds out who she is.  He meets here on the corso or the strasse one 
+evening and gives us ten pages of conversation.  She reminds him of 
+the difference in their stations, and that gives him a chance to ring 
+in three solid pages about America's uncrowned sovereigns.  If you'd 
+take his remarks and set 'em to music, and then take the music away 
+from 'em, they'd sound exactly like one of George Cohan's songs.
+
+"Well, you know how it runs on, if you ve read any of 'em--he slaps 
+the king's Swiss body-guards around like everything whenever they get 
+in his way.  He's a great fencer, too.  Now, I've known of some 
+Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of any 
+fencers coming from there.  He stands on the first landing of the 
+royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier 
+in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors 
+who come to massacre the said king.  And then he has to fight duels 
+with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian 
+archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.
+
+"But the great scene is when his rival for the princess' hand, Count 
+Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel, 
+armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian 
+bloodhounds.  This scene is what runs the best-seller into the twenty-
+ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a check for 
+the advance royalties.
+
+"The American hero shucks his coat and throws it over the heads of the 
+bloodhounds, gives the mitrailleuse a slap with his mitt, says 'Yah!' 
+to the yataghan, and lands in Kid McCoy's best style on the count's 
+left eye.  Of course, we have a neat little prize-fight right then and 
+there.  The count--in order to make the go possible--seems to be an 
+expert at the art of self-defence, himself; and here we have the 
+Corbett-Sullivan fight done over into literature.  The book ends with 
+the broker and the princess doing a John Cecil Clay cover under the 
+linden-trees on the Gorgonzola Walk.  That winds up the love-story 
+plenty good enough.  But I notice that the book dodges the final 
+issue.  Even a best-seller has sense enough to shy at either leaving a 
+Chicago grain broker on the throne of Lobsterpotsdam or bringing over 
+a real princess to eat fish and potato salad in an Italian chalet on 
+Michigan Avenue.  What do you think about 'em?"
+
+"Why," said I, "I hardly know, John.  There's a saying: 'Love levels 
+all ranks,' you know."
+
+"Yes," said Pescud, "but these kind of love-stories are rank--on the 
+level.  I know something about literature, even if I am in plate-
+glass.  These kind of books are wrong, and yet I never go into a train 
+but what they pile 'em up on me.  No good can come out of an 
+international clinch between the Old-World aristocracy and one of us 
+fresh Americans.  When people in real life marry, they generally hunt 
+up somebody in their own station.  A fellow usually picks out a girl 
+that went to the same high-school and belonged to the same singing-
+society that he did.  When young millionaires fall in love, they 
+always select the chorus-girl that likes the same kind of sauce on the 
+lobster that he does.  Washington newspaper correspondents always many 
+widow ladies ten years older than themselves who keep boarding-houses.  
+No, sir, you can't make a novel sound right to me when it makes one of 
+C.  D.  Gibson's bright young men go abroad and turn kingdoms upside 
+down just because he's a Taft American aud took a course at a 
+gymnasium.  And listen how they talk, too!"
+
+Pescud picked up the best-seller and hunted his page.
+
+"Listen at this," said he.  "Trevelyan is chinning with the Princess 
+Alwyna at the back end of the tulip-garden.  This is how it goes:
+
+
+"'Say not so, dearest and sweetest of earth's fairest flowers.  Would 
+I aspire?  You are a star set high above me in a royal heaven; I am 
+only--myself.  Yet I am a man, and I have a heart to do and dare.  I 
+have no title save that of an uncrowned sovereign; but I have an arm 
+and a sword that yet might free Schutzenfestenstein from the plots of 
+traitors.'
+
+"Think of a Chicago man packing a sword, and talking about freeing 
+anything that sounded as much like canned pork as that!  He'd be much 
+more likely to fight to have an import duty put on it."
+
+"I think I understand you, John," said I.  "You want fiction-writers 
+to be consistent with their scenes and characters.  They shouldn't mix 
+Turkish pashas with Vermont farmers, or English dukes with Long Island 
+clam-diggers, or Italian countesses with Montana cowboys, or 
+Cincinnati brewery agents with the rajahs of India."
+
+"Or plain business men with aristocracy high above 'em," added Pescud.  
+"It don't jibe.  People are divided into classes, whether we admit it 
+or not, and it's everybody's impulse to stick to their own class.  
+They do it, too.  I don't see why people go to work and buy hundreds 
+of thousands of books like that.  You don't see or hear of any such 
+didoes and capers in real life."
+
+
+III
+
+
+"Well, John," said I, "I haven't read a best-seller in a long time.  
+Maybe I've had notions about them somewhat like yours.  But tell me 
+more about yourself.  Getting along all right with the company?"
+
+"Bully," said Pescud, brightening at once.  "I've had my salary raised 
+twice since I saw you, and I get a commission, too.  I've bought a 
+neat slice of real estate out in the East End, and have run up a house 
+on it.  Next year the firm is going to sell me some shares of stock.  
+Oh, I'm in on the line of General Prosperity, no matter who's 
+elected!"
+
+"Met your affinity yet, John?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, I didn't tell you about that, did I?" said Pescud with a broader 
+grin.
+
+"0-ho!" I said.  "So you've taken time enough off from your plate-
+glass to have a romance?"
+
+"No, no," said John.  "No romance--nothing like that!  But I'll tell 
+you about it.
+
+"I was on the south-bound, going to Cincinnati, about eighteen months 
+ago, when I saw, across the aisle, the finest-looking girl I'd ever 
+laid eyes on.  Nothing spectacular, you know, but just the sort you 
+want for keeps.  Well, I never was up to the flirtation business, 
+either handkerchief, automobile, postage-stamp, or door-step, and she 
+wasn't the kind to start anything.  She read a book and minded her 
+business, which was to make the world prettier and better just by 
+residing on it.  I kept on looking out of the side doors of my eyes, 
+and finally the proposition got out of the Pullman class into a case 
+of a cottage with a lawn and vines running over the porch.  I never 
+thought of speaking to her, but I let the plate-glass business go to 
+smash for a while.
+
+"She changed cars at Cincinnati, and took a sleeper to Louisville over 
+the L.  and N.  There she bought another ticket, and went on through 
+Shelbyville, Frankfort, and Lexington.  Along there I began to have a 
+hard time keeping up with her.  The trains came along when they 
+pleased, and didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular, except to 
+keep on the track and the right of way as much as possible.  Then they 
+began to stop at junctions instead of towns, and at last they stopped 
+altogether.  I'll bet Pinkerton would outbid the plate-glass people 
+for my services any time if they knew how I managed to shadow that 
+young lady.  I contrived to keep out of her sight as much as I could, 
+but I never lost track of her.
+
+"The last station she got off at was away down in Virginia, about six 
+in the afternoon.  There were about fifty houses and four hundred 
+niggers in sight.  The rest was red mud, mules, and speckled hounds.
+
+"A tall old man, with a smooth face and white hair, looking as proud 
+as Julius Caesar and Roscoe Conkling on the same post-card, was there 
+to meet her.  His clothcs were frazzled, but I didn't notice that till 
+later.  He took her little satchel, and they started over the plank-
+walks and went up a road along the hill.  I kept along a piece behind 
+'em, trying to look like I was hunting a garnet ring in the sand that 
+my sister had lost at a picnic the previous Saturday.
+
+"They went in a gate on top of the hill.  It nearly took my breath 
+away when I looked up.  Up there in the biggest grove I ever saw was a 
+tremendous house with round white pillars about a thousand feet high, 
+and the yard was so full of rose-bushes and box-bushes and lilacs that 
+you couldn't have seen the house if it hadn't been as big as the 
+Capitol at Washington.
+
+"'Here's where I have to trail,' says I to myself.  "I thought before 
+that she seemed to be in moderate circumstances, at least.  This must 
+be the Governor's mansion, or the Agricultural Building of a new 
+World's Fair, anyhow.  I'd better go back to the village and get 
+posted by the postmaster, or drug the druggist for some information.
+
+"In the village I found a pine hotel called the Bay View House.  The 
+only excuse for the name was a bay horse grazing in the front yard.  I 
+set my sample-case down, and tried to be ostensible.  I told the 
+landlord I was taking orders for plate-glass.
+
+"'I don't want no plates,' says he, 'but I do need another glass 
+molasses-pitcher.'
+
+"By-and-by I got him down to local gossip and answering questions.
+
+"'Why,' says he, 'I thought everybody knowed who lived in the big 
+white house on the hill.  It's Colonel Allyn, the biggest man and the 
+finest quality in Virginia, or anywhere else.  They're the oldest 
+family in the State.  That was his daughter that got off the train.  
+She's been up to Illinois to see her aunt, who is sick.'
+
+"I registered at the hotel, and on the third day I caught the young 
+lady walking in the front yard, down next to the paling fence.  I 
+stopped and raised my hat--there wasn't any other way.
+
+"'Excuse me,' says I, 'can you tell me where Mr.  Hinkle lives?'
+
+"She looks at me as cool as if I was the man come to see about the 
+weeding of the garden, but I thought I saw just a slight twinkle of 
+fun in her eyes.
+
+"'No one of that name lives in Birchton,' says she.  'That is,' she 
+goes on, 'as far as I know.  Is the gentleman you are seeking white?'
+
+"Well, that tickled me.  'No kidding,' says I.  'I'm not looking for 
+smoke, even if I do come from Pittsburgh.'
+
+"'You are quite a distance from home,' says she.
+
+"'I'd have gone a thousand miles farther,' says I.
+
+"'Not if you hadn't waked up when the train started in Shelbyville,' 
+says she; and then she turned almost as red as one of the roses on the 
+bushes in the yard.  I remembered I had dropped off to sleep on a 
+bench in the Shelbyville station, waiting to see which train she took, 
+and only just managed to wake up in time.
+
+"And then I told her why I had come, as respectful and earnest as I 
+could.  And I told her everything about myself, and what I was making, 
+and how that all I asked was just to get acquainted with her and try 
+to get her to like me.
+
+"She smiles a little, and blushes some, but her eyes never get mixed 
+up.  They look straight at whatever she's talking to.
+
+"'I never had any one talk like this to me before, Mr.  Pescud,' says 
+she.  'What did you say your name is--John?'
+
+"'John A.,' says I.
+
+"'And you came mighty near missing the train at Powhatan Junction, 
+too,' says she, with a laugh that sounded as good as a mileage-book to 
+me.
+
+"'How did you know?' I asked.
+
+"'Men are very clumsy,' said she.  'I knew you were on every train.  I 
+thought you were going to speak to me, and I'm glad you didn't.'
+
+"Then we had more talk; and at last a kind of proud, serious look came 
+on her face, and she turned and pointed a finger at the big house.
+
+"'The Allyns,' says she, 'have lived in Elmcroft for a hundred years.  
+We are a proud family.  Look at that mansion.  It has fifty rooms.  
+See the pillars and porches and balconies.  The ceilings in the 
+reception-rooms and the ball-room are twenty-eight feet high.  My 
+father is a lineal descendant of belted earls.'
+
+"'I belted one of 'em once in the Duquesne Hotel, in Pittsburgh,' says 
+I, 'and he didn't offer to resent it.  He was there dividing his 
+attentions between Monongahela whiskey and heiresses, and he got 
+fresh.'
+
+"'Of course,' she goes on, 'my father wouldn't allow a drummer to set 
+his foot in Elmeroft.  If he knew that I was talking to one over the 
+fence he would lock me in my room.'
+
+"'Would you let me come there?' says I.  'Would you talk to me if I 
+was to call?  For,' I goes on, 'if you said I might come and see you, 
+the earls might be belted or suspendered, or pinned up with safety-
+pins, as far as I am concerned.'
+
+"'I must not talk to you,' she says, 'because we have not been 
+introduced.  It is not exactly proper.  So I will say good-bye, Mr.--'
+"'Say the name,' says I.  'You haven't forgotten it.'
+
+"'Pescud,' says she, a little mad.
+
+"'The rest of the name!' I demands, cool as could be.
+
+"'John,' says she.
+
+"'John-what?' I says.
+
+"'John A.,' says she, with her head high.  'Are you through, now?'
+
+"'I'm coming to see the belted earl to-morrow,' I says.
+
+"'He'll feed you to his fox-hounds,' says she, laughing.
+
+"'If he does, it'll improve their running,' says I.  'I'm something of 
+a hunter myself.'
+
+"'I must be going in now,' says she.  'I oughtn't to have spoken to 
+you at all.  I hope you'll have a pleasant trip back to Minneapolis --
+or Pittsburgh, was it?  Good-bye!'
+
+"'Good-night,' says I, 'and it wasn't Minneapolis.  What's your name, 
+first, please?'
+
+"She hesitated.  Then she pulled a leaf off a bush, and said:
+
+"'My name is Jessie,' says she.
+
+"'Good-night, Miss Allyn,' says I.
+
+"The next morning at eleven, sharp, I rang the door-bell of that 
+World's Fair main building.  After about three-quarters of an hour an 
+old nigger man about eighty showed up and asked what I wanted.  I gave 
+him my business card, and said I wanted to see the colonel.  He showed 
+me in.
+
+"Say, did you ever crack open a wormy English walnut?  That's what 
+that house was like.  There wasn't enough furniture in it to fill an 
+eight-dollar flat.  Some old horsehair lounges and three-legged chairs 
+and some framed ancestors on the walls were all that met the eye.  But 
+when Colonel Allyn comes in, the place seemed to light up.  You could 
+almost hear a band playing, and see a bunch of old-timers in wigs and 
+white stockings dancing a quadrille.  It was the style of him, 
+although he had on the same shabby clothes I saw him wear at the 
+station.
+
+"For about nine seconds he had me rattled, and I came mighty near 
+getting cold feet and trying to sell him some plate-glass.  But I got 
+my nerve back pretty quick.  He asked me to sit down, and I told him 
+everything.  I told him how I followed his daughter from Cincinnati, 
+and what I did it for, and all about my salary and prospects, and 
+explained to him my little code of living--to be always decent and 
+right in your home town; and when you're on the road, never take more 
+than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent 
+limit.  At first I thought he was going to throw me out of the window, 
+but I kept on talking.  Pretty soon I got a chance to tell him that 
+story about the Western Congressman who had lost his pocket-book and 
+the grass widow--you remember that story.  Well, that got him to 
+laughing, and I'll bet that was the first laugh those ancestors and 
+horsehair sofas had heard in many a day.
+
+"We talked two hours.  I told him everything I knew; and then he began 
+to ask questions, and I told him the rest.  All I asked of him was to 
+give me a chance.  If I couldn't make a hit with the little lady, I'd 
+clear out, and not bother any more.  At last he says:
+
+"'There was a Sir Courtenay Pescud in the time of Charles I, if I 
+remember rightly.'
+
+"'If there was,' says I, 'he can't claim kin with our bunch.  We've 
+always lived in and around Pittsburgh.  I've got an uncle in the real-
+estate business, and one in trouble somewhere out in Kansas.  You can 
+inquire about any of the rest of us from anybody in old Smoky Town, 
+and get satisfactory replies.  Did you ever run across that story 
+about the captain of the whaler who tried to make a sailor say his 
+prayers?' says I.
+
+"'It occurs to me that I have never been so fortunate,' says the 
+colonel.
+
+"So I told it to him.  Laugh!  I was wishing to myself that he was a 
+customer.  What a bill of glass I'd sell him!  And then he says:
+
+"'The relating of anecdotes and humorous occurrences has always seemed 
+to me, Mr.  Pescud, to be a particularly agreeable way of promoting 
+and perpetuating amenities between friends.  With your permission, I 
+will relate to you a fox-hunting story with which I was personally 
+connected, and which may furnish you some amusement.'
+
+So he tells it.  It takes forty minutes by the watch.  Did I laugh?  
+Well, say!  When I got my face straight he calls in old Pete, the 
+super-annuated darky, and sends him down to the hotel to bring up my 
+valise.  It was Elmcroft for me while I was in the town.
+
+"Two evenings later I got a chance to speak a word with Miss Jessie 
+alone on the porch while the colonel was thinking up another story.
+
+"'It's going to be a fine evening,' says I.
+
+"'He's coming,' says she.  'He's going to tell you, this time, the 
+story about the old negro and the green watermelons.  It always comes 
+after the one about the Yankees and the game rooster.  There was 
+another time,' she goes on, 'that you nearly got left--it was at 
+Pulaski City.'
+
+"'Yes,' says I, 'I remember.  My foot slipped as I was jumping on the 
+step, and I nearly tumbled off.'
+
+"'I know,' says she.  'And--and I--I was afraid you had, John A.  I 
+was afraid you had.'
+
+"And then she skips into the house through one of the big windows."
+
+
+IV
+
+
+"Coketown!" droned the porter, making his way through the slowing car.
+
+Pescud gathered his hat and baggage with the leisurely promptness of 
+an old traveller.
+
+"I married her a year ago," said John.  "I told you I built a house in 
+the East End.  The belted--I mean the colonel--is there, too.  I find 
+him waiting at the gate whenever I get back from a trip to hear any 
+new story I might have picked up on the road."
+
+I glanced out of the window.  Coketown was nothing more than a ragged 
+hillside dotted with a score of black dismal huts propped up against 
+dreary mounds of slag and clinkers.  It rained in slanting torrents, 
+too, and the rills foamed and splashed down through the black mud to 
+the railroad-tracks.
+
+"You won't sell much plate-glass here, John," said I.  "Why do you get 
+off at this end-o'-the-world?"
+
+"Why," said Pescud, "the other day I took Jessie for a little trip to 
+Philadelphia, and coming back she thought she saw some petunias in a 
+pot in one of those windows over there just like some she used to 
+raise down in the old Virginia home.  So I thought I'd drop off here 
+for the night, and see if I could dig up some of the cuttings or 
+blossoms for her.  Here we are.  Good-night, old man.  I gave you the 
+address.  Come out and see us when you have time."
+
+The train moved forward.  One of the dotted brown ladies insisted on 
+having windows raised, now that the rain beat against them.  The 
+porter came along with his mysterious wand and began to light the car.
+
+I glanced downward and saw the best-seller.  I picked it up and set it 
+carefully farther along on the floor of the car, where the rain-drops 
+would not fall upon it.  And then, suddenly, I smiled, and seemed to 
+see that life has no geographical metes and bounds.
+
+"Good-luck to you, Trevelyan," I said.  "And may you get the petunias 
+for your princess!"
+
+
+
+RUS IN URBE
+
+
+
+Considering men in relation to money, there are three kinds whom I 
+dislike: men who have more money than they can spend; men who have 
+more money than they do spend; and men who spend more money than they 
+have.  Of the three varieties, I believe I have the least liking for 
+the first.  But, as a man, I liked Spencer Grenville North pretty 
+well, although he had something like two or ten or thirty millions--
+I've forgotten exactly how many.
+
+I did not leave town that summer.  I usually went down to a village on 
+the south shore of Long Island.  The place was surrounded by duck-
+farms, and the ducks and dogs and whippoorwills and rusty windmills 
+made so much noise that I could sleep as peacefully as if I were in my 
+own flat six doors from the elevated railroad in New York.  But that 
+summer I did not go.  Remember that.  One of my friends asked me why I 
+did not.  I replied:
+
+"Because, old man, New York is the finest summer resort in the world."  
+You have heard that phrase before.  But that is what I told him.
+
+I was press-agent that year for Binkly & Bing, the theatrical managers 
+and producers.  Of course you know what a press-agent is.  Well, he is 
+not.  That is the secret of being one.
+
+Binkly was touring France in his new C.  & N.  Williamson car, and 
+Bing had gone to Scotland to learn curling, which he seemed to 
+associate in his mind with hot tongs rather than with ice.  Before 
+they left they gave me June and July, on salary, for my vacation, 
+which act was in accord with their large spirit of liberality.  But I 
+remained in New York, which I had decided was the finest summer resort 
+in--
+
+But I said that before.  
+
+On July the 10th, North came to town from his camp in the Adirondacks.  
+Try to imagine a camp with sixteen rooms, plumbing, eiderdown quilts, 
+a butler, a garage, solid silver plate, and a long-distance telephone.  
+Of course it was in the woods--if Mr.  Pinchot wants to preserve the 
+forests let him give every citizen two or ten or thirty million 
+dollars, and the trees will all gather around the summer camps, as the 
+Birnam woods came to Dunsinane, and be preserved.
+
+North came to see me in my three rooms and bath, extra charge for 
+light when used extravagantly or all night.  He slapped me on the back 
+(I would rather have my shins kicked any day), and greeted me with 
+out-door obstreperousness and revolting good spirits.  He was 
+insolently brown and healthy-looking, and offensively well dressed.
+
+"Just ran down for a few days," said he, "to sign some papers and 
+stuff like that.  My lawyer wired me to come.  Well, you indolent 
+cockney, what are you doing in town?  I took a chance and telephoned, 
+and they said you were here.  What's the matter with that Utopia on 
+Long Island where you used to take your typewriter and your villanous 
+temper every summer?  Anything wrong with the--er--swans, weren't 
+they, that used to sing on the farms at night?"
+
+"Ducks," said I.  "The songs of swans are for luckier ears.  They swim 
+and curve their necks in artificial lakes on the estates of the 
+wealthy to delight the eyes of the favorites of Fortune."
+
+"Also in Central Park," said North, "to delight the eyes of immigrants 
+and bummers.  I've seen em there lots of times.  But why are you in 
+the city so late in the summer?"
+
+"New York City," I began to recite, "is the finest sum--"
+
+"No, you don't," said North, emphatically.  "You don't spring that old 
+one on me.  I know you know better.  Man, you ought to have gone up 
+with us this summer.  The Prestons are there, and Tom Volney and the 
+Monroes and Lulu Stanford and the Miss Kennedy and her aunt that you 
+liked so well."
+
+"I never liked Miss Kennedy's aunt," I said.
+
+"I didn't say you did," said North.  "We are having the greatest time 
+we've ever had.  The pickerel and trout are so ravenous that I believe 
+they would swallow your hook with a Montana copper-mine prospectus 
+fastened on it.  And we've a couple of electric launches; and I'll 
+tell you what we do every night or two--we tow a rowboat behind each 
+one with a big phonograph and a boy to change the discs in 'em.  On 
+the water, and twenty yards behind you, they are not so bad.  And 
+there are passably good roads through the woods where we go motoring.  
+I shipped two cars up there.  And the Pinecliff Inn is only three 
+miles away.  You know the Pinecliff.  Some good people are there this 
+season, and we run over to the dances twice a week.  Can't you go back 
+with me for a week, old man?"
+
+I laughed.  "Northy," said I--"if I may be so familiar with a 
+millionaire, because I hate both the names Spencer and Grenville--your 
+invitation is meant kindly, but--the city in the summer-time for me.  
+Here, while the bourgeoisie is away, I can live as Nero lived-barring, 
+thank heaven, the fiddling-while the city burns at ninety in the 
+shade.  The tropics and the zones wait upon me like handmaidens.  I 
+sit under Florida palms and eat pomegranates while Boreas himself, 
+electrically conjured up, blows upon me his Arctic breath.  As for 
+trout, you know, yourself, that Jean, at Maurice's, cooks them better 
+than any one else in the world."
+
+"Be advised," said North.  "My chef has pinched the blue ribbon from 
+the lot.  He lays some slices of bacon inside the trout, wraps it all 
+in corn-husks--the husks of green corn, you know--buries them in hot 
+ashes and covers them with live coals.  We build fires on the bank of 
+the lake and have fish suppers."
+
+"I know," said I.  "And the servants bring down tables and chairs and 
+damask cloths, and you eat with silver forks.  I know the kind of 
+camps that you millionaires have.  And therc are champagne pails set 
+about, disgracing the wild flowers, and, no doubt, Madame Tetrazzini 
+to sing in the boat pavilion after the trout."
+
+"Oh no," said North, concernedly, "we were never as bad as that.  We 
+did have a variety troupe up from the city three or four nights, but 
+they weren't stars by as far as light can travel in the same length of 
+time.  I always like a few home comforts even when I'm roughing it.  
+But don't tell me you prefer to stay in the city during summer.  I 
+don't believe it.  If you do, why did you spend your summers there for 
+the last four years, even sneaking away from town on a night train, 
+and refusing to tell your friends where this Arcadian village was?"
+
+"Because," said I, "they might have followed me and discovered it.  
+But since then I have learned that Amaryllis has come to town.  The 
+coolest things, the freshest, the brightest, the choicest, are to be 
+found in the city.  If you've nothing on hand this evening I will show 
+you."
+
+"I'm free," said North, "and I have my light car outside.  I suppose, 
+since you've been converted to the town, that your idea of rural sport 
+is to have a little whirl between bicycle cops in Central Park and 
+then a mug of sticky ale in some stuffy rathskeller under a fan that 
+can't stir up as many revolutions in a week as Nicaragua can in a 
+day."
+
+"We'll begin with the spin through the Park, anyhow," I said.  I was 
+choking with the hot, stale air of my little apartment, and I wanted 
+that breath of the cool to brace me for the task of proving to my 
+friend that New York was the greatest--and so forth.
+
+"Where can you find air any fresher or purer than this?" I asked, as 
+we sped into Central's boskiest dell.
+
+"Air!" said North, contemptuously.  "Do you call this air?--this muggy 
+vapor, smelling of garbage and gasoline smoke.  Man, I wish you could 
+get one sniff of the real Adirondack article in the pine woods at 
+daylight."
+
+"I have heard of it," said I.  "But for fragrance and tang and a joy 
+in the nostrils I would not give one puff of sea breeze across the 
+bay, down on my little boat dock on Long Island, for ten of your 
+turpentine-scented tornadoes."
+
+"Then why," asked North, a little curiously, "don't you go there 
+instead of staying cooped up in this Greater Bakery?"
+
+"Because," said I, doggedly, "I have discovered that New York is the 
+greatest summer--"
+
+"Don't say that again," interrupted North, "unless you've actually got 
+a job as General Passenger Agent of the Subway.  You can't really 
+believe it."
+
+I went to some trouble to try to prove my theory to my friend.  The 
+Weather Bureau and the season had conspired to make the argument 
+worthy of an able advocate.
+
+The city seemed stretched on a broiler directly above the furnaces of 
+Avernus.  There was a kind of tepid gayety afoot and awheel in the 
+boulevards, mainly evinced by languid men strolling about in straw 
+hats and evening clothes, and rows of idle taxicabs with their flags 
+up, looking like a blockaded Fourth of July procession.  The hotels 
+kept up a specious brilliancy and hospitable outlook, but inside one 
+saw vast empty caverns, and the footrails at the bars gleamed brightly 
+from long disacquaintance with the sole-leather of customers.  In the 
+cross-town streets the steps of the old brownstone houses were 
+swarming with "stoopers," that motley race hailing from sky-light room 
+and basement, bringing out their straw doorstep mats to sit and fill 
+the air with strange noises and opinions.
+
+North and I dined on the top of a hotel; and here, for a few minutes, 
+I thought I had made a score.  An east wind, almost cool, blew across 
+the roofless roof.  A capable orchestra concealed in a bower of 
+wistaria played with sufficient judgment to make the art of music 
+probable and the art of conversation possible.
+
+Some ladies in reproachless summer gowns at other tables gave 
+animation and color to the scene.  And an excellent dinner, mainly 
+from the refrigerator, seemed to successfully back my judgment as to 
+summer resorts.  But North grumbled all during the meal, and cursed 
+his lawyers and prated so of his confounded camp in the woods that I 
+began to wish he would go back there and leave me in my peaceful city 
+retreat.
+
+After dining we went to a roof-garden vaudeville that was being much 
+praised.  There we found a good bill, an artificially cooled 
+atmosphere, cold drinks, prompt service, and a gay, well-dressed 
+audience.  North was bored.
+
+"If this isn't comfortable enough for you on the hottest August night 
+for five years," I said, a little sarcastically, "you might think 
+about the kids down in Delancey and Hester streets lying out on the 
+fire-escapes with their tongues hanging out, trying to get a breath of 
+air that hasn't been fried on both sides.  The contrast might increase 
+your enjoyment."
+
+"Don't talk Socialism," said North.  "I gave five hundred dollars to 
+the free ice fund on the first of May.  I'm contrasting these stale, 
+artificial, hollow, wearisome 'amusements' with the enjoyment a man 
+can get in the woods.  You should see the firs and pines do skirt-
+dances during a storm; and lie down flat and drink out of a mountain 
+branch at the end of a day's tramp after the deer.  That's the only 
+way to spend a summer.  Get out and live with nature."
+
+"I agree with you absolutely," said I, with emphasis.
+
+For one moment I had relaxed my vigilance, and had spoken my true 
+sentiments.  North looked at me long and curiously.
+
+"Then why, in the name of Pan and Apollo," he asked, "have you been 
+singing this deceitful paean to summer in town?"
+
+I suppose I looked my guilt.
+
+"Ha," said North, "I see.  May I ask her name?"
+
+"Annie Ashton," said I, simply.  "She played Nannette in Binkley & 
+Bing's production of The Silver Cord.  She is to have a better part 
+next season."
+
+"Take me to see her," said North.
+
+Miss Ashton lived with her mother in a small hotel.  They were out of 
+the West, and had a little money that bridged the seasons.  As press-
+agent of Binkley & Bing I had tried to keep her before the public.  As 
+Robert James Vandiver I had hoped to withdraw her; for if ever one was 
+made to keep company with said Vandiver and smell the salt breeze on 
+the south shore of Long Island and listen to the ducks quack in the 
+watches of the night, it was the Ashton set forth above.
+
+But she had a soul above ducks--above nightingales; aye, even above 
+birds of paradise.  She was very beautiful, with quiet ways, and 
+seemed genuine.  She had both taste and talent for the stage, and she 
+liked to stay at home and read and make caps for her mother.  She was 
+unvaryingly kind and friendly with Binkley & Bing's press-agent.  
+Since the theatre had closed she had allowed Mr.  Vandiver to call in 
+an unofficial role.  I had often spoken to her of my friend, Spencer 
+Grenville North; and so, as it was early, the first turn of the 
+vaudeville being not yet over, we left to find a telephone.
+
+Miss Ashton would be very glad to see Mr.  Vandiver and Mr.  North.
+
+We found her fitting a new cap on her mother.  I never saw her look 
+more charming.
+
+North made himself disagreeably entertaining.  He was a good talker, 
+and had a way with him.  Besides, he had two, ten, or thirty millions, 
+I've for gotten which.  I incautiously admired the mother's cap, 
+whereupon she brought out her store of a dozen or two, and I took a 
+course in edgings and frills.  Even though Annie's fingers had pinked, 
+or ruched, or hemmed, or whatever you do to 'em, they palled upon me.  
+And I could hear North drivelling to Annie about his odious Adirondack 
+camp.
+
+Two days after that I saw North in his motor-car with Miss Ashton and 
+her mother.  On the next afternoon he dropped in on me.
+
+"Bobby," said he, "this old burg isn't such a bad proposition in the 
+summer-time, after all.  Since I've keen knocking around it looks 
+better to me.  There are some first-rate musical comedies and light 
+operas on the roofs and in the outdoor gardens.  And if you hunt up 
+the right places and stick to soft drinks, you can keep about as cool 
+here as you can in the country.  Hang it! when you come to think of 
+it, there's nothing much to the country, anyhow.  You get tired and 
+sunburned and lonesome, and you have to eat any old thing that the 
+cook dishes up to you."
+
+"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" said I.
+
+"It certainly does.  Now, I found some whitebait yesterday, at 
+Maurice's, with a new sauce that beats anything in the trout line I 
+ever tasted."
+
+"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" I said.
+
+"Immense.  The sauce is the main thing with whitebait."
+
+"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" I asked, looking him straight in 
+the eye.  He understood.
+
+"Look here, Bob," he said, "I was going to tell you.  I couldn't help 
+it.  I'll play fair with you, but I'm going in to win.  She is the 
+'one particular' for me."
+
+"All right," said I.  "It's a fair field.  There are no rights for you 
+to encroach upon."
+
+On Thursday afternoon Miss Ashton invited North and myself to have tea 
+in her apartment.  He was devoted, and she was more charming than 
+usual.  By avoiding the subject of caps I managed to get a word or two 
+into and out of the talk.  Miss Ashton asked me in a make-
+conversational tone something about the next season's tour.
+
+"Oh," said I, "I don't know about that.  I'm not going to be with 
+Binkley & Bing next season."
+
+"Why, I thought," said she, "that they were going to put the Number 
+One road company under your charge.  I thought you told me so."
+
+"They were," said I, "but they won't..  I'll tell you what I'm going 
+to do.  I'm going to the south shore of Long Island and buy a small 
+cottage I know there on the edge of the bay.  And I'll buy a catboat 
+and a rowboat and a shotgun and a yellow dog.  I've got money enough 
+to do it.  And I'll smell the salt wind all day when it blows from the 
+sea and the pine odor when it blows from the land.  And, of course, 
+I'll write plays until I have a trunk full of 'em on hand.
+
+"And the next thing and the biggest thing I'll do will be to buy that 
+duck-farm next door.  Few people understand ducks.  I can watch 'em 
+for hours.  They can march better than any company in the National 
+Guard, and they can play 'follow my leader' better than the entire 
+Democratic party.  Their voices don't amount to much, but I like to 
+hear 'em.  They wake you up a dozen times a night, but there's a 
+homely sound about their quacking that is more musical to me than the 
+cry of 'Fresh strawber-rees!' under your window in the morning when 
+you want to sleep.
+
+"And," I went on, enthusiastically, "do you know the value of ducks 
+besides their beauty and intelligence and order and sweetness of 
+voice?  Picking their feathers gives you an unfailing and never 
+ceasing income.  On a farm that I know the feathers were sold for $400 
+in one year.  Think of that!  And the ones shipped to the market will 
+bring in more money than that.  Yes, I am for the ducks and the salt 
+breeze coming over the bay.  I think I shall get a Chinaman cook, and 
+with him and the dog and the sunsets for company I shall do well.  No 
+more of this dull, baking, senseless, roaring city for me."
+
+Miss Ashton looked surprised.  North laughed.
+
+"I am going to begin one of my plays tonight," I said, "so I must be 
+going."  And with that I took my departure.
+
+A few days later Miss Ashton telephoned to me, asking me to call at 
+four in the afternoon.
+
+I did.
+
+"You have been very good to me," she said, hesitatingly, "and I 
+thought I would tell you.  I am going to leave the stage."
+
+"Yes," said I, "I suppose you will.  They usually do when there's so 
+much money."
+
+"There is no money," she said, "or very little.  Our money is almost 
+gone."
+
+"But I am told," said I, "that he has something like two or ten or 
+thirty millions--I have forgotten which."
+
+"I know what you mean," she said.  "I will not pretend that I do not.  
+I am not going to marry Mr.  North."
+
+"Then why are you leaving the stage ?" I asked, severely.  "What else 
+can you do to earn a living?"
+
+She came closer to me, and I can see the look in her eyes yet as she 
+spoke.
+
+"I can pick ducks," she said.
+
+We sold the first year's feathers for $350.
+
+
+
+
+A POOR RULE
+
+
+
+I have always maintained, and asserted ime to time, that woman is no 
+mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and 
+interpret her.  That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon 
+credulous mankind.  Whether I am right or wrong we shall see.  As 
+"Harper's Drawer" used to say in bygone years: "The following good 
+story is told of Miss --, Mr. --, Mr. --and Mr. --."
+
+We shall have to omit "Bishop X" and "the Rev. --," for they do not 
+belong.
+
+In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern 
+Pacific.  A reporter would have called it a "mushroom" town; but it 
+was not.  Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.
+
+The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the 
+passengers both to drink and to dine.  There was a new yellow-pine 
+hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences.  
+The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, "black-waxy" mud, and 
+mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon.  Paloma was an about-to-
+be city.  The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the twice-a-
+day train by which you might leave, creditably sustained the role of 
+charity.
+
+The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while 
+it rained, and the warmest when it shone.  It was operated, owned, and 
+perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out of 
+Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and 
+sorghum.
+
+There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which 
+the family lived.  From the kitchen extended a "shelter" made of poles 
+covered with chaparral brush.  Under this was a table and two benches, 
+each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry.  Here was 
+set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans, soda-
+biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu.
+
+Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as "Betty," but denied 
+to the eyesight, presided at the range.  Pa Hinkle himself, with 
+salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands.  During rush hours a 
+Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided 
+him in waiting on the guests.  As is customary at Parisian banquets, I 
+place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.
+
+Ileen Hinkle!
+
+The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it.  No doubt she 
+had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography that 
+Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have indorsed the 
+phonography.
+
+Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to 
+invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through 
+Galveston and Del Rio.  She sat on a high stool in a rough pine grand-
+stand--or was it a temple?--under the shelter at the door of the 
+kitchen.  There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with a 
+little arch under which you passed your money.  Heaven knows why the 
+barbed wire; for every man who dined Parisianly there would have died 
+in her service.  Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you 
+put it under the arch, and she took it.
+
+I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you.  Instead, I 
+must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: A Philosophical 
+Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.  It 
+is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive 
+conceptions of beauty--roundness and smoothness, I think they are, 
+according to Burke.  It is well said.  Rotundity is a patent charm; as 
+for smoothness--the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother 
+she becomes.
+
+Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure 
+Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam.  She 
+was a fruit-stand blonde-strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc.  Her 
+eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm 
+that never comes.  But it seems to me that words (at any rate per) are 
+wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful.  Like fancy, "It is 
+engendered in the eyes."  There are three kinds of beauties--I was 
+foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a story.
+
+The first is the freckle-faced, snub-nosed girl whom you like.  The 
+second is Maud Adams.  The third is, or are, the ladies in 
+Bouguereau's paintings.  Ileen Hinkle was the fourth.  She was the 
+mayoress of Spotless Town.  There were a thousand golden apples coming 
+to her as Helen of the Troy laundries.
+
+The Parisian Restaurant was within a radius.  Even from beyond its 
+circumference men rode in to Paloma to win her smiles.  They got them.  
+One meal--one smile--one dollar.  But, with all her impartiality, 
+Ileen seemed to favor three of her admirers above the rest.  According 
+to the rules of politeness, I will mention myself last.
+
+The first was an artificial product known as Bryan Jacks--a name that 
+had obviously met with reverses.  Jacks was the outcome of paved 
+cities.  He was a small man made of some material resembling flexible 
+sandstone.  His hair was the color of a brick Quaker meeting-house; 
+his eyes were twin cranberries; his mouth was like the aperture under 
+a drop-letters-here sign.
+
+He knew every city from Bangor to San Francisco, thence north to 
+Portland, thence S. 45 E. to a given point in Florida.  He had 
+mastered every art, trade, game, business, profession, and sport in 
+the world, had been present at, or hurrying on his way to, every head-
+line event that had ever occurred between oceans since he was five 
+years old.  You might open the atlas, place your finger at random upon 
+the name of a town, and Jacks would tell you the front names of three 
+prominent citizens before you could close it again.  He spoke 
+patronizingly and even disrespectfully of Broadway, Beacon Hill, 
+Michigan, Euclid, and Fifth avenues, and the St. Louis Four Courts.  
+Compared with him as a cosmopolite, the Wandering Jew would have 
+seemed a mere hermit.  He had learned everything the world could teach 
+him, and he would tell you about it.
+
+I hate to be reminded of Pollock's Course of Time, and so do you; but 
+every time I saw Jacks I would think of the poet's description of 
+another poet by the name of G. G. Byron who "Drank early; deeply 
+drank--drank draughts that common millions might have quenched; then 
+died of thirst because there was no more to drink."
+
+That fitted Jacks, except that, instead of dying, he came to Paloma, 
+which was about the same thing.  He was a telegrapher and station- and 
+express-agent at seventy-five dollars a month.  Why a young man who 
+knew everything and could do everything was content to serve in such 
+an obscure capacity I never could understand, although he let out a 
+hint once that it was as a personal favor to the president and 
+stockholders of the S. P. Ry. Co.
+
+One more line of description, and I turn Jacks over to you.  He wore 
+bright blue clothes, yellow shoes, and a bow tie made of the same 
+cloth as his shirt.
+
+My rival No.2 was Bud Cunningham, whose services had been engaged by a 
+ranch near Paloma to assist in compelling refractory cattle to keep 
+within the bounds of decorum and order.  Bud was the only cowboy off 
+the stage that I ever saw who looked like one on it.  He wore the 
+sombrero, the chaps, and the handkerchief tied at the back of his 
+neck.
+
+Twice a week Bud rode in from the Val Verde Ranch to sup at the 
+Parisian Restaurant.  He rode a many-high-handed Kentucky horse at a 
+tremendously fast lope, which animal he would rein up so suddenly 
+under the big mesquite at the corner of the brush shelter that his 
+hoofs would plough canals yards long in the loam.
+
+Jacks and I were regular boarders at the restaurant, of course.
+
+The front room of the Hinkle House was as neat a little parlor as 
+there was in the black-waxy country.  It was all willow rocking-
+chairs, and home-knit tidies, and albums, and conch shells in a row.  
+And a little upright piano in one comer.
+
+Here Jacks and Bud and I--or sometimes one or two of us, according to 
+our good-luck--used to sit of evenings when the tide of trade was 
+over, and "visit" Miss Hinkle.
+
+Ileen was a girl of ideas.  She was destined for higher things (if 
+there can be anything higher) than taking in dollars all day through a 
+barbed-wire wicket.  She had read and listened and thought.  Her looks 
+would have formed a career for a less ambitious girl; but, rising 
+superior to mere beauty, she must establish something in the nature of 
+a salon--the only one in Paloma.
+
+"Don't you think that Shakespeare was a great writer?" she would ask, 
+with such a pretty little knit of her arched brows that the late 
+Ignatius Donnelly, himself, had he seen it, could scarcely have saved 
+his Bacon.
+
+Ileen was of the opinion, also, that Boston is more cultured than 
+Chicago; that Rosa Bonheur was one of the greatest of women painters; 
+that Westerners are more spontaneous and open-hearted than Easterners; 
+that London must be a very foggy city, and that California must be 
+quite lovely in the springtime.  And of many other opinions indicating 
+a keeping up with the world's best thought.
+
+These, however, were but gleaned from hearsay and evidence: Ileen had 
+theories of her own.  One, in particular, she disseminated to us 
+untiringly.  Flattery she detested.  Frankness and honesty of speech 
+and action, she declared, were the chief mental ornaments of man and 
+woman.  If ever she could like any one, it would be for those 
+qualities.
+
+"I'm awfully weary," she said, one evening, when we three musketeers 
+of the mesquite were in the little parlor, "of having compliments on 
+my looks paid to me.  I know I'm not beautiful."
+
+(Bud Cunningham told me afterward that it was all he could do to keep 
+from calling her a liar when she said that.)
+
+"I'm only a little Middle-Western girl," went on Ileen, "who justs 
+wants to be simple and neat, and tries to help her father make a 
+humble living."
+
+(Old Man Hinkle was shipping a thousand silver dollars a month, clear 
+profit, to a bank in San Antonio.[)]
+
+Bud twisted around in his chair and bent the rim of his hat, from 
+which he could never be persuaded to separate.  He did not know 
+whether she wanted what she said she wanted or what she knew she 
+deserved.  Many a wiser man has hesitated at deciding.  Bud decided.
+
+"Why--ah, Miss Ileen, beauty, as you might say, ain't everything.  Not 
+sayin' that you haven't your share of good looks, I always admired 
+more than anything else about you the nice, kind way you treat your ma 
+and pa.  Any one what's good to their parents and is a kind of home-
+body don't specially need to be too pretty."
+
+Ileen gave him one of her sweetest smiles.  "Thank you, Mr.  
+Cunningham," she said.  "I consider that one of the finest compliments 
+I've had in a long time.  I'd so much rather hear you say that than to 
+hear you talk about my eyes and hair.  I'm glad you believe me when I 
+say I don't like flattery."
+
+Our cue was there for us.  Bud had made a good guess.  You couldn't 
+lose Jacks.  He chimed in next.
+
+"Sure thing, Miss Ileen," he said; "the good-lookers don't always win 
+out.  Now, you ain't bad looking, of course-but that's nix-cum-rous.  
+I knew a girl once in Dubuque with a face like a cocoanut, who could 
+skin the cat twice on a horizontal bar without changing hands.  Now, a 
+girl might have the California peach crop mashed to a marmalade and 
+not be able to do that.  I've seen--er--worse lookers than you, Miss 
+Ileen; but what I like about you is the business way you've got of 
+doing things.  Cool and wise--that's the winning way for a girl.  Mr. 
+Hinkle told me the other day you'd never taken in a lead silver dollar 
+or a plugged one since you've been on the job.  Now, that's the stuff 
+for a girl--that's what catches me."
+
+Jacks got his smile, too.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Jacks," said Ileen.  "If you only knew how I 
+appreciate any one's being candid and not a flatterer!  I get so tired 
+of people telling me I'm pretty.  I think it is the loveliest thing to 
+have friends who tell you the truth."
+
+Then I thought I saw an expectant look on Ileen's face as she glanced 
+toward me.  I had a wild, sudden impulse to dare fate, and tell her of 
+all the beautiful handiwork of the Great Artificer she was the most 
+exquisite--that she was a flawless pearl gleaming pure and serene in a 
+setting of black mud and emerald prairies--that she was--a--a corker; 
+and as for mine, I cared not if she were as crtiel as a serpent's 
+tooth to her fond parents, or if she couldn't tell a plugged dollar 
+from a bridle buckle, if I might sing, chant, praise, glorify, and 
+worship her peerless and wonderful beauty.
+
+But I refrained.  I feared the fate of a flatterer.  I had witnessed 
+her delight at the crafty and discreet words of Bud and Jacks.  No!  
+Miss Hinkle was not one to be beguiled by the plated-silver tongue of 
+a flatterer.  So I joined the ranks of the candid and honest.  At once 
+I became mendacious and didactic.
+
+"In all ages, Miss Hinkle," said I, "in spite of the poetry and 
+romance of each, intellect in woman has been admired more than beauty.  
+Even in Cleopatra, herself, men found more charm in her queenly mind 
+than in her looks."
+
+"Well, I should think so!" said Ileen.  "I've seen pictures of her 
+that weren't so much.  she had an awfully long nose."
+
+"If I may say so," I went on, "you remind me of Cleopatra, Miss 
+Ileen."
+
+"Why, my nose isn't so long!" said she, opening her eyes wide and 
+touching that comely feature with a dimpled forefinger.
+
+"Why--er--I mean," said I--" I mean as to mental endowments."
+
+"Oh!" said she; and then I got my smile just as Bud and Jacks had got 
+theirs.
+
+"Thank every one of you," she said, very, very sweetly, "for being so 
+frank and honest with me.  That's the way I want you to be always.  
+Just tell me plainly and truthfully what you think, and we'll all be 
+the best friends in the world.  And now, because you've been so good 
+to me, and understand so well how I dislike people who do nothing but 
+pay me exaggerated compliments, I'll sing and play a little for you."
+
+Of course, we expressed our thanks and joy; but we would have been 
+better pleased if Ileen had remained in her low rocking-chair face to 
+face with us and let us gaze upon her.  For she was no Adelina Patti--
+not even on the fare-wellest of the diva's farewell tours.  She had a 
+cooing little voice like that of a turtle-dove that could almost fill 
+the parlor when the windows and doors were closed, and Betty was not 
+rattling the lids of the stove in the kitchen.  She had a gamut that I 
+estimate at about eight inches on the piano; and her runs and trills 
+sounded like the clothes bubbling in your grandmother's iron wash-pot.  
+Believe that she must have been beautiful when I tell you that it 
+sounded like music to us.
+
+"She Must Have Been Beautiful When I Tell You That It Sounded Like 
+Music To Us"
+
+Ileen's musical taste was catholic.  She would sing through a pile of 
+sheet music on the left-hand top of the piano, laying each slaughtered 
+composition on the right-hand top.  The next evening she would sing 
+from right to left.  Her favorites were Mendelssohn, and Moody and 
+Sankey.  By request she always wound up with Sweet Violets and When 
+the Leaves Begin to Turn.
+
+When we left at ten o'clock the three of us would go down to Jacks' 
+little wooden station and sit on the platform, swinging our feet and 
+trying to pump one another for dews as to which way Miss Ileen's 
+inclinations seemed to lean.  That is the way of rivals--they do not 
+avoid and glower at one another; they convene and converse and 
+construe--striving by the art politic to estimate the strength of the 
+enemy.
+
+One day there came a dark horse to Paloma, a young lawyer who at once 
+flaunted his shingle and himself spectacularly upon the town.  His 
+name was C. Vincent Vesey.  You could see at a glance that he was a 
+recent graduate of a southwestern law school.  His Prince Albert coat, 
+light striped trousers, broad-brimmed soft black hat, and narrow white 
+muslin bow tie proclaimed that more loudly than any diploma could.  
+Vesey was a compound of Daniel Webster, Lord Chesterfield, Beau 
+Brummell, and Little Jack Horner.  His coming boomed Paloma.  The next 
+day after he arrived an addition to the town was surveyed and laid off 
+in lots.
+
+Of course, Vesey, to further his professional fortunes, must mingle 
+with the citizenry and outliers of Paloma.  And, as well as with the 
+soldier men, he was bound to seek popularity with the gay dogs of the 
+place.  So Jacks and Bud Cunningham and I came to be honored by his 
+acquaintance.
+
+The doctrine of predestination would have been discredited had not 
+Vesey seen Ileen Hinkle and become fourth in the tourney.  
+Magnificently, he boarded at the yellow pine hotel instead of at the 
+Parisian Restaurant; but he came to be a formidable visitor in the 
+Hinkle parlor.  His competition reduced Bud to an inspired increase of 
+profanity, drove Jacks to an outburst of slang so weird that it 
+sounded more horrible than the most trenchant of Bud's imprecations, 
+and made me dumb with gloom.
+
+For Vesey had the rhetoric.  Words flowed from him like oil from a 
+gusher.  Hyperbole, compliment, praise, appreciation, honeyed 
+gallantry, golden opinions, eulogy, and unveiled panegyric vied with 
+one another for pre-eminence in his speech.  We had small hopes that 
+Ileen could resist his oratory and Prince Albert.
+
+But a day came that gave us courage.
+
+About dusk one evening I was sitting on the little gallery in front of 
+the Hinkle parlor, waiting for Ileen to come, when I heard voices 
+inside.  She had come into the room with her father, and Old Man 
+Hinkle began to talk to her.  I had observed before that he was a 
+shrewd man, and not unphilosophic.
+
+"Ily," said he, "I notice there's three or four young fellers that 
+have been callin' to see you regular for quite a while.  Is there any 
+one of 'em you like better than another?"
+
+"Why, pa," she answered, "I like all of 'em very well.  I think Mr. 
+Cuninngham and Mr. Jacks and Mr. Harris are very nice young men.  They 
+are so frank and honest in everything they say to me.  I haven't known 
+Mr. Vesey very long, but I think he's a very nice young man, he's so 
+frank and honest in everything he says to me."
+
+"Now, that's what I'm gittin' at," says old Hinkle.  "You've always 
+been sayin' you like people what tell the truth and don't go 
+humbuggin' you with compliments and bogus talk.  Now, suppose you make 
+a test of these fellers, and see which one of 'em will talk the 
+straightest to you."
+
+"But how'll I do it, pa?"
+
+"I'll tell you how.  You know you sing a little bit, Ily; you took 
+music-lessons nearly two years in Logansport.  It wasn't long, but it 
+was all we could afford then.  And your teacher said you didn't have 
+any voice, and it was a waste of money to keep on.  Now, suppose you 
+ask the fellers what they think of your singin', and see what each one 
+of 'em tells you.  The man that 'll tell you the truth about it 'll 
+have a mighty lot of nerve, and 'll do to tie to.  What do you think 
+of the plan?"
+
+"All right, pa," said Ileen.  "I think it's a good idea.  I'll try 
+it."
+
+Ileen and Mr. Hinkle went out of the room through the inside doors.  
+Unobserved, I hurried down to the station.  Jacks was at his telegraph 
+table waiting for eight o'clock to come.  It was Bud's night in town, 
+and when he rode in I repeated the conversation to them both.  I was 
+loyal to my rivals, as all true admirers of all Ileens should be.
+
+Simultaneously the three of us were smitten by an uplifting thought.  
+Surely this test would eliminate Vesey from the contest.  He, with his 
+unctuous flattery, would be driven from the lists.  Well we remembered 
+Ileen's love of frankness and honesty--how she treasured truth and 
+candor above vain compliment and blandishment.
+
+Linking arms, we did a grotesque dance of joy up and down the 
+platform, singing Muldoon Was a Solid Man at the top of our voices.
+
+That evening four of the willow rocking-chairs were filled besides the 
+lucky one that sustained the trim figure of Miss Hinkle.  Three of us 
+awaited with suppressed excitement the application of the test.  It 
+was tried on Bud first.
+
+"Mr. Cunningham," said Ileen, with her dazzling smile, after she had 
+sung When the Leaves Begin to Turn, "what do you really think of my 
+voice?  Frankly and honestly, now, as you know I want you to always be 
+toward me."
+
+Bud squirmed in his chair at his chance to show the sincerity that he 
+knew was required of him.
+
+"Tell you the truth, Miss Ileen," he said, earnestly, "you ain't got 
+much more voice than a weasel--just a little squeak, you know.  Of 
+course, we all like to hear you sing, for it's kind of sweet and 
+soothin' after all, and you look most as mighty well sittin' on the 
+piano-stool as you do faced around.  But as for real singin'--I reckon 
+you couldn't call it that."
+
+I looked closely at Ileen to see if Bud had overdone his frankness, 
+but her pleased smile and sweetly spoken thanks assured me that we 
+were on the right track.
+
+"And what do you think, Mr. Jacks?" she asked next.
+"Take it from me," said Jacks, "you ain't in the prima donna class.  
+I've heard 'em warble in every city in the United States; and I tell 
+you your vocal output don't go.  Otherwise, you've got the grand opera 
+bunch sent to the soap factory--in looks, I mean; for the high 
+screechers generally look like Mary Ann on her Thursday out.  But nix 
+for the gargle work.  Your epiglottis ain't a real side-stepper--its 
+footwork ain't good."
+
+With a merry laugh at Jacks' criticism, Ileen looked inquiringly at 
+me.
+
+I admit that I faltered a little.  Was there not such a thing as being 
+too frank?  Perhaps I even hedged a little in my verdict; but I stayed 
+with the critics.
+
+"I am not skilled in scientific music, Miss Ileen," I said, "but, 
+frankly, I cannot praise very highly the singing-voice that Nature has 
+given you.  It has long been a favorite comparison that a great singer 
+sings like a bird.  Well, there are birds and birds.  I would say that 
+your voice reminds me of the thrush's--throaty and not strong, nor of 
+much compass or variety--but still--er--sweet--in--er--its--way, and--
+er--"
+
+"Thank you, Mr.  Harris," interrupted Miss Hinkle.  "I knew I could 
+depend Upon your frankness and honesty."
+
+And then C. Vincent Vesey drew back one sleeve from his snowy cuff, 
+and the water came down at Lodore.
+
+My memory cannot do justice to his masterly tribute to that priceless, 
+God-given treasure--Miss Hinkle's voice.  He raved over it in terms 
+that, if they had been addressed to the morning stars when they sang 
+together, would have made that stellar choir explode in a meteoric 
+shower of flaming self-satisfaction.
+
+He marshalled on his white finger-tips the grand opera stars of all 
+the continents, from Jenny Lind to Emma Abbott, only to depreciate 
+their endowments.  He spoke  of larynxes, of chest notes, of phrasing, 
+arpeggios, and other strange paraphernalia of the throaty art.  He 
+admitted, as though driven to a corner, that Jenny Lind had a note or 
+two in the high register that Miss Hinkle had not yet acquired--but--
+"!!!"-that was a mere matter of practice and training.
+
+And, as a peroration, he predicted--solemnly predicted--a career in 
+vocal art for the "coming star of the Southwest--and one of which 
+grand old Texas may well be proud," hitherto unsurpassed in the annals 
+of musical history.
+
+When we left at ten, Ileen gave each of us her usual warm, cordial 
+handshake, entrancing smile, and invitation to call again.  I could 
+not see that one was favored above or below another--but three of us 
+knew--we knew.
+
+We knew that frankness and honesty had won, and that the rivals now 
+numbered three instead of four.
+
+Down at the station Jacks brought out a pint bottle of the proper 
+stuff, and we celebrated the downfall of a blatant interloper.
+
+Four days went by without anything happening worthy of recount.
+
+On the fifth, Jacks and I, entering the brush arbor for our supper, 
+saw the Mexican youth, instead of a divinity in a spotless waist and a 
+navy-blue skirt, taking in the dollars through the barbed-wire wicket.
+
+We rushed into the kitchen, meeting Pa Hinkle coming out with two cups 
+of hot coffee in his hands.
+
+"Where's Ileen?" we asked, in recitative.
+
+Pa Hinkle was a kindly man.  "Well, gents," said he, "it was a sudden 
+notion she took; but I've got the money, and I let her have her way.  
+She's gone to a corn--a conservatory in Boston for four years for to 
+have her voice cultivated.  Now, excuse me to pass, gents, for this 
+coffee's hot, and my thumbs is tender."
+
+That night there were four instead of three of us sitting on the 
+station platform and swinging our feet.  C. Vincent Vesey was one of 
+us.  We discussed things while dogs barked at the moon that rose, as 
+big as a five-cent piece or a flour barrel, over the chaparral.
+
+And what we discussed was whether it is better to lie to a woman or to 
+tell her the truth.
+
+And as all of us were young then, we did not come to a decision.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+End of Project Gutenburg Etext of OPTIONS by O. Henry.
+
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