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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Gentle Grafter, by O. Henry
+#18 in our series by O. Henry
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+The Gentle Grafter
+
+by O. Henry
+
+July, 1999  [Etext #1805]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Gentle Grafter, by O. Henry
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+Etext prepared by John Bickers, jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz
+and Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
+
+
+
+
+
+The Gentle Grafter
+
+by O. Henry
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   I. The Octopus Marooned
+  II. Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet
+ III. Modern Rural Sports
+  IV. The Chair of Philanthromathematics
+   V. The Hand That Riles the World
+  VI. The Exact Science of Matrimony
+ VII. A Midsummer Masquerade
+VIII. Shearing the Wolf
+  IX. Innocents of Broadway
+   X. Conscience in Art
+  XI. The Man Higher Up
+ XII. A Tempered Wind
+XIII. Hostages to Momus
+ XIV. The Ethics of Pig
+
+
+
+
+THE GENTLE GRAFTER
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE OCTOPUS MAROONED
+
+"A trust is its weakest point," said Jeff Peters.
+
+"That," said I, "sounds like one of those unintelligible remarks such
+as, 'Why is a policeman?'"
+
+"It is not," said Jeff. "There are no relations between a trust and a
+policeman. My remark was an epitogram--an axis--a kind of mulct'em in
+parvo. What it means is that a trust is like an egg, and it is not
+like an egg. If you want to break an egg you have to do it from the
+outside. The only way to break up a trust is from the inside. Keep
+sitting on it until it hatches. Look at the brood of young colleges
+and libraries that's chirping and peeping all over the country. Yes,
+sir, every trust bears in its own bosom the seeds of its destruction
+like a rooster that crows near a Georgia colored Methodist camp
+meeting, or a Republican announcing himself a candidate for governor
+of Texas."
+
+I asked Jeff, jestingly, if he had ever, during his checkered,
+plaided, mottled, pied and dappled career, conducted an enterprise of
+the class to which the word "trust" had been applied. Somewhat to my
+surprise he acknowledged the corner.
+
+"Once," said he. "And the state seal of New Jersey never bit into a
+charter that opened up a solider and safer piece of legitimate
+octopusing. We had everything in our favor--wind, water, police,
+nerve, and a clean monopoly of an article indispensable to the public.
+There wasn't a trust buster on the globe that could have found a weak
+spot in our scheme. It made Rockefeller's little kerosene speculation
+look like a bucket shop. But we lost out."
+
+"Some unforeseen opposition came up, I suppose," I said.
+
+"No, sir, it was just as I said. We were self-curbed. It was a case of
+auto-suppression. There was a rift within the loot, as Albert Tennyson
+says.
+
+"You remember I told you that me and Andy Tucker was partners for some
+years. That man was the most talented conniver at stratagems I ever
+saw. Whenever he saw a dollar in another man's hands he took it as a
+personal grudge, if he couldn't take it any other way. Andy was
+educated, too, besides having a lot of useful information. He had
+acquired a big amount of experience out of books, and could talk for
+hours on any subject connected with ideas and discourse. He had been
+in every line of graft from lecturing on Palestine with a lot of magic
+lantern pictures of the annual Custom-made Clothiers' Association
+convention at Atlantic City to flooding Connecticut with bogus wood
+alcohol distilled from nutmegs.
+
+"One Spring me and Andy had been over in Mexico on a flying trip
+during which a Philadelphia capitalist had paid us $2,500 for a half
+interest in a silver mine in Chihuahua. Oh, yes, the mine was all
+right. The other half interest must have been worth two or three
+thousand. I often wondered who owned that mine.
+
+"In coming back to the United States me and Andy stubbed our toes
+against a little town in Texas on the bank of the Rio Grande. The name
+of it was Bird City; but it wasn't. The town had about 2,000
+inhabitants, mostly men. I figured out that their principal means of
+existence was in living close to tall chaparral. Some of 'em were
+stockmen and some gamblers and some horse peculators and plenty were
+in the smuggling line. Me and Andy put up at a hotel that was built
+like something between a roof-garden and a sectional bookcase. It
+began to rain the day we got there. As the saying is, Juniper Aquarius
+was sure turning on the water plugs on Mount Amphibious.
+
+"Now, there were three saloons in Bird City, though neither Andy nor
+me drank. But we could see the townspeople making a triangular
+procession from one to another all day and half the night. Everybody
+seemed to know what to do with as much money as they had.
+
+"The third day of the rain it slacked up awhile in the afternoon, so
+me and Andy walked out to the edge of town to view the mudscape. Bird
+City was built between the Rio Grande and a deep wide arroyo that used
+to be the old bed of the river. The bank between the stream and its
+old bed was cracking and giving away, when we saw it, on account of
+the high water caused by the rain. Andy looks at it a long time. That
+man's intellects was never idle. And then he unfolds to me a
+instantaneous idea that has occurred to him. Right there was organized
+a trust; and we walked back into town and put it on the market.
+
+"First we went to the main saloon in Bird City, called the Blue Snake,
+and bought it. It cost us $1,200. And then we dropped in, casual, at
+Mexican Joe's place, referred to the rain, and bought him out for
+$500. The other one came easy at $400.
+
+"The next morning Bird City woke up and found itself an island. The
+river had busted through its old channel, and the town was surrounded
+by roaring torrents. The rain was still raining, and there was heavy
+clouds in the northwest that presaged about six more mean annual
+rainfalls during the next two weeks. But the worst was yet to come.
+
+"Bird City hopped out of its nest, waggled its pin feathers and
+strolled out for its matutinal toot. Lo! Mexican Joe's place was
+closed and likewise the other little 'dobe life saving station. So,
+naturally the body politic emits thirsty ejaculations of surprise and
+ports hellum for the Blue Snake. And what does it find there?
+
+"Behind one end of the bar sits Jefferson Peters, octopus, with a
+sixshooter on each side of him, ready to make change or corpses as the
+case may be. There are three bartenders; and on the wall is a ten foot
+sign reading: 'All Drinks One Dollar.' Andy sits on the safe in his
+neat blue suit and gold-banded cigar, on the lookout for emergencies.
+The town marshal is there with two deputies to keep order, having been
+promised free drinks by the trust.
+
+"Well, sir, it took Bird City just ten minutes to realize that it was
+in a cage. We expected trouble; but there wasn't any. The citizens saw
+that we had 'em. The nearest railroad was thirty miles away; and it
+would be two weeks at least before the river would be fordable. So
+they began to cuss, amiable, and throw down dollars on the bar till it
+sounded like a selection on the xylophone.
+
+"There was about 1,500 grown-up adults in Bird City that had arrived
+at years of indiscretion; and the majority of 'em required from three
+to twenty drinks a day to make life endurable. The Blue Snake was the
+only place where they could get 'em till the flood subsided. It was
+beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.
+
+"About ten o'clock the silver dollars dropping on the bar slowed down
+to playing two-steps and marches instead of jigs. But I looked out the
+window and saw a hundred or two of our customers standing in line at
+Bird City Savings and Loan Co., and I knew they were borrowing more
+money to be sucked in by the clammy tendrils of the octopus.
+
+"At the fashionable hour of noon everybody went home to dinner. We
+told the bartenders to take advantage of the lull, and do the same.
+Then me and Andy counted the receipts. We had taken in $1,300. We
+calculated that if Bird City would only remain an island for two weeks
+the trust would be able to endow the Chicago University with a new
+dormitory of padded cells for the faculty, and present every worthy
+poor man in Texas with a farm, provided he furnished the site for it.
+
+"Andy was especial inroaded by self-esteem at our success, the
+rudiments of the scheme having originated in his own surmises and
+premonitions. He got off the safe and lit the biggest cigar in the
+house.
+
+"'Jeff,' says he, 'I don't suppose that anywhere in the world you
+could find three cormorants with brighter ideas about down-treading
+the proletariat than the firm of Peters, Satan and Tucker,
+incorporated. We have sure handed the small consumer a giant blow in
+the sole apoplectic region. No?'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'it does look as if we would have to take up
+gastritis and golf or be measured for kilts in spite of ourselves.
+This little turn in bug juice is, verily, all to the Skibo. And I can
+stand it,' says I, 'I'd rather batten than bant any day.'
+
+"Andy pours himself out four fingers of our best rye and does with it
+as was so intended. It was the first drink I had ever known him to
+take.
+
+"'By way of liberation,' says he, 'to the gods.'
+
+"And then after thus doing umbrage to the heathen diabetes he drinks
+another to our success. And then he begins to toast the trade,
+beginning with Raisuli and the Northern Pacific, and on down the line
+to the little ones like the school book combine and the oleomargarine
+outrages and the Lehigh Valley and Great Scott Coal Federation.
+
+"'It's all right, Andy,' says I, 'to drink the health of our brother
+monopolists, but don't overdo the wassail. You know our most eminent
+and loathed multi-corruptionists live on weak tea and dog biscuits.'
+
+"Andy went in the back room awhile and came out dressed in his best
+clothes. There was a kind of murderous and soulful look of gentle
+riotousness in his eye that I didn't like. I watched him to see what
+turn the whiskey was going to take in him. There are two times when
+you never can tell what is going to happen. One is when a man takes
+his first drink; and the other is when a woman takes her latest.
+
+"In less than an hour Andy's skate had turned to an ice yacht. He was
+outwardly decent and managed to preserve his aquarium, but inside he
+was impromptu and full of unexpectedness.
+
+"'Jeff,' says he, 'do you know that I'm a crater--a living crater?'
+
+"'That's a self-evident hypothesis,' says I. 'But you're not Irish.
+Why don't you say 'creature,' according to the rules and syntax of
+America?'
+
+"'I'm the crater of a volcano,' says he. 'I'm all aflame and crammed
+inside with an assortment of words and phrases that have got to have
+an exodus. I can feel millions of synonyms and parts of speech rising
+in me,' says he, 'and I've got to make a speech of some sort. Drink,'
+says Andy, 'always drives me to oratory.'
+
+"'It could do no worse,' says I.
+
+"'From my earliest recollections,' says he, 'alcohol seemed to
+stimulate my sense of recitation and rhetoric. Why, in Bryan's second
+campaign,' says Andy, 'they used to give me three gin rickeys and I'd
+speak two hours longer than Billy himself could on the silver
+question. Finally, they persuaded me to take the gold cure.'
+
+"'If you've got to get rid of your excess verbiage,' says I, 'why not
+go out on the river bank and speak a piece? It seems to me there was
+an old spell-binder named Cantharides that used to go and
+disincorporate himself of his windy numbers along the seashore.'
+
+"'No,' says Andy, 'I must have an audience. I feel like if I once
+turned loose people would begin to call Senator Beveridge the Grand
+Young Sphinx of the Wabash. I've got to get an audience together,
+Jeff, and get this oral distension assuaged or it may turn in on me
+and I'd go about feeling like a deckle-edge edition de luxe of Mrs. E.
+D. E. N. Southworth.'
+
+"'On what special subject of the theorems and topics does your desire
+for vocality seem to be connected with?' I asks.
+
+"'I ain't particular,' says Andy. 'I am equally good and varicose on
+all subjects. I can take up the matter of Russian immigration, or the
+poetry of John W. Keats, or the tariff, or Kabyle literature, or
+drainage, and make my audience weep, cry, sob and shed tears by
+turns.'
+
+"'Well, Andy,' says I, 'if you are bound to get rid of this
+accumulation of vernacular suppose you go out in town and work it on
+some indulgent citizen. Me and the boys will take care of the
+business. Everybody will be through dinner pretty soon, and salt pork
+and beans makes a man pretty thirsty. We ought to take in $1,500 more
+by midnight.'
+
+"So Andy goes out of the Blue Snake, and I see him stopping men on the
+street and talking to 'em. By and by he has half a dozen in a bunch
+listening to him; and pretty soon I see him waving his arms and
+elocuting at a good-sized crowd on a corner. When he walks away they
+string out after him, talking all the time; and he leads 'em down the
+main street of Bird City with more men joining the procession as they
+go. It reminded me of the old legerdemain that I'd read in books about
+the Pied Piper of Heidsieck charming the children away from the town.
+
+"One o'clock came; and then two; and three got under the wire for
+place; and not a Bird citizen came in for a drink. The streets were
+deserted except for some ducks and ladies going to the stores. There
+was only a light drizzle falling then.
+
+"A lonesome man came along and stopped in front of the Blue Snake to
+scrape the mud off his boots.
+
+"'Pardner,' says I, 'what has happened? This morning there was hectic
+gaiety afoot; and now it seems more like one of them ruined cities of
+Tyre and Siphon where the lone lizard crawls on the walls of the main
+port-cullis.'
+
+"'The whole town,' says the muddy man, 'is up in Sperry's wool
+warehouse listening to your side-kicker make a speech. He is some
+gravy on delivering himself of audible sounds relating to matters and
+conclusions,' says the man.
+
+"'Well, I hope he'll adjourn, sine qua non, pretty soon,' says I, 'for
+trade languishes.'
+
+"Not a customer did we have that afternoon. At six o'clock two
+Mexicans brought Andy to the saloon lying across the back of a burro.
+We put him in bed while he still muttered and gesticulated with his
+hands and feet.
+
+"Then I locked up the cash and went out to see what had happened. I
+met a man who told me all about it. Andy had made the finest two hour
+speech that had ever been heard in Texas, he said, or anywhere else in
+the world.
+
+"'What was it about?' I asked.
+
+"'Temperance,' says he. 'And when he got through, every man in Bird
+City signed the pledge for a year.'"
+
+
+
+II
+
+JEFF PETERS AS A PERSONAL MAGNET
+
+Jeff Peters has been engaged in as many schemes for making money as
+there are recipes for cooking rice in Charleston, S.C.
+
+Best of all I like to hear him tell of his earlier days when he sold
+liniments and cough cures on street corners, living hand to mouth,
+heart to heart with the people, throwing heads or tails with fortune
+for his last coin.
+
+"I struck Fisher Hill, Arkansaw," said he, "in a buckskin suit,
+moccasins, long hair and a thirty-carat diamond ring that I got from
+an actor in Texarkana. I don't know what he ever did with the pocket
+knife I swapped him for it.
+
+"I was Dr. Waugh-hoo, the celebrated Indian medicine man. I carried
+only one best bet just then, and that was Resurrection Bitters. It was
+made of life-giving plants and herbs accidentally discovered by Ta-
+qua-la, the beautiful wife of the chief of the Choctaw Nation, while
+gathering truck to garnish a platter of boiled dog for the annual corn
+dance.
+
+"Business hadn't been good in the last town, so I only had five
+dollars. I went to the Fisher Hill druggist and he credited me for
+half a gross of eight-ounce bottles and corks. I had the labels and
+ingredients in my valise, left over from the last town. Life began to
+look rosy again after I got in my hotel room with the water running
+from the tap, and the Resurrection Bitters lining up on the table by
+the dozen.
+
+"Fake? No, sir. There was two dollars' worth of fluid extract of
+cinchona and a dime's worth of aniline in that half-gross of bitters.
+I've gone through towns years afterwards and had folks ask for 'em
+again.
+
+"I hired a wagon that night and commenced selling the bitters on Main
+Street. Fisher Hill was a low, malarial town; and a compound
+hypothetical pneumocardiac anti-scorbutic tonic was just what I
+diagnosed the crowd as needing. The bitters started off like
+sweetbreads-on-toast at a vegetarian dinner. I had sold two dozen at
+fifty cents apiece when I felt somebody pull my coat tail. I knew what
+that meant; so I climbed down and sneaked a five dollar bill into the
+hand of a man with a German silver star on his lapel.
+
+"'Constable,' says I, 'it's a fine night.'
+
+"'Have you got a city license,' he asks, 'to sell this illegitimate
+essence of spooju that you flatter by the name of medicine?'
+
+"'I have not,' says I. 'I didn't know you had a city. If I can find it
+to-morrow I'll take one out if it's necessary.'
+
+"'I'll have to close you up till you do,' says the constable.
+
+"I quit selling and went back to the hotel. I was talking to the
+landlord about it.
+
+"'Oh, you won't stand no show in Fisher Hill,' says he. 'Dr. Hoskins,
+the only doctor here, is a brother-in-law of the Mayor, and they won't
+allow no fake doctor to practice in town.'
+
+"'I don't practice medicine,' says I, 'I've got a State peddler's
+license, and I take out a city one wherever they demand it.'
+
+"I went to the Mayor's office the next morning and they told me he
+hadn't showed up yet. They didn't know when he'd be down. So Doc
+Waugh-hoo hunches down again in a hotel chair and lights a jimpson-
+weed regalia, and waits.
+
+"By and by a young man in a blue necktie slips into the chair next to
+me and asks the time.
+
+"'Half-past ten,' says I, 'and you are Andy Tucker. I've seen you
+work. Wasn't it you that put up the Great Cupid Combination package on
+the Southern States? Let's see, it was a Chilian diamond engagement
+ring, a wedding ring, a potato masher, a bottle of soothing syrup and
+Dorothy Vernon--all for fifty cents.'
+
+"Andy was pleased to hear that I remembered him. He was a good street
+man; and he was more than that--he respected his profession, and he
+was satisfied with 300 per cent. profit. He had plenty of offers to go
+into the illegitimate drug and garden seed business; but he was never
+to be tempted off of the straight path.
+
+"I wanted a partner, so Andy and me agreed to go out together. I told
+him about the situation in Fisher Hill and how finances was low on
+account of the local mixture of politics and jalap. Andy had just got
+in on the train that morning. He was pretty low himself, and was going
+to canvass the whole town for a few dollars to build a new battleship
+by popular subscription at Eureka Springs. So we went out and sat on
+the porch and talked it over.
+
+"The next morning at eleven o'clock when I was sitting there alone, an
+Uncle Tom shuffles into the hotel and asked for the doctor to come and
+see Judge Banks, who, it seems, was the mayor and a mighty sick man.
+
+"'I'm no doctor,' says I. 'Why don't you go and get the doctor?'
+
+"'Boss,' says he. 'Doc Hoskins am done gone twenty miles in de country
+to see some sick persons. He's de only doctor in de town, and Massa
+Banks am powerful bad off. He sent me to ax you to please, suh, come.'
+
+"'As man to man,' says I, 'I'll go and look him over.' So I put a
+bottle of Resurrection Bitters in my pocket and goes up on the hill to
+the mayor's mansion, the finest house in town, with a mannered roof
+and two cast iron dogs on the lawn.
+
+"This Mayor Banks was in bed all but his whiskers and feet. He was
+making internal noises that would have had everybody in San Francisco
+hiking for the parks. A young man was standing by the bed holding a
+cup of water.
+
+"'Doc,' says the Mayor, 'I'm awful sick. I'm about to die. Can't you
+do nothing for me?'
+
+"'Mr. Mayor,' says I, 'I'm not a regular preordained disciple of S. Q.
+Lapius. I never took a course in a medical college,' says I. 'I've
+just come as a fellow man to see if I could be off assistance.'
+
+"'I'm deeply obliged,' says he. 'Doc Waugh-hoo, this is my nephew, Mr.
+Biddle. He has tried to alleviate my distress, but without success.
+Oh, Lordy! Ow-ow-ow!!' he sings out.
+
+"I nods at Mr. Biddle and sets down by the bed and feels the mayor's
+pulse. 'Let me see your liver--your tongue, I mean,' says I. Then I
+turns up the lids of his eyes and looks close that the pupils of 'em.
+
+"'How long have you been sick?' I asked.
+
+"'I was taken down--ow-ouch--last night,' says the Mayor. 'Gimme
+something for it, doc, won't you?'
+
+"'Mr. Fiddle,' says I, 'raise the window shade a bit, will you?'
+
+"'Biddle,' says the young man. 'Do you feel like you could eat some
+ham and eggs, Uncle James?'
+
+"'Mr. Mayor,' says I, after laying my ear to his right shoulder blade
+and listening, 'you've got a bad attack of super-inflammation of the
+right clavicle of the harpsichord!'
+
+"'Good Lord!' says he, with a groan, 'Can't you rub something on it,
+or set it or anything?'
+
+"I picks up my hat and starts for the door.
+
+"'You ain't going, doc?' says the Mayor with a howl. 'You ain't going
+away and leave me to die with this--superfluity of the clapboards, are
+you?'
+
+"'Common humanity, Dr. Whoa-ha,' says Mr. Biddle, 'ought to prevent
+your deserting a fellow-human in distress.'
+
+"'Dr. Waugh-hoo, when you get through plowing,' says I. And then I
+walks back to the bed and throws back my long hair.
+
+"'Mr. Mayor,' says I, 'there is only one hope for you. Drugs will do
+you no good. But there is another power higher yet, although drugs are
+high enough,' says I.
+
+"'And what is that?' says he.
+
+"'Scientific demonstrations,' says I. 'The triumph of mind over
+sarsaparilla. The belief that there is no pain and sickness except
+what is produced when we ain't feeling well. Declare yourself in
+arrears. Demonstrate.'
+
+"'What is this paraphernalia you speak of, Doc?' says the Mayor. 'You
+ain't a Socialist, are you?'
+
+"'I am speaking,' says I, 'of the great doctrine of psychic
+financiering--of the enlightened school of long-distance, sub-
+conscientious treatment of fallacies and meningitis--of that wonderful
+in-door sport known as personal magnetism.'
+
+"'Can you work it, doc?' asks the Mayor.
+
+"'I'm one of the Sole Sanhedrims and Ostensible Hooplas of the Inner
+Pulpit,' says I. 'The lame talk and the blind rubber whenever I make a
+pass at 'em. I am a medium, a coloratura hypnotist and a spirituous
+control. It was only through me at the recent seances at Ann Arbor
+that the late president of the Vinegar Bitters Company could revisit
+the earth to communicate with his sister Jane. You see me peddling
+medicine on the street,' says I, 'to the poor. I don't practice
+personal magnetism on them. I do not drag it in the dust,' says I,
+'because they haven't got the dust.'
+
+"'Will you treat my case?' asks the Mayor.
+
+"'Listen,' says I. 'I've had a good deal of trouble with medical
+societies everywhere I've been. I don't practice medicine. But, to
+save your life, I'll give you the psychic treatment if you'll agree as
+mayor not to push the license question.'
+
+"'Of course I will,' says he. 'And now get to work, doc, for them
+pains are coming on again.'
+
+"'My fee will be $250.00, cure guaranteed in two treatments,' says I.
+
+"'All right,' says the Mayor. 'I'll pay it. I guess my life's worth
+that much.'
+
+"I sat down by the bed and looked him straight in the eye.
+
+"'Now,' says I, 'get your mind off the disease. You ain't sick. You
+haven't got a heart or a clavicle or a funny bone or brains or
+anything. You haven't got any pain. Declare error. Now you feel the
+pain that you didn't have leaving, don't you?'
+
+"'I do feel some little better, doc,' says the Mayor, 'darned if I
+don't. Now state a few lies about my not having this swelling in my
+left side, and I think I could be propped up and have some sausage and
+buckwheat cakes.'
+
+"I made a few passes with my hands.
+
+"'Now,' says I, 'the inflammation's gone. The right lobe of the
+perihelion has subsided. You're getting sleepy. You can't hold your
+eyes open any longer. For the present the disease is checked. Now, you
+are asleep.'
+
+"The Mayor shut his eyes slowly and began to snore.
+
+"'You observe, Mr. Tiddle,' says I, 'the wonders of modern science.'
+
+"'Biddle,' says he, 'When will you give uncle the rest of the
+treatment, Dr. Pooh-pooh?'
+
+"'Waugh-hoo,' says I. 'I'll come back at eleven to-morrow. When he
+wakes up give him eight drops of turpentine and three pounds of steak.
+Good morning.'
+
+"The next morning I was back on time. 'Well, Mr. Riddle,' says I, when
+he opened the bedroom door, 'and how is uncle this morning?'
+
+"'He seems much better,' says the young man.
+
+"The mayor's color and pulse was fine. I gave him another treatment,
+and he said the last of the pain left him.
+
+"'Now,' says I, 'you'd better stay in bed for a day or two, and you'll
+be all right. It's a good thing I happened to be in Fisher Hill, Mr.
+Mayor,' says I, 'for all the remedies in the cornucopia that the
+regular schools of medicine use couldn't have saved you. And now that
+error has flew and pain proved a perjurer, let's allude to a
+cheerfuller subject--say the fee of $250. No checks, please, I hate to
+write my name on the back of a check almost as bad as I do on the
+front.'
+
+"'I've got the cash here,' says the mayor, pulling a pocket book from
+under his pillow.
+
+"He counts out five fifty-dollar notes and holds 'em in his hand.
+
+"'Bring the receipt,' he says to Biddle.
+
+"I signed the receipt and the mayor handed me the money. I put it in
+my inside pocket careful.
+
+"'Now do your duty, officer,' says the mayor, grinning much unlike a
+sick man.
+
+"Mr. Biddle lays his hand on my arm.
+
+"'You're under arrest, Dr. Waugh-hoo, alias Peters,' says he, 'for
+practising medicine without authority under the State law.'
+
+"'Who are you?' I asks.
+
+"'I'll tell you who he is,' says Mr. Mayor, sitting up in bed. 'He's a
+detective employed by the State Medical Society. He's been following
+you over five counties. He came to me yesterday and we fixed up this
+scheme to catch you. I guess you won't do any more doctoring around
+these parts, Mr. Fakir. What was it you said I had, doc?' the mayor
+laughs, 'compound--well, it wasn't softening of the brain, I guess,
+anyway.'
+
+"'A detective,' says I.
+
+"'Correct,' says Biddle. 'I'll have to turn you over to the sheriff.'
+
+"'Let's see you do it,' says I, and I grabs Biddle by the throat and
+half throws him out the window, but he pulls a gun and sticks it under
+my chin, and I stand still. Then he puts handcuffs on me, and takes
+the money out of my pocket.
+
+"'I witness,' says he, 'that they're the same bank bills that you and
+I marked, Judge Banks. I'll turn them over to the sheriff when we get
+to his office, and he'll send you a receipt. They'll have to be used
+as evidence in the case.'
+
+"'All right, Mr. Biddle,' says the mayor. 'And now, Doc Waugh-hoo,' he
+goes on, 'why don't you demonstrate? Can't you pull the cork out of
+your magnetism with your teeth and hocus-pocus them handcuffs off?'
+
+"'Come on, officer,' says I, dignified. 'I may as well make the best
+of it.' And then I turns to old Banks and rattles my chains.
+
+"'Mr. Mayor,' says I, 'the time will come soon when you'll believe
+that personal magnetism is a success. And you'll be sure that it
+succeeded in this case, too.'
+
+"And I guess it did.
+
+"When we got nearly to the gate, I says: 'We might meet somebody now,
+Andy. I reckon you better take 'em off, and--' Hey? Why, of course it
+was Andy Tucker. That was his scheme; and that's how we got the
+capital to go into business together."
+
+
+
+III
+
+MODERN RURAL SPORTS
+
+Jeff Peters must be reminded. Whenever he is called upon, pointedly,
+for a story, he will maintain that his life has been as devoid of
+incident as the longest of Trollope's novels. But lured, he will
+divulge. Therefore I cast many and divers flies upon the current of
+his thoughts before I feel a nibble.
+
+"I notice," said I, "that the Western farmers, in spite of their
+prosperity, are running after their old populistic idols again."
+
+"It's the running season," said Jeff, "for farmers, shad, maple trees
+and the Connemaugh river. I know something about farmers. I thought I
+struck one once that had got out of the rut; but Andy Tucker proved to
+me I was mistaken. 'Once a farmer, always a sucker,' said Andy. 'He's
+the man that's shoved into the front row among bullets, ballots and
+the ballet. He's the funny-bone and gristle of the country,' said
+Andy, 'and I don't know who we would do without him.'
+
+"One morning me and Andy wakes up with sixty-eight cents between us in
+a yellow pine hotel on the edge of the pre-digested hoe-cake belt of
+Southern Indiana. How we got off the train there the night before I
+can't tell you; for she went through the village so fast that what
+looked like a saloon to us through the car window turned out to be a
+composite view of a drug store and a water tank two blocks apart. Why
+we got off at the first station we could, belongs to a little oroide
+gold watch and Alaska diamond deal we failed to pull off the day
+before, over the Kentucky line.
+
+"When I woke up I heard roosters crowing, and smelt something like the
+fumes of nitro-muriatic acid, and heard something heavy fall on the
+floor below us, and a man swearing.
+
+"'Cheer up, Andy,' says I. 'We're in a rural community. Somebody has
+just tested a gold brick downstairs. We'll go out and get what's
+coming to us from a farmer; and then yoicks! and away.'
+
+"Farmers was always a kind of reserve fund to me. Whenever I was in
+hard luck I'd go to the crossroads, hook a finger in a farmer's
+suspender, recite the prospectus of my swindle in a mechanical kind of
+a way, look over what he had, give him back his keys, whetstone and
+papers that was of no value except to owner, and stroll away without
+asking any questions. Farmers are not fair game to me as high up in
+our business as me and Andy was; but there was times when we found 'em
+useful, just as Wall Street does the Secretary of the Treasury now and
+then.
+
+"When we went down stairs we saw we was in the midst of the finest
+farming section we ever see. About two miles away on a hill was a big
+white house in a grove surrounded by a wide-spread agricultural
+agglomeration of fields and barns and pastures and out-houses.
+
+"'Whose house is that?' we asked the landlord.
+
+"'That,' says he, 'is the domicile and the arboreal, terrestrial and
+horticultural accessories of Farmer Ezra Plunkett, one of our
+country's most progressive citizens.'
+
+"After breakfast me and Andy, with eight cents capital left, casts the
+horoscope of the rural potentate.
+
+"'Let me go alone,' says I. 'Two of us against one farmer would look
+as one-sided as Roosevelt using both hands to kill a grizzly.'
+
+"'All right,' says Andy. 'I like to be a true sport even when I'm only
+collecting rebates from the rutabag raisers. What bait are you going
+to use for this Ezra thing?' Andy asks me.
+
+"'Oh,' I says, 'the first thing that come to hand in the suit case. I
+reckon I'll take along some of the new income tax receipts, and the
+recipe for making clover honey out of clabber and apple peelings; and
+the order blanks for the McGuffey's readers, which afterwards turn out
+to be McCormick's reapers; and the pearl necklace found on the train;
+and a pocket-size goldbrick; and a--'
+
+"'That'll be enough,' says Andy. 'Any one of the lot ought to land on
+Ezra. And say, Jeff, make that succotash fancier give you nice, clean,
+new bills. It's a disgrace to our Department of Agriculture, Civil
+Service and Pure Food Law the kind of stuff some of these farmers hand
+out to use. I've had to take rolls from 'em that looked like bundles
+of microbe cultures captured out of a Red Cross ambulance.'
+
+"So, I goes to a livery stable and hires a buggy on my looks. I drove
+out to the Plunkett farm and hitched. There was a man sitting on the
+front steps of the house. He had on a white flannel suit, a diamond
+ring, golf cap and a pink ascot tie. 'Summer boarder,' says I to
+myself.
+
+"'I'd like to see Farmer Ezra Plunkett,' says I to him.
+
+"'You see him,' says he. 'What seems to be on your mind?'
+
+"I never answered a word. I stood still, repeating to myself the
+rollicking lines of that merry jingle, 'The Man with the Hoe.' When I
+looked at this farmer, the little devices I had in my pocket for
+buncoing the pushed-back brows seemed as hopeless as trying to shake
+down the Beef Trust with a mittimus and a parlor rifle.
+
+"'Well,' says he, looking at me close, 'speak up. I see the left
+pocket of your coat sags a good deal. Out with the goldbrick first.
+I'm rather more interested in the bricks than I am in the trick sixty-
+day notes and the lost silver mine story.'
+
+"I had a kind of cerebral sensation of foolishness in my ideas of
+ratiocination; but I pulled out the little brick and unwrapped my
+handkerchief off it.
+
+"'One dollar and eighty cents,' says the farmer hefting it in his
+hand. 'Is it a trade?'
+
+"'The lead in it is worth more than that,' says I, dignified. I put it
+back in my pocket.
+
+"'All right,' says he. 'But I sort of wanted it for the collection I'm
+starting. I got a $5,000 one last week for $2.10.'
+
+"Just then a telephone bell rings in the house.
+
+"'Come in, Bunk,' says the farmer, 'and look at my place. It's kind of
+lonesome here sometimes. I think that's New York calling.'
+
+"We went inside. The room looked like a Broadway stockbroker's--light
+oak desks, two 'phones, Spanish leather upholstered chairs and
+couches, oil paintings in gilt frames a foot deep and a ticker hitting
+off the news in one corner.
+
+"'Hello, hello!' says this funny farmer. 'Is that the Regent Theatre?
+Yes; this is Plunkett, of Woodbine Centre. Reserve four orchestra
+seats for Friday evening--my usual ones. Yes; Friday--good-bye.'
+
+"'I run over to New York every two weeks to see a show,' says the
+farmer, hanging up the receiver. 'I catch the eighteen-hour flyer at
+Indianapolis, spend ten hours in the heyday of night on the Yappian
+Way, and get home in time to see the chickens go to roost forty-eight
+hours later. Oh, the pristine Hubbard squasherino of the cave-dwelling
+period is getting geared up some for the annual meeting of the Don't-
+Blow-Out-the-Gas Association, don't you think, Mr. Bunk?'
+
+"'I seem to perceive,' says I, 'a kind of hiatus in the agrarian
+traditions in which heretofore, I have reposed confidence.'
+
+"'Sure, Bunk,' says he. 'The yellow primrose on the river's brim is
+getting to look to us Reubs like a holiday edition de luxe of the
+Language of Flowers with deckle edges and frontispiece.'
+
+"Just then the telephone calls him again.
+
+"'Hello, hello!' says he. 'Oh, that's Perkins, at Milldale. I told you
+$800 was too much for that horse. Have you got him there? Good. Let me
+see him. Get away from the transmitter. Now make him trot in a circle.
+Faster. Yes, I can hear him. Keep on--faster yet. . . . That'll do.
+Now lead him up to the phone. Closer. Get his nose nearer. There. Now
+wait. No; I don't want that horse. What? No; not at any price. He
+interferes; and he's windbroken. Goodbye.'
+
+"'Now, Bunk,' says the farmer, 'do you begin to realize that
+agriculture has had a hair cut? You belong in a bygone era. Why, Tom
+Lawson himself knows better than to try to catch an up-to-date
+agriculturalist napping. It's Saturday, the Fourteenth, on the farm,
+you bet. Now, look here, and see how we keep up with the day's
+doings.'
+
+"He shows me a machine on a table with two things for your ears like
+the penny-in-the-slot affairs. I puts it on and listens. A female
+voice starts up reading headlines of murders, accidents and other
+political casualities.
+
+"'What you hear,' says the farmer, 'is a synopsis of to-day's news in
+the New York, Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco papers. It is wired
+in to our Rural News Bureau and served hot to subscribers. On this
+table you see the principal dailies and weeklies of the country. Also
+a special service of advance sheets of the monthly magazines.'
+
+"I picks up one sheet and sees that it's headed: 'Special Advance
+Proofs. In July, 1909, the /Century/ will say'--and so forth.
+
+"The farmer rings up somebody--his manager, I reckon--and tells him to
+let that herd of 15 Jerseys go at $600 a head; and to sow the 900-acre
+field in wheat; and to have 200 extra cans ready at the station for
+the milk trolley car. Then he passes the Henry Clays and sets out a
+bottle of green chartreuse, and goes over and looks at the ticker
+tape.
+
+"'Consolidated Gas up two points,' says he. 'Oh, very well.'
+
+"'Ever monkey with copper?' I asks.
+
+"'Stand back!' says he, raising his hand, 'or I'll call the dog. I
+told you not to waste your time.'
+
+"After a while he says: 'Bunk, if you don't mind my telling you, your
+company begins to cloy slightly. I've got to write an article on the
+Chimera of Communism for a magazine, and attend a meeting of the Race
+Track Association this afternoon. Of course you understand by now that
+you can't get my proxy for your Remedy, whatever it may be.'
+
+"Well, sir, all I could think of to do was to go out and get in the
+buggy. The horse turned round and took me back to the hotel. I hitched
+him and went in to see Andy. In his room I told him about this farmer,
+word for word; and I sat picking at the table cover like one bereft of
+sagaciousness.
+
+"'I don't understand it,' says I, humming a sad and foolish little
+song to cover my humiliation.
+
+"Andy walks up and down the room for a long time, biting the left end
+of his mustache as he does when in the act of thinking.
+
+"'Jeff,' says he, finally, 'I believe your story of this expurgated
+rustic; but I am not convinced. It looks incredulous to me that he
+could have inoculated himself against all the preordained systems of
+bucolic bunco. Now, you never regarded me as a man of special
+religious proclivities, did you, Jeff?' says Andy.
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'No. But,' says I, not to wound his feelings, 'I have
+also observed many church members whose said proclivities were not so
+outwardly developed that they would show on a white handkerchief if
+you rubbed 'em with it.'
+
+"'I have always been a deep student of nature from creation down,'
+says Andy, 'and I believe in an ultimatum design of Providence.
+Farmers was made for a purpose; and that was to furnish a livelihood
+to men like me and you. Else why was we given brains? It is my belief
+that the manna that the Israelites lived on for forty years in the
+wilderness was only a figurative word for farmers; and they kept up
+the practice to this day. And now,' says Andy, 'I am going to test my
+theory "Once a farmer, always a come-on," in spite of the veneering
+and the orifices that a spurious civilization has brought to him.'
+
+"'You'll fail, same as I did,' says I. 'This one's shook off the
+shackles of the sheep-fold. He's entrenched behind the advantages of
+electricity, education, literature and intelligence.'
+
+"'I'll try,' said Andy. 'There are certain Laws of Nature that Free
+Rural Delivery can't overcome.'
+
+"Andy fumbles around awhile in the closet and comes out dressed in a
+suit with brown and yellow checks as big as your hand. His vest is red
+with blue dots, and he wears a high silk hat. I noticed he'd soaked
+his sandy mustache in a kind of blue ink.
+
+"'Great Barnums?' says I. 'You're a ringer for a circus thimblerig
+man.'
+
+"'Right,' says Andy. 'Is the buggy outside? Wait here till I come
+back. I won't be long.'
+
+"Two hours afterwards Andy steps into the room and lays a wad of money
+on the table.
+
+"'Eight hundred and sixty dollars,' said he. 'Let me tell you. He was
+in. He looked me over and began to guy me. I didn't say a word, but
+got out the walnut shells and began to roll the little ball on the
+table. I whistled a tune or two, and then I started up the old
+formula.
+
+"'Step up lively, gentlemen,' says I, 'and watch the little ball. It
+costs you nothing to look. There you see it, and there you don't.
+Guess where the little joker is. The quickness of the hand deceives
+the eye.
+
+"'I steals a look at the farmer man. I see the sweat coming out on his
+forehead. He goes over and closes the front door and watches me some
+more. Directly he says: "I'll bet you twenty I can pick the shell the
+ball's under now."
+
+"'After that,' goes on Andy, 'there is nothing new to relate. He only
+had $860 cash in the house. When I left he followed me to the gate.
+There was tears in his eyes when he shook hands.
+
+"'"Bunk," says he, "thank you for the only real pleasure I've had in
+years. It brings up happy old days when I was only a farmer and not an
+agriculturalist. God bless you."'"
+
+Here Jeff Peters ceased, and I inferred that his story was done.
+
+"Then you think"--I began.
+
+"Yes," said Jeff. "Something like that. You let the farmers go ahead
+and amuse themselves with politics. Farming's a lonesome life; and
+they've been against the shell game before."
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE CHAIR OF PHILANTHROMATHEMATICS
+
+"I see that the cause of Education has received the princely gift of
+more than fifty millions of dollars," said I.
+
+I was gleaning the stray items from the evening papers while Jeff
+Peters packed his briar pipe with plug cut.
+
+"Which same," said Jeff, "calls for a new deck, and a recitation by
+the entire class in philanthromathematics."
+
+"Is that an allusion?" I asked.
+
+"It is," said Jeff. "I never told you about the time when me and Andy
+Tucker was philanthropists, did I? It was eight years ago in Arizona.
+Andy and me was out in the Gila mountains with a two-horse wagon
+prospecting for silver. We struck it, and sold out to parties in
+Tucson for $25,000. They paid our check at the bank in silver--a
+thousand dollars in a sack. We loaded it in our wagon and drove east a
+hundred miles before we recovered our presence of intellect. Twenty-
+five thousand dollars doesn't sound like so much when you're reading
+the annual report of the Pennsylvania Railroad or listening to an
+actor talking about his salary; but when you can raise up a wagon
+sheet and kick around your bootheel and hear every one of 'em ring
+against another it makes you feel like you was a night-and-day bank
+with the clock striking twelve.
+
+"The third day out we drove into one of the most specious and tidy
+little towns that Nature or Rand and McNally ever turned out. It was
+in the foothills, and mitigated with trees and flowers and about 2,000
+head of cordial and dilatory inhabitants. The town seemed to be called
+Floresville, and Nature had not contaminated it with many railroads,
+fleas or Eastern tourists.
+
+"Me and Andy deposited our money to the credit of Peters and Tucker in
+the Esperanza Savings Bank, and got rooms at the Skyview Hotel. After
+supper we lit up, and sat out on the gallery and smoked. Then was when
+the philanthropy idea struck me. I suppose every grafter gets it
+sometime.
+
+"When a man swindles the public out of a certain amount he begins to
+get scared and wants to return part of it. And if you'll watch close
+and notice the way his charity runs you'll see that he tries to
+restore it to the same people he got it from. As a hydrostatical case,
+take, let's say, A. A made his millions selling oil to poor students
+who sit up nights studying political economy and methods for
+regulating the trusts. So, back to the universities and colleges goes
+his conscience dollars.
+
+"There's B got his from the common laboring man that works with his
+hands and tools. How's he to get some of the remorse fund back into
+their overalls?
+
+"'Aha!' says B, 'I'll do it in the name of Education. I've skinned the
+laboring man,' says he to himself, 'but, according to the old proverb,
+"Charity covers a multitude of skins."'
+
+"So he puts up eighty million dollars' worth of libraries; and the
+boys with the dinner pail that builds 'em gets the benefit.
+
+"'Where's the books?' asks the reading public.
+
+"'I dinna ken,' says B. 'I offered ye libraries; and there they are. I
+suppose if I'd given ye preferred steel trust stock instead ye'd have
+wanted the water in it set out in cut glass decanters. Hoot, for ye!'
+
+"But, as I said, the owning of so much money was beginning to give me
+philanthropitis. It was the first time me and Andy had ever made a
+pile big enough to make us stop and think how we got it.
+
+"'Andy,' says I, 'we're wealthy--not beyond the dreams of average; but
+in our humble way we are comparatively as rich as Greasers. I feel as
+if I'd like to do something for as well as to humanity.'
+
+"'I was thinking the same thing, Jeff,' says he. 'We've been gouging
+the public for a long time with all kinds of little schemes from
+selling self-igniting celluloid collars to flooding Georgia with Hoke
+Smith presidential campaign buttons. I'd like, myself, to hedge a bet
+or two in the graft game if I could do it without actually banging the
+cymbalines in the Salvation Army or teaching a bible class by the
+Bertillon system.
+
+"'What'll we do?' says Andy. 'Give free grub to the poor or send a
+couple of thousand to George Cortelyou?'
+
+"'Neither,' says I. 'We've got too much money to be implicated in
+plain charity; and we haven't got enough to make restitution. So,
+we'll look about for something that's about half way between the two.'
+
+"The next day in walking around Floresville we see on a hill a big red
+brick building that appears to be disinhabited. The citizens speak up
+and tell us that it was begun for a residence several years before by
+a mine owner. After running up the house he finds he only had $2.80
+left to furnish it with, so he invests that in whiskey and jumps off
+the roof on a spot where he now requiescats in pieces.
+
+"As soon as me and Andy saw that building the same idea struck both of
+us. We would fix it up with lights and pen wipers and professors, and
+put an iron dog and statues of Hercules and Father John on the lawn,
+and start one of the finest free educational institutions in the world
+right there.
+
+"So we talks it over to the prominent citizens of Floresville, who
+falls in fine with the idea. They give a banquet in the engine house
+to us, and we make our bow for the first time as benefactors to the
+cause of progress and enlightenment. Andy makes an hour-and-a-half
+speech on the subject of irrigation in Lower Egypt, and we have a
+moral tune on the phonograph and pineapple sherbert.
+
+"Andy and me didn't lose any time in philanthropping. We put every man
+in town that could tell a hammer from a step ladder to work on the
+building, dividing it up into class rooms and lecture halls. We wire
+to Frisco for a car load of desks, footballs, arithmetics, penholders,
+dictionaries, chairs for the professors, slates, skeletons, sponges,
+twenty-seven cravenetted gowns and caps for the senior class, and an
+open order for all the truck that goes with a first-class university.
+I took it on myself to put a campus and a curriculum on the list; but
+the telegraph operator must have got the words wrong, being an
+ignorant man, for when the goods come we found a can of peas and a
+curry-comb among 'em.
+
+"While the weekly papers was having chalk-plate cuts of me and Andy we
+wired an employment agency in Chicago to express us f.o.b., six
+professors immediately--one English literature, one up-to-date dead
+languages, one chemistry, one political economy--democrat preferred--
+one logic, and one wise to painting, Italian and music, with union
+card. The Esperanza bank guaranteed salaries, which was to run between
+$800 and $800.50.
+
+"Well, sir, we finally got in shape. Over the front door was carved
+the words: 'The World's University; Peters & Tucker, Patrons and
+Proprietors. And when September the first got a cross-mark on the
+calendar, the come-ons begun to roll in. First the faculty got off the
+tri-weekly express from Tucson. They was mostly young, spectacled, and
+red-headed, with sentiments divided between ambition and food. Andy
+and me got 'em billeted on the Floresvillians and then laid for the
+students.
+
+"They came in bunches. We had advertised the University in all the
+state papers, and it did us good to see how quick the country
+responded. Two hundred and nineteen husky lads aging along from 18 up
+to chin whiskers answered the clarion call of free education. They
+ripped open that town, sponged the seams, turned it, lined it with new
+mohair; and you couldn't have told it from Harvard or Goldfields at
+the March term of court.
+
+"They marched up and down the streets waving flags with the World's
+University colors--ultra-marine and blue--and they certainly made a
+lively place of Floresville. Andy made them a speech from the balcony
+of the Skyview Hotel, and the whole town was out celebrating.
+
+"In about two weeks the professors got the students disarmed and
+herded into classes. I don't believe there's any pleasure equal to
+being a philanthropist. Me and Andy bought high silk hats and
+pretended to dodge the two reporters of the Floresville Gazette. The
+paper had a man to kodak us whenever we appeared on the street, and
+ran our pictures every week over the column headed 'Educational
+Notes.' Andy lectured twice a week at the University; and afterward I
+would rise and tell a humorous story. Once the Gazette printed my
+pictures with Abe Lincoln on one side and Marshall P. Wilder on the
+other. 
+
+"Andy was as interested in philanthropy as I was. We used to wake up
+of nights and tell each other new ideas for booming the University.
+
+"'Andy,' says I to him one day, 'there's something we overlooked. The
+boys ought to have dromedaries.'
+
+"'What's that?' Andy asks.
+
+"'Why, something to sleep in, of course,' says I. 'All colleges have
+'em.'
+
+"'Oh, you mean pajamas,' says Andy.
+
+"'I do not,' says I. 'I mean dromedaries.' But I never could make Andy
+understand; so we never ordered 'em. Of course, I meant them long
+bedrooms in colleges where the scholars sleep in a row.
+
+"Well, sir, the World's University was a success. We had scholars from
+five States and territories, and Floresville had a boom. A new
+shooting gallery and a pawn shop and two more saloons started; and the
+boys got up a college yell that went this way:
+
+  "'Raw, raw, raw,
+    Done, done, done,
+  Peters, Tucker,
+    Lots of fun,
+  Bow-wow-wow,
+    Haw-hee-haw,
+  World University,
+    Hip, hurrah!'
+
+"The scholars was a fine lot of young men, and me and Andy was as
+proud of 'em as if they belonged to our own family.
+
+"But one day about the last of October Andy comes to me and asks if I
+have any idea how much money we had left in the bank. I guesses about
+sixteen thousand. 'Our balance,' says Andy, 'is $821.62.'
+
+"'What!' says I, with a kind of a yell. 'Do you mean to tell me that
+them infernal clod-hopping, dough-headed, pup-faced, goose-brained,
+gate-stealing, rabbit-eared sons of horse thieves have soaked us for
+that much?'
+
+"'No less,' says Andy.
+
+"'Then, to Helvetia with philanthropy,' says I.
+
+"'Not necessarily,' says Andy. 'Philanthropy,' says he, 'when run on a
+good business basis is one of the best grafts going. I'll look into
+the matter and see if it can't be straightened out.'
+
+"The next week I am looking over the payroll of our faculty when I run
+across a new name--Professor James Darnley McCorkle, chair of
+mathematics; salary $100 per week. I yells so loud that Andy runs in
+quick.
+
+"'What's this,' says I. 'A professor of mathematics at more than
+$5,000 a year? How did this happen? Did he get in through the window
+and appoint himself?'
+
+"'I wired to Frisco for him a week ago,' says Andy. 'In ordering the
+faculty we seemed to have overlooked the chair of mathematics.'
+
+"'A good thing we did,' says I. 'We can pay his salary two weeks, and
+then our philanthropy will look like the ninth hole on the Skibo golf
+links.'
+
+"'Wait a while,' says Andy, 'and see how things turn out. We have
+taken up too noble a cause to draw out now. Besides, the further I
+gaze into the retail philanthropy business the better it looks to me.
+I never thought about investigating it before. Come to think of it
+now,' goes on Andy, 'all the philanthropists I ever knew had plenty of
+money. I ought to have looked into that matter long ago, and located
+which was the cause and which was the effect.'
+
+"I had confidence in Andy's chicanery in financial affairs, so I left
+the whole thing in his hands. The University was flourishing fine, and
+me and Andy kept our silk hats shined up, and Floresville kept on
+heaping honors on us like we was millionaires instead of almost busted
+philanthropists.
+
+"The students kept the town lively and prosperous. Some stranger came
+to town and started a faro bank over the Red Front livery stable, and
+began to amass money in quantities. Me and Andy strolled up one night
+and piked a dollar or two for sociability. There were about fifty of
+our students there drinking rum punches and shoving high stacks of
+blues and reds about the table as the dealer turned the cards up.
+
+"'Why, dang it, Andy,' says I, 'these free-school-hunting, gander-
+headed, silk-socked little sons of sap-suckers have got more money
+than you and me ever had. Look at the rolls they're pulling out of
+their pistol pockets?'
+
+"'Yes,' says Andy, 'a good many of them are sons of wealthy miners and
+stockmen. It's very sad to see 'em wasting their opportunities this
+way.'
+
+"At Christmas all the students went home to spend the holidays. We had
+a farewell blowout at the University, and Andy lectured on 'Modern
+Music and Prehistoric Literature of the Archipelagos.' Each one of the
+faculty answered to toasts, and compared me and Andy to Rockefeller
+and the Emperor Marcus Autolycus. I pounded on the table and yelled
+for Professor McCorkle; but it seems he wasn't present on the
+occasion. I wanted a look at the man that Andy thought could earn $100
+a week in philanthropy that was on the point of making an assignment.
+
+"The students all left on the night train; and the town sounded as
+quiet as the campus of a correspondence school at midnight. When I
+went to the hotel I saw a light in Andy's room, and I opened the door
+and walked in.
+
+"There sat Andy and the faro dealer at a table dividing a two-foot
+high stack of currency in thousand-dollar packages.
+
+"'Correct,' says Andy. 'Thirty-one thousand apiece. Come in, Jeff,'
+says he. 'This is our share of the profits of the first half of the
+scholastic term of the World's University, incorporated and
+philanthropated. Are you convinced now,' says Andy, 'that philanthropy
+when practiced in a business way is an art that blesses him who gives
+as well as him who receives?'
+
+"'Great!' says I, feeling fine. 'I'll admit you are the doctor this
+time.'
+
+"'We'll be leaving on the morning train,' says Andy. 'You'd better get
+your collars and cuffs and press clippings together.'
+
+"'Great!' says I. 'I'll be ready. But, Andy,' says I, 'I wish I could
+have met that Professor James Darnley McCorkle before we went. I had a
+curiosity to know that man.'
+
+"'That'll be easy,' says Andy, turning around to the faro dealer.
+
+"'Jim,' says Andy, 'shake hands with Mr. Peters.'"
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE HAND THAT RILES THE WORLD
+
+"Many of our great men," said I (apropos of many things), "have
+declared that they owe their success to the aid and encouragement of
+some brilliant woman."
+
+"I know," said Jeff Peters. "I've read in history and mythology about
+Joan of Arc and Mme. Yale and Mrs. Caudle and Eve and other noted
+females of the past. But, in my opinion, the woman of to-day is of
+little use in politics or business. What's she best in, anyway?--men
+make the best cooks, milliners, nurses, housekeepers, stenographers,
+clerks, hairdressers and launderers. About the only job left that a
+woman can beat a man in is female impersonator in vaudeville."
+
+"I would have thought," said I, "that occasionally, anyhow, you would
+have found the wit and intuition of woman valuable to you in your
+lines of--er--business."
+
+"Now, wouldn't you," said Jeff, with an emphatic nod--"wouldn't you
+have imagined that? But a woman is an absolutely unreliable partner in
+any straight swindle. She's liable to turn honest on you when you are
+depending upon her the most. I tried 'em once.
+
+"Bill Humble, an old friend of mine in the Territories, conceived the
+illusion that he wanted to be appointed United States Marshall. At
+that time me and Andy was doing a square, legitimate business of
+selling walking canes. If you unscrewed the head of one and turned it
+up to your mouth a half pint of good rye whiskey would go trickling
+down your throat to reward you for your act of intelligence. The
+deputies was annoying me and Andy some, and when Bill spoke to me
+about his officious aspirations, I saw how the appointment as Marshall
+might help along the firm of Peters & Tucker.
+
+"'Jeff,' says Bill to me, 'you are a man of learning and education,
+besides having knowledge and information concerning not only rudiments
+but facts and attainments.'
+
+"'I do,' says I, 'and I have never regretted it. I am not one,' says
+I, 'who would cheapen education by making it free. Tell me,' says I,
+'which is of the most value to mankind, literature or horse racking?'
+
+"'Why--er--, playing the po--I mean, of course, the poets and the
+great writers have got the call, of course,' says Bill.
+
+"'Exactly,' says I. 'Then why do the master minds of finance and
+philanthropy,' says I, 'charge us $2 to get into a race-track and let
+us into a library free? Is that distilling into the masses,' says I,
+'a correct estimate of the relative value of the two means of self-
+culture and disorder?'
+
+"'You are arguing outside of my faculties of sense and rhetoric,' says
+Bill. 'What I wanted you to do is to go to Washington and dig out this
+appointment for me. I haven't no ideas of cultivation and intrigue.
+I'm a plain citizen and I need the job. I've killed seven men,' says
+Bill; 'I've got nine children; I've been a good Republican ever since
+the first of May; I can't read nor write, and I see no reason why I
+ain't illegible for the office. And I think your partner, Mr. Tucker,'
+goes on Bill, 'is also a man of sufficient ingratiation and connected
+system of mental delinquency to assist you in securing the
+appointment. I will give you preliminary,' says Bill, '$1,000 for
+drinks, bribes and carfare in Washington. If you land the job I will
+pay you $1,000 more, cash down, and guarantee you impunity in boot-
+legging whiskey for twelve months. Are you patriotic to the West
+enough to help me put this thing through the Whitewashed Wigwam of the
+Great Father of the most eastern flag station of the Pennsylvania
+Railroad?' says Bill.
+
+"Well, I talked to Andy about it, and he liked the idea immense. Andy
+was a man of an involved nature. He was never content to plod along,
+as I was, selling to the peasantry some little tool like a combination
+steak beater, shoe horn, marcel waver, monkey wrench, nail file,
+potato masher and Multum in Parvo tuning fork. Andy had the artistic
+temper, which is not to be judged as a preacher's or a moral man's is
+by purely commercial deflections. So we accepted Bill's offer, and
+strikes out for Washington.
+
+"Says I to Andy, when we get located at a hotel on South Dakota
+Avenue, G.S.S.W. 'Now Andy, for the first time in our lives we've got
+to do a real dishonest act. Lobbying is something we've never been
+used to; but we've got to scandalize ourselves for Bill Humble's sake.
+In a straight and legitimate business,' says I, 'we could afford to
+introduce a little foul play and chicanery, but in a disorderly and
+heinous piece of malpractice like this it seems to me that the
+straightforward and aboveboard way is the best. I propose,' says I,
+'that we hand over $500 of this money to the chairman of the national
+campaign committee, get a receipt, lay the receipt on the President's
+desk and tell him about Bill. The President is a man who would
+appreciate a candidate who went about getting office that way instead
+of pulling wires.'
+
+"Andy agreed with me, but after we talked the scheme over with the
+hotel clerk we give that plan up. He told us that there was only one
+way to get an appointment in Washington, and that was through a lady
+lobbyist. He gave us the address of one he recommended, a Mrs. Avery,
+who he said was high up in sociable and diplomatic rings and circles.
+
+"The next morning at 10 o'clock me and Andy called at her hotel, and
+was shown up to her reception room.
+
+"This Mrs. Avery was a solace and a balm to the eyesight. She had hair
+the color of the back of a twenty dollar gold certificate, blue eyes
+and a system of beauty that would make the girl on the cover of a July
+magazine look like a cook on a Monongahela coal barge.
+
+"She had on a low necked dress covered with silver spangles, and
+diamond rings and ear bobs. Her arms was bare; and she was using a
+desk telephone with one hand, and drinking tea with the other.
+
+"'Well, boys,' says she after a bit, 'what is it?'
+
+"I told her in as few words as possible what we wanted for Bill, and
+the price we could pay.
+
+"'Those western appointments,' says she, 'are easy. Le'me see, now,'
+says she, 'who could put that through for us. No use fooling with the
+Territorial delegates. I guess,' says she, 'that Senator Sniper would
+be about the man. He's from somewheres in the West. Let's see how he
+stands on my private menu card.' She takes some papers out of a
+pigeon-hole with the letter 'S' over it.
+
+"'Yes,' says she, 'he's marked with a star; that means "ready to
+serve." Now, let's see. "Age 55; married twice; Presbyterian, likes
+blondes, Tolstoi, poker and stewed terrapin; sentimental at third
+bottle of wine." Yes,' she goes on, 'I am sure I can have your friend,
+Mr. Bummer, appointed Minister to Brazil.'
+
+"'Humble,' says I. 'And United States Marshal was the berth.'
+
+"'Oh, yes,' says Mrs. Avery. 'I have so many deals of this sort I
+sometimes get them confused. Give me all the memoranda you have of the
+case, Mr. Peters, and come back in four days. I think it can be
+arranged by then.'
+
+"So me and Andy goes back to our hotel and waits. Andy walks up and
+down and chews the left end of his mustache.
+
+"'A woman of high intellect and perfect beauty is a rare thing, Jeff,'
+says he.
+
+"'As rare,' says I, 'as an omelet made from the eggs of the fabulous
+bird known as the epidermis,' says I.
+
+"'A woman like that,' says Andy, 'ought to lead a man to the highest
+positions of opulence and fame.'
+
+"'I misdoubt,' says I, 'if any woman ever helped a man to secure a job
+any more than to have his meals ready promptly and spread a report
+that the other candidate's wife had once been a shoplifter. They are
+no more adapted for business and politics,' says I, 'than Algernon
+Charles Swinburne is to be floor manager at one of Chuck Connor's
+annual balls. I know,' says I to Andy, 'that sometimes a woman seems
+to step out into the kalsomine light as the charge d'affaires of her
+man's political job. But how does it come out? Say, they have a neat
+little berth somewhere as foreign consul of record to Afghanistan or
+lockkeeper on the Delaware and Raritan Canal. One day this man finds
+his wife putting on her overshoes and three months supply of bird seed
+into the canary's cage. "Sioux Falls?" he asks with a kind of hopeful
+light in his eye. "No, Arthur," says she, "Washington. We're wasted
+here," says she. "You ought to be Toady Extraordinary to the Court of
+St. Bridget or Head Porter of the Island of Porto Rico. I'm going to
+see about it."
+
+"'Then this lady,' I says to Andy, 'moves against the authorities at
+Washington with her baggage and munitions, consisting of five dozen
+indiscriminating letters written to her by a member of the Cabinet
+when she was 15; a letter of introduction from King Leopold to the
+Smithsonian Institution, and a pink silk costume with canary colored
+spats.
+
+"'Well and then what?' I goes. 'She has the letters printed in the
+evening papers that match her costume, she lectures at an informal tea
+given in the palm room of the B. & O. Depot and then calls on the
+President. The ninth Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Labor, the
+first aide-de-camp of the Blue Room and an unidentified colored man
+are waiting there to grasp her by the hands--and feet. They carry her
+out to S.W.B. street and leave her on a cellar door. That ends it. The
+next time we hear of her she is writing postcards to the Chinese
+Minister asking him to get Arthur a job in a tea store.'
+
+"'Then,' says Andy, 'you don't think Mrs. Avery will land the
+Marshalship for Bill?'
+
+"'I do not,' says I. 'I do not wish to be a sceptic, but I doubt if
+she can do as well as you and me could have done.'
+
+"'I don't agree with you,' says Andy. 'I'll bet you she does. I'm
+proud of having a higher opinion of the talent and the powers of
+negotiation of ladies.'
+
+"We was back at Mrs. Avery's hotel at the time she appointed. She was
+looking pretty and fine enough, as far as that went, to make any man
+let her name every officer in the country. But I hadn't much faith in
+looks, so I was certainly surprised when she pulls out a document with
+the great seal of the United States on it, and 'William Henry Humble'
+in a fine, big hand on the back.
+
+"'You might have had it the next day, boys,' says Mrs. Avery, smiling.
+'I hadn't the slightest trouble in getting it,' says she. 'I just
+asked for it, that's all. Now, I'd like to talk to you a while,' she
+goes on, 'but I'm awfully busy, and I know you'll excuse me. I've got
+an Ambassadorship, two Consulates and a dozen other minor applications
+to look after. I can hardly find time to sleep at all. You'll give my
+compliments to Mr. Humble when you get home, of course.'
+
+"Well, I handed her the $500, which she pitched into her desk drawer
+without counting. I put Bill's appointment in my pocket and me and
+Andy made our adieus.
+
+"We started back for the Territory the same day. We wired Bill: 'Job
+landed; get the tall glasses ready,' and we felt pretty good.
+
+"Andy joshed me all the way about how little I knew about women.
+
+"'All right,' says I. 'I'll admit that she surprised me. But it's the
+first time I ever knew one of 'em to manipulate a piece of business on
+time without getting it bungled up in some way,' says I.
+
+"Down about the edge of Arkansas I got out Bill's appointment and
+looked it over, and then I handed it to Andy to read. Andy read it,
+but didn't add any remarks to my silence.
+
+"The paper was for Bill, all right, and a genuine document, but it
+appointed him postmaster of Dade City, Fla.
+
+"Me and Andy got off the train at Little Rock and sent Bill's
+appointment to him by mail. Then we struck northeast toward Lake
+Superior.
+
+"I never saw Bill Humble after that."
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE EXACT SCIENCE OF MATRIMONY
+
+"As I have told you before," said Jeff Peters, "I never had much
+confidence in the perfidiousness of woman. As partners or coeducators
+in the most innocent line of graft they are not trustworthy."
+
+"They deserve the compliment," said I. "I think they are entitled to
+be called the honest sex."
+
+"Why shouldn't they be?" said Jeff. "They've got the other sex either
+grafting or working overtime for 'em. They're all right in business
+until they get their emotions or their hair touched up too much. Then
+you want to have a flat footed, heavy breathing man with sandy
+whiskers, five kids and a building and loan mortgage ready as an
+understudy to take her desk. Now there was that widow lady that me and
+Andy Tucker engaged to help us in that little matrimonial agency
+scheme we floated out in Cairo.
+
+"When you've got enough advertising capital--say a roll as big as the
+little end of a wagon tongue--there's money in matrimonial agencies.
+We had about $6,000 and we expected to double it in two months, which
+is about as long as a scheme like ours can be carried on without
+taking out a New Jersey charter.
+
+"We fixed up an advertisement that read about like this:
+
+  "Charming widow, beautiful, home loving, 32 years, possessing
+  $3,000 cash and owning valuable country property, would remarry.
+  Would prefer a poor man with affectionate disposition to one with
+  means, as she realizes that the solid virtues are oftenest to be
+  found in the humble walks of life. No objection to elderly man or
+  one of homely appearance if faithful and true and competent to
+  manage property and invest money with judgment. Address, with
+  particulars.
+
+Lonely,
+Care of Peters & Tucker, agents, Cairo, Ill.
+
+
+"'So far, so pernicious,' says I, when we had finished the literary
+concoction. 'And now,' says I, 'where is the lady.'
+
+"Andy gives me one of his looks of calm irritation.
+
+"'Jeff,' says he, 'I thought you had lost them ideas of realism in
+your art. Why should there be a lady? When they sell a lot of watered
+stock on Wall Street would you expect to find a mermaid in it? What
+has a matrimonial ad got to do with a lady?'
+
+"'Now listen,' says I. 'You know my rule, Andy, that in all my
+illegitimate inroads against the legal letter of the law the article
+sold must be existent, visible, producible. In that way and by a
+careful study of city ordinances and train schedules I have kept out
+of all trouble with the police that a five dollar bill and a cigar
+could not square. Now, to work this scheme we've got to be able to
+produce bodily a charming widow or its equivalent with or without the
+beauty, hereditaments and appurtenances set forth in the catalogue and
+writ of errors, or hereafter be held by a justice of the peace.'
+
+"'Well,' says Andy, reconstructing his mind, 'maybe it would be safer
+in case the post office or the peace commission should try to
+investigate our agency. But where,' he says, 'could you hope to find a
+widow who would waste time on a matrimonial scheme that had no
+matrimony in it?'
+
+"I told Andy that I thought I knew of the exact party. An old friend
+of mine, Zeke Trotter, who used to draw soda water and teeth in a tent
+show, had made his wife a widow a year before by drinking some
+dyspepsia cure of the old doctor's instead of the liniment that he
+always got boozed up on. I used to stop at their house often, and I
+thought we could get her to work with us.
+
+"'Twas only sixty miles to the little town where she lived, so I
+jumped out on the I.C. and finds her in the same cottage with the same
+sunflowers and roosters standing on the washtub. Mrs. Trotter fitted
+our ad first rate except, maybe for beauty and age and property
+valuation. But she looked feasible and praiseworthy to the eye, and it
+was a kindness to Zeke's memory to give her the job.
+
+"'Is this an honest deal you are putting on, Mr. Peters,' she asks me
+when I tell her what we want.
+
+"'Mrs. Trotter,' says I, 'Andy Tucker and me have computed the
+calculation that 3,000 men in this broad and unfair country will
+endeavor to secure your fair hand and ostensible money and property
+through our advertisement. Out of that number something like thirty
+hundred will expect to give you in exchange, if they should win you,
+the carcass of a lazy and mercenary loafer, a failure in life, a
+swindler and contemptible fortune seeker.
+
+"'Me and Andy,' says I, 'propose to teach these preyers upon society a
+lesson. It was with difficulty,' says I, 'that me and Andy could
+refrain from forming a corporation under the title of the Great Moral
+and Millennial Malevolent Matrimonial Agency. Does that satisfy you?'
+
+"'It does, Mr. Peters,' says she. 'I might have known you wouldn't
+have gone into anything that wasn't opprobrious. But what will my
+duties be? Do I have to reject personally these 3,000 ramscallions you
+speak of, or can I throw them out in bunches?'
+
+"'Your job, Mrs. Trotter,' says I, 'will be practically a cynosure.
+You will live at a quiet hotel and will have no work to do. Andy and I
+will attend to all the correspondence and business end of it.
+
+"'Of course,' says I, 'some of the more ardent and impetuous suitors
+who can raise the railroad fare may come to Cairo to personally press
+their suit or whatever fraction of a suit they may be wearing. In that
+case you will be probably put to the inconvenience of kicking them out
+face to face. We will pay you $25 per week and hotel expenses.'
+
+"'Give me five minutes,' says Mrs. Trotter, 'to get my powder rag and
+leave the front door key with a neighbor and you can let my salary
+begin.'
+
+"So I conveys Mrs. Trotter to Cairo and establishes her in a family
+hotel far enough away from mine and Andy's quarters to be unsuspicious
+and available, and I tell Andy.
+
+"'Great,' says Andy. 'And now that your conscience is appeased as to
+the tangibility and proximity of the bait, and leaving mutton aside,
+suppose we revenoo a noo fish.'
+
+"So, we began to insert our advertisement in newspapers covering the
+country far and wide. One ad was all we used. We couldn't have used
+more without hiring so many clerks and marcelled paraphernalia that
+the sound of the gum chewing would have disturbed the Postmaster-
+General.
+
+"We placed $2,000 in a bank to Mrs. Trotter's credit and gave her the
+book to show in case anybody might question the honesty and good faith
+of the agency. I knew Mrs. Trotter was square and reliable and it was
+safe to leave it in her name.
+
+"With that one ad Andy and me put in twelve hours a day answering
+letters.
+
+"About one hundred a day was what came in. I never knew there was so
+many large hearted but indigent men in the country who were willing to
+acquire a charming widow and assume the burden of investing her money.
+
+"Most of them admitted that they ran principally to whiskers and lost
+jobs and were misunderstood by the world, but all of 'em were sure
+that they were so chock full of affection and manly qualities that the
+widow would be making the bargain of her life to get 'em.
+
+"Every applicant got a reply from Peters & Tucker informing him that
+the widow had been deeply impressed by his straightforward and
+interesting letter and requesting them to write again; stating more
+particulars; and enclosing photograph if convenient. Peters & Tucker
+also informed the applicant that their fee for handing over the second
+letter to their fair client would be $2, enclosed therewith.
+
+"There you see the simple beauty of the scheme. About 90 per cent. of
+them domestic foreign noblemen raised the price somehow and sent it
+in. That was all there was to it. Except that me and Andy complained
+an amount about being put to the trouble of slicing open them
+envelopes, and taking the money out.
+
+"Some few clients called in person. We sent 'em to Mrs. Trotter and
+she did the rest; except for three or four who came back to strike us
+for carfare. After the letters began to get in from the r.f.d.
+districts Andy and me were taking in about $200 a day.
+
+"One afternoon when we were busiest and I was stuffing the two and
+ones into cigar boxes and Andy was whistling 'No Wedding Bells for
+Her' a small slick man drops in and runs his eye over the walls like
+he was on the trail of a lost Gainesborough painting or two. As soon
+as I saw him I felt a glow of pride, because we were running our
+business on the level.
+
+"'I see you have quite a large mail to-day,' says the man.
+
+"I reached and got my hat.
+
+"'Come on,' says I. 'We've been expecting you. I'll show you the
+goods. How was Teddy when you left Washington?'
+
+"I took him down to the Riverview Hotel and had him shake hands with
+Mrs. Trotter. Then I showed him her bank book with the $2,000 to her
+credit.
+
+"'It seems to be all right,' says the Secret Service.
+
+"'It is,' says I. 'And if you're not a married man I'll leave you to
+talk a while with the lady. We won't mention the two dollars.'
+
+"'Thanks,' says he. 'If I wasn't, I might. Good day, Mrs. Peters.'
+
+"Toward the end of three months we had taken in something over $5,000,
+and we saw it was time to quit. We had a good many complaints made to
+us; and Mrs. Trotter seemed to be tired of the job. A good many
+suitors had been calling to see her, and she didn't seem to like that.
+
+"So we decides to pull out, and I goes down to Mrs. Trotter's hotel to
+pay her last week's salary and say farewell and get her check for the
+$2,000.
+
+"When I got there I found her crying like a kid that don't want to go
+to school.
+
+"'Now, now,' says I, 'what's it all about? Somebody sassed you or you
+getting homesick?'
+
+"'No, Mr. Peters,' says she. 'I'll tell you. You was always a friend
+of Zeke's, and I don't mind. Mr. Peters, I'm in love. I just love a
+man so hard I can't bear not to get him. He's just the ideal I've
+always had in mind.'
+
+"'Then take him,' says I. 'That is, if it's a mutual case. Does he
+return the sentiment according to the specifications and painfulness
+you have described?'
+
+"'He does,' says she. 'But he's one of the gentlemen that's been
+coming to see me about the advertisement and he won't marry me unless
+I give him the $2,000. His name is William Wilkinson.' And then she
+goes off again in the agitations and hysterics of romance.
+
+"'Mrs. Trotter,' says I, 'there's no man more sympathizing with a
+woman's affections than I am. Besides, you was once the life partner
+of one of my best friends. If it was left to me I'd say take this
+$2,000 and the man of your choice and be happy.
+
+"'We could afford to do that, because we have cleaned up over $5,000
+from these suckers that wanted to marry you. But,' says I, 'Andy
+Tucker is to be consulted.
+
+"'He is a good man, but keen in business. He is my equal partner
+financially. I will talk to Andy,' says I, 'and see what can be done.'
+
+"I goes back to our hotel and lays the case before Andy.
+
+"'I was expecting something like this all the time,' says Andy. 'You
+can't trust a woman to stick by you in any scheme that involves her
+emotions and preferences.'
+
+"'It's a sad thing, Andy,' says I, 'to think that we've been the cause
+of the breaking of a woman's heart.'
+
+"'It is,' says Andy, 'and I tell you what I'm willing to do, Jeff.
+You've always been a man of a soft and generous heart and disposition.
+Perhaps I've been too hard and worldly and suspicious. For once I'll
+meet you half way. Go to Mrs. Trotter and tell her to draw the $2,000
+from the bank and give it to this man she's infatuated with and be
+happy.'
+
+"I jumps up and shakes Andy's hand for five minutes, and then I goes
+back to Mrs. Trotter and tells her, and she cries as hard for joy as
+she did for sorrow.
+
+"Two days afterward me and Andy packed up to go.
+
+"'Wouldn't you like to go down and meet Mrs. Trotter once before we
+leave?' I asks him. 'She'd like mightily to know you and express her
+encomiums and gratitude.'
+
+"'Why, I guess not,' says Andy. 'I guess we'd better hurry and catch
+that train.'
+
+"I was strapping our capital around me in a memory belt like we always
+carried it, when Andy pulls a roll of large bills out of his pocket
+and asks me to put 'em with the rest.
+
+"'What's this?' says I.
+
+"'It's Mrs. Trotter's two thousand,' says Andy.
+
+"'How do you come to have it?' I asks.
+
+"'She gave it to me,' says Andy. 'I've been calling on her three
+evenings a week for more than a month.'
+
+"'Then are you William Wilkinson?' says I.
+
+"'I was,' says Andy."
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A MIDSUMMER MASQUERADE
+
+"Satan," said Jeff Peters, "is a hard boss to work for. When other
+people are having their vacation is when he keeps you the busiest. As
+old Dr. Watts or St. Paul or some other diagnostician says: 'He always
+finds somebody for idle hands to do.'
+
+"I remember one summer when me and my partner, Andy Tucker, tried to
+take a layoff from our professional and business duties; but it seems
+that our work followed us wherever we went.
+
+"Now, with a preacher it's different. He can throw off his
+responsibilities and enjoy himself. On the 31st of May he wraps
+mosquito netting and tin foil around the pulpit, grabs his niblick,
+breviary and fishing pole and hikes for Lake Como or Atlantic City
+according to the size of the loudness with which he has been called by
+his congregation. And, sir, for three months he don't have to think
+about business except to hunt around in Deuteronomy and Proverbs and
+Timothy to find texts to cover and exculpate such little midsummer
+penances as dropping a couple of looey door on rouge or teaching a
+Presbyterian widow to swim.
+
+"But I was going to tell you about mine and Andy's summer vacation
+that wasn't one.
+
+"We was tired of finance and all the branches of unsanctified
+ingenuity. Even Andy, whose brain rarely ever stopped working, began
+to make noises like a tennis cabinet.
+
+"'Heigh ho!' says Andy. 'I'm tired. I've got that steam up the yacht
+Corsair and ho for the Riviera! feeling. I want to loaf and indict my
+soul, as Walt Whittier says. I want to play pinochle with Merry del
+Val or give a knouting to the tenants on my Tarrytown estates or do a
+monologue at a Chautauqua picnic in kilts or something summery and
+outside the line of routine and sand-bagging.'
+
+"'Patience,' says I. 'You'll have to climb higher in the profession
+before you can taste the laurels that crown the footprints of the
+great captains of industry. Now, what I'd like, Andy,' says I, 'would
+be a summer sojourn in a mountain village far from scenes of larceny,
+labor and overcapitalization. I'm tired, too, and a month or so of
+sinlessness ought to leave us in good shape to begin again to take
+away the white man's burdens in the fall.'
+
+"Andy fell in with the rest cure at once, so we struck the general
+passenger agents of all the railroads for summer resort literature,
+and took a week to study out where we should go. I reckon the first
+passenger agent in the world was that man Genesis. But there wasn't
+much competition in his day, and when he said: 'The Lord made the
+earth in six days, and all very good,' he hadn't any idea to what
+extent the press agents of the summer hotels would plagiarize from him
+later on.
+
+"When we finished the booklets we perceived, easy, that the United
+States from Passadumkeg, Maine, to El Paso, and from Skagway to Key
+West was a paradise of glorious mountain peaks, crystal lakes, new
+laid eggs, golf, girls, garages, cooling breezes, straw rides, open
+plumbing and tennis; and all within two hours' ride.
+
+"So me and Andy dumps the books out the back window and packs our
+trunk and takes the 6 o'clock Tortoise Flyer for Crow Knob, a kind of
+a dernier resort in the mountains on the line of Tennessee and North
+Carolina.
+
+"We was directed to a kind of private hotel called Woodchuck Inn, and
+thither me and Andy bent and almost broke our footsteps over the rocks
+and stumps. The Inn set back from the road in a big grove of trees,
+and it looked fine with its broad porches and a lot of women in white
+dresses rocking in the shade. The rest of Crow Knob was a post office
+and some scenery set an angle of forty-five degrees and a welkin.
+
+"Well, sir, when we got to the gate who do you suppose comes down the
+walk to greet us? Old Smoke-'em-out Smithers, who used to be the best
+open air painless dentist and electric liver pad faker in the
+Southwest.
+
+"Old Smoke-'em-out is dressed clerico-rural, and has the mingled air
+of a landlord and a claim jumper. Which aspect he corroborates by
+telling us that he is the host and perpetrator of Woodchuck Inn. I
+introduces Andy, and we talk about a few volatile topics, such as will
+go around at meetings of boards of directors and old associates like
+us three were. Old Smoke-'em-out leads us into a kind of summer house
+in the yard near the gate and took up the harp of life and smote on
+all the chords with his mighty right.
+
+"'Gents,' says he, 'I'm glad to see you. Maybe you can help me out of
+a scrape. I'm getting a bit old for street work, so I leased this
+dogdays emporium so the good things would come to me. Two weeks before
+the season opened I gets a letter signed Lieut. Peary and one from the
+Duke of Marlborough, each wanting to engage board for part of the
+summer.
+
+"'Well, sir, you gents know what a big thing for an obscure hustlery
+it would be to have for guests two gentlemen whose names are famous
+from long association with icebergs and the Coburgs. So I prints a lot
+of handbills announcing that Woodchuck Inn would shelter these
+distinguished boarders during the summer, except in places where it
+leaked, and I sends 'em out to towns around as far as Knoxville and
+Charlotte and Fish Dam and Bowling Green.
+
+"'And now look up there on the porch, gents,' says Smoke-'em-out, 'at
+them disconsolate specimens of their fair sex waiting for the arrival
+of the Duke and the Lieutenant. The house is packed from rafters to
+cellar with hero worshippers.
+
+"'There's four normal school teachers and two abnormal; there's three
+high school graduates between 37 and 42; there's two literary old
+maids and one that can write; there's a couple of society women and a
+lady from Haw River. Two elocutionists are bunking in the corn crib,
+and I've put cots in the hay loft for the cook and the society
+editress of the Chattanooga /Opera Glass/. You see how names draw,
+gents.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'how is it that you seem to be biting your thumbs at
+good luck? You didn't use to be that way.'
+
+"'I ain't through,' says Smoke-'em-out. 'Yesterday was the day for the
+advent of the auspicious personages. I goes down to the depot to
+welcome 'em. Two apparently animate substances gets off the train,
+both carrying bags full of croquet mallets and these magic lanterns
+with pushbuttons.
+
+"I compares these integers with the original signatures to the letters
+--and, well, gents, I reckon the mistake was due to my poor eyesight.
+Instead of being the Lieutenant, the daisy chain and wild verbena
+explorer was none other than Levi T. Peevy, a soda water clerk from
+Asheville. And the Duke of Marlborough turned out to be Theo. Drake of
+Murfreesborough, a bookkeeper in a grocery. What did I do? I kicked
+'em both back on the train and watched 'em depart for the lowlands,
+the low.
+
+"'Now you see the fix I'm in, gents,' goes on Smoke-'em-out Smithers.
+'I told the ladies that the notorious visitors had been detained on
+the road by some unavoidable circumstances that made a noise like an
+ice jam and an heiress, but they would arrive a day or two later. When
+they find out that they've been deceived,' says Smoke-'em-out, 'every
+yard of cross barred muslin and natural waved switch in the house will
+pack up and leave. It's a hard deal,' says old Smoke-'em-out.
+
+"'Friend,' says Andy, touching the old man on the aesophagus, 'why this
+jeremiad when the polar regions and the portals of Blenheim are
+conspiring to hand you prosperity on a hall-marked silver salver. We
+have arrived.'
+
+"A light breaks out on Smoke-'em-out's face.
+
+"'Can you do it, gents?' he asks. 'Could ye do it? Could ye play the
+polar man and the little duke for the nice ladies? Will ye do it?'
+
+"I see that Andy is superimposed with his old hankering for the oral
+and polyglot system of buncoing. That man had a vocabulary of about
+10,000 words and synonyms, which arrayed themselves into contraband
+sophistries and parables when they came out.
+
+"'Listen,' says Andy to old Smoke-'em-out. 'Can we do it? You behold
+before you, Mr. Smithers, two of the finest equipped men on earth for
+inveigling the proletariat, whether by word of mouth, sleight-of-hand
+or swiftness of foot. Dukes come and go, explorers go and get lost,
+but me and Jeff Peters,' says Andy, 'go after the come-ons forever. If
+you say so, we're the two illustrious guests you were expecting. And
+you'll find,' says Andy, 'that we'll give you the true local color of
+the title roles from the aurora borealis to the ducal portcullis.'
+
+"Old Smoke-'em-out is delighted. He takes me and Andy up to the inn by
+an arm apiece, telling us on the way that the finest fruits of the can
+and luxuries of the fast freights should be ours without price as long
+as we would stay.
+
+"On the porch Smoke-'em-out says: 'Ladies, I have the honor to
+introduce His Gracefulness the Duke of Marlborough and the famous
+inventor of the North Pole, Lieut. Peary.'
+
+"The skirts all flutter and the rocking chairs squeak as me and Andy
+bows and then goes on in with old Smoke-'em-out to register. And then
+we washed up and turned our cuffs, and the landlord took us to the
+rooms he'd been saving for us and got out a demijohn of North Carolina
+real mountain dew.
+
+"I expected trouble when Andy began to drink. He has the artistic
+metempsychosis which is half drunk when sober and looks down on
+airships when stimulated.
+
+"After lingering with the demijohn me and Andy goes out on the porch,
+where the ladies are to begin to earn our keep. We sit in two special
+chairs and then the schoolma'ams and literaterrers hunched their
+rockers close around us.
+
+"One lady says to me: 'How did that last venture of yours turn out,
+sir?'
+
+"Now, I'd clean forgot to have an understanding with Andy which I was
+to be, the duke or the lieutenant. And I couldn't tell from her
+question whether she was referring to Arctic or matrimonial
+expeditions. So I gave an answer that would cover both cases.
+
+"'Well, ma'am,' says I, 'it was a freeze out--right smart of a freeze
+out, ma'am.'
+
+"And then the flood gates of Andy's perorations was opened and I knew
+which one of the renowned ostensible guests I was supposed to be. I
+wasn't either. Andy was both. And still furthermore it seemed that he
+was trying to be the mouthpiece of the whole British nobility and of
+Arctic exploration from Sir John Franklin down. It was the union of
+corn whiskey and the conscientious fictional form that Mr. W. D.
+Howletts admires so much.
+
+"'Ladies,' says Andy, smiling semicircularly, 'I am truly glad to
+visit America. I do not consider the magna charta,' says he, 'or gas
+balloons or snow-shoes in any way a detriment to the beauty and charm
+of your American women, skyscrapers or the architecture of your
+icebergs. The next time,' says Andy, 'that I go after the North Pole
+all the Vanderbilts in Greenland won't be able to turn me out in the
+cold--I mean make it hot for me.'
+
+"'Tell us about one of your trips, Lieutenant,' says one of the
+normals.
+
+"'Sure,' says Andy, getting the decision over a hiccup. 'It was in the
+spring of last year that I sailed the Castle of Blenheim up to
+latitude 87 degrees Fahrenheit and beat the record. Ladies,' says
+Andy, 'it was a sad sight to see a Duke allied by a civil and
+liturgical chattel mortgage to one of your first families lost in a
+region of semiannual days.' And then he goes on, 'At four bells we
+sighted Westminster Abbey, but there was not a drop to eat. At noon we
+threw out five sandbags, and the ship rose fifteen knots higher. At
+midnight,' continues Andy, 'the restaurants closed. Sitting on a cake
+of ice we ate seven hot dogs. All around us was snow and ice. Six
+times a night the boatswain rose up and tore a leaf off the calendar,
+so we could keep time with the barometer. At 12,' says Andy, with a
+lot of anguish on his face, 'three huge polar bears sprang down the
+hatchway, into the cabin. And then--'
+
+"'What then, Lieutenant?' says a schoolma'am, excitedly.
+
+"Andy gives a loud sob.
+
+"'The Duchess shook me,' he cries out, and slides out of the chair and
+weeps on the porch.
+
+"Well, of course, that fixed the scheme. The women boarders all left
+the next morning. The landlord wouldn't speak to us for two days, but
+when he found we had money to pay our way he loosened up.
+
+"So me and Andy had a quiet, restful summer after all, coming away
+from Crow Knob with $1,100, that we enticed out of old Smoke-'em-out
+playing seven up."
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+SHEARING THE WOLF
+
+Jeff Peters was always eloquent when the ethics of his profession was
+under discussion.
+
+"The only times," said he, "that me and Andy Tucker ever had any
+hiatuses in our cordial intents was when we differed on the moral
+aspects of grafting. Andy had his standards and I had mine. I didn't
+approve of all of Andy's schemes for levying contributions from the
+public, and he thought I allowed my conscience to interfere too often
+for the financial good of the firm. We had high arguments sometimes.
+One word led on to another till he said I reminded him of Rockefeller.
+
+"'I don't know how you mean that, Andy,' says I, 'but we have been
+friends too long for me to take offense, at a taunt that you will
+regret when you cool off. I have yet,' says I, 'to shake hands with a
+subpoena server.'
+
+"One summer me and Andy decided to rest up a spell in a fine little
+town in the mountains of Kentucky called Grassdale. We was supposed to
+be horse drovers, and good decent citizens besides, taking a summer
+vacation. The Grassdale people liked us, and me and Andy declared a
+cessation of hostilities, never so much as floating the fly leaf of a
+rubber concession prospectus or flashing a Brazilian diamond while we
+was there.
+
+"One day the leading hardware merchant of Grassdale drops around to
+the hotel where me and Andy stopped, and smokes with us, sociable, on
+the side porch. We knew him pretty well from pitching quoits in the
+afternoons in the court house yard. He was a loud, red man, breathing
+hard, but fat and respectable beyond all reason.
+
+"After we talk on all the notorious themes of the day, this Murkison--
+for such was his entitlements--takes a letter out of his coat pocket
+in a careful, careless way and hands it to us to read.
+
+"'Now, what do you think of that?' says he, laughing--'a letter like
+that to ME!'
+
+"Me and Andy sees at a glance what it is; but we pretend to read it
+through. It was one of them old time typewritten green goods letters
+explaining how for $1,000 you could get $5,000 in bills that an expert
+couldn't tell from the genuine; and going on to tell how they were
+made from plates stolen by an employee of the Treasury at Washington.
+
+"'Think of 'em sending a letter like that to ME!' says Murkison again.
+
+"'Lot's of good men get 'em,' says Andy. 'If you don't answer the
+first letter they let you drop. If you answer it they write again
+asking you to come on with your money and do business.'
+
+"'But think of 'em writing to ME!' says Murkison.
+
+"A few days later he drops around again.
+
+"'Boys,' says he, 'I know you are all right or I wouldn't confide in
+you. I wrote to them rascals again just for fun. They answered and
+told me to come on to Chicago. They said telegraph to J. Smith when I
+would start. When I get there I'm to wait on a certain street corner
+till a man in a gray suit comes along and drops a newspaper in front
+of me. Then I am to ask him how the water is, and he knows it's me and
+I know it's him.'
+
+"'Ah, yes,' says Andy, gaping, 'it's the same old game. I've often
+read about it in the papers. Then he conducts you to the private
+abattoir in the hotel, where Mr. Jones is already waiting. They show
+you brand new real money and sell you all you want at five for one.
+You see 'em put it in a satchel for you and know it's there. Of course
+it's brown paper when you come to look at it afterward.'
+
+"'Oh, they couldn't switch it on me,' says Murkison. 'I haven't built
+up the best paying business in Grassdale without having witticisms
+about me. You say it's real money they show you, Mr. Tucker?'
+
+"'I've always--I see by the papers that it always is,' says Andy.
+
+"'Boys,' says Murkison, 'I've got it in my mind that them fellows
+can't fool me. I think I'll put a couple of thousand in my jeans and
+go up there and put it all over 'em. If Bill Murkison gets his eyes
+once on them bills they show him he'll never take 'em off of 'em. They
+offer $5 for $1, and they'll have to stick to the bargain if I tackle
+'em. That's the kind of trader Bill Murkison is. Yes, I jist believe
+I'll drop up Chicago way and take a 5 to 1 shot on J. Smith. I guess
+the water'll be fine enough.'
+
+"Me and Andy tries to get this financial misquotation out of
+Murkison's head, but we might as well have tried to keep the man who
+rolls peanuts with a toothpick from betting on Bryan's election. No,
+sir; he was going to perform a public duty by catching these green
+goods swindlers at their own game. Maybe it would teach 'em a lesson.
+
+"After Murkison left us me and Andy sat a while prepondering over our
+silent meditations and heresies of reason. In our idle hours we always
+improved our higher selves by ratiocination and mental thought.
+
+"'Jeff,' says Andy after a long time, 'quite unseldom I have seen fit
+to impugn your molars when you have been chewing the rag with me about
+your conscientious way of doing business. I may have been often wrong.
+But here is a case where I think we can agree. I feel that it would be
+wrong for us to allow Mr. Murkison to go alone to meet those Chicago
+green goods men. There is but one way it can end. Don't you think we
+would both feel better if we was to intervene in some way and prevent
+the doing of this deed?'
+
+"I got up and shook Andy Tucker's hand hard and long.
+
+"'Andy,' says I, 'I may have had one or two hard thoughts about the
+heartlessness of your corporation, but I retract 'em now. You have a
+kind nucleus at the interior of your exterior after all. It does you
+credit. I was just thinking the same thing that you have expressed. It
+would not be honorable or praiseworthy,' says I, 'for us to let
+Murkison go on with this project he has taken up. If he is determined
+to go let us go with him and prevent this swindle from coming off.'
+
+"Andy agreed with me; and I was glad to see that he was in earnest
+about breaking up this green goods scheme.
+
+"'I don't call myself a religious man,' says I, 'or a fanatic in moral
+bigotry, but I can't stand still and see a man who has built up his
+business by his own efforts and brains and risk be robbed by an
+unscrupulous trickster who is a menace to the public good.'
+
+"'Right, Jeff,' says Andy. 'We'll stick right along with Murkison if
+he insists on going and block this funny business. I'd hate to see any
+money dropped in it as bad as you would.'
+
+"Well, we went to see Murkison.
+
+"'No, boys,' says he. 'I can't consent to let the song of this Chicago
+siren waft by me on the summer breeze. I'll fry some fat out of this
+ignis fatuus or burn a hole in the skillet. But I'd be plumb diverted
+to death to have you all go along with me. Maybe you could help some
+when it comes to cashing in the ticket to that 5 to 1 shot. Yes, I'd
+really take it as a pastime and regalement if you boys would go along
+too.'
+
+"Murkison gives it out in Grassdale that he is going for a few days
+with Mr. Peters and Mr. Tucker to look over some iron ore property in
+West Virginia. He wires J. Smith that he will set foot in the spider
+web on a given date; and the three of us lights out for Chicago.
+
+"On the way Murkison amuses himself with premonitions and advance
+pleasant recollections.
+
+"'In a gray suit,' says he, 'on the southwest corner of Wabash avenue
+and Lake street. He drops the paper, and I ask how the water is. Oh,
+my, my, my!' And then he laughs all over for five minutes.
+
+"Sometimes Murkison was serious and tried to talk himself out of his
+cogitations, whatever they was.
+
+"'Boys,' says he, 'I wouldn't have this to get out in Grassdale for
+ten times a thousand dollars. It would ruin me there. But I know you
+all are all right. I think it's the duty of every citizen,' says he,
+'to try to do up these robbers that prey upon the public. I'll show
+'em whether the water's fine. Five dollars for one--that's what J.
+Smith offers, and he'll have to keep his contract if he does business
+with Bill Murkison.'
+
+"We got into Chicago about 7 P.M. Murkison was to meet the gray man at
+half past 9. We had dinner at a hotel and then went up to Murkison's
+room to wait for the time to come.
+
+"'Now, boys,' says Murkison, 'let's get our gumption together and
+inoculate a plan for defeating the enemy. Suppose while I'm exchanging
+airy bandage with the gray capper you gents come along, by accident,
+you know, and holler: "Hello, Murk!" and shake hands with symptoms of
+surprise and familiarity. Then I take the capper aside and tell him
+you all are Jenkins and Brown of Grassdale, groceries and feed, good
+men and maybe willing to take a chance while away from home.'
+
+"'"Bring 'em along," he'll say, of course, "if they care to invest."
+Now, how does that scheme strike you?'
+
+"'What do you say, Jeff?' says Andy, looking at me.
+
+"'Why, I'll tell you what I say,' says I. 'I say let's settle this
+thing right here now. I don't see any use of wasting any more time.' I
+took a nickel-plated .38 out of my pocket and clicked the cylinder
+around a few times.
+
+"'You undevout, sinful, insidious hog,' says I to Murkison, 'get out
+that two thousand and lay it on the table. Obey with velocity,' says
+I, 'for otherwise alternatives are impending. I am preferably a man of
+mildness, but now and then I find myself in the middle of extremities.
+Such men as you,' I went on after he had laid the money out, 'is what
+keeps the jails and court houses going. You come up here to rob these
+men of their money. Does it excuse you?' I asks, 'that they were
+trying to skin you? No, sir; you was going to rob Peter to stand off
+Paul. You are ten times worse,' says I, 'than that green goods man.
+You go to church at home and pretend to be a decent citizen, but
+you'll come to Chicago and commit larceny from men that have built up
+a sound and profitable business by dealing with such contemptible
+scoundrels as you have tried to be to-day. How do you know,' says I,
+'that that green goods man hasn't a large family dependent upon his
+extortions? It's you supposedly respectable citizens who are always on
+the lookout to get something for nothing,' says I, 'that support the
+lotteries and wild-cat mines and stock exchanges and wire tappers of
+this country. If it wasn't for you they'd go out of business. The
+green goods man you was going to rob,' says I, 'studied maybe for
+years to learn his trade. Every turn he makes he risks his money and
+liberty and maybe his life. You come up here all sanctified and
+vanoplied with respectability and a pleasing post office address to
+swindle him. If he gets the money you can squeal to the police. If you
+get it he hocks the gray suit to buy supper and says nothing. Mr.
+Tucker and me sized you up,' says I, 'and came along to see that you
+got what you deserved. Hand over the money,' says I, 'you grass fed
+hypocrite.'
+
+"I put the two thousand, which was all in $20 bills, in my inside
+pocket.
+
+"'Now get out your watch,' says I to Murkison. 'No, I don't want it,'
+says I. 'Lay it on the table and you sit in that chair till it ticks
+off an hour. Then you can go. If you make any noise or leave any
+sooner we'll handbill you all over Grassdale. I guess your high
+position there is worth more than $2,000 to you.'
+
+"Then me and Andy left.
+
+"On the train Andy was a long time silent. Then he says: 'Jeff, do you
+mind my asking you a question?'
+
+"'Two,' says I, 'or forty.'
+
+"'Was that the idea you had,' says he, 'when we started out with
+Murkison?'
+
+"'Why, certainly,' says I. 'What else could it have been? Wasn't it
+yours, too?'
+
+"In about half an hour Andy spoke again. I think there are times when
+Andy don't exactly understand my system of ethics and moral hygiene.
+
+"'Jeff,' says he, 'some time when you have the leisure I wish you'd
+draw off a diagram and foot-notes of that conscience of yours. I'd
+like to have it to refer to occasionally.'"
+
+
+
+IX
+
+INNOCENTS OF BROADWAY
+
+"I hope some day to retire from business," said Jeff Peters; "and when
+I do I don't want anybody to be able to say that I ever got a dollar
+of any man's money without giving him a quid pro rata for it. I've
+always managed to leave a customer some little gewgaw to paste in his
+scrapbook or stick between his Seth Thomas clock and the wall after we
+are through trading.
+
+"There was one time I came near having to break this rule of mine and
+do a profligate and illaudable action, but I was saved from it by the
+laws and statutes of our great and profitable country.
+
+"One summer me and Andy Tucker, my partner, went to New York to lay in
+our annual assortment of clothes and gents' furnishings. We was always
+pompous and regardless dressers, finding that looks went further than
+anything else in our business, except maybe our knowledge of railroad
+schedules and an autograph photo of the President that Loeb sent us,
+probably by mistake. Andy wrote a nature letter once and sent it in
+about animals that he had seen caught in a trap lots of times. Loeb
+must have read it 'triplets,' instead of 'trap lots,' and sent the
+photo. Anyhow, it was useful to us to show people as a guarantee of
+good faith.
+
+"Me and Andy never cared much to do business in New York. It was too
+much like pothunting. Catching suckers in that town, is like
+dynamiting a Texas lake for bass. All you have to do anywhere between
+the North and East rivers is to stand in the street with an open bag
+marked, 'Drop packages of money here. No checks or loose bills taken.'
+You have a cop handy to club pikers who try to chip in post office
+orders and Canadian money, and that's all there is to New York for a
+hunter who loves his profession. So me and Andy used to just nature
+fake the town. We'd get out our spyglasses and watch the woodcocks
+along the Broadway swamps putting plaster casts on their broken legs,
+and then we'd sneak away without firing a shot.
+
+"One day in the papier mache palm room of a chloral hydrate and hops
+agency in a side street about eight inches off Broadway me and Andy
+had thrust upon us the acquaintance of a New Yorker. We had beer
+together until we discovered that each of us knew a man named
+Hellsmith, traveling for a stove factory in Duluth. This caused us to
+remark that the world was a very small place, and then this New Yorker
+busts his string and takes off his tin foil and excelsior packing and
+starts in giving us his Ellen Terris, beginning with the time he used
+to sell shoelaces to the Indians on the spot where Tammany Hall now
+stands.
+
+"This New Yorker had made his money keeping a cigar store in Beekman
+street, and he hadn't been above Fourteenth street in ten years.
+Moreover, he had whiskers, and the time had gone by when a true sport
+will do anything to a man with whiskers. No grafter except a boy who
+is soliciting subscribers to an illustrated weekly to win the prize
+air rifle, or a widow, would have the heart to tamper with the man
+behind with the razor. He was a typical city Reub--I'd bet the man
+hadn't been out of sight of a skyscraper in twenty-five years.
+
+"Well, presently this metropolitan backwoodsman pulls out a roll of
+bills with an old blue sleeve elastic fitting tight around it and
+opens it up.
+
+"'There's $5,000, Mr. Peters,' says he, shoving it over the table to
+me, 'saved during my fifteen years of business. Put that in your
+pocket and keep it for me, Mr. Peters. I'm glad to meet you gentlemen
+from the West, and I may take a drop too much. I want you to take care
+of my money for me. Now, let's have another beer.'
+
+"'You'd better keep this yourself,' says I. 'We are strangers to you,
+and you can't trust everybody you meet. Put your roll back in your
+pocket,' says I. 'And you'd better run along home before some farm-
+hand from the Kaw River bottoms strolls in here and sells you a copper
+mine.'
+
+"'Oh, I don't know,' says Whiskers. 'I guess Little Old New York can
+take care of herself. I guess I know a man that's on the square when I
+see him. I've always found the Western people all right. I ask you as
+a favor, Mr. Peters,' says he, 'to keep that roll in your pocket for
+me. I know a gentleman when I see him. And now let's have some more
+beer.'
+
+"In about ten minutes this fall of manna leans back in his chair and
+snores. Andy looks at me and says: 'I reckon I'd better stay with him
+for five minutes or so, in case the waiter comes in.'
+
+"I went out the side door and walked half a block up the street. And
+then I came back and sat down at the table.
+
+"'Andy,' says I, 'I can't do it. It's too much like swearing off
+taxes. I can't go off with this man's money without doing something to
+earn it like taking advantage of the Bankrupt act or leaving a bottle
+of eczema lotion in his pocket to make it look more like a square
+deal.'
+
+"'Well,' says Andy, 'it does seem kind of hard on one's professional
+pride to lope off with a bearded pard's competency, especially after
+he has nominated you custodian of his bundle in the sappy insouciance
+of his urban indiscrimination. Suppose we wake him up and see if we
+can formulate some commercial sophistry by which he will be enabled to
+give us both his money and a good excuse.'
+
+"We wakes up Whiskers. He stretches himself and yawns out the
+hypothesis that he must have dropped off for a minute. And then he
+says he wouldn't mind sitting in at a little gentleman's game of
+poker. He used to play some when he attended high school in Brooklyn;
+and as he was out for a good time, why--and so forth.
+
+"Andy brights up a little at that, for it looks like it might be a
+solution to our financial troubles. So we all three go to our hotel
+further down Broadway and have the cards and chips brought up to
+Andy's room. I tried once more to make this Babe in the Horticultural
+Gardens take his five thousand. But no.
+
+"'Keep that little roll for me, Mr. Peters,' says he, 'and oblige.
+I'll ask you fer it when I want it. I guess I know when I'm among
+friends. A man that's done business on Beekman street for twenty
+years, right in the heart of the wisest old village on earth, ought to
+know what he's about. I guess I can tell a gentleman from a con man or
+a flimflammer when I meet him. I've got some odd change in my clothes
+--enough to start the game with, I guess.'
+
+"He goes through his pockets and rains $20 gold certificates on the
+table till it looked like a $10,000 'Autumn Day in a Lemon Grove'
+picture by Turner in the salons. Andy almost smiled.
+
+"The first round that was dealt, this boulevardier slaps down his
+hand, claims low and jack and big casino and rakes in the pot.
+
+"Andy always took a pride in his poker playing. He got up from the
+table and looked sadly out of the window at the street cars.
+
+"'Well, gentlemen,' says the cigar man, 'I don't blame you for not
+wanting to play. I've forgotten the fine points of the game, I guess,
+it's been so long since I indulged. Now, how long are you gentlemen
+going to be in the city?'
+
+"I told him about a week longer. He says that'll suit him fine. His
+cousin is coming over from Brooklyn that evening and they are going to
+see the sights of New York. His cousin, he says, is in the artificial
+limb and lead casket business, and hasn't crossed the bridge in eight
+years. They expect to have the time of their lives, and he winds up by
+asking me to keep his roll of money for him till next day. I tried to
+make him take it, but it only insulted him to mention it.
+
+"'I'll use what I've got in loose change,' says he. 'You keep the rest
+for me. I'll drop in on you and Mr. Tucker to-morrow afternoon about 6
+or 7,' says he, 'and we'll have dinner together. Be good.'
+
+"After Whiskers had gone Andy looked at me curious and doubtful.
+
+"'Well, Jeff,' says he, 'it looks like the ravens are trying to feed
+us two Elijahs so hard that if we turned 'em down again we ought to
+have the Audubon Society after us. It won't do to put the crown aside
+too often. I know this is something like paternalism, but don't you
+think Opportunity has skinned its knuckles about enough knocking at
+our door?'
+
+"I put my feet up on the table and my hands in my pockets, which is an
+attitude unfavorable to frivolous thoughts.
+
+"'Andy,' says I, 'this man with the hirsute whiskers has got us in a
+predicament. We can't move hand or foot with his money. You and me
+have got a gentleman's agreement with Fortune that we can't break.
+We've done business in the West where it's more of a fair game. Out
+there the people we skin are trying to skin us, even the farmers and
+the remittance men that the magazines send out to write up Goldfields.
+But there's little sport in New York city for rod, reel or gun. They
+hunt here with either one of two things--a slungshot or a letter of
+introduction. The town has been stocked so full of carp that the game
+fish are all gone. If you spread a net here, do you catch legitimate
+suckers in it, such as the Lord intended to be caught--fresh guys who
+know it all, sports with a little coin and the nerve to play another
+man's game, street crowds out for the fun of dropping a dollar or two
+and village smarties who know just where the little pea is? No, sir,'
+says I. 'What the grafters live on here is widows and orphans, and
+foreigners who save up a bag of money and hand it out over the first
+counter they see with an iron railing to it, and factory girls and
+little shopkeepers that never leave the block they do business on.
+That's what they call suckers here. They're nothing but canned
+sardines, and all the bait you need to catch 'em is a pocketknife and
+a soda cracker.
+
+"'Now, this cigar man,' I went on, 'is one of the types. He's lived
+twenty years on one street without learning as much as you would in
+getting a once-over shave from a lockjawed barber in a Kansas
+crossroads town. But he's a New Yorker, and he'll brag about that all
+the time when he isn't picking up live wires or getting in front of
+street cars or paying out money to wire-tappers or standing under a
+safe that's being hoisted into a skyscraper. When a New Yorker does
+loosen up,' says I, 'it's like the spring decomposition of the ice jam
+in the Allegheny River. He'll swamp you with cracked ice and back-
+water if you don't get out of the way.
+
+"'It's mighty lucky for us, Andy,' says I, 'that this cigar exponent
+with the parsley dressing saw fit to bedeck us with his childlike
+trust and altruism. For,' says I, 'this money of his is an eyesore to
+my sense of rectitude and ethics. We can't take it, Andy; you know we
+can't,' says I, 'for we haven't a shadow of a title to it--not a
+shadow. If there was the least bit of a way we could put in a claim to
+it I'd be willing to see him start in for another twenty years and
+make another $5,000 for himself, but we haven't sold him anything, we
+haven't been embroiled in a trade or anything commercial. He
+approached us friendly,' says I, 'and with blind and beautiful idiocy
+laid the stuff in our hands. We'll have to give it back to him when he
+wants it.'
+
+"'Your arguments,' says Andy, 'are past criticism or comprehension.
+No, we can't walk off with the money--as things now stand. I admire
+your conscious way of doing business, Jeff,' says Andy, 'and I
+wouldn't propose anything that wasn't square in line with your
+theories of morality and initiative.
+
+"'But I'll be away to-night and most of to-morrow Jeff,' says Andy.
+'I've got some business affairs that I want to attend to. When this
+free greenbacks party comes in to-morrow afternoon hold him here till
+I arrive. We've all got an engagement for dinner, you know.'
+
+"Well, sir, about 5 the next afternoon in trips the cigar man, with
+his eyes half open.
+
+"'Been having a glorious time, Mr. Peters,' says he. 'Took in all the
+sights. I tell you New York is the onliest only. Now if you don't
+mind,' says he, 'I'll lie down on that couch and doze off for about
+nine minutes before Mr. Tucker comes. I'm not used to being up all
+night. And to-morrow, if you don't mind, Mr. Peters, I'll take that
+five thousand. I met a man last night that's got a sure winner at the
+racetrack to-morrow. Excuse me for being so impolite as to go to
+sleep, Mr. Peters.'
+
+"And so this inhabitant of the second city in the world reposes
+himself and begins to snore, while I sit there musing over things and
+wishing I was back in the West, where you could always depend on a
+customer fighting to keep his money hard enough to let your conscience
+take it from him.
+
+"At half-past 5 Andy comes in and sees the sleeping form.
+
+"'I've been over to Trenton,' says Andy, pulling a document out of his
+pocket. 'I think I've got this matter fixed up all right, Jeff. Look
+at that.'
+
+"I open the paper and see that it is a corporation charter issued by
+the State of New Jersey to 'The Peters and Tucker Consolidated and
+Amalgamated Aerial Franchise Development Company, Limited.'
+
+"'It's to buy up rights of way for airship lines,' explained Andy.
+'The Legislature wasn't in session, but I found a man at a postcard
+stand in the lobby that kept a stock of charters on hand. There are
+100,000 shares,' says Andy, 'expected to reach a par value of $1. I
+had one blank certificate of stock printed.'
+
+"Andy takes out the blank and begins to fill it in with a fountain
+pen.
+
+"'The whole bunch,' says he, 'goes to our friend in dreamland for
+$5,000. Did you learn his name?'
+
+"'Make it out to bearer,' says I.
+
+"We put the certificate of stock in the cigar man's hand and went out
+to pack our suit cases.
+
+"On the ferryboat Andy says to me: 'Is your conscience easy about
+taking the money now, Jeff?'
+
+"'Why shouldn't it be?' says I. 'Are we any better than any other
+Holding Corporation?'"
+
+
+
+X
+
+CONSCIENCE IN ART
+
+"I never could hold my partner, Andy Tucker, down to legitimate ethics
+of pure swindling," said Jeff Peters to me one day.
+
+"Andy had too much imagination to be honest. He used to devise schemes
+of money-getting so fraudulent and high-financial that they wouldn't
+have been allowed in the bylaws of a railroad rebate system.
+
+"Myself, I never believed in taking any man's dollars unless I gave
+him something for it--something in the way of rolled gold jewelry,
+garden seeds, lumbago lotion, stock certificates, stove polish or a
+crack on the head to show for his money. I guess I must have had New
+England ancestors away back and inherited some of their stanch and
+rugged fear of the police.
+
+"But Andy's family tree was in different kind. I don't think he could
+have traced his descent any further back than a corporation.
+
+"One summer while we was in the middle West, working down the Ohio
+valley with a line of family albums, headache powders and roach
+destroyer, Andy takes one of his notions of high and actionable
+financiering.
+
+"'Jeff,' says he, 'I've been thinking that we ought to drop these
+rutabaga fanciers and give our attention to something more nourishing
+and prolific. If we keep on snapshooting these hinds for their egg
+money we'll be classed as nature fakers. How about plunging into the
+fastnesses of the skyscraper country and biting some big bull caribous
+in the chest?'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'you know my idiosyncrasies. I prefer a square, non-
+illegal style of business such as we are carrying on now. When I take
+money I want to leave some tangible object in the other fellow's hands
+for him to gaze at and to distract his attention from my spoor, even
+if it's only a Komical Kuss Trick Finger Ring for Squirting Perfume in
+a Friend's Eye. But if you've got a fresh idea, Andy,' says I, 'let's
+have a look at it. I'm not so wedded to petty graft that I would
+refuse something better in the way of a subsidy.'
+
+"'I was thinking,' says Andy, 'of a little hunt without horn, hound or
+camera among the great herd of the Midas Americanus, commonly known as
+the Pittsburg millionaires.'
+
+"'In New York?' I asks.
+
+"'No, sir,' says Andy, 'in Pittsburg. That's their habitat. They don't
+like New York. They go there now and then just because it's expected
+of 'em.'
+
+"'A Pittsburg millionaire in New York is like a fly in a cup of hot
+coffee--he attracts attention and comment, but he don't enjoy it. New
+York ridicules him for "blowing" so much money in that town of sneaks
+and snobs, and sneers. The truth is, he don't spend anything while he
+is there. I saw a memorandum of expenses for a ten days trip to Bunkum
+Town made by a Pittsburg man worth $15,000,000 once. Here's the way he
+set it down:
+
+  R. R. fare to and from . . . . . . . . . . $   21 00
+  Cab fare to and from hotel . . . . . . . .      2 00
+  Hotel bill @ $5 per day  . . . . . . . . .     50 00
+  Tips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5,750 00
+                                            ----------
+     Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $5,823 00
+
+"'That's the voice of New York,' goes on Andy. 'The town's nothing but
+a head waiter. If you tip it too much it'll go and stand by the door
+and make fun of you to the hat check boy. When a Pittsburger wants to
+spend money and have a good time he stays at home. That's where we'll
+go to catch him.'
+
+"Well, to make a dense story more condensed, me and Andy cached our
+paris green and antipyrine powders and albums in a friend's cellar,
+and took the trail to Pittsburg. Andy didn't have any especial
+prospectus of chicanery and violence drawn up, but he always had
+plenty of confidence that his immoral nature would rise to any
+occasion that presented itself.
+
+"As a concession to my ideas of self-preservation and rectitude he
+promised that if I should take an active and incriminating part in any
+little business venture that we might work up there should be
+something actual and cognizant to the senses of touch, sight, taste or
+smell to transfer to the victim for the money so my conscience might
+rest easy. After that I felt better and entered more cheerfully into
+the foul play.
+
+"'Andy,' says I, as we strayed through the smoke along the cinderpath
+they call Smithfield street, 'had you figured out how we are going to
+get acquainted with these coke kings and pig iron squeezers? Not that
+I would decry my own worth or system of drawing room deportment, and
+work with the olive fork and pie knife,' says I, 'but isn't the entree
+nous into the salons of the stogie smokers going to be harder than you
+imagined?'
+
+"'If there's any handicap at all,' says Andy, 'it's our own refinement
+and inherent culture. Pittsburg millionaires are a fine body of plain,
+wholehearted, unassuming, democratic men.
+
+"'They are rough but uncivil in their manners, and though their ways
+are boisterous and unpolished, under it all they have a great deal of
+impoliteness and discourtesy. Nearly every one of 'em rose from
+obscurity,' says Andy, 'and they'll live in it till the town gets to
+using smoke consumers. If we act simple and unaffected and don't go
+too far from the saloons and keep making a noise like an import duty
+on steel rails we won't have any trouble in meeting some of 'em
+socially.'
+
+"Well Andy and me drifted about town three or four days getting our
+bearings. We got to knowing several millionaires by sight.
+
+"One used to stop his automobile in front of our hotel and have a
+quart of champagne brought out to him. When the waiter opened it he'd
+turn it up to his mouth and drink it out of the bottle. That showed he
+used to be a glassblower before he made his money.
+
+"One evening Andy failed to come to the hotel for dinner. About 11
+o'clock he came into my room.
+
+"'Landed one, Jeff,' says he. 'Twelve millions. Oil, rolling mills,
+real estate and natural gas. He's a fine man; no airs about him. Made
+all his money in the last five years. He's got professors posting him
+up now in education--art and literature and haberdashery and such
+things.
+
+"'When I saw him he'd just won a bet of $10,000 with a Steel
+Corporation man that there'd be four suicides in the Allegheny rolling
+mills to-day. So everybody in sight had to walk up and have drinks on
+him. He took a fancy to me and asked me to dinner with him. We went to
+a restaurant in Diamond alley and sat on stools and had a sparkling
+Moselle and clam chowder and apple fritters.
+
+"'Then he wanted to show me his bachelor apartment on Liberty street.
+He's got ten rooms over a fish market with privilege of the bath on
+the next floor above. He told me it cost him $18,000 to furnish his
+apartment, and I believe it.
+
+"'He's got $40,000 worth of pictures in one room, and $20,000 worth of
+curios and antiques in another. His name's Scudder, and he's 45, and
+taking lessons on the piano and 15,000 barrels of oil a day out of his
+wells.'
+
+"'All right,' says I. 'Preliminary canter satisfactory. But, kay
+vooly, voo? What good is the art junk to us? And the oil?'
+
+"'Now, that man,' says Andy, sitting thoughtfully on the bed, 'ain't
+what you would call an ordinary scutt. When he was showing me his
+cabinet of art curios his face lighted up like the door of a coke
+oven. He says that if some of his big deals go through he'll make J.
+P. Morgan's collection of sweatshop tapestry and Augusta, Me.,
+beadwork look like the contents of an ostrich's craw thrown on a
+screen by a magic lantern.
+
+"'And then he showed me a little carving,' went on Andy, 'that anybody
+could see was a wonderful thing. It was something like 2,000 years
+old, he said. It was a lotus flower with a woman's face in it carved
+out of a solid piece of ivory.
+
+"Scudder looks it up in a catalogue and describes it. An Egyptian
+carver named Khafra made two of 'em for King Rameses II. about the
+year B.C. The other one can't be found. The junkshops and antique bugs
+have rubbered all Europe for it, but it seems to be out of stock.
+Scudder paid $2,000 for the one he has.'
+
+"'Oh, well,' says I, 'this sounds like the purling of a rill to me. I
+thought we came here to teach the millionaires business, instead of
+learning art from 'em?'
+
+"'Be patient,' says Andy, kindly. 'Maybe we will see a rift in the
+smoke ere long.'
+
+"All the next morning Andy was out. I didn't see him until about noon.
+He came to the hotel and called me into his room across the hall. He
+pulled a roundish bundle about as big as a goose egg out of his pocket
+and unwrapped it. It was an ivory carving just as he had described the
+millionaire's to me.
+
+"'I went in an old second hand store and pawnshop a while ago,' says
+Andy, 'and I see this half hidden under a lot of old daggers and
+truck. The pawnbroker said he'd had it several years and thinks it was
+soaked by some Arabs or Turks or some foreign dubs that used to live
+down by the river.
+
+"'I offered him $2 for it, and I must have looked like I wanted it,
+for he said it would be taking the pumpernickel out of his children's
+mouths to hold any conversation that did not lead up to a price of
+$35. I finally got it for $25.
+
+"'Jeff,' goes on Andy, 'this is the exact counterpart of Scudder's
+carving. It's absolutely a dead ringer for it. He'll pay $2,000 for it
+as quick as he'd tuck a napkin under his chin. And why shouldn't it be
+the genuine other one, anyhow, that the old gypsy whittled out?'
+
+"'Why not, indeed?' says I. 'And how shall we go about compelling him
+to make a voluntary purchase of it?'
+
+"Andy had his plan all ready, and I'll tell you how we carried it out.
+
+"I got a pair of blue spectacles, put on my black frock coat, rumpled
+my hair up and became Prof. Pickleman. I went to another hotel,
+registered, and sent a telegram to Scudder to come to see me at once
+on important art business. The elevator dumped him on me in less than
+an hour. He was a foggy man with a clarion voice, smelling of
+Connecticut wrappers and naphtha.
+
+"'Hello, Profess!' he shouts. 'How's your conduct?'
+
+"I rumpled my hair some more and gave him a blue glass stare.
+
+"'Sir,' says I, 'are you Cornelius T. Scudder? Of Pittsburg,
+Pennsylvania?'
+
+"'I am,' says he. 'Come out and have a drink.'
+
+"'I've neither the time nor the desire,' says I, 'for such harmful and
+deleterious amusements. I have come from New York,' says I, 'on a
+matter of busi--on a matter of art.
+
+"'I learned there that you are the owner of an Egyptian ivory carving
+of the time of Rameses II., representing the head of Queen Isis in a
+lotus flower. There were only two of such carvings made. One has been
+lost for many years. I recently discovered and purchased the other in
+a pawn--in an obscure museum in Vienna. I wish to purchase yours. Name
+your price.'
+
+"'Well, the great ice jams, Profess!' says Scudder. 'Have you found
+the other one? Me sell? No. I don't guess Cornelius Scudder needs to
+sell anything that he wants to keep. Have you got the carving with
+you, Profess?'
+
+"I shows it to Scudder. He examines it careful all over.
+
+"'It's the article,' says he. 'It's a duplicate of mine, every line
+and curve of it. Tell you what I'll do,' he says. 'I won't sell, but
+I'll buy. Give you $2,500 for yours.'
+
+"'Since you won't sell, I will,' says I. 'Large bills, please. I'm a
+man of few words. I must return to New York to-night. I lecture
+to-morrow at the aquarium.'
+
+"Scudder sends a check down and the hotel cashes it. He goes off with
+his piece of antiquity and I hurry back to Andy's hotel, according to
+arrangement.
+
+"Andy is walking up and down the room looking at his watch.
+
+"'Well?' he says.
+
+"'Twenty-five hundred,' says I. 'Cash.'
+
+"'We've got just eleven minutes,' says Andy, 'to catch the B. & O.
+westbound. Grab your baggage.'
+
+"'What's the hurry,' says I. 'It was a square deal. And even if it was
+only an imitation of the original carving it'll take him some time to
+find it out. He seemed to be sure it was the genuine article.'
+
+"'It was,' says Andy. 'It was his own. When I was looking at his
+curios yesterday he stepped out of the room for a moment and I
+pocketed it. Now, will you pick up your suit case and hurry?'
+
+"'Then,' says I, 'why was that story about finding another one in the
+pawn--'
+
+"'Oh,' says Andy, 'out of respect for that conscience of yours. Come
+on.'"
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE MAN HIGHER UP
+
+Across our two dishes of spaghetti, in a corner of Provenzano's
+restaurant, Jeff Peters was explaining to me the three kinds of graft.
+
+Every winter Jeff comes to New York to eat spaghetti, to watch the
+shipping in East River from the depths of his chinchilla overcoat, and
+to lay in a supply of Chicago-made clothing at one of the Fulton
+street stores. During the other three seasons he may be found further
+west--his range is from Spokane to Tampa. In his profession he takes a
+pride which he supports and defends with a serious and unique
+philosophy of ethics. His profession is no new one. He is an
+incorporated, uncapitalized, unlimited asylum for the reception of the
+restless and unwise dollars of his fellowmen.
+
+In the wilderness of stone in which Jeff seeks his annual lonely
+holiday he is glad to palaver of his many adventures, as a boy will
+whistle after sundown in a wood. Wherefore, I mark on my calendar the
+time of his coming, and open a question of privilege at Provenzano's
+concerning the little wine-stained table in the corner between the
+rakish rubber plant and the framed palazzio della something on the
+wall.
+
+"There are two kinds of graft," said Jeff, "that ought to be wiped out
+by law. I mean Wall Street speculation, and burglary."
+
+"Nearly everybody will agree with you as to one of them," said I, with
+a laugh.
+
+"Well, burglary ought to be wiped out, too," said Jeff; and I wondered
+whether the laugh had been redundant.
+
+"About three months ago," said Jeff, "it was my privilege to become
+familiar with a sample of each of the aforesaid branches of
+illegitimate art. I was /sine que grata/ with a member of the
+housebreakers' union and one of the John D. Napoleons of finance at
+the same time."
+
+"Interesting combination,' said I, with a yawn. "Did I tell you I
+bagged a duck and a ground-squirrel at one shot last week over in the
+Ramapos?" I knew well how to draw Jeff's stories.
+
+"Let me tell you first about these barnacles that clog the wheels of
+society by poisoning the springs of rectitude with their upas-like
+eye," said Jeff, with the pure gleam of the muck-raker in his own.
+
+"As I said, three months ago I got into bad company. There are two
+times in a man's life when he does this--when he's dead broke, and
+when he's rich.
+
+"Now and then the most legitimate business runs out of luck. It was
+out in Arkansas I made the wrong turn at a cross-road, and drives into
+this town of Peavine by mistake. It seems I had already assaulted and
+disfigured Peavine the spring of the year before. I had sold $600
+worth of young fruit trees there--plums, cherries, peaches and pears.
+The Peaviners were keeping an eye on the country road and hoping I
+might pass that way again. I drove down Main street as far as the
+Crystal Palace drugstore before I realized I had committed ambush upon
+myself and my white horse Bill.
+
+"The Peaviners took me by surprise and Bill by the bridle and began a
+conversation that wasn't entirely disassociated with the subject of
+fruit trees. A committee of 'em ran some trace-chains through the
+armholes of my vest, and escorted me through their gardens and
+orchards.
+
+"Their fruit trees hadn't lived up to their labels. Most of 'em had
+turned out to be persimmons and dogwoods, with a grove or two of
+blackjacks and poplars. The only one that showed any signs of bearing
+anything was a fine young cottonwood that had put forth a hornet's
+nest and half of an old corset-cover.
+
+"The Peaviners protracted our fruitless stroll to the edge of town.
+They took my watch and money on account; and they kept Bill and the
+wagon as hostages. They said the first time one of them dogwood trees
+put forth an Amsden's June peach I might come back and get my things.
+Then they took off the trace chains and jerked their thumbs in the
+direction of the Rocky Mountains; and I struck a Lewis and Clark lope
+for the swollen rivers and impenetrable forests.
+
+"When I regained intellectualness I found myself walking into an
+unidentified town on the A., T. & S. F. railroad. The Peaviners hadn't
+left anything in my pockets except a plug of chewing--they wasn't
+after my life--and that saved it. I bit off a chunk and sits down on a
+pile of ties by the track to recogitate my sensations of thought and
+perspicacity.
+
+"And then along comes a fast freight which slows up a little at the
+town; and off of it drops a black bundle that rolls for twenty yards
+in a cloud of dust and then gets up and begins to spit soft coal and
+interjections. I see it is a young man broad across the face, dressed
+more for Pullmans than freights, and with a cheerful kind of smile in
+spite of it all that made Phoebe Snow's job look like a chimney-
+sweep's.
+
+"'Fall off?' says I.
+
+"'Nunk,' says he. 'Got off. Arrived at my destination. What town is
+this?'
+
+"'Haven't looked it up on the map yet,' says I. 'I got in about five
+minutes before you did. How does it strike you?'
+
+"'Hard,' says he, twisting one of his arms around. 'I believe that
+shoulder--no, it's all right.'
+
+"He stoops over to brush the dust off his clothes, when out of his
+pocket drops a fine, nine-inch burglar's steel jimmy. He picks it up
+and looks at me sharp, and then grins and holds out his hand.
+
+"'Brother,' says he, 'greetings. Didn't I see you in Southern Missouri
+last summer selling colored sand at half-a-dollar a teaspoonful to put
+into lamps to keep the oil from exploding?'
+
+"'Oil,' says I, 'never explodes. It's the gas that forms that
+explodes.' But I shakes hands with him, anyway.
+
+"'My name's Bill Bassett,' says he to me, 'and if you'll call it
+professional pride instead of conceit, I'll inform you that you have
+the pleasure of meeting the best burglar that ever set a gum-shoe on
+ground drained by the Mississippi River.'
+
+"Well, me and this Bill Bassett sits on the ties and exchanges brags
+as artists in kindred lines will do. It seems he didn't have a cent,
+either, and we went into close caucus. He explained why an able
+burglar sometimes had to travel on freights by telling me that a
+servant girl had played him false in Little Rock, and he was making a
+quick get-away.
+
+"'It's part of my business,' says Bill Bassett, 'to play up to the
+ruffles when I want to make a riffle as Raffles. 'Tis loves that makes
+the bit go 'round. Show me a house with a swag in it and a pretty
+parlor-maid, and you might as well call the silver melted down and
+sold, and me spilling truffles and that Chateau stuff on the napkin
+under my chin, while the police are calling it an inside job just
+because the old lady's nephew teaches a Bible class. I first make an
+impression on the girl,' says Bill, 'and when she lets me inside I
+make an impression on the locks. But this one in Little Rock done me,'
+says he. 'She saw me taking a trolley ride with another girl, and when
+I came 'round on the night she was to leave the door open for me it
+was fast. And I had keys made for the doors upstairs. But, no sir. She
+had sure cut off my locks. She was a Delilah,' says Bill Bassett.
+
+"It seems that Bill tried to break in anyhow with his jimmy, but the
+girl emitted a succession of bravura noises like the top-riders of a
+tally-ho, and Bill had to take all the hurdles between there and
+depot. As he had no baggage they tried hard to check his departure,
+but he made a train that was just pulling out.
+
+"'Well,' says Bill Bassett, when we had exchanged memories of our dead
+lives, 'I could eat. This town don't look like it was kept under a
+Yale lock. Suppose we commit some mild atrocity that will bring in
+temporary expense money. I don't suppose you've brought along any hair
+tonic or rolled gold watch-chains, or similar law-defying swindles
+that you could sell on the plaza to the pikers of the paretic
+populace, have you?'
+
+"'No,' says I, 'I left an elegant line of Patagonian diamond earrings
+and rainy-day sunbursts in my valise at Peavine. But they're to stay
+there until some of those black-gum trees begin to glut the market
+with yellow clings and Japanese plums. I reckon we can't count on them
+unless we take Luther Burbank in for a partner.'
+
+"'Very well,' says Bassett, 'we'll do the best we can. Maybe after
+dark I'll borrow a hairpin from some lady, and open the Farmers and
+Drovers Marine Bank with it.'
+
+"While we were talking, up pulls a passenger train to the depot near
+by. A person in a high hat gets off on the wrong side of the train and
+comes tripping down the track towards us. He was a little, fat man
+with a big nose and rat's eyes, but dressed expensive, and carrying a
+hand-satchel careful, as if it had eggs or railroads bonds in it. He
+passes by us and keeps on down the track, not appearing to notice the
+town.
+
+"'Come on,' says Bill Bassett to me, starting after him.
+
+"'Where?' I asks.
+
+"'Lordy!' says Bill, 'had you forgot you was in the desert? Didn't you
+see Colonel Manna drop down right before your eyes? Don't you hear the
+rustling of General Raven's wings? I'm surprised at you, Elijah.'
+
+"We overtook the stranger in the edge of some woods, and, as it was
+after sun-down and in a quiet place, nobody saw us stop him. Bill
+takes the silk hat off the man's head and brushes it with his sleeve
+and puts it back.
+
+"'What does this mean, sir?' says the man.
+
+"'When I wore one of these,' says Bill, 'and felt embarrassed, I
+always done that. Not having one now I had to use yours. I hardly know
+how to begin, sir, in explaining our business with you, but I guess
+we'll try your pockets first.'
+
+"Bill Bassett felt in all of them, and looked disgusted.
+
+"'Not even a watch,' he says. 'Ain't you ashamed of yourself, you
+whited sculpture? Going about dressed like a head-waiter, and financed
+like a Count! You haven't even got carfare. What did you do with your
+transfer?'
+
+"The man speaks up and says he has no assets or valuables of any sort.
+But Bassett takes his hand-satchel and opens it. Out comes some
+collars and socks and a half a page of a newspaper clipped out. Bill
+reads the clipping careful, and holds out his hand to the held-up
+party.
+
+"'Brother,' says he, 'greetings! Accept the apologies of friends. I am
+Bill Bassett, the burglar. Mr. Peters, you must make the acquaintance
+of Mr. Alfred E. Ricks. Shake hands. Mr. Peters,' says Bill, 'stands
+about halfway between me and you, Mr. Ricks, in the line of havoc and
+corruption. He always gives something for the money he gets. I'm glad
+to meet you, Mr. Ricks--you and Mr. Peters. This is the first time I
+ever attended a full gathering of the National Synod of Sharks--
+housebreaking, swindling, and financiering all represented. Please
+examine Mr. Rick's credentials, Mr. Peters.'
+
+"The piece of newspaper that Bill Bassett handed me had a good picture
+of this Ricks on it. It was a Chicago paper, and it had obloquies of
+Ricks in every paragraph. By reading it over I harvested the
+intelligence that said alleged Ricks had laid off all that portion of
+the State of Florida that lies under water into town lots and sold 'em
+to alleged innocent investors from his magnificently furnished offices
+in Chicago. After he had taken in a hundred thousand or so dollars one
+of these fussy purchasers that are always making trouble (I've had 'em
+actually try gold watches I've sold 'em with acid) took a cheap
+excursion down to the land where it is always just before supper to
+look at his lot and see if it didn't need a new paling or two on the
+fence, and market a few lemons in time for the Christmas present
+trade. He hires a surveyor to find his lot for him. They run the line
+out and find the flourishing town of Paradise Hollow, so advertised,
+to be about 40 rods and 16 poles S., 27 degrees E. of the middle of
+Lake Okeechobee. This man's lot was under thirty-six feet of water,
+and, besides, had been preempted so long by the alligators and gars
+that his title looked fishy.
+
+"Naturally, the man goes back to Chicago and makes it as hot for
+Alfred E. Ricks as the morning after a prediction of snow by the
+weather bureau. Ricks defied the allegation, but he couldn't deny the
+alligators. One morning the papers came out with a column about it,
+and Ricks come out by the fire-escape. It seems the alleged
+authorities had beat him to the safe-deposit box where he kept his
+winnings, and Ricks has to westward ho! with only feetwear and a dozen
+15-and-a-half English pokes in his shopping bag. He happened to have
+some mileage left in his book, and that took him as far as the town in
+the wilderness where he was spilled out on me and Bill Bassett as
+Elijah III. with not a raven in sight for any of us.
+
+"Then this Alfred E. Ricks lets out a squeak that he is hungry, too,
+and denies the hypothesis that he is good for the value, let alone the
+price, of a meal. And so, there was the three of us, representing, if
+we had a mind to draw syllogisms and parabolas, labor and trade and
+capital. Now, when trade has no capital there isn't a dicker to be
+made. And when capital has no money there's a stagnation in steak and
+onions. That put it up to the man with the jimmy.
+
+"'Brother bushrangers,' says Bill Bassett, 'never yet, in trouble, did
+I desert a pal. Hard by, in yon wood, I seem to see unfurnished
+lodgings. Let us go there and wait till dark.'
+
+"There was an old, deserted cabin in the grove, and we three took
+possession of it. After dark Bill Bassett tells us to wait, and goes
+out for half an hour. He comes back with a armful of bread and
+spareribs and pies.
+
+"'Panhandled 'em at a farmhouse on Washita Avenue,' says he. 'Eat,
+drink and be leary.'
+
+"The full moon was coming up bright, so we sat on the floor of the
+cabin and ate in the light of it. And this Bill Bassett begins to
+brag.
+
+"'Sometimes,' says he, with his mouth full of country produce, 'I lose
+all patience with you people that think you are higher up in the
+profession than I am. Now, what could either of you have done in the
+present emergency to set us on our feet again? Could you do it,
+Ricksy?'
+
+"'I must confess, Mr. Bassett,' says Ricks, speaking nearly inaudible
+out of a slice of pie, 'that at this immediate juncture I could not,
+perhaps, promote an enterprise to relieve the situation. Large
+operations, such as I direct, naturally require careful preparation in
+advance. I--'
+
+"'I know, Ricksy,' breaks in Bill Bassett. 'You needn't finish. You
+need $500 to make the first payment on a blond typewriter, and four
+roomsful of quartered oak furniture. And you need $500 more for
+advertising contracts. And you need two weeks' time for the fish to
+begin to bite. Your line of relief would be about as useful in an
+emergency as advocating municipal ownership to cure a man suffocated
+by eighty-cent gas. And your graft ain't much swifter, Brother
+Peters,' he winds up.
+
+"'Oh,' says I, 'I haven't seen you turn anything into gold with your
+wand yet, Mr. Good Fairy. 'Most anybody could rub the magic ring for a
+little left-over victuals.'
+
+"'That was only getting the pumpkin ready,' says Bassett, braggy and
+cheerful. 'The coach and six'll drive up to the door before you know
+it, Miss Cinderella. Maybe you've got some scheme under your sleeve-
+holders that will give us a start.'
+
+"'Son,' says I, 'I'm fifteen years older than you are, and young
+enough yet to take out an endowment policy. I've been broke before. We
+can see the lights of that town not half a mile away. I learned under
+Montague Silver, the greatest street man that ever spoke from a wagon.
+There are hundreds of men walking those streets this moment with
+grease spots on their clothes. Give me a gasoline lamp, a dry-goods
+box, and a two-dollar bar of white castile soap, cut into little--'
+
+"'Where's your two dollars?' snickered Bill Bassett into my discourse.
+There was no use arguing with that burglar.
+
+"'No,' he goes on; 'you're both babes-in-the-wood. Finance has closed
+the mahogany desk, and trade has put the shutters up. Both of you look
+to labor to start the wheels going. All right. You admit it. To-night
+I'll show you what Bill Bassett can do.'
+
+"Bassett tells me and Ricks not to leave the cabin till he comes back,
+even if it's daylight, and then he starts off toward town, whistling
+gay.
+
+"This Alfred E. Ricks pulls off his shoes and his coat, lays a silk
+handkerchief over his hat, and lays down on the floor.
+
+"'I think I will endeavor to secure a little slumber,' he squeaks.
+'The day has been fatiguing. Good-night, my dear Mr. Peters.'
+
+"'My regards to Morpheus,' says I. 'I think I'll sit up a while.'
+
+"About two o'clock, as near as I could guess by my watch in Peavine,
+home comes our laboring man and kicks up Ricks, and calls us to the
+streak of bright moonlight shining in the cabin door. Then he spreads
+out five packages of one thousand dollars each on the floor, and
+begins to cackle over the nest-egg like a hen.
+
+"'I'll tell you a few things about that town,' says he. 'It's named
+Rocky Springs, and they're building a Masonic temple, and it looks
+like the Democratic candidate for mayor is going to get soaked by a
+Pop, and Judge Tucker's wife, who has been down with pleurisy, is
+getting some better. I had a talk on these liliputian thesises before
+I could get a siphon in the fountain of knowledge that I was after.
+And there's a bank there called the Lumberman's Fidelity and Plowman's
+Savings Institution. It closed for business yesterday with $23,000
+cash on hand. It will open this morning with $18,000--all silver--
+that's the reason I didn't bring more. There you are, trade and
+capital. Now, will you be bad?'
+
+"'My young friend,' says Alfred E. Ricks, holding up his hands, 'have
+you robbed this bank? Dear me, dear me!'
+
+"'You couldn't call it that,' says Bassett. "Robbing" sounds harsh.
+All I had to do was to find out what street it was on. That town is so
+quiet that I could stand on the corner and hear the tumblers clicking
+in that safe lock--"right to 45; left twice to 80; right once to 60;
+left to 15"--as plain as the Yale captain giving orders in the
+football dialect. Now, boys,' says Bassett, 'this is an early rising
+town. They tell me the citizens are all up and stirring before
+daylight. I asked what for, and they said because breakfast was ready
+at that time. And what of merry Robin Hood? It must be Yoicks! and
+away with the tinkers' chorus. I'll stake you. How much do you want?
+Speak up. Capital.'
+
+"'My dear young friend,' says this ground squirrel of a Ricks,
+standing on his hind legs and juggling nuts in his paws, 'I have
+friends in Denver who would assist me. If I had a hundred dollars I--'
+
+"Basset unpins a package of the currency and throws five twenties to
+Ricks.
+
+"'Trade, how much?' he says to me.
+
+"'Put your money up, Labor,' says I. 'I never yet drew upon honest
+toil for its hard-earned pittance. The dollars I get are surplus ones
+that are burning the pockets of damfools and greenhorns. When I stand
+on a street corner and sell a solid gold diamond ring to a yap for
+$3.00, I make just $2.60. And I know he's going to give it to a girl
+in return for all the benefits accruing from a $125.00 ring. His
+profits are $122.00. Which of us is the biggest fakir?'
+
+"'And when you sell a poor woman a pinch of sand for fifty cents to
+keep her lamp from exploding,' says Bassett, 'what do you figure her
+gross earnings to be, with sand at forty cents a ton?'
+
+"'Listen,' says I. 'I instruct her to keep her lamp clean and well
+filled. If she does that it can't burst. And with the sand in it she
+knows it can't, and she don't worry. It's a kind of Industrial
+Christian Science. She pays fifty cents, and gets both Rockefeller and
+Mrs. Eddy on the job. It ain't everybody that can let the gold-dust
+twins do their work.'
+
+"Alfred E. Ricks all but licks the dust off of Bill Bassett's shoes.
+
+"'My dear young friend,' says he, 'I will never forget your
+generosity. Heaven will reward you. But let me implore you to turn
+from your ways of violence and crime.'
+
+"'Mousie,' says Bill, 'the hole in the wainscoting for yours. Your
+dogmas and inculcations sound to me like the last words of a bicycle
+pump. What has your high moral, elevator-service system of pillage
+brought you to? Penuriousness and want. Even Brother Peters, who
+insists upon contaminating the art of robbery with theories of
+commerce and trade, admitted he was on the lift. Both of you live by
+the gilded rule. Brother Peters,' says Bill, 'you'd better choose a
+slice of this embalmed currency. You're welcome.'
+
+"I told Bill Bassett once more to put his money in his pocket. I never
+had the respect for burglary that some people have. I always gave
+something for the money I took, even if it was only some little trifle
+for a souvenir to remind 'em not to get caught again.
+
+"And then Alfred E. Ricks grovels at Bill's feet again, and bids us
+adieu. He says he will have a team at a farmhouse, and drive to the
+station below, and take the train for Denver. It salubrified the
+atmosphere when that lamentable boll-worm took his departure. He was a
+disgrace to every non-industrial profession in the country. With all
+his big schemes and fine offices he had wound up unable even to get an
+honest meal except by the kindness of a strange and maybe unscrupulous
+burglar. I was glad to see him go, though I felt a little sorry for
+him, now that he was ruined forever. What could such a man do without
+a big capital to work with? Why, Alfred E. Ricks, as we left him, was
+as helpless as turtle on its back. He couldn't have worked a scheme to
+beat a little girl out of a penny slate-pencil.
+
+"When me and Bill Bassett was left alone I did a little sleight-of-
+mind turn in my head with a trade secret at the end of it. Thinks I,
+I'll show this Mr. Burglar Man the difference between business and
+labor. He had hurt some of my professional self-adulation by casting
+his Persians upon commerce and trade.
+
+"'I won't take any of your money as a gift, Mr. Bassett,' says I to
+him, 'but if you'll pay my expenses as a travelling companion until we
+get out of the danger zone of the immoral deficit you have caused in
+this town's finances to-night, I'll be obliged.'
+
+"Bill Bassett agreed to that, and we hiked westward as soon as we
+could catch a safe train.
+
+"When we got to a town in Arizona called Los Perros I suggested that
+we once more try our luck on terra-cotta. That was the home of
+Montague Silver, my old instructor, now retired from business. I knew
+Monty would stake me to web money if I could show him a fly buzzing
+'round the locality. Bill Bassett said all towns looked alike to him
+as he worked mainly in the dark. So we got off the train in Los
+Perros, a fine little town in the silver region.
+
+"I had an elegant little sure thing in the way of a commercial
+slugshot that I intended to hit Bassett behind the ear with. I wasn't
+going to take his money while he was asleep, but I was going to leave
+him with a lottery ticket that would represent in experience to him
+$4,755--I think that was the amount he had when we got off the train.
+But the first time I hinted to him about an investment, he turns on me
+and disencumbers himself of the following terms and expressions.
+
+"'Brother Peters,' says he, 'it ain't a bad idea to go into an
+enterprise of some kind, as you suggest. I think I will. But if I do
+it will be such a cold proposition that nobody but Robert E. Peary and
+Charlie Fairbanks will be able to sit on the board of directors.'
+
+"'I thought you might want to turn your money over,' says I.
+
+"'I do,' says he, 'frequently. I can't sleep on one side all night.
+I'll tell you, Brother Peters,' says he, 'I'm going to start a poker
+room. I don't seem to care for the humdrum in swindling, such as
+peddling egg-beaters and working off breakfast food on Barnum and
+Bailey for sawdust to strew in their circus rings. But the gambling
+business,' says he, 'from the profitable side of the table is a good
+compromise between swiping silver spoons and selling penwipers at a
+Waldorf-Astoria charity bazar.'
+
+"'Then,' says I, 'Mr. Bassett, you don't care to talk over my little
+business proposition?'
+
+"'Why,' says he, 'do you know, you can't get a Pasteur institute to
+start up within fifty miles of where I live. I bite so seldom.'
+
+"So, Bassett rents a room over a saloon and looks around for some
+furniture and chromos. The same night I went to Monty Silver's house,
+and he let me have $200 on my prospects. Then I went to the only store
+in Los Perros that sold playing cards and bought every deck in the
+house. The next morning when the store opened I was there bringing all
+the cards back with me. I said that my partner that was going to back
+me in the game had changed his mind; and I wanted to sell the cards
+back again. The storekeeper took 'em at half price.
+
+"Yes, I was seventy-five dollars loser up to that time. But while I
+had the cards that night I marked every one in every deck. That was
+labor. And then trade and commerce had their innings, and the bread I
+had cast upon the waters began to come back in the form of cottage
+pudding with wine sauce.
+
+"Of course I was among the first to buy chips at Bill Bassett's game.
+He had bought the only cards there was to be had in town; and I knew
+the back of every one of them better than I know the back of my head
+when the barber shows me my haircut in the two mirrors.
+
+"When the game closed I had the five thousand and a few odd dollars,
+and all Bill Bassett had was the wanderlust and a black cat he had
+bought for a mascot. Bill shook hands with me when I left.
+
+"'Brother Peters,' says he, 'I have no business being in business. I
+was preordained to labor. When a No. 1 burglar tries to make a James
+out of his jimmy he perpetrates an improfundity. You have a well-oiled
+and efficacious system of luck at cards,' says he. 'Peace go with
+you.' And I never afterward sees Bill Bassett again."
+
+*****
+
+"Well, Jeff," said I, when the Autolycan adventurer seemed to have
+divulged the gist of his tale, "I hope you took care of the money.
+That would be a respecta--that is a considerable working capital if
+you should choose some day to settle down to some sort of regular
+business."
+
+"Me?" said Jeff, virtuously. "You can bet I've taken care of that five
+thousand."
+
+He tapped his coat over the region of his chest exultantly.
+
+"Gold mining stock," he explained, "every cent of it. Shares par value
+one dollar. Bound to go up 500 per cent. within a year. Non-
+assessable. The Blue Gopher mine. Just discovered a month ago. Better
+get in yourself if you've any spare dollars on hand."
+
+"Sometimes," said I, "these mines are not--"
+
+"Oh, this one's solid as an old goose," said Jeff. "Fifty thousand
+dollars' worth of ore in sight, and 10 per cent. monthly earnings
+guaranteed."
+
+He drew out a long envelope from his pocket and cast it on the table.
+
+"Always carry it with me," said he. "So the burglar can't corrupt or
+the capitalist break in and water it."
+
+I looked at the beautifully engraved certificate of stock.
+
+"In Colorado, I see," said I. "And, by the way, Jeff, what was the
+name of the little man who went to Denver--the one you and Bill met at
+the station?"
+
+"Alfred E. Ricks," said Jeff, "was the toad's designation."
+
+"I see," said I, "the president of this mining company signs himself
+A. L. Fredericks. I was wondering--"
+
+"Let me see that stock," said Jeff quickly, almost snatching it from
+me.
+
+To mitigate, even though slightly, the embarrassment I summoned the
+waiter and ordered another bottle of the Barbera. I thought it was the
+least I could do.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A TEMPERED WIND
+
+The first time my optical nerves was disturbed by the sight of
+Buckingham Skinner was in Kansas City. I was standing on a corner when
+I see Buck stick his straw-colored head out of a third-story window of
+a business block and holler, "Whoa, there! Whoa!" like you would in
+endeavoring to assuage a team of runaway mules.
+
+I looked around; but all the animals I see in sight is a policeman,
+having his shoes shined, and a couple of delivery wagons hitched to
+posts. Then in a minute downstairs tumbles this Buckingham Skinner,
+and runs to the corner, and stands and gazes down the other street at
+the imaginary dust kicked up by the fabulous hoofs of the fictitious
+team of chimerical quadrupeds. And then B. Skinner goes back up to the
+third-story room again, and I see that the lettering on the window is
+"The Farmers' Friend Loan Company."
+
+By and by Straw-top comes down again, and I crossed the street to meet
+him, for I had my ideas. Yes, sir, when I got close I could see where
+he overdone it. He was Reub all right as far as his blue jeans and
+cowhide boots went, but he had a matinee actor's hands, and the rye
+straw stuck over his ear looked like it belonged to the property man
+of the Old Homestead Co. Curiosity to know what his graft was got the
+best of me.
+
+"Was that your team broke away and run just now?" I asks him, polite.
+"I tried to stop 'em," says I, "but I couldn't. I guess they're half
+way back to the farm by now."
+
+"Gosh blame them darned mules," says Straw-top, in a voice so good
+that I nearly apologized; "they're a'lus bustin' loose." And then he
+looks at me close, and then he takes off his hayseed hat, and says, in
+a different voice: "I'd like to shake hands with Parleyvoo Pickens,
+the greatest street man in the West, barring only Montague Silver,
+which you can no more than allow."
+
+I let him shake hands with me.
+
+"I learned under Silver," I said; "I don't begrudge him the lead. But
+what's your graft, son? I admit that the phantom flight of the non-
+existing animals at which you remarked 'Whoa!' has puzzled me
+somewhat. How do you win out on the trick?"
+
+Buckingham Skinner blushed.
+
+"Pocket money," says he; "that's all. I am temporarily unfinanced.
+This little coup de rye straw is good for forty dollars in a town of
+this size. How do I work it? Why, I involve myself, as you perceive,
+in the loathsome apparel of the rural dub. Thus embalmed I am Jonas
+Stubblefield--a name impossible to improve upon. I repair noisily to
+the office of some loan company conveniently located in the third-
+floor, front. There I lay my hat and yarn gloves on the floor and ask
+to mortgage my farm for $2,000 to pay for my sister's musical
+education in Europe. Loans like that always suit the loan companies.
+It's ten to one that when the note falls due the foreclosure will be
+leading the semiquavers by a couple of lengths.
+
+"Well, sir, I reach in my pocket for the abstract of title; but I
+suddenly hear my team running away. I run to the window and emit the
+word--or exclamation, which-ever it may be--viz, 'Whoa!' Then I rush
+down-stairs and down the street, returning in a few minutes. 'Dang
+them mules,' I says; 'they done run away and busted the doubletree and
+two traces. Now I got to hoof it home, for I never brought no money
+along. Reckon we'll talk about that loan some other time, gen'lemen.'
+
+"Then I spreads out my tarpaulin, like the Israelites, and waits for
+the manna to drop.
+
+"'Why, no, Mr. Stubblefield,' says the lobster-colored party in the
+specs and dotted pique vest; 'oblige us by accepting this ten-dollar
+bill until to-morrow. Get your harness repaired and call in at ten.
+We'll be pleased to accommodate you in the matter of this loan.'
+
+"It's a slight thing," says Buckingham Skinner, modest, "but, as I
+said, only for temporary loose change."
+
+"It's nothing to be ashamed of," says I, in respect for his
+mortification; "in case of an emergency. Of course, it's small
+compared to organizing a trust or bridge whist, but even the Chicago
+University had to be started in a small way."
+
+"What's your graft these days?" Buckingham Skinner asks me.
+
+"The legitimate," says I. "I'm handling rhinestones and Dr. Oleum
+Sinapi's Electric Headache Battery and the Swiss Warbler's Bird Call,
+a small lot of the new queer ones and twos, and the Bonanza Budget,
+consisting of a rolled-gold wedding and engagement ring, six Egyptian
+lily bulbs, a combination pickle fork and nail-clipper, and fifty
+engraved visiting cards--no two names alike--all for the sum of 38
+cents."
+
+"Two months ago," says Buckingham Skinner, "I was doing well down in
+Texas with a patent instantaneous fire kindler, made of compressed
+wood ashes and benzine. I sold loads of 'em in towns where they like
+to burn niggers quick, without having to ask somebody for a light. And
+just when I was doing the best they strikes oil down there and puts me
+out of business. 'Your machine's too slow, now, pardner,' they tells
+me. 'We can have a coon in hell with this here petroleum before your
+old flint-and-tinder truck can get him warm enough to perfess
+religion.' And so I gives up the kindler and drifts up here to K.C.
+This little curtain-raiser you seen me doing, Mr. Pickens, with the
+simulated farm and the hypothetical teams, ain't in my line at all,
+and I'm ashamed you found me working it."
+
+"No man," says I, kindly, "need to be ashamed of putting the skibunk
+on a loan corporation for even so small a sum as ten dollars, when he
+is financially abashed. Still, it wasn't quite the proper thing. It's
+too much like borrowing money without paying it back."
+
+I liked Buckingham Skinner from the start, for as good a man as ever
+stood over the axles and breathed gasoline smoke. And pretty soon we
+gets thick, and I let him in on a scheme I'd had in mind for some
+time, and offers to go partners.
+
+"Anything," says Buck, "that is not actually dishonest will find me
+willing and ready. Let us perforate into the inwardness of your
+proposition. I feel degraded when I am forced to wear property straw
+in my hair and assume a bucolic air for the small sum of ten dollars.
+Actually, Mr. Pickens, it makes me feel like the Ophelia of the Great
+Occidental All-Star One-Night Consolidated Theatrical Aggregation."
+
+This scheme of mine was one that suited my proclivities. By nature I
+am some sentimental, and have always felt gentle toward the mollifying
+elements of existence. I am disposed to be lenient with the arts and
+sciences; and I find time to instigate a cordiality for the more human
+works of nature, such as romance and the atmosphere and grass and
+poetry and the Seasons. I never skin a sucker without admiring the
+prismatic beauty of his scales. I never sell a little auriferous
+beauty to the man with the hoe without noticing the beautiful harmony
+there is between gold and green. And that's why I liked this scheme;
+it was so full of outdoor air and landscapes and easy money.
+
+We had to have a young lady assistant to help us work this graft; and
+I asked Buck if he knew of one to fill the bill.
+
+"One," says I, "that is cool and wise and strictly business from her
+pompadour to her Oxfords. No ex-toe-dancers or gum-chewers or crayon
+portrait canvassers for this."
+
+Buck claimed he knew a suitable feminine and he takes me around to see
+Miss Sarah Malloy. The minute I see her I am pleased. She looked to be
+the goods as ordered. No sign of the three p's about her--no peroxide,
+patchouli, nor peau de soie; about twenty-two, brown hair, pleasant
+ways--the kind of a lady for the place.
+
+"A description of the sandbag, if you please," she begins.
+
+"Why, ma'am," says I, "this graft of ours is so nice and refined and
+romantic, it would make the balcony scene in 'Romeo and Juliet' look
+like second-story work."
+
+We talked it over, and Miss Malloy agreed to come in as a business
+partner. She said she was glad to get a chance to give up her place as
+stenographer and secretary to a suburban lot company, and go into
+something respectable.
+
+This is the way we worked our scheme. First, I figured it out by a
+kind of a proverb. The best grafts in the world are built up on copy-
+book maxims and psalms and proverbs and Esau's fables. They seem to
+kind of hit off human nature. Our peaceful little swindle was
+constructed on the old saying: "The whole push loves a lover."
+
+One evening Buck and Miss Malloy drives up like blazes in a buggy to a
+farmer's door. She is pale but affectionate, clinging to his arm--
+always clinging to his arm. Any one can see that she is a peach and of
+the cling variety. They claim they are eloping for to be married on
+account of cruel parents. They ask where they can find a preacher.
+Farmer says, "B'gum there ain't any preacher nigher than Reverend
+Abels, four miles over on Caney Creek." Farmeress wipes her hand on
+her apron and rubbers through her specs.
+
+Then, lo and look ye! Up the road from the other way jogs Parleyvoo
+Pickens in a gig, dressed in black, white necktie, long face, sniffing
+his nose, emitting a spurious kind of noise resembling the long meter
+doxology.
+
+"B'jinks!" says farmer, "if thar ain't a preacher now!"
+
+It transpires that I am Rev. Abijah Green, travelling over to Little
+Bethel school-house for to preach next Sunday.
+
+The young folks will have it they must be married, for pa is pursuing
+them with the plow mules and the buckboard. So the Reverend Green,
+after hesitating, marries 'em in the farmer's parlor. And farmer
+grins, and has in cider, and says "B'gum!" and farmeress sniffles a
+bit and pats the bride on the shoulder. And Parleyvoo Pickens, the
+wrong reverend, writes out a marriage certificate, and farmer and
+farmeress sign it as witnesses. And the parties of the first, second
+and third part gets in their vehicles and rides away. Oh, that was an
+idyllic graft! True love and the lowing kine and the sun shining on
+the red barns--it certainly had all other impostures I know about beat
+to a batter.
+
+I suppose I happened along in time to marry Buck and Miss Malloy at
+about twenty farm-houses. I hated to think how the romance was going
+to fade later on when all them marriage certificates turned up in
+banks where we'd discounted 'em, and the farmers had to pay them notes
+of hand they'd signed, running from $300 to $500.
+
+On the 15th day of May us three divided about $6,000. Miss Malloy
+nearly cried with joy. You don't often see a tenderhearted girl or one
+that is bent on doing right.
+
+"Boys," says she, dabbing her eyes with a little handkerchief, "this
+stake comes in handier than a powder rag at a fat men's ball. It gives
+me a chance to reform. I was trying to get out of the real estate
+business when you fellows came along. But if you hadn't taken me in on
+this neat little proposition for removing the cuticle of the rutabaga
+propagators I'm afraid I'd have got into something worse. I was about
+to accept a place in one of these Women's Auxiliary Bazars, where they
+build a parsonage by selling a spoonful of chicken salad and a cream-
+puff for seventy-five cents and calling it a Business Man's Lunch.
+
+"Now I can go into a square, honest business, and give all them queer
+jobs the shake. I'm going to Cincinnati and start a palm reading and
+clairvoyant joint. As Madame Saramaloi, the Egyptian Sorceress, I
+shall give everybody a dollar's worth of good honest prognostication.
+Good-by, boys. Take my advice and go into some decent fake. Get
+friendly with the police and newspapers and you'll be all right."
+
+So then we all shook hands, and Miss Malloy left us. Me and Buck also
+rose up and sauntered off a few hundred miles; for we didn't care to
+be around when them marriage certificates fell due.
+
+With about $4,000 between us we hit that bumptious little town off the
+New Jersey coast they call New York.
+
+If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-
+on-the-Hudson. Cosmopolitan they call it. You bet. So's a piece of
+fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull
+their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough
+for us"--that's what they sing.
+
+There's enough Reubs walk down Broadway in one hour to buy up a week's
+output of the factory in Augusta, Maine, that makes Knaughty
+Knovelties and the little Phine Phum oroide gold finger ring that
+sticks a needle in your friend's hand.
+
+You'd think New York people was all wise; but no. They don't get a
+chance to learn. Everything's too compressed. Even the hayseeds are
+baled hayseeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut
+off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the
+other?
+
+It's no place for an honest grafter with a small capital. There's too
+big a protective tariff on bunco. Even when Giovanni sells a quart of
+warm worms and chestnut hulls he has to hand out a pint to an
+insectivorous cop. And the hotel man charges double for everything in
+the bill that he sends by the patrol wagon to the altar where the duke
+is about to marry the heiress.
+
+But old Badville-near-Coney is the ideal burg for a refined piece of
+piracy if you can pay the bunco duty. Imported grafts come pretty
+high. The custom-house officers that look after it carry clubs, and
+it's hard to smuggle in even a bib-and-tucker swindle to work Brooklyn
+with unless you can pay the toll. But now, me and Buck, having
+capital, descends upon New York to try and trade the metropolitan
+backwoodsmen a few glass beads for real estate just as the Vans did a
+hundred or two years ago.
+
+At an East Side hotel we gets acquainted with Romulus G. Atterbury, a
+man with the finest head for financial operations I ever saw. It was
+all bald and glossy except for gray side whiskers. Seeing that head
+behind an office railing, and you'd deposit a million with it without
+a receipt. This Atterbury was well dressed, though he ate seldom; and
+the synopsis of his talk would make the conversation of a siren sound
+like a cab driver's kick. He said he used to be a member of the Stock
+Exchange, but some of the big capitalists got jealous and formed a
+ring that forced him to sell his seat.
+
+Atterbury got to liking me and Buck and he begun to throw on the
+canvas for us some of the schemes that had caused his hair to
+evacuate. He had one scheme for starting a National bank on $45 that
+made the Mississippi Bubble look as solid as a glass marble. He talked
+this to us for three days, and when his throat was good and sore we
+told him about the roll we had. Atterbury borrowed a quarter from us
+and went out and got a box of throat lozenges and started all over
+again. This time he talked bigger things, and he got us to see 'em as
+he did. The scheme he laid out looked like a sure winner, and he
+talked me and Buck into putting our capital against his burnished dome
+of thought. It looked all right for a kid-gloved graft. It seemed to
+be just about an inch and a half outside of the reach of the police,
+and as money-making as a mint. It was just what me and Buck wanted--a
+regular business at a permanent stand, with an open air spieling with
+tonsolitis on the street corners every evening.
+
+So, in six weeks you see a handsome furnished set of offices down in
+the Wall Street neighborhood, with "The Golconda Gold Bond and
+Investment Company" in gilt letters on the door. And you see in his
+private room, with the door open, the secretary and treasurer, Mr.
+Buckingham Skinner, costumed like the lilies of the conservatory, with
+his high silk hat close to his hand. Nobody yet ever saw Buck outside
+of an instantaneous reach for his hat.
+
+And you might perceive the president and general manager, Mr. R. G.
+Atterbury, with his priceless polished poll, busy in the main office
+room dictating letters to a shorthand countess, who has got pomp and a
+pompadour that is no less than a guarantee to investors.
+
+There is a bookkeeper and an assistant, and a general atmosphere of
+varnish and culpability.
+
+At another desk the eye is relieved by the sight of an ordinary man,
+attired with unscrupulous plainness, sitting with his feet up, eating
+apples, with his obnoxious hat on the back of his head. That man is no
+other than Colonel Tecumseh (once "Parleyvoo") Pickens, the vice-
+president of the company.
+
+"No recherche rags for me," I says to Atterbury, when we was
+organizing the stage properties of the robbery. "I'm a plain man,"
+says I, "and I do not use pajamas, French, or military hair-brushes.
+Cast me for the role of the rhinestone-in-the-rough or I don't go on
+exhibition. If you can use me in my natural, though displeasing form,
+do so."
+
+"Dress you up?" says Atterbury; "I should say not! Just as you are
+you're worth more to the business than a whole roomful of the things
+they pin chrysanthemums on. You're to play the part of the solid but
+disheveled capitalist from the Far West. You despise the conventions.
+You've got so many stocks you can afford to shake socks. Conservative,
+homely, rough, shrewd, saving--that's your pose. It's a winner in New
+York. Keep your feet on the desk and eat apples. Whenever anybody
+comes in eat an apple. Let 'em see you stuff the peelings in a drawer
+of your desk. Look as economical and rich and rugged as you can."
+
+I followed out Atterbury's instructions. I played the Rocky Mountain
+capitalist without ruching or frills. The way I deposited apple
+peelings to my credit in a drawer when any customers came in made
+Hetty Green look like a spendthrift. I could hear Atterbury saying to
+victims, as he smiled at me, indulgent and venerating, "That's our
+vice-president, Colonel Pickens . . . fortune in Western investments
+. . . delightfully plain manners, but . . . could sign his check for
+half a million . . . simple as a child . . . wonderful head . . .
+conservative and careful almost to a fault."
+
+Atterbury managed the business. Me and Buck never quite understood all
+of it, though he explained it to us in full. It seems the company was
+a kind of cooperative one, and everybody that bought stock shared in
+the profits. First, we officers bought up a controlling interest--we
+had to have that--of the shares at 50 cents a hundred--just what the
+printer charged us--and the rest went to the public at a dollar each.
+The company guaranteed the stockholders a profit of ten per cent. each
+month, payable on the last day thereof.
+
+When any stockholder had paid in as much as $100, the company issued
+him a Gold Bond and he became a bondholder. I asked Atterbury one day
+what benefits and appurtenances these Gold Bonds was to an investor
+more so than the immunities and privileges enjoyed by the common
+sucker who only owned stock. Atterbury picked up one of them Gold
+Bonds, all gilt and lettered up with flourishes and a big red seal
+tied with a blue ribbon in a bowknot, and he looked at me like his
+feelings was hurt.
+
+"My dear Colonel Pickens," says he, "you have no soul for Art. Think
+of a thousand homes made happy by possessing one of these beautiful
+gems of the lithographer's skill! Think of the joy in the household
+where one of these Gold Bonds hangs by a pink cord to the what-not, or
+is chewed by the baby, caroling gleefully upon the floor! Ah, I see
+your eye growing moist, Colonel--I have touched you, have I not?"
+
+"You have not," says I, "for I've been watching you. The moisture you
+see is apple juice. You can't expect one man to act as a human cider-
+press and an art connoisseur too."
+
+Atterbury attended to the details of the concern. As I understand it,
+they was simple. The investors in stock paid in their money, and--
+well, I guess that's all they had to do. The company received it, and
+--I don't call to mind anything else. Me and Buck knew more about
+selling corn salve than we did about Wall Street, but even we could
+see how the Golconda Gold Bond Investment Company was making money.
+You take in money and pay back ten per cent. of it; it's plain enough
+that you make a clean, legitimate profit of 90 per cent., less
+expenses, as long as the fish bite.
+
+Atterbury wanted to be president and treasurer too, but Buck winks an
+eye at him and says: "You was to furnish the brains. Do you call it
+good brain work when you propose to take in money at the door, too?
+Think again. I hereby nominate myself treasurer ad valorem, sine die,
+and by acclamation. I chip in that much brain work free. Me and
+Pickens, we furnished the capital, and we'll handle the unearned
+increment as it incremates."
+
+It costs us $500 for office rent and first payment on furniture;
+$1,500 more went for printing and advertising. Atterbury knew his
+business. "Three months to a minute we'll last," says he. "A day
+longer than that and we'll have to either go under or go under an
+alias. By that time we ought to clean up $60,000. And then a money
+belt and a lower berth for me, and the yellow journals and the
+furniture men can pick the bones."
+
+Our ads. done the work. "Country weeklies and Washington hand-press
+dailies, of course," says I when we was ready to make contracts.
+
+"Man," says Atterbury, "as its advertising manager you would cause a
+Limburger cheese factory to remain undiscovered during a hot summer.
+The game we're after is right here in New York and Brooklyn and the
+Harlem reading-rooms. They're the people that the street-car fenders
+and the Answers to Correspondents columns and the pickpocket notices
+are made for. We want our ads. in the biggest city dailies, top of
+column, next to editorials on radium and pictures of the girl doing
+health exercises."
+
+Pretty soon the money begins to roll in. Buck didn't have to pretend
+to be busy; his desk was piled high up with money orders and checks
+and greenbacks. People began to drop in the office and buy stock every
+day.
+
+Most of the shares went in small amounts--$10 and $25 and $50, and a
+good many $2 and $3 lots. And the bald and inviolate cranium of
+President Atterbury shines with enthusiasm and demerit, while Colonel
+Tecumseh Pickens, the rude but reputable Croesus of the West, consumes
+so many apples that the peelings hang to the floor from the mahogany
+garbage chest that he calls his desk.
+
+Just as Atterbury said, we ran along about three months without being
+troubled. Buck cashed the paper as fast as it came in and kept the
+money in a safe deposit vault a block or so away. Buck never thought
+much of banks for such purposes. We paid the interest regular on the
+stock we'd sold, so there was nothing for anybody to squeal about. We
+had nearly $50,000 on hand and all three of us had been living as high
+as prize fighters out of training.
+
+One morning, as me and Buck sauntered into the office, fat and
+flippant, from our noon grub, we met an easy-looking fellow, with a
+bright eye and a pipe in his mouth, coming out. We found Atterbury
+looking like he'd been caught a mile from home in a wet shower.
+
+"Know that man?" he asked us.
+
+We said we didn't.
+
+"I don't either," says Atterbury, wiping off his head; "but I'll bet
+enough Gold Bonds to paper a cell in the Tombs that he's a newspaper
+reporter."
+
+"What did he want?" asks Buck.
+
+"Information," says our president. "Said he was thinking of buying
+some stock. He asked me about nine hundred questions, and every one of
+'em hit some sore place in the business. I know he's on a paper. You
+can't fool me. You see a man about half shabby, with an eye like a
+gimlet, smoking cut plug, with dandruff on his coat collar, and
+knowing more than J. P. Morgan and Shakespeare put together--if that
+ain't a reporter I never saw one. I was afraid of this. I don't mind
+detectives and post-office inspectors--I talk to 'em eight minutes and
+then sell 'em stock--but them reporters take the starch out of my
+collar. Boys, I recommend that we declare a dividend and fade away.
+The signs point that way."
+
+Me and Buck talked to Atterbury and got him to stop sweating and stand
+still. That fellow didn't look like a reporter to us. Reporters always
+pull out a pencil and tablet on you, and tell you a story you've
+heard, and strikes you for the drinks. But Atterbury was shaky and
+nervous all day.
+
+The next day me and Buck comes down from the hotel about ten-thirty.
+On the way we buys the papers, and the first thing we see is a column
+on the front page about our little imposition. It was a shame the way
+that reporter intimated that we were no blood relatives of the late
+George W. Childs. He tells all about the scheme as he sees it, in a
+rich, racy kind of a guying style that might amuse most anybody except
+a stockholder. Yes, Atterbury was right; it behooveth the gaily clad
+treasurer and the pearly pated president and the rugged vice-president
+of the Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company to go away real
+sudden and quick that their days might be longer upon the land.
+
+Me and Buck hurries down to the office. We finds on the stairs and in
+the hall a crowd of people trying to squeeze into our office, which is
+already jammed full inside to the railing. They've nearly all got
+Golconda stock and Gold Bonds in their hands. Me and Buck judged
+they'd been reading the papers, too.
+
+We stopped and looked at our stockholders, some surprised. It wasn't
+quite the kind of a gang we supposed had been investing. They all
+looked like poor people; there was plenty of old women and lots of
+young girls that you'd say worked in factories and mills. Some was old
+men that looked like war veterans, and some was crippled, and a good
+many was just kids--bootblacks and newsboys and messengers. Some was
+working-men in overalls, with their sleeves rolled up. Not one of the
+gang looked like a stockholder in anything unless it was a peanut
+stand. But they all had Golconda stock and looked as sick as you
+please.
+
+I saw a queer kind of a pale look come on Buck's face when he sized up
+the crowd. He stepped up to a sickly looking woman and says: "Madam,
+do you own any of this stock?"
+
+"I put in a hundred dollars," says the woman, faint like. "It was all
+I had saved in a year. One of my children is dying at home now and I
+haven't a cent in the house. I came to see if I could draw out some.
+The circulars said you could draw it at any time. But they say now I
+will lose it all."
+
+There was a smart kind of kid in the gang--I guess he was a newsboy.
+"I got in twenty-fi', mister," he says, looking hopeful at Buck's silk
+hat and clothes. "Dey paid me two-fifty a mont' on it. Say, a man
+tells me dey can't do dat and be on de square. Is dat straight? Do you
+guess I can get out my twenty-fi'?"
+
+Some of the old women was crying. The factory girls was plumb
+distracted. They'd lost all their savings and they'd be docked for the
+time they lost coming to see about it.
+
+There was one girl--a pretty one--in a red shawl, crying in a corner
+like her heart would dissolve. Buck goes over and asks her about it.
+
+"It ain't so much losing the money, mister," says she, shaking all
+over, "though I've been two years saving it up; but Jakey won't marry
+me now. He'll take Rosa Steinfeld. I know J--J--Jakey. She's got $400
+in the savings bank. Ai, ai, ai--" she sings out.
+
+Buck looks all around with that same funny look on his face. And then
+we see leaning against the wall, puffing at his pipe, with his eye
+shining at us, this newspaper reporter. Buck and me walks over to him.
+
+"You're a real interesting writer," says Buck. "How far do you mean to
+carry it? Anything more up your sleeve?"
+
+"Oh, I'm just waiting around," says the reporter, smoking away, "in
+case any news turns up. It's up to your stockholders now. Some of them
+might complain, you know. Isn't that the patrol wagon now?" he says,
+listening to a sound outside. "No," he goes on, "that's Doc.
+Whittleford's old cadaver coupe from the Roosevelt. I ought to know
+that gong. Yes, I suppose I've written some interesting stuff at
+times."
+
+"You wait," says Buck; "I'm going to throw an item of news in your
+way."
+
+Buck reaches in his pocket and hands me a key. I knew what he meant
+before he spoke. Confounded old buccaneer--I knew what he meant. They
+don't make them any better than Buck.
+
+"Pick," says he, looking at me hard, "ain't this graft a little out of
+our line? Do we want Jakey to marry Rosa Steinfeld?"
+
+"You've got my vote," says I. "I'll have it here in ten minutes." And
+I starts for the safe deposit vaults.
+
+I comes back with the money done up in a big bundle, and then Buck and
+me takes the journalist reporter around to another door and we let
+ourselves into one of the office rooms.
+
+"Now, my literary friend," says Buck, "take a chair, and keep still,
+and I'll give you an interview. You see before you two grafters from
+Graftersville, Grafter County, Arkansas. Me and Pick have sold brass
+jewelry, hair tonic, song books, marked cards, patent medicines,
+Connecticut Smyrna rugs, furniture polish, and albums in every town
+from Old Point Comfort to the Golden Gate. We've grafted a dollar
+whenever we saw one that had a surplus look to it. But we never went
+after the simoleon in the toe of the sock under the loose brick in the
+corner of the kitchen hearth. There's an old saying you may have heard
+--'fussily decency averni'--which means it's an easy slide from the
+street faker's dry goods box to a desk in Wall Street. We've took that
+slide, but we didn't know exactly what was at the bottom of it. Now,
+you ought to be wise, but you ain't. You've got New York wiseness,
+which means that you judge a man by the outside of his clothes. That
+ain't right. You ought to look at the lining and seams and the button-
+holes. While we are waiting for the patrol wagon you might get out
+your little stub pencil and take notes for another funny piece in the
+paper."
+
+And then Buck turns to me and says: "I don't care what Atterbury
+thinks. He only put in brains, and if he gets his capital out he's
+lucky. But what do you say, Pick?"
+
+"Me?" says I. "You ought to know me, Buck. I didn't know who was
+buying the stock."
+
+"All right," says Buck. And then he goes through the inside door into
+the main office and looks at the gang trying to squeeze through the
+railing. Atterbury and his hat was gone. And Buck makes 'em a short
+speech.
+
+"All you lambs get in line. You're going to get your wool back. Don't
+shove so. Get in a line--a /line/--not in a pile. Lady, will you
+please stop bleating? Your money's waiting for you. Here, sonny, don't
+climb over that railing; your dimes are safe. Don't cry, sis; you
+ain't out a cent. Get in /line/, I say. Here, Pick, come and
+straighten 'em out and let 'em through and out by the other door."
+
+Buck takes off his coat, pushes his silk hat on the back of his head,
+and lights up a reina victoria. He sets at the table with the boodle
+before him, all done up in neat packages. I gets the stockholders
+strung out and marches 'em, single file, through from the main room;
+and the reporter man passes 'em out of the side door into the hall
+again. As they go by, Buck takes up the stock and the Gold Bonds,
+paying 'em cash, dollar for dollar, the same as they paid in. The
+shareholders of the Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company can't
+hardly believe it. They almost grabs the money out of Buck's hands.
+Some of the women keep on crying, for it's a custom of the sex to cry
+when they have sorrow, to weep when they have joy, and to shed tears
+whenever they find themselves without either.
+
+The old women's fingers shake when they stuff the skads in the bosom
+of their rusty dresses. The factory girls just stoop over and flap
+their dry goods a second, and you hear the elastic go "pop" as the
+currency goes down in the ladies' department of the "Old Domestic
+Lisle-Thread Bank."
+
+Some of the stockholders that had been doing the Jeremiah act the
+loudest outside had spasms of restored confidence and wanted to leave
+the money invested. "Salt away that chicken feed in your duds, and
+skip along," says Buck. "What business have you got investing in
+bonds? The tea-pot or the crack in the wall behind the clock for your
+hoard of pennies."
+
+When the pretty girl in the red shawl cashes in Buck hands her an
+extra twenty.
+
+"A wedding present," says our treasurer, "from the Golconda Company.
+And say--if Jakey ever follows his nose, even at a respectful
+distance, around the corner where Rosa Steinfeld lives, you are hereby
+authorized to knock a couple of inches of it off."
+
+When they was all paid off and gone, Buck calls the newspaper reporter
+and shoves the rest of the money over to him.
+
+"You begun this," says Buck; "now finish it. Over there are the books,
+showing every share and bond issued. Here's the money to cover, except
+what we've spent to live on. You'll have to act as receiver. I guess
+you'll do the square thing on account of your paper. This is the best
+way we know how to settle it. Me and our substantial but apple-weary
+vice-president are going to follow the example of our revered
+president, and skip. Now, have you got enough news for to-day, or do
+you want to interview us on etiquette and the best way to make over an
+old taffeta skirt?"
+
+"News!" says the newspaper man, taking his pipe out; "do you think I
+could use this? I don't want to lose my job. Suppose I go around to
+the office and tell 'em this happened. What'll the managing editor
+say? He'll just hand me a pass to Bellevue and tell me to come back
+when I get cured. I might turn in a story about a sea serpent wiggling
+up Broadway, but I haven't got the nerve to try 'em with a pipe like
+this. A get-rich-quick scheme--excuse me--gang giving back the boodle!
+Oh, no. I'm not on the comic supplement."
+
+"You can't understand it, of course," says Buck, with his hand on the
+door knob. "Me and Pick ain't Wall Streeters like you know 'em. We
+never allowed to swindle sick old women and working girls and take
+nickels off of kids. In the lines of graft we've worked we took money
+from the people the Lord made to be buncoed--sports and rounders and
+smart Alecks and street crowds, that always have a few dollars to
+throw away, and farmers that wouldn't ever be happy if the grafters
+didn't come around and play with 'em when they sold their crops. We
+never cared to fish for the kind of suckers that bite here. No, sir.
+We got too much respect for the profession and for ourselves. Good-by
+to you, Mr. Receiver."
+
+"Here!" says the journalist reporter; "wait a minute. There's a broker
+I know on the next floor. Wait till I put this truck in his safe. I
+want you fellows to take a drink on me before you go."
+
+"On you?" says Buck, winking solemn. "Don't you go and try to make 'em
+believe at the office you said that. Thanks. We can't spare the time,
+I reckon. So long."
+
+And me and Buck slides out the door; and that's the way the Golconda
+Company went into involuntary liquefaction.
+
+If you had seen me and Buck the next night you'd have had to go to a
+little bum hotel over near the West Side ferry landings. We was in a
+little back room, and I was filling up a gross of six-ounce bottles
+with hydrant water colored red with aniline and flavored with
+cinnamon. Buck was smoking, contented, and he wore a decent brown
+derby in place of his silk hat.
+
+"It's a good thing, Pick," says he, as he drove in the corks, "that we
+got Brady to lend us his horse and wagon for a week. We'll rustle up
+the stake by then. This hair tonic'll sell right along over in Jersey.
+Bald heads ain't popular over there on account of the mosquitoes."
+
+Directly I dragged out my valise and went down in it for labels.
+
+"Hair tonic labels are out," says I. "Only about a dozen on hand."
+
+"Buy some more," says Buck.
+
+We investigated our pockets and found we had just enough money to
+settle our hotel bill in the morning and pay our passage over the
+ferry.
+
+"Plenty of the 'Shake-the-Shakes Chill Cure' labels," says I, after
+looking.
+
+"What more do you want?" says Buck. "Slap 'em on. The chill season is
+just opening up in the Hackensack low grounds. What's hair, anyway, if
+you have to shake it off?"
+
+We posted on the Chill Cure labels about half an hour and Buck says:
+
+"Making an honest livin's better than that Wall Street, anyhow; ain't
+it, Pick?"
+
+"You bet," says I.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+HOSTAGES TO MOMUS
+
+
+I
+
+I never got inside of the legitimate line of graft but once. But, one
+time, as I say, I reversed the decision of the revised statutes and
+undertook a thing that I'd have to apologize for even under the New
+Jersey trust laws.
+
+Me and Caligula Polk, of Muskogee in the Creek Nation, was down in the
+Mexican State of Tamaulipas running a peripatetic lottery and monte
+game. Now, selling lottery tickets is a government graft in Mexico,
+just like selling forty-eight cents' worth of postage-stamps for
+forty-nine cents is over here. So Uncle Porfirio he instructs the
+/rurales/ to attend to our case.
+
+/Rurales/? They're a sort of country police; but don't draw any mental
+crayon portraits of the worthy constables with a tin star and a gray
+goatee. The /rurales/--well, if we'd mount our Supreme Court on
+broncos, arm 'em with Winchesters, and start 'em out after John Doe
+/et al/., we'd have about the same thing.
+
+When the /rurales/ started for us we started for the States. They
+chased us as far as Matamoras. We hid in a brickyard; and that night
+we swum the Rio Grande, Caligula with a brick in each hand, absent-
+minded, which he drops upon the soil of Texas, forgetting he had 'em.
+
+From there we emigrated to San Antone, and then over to New Orleans,
+where we took a rest. And in that town of cotton bales and other
+adjuncts to female beauty we made the acquaintance of drinks invented
+by the Creoles during the period of Louey Cans, in which they are
+still served at the side doors. The most I can remember of this town
+is that me and Caligula and a Frenchman named McCarty--wait a minute;
+Adolph McCarty--was trying to make the French Quarter pay up the back
+trading-stamps due on the Louisiana Purchase, when somebody hollers
+that the johndarms are coming. I have an insufficient recollection of
+buying two yellow tickets through a window; and I seemed to see a man
+swing a lantern and say "All aboard!" I remembered no more, except
+that the train butcher was covering me and Caligula up with Augusta J.
+Evans's works and figs.
+
+When we become revised, we find that we have collided up against the
+State of Georgia at a spot hitherto unaccounted for in time tables
+except by an asterisk, which means that trains stop every other
+Thursday on signal by tearing up a rail. We was waked up in a yellow
+pine hotel by the noise of flowers and the smell of birds. Yes, sir,
+for the wind was banging sunflowers as big as buggy wheels against the
+weatherboarding and the chicken coop was right under the window. Me
+and Caligula dressed and went down-stairs. The landlord was shelling
+peas on the front porch. He was six feet of chills and fever, and
+Hongkong in complexion though in other respects he seemed amenable in
+the exercise of his sentiments and features.
+
+Caligula, who is a spokesman by birth, and a small man, though red-
+haired and impatient of painfulness of any kind, speaks up.
+
+"Pardner," says he, "good-morning, and be darned to you. Would you
+mind telling us why we are at? We know the reason we are where, but
+can't exactly figure out on account of at what place."
+
+"Well, gentlemen," says the landlord, "I reckoned you-all would be
+inquiring this morning. You-all dropped off of the nine-thirty train
+here last night; and you was right tight. Yes, you was right smart in
+liquor. I can inform you that you are now in the town of Mountain
+Valley, in the State of Georgia."
+
+"On top of that," says Caligula, "don't say that we can't have
+anything to eat."
+
+"Sit down, gentlemen," says the landlord, "and in twenty minutes I'll
+call you to the best breakfast you can get anywhere in town."
+
+That breakfast turned out to be composed of fried bacon and a
+yellowish edifice that proved up something between pound cake and
+flexible sandstone. The landlord calls it corn pone; and then he sets
+out a dish of the exaggerated breakfast food known as hominy; and so
+me and Caligula makes the acquaintance of the celebrated food that
+enabled every Johnny Reb to lick one and two-thirds Yankees for nearly
+four years at a stretch.
+
+"The wonder to me is," says Caligula, "that Uncle Robert Lee's boys
+didn't chase the Grant and Sherman outfit clear up into Hudson's Bay.
+It would have made me that mad to eat this truck they call mahogany!"
+
+"Hog and hominy," I explains, "is the staple food of this section."
+
+"Then," says Caligula, "they ought to keep it where it belongs. I
+thought this was a hotel and not a stable. Now, if we was in Muskogee
+at the St. Lucifer House, I'd show you some breakfast grub. Antelope
+steaks and fried liver to begin on, and venison cutlets with /chili
+con carne/ and pineapple fritters, and then some sardines and mixed
+pickles; and top it off with a can of yellow clings and a bottle of
+beer. You won't find a layout like that on the bill of affairs of any
+of your Eastern restauraws."
+
+"Too lavish," says I. "I've traveled, and I'm unprejudiced. There'll
+never be a perfect breakfast eaten until some man grows arms long
+enough to stretch down to New Orleans for his coffee and over to
+Norfolk for his rolls, and reaches up to Vermont and digs a slice of
+butter out of a spring-house, and then turns over a beehive close to a
+white clover patch out in Indiana for the rest. Then he'd come pretty
+close to making a meal on the amber that the gods eat on Mount
+Olympia."
+
+"Too ephemeral," says Caligula. "I'd want ham and eggs, or rabbit
+stew, anyhow, for a chaser. What do you consider the most edifying and
+casual in the way of a dinner?"
+
+"I've been infatuated from time to time," I answers, "with fancy
+ramifications of grub such as terrapins, lobsters, reed birds,
+jambolaya, and canvas-covered ducks; but after all there's nothing
+less displeasing to me than a beefsteak smothered in mushrooms on a
+balcony in sound of the Broadway streetcards, with a hand-organ
+playing down below, and the boys hollering extras about the latest
+suicide. For the wine, give me a reasonable Ponty Cany. And that's
+all, except a /demi-tasse/."
+
+"Well," says Caligula, "I reckon in New York you get to be a
+conniseer; and when you go around with the /demi-tasse/ you are
+naturally bound to buy 'em stylish grub."
+
+"It's a great town for epicures," says I. "You'd soon fall into their
+ways if you was there."
+
+"I've heard it was," says Caligula. "But I reckon I wouldn't. I can
+polish my fingernails all they need myself."
+
+
+II
+
+After breakfast we went out on the front porch, lighted up two of the
+landlord's /flor de upas/ perfectos, and took a look at Georgia.
+
+The installment of scenery visible to the eye looked mighty poor. As
+far as we could see was red hills all washed down with gullies and
+scattered over with patches of piny woods. Blackberry bushes was all
+that kept the rail fences from falling down. About fifteen miles over
+to the north was a little range of well-timbered mountains.
+
+That town of Mountain Valley wasn't going. About a dozen people
+permeated along the sidewalks; but what you saw mostly was rain-
+barrels and roosters, and boys poking around with sticks in piles of
+ashes made by burning the scenery of Uncle Tom shows.
+
+And just then there passes down on the other side of the street a high
+man in a long black coat and a beaver hat. All the people in sight
+bowed, and some crossed the street to shake hands with him; folks came
+out of stores and houses to holler at him; women leaned out of windows
+and smiled; and all the kids stopped playing to look at him. Our
+landlord stepped out on the porch and bent himself double like a
+carpenter's rule, and sung out, "Good-morning, Colonel," when he was a
+dozen yards gone by.
+
+"And is that Alexander, pa?" says Caligula to the landlord; "and why
+is he called great?"
+
+"That, gentlemen," says the landlord, "is no less than Colonel Jackson
+T. Rockingham, the president of the Sunrise & Edenville Tap Railroad,
+mayor of Mountain Valley, and chairman of the Perry County board of
+immigration and public improvements."
+
+"Been away a good many years, hasn't he?" I asked.
+
+"No, sir; Colonel Rockingham is going down to the post-office for his
+mail. His fellow-citizens take pleasure in greeting him thus every
+morning. The colonel is our most prominent citizen. Besides the height
+of the stock of the Sunrise & Edenville Tap Railroad, he owns a
+thousand acres of that land across the creek. Mountain Valley
+delights, sir, to honor a citizen of such worth and public spirit."
+
+For an hour that afternoon Caligula sat on the back of his neck on the
+porch and studied a newspaper, which was unusual in a man who despised
+print. When he was through he took me to the end of the porch among
+the sunlight and drying dish-towels. I knew that Caligula had invented
+a new graft. For he chewed the ends of his mustache and ran the left
+catch of his suspenders up and down, which was his way.
+
+"What is it now?" I asks. "Just so it ain't floating mining stocks or
+raising Pennsylvania pinks, we'll talk it over."
+
+"Pennsylvania pinks? Oh, that refers to a coin-raising scheme of the
+Keystoners. They burn the soles of old women's feet to make them tell
+where their money's hid."
+
+Caligula's words in business was always few and bitter.
+
+"You see them mountains," said he, pointing. "And you seen that
+colonel man that owns railroads and cuts more ice when he goes to the
+post-office than Roosevelt does when he cleans 'em out. What we're
+going to do is to kidnap the latter into the former, and inflict a
+ransom of ten thousand dollars."
+
+"Illegality," says I, shaking my head.
+
+"I knew you'd say that," says Caligula. "At first sight it does seem
+to jar peace and dignity. But it don't. I got the idea out of that
+newspaper. Would you commit aspersions on a equitable graft that the
+United States itself has condoned and indorsed and ratified?"
+
+"Kidnapping," says I, "is an immoral function in the derogatory list
+of the statutes. If the United States upholds it, it must be a recent
+enactment of ethics, along with race suicide and rural delivery."
+
+"Listen," says Caligula, "and I'll explain the case set down in the
+papers. Here was a Greek citizen named Burdick Harris," says he,
+"captured for a graft by Africans; and the United States sends two
+gunboats to the State of Tangiers and makes the King of Morocco give
+up seventy thousand dollars to Raisuli."
+
+"Go slow," says I. "That sounds too international to take in all at
+once. It's like 'thimble, thimble, who's got the naturalization
+papers?'"
+
+"'Twas press despatches from Constantinople," says Caligula. "You'll
+see, six months from now. They'll be confirmed by the monthly
+magazines; and then it won't be long till you'll notice 'em alongside
+the photos of the Mount Pelee eruption photos in the while-you-get-
+your-hair-cut weeklies. It's all right, Pick. This African man Raisuli
+hides Burdick Harris up in the mountains, and advertises his price to
+the governments of different nations. Now, you wouldn't think for a
+minute," goes on Caligula, "that John Hay would have chipped in and
+helped this graft along if it wasn't a square game, would you?"
+
+"Why, no," says I. "I've always stood right in with Bryan's policies,
+and I couldn't consciously say a word against the Republican
+administration just now. But if Harris was a Greek, on what system of
+international protocols did Hay interfere?"
+
+"It ain't exactly set forth in the papers," says Caligula. "I suppose
+it's a matter of sentiment. You know he wrote this poem, 'Little
+Breeches'; and them Greeks wear little or none. But anyhow, John Hay
+sends the Brooklyn and the Olympia over, and they cover Africa with
+thirty-inch guns. And then Hay cables after the health of the /persona
+grata/. 'And how are they this morning?' he wires. 'Is Burdick Harris
+alive yet, or Mr. Raisuli dead?' And the King of Morocco sends up the
+seventy thousand dollars, and they turn Burdick Harris loose. And
+there's not half the hard feelings among the nations about this little
+kidnapping matter as there was about the peace congress. And Burdick
+Harris says to the reporters, in the Greek language, that he's often
+heard about the United States, and he admires Roosevelt next to
+Raisuli, who is one of the whitest and most gentlemanly kidnappers
+that he ever worked alongside of. So you see, Pick," winds up
+Caligula, "we've got the law of nations on our side. We'll cut this
+colonel man out of the herd, and corral him in them little mountains,
+and stick up his heirs and assigns for ten thousand dollars."
+
+"Well, you seldom little red-headed territorial terror," I answers,
+"you can't bluff your uncle Tecumseh Pickens! I'll be your company in
+this graft. But I misdoubt if you've absorbed the inwardness of this
+Burdick Harris case, Calig; and if on any morning we get a telegram
+from the Secretary of State asking about the health of the scheme, I
+propose to acquire the most propinquitous and celeritous mule in this
+section and gallop diplomatically over into the neighboring and
+peaceful nation of Alabama."
+
+
+III
+
+Me and Caligula spent the next three days investigating the bunch of
+mountains into which we proposed to kidnap Colonel Jackson T.
+Rockingham. We finally selected an upright slice of topography covered
+with bushes and trees that you could only reach by a secret path that
+we cut out up the side of it. And the only way to reach the mountain
+was to follow up the bend of a branch that wound among the elevations.
+
+Then I took in hand an important subdivision of the proceedings. I
+went up to Atlanta on the train and laid in a two-hundred-and-fifty-
+dollar supply of the most gratifying and efficient lines of grub that
+money could buy. I always was an admirer of viands in their more
+palliative and revised stages. Hog and hominy are not only inartistic
+to my stomach, but they give indigestion to my moral sentiments. And I
+thought of Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham, president of the Sunrise &
+Edenville Tap Railroad, and how he would miss the luxury of his home
+fare as is so famous among wealthy Southerners. So I sunk half of mine
+and Caligula's capital in as elegant a layout of fresh and canned
+provisions as Burdick Harris or any other professional kidnappee ever
+saw in a camp.
+
+I put another hundred in a couple of cases of Bordeaux, two quarts of
+cognac, two hundred Havana regalias with gold bands, and a camp stove
+and stools and folding cots. I wanted Colonel Rockingham to be
+comfortable; and I hoped after he gave up the ten thousand dollars he
+would give me and Caligula as good a name for gentlemen and
+entertainers as the Greek man did the friend of his that made the
+United States his bill collector against Africa.
+
+When the goods came down from Atlanta, we hired a wagon, moved them up
+on the little mountain, and established camp. And then we laid for the
+colonel.
+
+We caught him one morning about two miles out from Mountain Valley, on
+his way to look after some of his burnt umber farm land. He was an
+elegant old gentleman, as thin and tall as a trout rod, with frazzled
+shirt-cuffs and specs on a black string. We explained to him, brief
+and easy, what we wanted; and Caligula showed him, careless, the
+handle of his forty-five under his coat.
+
+"What?" says Colonel Rockingham. "Bandits in Perry County, Georgia! I
+shall see that the board of immigration and public improvements hears
+of this!"
+
+"Be so unfoolhardy as to climb into that buggy," says Caligula, "by
+order of the board of perforation and public depravity. This is a
+business meeting, and we're anxious to adjourn /sine qua non/."
+
+We drove Colonel Rockingham over the mountain and up the side of it as
+far as the buggy could go. Then we tied the horse, and took our
+prisoner on foot up to the camp.
+
+"Now, colonel," I says to him, "we're after the ransom, me and my
+partner; and no harm will come to you if the King of Mor--if your
+friends send up the dust. In the mean time we are gentlemen the same
+as you. And if you give us your word not to try to escape, the freedom
+of the camp is yours."
+
+"I give you my word," says the colonel.
+
+"All right," says I; "and now it's eleven o'clock, and me and Mr. Polk
+will proceed to inculcate the occasion with a few well-timed
+trivialities in the way of grub."
+
+"Thank you," says the colonel; "I believe I could relish a slice of
+bacon and a plate of hominy."
+
+"But you won't," says I emphatic. "Not in this camp. We soar in higher
+regions than them occupied by your celebrated but repulsive dish."
+
+While the colonel read his paper, me and Caligula took off our coats
+and went in for a little luncheon /de luxe/ just to show him. Caligula
+was a fine cook of the Western brand. He could toast a buffalo or
+fricassee a couple of steers as easy as a woman could make a cup of
+tea. He was gifted in the way of knocking together edibles when haste
+and muscle and quantity was to be considered. He held the record west
+of the Arkansas River for frying pancakes with his left hand, broiling
+venison cutlets with his right, and skinning a rabbit with his teeth
+at the same time. But I could do things /en casserole/ and /a la
+creole/, and handle the oil and tobasco as gently and nicely as a
+French /chef/.
+
+So at twelve o'clock we had a hot lunch ready that looked like a
+banquet on a Mississippi River steamboat. We spread it on the tops of
+two or three big boxes, opened two quarts of the red wine, set the
+olives and a canned oyster cocktail and a ready-made Martini by the
+colonel's plate, and called him to grub.
+
+Colonel Rockingham drew up his campstool, wiped off his specs, and
+looked at the things on the table. Then I thought he was swearing; and
+I felt mean because I hadn't taken more pains with the victuals. But
+he wasn't; he was asking a blessing; and me and Caligula hung our
+heads, and I saw a tear drop from the colonel's eye into his cocktail.
+
+I never saw a man eat with so much earnestness and application--not
+hastily, like a grammarian, or one of the canal, but slow and
+appreciative, like a anaconda, or a real /vive bonjour/.
+
+In an hour and a half the colonel leaned back. I brought him a pony of
+brandy and his black coffee, and set the box of Havana regalias on the
+table.
+
+"Gentlemen," says he, blowing out the smoke and trying to breathe it
+back again, "when we view the eternal hills and the smiling and
+beneficent landscape, and reflect upon the goodness of the Creator
+who--"
+
+"Excuse me, colonel," says I, "but there's some business to attend to
+now"; and I brought out paper and pen and ink and laid 'em before him.
+"Who do you want to send to for the money?" I asks.
+
+"I reckon," says he, after thinking a bit, "to the vice-president of
+our railroad, at the general offices of the Company in Edenville."
+
+"How far is it to Edenville from here?" I asked.
+
+"About ten miles," says he.
+
+Then I dictated these lines, and Colonel Rockingham wrote them out:
+
+  I am kidnapped and held a prisoner by two desperate outlaws in a
+  place which is useless to attempt to find. They demand ten
+  thousand dollars at once for my release. The amount must be raised
+  immediately, and these directions followed. Come alone with the
+  money to Stony Creek, which runs out of Blacktop Mountains. Follow
+  the bed of the creek till you come to a big flat rock on the left
+  bank, on which is marked a cross in red chalk. Stand on the rock
+  and wave a white flag. A guide will come to you and conduct you to
+  where I am held. Lose no time.
+
+After the colonel had finished this, he asked permission to take on a
+postscript about how he was being treated, so the railroad wouldn't
+feel uneasy in its bosom about him. We agreed to that. He wrote down
+that he had just had lunch with the two desperate ruffians; and then
+he set down the whole bill of fare, from cocktails to coffee. He wound
+up with the remark that dinner would be ready about six, and would
+probably be a more licentious and intemperate affair than lunch.
+
+Me and Caligula read it, and decided to let it go; for we, being
+cooks, were amenable to praise, though it sounded out of place on a
+sight draft for ten thousand dollars.
+
+I took the letter over to the Mountain Valley road and watched for a
+messenger. By and by a colored equestrian came along on horseback,
+riding toward Edenville. I gave him a dollar to take the letter to the
+railroad offices; and then I went back to camp.
+
+
+IV
+
+About four o'clock in the afternoon, Caligula, who was acting as
+lookout, calls to me:
+
+"I have to report a white shirt signalling on the starboard bow, sir."
+
+I went down the mountain and brought back a fat, red man in an alpaca
+coat and no collar.
+
+"Gentlemen," says Colonel Rockingham, "allow me to introduce my
+brother, Captain Duval C. Rockingham, vice-president of the Sunrise &
+Edenville Tap Railroad."
+
+"Otherwise the King of Morocco," says I. "I reckon you don't mind my
+counting the ransom, just as a business formality."
+
+"Well, no, not exactly," says the fat man, "not when it comes. I
+turned that matter over to our second vice-president. I was anxious
+after Brother Jackson's safetiness. I reckon he'll be along right
+soon. What does that lobster salad you mentioned taste like, Brother
+Jackson?"
+
+"Mr. Vice-President," says I, "you'll oblige us by remaining here till
+the second V.P. arrives. This is a private rehearsal, and we don't
+want any roadside speculators selling tickets."
+
+In half an hour Caligula sings out again:
+
+"Sail ho! Looks like an apron on a broomstick."
+
+I perambulated down the cliff again, and escorted up a man six foot
+three, with a sandy beard and no other dimension that you could
+notice. Thinks I to myself, if he's got ten thousand dollars on his
+person it's in one bill and folded lengthwise.
+
+"Mr. Patterson G. Coble, our second vice-president," announces the
+colonel.
+
+"Glad to know you, gentlemen," says this Coble. "I came up to
+disseminate the tidings that Major Tallahassee Tucker, our general
+passenger agent, is now negotiating a peachcrate full of our railroad
+bonds with the Perry County Bank for a loan. My dear Colonel
+Rockingham, was that chicken gumbo or cracked goobers on the bill of
+fare in your note? Me and the conductor of fifty-six was having a
+dispute about it."
+
+"Another white wings on the rocks!" hollers Caligula. "If I see any
+more I'll fire on 'em and swear they was torpedo-boats!"
+
+The guide goes down again, and convoys into the lair a person in blue
+overalls carrying an amount of inebriety and a lantern. I am so sure
+that this is Major Tucker that I don't even ask him until we are up
+above; and then I discover that it is Uncle Timothy, the yard
+switchman at Edenville, who is sent ahead to flag our understandings
+with the gossip that Judge Pendergast, the railroad's attorney, is in
+the process of mortgaging Colonel Rockingham's farming lands to make
+up the ransom.
+
+While he is talking, two men crawl from under the bushes into camp,
+and Caligula, with no white flag to disinter him from his plain duty,
+draws his gun. But again Colonel Rockingham intervenes and introduces
+Mr. Jones and Mr. Batts, engineer and fireman of train number forty-
+two.
+
+"Excuse us," says Batts, "but me and Jim have hunted squirrels all
+over this mounting, and we don't need no white flag. Was that
+straight, colonel, about the plum pudding and pineapples and real
+store cigars?"
+
+"Towel on a fishing-pole in the offing!" howls Caligula. "Suppose it's
+the firing line of the freight conductors and brakeman."
+
+"My last trip down," says I, wiping off my face. "If the S. & E.T.
+wants to run an excursion up here just because we kidnapped their
+president, let 'em. We'll put out our sign. 'The Kidnapper's Cafe and
+Trainmen's Home.'"
+
+This time I caught Major Tallahassee Tucker by his own confession, and
+I felt easier. I asked him into the creek, so I could drown him if he
+happened to be a track-walker or caboose porter. All the way up the
+mountain he driveled to me about asparagus on toast, a thing that his
+intelligence in life had skipped.
+
+Up above I got his mind segregated from food and asked if he had
+raised the ransom.
+
+"My dear sir," says he, "I succeeded in negotiating a loan on thirty
+thousand dollars' worth of the bonds of our railroad, and--"
+
+"Never mind just now, major," says I. "It's all right, then. Wait till
+after dinner, and we'll settle the business. All of you gentlemen," I
+continues to the crowd, "are invited to stay to dinner. We have
+mutually trusted one another, and the white flag is supposed to wave
+over the proceedings."
+
+"The correct idea," says Caligula, who was standing by me. "Two
+baggage-masters and a ticket-agent dropped out of a tree while you was
+below the last time. Did the major man bring the money?"
+
+"He says," I answered, "that he succeeded in negotiating the loan."
+
+If any cooks ever earned ten thousand dollars in twelve hours, me and
+Caligula did that day. At six o'clock we spread the top of the
+mountain with as fine a dinner as the personnel of any railroad ever
+engulfed. We opened all the wine, and we concocted entrees and /pieces
+de resistance/, and stirred up little savory /chef de cuisines/ and
+organized a mass of grub such as has been seldom instigated out of
+canned and bottled goods. The railroad gathered around it, and the
+wassail and diversions was intense.
+
+After the feast me and Caligula, in the line of business, takes Major
+Tucker to one side and talks ransom. The major pulls out an
+agglomeration of currency about the size of the price of a town lot in
+the suburbs of Rabbitville, Arizona, and makes this outcry.
+
+"Gentlemen," says he, "the stock of the Sunrise & Edenville railroad
+has depreciated some. The best I could do with thirty thousand
+dollars' worth of the bonds was to secure a loan of eighty-seven
+dollars and fifty cents. On the farming lands of Colonel Rockingham,
+Judge Pendergast was able to obtain, on a ninth mortgage, the sum of
+fifty dollars. You will find the amount, one hundred and thirty-seven
+fifty, correct."
+
+"A railroad president," said I, looking this Tucker in the eye, "and
+the owner of a thousand acres of land; and yet--"
+
+"Gentlemen," says Tucker, "The railroad is ten miles long. There don't
+any train run on it except when the crew goes out in the pines and
+gathers enough lightwood knots to get up steam. A long time ago, when
+times was good, the net earnings used to run as high as eighteen
+dollars a week. Colonel Rockingham's land has been sold for taxes
+thirteen times. There hasn't been a peach crop in this part of Georgia
+for two years. The wet spring killed the watermelons. Nobody around
+here has money enough to buy fertilizer; and land is so poor the corn
+crop failed and there wasn't enough grass to support the rabbits. All
+the people have had to eat in this section for over a year is hog and
+hominy, and--"
+
+"Pick," interrupts Caligula, mussing up his red hair, "what are you
+going to do with that chicken-feed?"
+
+I hands the money back to Major Tucker; and then I goes over to
+Colonel Rockingham and slaps him on the back.
+
+"Colonel," says I, "I hope you've enjoyed our little joke. We don't
+want to carry it too far. Kidnappers! Well, wouldn't it tickle your
+uncle? My name's Rhinegelder, and I'm a nephew of Chauncey Depew. My
+friend's a second cousin of the editor of /Puck/. So you can see. We
+are down South enjoying ourselves in our humorous way. Now, there's
+two quarts of cognac to open yet, and then the joke's over."
+
+What's the use to go into details? One or two will be enough. I
+remember Major Tallahassee Tucker playing on a jew's-harp, and
+Caligula waltzing with his head on the watch pocket of a tall baggage-
+master. I hesitate to refer to the cake-walk done by me and Mr.
+Patterson G. Coble with Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham between us.
+
+And even on the next morning, when you wouldn't think it possible,
+there was a consolation for me and Caligula. We knew that Raisuli
+himself never made half the hit with Burdick Harris that we did with
+the Sunrise & Edenville Tap Railroad.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+THE ETHICS OF PIG
+
+On an east-bound train I went into the smoker and found Jefferson
+Peters, the only man with a brain west of the Wabash River who can use
+his cerebrum cerebellum, and medulla oblongata at the same time.
+
+Jeff is in the line of unillegal graft. He is not to be dreaded by
+widows and orphans; he is a reducer of surplusage. His favorite
+disguise is that of the target-bird at which the spendthrift or the
+reckless investor may shy a few inconsequential dollars. He is readily
+vocalized by tobacco; so, with the aid of two thick and easy-burning
+brevas, I got the story of his latest Autolycan adventure.
+
+"In my line of business," said Jeff, "the hardest thing is to find an
+upright, trustworthy, strictly honorable partner to work a graft with.
+Some of the best men I ever worked with in a swindle would resort to
+trickery at times.
+
+"So, last summer, I thinks I will go over into this section of country
+where I hear the serpent has not yet entered, and see if I can find a
+partner naturally gifted with a talent for crime, but not yet
+contaminated by success.
+
+"I found a village that seemed to show the right kind of a layout. The
+inhabitants hadn't found that Adam had been dispossessed, and were
+going right along naming the animals and killing snakes just as if
+they were in the Garden of Eden. They call this town Mount Nebo, and
+it's up near the spot where Kentucky and West Virginia and North
+Carolina corner together. Them States don't meet? Well, it was in that
+neighborhood, anyway.
+
+"After putting in a week proving I wasn't a revenue officer, I went
+over to the store where the rude fourflushers of the hamlet lied, to
+see if I could get a line on the kind of man I wanted.
+
+"'Gentlemen,' says I, after we had rubbed noses and gathered 'round
+the dried-apple barrel. 'I don't suppose there's another community in
+the whole world into which sin and chicanery has less extensively
+permeated than this. Life here, where all the women are brave and
+propitious and all the men honest and expedient, must, indeed, be an
+idol. It reminds me,' says I, 'of Goldstein's beautiful ballad
+entitled "The Deserted Village," which says:
+
+  'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
+    What art can drive its charms away?
+  The judge rode slowly down the lane, mother.
+    For I'm to be Queen of the May.'
+
+"'Why, yes, Mr. Peters,' says the storekeeper. 'I reckon we air about
+as moral and torpid a community as there be on the mounting, according
+to censuses of opinion; but I reckon you ain't ever met Rufe Tatum.'
+
+"'Why, no,' says the town constable, 'he can't hardly have ever. That
+air Rufe is shore the monstrousest scalawag that has escaped hangin'
+on the galluses. And that puts me in mind that I ought to have turned
+Rufe out of the lockup before yesterday. The thirty days he got for
+killin' Yance Goodloe was up then. A day or two more won't hurt Rufe
+any, though.'
+
+"'Shucks, now,' says I, in the mountain idiom, 'don't tell me there's
+a man in Mount Nebo as bad as that.'
+
+"'Worse,' says the storekeeper. 'He steals hogs.'
+
+"I think I will look up this Mr. Tatum; so a day or two after the
+constable turned him out I got acquainted with him and invited him out
+on the edge of town to sit on a log and talk business.
+
+"What I wanted was a partner with a natural rural make-up to play a
+part in some little one-act outrages that I was going to book with the
+Pitfall & Gin circuit in some of the Western towns; and this R. Tatum
+was born for the role as sure as nature cast Fairbanks for the stuff
+that kept /Eliza/ from sinking into the river.
+
+"He was about the size of a first baseman; and he had ambiguous blue
+eyes like the china dog on the mantelpiece that Aunt Harriet used to
+play with when she was a child. His hair waved a little bit like the
+statue of the dinkus-thrower at the Vacation in Rome, but the color of
+it reminded you of the 'Sunset in the Grand Canon, by an American
+Artist,' that they hang over the stove-pipe holes in the salongs. He
+was the Reub, without needing a touch. You'd have known him for one,
+even if you'd seen him on the vaudeville stage with one cotton
+suspender and a straw over his ear.
+
+"I told him what I wanted, and found him ready to jump at the job.
+
+"'Overlooking such a trivial little peccadillo as the habit of
+manslaughter,' says I, 'what have you accomplished in the way of
+indirect brigandage or nonactionable thriftiness that you could point
+to, with or without pride, as an evidence of your qualifications for
+the position?'
+
+"'Why,' says he, in his kind of Southern system of procrastinated
+accents, 'hain't you heard tell? There ain't any man, black or white,
+in the Blue Ridge that can tote off a shoat as easy as I can without
+bein' heard, seen, or cotched. I can lift a shoat,' he goes on, 'out
+of a pen, from under a porch, at the trough, in the woods, day or
+night, anywhere or anyhow, and I guarantee nobody won't hear a squeal.
+It's all in the way you grab hold of 'em and carry 'em atterwards.
+Some day,' goes on this gentle despoiler of pig-pens, 'I hope to
+become reckernized as the champion shoat-stealer of the world.'
+
+"'It's proper to be ambitious,' says I; 'and hog-stealing will do very
+well for Mount Nebo; but in the outside world, Mr. Tatum, it would be
+considered as crude a piece of business as a bear raid on Bay State
+Gas. However, it will do as a guarantee of good faith. We'll go into
+partnership. I've got a thousand dollars cash capital; and with that
+homeward-plods atmosphere of yours we ought to be able to win out a
+few shares of Soon Parted, preferred, in the money market.'
+
+"So I attaches Rufe, and we go away from Mount Nebo down into the
+lowlands. And all the way I coach him for his part in the grafts I had
+in mind. I had idled away two months on the Florida coast, and was
+feeling all to the Ponce de Leon, besides having so many new schemes
+up my sleeve that I had to wear kimonos to hold 'em.
+
+"I intended to assume a funnel shape and mow a path nine miles wide
+though the farming belt of the Middle West; so we headed in that
+direction. But when we got as far as Lexington we found Binkley
+Brothers' circus there, and the blue-grass peasantry romping into town
+and pounding the Belgian blocks with their hand-pegged sabots as
+artless and arbitrary as an extra session of a Datto Bryan drama. I
+never pass a circus without pulling the valve-cord and coming down for
+a little Key West money; so I engaged a couple of rooms and board for
+Rufe and me at a house near the circus grounds run by a widow lady
+named Peevy. Then I took Rufe to a clothing store and gent's-outfitted
+him. He showed up strong, as I knew he would, after he was rigged up
+in the ready-made rutabaga regalia. Me and old Misfitzky stuffed him
+into a bright blue suit with a Nile green visible plaid effect, and
+riveted on a fancy vest of a light Tuskegee Normal tan color, a red
+necktie, and the yellowest pair of shoes in town.
+
+"They were the first clothes Rufe had ever worn except the gingham
+layette and the butternut top-dressing of his native kraal, and he
+looked as self-conscious as an Igorrote with a new nose-ring.
+
+"That night I went down to the circus tents and opened a small shell
+game. Rufe was to be the capper. I gave him a roll of phony currency
+to bet with and kept a bunch of it in a special pocket to pay his
+winnings out of. No; I didn't mistrust him; but I simply can't
+manipulate the ball to lose when I see real money bet. My fingers go
+on a strike every time I try it.
+
+"I set up my little table and began to show them how easy it was to
+guess which shell the little pea was under. The unlettered hinds
+gathered in a thick semicircle and began to nudge elbows and banter
+one another to bed. Then was when Rufe ought to have single-footed up
+and called the turn on the little joker for a few tens and fives to
+get them started. But, no Rufe. I'd seen him two or three times
+walking about and looking at the side-show pictures with his mouth
+full of peanut candy; but he never came nigh.
+
+"The crowd piked a little; but trying to work the shells without a
+capper is like fishing without a bait. I closed the game with only
+forty-two dollars of the unearned increment, while I had been counting
+on yanking the yeomen for two hundred at least. I went home at eleven
+and went to bed. I supposed that the circus had proved too alluring
+for Rufe, and that he had succumbed to it, concert and all; but I
+meant to give him a lecture on general business principles in the
+morning.
+
+"Just after Morpheus had got both my shoulders to the shuck mattress I
+hears a houseful of unbecoming and ribald noises like a youngster
+screeching with green-apple colic. I opens my door and calls out in
+the hall for the widow lady, and when she sticks her head out, I says:
+'Mrs. Peevy, ma'am, would you mind choking off that kid of yours so
+that honest people can get their rest?'
+
+"'Sir,' says she, 'it's no child of mine. It's the pig squealing that
+your friend Mr. Tatum brought home to his room a couple of hours ago.
+And if you are uncle or second cousin or brother to it, I'd appreciate
+your stopping its mouth, sir, yourself, if you please.'
+
+"I put on some of the polite outside habiliments of external society
+and went into Rufe's room. He had gotten up and lit his lamp, and was
+pouring some milk into a tin pan on the floor for a dingy-white, half-
+grown, squealing pig.
+
+"'How is this, Rufe?' says I. 'You flimflammed in your part of the
+work to-night and put the game on crutches. And how do you explain the
+pig? It looks like back-sliding to me.'
+
+"'Now, don't be too hard on me, Jeff,' says he. 'You know how long
+I've been used to stealing shoats. It's got to be a habit with me. And
+to-night, when I see such a fine chance, I couldn't help takin' it.'
+
+"'Well,' says I, 'maybe you've really got kleptopigia. And maybe when
+we get out of the pig belt you'll turn your mind to higher and more
+remunerative misconduct. Why you should want to stain your soul with
+such a distasteful, feeble-minded, perverted, roaring beast as that I
+can't understand.'
+
+"'Why, Jeff,' says he, 'you ain't in sympathy with shoats. You don't
+understand 'em like I do. This here seems to me to be an animal of
+more than common powers of ration and intelligence. He walked half
+across the room on his hind legs a while ago.'
+
+"'Well, I'm going back to bed,' says I. 'See if you can impress it
+upon your friend's ideas of intelligence that he's not to make so much
+noise.'
+
+"'He was hungry,' says Rufe. 'He'll go to sleep and keep quiet now.'
+
+"I always get up before breakfast and read the morning paper whenever
+I happen to be within the radius of a Hoe cylinder or a Washington
+hand-press. The next morning I got up early, and found a Lexington
+daily on the front porch where the carrier had thrown it. The first
+thing I saw in it was a double-column ad. on the front page that read
+like this:
+
+FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS REWARD
+
+  The above amount will be paid, and no questions asked, for the
+  return, alive and uninjured, of Beppo, the famous European
+  educated pig, that strayed or was stolen from the side-show tents
+  of Binkley Bros.' circus last night.
+
+Geo. B. Tapley, Business Manager.
+At the circus grounds.
+
+
+"I folded up the paper flat, put it into my inside pocket, and went to
+Rufe's room. He was nearly dressed, and was feeding the pig the rest
+of the milk and some apple-peelings.
+
+"'Well, well, well, good morning all,' I says, hearty and amiable. 'So
+we are up? And piggy is having his breakfast. What had you intended
+doing with that pig, Rufe?'
+
+"'I'm going to crate him up,' says Rufe, 'and express him to ma in
+Mount Nebo. He'll be company for her while I am away.'
+
+"'He's a mighty fine pig,' says I, scratching him on the back.
+
+"'You called him a lot of names last night,' says Rufe.
+
+"'Oh, well,' says I, 'he looks better to me this morning. I was raised
+on a farm, and I'm very fond of pigs. I used to go to bed at sundown,
+so I never saw one by lamplight before. Tell you what I'll do, Rufe,'
+I says. 'I'll give you ten dollars for that pig.'
+
+"'I reckon I wouldn't sell this shoat,' says he. 'If it was any other
+one I might.'
+
+"'Why not this one?' I asked, fearful that he might know something.
+
+"'Why, because,' says he, 'it was the grandest achievement of my life.
+There ain't airy other man that could have done it. If I ever have a
+fireside and children, I'll sit beside it and tell 'em how their daddy
+toted off a shoat from a whole circus full of people. And maybe my
+grandchildren, too. They'll certainly be proud a whole passel. Why,'
+says he, 'there was two tents, one openin' into the other. This shoat
+was on a platform, tied with a little chain. I seen a giant and a lady
+with a fine chance of bushy white hair in the other tent. I got the
+shoat and crawled out from under the canvas again without him
+squeakin' as loud as a mouse. I put him under my coat, and I must have
+passed a hundred folks before I got out where the streets was dark. I
+reckon I wouldn't sell that shoat, Jeff. I'd want ma to keep it, so
+there'd be a witness to what I done.'
+
+"'The pig won't live long enough,' I says, 'to use as an exhibit in
+your senile fireside mendacity. Your grandchildren will have to take
+your word for it. I'll give you one hundred dollars for the animal.'
+
+"Rufe looked at me astonished.
+
+"'The shoat can't be worth anything like that to you,' he says. 'What
+do you want him for?'
+
+"'Viewing me casuistically,' says I, with a rare smile, 'you wouldn't
+think that I've got an artistic side to my temper. But I have. I'm a
+collector of pigs. I've scoured the world for unusual pigs. Over in
+the Wabash Valley I've got a hog ranch with most every specimen on it,
+from a Merino to a Poland China. This looks like a blooded pig to me,
+Rufe,' says I. 'I believe it's a genuine Berkshire. That's why I'd
+like to have it.'
+
+"'I'd shore like to accommodate you,' says he, 'but I've got the
+artistic tenement, too. I don't see why it ain't art when you can
+steal a shoat better than anybody else can. Shoats is a kind of
+inspiration and genius with me. Specially this one. I wouldn't take
+two hundred and fifty for that animal.'
+
+"'Now, listen,' says I, wiping off my forehead. 'It's not so much a
+matter of business with me as it is art; and not so much art as it is
+philanthropy. Being a connoisseur and disseminator of pigs, I wouldn't
+feel like I'd done my duty to the world unless I added that Berkshire
+to my collection. Not intrinsically, but according to the ethics of
+pigs as friends and coadjutors of mankind, I offer you five hundred
+dollars for the animal.'
+
+"'Jeff,' says this pork esthete, 'it ain't money; it's sentiment with
+me.'
+
+"'Seven hundred,' says I.
+
+"'Make it eight hundred,' says Rufe, 'and I'll crush the sentiment out
+of my heart.'
+
+"I went under my clothes for my money-belt, and counted him out forty
+twenty-dollar gold certificates.
+
+"'I'll just take him into my own room,' says I, 'and lock him up till
+after breakfast.'
+
+"I took the pig by the hind leg. He turned on a squeal like the steam
+calliope at the circus.
+
+"'Let me tote him in for you,' says Rufe; and he picks up the beast
+under one arm, holding his snout with the other hand, and packs him
+into my room like a sleeping baby.
+
+"After breakfast Rufe, who had a chronic case of haberdashery ever
+since I got his trousseau, says he believes he will amble down to
+Misfitzky's and look over some royal-purple socks. And then I got as
+busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wall-paper. I
+found an old Negro man with an express wagon to hire; and we tied the
+pig in a sack and drove down to the circus grounds.
+
+"I found George B. Tapley in a little tent with a window flap open. He
+was a fattish man with an immediate eye, in a black skull-cap, with a
+four-ounce diamond screwed into the bosom of his red sweater.
+
+"'Are you George B. Tapley?' I asks.
+
+"'I swear it,' says he.
+
+"'Well, I've got it,' says I.
+
+"'Designate,' says he. 'Are you the guinea pigs for the Asiatic python
+or the alfalfa for the sacred buffalo?'
+
+"'Neither,' says I. 'I've got Beppo, the educated hog, in a sack in
+that wagon. I found him rooting up the flowers in my front yard this
+morning. I'll take the five thousand dollars in large bills, if it's
+handy.'
+
+"George B. hustles out of his tent, and asks me to follow. We went
+into one of the side-shows. In there was a jet black pig with a pink
+ribbon around his neck lying on some hay and eating carrots that a man
+was feeding to him.
+
+"'Hey, Mac,' calls G. B. 'Nothing wrong with the world-wide this
+morning, is there?'
+
+"'Him? No,' says the man. 'He's got an appetite like a chorus girl at
+1 A.M.'
+
+"'How'd you get this pipe?' says Tapley to me. 'Eating too many pork
+chops last night?'
+
+"I pulls out the paper and shows him the ad.
+
+"'Fake,' says he. 'Don't know anything about it. You've beheld with
+your own eyes the marvelous, world-wide porcine wonder of the four-
+footed kingdom eating with preternatural sagacity his matutinal meal,
+unstrayed and unstole. Good morning.'
+
+"I was beginning to see. I got in the wagon and told Uncle Ned to
+drive to the most adjacent orifice of the nearest alley. There I took
+out my pig, got the range carefully for the other opening, set his
+sights, and gave him such a kick that he went out the other end of the
+alley twenty feet ahead of his squeal.
+
+"Then I paid Uncle Ned his fifty cents, and walked down to the
+newspaper office. I wanted to hear it in cold syllables. I got the
+advertising man to his window.
+
+"'To decide a bet,' says I, 'wasn't the man who had this ad. put in
+last night short and fat, with long black whiskers and a club-foot?'
+
+"'He was not,' says the man. 'He would measure about six feet by four
+and a half inches, with corn-silk hair, and dressed like the pansies
+of the conservatory.'
+
+"At dinner time I went back to Mrs. Peevy's.
+
+"'Shall I keep some soup hot for Mr. Tatum till he comes back?' she
+asks.
+
+"'If you do, ma'am,' says I, 'you'll more than exhaust for firewood
+all the coal in the bosom of the earth and all the forests on the
+outside of it.'
+
+"So there, you see," said Jefferson Peters, in conclusion, "how hard
+it is ever to find a fair-minded and honest business-partner."
+
+"But," I began, with the freedom of long acquaintance, "the rule
+should work both ways. If you had offered to divide the reward you
+would not have lost--"
+
+Jeff's look of dignified reproach stopped me.
+
+"That don't involve the same principles at all," said he. "Mine was a
+legitimate and moral attempt at speculation. Buy low and sell high--
+don't Wall Street endorse it? Bulls and bears and pigs--what's the
+difference? Why not bristles as well as horns and fur?"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Gentle Grafter, by O. Henry
+
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