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+Project Gutenberg's When God Laughs and Other Stories, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: When God Laughs and Other Stories
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Posting Date: December 14, 2008 [EBook #2545]
+Release Date: March, 2001
+Last updated: November 10, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHEN GOD LAUGHS AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Les Bowler
+
+
+
+
+
+WHEN GOD LAUGHS, AND OTHER STORIES
+
+By Jack London
+
+
+1911 Mills and Boon edition
+
+
+Contents:
+
+     When God Laughs
+     The Apostate
+     A Wicked Woman
+     Just Meat
+     Created He Them
+     The Chinago
+     Make Westing
+     Semper Idem
+     A Nose For The King
+     The "Francis Spaight"
+     A Curious Fragment
+     A Piece Of Steak
+
+
+
+
+WHEN GOD LAUGHS (with compliments to Harry Cowell)
+
+     "The gods, the gods are stronger; time
+      Falls down before them, all men's knees
+      Bow, all men's prayers and sorrows climb
+      Like incense toward them; yea, for these
+          Are gods, Felise."
+
+Carquinez had relaxed finally. He stole a glance at the rattling
+windows, looked upward at the beamed roof, and listened for a moment
+to the savage roar of the south-easter as it caught the bungalow in
+its bellowing jaws. Then he held his glass between him and the fire and
+laughed for joy through the golden wine.
+
+"It is beautiful," he said. "It is sweetly sweet. It is a woman's wine,
+and it was made for gray-robed saints to drink."
+
+"We grow it on our own warm hills," I said, with pardonable California
+pride. "You rode up yesterday through the vines from which it was made."
+
+It was worth while to get Carquinez to loosen up. Nor was he ever really
+himself until he felt the mellow warmth of the vine singing in his
+blood. He was an artist, it is true, always an artist; but somehow,
+sober, the high pitch and lilt went out of his thought-processes and he
+was prone to be as deadly dull as a British Sunday--not dull as other
+men are dull, but dull when measured by the sprightly wight that Monte
+Carquinez was when he was really himself.
+
+From all this it must not be inferred that Carquinez, who is my dear
+friend and dearer comrade, was a sot. Far from it. He rarely erred. As
+I have said, he was an artist. He knew when he had enough, and enough,
+with him, was equilibrium--the equilibrium that is yours and mine when
+we are sober.
+
+His was a wise and instinctive temperateness that savoured of the Greek.
+Yet he was far from Greek. "I am Aztec, I am Inca, I am Spaniard," I
+have heard him say. And in truth he looked it, a compound of strange
+and ancient races, what with his swarthy skin and the asymmetry and
+primitiveness of his features. His eyes, under massively arched brows,
+were wide apart and black with the blackness that is barbaric, while
+before them was perpetually falling down a great black mop of hair
+through which he gazed like a roguish satyr from a thicket. He
+invariably wore a soft flannel shirt under his velvet-corduroy jacket,
+and his necktie was red. This latter stood for the red flag (he had once
+lived with the socialists of Paris), and it symbolized the blood and
+brotherhood of man. Also, he had never been known to wear anything on
+his head save a leather-banded sombrero. It was even rumoured that
+he had been born with this particular piece of headgear. And in my
+experience it was provocative of nothing short of sheer delight to see
+that Mexican sombrero hailing a cab in Piccadilly or storm-tossed in the
+crush for the New York Elevated.
+
+As I have said, Carquinez was made quick by wine--"as the clay was made
+quick when God breathed the breath of life into it," was his way of
+saying it. I confess that he was blasphemously intimate with God; and I
+must add that there was no blasphemy in him. He was at all times honest,
+and, because he was compounded of paradoxes, greatly misunderstood by
+those who did not know him. He could be as elementally raw at times as a
+screaming savage; and at other times as delicate as a maid, as subtle as
+a Spaniard. And--well, was he not Aztec? Inca? Spaniard?
+
+And now I must ask pardon for the space I have given him. (He is my
+friend, and I love him.) The house was shaking to the storm, as he drew
+closer to the fire and laughed at it through his wine. He looked at me,
+and by the added lustre of his eye, and by the alertness of it, I knew
+that at last he was pitched in his proper key.
+
+"And so you think you've won out against the gods?" he demanded.
+
+"Why the gods?"
+
+"Whose will but theirs has put satiety upon man?" he cried.
+
+"And whence the will in me to escape satiety?" I asked triumphantly.
+
+"Again the gods," he laughed. "It is their game we play. They deal and
+shuffle all the cards... and take the stakes. Think not that you have
+escaped by fleeing from the mad cities. You with your vine-clad hills,
+your sunsets and your sunrises, your homely fare and simple round of
+living!
+
+"I've watched you ever since I came. You have not won. You have
+surrendered. You have made terms with the enemy. You have made
+confession that you are tired. You have flown the white flag of fatigue.
+You have nailed up a notice to the effect that life is ebbing down in
+you. You have run away from life. You have played a trick, shabby trick.
+You have balked at the game. You refuse to play. You have thrown your
+cards under the table and run away to hide, here amongst your hills."
+
+He tossed his straight hair back from his flashing eyes, and scarcely
+interrupted to roll a long, brown, Mexican cigarette.
+
+"But the gods know. It is an old trick. All the generations of man have
+tried it... and lost. The gods know how to deal with such as you. To
+pursue is to possess, and to possess is to be sated. And so you, in your
+wisdom, have refused any longer to pursue. You have elected surcease.
+Very well. You will become sated with surcease. You say you have escaped
+satiety! You have merely bartered it for senility. And senility is
+another name for satiety. It is satiety's masquerade. Bah!"
+
+"But look at me!" I cried.
+
+Carquinez was ever a demon for haling ones soul out and making rags and
+tatters of it.
+
+He looked me witheringly up and down.
+
+"You see no signs," I challenged.
+
+"Decay is insidious," he retorted. "You are rotten ripe."
+
+I laughed and forgave him for his very deviltry. But he refused to be
+forgiven.
+
+"Do I not know?" he asked. "The gods always win. I have watched men play
+for years what seemed a winning game. In the end they lost."
+
+"Don't you ever make mistakes?" I asked.
+
+He blew many meditative rings of smoke before replying.
+
+"Yes, I was nearly fooled, once. Let me tell you. There was Marvin
+Fiske. You remember him? And his Dantesque face and poet's soul, singing
+his chant of the flesh, the very priest of Love? And there was Ethel
+Baird, whom also you must remember."
+
+"A warm saint," I said.
+
+"That is she! Holy as Love, and sweeter! Just a woman, made for love;
+and yet--how shall I say?--drenched through with holiness as your own
+air here is with the perfume of flowers. Well, they married. They played
+a hand with the gods--"
+
+"And they won, they gloriously won!" I broke in.
+
+Carquinez looked at me pityingly, and his voice was like a funeral bell.
+
+"They lost. They supremely, colossally lost."
+
+"But the world believes otherwise," I ventured coldly.
+
+"The world conjectures. The world sees only the face of things. But I
+know. Has it ever entered your mind to wonder why she took the veil,
+buried herself in that dolorous convent of the living dead?"
+
+"Because she loved him so, and when he died..."
+
+Speech was frozen on my lips by Carquinez's sneer.
+
+"A pat answer," he said, "machine-made like a piece of cotton-drill. The
+world's judgment! And much the world knows about it. Like you, she fled
+from life. She was beaten. She flung out the white flag of fatigue. And
+no beleaguered city ever flew that flag in such bitterness and tears.
+
+"Now I shall tell you the whole tale, and you must believe me, for I
+know. They had pondered the problem of satiety. They loved Love. They
+knew to the uttermost farthing the value of Love. They loved him so
+well that they were fain to keep him always, warm and a-thrill in their
+hearts. They welcomed his coming; they feared to have him depart.
+
+"Love was desire, they held, a delicious pain. He was ever seeking
+easement, and when he found that for which he sought, he died. Love
+denied was Love alive; Love granted was Love deceased. Do you follow me?
+They saw it was not the way of life to be hungry for what it has. To eat
+and still be hungry--man has never accomplished that feat. The problem
+of satiety. That is it. To have and to keep the sharp famine-edge of
+appetite at the groaning board. This was their problem, for they loved
+Love. Often did they discuss it, with all Love's sweet ardours brimming
+in their eyes; his ruddy blood spraying their cheeks; his voice playing
+in and out with their voices, now hiding as a tremolo in their throats,
+and again shading a tone with that ineffable tenderness which he alone
+can utter.
+
+"How do I know all this? I saw--much. More I learned from her diary.
+This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wandering
+voice, that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that
+flame-winged lute-player whom none sees but for a moment, in a
+rainbow-shimmer of joy, or a sudden lightning-flare of passion, this
+exquisite mystery we call Amor, comes, to some rapt visionaries at
+least, not with a song upon the lips that all may hear, or with blithe
+viol of public music, but as one wrought by ecstasy, dumbly eloquent
+with desire.'
+
+"How to keep the flame-winged lute-player with his dumb eloquence of
+desire? To feast him was to lose him. Their love for each other was a
+great love. Their granaries were overflowing with plenitude; yet they
+wanted to keep the sharp famine-edge of their love undulled.
+
+"Nor were they lean little fledglings theorizing on the threshold of
+Love. They were robust and realized souls. They had loved before,
+with others, in the days before they met; and in those days they had
+throttled Love with caresses, and killed him with kisses, and buried him
+in the pit of satiety.
+
+"They were not cold wraiths, this man and woman. They were warm human.
+They had no Saxon soberness in their blood. The colour of it was
+sunset-red. They glowed with it. Temperamentally theirs was the French
+joy in the flesh. They were idealists, but their idealism was Gallic.
+It was not tempered by the chill and sombre fluid that for the English
+serves as blood. There was no stoicism about them. They were Americans,
+descended out of the English, and yet the refraining and self-denying of
+the English spirit-groping were not theirs.
+
+"They were all this that I have said, and they were made for joy, only
+they achieved a concept. A curse on concepts! They played with logic,
+and this was their logic.--But first let me tell you of a talk we had
+one night. It was of Gautier's Madeline de Maupin. You remember the
+maid? She kissed once, and once only, and kisses she would have no
+more. Not that she found kisses were not sweet, but that she feared with
+repetition they would cloy. Satiety again! She tried to play without
+stakes against the gods. Now this is contrary to a rule of the game the
+gods themselves have made. Only the rules are not posted over the table.
+Mortals must play in order to learn the rules.
+
+"Well, to the logic. The man and the woman argued thus: Why kiss once
+only? If to kiss once were wise, was it not wiser to kiss not at all?
+Thus could they keep Love alive. Fasting, he would knock forever at
+their hearts.
+
+"Perhaps it was out of their heredity that they achieved this unholy
+concept. The breed will out and sometimes most fantastically. Thus
+in them did cursed Albion array herself a scheming wanton, a bold,
+cold-calculating, and artful hussy. After all, I do not know. But this
+I know: it was out of their inordinate desire for joy that they forewent
+joy.
+
+"As he said (I read it long afterward in one of his letters to her):
+'To hold you in my arms, close, and yet not close. To yearn for you, and
+never to have you, and so always to have you.' And she: 'For you to be
+always just beyond my reach. To be ever attaining you, and yet never
+attaining you, and for this to last forever, always fresh and new, and
+always with the first flush upon us.
+
+"That is not the way they said it. On my lips their love-philosophy is
+mangled. And who am I to delve into their soul-stuff? I am a frog, on
+the dank edge of a great darkness, gazing goggle-eyed at the mystery and
+wonder of their flaming souls.
+
+"And they were right, as far as they went. Everything is good... as long
+as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death's horses; they
+run in span.
+
+     "'And time could only tutor us to eke
+       Our rapture's warmth with custom's afterglow.'
+
+"They got that from a sonnet of Alfred Austin's. It was called 'Love's
+Wisdom.' It was the one kiss of Madeline de Maupin. How did it run?
+
+     "'Kiss we and part; no further can we go;
+       And better death than we from high to low
+   Should dwindle, or decline from strong to weak.'
+
+"But they were wiser. They would not kiss and part. They would not
+kiss at all, and thus they planned to stay at Love's topmost peak. They
+married. You were in England at the time. And never was there such a
+marriage. They kept their secret to themselves. I did not know, then.
+Their rapture's warmth did not cool. Their love burned with increasing
+brightness. Never was there anything like it. The time passed, the
+months, the years, and ever the flame-winged lute-player grew more
+resplendent.
+
+"Everybody marvelled. They became the wonderful lovers, and they were
+greatly envied. Sometimes women pitied her because she was childless; it
+is the form the envy of such creatures takes.
+
+"And I did not know their secret. I pondered and I marvelled. As first I
+had expected, subconsciously I imagine, the passing of their love. Then
+I became aware that it was Time that passed and Love that remained. Then
+I became curious. What was their secret? What were the magic fetters
+with which they bound Love to them? How did they hold the graceless elf?
+What elixir of eternal love had they drunk together as had Tristram and
+Iseult of old time? And whose hand had brewed the fairy drink?
+
+"As I say, I was curious, and I watched them. They were love-mad. They
+lived in an unending revel of Love. They made a pomp and ceremonial of
+it. They saturated themselves in the art and poetry of Love. No, they
+were not neurotics. They were sane and healthy, and they were artists.
+But they had accomplished the impossible. They had achieved deathless
+desire.
+
+"And I? I saw much of them and their everlasting miracle of Love. I
+puzzled and wondered, and then one day--"
+
+Carquinez broke off abruptly and asked, "Have you ever read, 'Love's
+Waiting Time'?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Page wrote it--Curtis Hidden Page, I think. Well, it was that bit of
+verse that gave me the clue. One day, in the window-seat near the big
+piano--you remember how she could play? She used to laugh, sometimes,
+and doubt whether it was for them I came, or for the music. She called
+me a 'music-sot' once, a 'sound-debauchee.' What a voice he had! When
+he sang I believed in immortality, my regard for the gods grew almost
+patronizing and I devised ways and means whereby I surely could outwit
+them and their tricks.
+
+"It was a spectacle for God, that man and woman, years married, and
+singing love-songs with a freshness virginal as new-born Love himself,
+with a ripeness and wealth of ardour that young lovers can never know.
+Young lovers were pale and anaemic beside that long-married pair. To
+see them, all fire and flame and tenderness, at a trembling distance,
+lavishing caresses of eye and voice with every action, through every
+silence--their love driving them toward each other, and they withholding
+like fluttering moths, each to the other a candle-flame, and revolving
+each about the other in the mad gyrations of an amazing orbit-flight!
+It seemed, in obedience to some great law of physics, more potent than
+gravitation and more subtle, that they must corporeally melt each
+into each there before my very eyes. Small wonder they were called the
+wonderful lovers.
+
+"I have wandered. Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I found
+a book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to 'Love's
+Waiting Time.' The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, and
+there I read:--
+
+     "'So sweet it is to stand but just apart,
+       To know each other better, and to keep
+       The soft, delicious sense of two that touch...
+
+       O love, not yet!...  Sweet, let us keep our love
+       Wrapped round with sacred mystery awhile,
+       Waiting the secret of the coming years,
+       That come not yet, not yet... sometime...
+                    not yet...
+
+       Oh, yet a little while our love may grow!
+       When it has blossomed it will haply die.
+       Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep,
+       Bedded in dead denial yet some while...
+       Oh, yet a little while, a little while.'
+
+"I folded the book on my thumb and sat there silent and without moving
+for a long time. I was stunned by the clearness of vision the verse
+had imparted to me. It was illumination. It was like a bolt of God's
+lightning in the Pit. They would keep Love, the fickle sprite, the
+forerunner of young life--young life that is imperative to be born!
+
+"I conned the lines over in my mind--'Not yet, sometime'--'O Love, not
+yet'--'Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep.' And I laughed
+aloud, ha, ha! I saw with white vision their blameless souls. They were
+children. They did not understand. They played with Nature's fire and
+bedded with a naked sword. They laughed at the gods. They would stop
+the cosmic sap. They had invented a system, and brought it to the
+gaming-table of life, and expected to win out. 'Beware!' I cried. 'The
+gods are behind the table. They make new rules for every system that is
+devised. You have no chance to win.'
+
+"But I did not so cry to them. I waited. They would learn that their
+system was worthless and throw it away. They would be content with
+whatever happiness the gods gave them and not strive to wrest more away.
+
+"I watched. I said nothing. The months continued to come and go, and
+still the famine-edge of their love grew the sharper. Never did they
+dull it with a permitted love-clasp. They ground and whetted it on
+self-denial, and sharper and sharper it grew. This went on until even I
+doubted. Did the gods sleep? I wondered. Or were they dead? I laughed
+to myself. The man and the woman had made a miracle. They had outwitted
+God. They had shamed the flesh, and blackened the face of the good Earth
+Mother. They had played with her fire and not been burned. They were
+immune. They were themselves gods, knowing good from evil and tasting
+not. 'Was this the way gods came to be?' I asked myself. 'I am a frog,'
+I said. 'But for my mud-lidded eyes I should have been blinded by the
+brightness of this wonder I have witnessed. I have puffed myself up with
+my wisdom and passed judgment upon gods.'
+
+"Yet even in this, my latest wisdom, I was wrong. They were not gods.
+They were man and woman--soft clay that sighed and thrilled, shot
+through with desire, thumbed with strange weaknesses which the gods have
+not."
+
+Carquinez broke from his narrative to roll another cigarette and to
+laugh harshly. It was not a pretty laugh; it was like the mockery of a
+devil, and it rose over and rode the roar of the storm that came muffled
+to our ears from the crashing outside world.
+
+"I am a frog," he said apologetically. "How were they to understand?
+They were artists, not biologists. They knew the clay of the studio, but
+they did not know the clay of which they themselves were made. But this
+I will say--they played high. Never was there such a game before, and I
+doubt me if there will ever be such a game again.
+
+"Never was lovers' ecstasy like theirs. They had not killed Love with
+kisses. They had quickened him with denial. And by denial they drove him
+on till he was all aburst with desire. And the flame-winged lute-player
+fanned them with his warm wings till they were all but swooning. It was
+the very delirium of Love, and it continued undiminished and increasing
+through the weeks and months.
+
+"They longed and yearned, with all the fond pangs and sweet delicious
+agonies, with an intensity never felt by lovers before nor since.
+
+"And then one day the drowsy gods ceased nodding. They aroused and
+looked at the man and woman who had made a mock of them. And the man and
+woman looked into each other's eyes one morning and knew that something
+was gone. It was the flame-winged one. He had fled, silently, in the
+night, from their anchorites' board.
+
+"They looked into each other's eyes and knew that they did not care.
+Desire was dead. Do you understand? Desire was dead. And they had never
+kissed. Not once had they kissed. Love was gone. They would never yearn
+and burn again. For them there was nothing left--no more tremblings and
+flutterings and delicious anguishes, no more throbbing and pulsing, and
+sighing and song. Desire was dead. It had died in the night, on a couch
+cold and unattended; nor had they witnessed its passing. They learned it
+for the first time in each other's eyes.
+
+"The gods may not be kind, but they are often merciful. They had twirled
+the little ivory ball and swept the stakes from the table. All that
+remained was the man and woman gazing into each other's cold eyes.
+And then he died. That was the mercy. Within the week Marvin Fiske was
+dead--you remember the accident. And in her diary, written at this time,
+I long afterward read Mitchell Kennerly's:--
+
+     "'There was not a single hour
+       We might have kissed and did not kiss.'"
+
+"Oh, the irony of it!" I cried out.
+
+And Carquinez, in the firelight a veritable Mephistopheles in velvet
+jacket, fixed me with his black eyes.
+
+"And they won, you said? The world's judgment! I have told you, and I
+know. They won as you are winning, here in your hills."
+
+"But you," I demanded hotly; "you with your orgies of sound and sense,
+with your mad cities and madder frolics--bethink you that you win?"
+
+He shook his head slowly. "Because you with your sober bucolic regime,
+lose, is no reason that I should win. We never win. Sometimes we think
+we win. That is a little pleasantry of the gods."
+
+
+
+
+THE APOSTATE
+
+     "Now I wake me up to work;
+      I pray the Lord I may not shirk.
+      If I should die before the night,
+      I pray the Lord my work's all right.
+                                    Amen."
+
+"If you don't git up, Johnny, I won't give you a bite to eat!"
+
+The threat had no effect on the boy. He clung stubbornly to sleep,
+fighting for its oblivion as the dreamer fights for his dream. The boy's
+hands loosely clenched themselves, and he made feeble, spasmodic blows
+at the air. These blows were intended for his mother, but she betrayed
+practised familiarity in avoiding them as she shook him roughly by the
+shoulder.
+
+"Lemme 'lone!"
+
+It was a cry that began, muffled, in the deeps of sleep, that swiftly
+rushed upward, like a wail, into passionate belligerence, and that died
+away and sank down into an inarticulate whine. It was a bestial cry, as
+of a soul in torment, filled with infinite protest and pain.
+
+But she did not mind. She was a sad-eyed, tired-faced woman, and she had
+grown used to this task, which she repeated every day of her life. She
+got a grip on the bedclothes and tried to strip them down; but the boy,
+ceasing his punching, clung to them desperately. In a huddle, at the
+foot of the bed, he still remained covered. Then she tried dragging the
+bedding to the floor. The boy opposed her. She braced herself. Hers
+was the superior weight, and the boy and bedding gave, the former
+instinctively following the latter in order to shelter against the chill
+of the room that bit into his body.
+
+As he toppled on the edge of the bed it seemed that he must fall
+head-first to the floor. But consciousness fluttered up in him. He
+righted himself and for a moment perilously balanced. Then he struck the
+floor on his feet. On the instant his mother seized him by the shoulders
+and shook him. Again his fists struck out, this time with more force and
+directness. At the same time his eyes opened. She released him. He was
+awake.
+
+"All right," he mumbled.
+
+She caught up the lamp and hurried out, leaving him in darkness.
+
+"You'll be docked," she warned back to him.
+
+He did not mind the darkness. When he had got into his clothes, he went
+out into the kitchen. His tread was very heavy for so thin and light a
+boy. His legs dragged with their own weight, which seemed unreasonable
+because they were such skinny legs. He drew a broken-bottomed chair to
+the table.
+
+"Johnny," his mother called sharply.
+
+He arose as sharply from the chair, and, without a word, went to the
+sink. It was a greasy, filthy sink. A smell came up from the outlet. He
+took no notice of it. That a sink should smell was to him part of the
+natural order, just as it was a part of the natural order that the soap
+should be grimy with dish-water and hard to lather. Nor did he try very
+hard to make it lather. Several splashes of the cold water from the
+running faucet completed the function. He did not wash his teeth. For
+that matter he had never seen a toothbrush, nor did he know that there
+existed beings in the world who were guilty of so great a foolishness as
+tooth washing.
+
+"You might wash yourself wunst a day without bein' told," his mother
+complained.
+
+She was holding a broken lid on the pot as she poured two cups of
+coffee. He made no remark, for this was a standing quarrel between them,
+and the one thing upon which his mother was hard as adamant. "Wunst" a
+day it was compulsory that he should wash his face. He dried himself on
+a greasy towel, damp and dirty and ragged, that left his face covered
+with shreds of lint.
+
+"I wish we didn't live so far away," she said, as he sat down. "I try
+to do the best I can. You know that. But a dollar on the rent is such a
+savin', an' we've more room here. You know that."
+
+He scarcely followed her. He had heard it all before, many times. The
+range of her thought was limited, and she was ever harking back to the
+hardship worked upon them by living so far from the mills.
+
+"A dollar means more grub," he remarked sententiously. "I'd sooner do
+the walkin' an' git the grub."
+
+He ate hurriedly, half chewing the bread and washing the unmasticated
+chunks down with coffee. The hot and muddy liquid went by the name of
+coffee. Johnny thought it was coffee--and excellent coffee. That was one
+of the few of life's illusions that remained to him. He had never drunk
+real coffee in his life.
+
+In addition to the bread, there was a small piece of cold pork. His
+mother refilled his cup with coffee. As he was finishing the bread, he
+began to watch if more was forthcoming. She intercepted his questioning
+glance.
+
+"Now, don't be hoggish, Johnny," was her comment. "You've had your
+share. Your brothers an' sisters are smaller'n you."
+
+He did not answer the rebuke. He was not much of a talker. Also, he
+ceased his hungry glancing for more. He was uncomplaining, with a
+patience that was as terrible as the school in which it had been
+learned. He finished his coffee, wiped his mouth on the back of his
+hand, and started to rise.
+
+"Wait a second," she said hastily. "I guess the loaf kin stand you
+another slice--a thin un."
+
+There was legerdemain in her actions. With all the seeming of cutting
+a slice from the loaf for him, she put loaf and slice back in the bread
+box and conveyed to him one of her own two slices. She believed she had
+deceived him, but he had noted her sleight-of-hand. Nevertheless, he
+took the bread shamelessly. He had a philosophy that his mother, because
+of her chronic sickliness, was not much of an eater anyway.
+
+She saw that he was chewing the bread dry, and reached over and emptied
+her coffee cup into his.
+
+"Don't set good somehow on my stomach this morning," she explained.
+
+A distant whistle, prolonged and shrieking, brought both of them to
+their feet. She glanced at the tin alarm-clock on the shelf. The hands
+stood at half-past five. The rest of the factory world was just arousing
+from sleep. She drew a shawl about her shoulders, and on her head put a
+dingy hat, shapeless and ancient.
+
+"We've got to run," she said, turning the wick of the lamp and blowing
+down the chimney.
+
+They groped their way out and down the stairs. It was clear and cold,
+and Johnny shivered at the first contact with the outside air. The stars
+had not yet begun to pale in the sky, and the city lay in blackness.
+Both Johnny and his mother shuffled their feet as they walked. There was
+no ambition in the leg muscles to swing the feet clear of the ground.
+
+After fifteen silent minutes, his mother turned off to the right.
+
+"Don't be late," was her final warning from out of the dark that was
+swallowing her up.
+
+He made no response, steadily keeping on his way. In the factory
+quarter, doors were opening everywhere, and he was soon one of a
+multitude that pressed onward through the dark. As he entered the
+factory gate the whistle blew again. He glanced at the east. Across a
+ragged sky-line of housetops a pale light was beginning to creep. This
+much he saw of the day as he turned his back upon it and joined his work
+gang.
+
+He took his place in one of many long rows of machines. Before him,
+above a bin filled with small bobbins, were large bobbins revolving
+rapidly. Upon these he wound the jute-twine of the small bobbins. The
+work was simple. All that was required was celerity. The small bobbins
+were emptied so rapidly, and there were so many large bobbins that did
+the emptying, that there were no idle moments.
+
+He worked mechanically. When a small bobbin ran out, he used his left
+hand for a brake, stopping the large bobbin and at the same time, with
+thumb and forefinger, catching the flying end of twine. Also, at the
+same time, with his right hand, he caught up the loose twine-end of
+a small bobbin. These various acts with both hands were performed
+simultaneously and swiftly. Then there would come a flash of his hands
+as he looped the weaver's knot and released the bobbin. There was
+nothing difficult about weaver's knots. He once boasted he could tie
+them in his sleep. And for that matter, he sometimes did, toiling
+centuries long in a single night at tying an endless succession of
+weaver's knots.
+
+Some of the boys shirked, wasting time and machinery by not replacing
+the small bobbins when they ran out. And there was an overseer to
+prevent this. He caught Johnny's neighbour at the trick, and boxed his
+ears.
+
+"Look at Johnny there--why ain't you like him?" the overseer wrathfully
+demanded.
+
+Johnny's bobbins were running full blast, but he did not thrill at the
+indirect praise. There had been a time... but that was long ago, very
+long ago. His apathetic face was expressionless as he listened to
+himself being held up as a shining example. He was the perfect worker.
+He knew that. He had been told so, often. It was a commonplace, and
+besides it didn't seem to mean anything to him any more. From the
+perfect worker he had evolved into the perfect machine. When his work
+went wrong, it was with him as with the machine, due to faulty material.
+It would have been as possible for a perfect nail-die to cut imperfect
+nails as for him to make a mistake.
+
+And small wonder. There had never been a time when he had not been in
+intimate relationship with machines. Machinery had almost been bred into
+him, and at any rate he had been brought up on it. Twelve years before,
+there had been a small flutter of excitement in the loom room of this
+very mill. Johnny's mother had fainted. They stretched her out on the
+floor in the midst of the shrieking machines. A couple of elderly women
+were called from their looms. The foreman assisted. And in a few minutes
+there was one more soul in the loom room than had entered by the doors.
+It was Johnny, born with the pounding, crashing roar of the looms in his
+ears, drawing with his first breath the warm, moist air that was thick
+with flying lint. He had coughed that first day in order to rid his
+lungs of the lint; and for the same reason he had coughed ever since.
+
+The boy alongside of Johnny whimpered and sniffed. The boy's face was
+convulsed with hatred for the overseer who kept a threatening eye on
+him from a distance; but every bobbin was running full. The boy yelled
+terrible oaths into the whirling bobbins before him; but the sound did
+not carry half a dozen feet, the roaring of the room holding it in and
+containing it like a wall.
+
+Of all this Johnny took no notice. He had a way of accepting things.
+Besides, things grow monotonous by repetition, and this particular
+happening he had witnessed many times. It seemed to him as useless to
+oppose the overseer as to defy the will of a machine. Machines were made
+to go in certain ways and to perform certain tasks. It was the same with
+the overseer.
+
+But at eleven o'clock there was excitement in the room. In an apparently
+occult way the excitement instantly permeated everywhere. The one-legged
+boy who worked on the other side of Johnny bobbed swiftly across the
+floor to a bin truck that stood empty. Into this he dived out of
+sight, crutch and all. The superintendent of the mill was coming along,
+accompanied by a young man. He was well dressed and wore a starched
+shirt--a gentleman, in Johnny's classification of men, and also, "the
+Inspector."
+
+He looked sharply at the boys as he passed along. Sometimes he stopped
+and asked questions. When he did so, he was compelled to shout at the
+top of his lungs, at which moments his face was ludicrously contorted
+with the strain of making himself heard. His quick eye noted the empty
+machine alongside of Johnny's, but he said nothing. Johnny also caught
+his eye, and he stopped abruptly. He caught Johnny by the arm to draw
+him back a step from the machine; but with an exclamation of surprise he
+released the arm.
+
+"Pretty skinny," the superintendent laughed anxiously.
+
+"Pipe stems," was the answer. "Look at those legs. The boy's got the
+rickets--incipient, but he's got them. If epilepsy doesn't get him in
+the end, it will be because tuberculosis gets him first."
+
+Johnny listened, but did not understand. Furthermore he was not
+interested in future ills. There was an immediate and more serious ill
+that threatened him in the form of the inspector.
+
+"Now, my boy, I want you to tell me the truth," the inspector said, or
+shouted, bending close to the boy's ear to make him hear. "How old are
+you?"
+
+"Fourteen," Johnny lied, and he lied with the full force of his lungs.
+So loudly did he lie that it started him off in a dry, hacking cough
+that lifted the lint which had been settling in his lungs all morning.
+
+"Looks sixteen at least," said the superintendent.
+
+"Or sixty," snapped the inspector.
+
+"He's always looked that way."
+
+"How long?" asked the inspector, quickly.
+
+"For years. Never gets a bit older."
+
+"Or younger, I dare say. I suppose he's worked here all those years?"
+
+"Off and on--but that was before the new law was passed," the
+superintendent hastened to add.
+
+"Machine idle?" the inspector asked, pointing at the unoccupied machine
+beside Johnny's, in which the part-filled bobbins were flying like mad.
+
+"Looks that way." The superintendent motioned the overseer to him and
+shouted in his ear and pointed at the machine. "Machine's idle," he
+reported back to the inspector.
+
+They passed on, and Johnny returned to his work, relieved in that the
+ill had been averted. But the one-legged boy was not so fortunate. The
+sharp-eyed inspector haled him out at arms length from the bin truck.
+His lips were quivering, and his face had all the expression of one upon
+whom was fallen profound and irremediable disaster. The overseer looked
+astounded, as though for the first time he had laid eyes on the boy,
+while the superintendent's face expressed shock and displeasure.
+
+"I know him," the inspector said. "He's twelve years old. I've had him
+discharged from three factories inside the year. This makes the fourth."
+
+He turned to the one-legged boy. "You promised me, word and honour, that
+you'd go to school."
+
+The one-legged boy burst into tears. "Please, Mr. Inspector, two babies
+died on us, and we're awful poor."
+
+"What makes you cough that way?" the inspector demanded, as though
+charging him with crime.
+
+And as in denial of guilt, the one-legged boy replied: "It ain't
+nothin'. I jes' caught a cold last week, Mr. Inspector, that's all."
+
+In the end the one-legged boy went out of the room with the inspector,
+the latter accompanied by the anxious and protesting superintendent.
+After that monotony settled down again. The long morning and the longer
+afternoon wore away and the whistle blew for quitting time. Darkness had
+already fallen when Johnny passed out through the factory gate. In the
+interval the sun had made a golden ladder of the sky, flooded the world
+with its gracious warmth, and dropped down and disappeared in the west
+behind a ragged sky-line of housetops.
+
+Supper was the family meal of the day--the one meal at which Johnny
+encountered his younger brothers and sisters. It partook of the
+nature of an encounter, to him, for he was very old, while they were
+distressingly young. He had no patience with their excessive and amazing
+juvenility. He did not understand it. His own childhood was too far
+behind him. He was like an old and irritable man, annoyed by the
+turbulence of their young spirits that was to him arrant silliness. He
+glowered silently over his food, finding compensation in the thought
+that they would soon have to go to work. That would take the edge off
+of them and make them sedate and dignified--like him. Thus it was, after
+the fashion of the human, that Johnny made of himself a yardstick with
+which to measure the universe.
+
+During the meal, his mother explained in various ways and with infinite
+repetition that she was trying to do the best she could; so that it was
+with relief, the scant meal ended, that Johnny shoved back his chair
+and arose. He debated for a moment between bed and the front door,
+and finally went out the latter. He did not go far. He sat down on the
+stoop, his knees drawn up and his narrow shoulders drooping forward, his
+elbows on his knees and the palms of his hands supporting his chin.
+
+As he sat there, he did no thinking. He was just resting. So far as his
+mind was concerned, it was asleep. His brothers and sisters came out,
+and with other children played noisily about him. An electric globe at
+the corner lighted their frolics. He was peevish and irritable, that
+they knew; but the spirit of adventure lured them into teasing him. They
+joined hands before him, and, keeping time with their bodies, chanted in
+his face weird and uncomplimentary doggerel. At first he snarled curses
+at them--curses he had learned from the lips of various foremen. Finding
+this futile, and remembering his dignity, he relapsed into dogged
+silence.
+
+His brother Will, next to him in age, having just passed his tenth
+birthday, was the ringleader. Johnny did not possess particularly kindly
+feelings toward him. His life had early been embittered by continual
+giving over and giving way to Will. He had a definite feeling that
+Will was greatly in his debt and was ungrateful about it. In his own
+playtime, far back in the dim past, he had been robbed of a large part
+of that playtime by being compelled to take care of Will. Will was a
+baby then, and then, as now, their mother had spent her days in the
+mills. To Johnny had fallen the part of little father and little mother
+as well.
+
+Will seemed to show the benefit of the giving over and the giving way.
+He was well-built, fairly rugged, as tall as his elder brother and even
+heavier. It was as though the life-blood of the one had been diverted
+into the other's veins. And in spirits it was the same. Johnny was
+jaded, worn out, without resilience, while his younger brother seemed
+bursting and spilling over with exuberance.
+
+The mocking chant rose louder and louder. Will leaned closer as he
+danced, thrusting out his tongue. Johnny's left arm shot out and caught
+the other around the neck. At the same time he rapped his bony fist to
+the other's nose. It was a pathetically bony fist, but that it was
+sharp to hurt was evidenced by the squeal of pain it produced. The other
+children were uttering frightened cries, while Johnny's sister, Jennie,
+had dashed into the house.
+
+He thrust Will from him, kicked him savagely on the shins, then reached
+for him and slammed him face downward in the dirt. Nor did he release
+him till the face had been rubbed into the dirt several times. Then the
+mother arrived, an anaemic whirlwind of solicitude and maternal wrath.
+
+"Why can't he leave me alone?" was Johnny's reply to her upbraiding.
+"Can't he see I'm tired?"
+
+"I'm as big as you," Will raged in her arms, his face a mass of tears,
+dirt, and blood. "I'm as big as you now, an' I'm goin' to git bigger.
+Then I'll lick you--see if I don't."
+
+"You ought to be to work, seein' how big you are," Johnny snarled.
+"That's what's the matter with you. You ought to be to work. An' it's up
+to your ma to put you to work."
+
+"But he's too young," she protested. "He's only a little boy."
+
+"I was younger'n him when I started to work."
+
+Johnny's mouth was open, further to express the sense of unfairness that
+he felt, but the mouth closed with a snap. He turned gloomily on his
+heel and stalked into the house and to bed. The door of his room
+was open to let in warmth from the kitchen. As he undressed in the
+semi-darkness he could hear his mother talking with a neighbour woman
+who had dropped in. His mother was crying, and her speech was punctuated
+with spiritless sniffles.
+
+"I can't make out what's gittin' into Johnny," he could hear her say.
+"He didn't used to be this way. He was a patient little angel.
+
+"An' he is a good boy," she hastened to defend. "He's worked faithful,
+an' he did go to work too young. But it wasn't my fault. I do the best I
+can, I'm sure."
+
+Prolonged sniffling from the kitchen, and Johnny murmured to himself as
+his eyelids closed down, "You betcher life I've worked faithful."
+
+The next morning he was torn bodily by his mother from the grip of
+sleep. Then came the meagre breakfast, the tramp through the dark, and
+the pale glimpse of day across the housetops as he turned his back on
+it and went in through the factory gate. It was another day, of all the
+days, and all the days were alike.
+
+And yet there had been variety in his life--at the times he changed from
+one job to another, or was taken sick. When he was six, he was little
+mother and father to Will and the other children still younger. At seven
+he went into the mills--winding bobbins. When he was eight, he got work
+in another mill. His new job was marvellously easy. All he had to do was
+to sit down with a little stick in his hand and guide a stream of cloth
+that flowed past him. This stream of cloth came out of the maw of a
+machine, passed over a hot roller, and went on its way elsewhere. But he
+sat always in one place, beyond the reach of daylight, a gas-jet flaring
+over him, himself part of the mechanism.
+
+He was very happy at that job, in spite of the moist heat, for he was
+still young and in possession of dreams and illusions. And wonderful
+dreams he dreamed as he watched the steaming cloth streaming endlessly
+by. But there was no exercise about the work, no call upon his mind,
+and he dreamed less and less, while his mind grew torpid and drowsy.
+Nevertheless, he earned two dollars a week, and two dollars represented
+the difference between acute starvation and chronic underfeeding.
+
+But when he was nine, he lost his job. Measles was the cause of it.
+After he recovered, he got work in a glass factory. The pay was better,
+and the work demanded skill. It was piecework, and the more skilful
+he was, the bigger wages he earned. Here was incentive. And under this
+incentive he developed into a remarkable worker.
+
+It was simple work, the tying of glass stoppers into small bottles. At
+his waist he carried a bundle of twine. He held the bottles between his
+knees so that he might work with both hands. Thus, in a sitting position
+and bending over his own knees, his narrow shoulders grew humped and his
+chest was contracted for ten hours each day. This was not good for the
+lungs, but he tied three hundred dozen bottles a day.
+
+The superintendent was very proud of him, and brought visitors to look
+at him. In ten hours three hundred dozen bottles passed through his
+hands. This meant that he had attained machine-like perfection. All
+waste movements were eliminated. Every motion of his thin arms, every
+movement of a muscle in the thin fingers, was swift and accurate. He
+worked at high tension, and the result was that he grew nervous. At
+night his muscles twitched in his sleep, and in the daytime he could
+not relax and rest. He remained keyed up and his muscles continued
+to twitch. Also he grew sallow and his lint-cough grew worse. Then
+pneumonia laid hold of the feeble lungs within the contracted chest, and
+he lost his job in the glass-works.
+
+Now he had returned to the jute mills where he had first begun with
+winding bobbins. But promotion was waiting for him. He was a good
+worker. He would next go on the starcher, and later he would go into the
+loom room. There was nothing after that except increased efficiency.
+
+The machinery ran faster than when he had first gone to work, and his
+mind ran slower. He no longer dreamed at all, though his earlier years
+had been full of dreaming. Once he had been in love. It was when he
+first began guiding the cloth over the hot roller, and it was with the
+daughter of the superintendent. She was much older than he, a young
+woman, and he had seen her at a distance only a paltry half-dozen times.
+But that made no difference. On the surface of the cloth stream that
+poured past him, he pictured radiant futures wherein he performed
+prodigies of toil, invented miraculous machines, won to the mastership
+of the mills, and in the end took her in his arms and kissed her soberly
+on the brow.
+
+But that was all in the long ago, before he had grown too old and tired
+to love. Also, she had married and gone away, and his mind had gone to
+sleep. Yet it had been a wonderful experience, and he used often to
+look back upon it as other men and women look back upon the time they
+believed in fairies. He had never believed in fairies nor Santa Claus;
+but he had believed implicitly in the smiling future his imagination had
+wrought into the steaming cloth stream.
+
+He had become a man very early in life. At seven, when he drew his first
+wages, began his adolescence. A certain feeling of independence crept
+up in him, and the relationship between him and his mother changed.
+Somehow, as an earner and breadwinner, doing his own work in the world,
+he was more like an equal with her. Manhood, full-blown manhood, had
+come when he was eleven, at which time he had gone to work on the night
+shift for six months. No child works on the night shift and remains a
+child.
+
+There had been several great events in his life. One of these had been
+when his mother bought some California prunes. Two others had been the
+two times when she cooked custard. Those had been events. He remembered
+them kindly. And at that time his mother had told him of a blissful dish
+she would sometime make--"floating island," she had called it, "better
+than custard." For years he had looked forward to the day when he would
+sit down to the table with floating island before him, until at last he
+had relegated the idea of it to the limbo of unattainable ideals.
+
+Once he found a silver quarter lying on the sidewalk. That, also, was
+a great event in his life, withal a tragic one. He knew his duty on the
+instant the silver flashed on his eyes, before even he had picked it up.
+At home, as usual, there was not enough to eat, and home he should have
+taken it as he did his wages every Saturday night. Right conduct in this
+case was obvious; but he never had any spending of his money, and he was
+suffering from candy hunger. He was ravenous for the sweets that only on
+red-letter days he had ever tasted in his life.
+
+He did not attempt to deceive himself. He knew it was sin, and
+deliberately he sinned when he went on a fifteen-cent candy debauch.
+Ten cents he saved for a future orgy; but not being accustomed to the
+carrying of money, he lost the ten cents. This occurred at the time when
+he was suffering all the torments of conscience, and it was to him an
+act of divine retribution. He had a frightened sense of the closeness
+of an awful and wrathful God. God had seen, and God had been swift to
+punish, denying him even the full wages of sin.
+
+In memory he always looked back upon that as the one great criminal deed
+of his life, and at the recollection his conscience always awoke and
+gave him another twinge. It was the one skeleton in his closet. Also,
+being so made, and circumstanced, he looked back upon the deed with
+regret. He was dissatisfied with the manner in which he had spent
+the quarter. He could have invested it better, and, out of his later
+knowledge of the quickness of God, he would have beaten God out by
+spending the whole quarter at one fell swoop. In retrospect he spent the
+quarter a thousand times, and each time to better advantage.
+
+There was one other memory of the past, dim and faded, but stamped into
+his soul everlasting by the savage feet of his father. It was more like
+a nightmare than a remembered vision of a concrete thing--more like the
+race-memory of man that makes him fall in his sleep and that goes back
+to his arboreal ancestry.
+
+This particular memory never came to Johnny in broad daylight when
+he was wide awake. It came at night, in bed, at the moment that his
+consciousness was sinking down and losing itself in sleep. It always
+aroused him to frightened wakefulness, and for the moment, in the first
+sickening start, it seemed to him that he lay crosswise on the foot of
+the bed. In the bed were the vague forms of his father and mother. He
+never saw what his father looked like. He had but one impression of his
+father, and that was that he had savage and pitiless feet.
+
+His earlier memories lingered with him, but he had no late memories.
+All days were alike. Yesterday or last year were the same as a thousand
+years--or a minute. Nothing ever happened. There were no events to mark
+the march of time. Time did not march. It stood always still. It was
+only the whirling machines that moved, and they moved nowhere--in spite
+of the fact that they moved faster.
+
+When he was fourteen, he went to work on the starcher. It was a colossal
+event. Something had at last happened that could be remembered beyond
+a night's sleep or a week's pay-day. It marked an era. It was a machine
+Olympiad, a thing to date from. "When I went to work on the starcher,"
+or, "after," or "before I went to work on the starcher," were sentences
+often on his lips.
+
+He celebrated his sixteenth birthday by going into the loom room and
+taking a loom. Here was an incentive again, for it was piece-work. And
+he excelled, because the clay of him had been moulded by the mills
+into the perfect machine. At the end of three months he was running two
+looms, and, later, three and four.
+
+At the end of his second year at the looms he was turning out more yards
+than any other weaver, and more than twice as much as some of the less
+skilful ones. And at home things began to prosper as he approached the
+full stature of his earning power. Not, however, that his increased
+earnings were in excess of need. The children were growing up. They ate
+more. And they were going to school, and school-books cost money. And
+somehow, the faster he worked, the faster climbed the prices of things.
+Even the rent went up, though the house had fallen from bad to worse
+disrepair.
+
+He had grown taller; but with his increased height he seemed leaner
+than ever. Also, he was more nervous. With the nervousness increased his
+peevishness and irritability. The children had learned by many bitter
+lessons to fight shy of him. His mother respected him for his earning
+power, but somehow her respect was tinctured with fear.
+
+There was no joyousness in life for him. The procession of the days he
+never saw. The nights he slept away in twitching unconsciousness.
+The rest of the time he worked, and his consciousness was machine
+consciousness. Outside this his mind was a blank. He had no ideals,
+and but one illusion; namely, that he drank excellent coffee. He was a
+work-beast. He had no mental life whatever; yet deep down in the crypts
+of his mind, unknown to him, were being weighed and sifted every hour of
+his toil, every movement of his hands, every twitch of his muscles, and
+preparations were making for a future course of action that would amaze
+him and all his little world.
+
+It was in the late spring that he came home from work one night aware of
+unusual tiredness. There was a keen expectancy in the air as he sat down
+to the table, but he did not notice. He went through the meal in moody
+silence, mechanically eating what was before him. The children um'd
+and ah'd and made smacking noises with their mouths. But he was deaf to
+them.
+
+"D'ye know what you're eatin'?" his mother demanded at last,
+desperately.
+
+He looked vacantly at the dish before him, and vacantly at her.
+
+"Floatin' island," she announced triumphantly.
+
+"Oh," he said.
+
+"Floating island!" the children chorussed loudly.
+
+"Oh," he said. And after two or three mouthfuls, he added, "I guess I
+ain't hungry to-night."
+
+He dropped the spoon, shoved back his chair, and arose wearily from the
+table.
+
+"An' I guess I'll go to bed."
+
+His feet dragged more heavily than usual as he crossed the kitchen
+floor. Undressing was a Titan's task, a monstrous futility, and he wept
+weakly as he crawled into bed, one shoe still on. He was aware of a
+rising, swelling something inside his head that made his brain thick and
+fuzzy. His lean fingers felt as big as his wrist, while in the ends of
+them was a remoteness of sensation vague and fuzzy like his brain.
+The small of his back ached intolerably. All his bones ached. He ached
+everywhere. And in his head began the shrieking, pounding, crashing,
+roaring of a million looms. All space was filled with flying shuttles.
+They darted in and out, intricately, amongst the stars. He worked a
+thousand looms himself, and ever they speeded up, faster and faster, and
+his brain unwound, faster and faster, and became the thread that fed the
+thousand flying shuttles.
+
+He did not go to work next morning. He was too busy weaving colossally
+on the thousand looms that ran inside his head. His mother went to work,
+but first she sent for the doctor. It was a severe attack of la grippe,
+he said. Jennie served as nurse and carried out his instructions.
+
+It was a very severe attack, and it was a week before Johnny dressed and
+tottered feebly across the floor. Another week, the doctor said, and he
+would be fit to return to work. The foreman of the loom room visited him
+on Sunday afternoon, the first day of his convalescence. The best weaver
+in the room, the foreman told his mother. His job would be held for him.
+He could come back to work a week from Monday.
+
+"Why don't you thank 'im, Johnny?" his mother asked anxiously.
+
+"He's ben that sick he ain't himself yet," she explained apologetically
+to the visitor.
+
+Johnny sat hunched up and gazing steadfastly at the floor. He sat in the
+same position long after the foreman had gone. It was warm outdoors,
+and he sat on the stoop in the afternoon. Sometimes his lips moved. He
+seemed lost in endless calculations.
+
+Next morning, after the day grew warm, he took his seat on the stoop. He
+had pencil and paper this time with which to continue his calculations,
+and he calculated painfully and amazingly.
+
+"What comes after millions?" he asked at noon, when Will came home from
+school. "An' how d'ye work 'em?"
+
+That afternoon finished his task. Each day, but without paper and
+pencil, he returned to the stoop. He was greatly absorbed in the one
+tree that grew across the street. He studied it for hours at a time, and
+was unusually interested when the wind swayed its branches and fluttered
+its leaves. Throughout the week he seemed lost in a great communion
+with himself. On Sunday, sitting on the stoop, he laughed aloud, several
+times, to the perturbation of his mother, who had not heard him laugh
+for years.
+
+Next morning, in the early darkness, she came to his bed to rouse him.
+He had had his fill of sleep all the week, and awoke easily. He made no
+struggle, nor did he attempt to hold on to the bedding when she stripped
+it from him. He lay quietly, and spoke quietly.
+
+"It ain't no use, ma."
+
+"You'll be late," she said, under the impression that he was still
+stupid with sleep.
+
+"I'm awake, ma, an' I tell you it ain't no use. You might as well lemme
+alone. I ain't goin' to git up."
+
+"But you'll lose your job!" she cried.
+
+"I ain't goin' to git up," he repeated in a strange, passionless voice.
+
+She did not go to work herself that morning. This was sickness
+beyond any sickness she had ever known. Fever and delirium she could
+understand; but this was insanity. She pulled the bedding up over him
+and sent Jennie for the doctor.
+
+When that person arrived, Johnny was sleeping gently, and gently he
+awoke and allowed his pulse to be taken.
+
+"Nothing the matter with him," the doctor reported. "Badly debilitated,
+that's all. Not much meat on his bones."
+
+"He's always been that way," his mother volunteered.
+
+"Now go 'way, ma, an' let me finish my snooze."
+
+Johnny spoke sweetly and placidly, and sweetly and placidly he rolled
+over on his side and went to sleep.
+
+At ten o'clock he awoke and dressed himself. He walked out into the
+kitchen, where he found his mother with a frightened expression on her
+face.
+
+"I'm goin' away, ma," he announced, "an' I jes' want to say good-bye."
+
+She threw her apron over her head and sat down suddenly and wept. He
+waited patiently.
+
+"I might a-known it," she was sobbing.
+
+"Where?" she finally asked, removing the apron from her head and gazing
+up at him with a stricken face in which there was little curiosity.
+
+"I don't know--anywhere."
+
+As he spoke, the tree across the street appeared with dazzling
+brightness on his inner vision. It seemed to lurk just under his
+eyelids, and he could see it whenever he wished.
+
+"An' your job?" she quavered.
+
+"I ain't never goin' to work again."
+
+"My God, Johnny!" she wailed, "don't say that!"
+
+What he had said was blasphemy to her. As a mother who hears her child
+deny God, was Johnny's mother shocked by his words.
+
+"What's got into you, anyway?" she demanded, with a lame attempt at
+imperativeness.
+
+"Figures," he answered. "Jes' figures. I've ben doin' a lot of figurin'
+this week, an' it's most surprisin'."
+
+"I don't see what that's got to do with it," she sniffled.
+
+Johnny smiled patiently, and his mother was aware of a distinct shock at
+the persistent absence of his peevishness and irritability.
+
+"I'll show you," he said. "I'm plum' tired out. What makes me tired?
+Moves. I've ben movin' ever since I was born. I'm tired of movin', an' I
+ain't goin' to move any more. Remember when I worked in the glass-house?
+I used to do three hundred dozen a day. Now I reckon I made about ten
+different moves to each bottle. That's thirty-six thousan' moves a day.
+Ten days, three hundred an' sixty thousan' moves. One month, one million
+an' eighty thousan' moves. Chuck out the eighty thousan'"--he spoke with
+the complacent beneficence of a philanthropist--"chuck out the eighty
+thousan', that leaves a million moves a month--twelve million moves a
+year.
+
+"At the looms I'm movin' twic'st as much. That makes twenty-five million
+moves a year, an' it seems to me I've ben a movin' that way 'most a
+million years.
+
+"Now this week I ain't moved at all. I ain't made one move in hours an'
+hours. I tell you it was swell, jes' settin' there, hours an' hours,
+an' doin' nothin'. I ain't never ben happy before. I never had any time.
+I've ben movin' all the time. That ain't no way to be happy. An' I ain't
+going to do it any more. I'm jes' goin' to set, an' set, an' rest, an'
+rest, and then rest some more."
+
+"But what's goin' to come of Will an' the children?" she asked
+despairingly.
+
+"That's it, 'Will an' the children,'" he repeated.
+
+But there was no bitterness in his voice. He had long known his mother's
+ambition for the younger boy, but the thought of it no longer rankled.
+Nothing mattered any more. Not even that.
+
+"I know, ma, what you've ben plannin' for Will--keepin' him in school to
+make a book-keeper out of him. But it ain't no use, I've quit. He's got
+to go to work."
+
+"An' after I have brung you up the way I have," she wept, starting to
+cover her head with the apron and changing her mind.
+
+"You never brung me up," he answered with sad kindliness. "I brung
+myself up, ma, an' I brung up Will. He's bigger'n me, an' heavier, an'
+taller. When I was a kid, I reckon I didn't git enough to eat. When he
+come along an' was a kid, I was workin' an' earnin' grub for him too.
+But that's done with. Will can go to work, same as me, or he can go to
+hell, I don't care which. I'm tired. I'm goin' now. Ain't you goin' to
+say goodbye?"
+
+She made no reply. The apron had gone over her head again, and she was
+crying. He paused a moment in the doorway.
+
+"I'm sure I done the best I knew how," she was sobbing.
+
+He passed out of the house and down the street. A wan delight came
+into his face at the sight of the lone tree. "Jes' ain't goin' to do
+nothin'," he said to himself, half aloud, in a crooning tone. He glanced
+wistfully up at the sky, but the bright sun dazzled and blinded him.
+
+It was a long walk he took, and he did not walk fast. It took him past
+the jute-mill. The muffled roar of the loom room came to his ears, and
+he smiled. It was a gentle, placid smile. He hated no one, not even the
+pounding, shrieking machines. There was no bitterness in him, nothing
+but an inordinate hunger for rest.
+
+The houses and factories thinned out and the open spaces increased as
+he approached the country. At last the city was behind him, and he was
+walking down a leafy lane beside the railroad track. He did not walk
+like a man. He did not look like a man. He was a travesty of the human.
+It was a twisted and stunted and nameless piece of life that shambled
+like a sickly ape, arms loose-hanging, stoop-shouldered, narrow-chested,
+grotesque and terrible.
+
+He passed by a small railroad station and lay down in the grass under a
+tree. All afternoon he lay there. Sometimes he dozed, with muscles that
+twitched in his sleep. When awake, he lay without movement, watching the
+birds or looking up at the sky through the branches of the tree above
+him. Once or twice he laughed aloud, but without relevance to anything
+he had seen or felt.
+
+After twilight had gone, in the first darkness of the night, a freight
+train rumbled into the station. When the engine was switching cars on to
+the side-track, Johnny crept along the side of the train. He pulled open
+the side-door of an empty box-car and awkwardly and laboriously climbed
+in. He closed the door. The engine whistled. Johnny was lying down, and
+in the darkness he smiled.
+
+
+
+
+A WICKED WOMAN
+
+It was because she had broken with Billy that Loretta had come visiting
+to Santa Clara. Billy could not understand. His sister had reported that
+he had walked the floor and cried all night. Loretta had not slept all
+night either, while she had wept most of the night. Daisy knew this,
+because it was in her arms that the weeping had been done. And Daisy's
+husband, Captain Kitt, knew, too. The tears of Loretta, and the
+comforting by Daisy, had lost him some sleep.
+
+Now Captain Kitt did not like to lose sleep. Neither did he want Loretta
+to marry Billy--nor anybody else. It was Captain Kitt's belief that
+Daisy needed the help of her younger sister in the household. But he
+did not say this aloud. Instead, he always insisted that Loretta was too
+young to think of marriage. So it was Captain Kitt's idea that Loretta
+should be packed off on a visit to Mrs. Hemingway. There wouldn't be any
+Billy there.
+
+Before Loretta had been at Santa Clara a week, she was convinced that
+Captain Kitt's idea was a good one. In the first place, though Billy
+wouldn't believe it, she did not want to marry Billy. And in the second
+place, though Captain Kitt wouldn't believe it, she did not want to
+leave Daisy. By the time Loretta had been at Santa Clara two weeks, she
+was absolutely certain that she did not want to marry Billy. But she was
+not so sure about not wanting to leave Daisy. Not that she loved Daisy
+less, but that she--had doubts.
+
+The day of Loretta's arrival, a nebulous plan began shaping itself in
+Mrs. Hemingway's brain. The second day she remarked to Jack Hemingway,
+her husband, that Loretta was so innocent a young thing that were it not
+for her sweet guilelessness she would be positively stupid. In proof
+of which, Mrs. Hemingway told her husband several things that made him
+chuckle. By the third day Mrs. Hemingway's plan had taken recognizable
+form. Then it was that she composed a letter. On the envelope she wrote:
+"Mr. Edward Bashford, Athenian Club, San Francisco."
+
+"Dear Ned," the letter began. She had once been violently loved by him
+for three weeks in her pre-marital days. But she had covenanted herself
+to Jack Hemingway, who had prior claims, and her heart as well; and Ned
+Bashford had philosophically not broken his heart over it. He merely
+added the experience to a large fund of similarly collected data out of
+which he manufactured philosophy. Artistically and temperamentally he
+was a Greek--a tired Greek. He was fond of quoting from Nietzsche, in
+token that he, too, had passed through the long sickness that follows
+upon the ardent search for truth; that he too had emerged, too
+experienced, too shrewd, too profound, ever again to be afflicted by the
+madness of youths in their love of truth. "'To worship appearance,'" he
+often quoted; "'to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole
+Olympus of appearance!'" This particular excerpt he always concluded
+with, "'Those Greeks were superficial--OUT OF PROFUNDITY!'"
+
+He was a fairly young Greek, jaded and worn. Women were faithless and
+unveracious, he held--at such times that he had relapses and descended
+to pessimism from his wonted high philosophical calm. He did not believe
+in the truth of women; but, faithful to his German master, he did
+not strip from them the airy gauzes that veiled their untruth. He was
+content to accept them as appearances and to make the best of it. He was
+superficial--OUT OF PROFUNDITY.
+
+"Jack says to be sure to say to you, 'good swimming,'" Mrs. Hemingway
+wrote in her letter; "and also 'to bring your fishing duds along.'" Mrs.
+Hemingway wrote other things in the letter. She told him that at last
+she was prepared to exhibit to him an absolutely true, unsullied, and
+innocent woman. "A more guileless, immaculate bud of womanhood never
+blushed on the planet," was one of the several ways in which she phrased
+the inducement. And to her husband she said triumphantly, "If I don't
+marry Ned off this time--" leaving unstated the terrible alternative
+that she lacked either vocabulary to express or imagination to conceive.
+
+Contrary to all her forebodings, Loretta found that she was not unhappy
+at Santa Clara. Truly, Billy wrote to her every day, but his letters
+were less distressing than his presence. Also, the ordeal of being away
+from Daisy was not so severe as she had expected. For the first time in
+her life she was not lost in eclipse in the blaze of Daisy's brilliant
+and mature personality. Under such favourable circumstances Loretta
+came rapidly to the front, while Mrs. Hemingway modestly and shamelessly
+retreated into the background.
+
+Loretta began to discover that she was not a pale orb shining by
+reflection. Quite unconsciously she became a small centre of things.
+When she was at the piano, there was some one to turn the pages for
+her and to express preferences for certain songs. When she dropped her
+handkerchief, there was some one to pick it up. And there was some one
+to accompany her in ramblings and flower gatherings. Also, she learned
+to cast flies in still pools and below savage riffles, and how not to
+entangle silk lines and gut-leaders with the shrubbery.
+
+Jack Hemingway did not care to teach beginners, and fished much by
+himself, or not at all, thus giving Ned Bashford ample time in which
+to consider Loretta as an appearance. As such, she was all that his
+philosophy demanded. Her blue eyes had the direct gaze of a boy, and
+out of his profundity he delighted in them and forbore to shudder at the
+duplicity his philosophy bade him to believe lurked in their depths. She
+had the grace of a slender flower, the fragility of colour and line of
+fine china, in all of which he pleasured greatly, without thought of the
+Life Force palpitating beneath and in spite of Bernard Shaw--in whom he
+believed.
+
+Loretta burgeoned. She swiftly developed personality. She discovered
+a will of her own and wishes of her own that were not everlastingly
+entwined with the will and the wishes of Daisy. She was petted by Jack
+Hemingway, spoiled by Alice Hemingway, and devotedly attended by Ned
+Bashford. They encouraged her whims and laughed at her follies, while
+she developed the pretty little tyrannies that are latent in all pretty
+and delicate women. Her environment acted as a soporific upon her
+ancient desire always to live with Daisy. This desire no longer prodded
+her as in the days of her companionship with Billy. The more she saw of
+Billy, the more certain she had been that she could not live away
+from Daisy. The more she saw of Ned Bashford, the more she forgot her
+pressing need of Daisy.
+
+Ned Bashford likewise did some forgetting. He confused superficiality
+with profundity, and entangled appearance with reality until he
+accounted them one. Loretta was different from other women. There was no
+masquerade about her. She was real. He said as much to Mrs. Hemingway,
+and more, who agreed with him and at the same time caught her husband's
+eyelid drooping down for the moment in an unmistakable wink.
+
+It was at this time that Loretta received a letter from Billy that was
+somewhat different from his others. In the main, like all his letters,
+it was pathological. It was a long recital of symptoms and sufferings,
+his nervousness, his sleeplessness, and the state of his heart. Then
+followed reproaches, such as he had never made before. They were sharp
+enough to make her weep, and true enough to put tragedy into her face.
+This tragedy she carried down to the breakfast table. It made Jack and
+Mrs. Hemingway speculative, and it worried Ned. They glanced to him for
+explanation, but he shook his head.
+
+"I'll find out to-night," Mrs. Hemingway said to her husband.
+
+But Ned caught Loretta in the afternoon in the big living-room. She
+tried to turn away. He caught her hands, and she faced him with wet
+lashes and trembling lips. He looked at her, silently and kindly. The
+lashes grew wetter.
+
+"There, there, don't cry, little one," he said soothingly.
+
+He put his arm protectingly around her shoulder. And to his shoulder,
+like a tired child, she turned her face. He thrilled in ways unusual for
+a Greek who has recovered from the long sickness.
+
+"Oh, Ned," she sobbed on his shoulder, "if you only knew how wicked I
+am!"
+
+He smiled indulgently, and breathed in a great breath freighted with the
+fragrance of her hair. He thought of his world-experience of women, and
+drew another long breath. There seemed to emanate from her the perfect
+sweetness of a child--"the aura of a white soul," was the way he phrased
+it to himself.
+
+Then he noticed that her sobs were increasing.
+
+"What's the matter, little one?" he asked pettingly and almost
+paternally. "Has Jack been bullying you? Or has your dearly beloved
+sister failed to write?"
+
+She did not answer, and he felt that he really must kiss her hair, that
+he could not be responsible if the situation continued much longer.
+
+"Tell me," he said gently, "and we'll see what I can do."
+
+"I can't. You will despise me.--Oh, Ned, I am so ashamed!"
+
+He laughed incredulously, and lightly touched her hair with his lips--so
+lightly that she did not know.
+
+"Dear little one, let us forget all about it, whatever it is. I want to
+tell you how I love--"
+
+She uttered a sharp cry that was all delight, and then moaned--
+
+"Too late!"
+
+"Too late?" he echoed in surprise.
+
+"Oh, why did I? Why did I?" she was moaning.
+
+He was aware of a swift chill at his heart.
+
+"What?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I... he... Billy.
+
+"I am such a wicked woman, Ned. I know you will never speak to me
+again."
+
+"This--er--this Billy," he began haltingly. "He is your brother?"
+
+"No... he... I didn't know. I was so young. I could not help it. Oh, I
+shall go mad! I shall go mad!"
+
+It was then that Loretta felt his shoulder and the encircling arm become
+limp. He drew away from her gently, and gently he deposited her in a
+big chair, where she buried her face and sobbed afresh. He twisted his
+moustache fiercely, then drew up another chair and sat down.
+
+"I--I do not understand," he said.
+
+"I am so unhappy," she wailed.
+
+"Why unhappy?"
+
+"Because... he... he wants me to marry him."
+
+His face cleared on the instant, and he placed a hand soothingly on
+hers.
+
+"That should not make any girl unhappy," he remarked sagely. "Because
+you don't love him is no reason--of course, you don't love him?"
+
+Loretta shook her head and shoulders in a vigorous negative.
+
+"What?"
+
+Bashford wanted to make sure.
+
+"No," she asserted explosively. "I don't love Billy! I don't want to
+love Billy!"
+
+"Because you don't love him," Bashford resumed with confidence, "is no
+reason that you should be unhappy just because he has proposed to you."
+
+She sobbed again, and from the midst of her sobs she cried--
+
+"That's the trouble. I wish I did love him. Oh, I wish I were dead!"
+
+"Now, my dear child, you are worrying yourself over trifles." His other
+hand crossed over after its mate and rested on hers. "Women do it every
+day. Because you have changed your mind or did not know your mind,
+because you have--to use an unnecessarily harsh word--jilted a man--"
+
+"Jilted!" She had raised her head and was looking at him with
+tear-dimmed eyes. "Oh, Ned, if that were all!"
+
+"All?" he asked in a hollow voice, while his hands slowly retreated from
+hers. He was about to speak further, then remained silent.
+
+"But I don't want to marry him," Loretta broke forth protestingly.
+
+"Then I shouldn't," he counselled.
+
+"But I ought to marry him."
+
+"OUGHT to marry him?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"That is a strong word."
+
+"I know it is," she acquiesced, while she strove to control her
+trembling lips. Then she spoke more calmly. "I am a wicked woman, a
+terribly wicked woman. No one knows how wicked I am--except Billy."
+
+There was a pause. Ned Bashford's face was grave, and he looked queerly
+at Loretta.
+
+"He--Billy knows?" he asked finally.
+
+A reluctant nod and flaming cheeks was the reply.
+
+He debated with himself for a while, seeming, like a diver, to be
+preparing himself for the plunge.
+
+"Tell me about it." He spoke very firmly. "You must tell me all of it."
+
+"And will you--ever--forgive me?" she asked in a faint, small voice.
+
+He hesitated, drew a long breath, and made the plunge.
+
+"Yes," he said desperately. "I'll forgive you. Go ahead."
+
+"There was no one to tell me," she began. "We were with each other so
+much. I did not know anything of the world--then."
+
+She paused to meditate. Bashford was biting his lip impatiently.
+
+"If I had only known--"
+
+She paused again.
+
+"Yes, go on," he urged.
+
+"We were together almost every evening."
+
+"Billy?" he demanded, with a savageness that startled her.
+
+"Yes, of course, Billy. We were with each other so much... If I had only
+known... There was no one to tell me... I was so young--"
+
+Her lips parted as though to speak further, and she regarded him
+anxiously.
+
+"The scoundrel!"
+
+With the explosion Ned Bashford was on his feet, no longer a tired
+Greek, but a violently angry young man.
+
+"Billy is not a scoundrel; he is a good man," Loretta defended, with a
+firmness that surprised Bashford.
+
+"I suppose you'll be telling me next that it was all your fault," he
+said sarcastically.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"What?" he shouted.
+
+"It was all my fault," she said steadily. "I should never have let him.
+I was to blame."
+
+Bashford ceased from his pacing up and down, and when he spoke, his
+voice was resigned.
+
+"All right," he said. "I don't blame you in the least, Loretta. And you
+have been very honest. But Billy is right, and you are wrong. You must
+get married."
+
+"To Billy?" she asked, in a dim, far-away voice.
+
+"Yes, to Billy. I'll see to it. Where does he live? I'll make him."
+
+"But I don't want to marry Billy!" she cried out in alarm. "Oh, Ned, you
+won't do that?"
+
+"I shall," he answered sternly. "You must. And Billy must. Do you
+understand?"
+
+Loretta buried her face in the cushioned chair back, and broke into a
+passionate storm of sobs.
+
+All that Bashford could make out at first, as he listened, was: "But I
+don't want to leave Daisy! I don't want to leave Daisy!"
+
+He paced grimly back and forth, then stopped curiously to listen.
+
+"How was I to know?--Boo--hoo," Loretta was crying. "He didn't tell me.
+Nobody else ever kissed me. I never dreamed a kiss could be so
+terrible... until, boo-hoo... until he wrote to me. I only got the
+letter this morning."
+
+His face brightened. It seemed as though light was dawning on him.
+
+"Is that what you're crying about?"
+
+"N--no."
+
+His heart sank.
+
+"Then what are you crying about?" he asked in a hopeless voice.
+
+"Because you said I had to marry Billy. And I don't want to marry Billy.
+I don't want to leave Daisy. I don't know what I want. I wish I were
+dead."
+
+He nerved himself for another effort.
+
+"Now look here, Loretta, be sensible. What is this about kisses. You
+haven't told me everything?"
+
+"I--I don't want to tell you everything."
+
+She looked at him beseechingly in the silence that fell.
+
+"Must I?" she quavered finally.
+
+"You must," he said imperatively. "You must tell me everything."
+
+"Well, then... must I?"
+
+"You must."
+
+"He... I... we..." she began flounderingly. Then blurted out, "I let
+him, and he kissed me."
+
+"Go on," Bashford commanded desperately.
+
+"That's all," she answered.
+
+"All?" There was a vast incredulity in his voice.
+
+"All?" In her voice was an interrogation no less vast.
+
+"I mean--er--nothing worse?" He was overwhelmingly aware of his own
+awkwardness.
+
+"Worse?" She was frankly puzzled. "As though there could be! Billy
+said--"
+
+"When did he say it?" Bashford demanded abruptly.
+
+"In his letter I got this morning. Billy said that my... our... our
+kisses were terrible if we didn't get married."
+
+Bashford's head was swimming.
+
+"What else did Billy say?" he asked.
+
+"He said that when a woman allowed a man to kiss her, she always married
+him--that it was terrible if she didn't. It was the custom, he said;
+and I say it is a bad, wicked custom, and I don't like it. I know I'm
+terrible," she added defiantly, "but I can't help it."
+
+Bashford absent-mindedly brought out a cigarette.
+
+"Do you mind if I smoke?" he asked, as he struck a match.
+
+Then he came to himself.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he cried, flinging away match and cigarette. "I
+don't want to smoke. I didn't mean that at all. What I mean is--"
+
+He bent over Loretta, caught her hands in his, then sat on the arm of
+the chair and softly put one arm around her.
+
+"Loretta, I am a fool. I mean it. And I mean something more. I want you
+to be my wife."
+
+He waited anxiously in the pause that followed.
+
+"You might answer me," he urged.
+
+"I will... if--"
+
+"Yes, go on. If what?"
+
+"If I don't have to marry Billy."
+
+"You can't marry both of us," he almost shouted.
+
+"And it isn't the custom... what... what Billy said?"
+
+"No, it isn't the custom. Now, Loretta, will you marry me?"
+
+"Don't be angry with me," she pouted demurely.
+
+He gathered her into his arms and kissed her.
+
+"I wish it were the custom," she said in a faint voice, from the
+midst of the embrace, "because then I'd have to marry you, Ned dear...
+wouldn't I?"
+
+
+
+
+JUST MEAT
+
+He strolled to the corner and glanced up and down the intersecting
+street, but saw nothing save the oases of light shed by the street lamps
+at the successive crossings. Then he strolled back the way he had come.
+He was a shadow of a man, sliding noiselessly and without undue movement
+through the semi-darkness. Also he was very alert, like a wild animal in
+the jungle, keenly perceptive and receptive. The movement of another in
+the darkness about him would need to have been more shadowy than he to
+have escaped him.
+
+In addition to the running advertisement of the state of affairs carried
+to him by his senses, he had a subtler perception, a FEEL, of the
+atmosphere around him. He knew that the house in front of which he
+paused for a moment, contained children. Yet by no willed effort of
+perception did he have this knowledge. For that matter, he was not even
+aware that he knew, so occult was the impression. Yet, did a moment
+arise in which action, in relation to that house, were imperative, he
+would have acted on the assumption that it contained children. He was
+not aware of all that he knew about the neighbourhood.
+
+In the same way, he knew not how, he knew that no danger threatened in
+the footfalls that came up the cross street. Before he saw the walker,
+he knew him for a belated pedestrian hurrying home. The walker came
+into view at the crossing and disappeared on up the street. The man that
+watched, noted a light that flared up in the window of a house on the
+corner, and as it died down he knew it for an expiring match. This was
+conscious identification of familiar phenomena, and through his mind
+flitted the thought, "Wanted to know what time." In another house one
+room was lighted. The light burned dimly and steadily, and he had the
+feel that it was a sick-room.
+
+He was especially interested in a house across the street in the middle
+of the block. To this house he paid most attention. No matter what
+way he looked, nor what way he walked, his looks and his steps always
+returned to it. Except for an open window above the porch, there was
+nothing unusual about the house. Nothing came in nor out. Nothing
+happened. There were no lighted windows, nor had lights appeared and
+disappeared in any of the windows. Yet it was the central point of his
+consideration. He rallied to it each time after a divination of the
+state of the neighbourhood.
+
+Despite his feel of things, he was not confident. He was supremely
+conscious of the precariousness of his situation. Though unperturbed by
+the footfalls of the chance pedestrian, he was as keyed up and sensitive
+and ready to be startled as any timorous deer. He was aware of
+the possibility of other intelligences prowling about in the
+darkness--intelligences similar to his own in movement, perception, and
+divination.
+
+Far down the street he caught a glimpse of something that moved. And he
+knew it was no late home-goer, but menace and danger. He whistled twice
+to the house across the street, then faded away shadow-like to the
+corner and around the corner. Here he paused and looked about him
+carefully. Reassured, he peered back around the corner and studied the
+object that moved and that was coming nearer. He had divined aright. It
+was a policeman.
+
+The man went down the cross street to the next corner, from the shelter
+of which he watched the corner he had just left. He saw the policeman
+pass by, going straight on up the street. He paralleled the policeman's
+course, and from the next corner again watched him go by; then he
+returned the way he had come. He whistled once to the house across the
+street, and after a time whistled once again. There was reassurance
+in the whistle, just as there had been warning in the previous double
+whistle.
+
+He saw a dark bulk outline itself on the roof of the porch and slowly
+descend a pillar. Then it came down the steps, passed through the small
+iron gate, and went down the sidewalk, taking on the form of a man. He
+that watched kept on his own side of the street and moved on abreast
+to the corner, where he crossed over and joined the other. He was quite
+small alongside the man he accosted.
+
+"How'd you make out, Matt?" he asked.
+
+The other grunted indistinctly, and walked on in silence a few steps.
+
+"I reckon I landed the goods," he said.
+
+Jim chuckled in the darkness, and waited for further information. The
+blocks passed by under their feet, and he grew impatient.
+
+"Well, how about them goods?" he asked. "What kind of a haul did you
+make, anyway?"
+
+"I was too busy to figger it out, but it's fat. I can tell you that
+much, Jim, it's fat. I don't dast to think how fat it is. Wait till we
+get to the room."
+
+Jim looked at him keenly under the street lamp of the next crossing,
+and saw that his face was a trifle grim and that he carried his left arm
+peculiarly.
+
+"What's the matter with your arm?" he demanded.
+
+"The little cuss bit me. Hope I don't get hydrophoby. Folks gets
+hydrophoby from manbite sometimes, don't they?"
+
+"Gave you fight, eh?" Jim asked encouragingly.
+
+The other grunted.
+
+"You're harder'n hell to get information from," Jim burst out irritably.
+"Tell us about it. You ain't goin' to lose money just a-tellin' a guy."
+
+"I guess I choked him some," came the answer. Then, by way of
+explanation, "He woke up on me."
+
+"You did it neat. I never heard a sound."
+
+"Jim," the other said with seriousness, "it's a hangin' matter.
+I fixed 'm. I had to. He woke up on me. You an' me's got to do some
+layin' low for a spell."
+
+Jim gave a low whistle of comprehension.
+
+"Did you hear me whistle?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"Sure. I was all done. I was just comin' out."
+
+"It was a bull. But he wasn't on a little bit. Went right by an' kept
+a-paddin' the hoof out a sight. Then I come back an' gave you the
+whistle. What made you take so long after that?"
+
+"I was waitin' to make sure," Matt explained. "I was mighty glad when
+I heard you whistle again. It's hard work waitin'. I just sat there an'
+thought an' thought... oh, all kinds of things. It's remarkable what
+a fellow'll think about. And then there was a darn cat that kept movin'
+around the house all' botherin' me with its noises."
+
+"An' it's fat!" Jim exclaimed irrelevantly and with joy.
+
+"I'm sure tellin' you, Jim, it's fat. I'm plum' anxious for another look
+at 'em."
+
+Unconsciously the two men quickened their pace. Yet they did not relax
+from their caution. Twice they changed their course in order to avoid
+policemen, and they made very sure that they were not observed when they
+dived into the dark hallway of a cheap rooming house down town.
+
+Not until they had gained their own room on the top floor, did they
+scratch a match. While Jim lighted a lamp, Matt locked the door and
+threw the bolts into place. As he turned, he noticed that his partner
+was waiting expectantly. Matt smiled to himself at the other's
+eagerness.
+
+"Them search-lights is all right," he said, drawing forth a small pocket
+electric lamp and examining it. "But we got to get a new battery. It's
+runnin' pretty weak. I thought once or twice it'd leave me in the dark.
+Funny arrangements in that house. I near got lost. His room was on the
+left, an' that fooled me some."
+
+"I told you it was on the left," Jim interrupted.
+
+"You told me it was on the right," Matt went on. "I guess I know what
+you told me, an' there's the map you drew."
+
+Fumbling in his vest pocket, he drew out a folded slip of paper. As he
+unfolded it, Jim bent over and looked.
+
+"I did make a mistake," he confessed.
+
+"You sure did. It got me guessin' some for a while."
+
+"But it don't matter now," Jim cried. "Let's see what you got."
+
+"It does matter," Matt retorted. "It matters a lot... to me. I've got
+to run all the risk. I put my head in the trap while you stay on the
+street. You got to get on to yourself an' be more careful. All right,
+I'll show you."
+
+He dipped loosely into his trousers pocket and brought out a handful of
+small diamonds. He spilled them out in a blazing stream on the greasy
+table. Jim let out a great oath.
+
+"That's nothing," Matt said with triumphant complacence. "I ain't begun
+yet."
+
+From one pocket after another he continued bringing forth the spoil.
+There were many diamonds wrapped in chamois skin that were larger than
+those in the first handful. From one pocket he brought out a handful of
+very small cut gems.
+
+"Sun dust," he remarked, as he spilled them on the table in a space by
+themselves.
+
+Jim examined them.
+
+"Just the same, they retail for a couple of dollars each," he said. "Is
+that all?"
+
+"Ain't it enough?" the other demanded in an aggrieved tone.
+
+"Sure it is," Jim answered with unqualified approval. "Better'n I
+expected. I wouldn't take a cent less than ten thousan' for the bunch."
+
+"Ten thousan'," Matt sneered. "They're worth twic't that, an' I don't
+know anything about joolery, either. Look at that big boy!"
+
+He picked it out from the sparkling heap and held it near to the lamp
+with the air of an expert, weighing and judging.
+
+"Worth a thousan' all by its lonely," was Jim's quicker judgment.
+
+"A thousan' your grandmother," was Matt's scornful rejoinder. "You
+couldn't buy it for three."
+
+"Wake me up! I'm dreamin'!" The sparkle of the gems was in Jim's eyes,
+and he began sorting out the larger diamonds and examining them. "We're
+rich men, Matt--we'll be regular swells."
+
+"It'll take years to get rid of 'em," was Matt's more practical thought.
+
+"But think how we'll live! Nothin' to do but spend the money an' go on
+gettin' rid of em."
+
+Matt's eyes were beginning to sparkle, though sombrely, as his
+phlegmatic nature woke up.
+
+"I told you I didn't dast think how fat it was," he murmured in a low
+voice.
+
+"What a killin'! What a killin'!" was the other's more ecstatic
+utterance.
+
+"I almost forgot," Matt said, thrusting his hand into his inside coat
+pocket.
+
+A string of large pearls emerged from wrappings of tissue paper and
+chamois skin. Jim scarcely glanced at them.
+
+"They're worth money," he said, and returned to the diamonds.
+
+A silence fell on the two men. Jim played with the gems, running them
+through his fingers, sorting them into piles, and spreading them out
+flat and wide. He was a slender, weazened man, nervous, irritable,
+high-strung, and anaemic--a typical child of the gutter, with
+unbeautiful twisted features, small-eyed, with face and mouth
+perpetually and feverishly hungry, brutish in a cat-like way, stamped to
+the core with degeneracy.
+
+Matt did not finger the diamonds. He sat with chin on hands and elbows
+on table, blinking heavily at the blazing array. He was in every way a
+contrast to the other. No city had bred him. He was heavy-muscled and
+hairy, gorilla-like in strength and aspect. For him there was no unseen
+world. His eyes were full and wide apart, and there seemed in them
+a certain bold brotherliness. They inspired confidence. But a closer
+inspection would have shown that his eyes were just a trifle too full,
+just a shade too wide apart. He exceeded, spilled over the limits of
+normality, and his features told lies about the man beneath.
+
+"The bunch is worth fifty thousan'," Jim remarked suddenly.
+
+"A hundred thousan'," Matt said.
+
+The silence returned and endured a long time, to be broken again by Jim.
+
+"What in hell was he doin' with 'em all at the house?--that's what
+I want to know. I'd a-thought he'd kept 'em in the safe down at the
+store."
+
+Matt had just been considering the vision of the throttled man as he had
+last looked upon him in the dim light of the electric lantern; but he
+did not start at the mention of him.
+
+"There's no tellin'," he answered. "He might a-ben gettin' ready to
+chuck his pardner. He might a-pulled out in the mornin' for parts
+unknown, if we hadn't happened along. I guess there's just as many
+thieves among honest men as there is among thieves. You read about such
+things in the papers, Jim. Pardners is always knifin' each other."
+
+A queer, nervous look came into the other's eyes. Matt did not betray
+that he noted it, though he said--
+
+"What was you thinkin' about, Jim?"
+
+Jim was a trifle awkward for the moment.
+
+"Nothin'," he answered. "Only I was thinkin' just how funny it was--all
+them jools at his house. What made you ask?"
+
+"Nothin'. I was just wonderin', that was all."
+
+The silence settled down, broken by an occasional low and nervous giggle
+on the part of Jim. He was overcome by the spread of gems. It was not
+that he felt their beauty. He was unaware that they were beautiful in
+themselves. But in them his swift imagination visioned the joys of life
+they would buy, and all the desires and appetites of his diseased mind
+and sickly flesh were tickled by the promise they extended. He builded
+wondrous, orgy-haunted castles out of their brilliant fires, and was
+appalled at what he builded. Then it was that he giggled. It was all
+too impossible to be real. And yet there they blazed on the table before
+him, fanning the flame of the lust of him, and he giggled again.
+
+"I guess we might as well count 'em," Matt said suddenly, tearing
+himself away from his own visions. "You watch me an' see that
+it's square, because you an' me has got to be on the square, Jim.
+Understand?"
+
+Jim did not like this, and betrayed it in his eyes, while Matt did not
+like what he saw in his partner's eyes.
+
+"Understand?" Matt repeated, almost menacingly.
+
+"Ain't we always ben square?" the other replied, on the defensive
+because of the treachery already whispering in him.
+
+"It don't cost nothin', bein' square in hard times," Matt retorted.
+"It's bein' square in prosperity that counts. When we ain't got nothin',
+we can't help bein' square. We're prosperous now, an' we've got to be
+business men--honest business men. Understand?"
+
+"That's the talk for me," Jim approved, but deep down in the meagre soul
+of him,--and in spite of him,--wanton and lawless thoughts were stirring
+like chained beasts.
+
+Matt stepped to the food shelf behind the two-burner kerosene cooking
+stove. He emptied the tea from a paper bag, and from a second bag
+emptied some red peppers. Returning to the table with the bags, he put
+into them the two sizes of small diamonds. Then he counted the large
+gems and wrapped them in their tissue paper and chamois skin.
+
+"Hundred an' forty-seven good-sized ones," was his inventory; "twenty
+real big ones; two big boys and one whopper; an' a couple of fistfuls of
+teeny ones an' dust."
+
+He looked at Jim.
+
+"Correct," was the response.
+
+He wrote the count out on a slip of memorandum paper, and made a copy of
+it, giving one slip to his partner and retaining the other.
+
+"Just for reference," he said.
+
+Again he had recourse to the food shelf, where he emptied the sugar from
+a large paper bag. Into this he thrust the diamonds, large and small,
+wrapped it up in a bandanna handkerchief, and stowed it away under his
+pillow. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes.
+
+"An' you think they're worth a hundred thousan'?" Jim asked, pausing and
+looking up from the unlacing of his shoe.
+
+"Sure," was the answer. "I seen a dance-house girl down in Arizona once,
+with some big sparklers on her. They wasn't real. She said if they was
+she wouldn't be dancin'. Said they'd be worth all of fifty thousan', an'
+she didn't have a dozen of 'em all told."
+
+"Who'd work for a livin'?" Jim triumphantly demanded. "Pick an' shovel
+work!" he sneered. "Work like a dog all my life, an' save all my wages,
+an' I wouldn't have half as much as we got tonight."
+
+"Dish washin's about your measure, an' you couldn't get more'n twenty a
+month an' board. Your figgers is 'way off, but your point is well taken.
+Let them that likes it, work. I rode range for thirty a month when I was
+young an' foolish. Well, I'm older, an' I ain't ridin' range."
+
+He got into bed on one side. Jim put out the light and followed him in
+on the other side.
+
+"How's your arm feel?" Jim queried amiably.
+
+Such concern was unusual, and Matt noted it, and replied--
+
+"I guess there's no danger of hydrophoby. What made you ask?"
+
+Jim felt in himself a guilty stir, and under his breath he cursed the
+other's way of asking disagreeable questions; but aloud he answered--
+
+"Nothin', only you seemed scared of it at first. What are you goin' to
+do with your share, Matt?"
+
+"Buy a cattle ranch in Arizona an' set down an' pay other men to ride
+range for me. There's some several I'd like to see askin' a job from me,
+damn them! An' now you shut your face, Jim. It'll be some time before I
+buy that ranch. Just now I'm goin' to sleep."
+
+But Jim lay long awake, nervous and twitching, rolling about restlessly
+and rolling himself wide awake every time he dozed. The diamonds still
+blazed under his eyelids, and the fire of them hurt. Matt, in spite of
+his heavy nature, slept lightly, like a wild animal alert in its sleep;
+and Jim noticed, every time he moved, that his partner's body moved
+sufficiently to show that it had received the impression and that it was
+trembling on the verge of awakening. For that matter, Jim did not
+know whether or not, frequently, the other was awake. Once, quietly,
+betokening complete consciousness, Matt said to him: "Aw, go to sleep,
+Jim. Don't worry about them jools. They'll keep." And Jim had thought
+that at that particular moment Matt had been surely asleep.
+
+In the late morning Matt was awake with Jim's first movement, and
+thereafter he awoke and dozed with him until midday, when they got up
+together and began dressing.
+
+"I'm goin' out to get a paper an' some bread," Matt said. "You boil the
+coffee."
+
+As Jim listened, unconsciously his gaze left Matt's face and roved
+to the pillow, beneath which was the bundle wrapped in the bandanna
+handkerchief. On the instant Matt's face became like a wild beast's.
+
+"Look here, Jim," he snarled. "You've got to play square. If you do me
+dirt, I'll fix you. Understand? I'd eat you, Jim. You know that. I'd
+bite right into your throat an' eat you like that much beefsteak."
+
+His sunburned skin was black with the surge of blood in it, and his
+tobacco-stained teeth were exposed by the snarling lips. Jim shivered
+and involuntarily cowered. There was death in the man he looked at. Only
+the night before that black-faced man had killed another with his hands,
+and it had not hurt his sleep. And in his own heart Jim was aware of
+a sneaking guilt, of a train of thought that merited all that was
+threatened.
+
+Matt passed out, leaving him still shivering. Then a hatred twisted his
+own face, and he softly hurled savage curses at the door. He remembered
+the jewels, and hastened to the bed, feeling under the pillow for the
+bandanna bundle. He crushed it with his fingers to make certain that
+it still contained the diamonds. Assured that Matt had not carried them
+away, he looked toward the kerosene stove with a guilty start. Then he
+hurriedly lighted it, filled the coffee-pot at the sink, and put it over
+the flame.
+
+The coffee was boiling when Matt returned, and while the latter cut the
+bread and put a slice of butter on the table, Jim poured out the coffee.
+It was not until he sat down and had taken a few sips of the coffee,
+that Matt pulled out the morning paper from his pocket.
+
+"We was way off," he said. "I told you I didn't dast figger out how fat
+it was. Look at that."
+
+He pointed to the head-lines on the first page.
+
+"SWIFT NEMESIS ON BUJANNOFF'S TRACK," they read. "MURDERED IN HIS SLEEP
+AFTER ROBBING HIS PARTNER."
+
+"There you have it!" Matt cried. "He robbed his partner--robbed him like
+a dirty thief."
+
+"Half a million of jewels missin'," Jim read aloud. He put the paper
+down and stared at Matt.
+
+"That's what I told you," the latter said. "What in hell do we know
+about jools? Half a million!--an' the best I could figger it was a
+hundred thousan'. Go on an' read the rest of it."
+
+They read on silently, their heads side by side, the untouched coffee
+growing cold; and ever and anon one or the other burst forth with some
+salient printed fact.
+
+"I'd like to seen Metzner's face when he opened the safe at the store
+this mornin'," Jim gloated.
+
+"He hit the high places right away for Bujannoff's house," Matt
+explained. "Go on an' read."
+
+"Was to have sailed last night at ten on the Sajoda for the South
+Seas--steamship delayed by extra freight--"
+
+"That's why we caught 'm in bed," Matt interrupted. "It was just
+luck--like pickin' a fifty-to-one winner."
+
+"Sajoda sailed at six this mornin'--"
+
+"He didn't catch her," Matt said. "I saw his alarm-clock was set at
+five. That'd given 'm plenty of time... only I come along an' put the
+kibosh on his time. Go on."
+
+"Adolph Metzner in despair--the famous Haythorne pearl
+necklace--magnificently assorted pearls--valued by experts at from fifty
+to seventy thousan' dollars."
+
+Jim broke off to swear vilely and solemnly, concluding with, "Those damn
+oyster-eggs worth all that money!"
+
+He licked his lips and added, "They was beauties an' no mistake."
+
+"Big Brazilian gem," he read on. "Eighty thousan' dollars--many valuable
+gems of the first water--several thousan' small diamonds well worth
+forty thousan'."
+
+"What you don't know about jools is worth knowin'," Matt smiled
+good-humouredly.
+
+"Theory of the sleuths," Jim read. "Thieves must have known--cleverly
+kept watch on Bujannoff's actions--must have learned his plan and
+trailed him to his house with the fruits of his robbery--"
+
+"Clever--hell!" Matt broke out. "That's the way reputations is made...
+in the noospapers. How'd we know he was robbin' his pardner?"
+
+"Anyway, we've got the goods," Jim grinned. "Let's look at 'em again."
+
+He assured himself that the door was locked and bolted, while Matt
+brought out the bundle in the bandanna and opened it on the table.
+
+"Ain't they beauties, though!" Jim exclaimed at sight of the pearls; and
+for a time he had eyes only for them. "Accordin' to the experts, worth
+from fifty to seventy thousan' dollars."
+
+"An' women like them things," Matt commented. "An' they'll do everything
+to get 'em--sell themselves, commit murder, anything."
+
+"Just like you an' me."
+
+"Not on your life," Matt retorted. "I'll commit murder for 'em, but not
+for their own sakes, but for sake of what they'll get me. That's the
+difference. Women want the jools for themselves, an' I want the jools
+for the women an' such things they'll get me."
+
+"Lucky that men an' women don't want the same things," Jim remarked.
+
+"That's what makes commerce," Matt agreed; "people wantin' different
+things."
+
+In the middle of the afternoon Jim went out to buy food. While he was
+gone, Matt cleared the table of the jewels, wrapping them up as before
+and putting them under the pillow. Then he lighted the kerosene stove
+and started to boil water for coffee. A few minutes later, Jim returned.
+
+"Most surprising," he remarked. "Streets, an' stores, an' people just
+like they always was. Nothin' changed. An' me walking along through it
+all a millionaire. Nobody looked at me an' guessed it."
+
+Matt grunted unsympathetically. He had little comprehension of the
+lighter whims and fancies of his partner's imagination.
+
+"Did you get a porterhouse?" he demanded.
+
+"Sure, an' an inch thick. It's a peach. Look at it."
+
+He unwrapped the steak and held it up for the other's inspection. Then
+he made the coffee and set the table, while Matt fried the steak.
+
+"Don't put on too much of them red peppers," Jim warned. "I ain't used
+to your Mexican cookin'. You always season too hot."
+
+Matt grunted a laugh and went on with his cooking. Jim poured out the
+coffee, but first, into the nicked china cup, he emptied a powder he had
+carried in his vest pocket wrapped in a rice-paper. He had turned his
+back for the moment on his partner, but he did not dare to glance around
+at him. Matt placed a newspaper on the table, and on the newspaper
+set the hot frying-pan. He cut the steak in half, and served Jim and
+himself.
+
+"Eat her while she's hot," he counselled, and with knife and fork set
+the example.
+
+"She's a dandy," was Jim's judgment, after his first mouthful. "But
+I tell you one thing straight. I'm never goin' to visit you on that
+Arizona ranch, so you needn't ask me."
+
+"What's the matter now?" Matt asked.
+
+"Hell's the matter," was the answer. "The Mexican cookin' on your
+ranch'd be too much for me. If I've got hell a-comin' in the next life,
+I'm not goin' to torment my insides in this one. Damned peppers!"
+
+He smiled, expelled his breath forcibly to cool his burning mouth, drank
+some coffee, and went on eating the steak.
+
+"What do you think about the next life anyway, Matt?" he asked a little
+later, while secretly he wondered why the other had not yet touched his
+coffee.
+
+"Ain't no next life," Matt answered, pausing from the steak to take
+his first sip of coffee. "Nor heaven nor hell, nor nothin'. You get all
+that's comin' right here in this life."
+
+"An' afterward?" Jim queried out of his morbid curiosity, for he knew
+that he looked upon a man that was soon to die. "An' afterward?" he
+repeated.
+
+"Did you ever see a man two weeks dead?" the other asked.
+
+Jim shook his head.
+
+"Well, I have. He was like this beefsteak you an' me is eatin'. It was
+once steer cavortin' over the landscape. But now it's just meat.
+That's all, just meat. An' that's what you an' me an' all people come
+to--meat."
+
+Matt gulped down the whole cup of coffee, and refilled the cup.
+
+"Are you scared to die?" he asked.
+
+Jim shook his head. "What's the use? I don't die anyway. I pass on an'
+live again--"
+
+"To go stealin', an' lyin' an' snivellin' through another life, an' go
+on that way forever an' ever an' ever?" Matt sneered.
+
+"Maybe I'll improve," Jim suggested hopefully. "Maybe stealin' won't be
+necessary in the life to come."
+
+He ceased abruptly, and stared straight before him, a frightened
+expression on his face.
+
+"What's the matter!" Matt demanded.
+
+"Nothin'. I was just wonderin'"--Jim returned to himself with an
+effort--"about this dyin', that was all."
+
+But he could not shake off the fright that had startled him. It was
+as if an unseen thing of gloom had passed him by, casting upon him
+the intangible shadow of its presence. He was aware of a feeling of
+foreboding. Something ominous was about to happen. Calamity hovered in
+the air. He gazed fixedly across the table at the other man. He could
+not understand. Was it that he had blundered and poisoned himself? No,
+Matt had the nicked cup, and he had certainly put the poison in the
+nicked cup.
+
+It was all his own imagination, was his next thought. It had played him
+tricks before. Fool! Of course it was. Of course something was about to
+happen, but it was about to happen to Matt. Had not Matt drunk the whole
+cup of coffee?
+
+Jim brightened up and finished his steak, sopping bread in the gravy
+when the meat was gone.
+
+"When I was a kid--" he began, but broke off abruptly.
+
+Again the unseen thing of gloom had fluttered, and his being was vibrant
+with premonition of impending misfortune. He felt a disruptive influence
+at work in the flesh of him, and in all his muscles there was a seeming
+that they were about to begin to twitch. He sat back suddenly, and as
+suddenly leaned forward with his elbows on the table. A tremor ran
+dimly through the muscles of his body. It was like the first rustling
+of leaves before the oncoming of wind. He clenched his teeth. It came
+again, a spasmodic tensing of his muscles. He knew panic at the revolt
+within his being. His muscles no longer recognized his mastery over
+them. Again they spasmodically tensed, despite the will of him, for
+he had willed that they should not tense. This was revolution within
+himself, this was anarchy; and the terror of impotence rushed up in him
+as his flesh gripped and seemed to seize him in a clutch, chills running
+up and down his back and sweat starting on his brow. He glanced about
+the room, and all the details of it smote him with a strange sense of
+familiarity. It was as though he had just returned from a long journey.
+He looked across the table at his partner. Matt was watching him and
+smiling. An expression of horror spread over Jim's face.
+
+"My God, Matt!" he screamed. "You ain't doped me?"
+
+Matt smiled and continued to watch him. In the paroxysm that followed,
+Jim did not become unconscious. His muscles tensed and twitched and
+knotted, hurting him and crushing him in their savage grip. And in the
+midst of it all, it came to him that Matt was acting queerly. He was
+travelling the same road. The smile had gone from his face, and there
+was on it an intent expression, as if he were listening to some inner
+tale of himself and trying to divine the message. Matt got up and walked
+across the room and back again, then sat down.
+
+"You did this, Jim," he said quietly.
+
+"But I didn't think you'd try to fix ME," Jim answered reproachfully.
+
+"Oh, I fixed you all right," Matt said, with teeth close together and
+shivering body. "What did you give me?"
+
+"Strychnine."
+
+"Same as I gave you," Matt volunteered. "It's a hell of a mess, ain't
+it?"
+
+"You're lyin', Matt," Jim pleaded. "You ain't doped me, have you?"
+
+"I sure did, Jim; an' I didn't overdose you, neither. I cooked it in as
+neat as you please in your half the porterhouse.--Hold on! Where're you
+goin'?"
+
+Jim had made a dash for the door, and was throwing back the bolts. Matt
+sprang in between and shoved him away.
+
+"Drug store," Jim panted. "Drug store."
+
+"No you don't. You'll stay right here. There ain't goin' to be any
+runnin' out an' makin' a poison play on the street--not with all them
+jools reposin' under the pillow. Savve? Even if you didn't die, you'd
+be in the hands of the police with a whole lot of explanations comin'.
+Emetics is the stuff for poison. I'm just as bad bit as you, an' I'm
+goin' to take a emetic. That's all they'd give you at a drug store,
+anyway."
+
+He thrust Jim back into the middle of the room and shot the bolts into
+place. As he went across the floor to the food shelf, he passed one hand
+over his brow and flung off the beaded sweat. It spattered audibly on
+the floor. Jim watched agonizedly as Matt got the mustard-can and a cup
+and ran for the sink. He stirred a cupful of mustard and water and drank
+it down. Jim had followed him and was reaching with trembling hands for
+the empty cup. Again Matt shoved him away. As he mixed a second cupful,
+he demanded--
+
+"D'you think one cup'll do for me? You can wait till I'm done."
+
+Jim started to totter toward the door, but Matt checked him.
+
+"If you monkey with that door, I'll twist your neck. Savve? You can take
+yours when I'm done. An' if it saves you, I'll twist your neck, anyway.
+You ain't got no chance, nohow. I told you many times what you'd get if
+you did me dirt."
+
+"But you did me dirt, too," Jim articulated with an effort.
+
+Matt was drinking the second cupful, and did not answer. The sweat had
+got into Jim's eyes, and he could scarcely see his way to the table,
+where he got a cup for himself. But Matt was mixing a third cupful, and,
+as before, thrust him away.
+
+"I told you to wait till I was done," Matt growled. "Get outa my way."
+
+And Jim supported his twitching body by holding on to the sink, the
+while he yearned toward the yellowish concoction that stood for life. It
+was by sheer will that he stood and clung to the sink. His flesh strove
+to double him up and bring him to the floor. Matt drank the third
+cupful, and with difficulty managed to get to a chair and sit down. His
+first paroxysm was passing. The spasms that afflicted him were dying
+away. This good effect he ascribed to the mustard and water. He was
+safe, at any rate. He wiped the sweat from his face, and, in the
+interval of calm, found room for curiosity. He looked at his partner.
+
+A spasm had shaken the mustard can out of Jim's hands, and the contents
+were spilled upon the floor. He stooped to scoop some of the mustard
+into the cup, and the succeeding spasm doubled him upon the floor. Matt
+smiled.
+
+"Stay with it," he encouraged. "It's the stuff all right. It's fixed me
+up."
+
+Jim heard him and turned toward him a stricken face, twisted with
+suffering and pleading. Spasm now followed spasm till he was in
+convulsions, rolling on the floor and yellowing his face and hair in the
+mustard.
+
+Matt laughed hoarsely at the sight, but the laugh broke midway. A tremor
+had run through his body. A new paroxysm was beginning. He arose and
+staggered across to the sink, where, with probing forefinger, he vainly
+strove to assist the action of the emetic. In the end, he clung to
+the sink as Jim had clung, filled with the horror of going down to the
+floor.
+
+The other's paroxysm had passed, and he sat up, weak and fainting, too
+weak to rise, his forehead dripping, his lips flecked with a foam made
+yellow by the mustard in which he had rolled. He rubbed his eyes with
+his knuckles, and groans that were like whines came from his throat.
+
+"What are you snifflin' about?" Matt demanded out of his agony. "All you
+got to do is die. An' when you die you're dead."
+
+"I... ain't... snifflin'... it's... the... mustard... stingin'... my...
+eyes," Jim panted with desperate slowness.
+
+It was his last successful attempt at speech. Thereafter he babbled
+incoherently, pawing the air with shaking arms till a fresh convulsion
+stretched him on the floor.
+
+Matt struggled back to the chair, and, doubled up on it, with his arms
+clasped about his knees, he fought with his disintegrating flesh. He
+came out of the convulsion cool and weak. He looked to see how it went
+with the other, and saw him lying motionless.
+
+He tried to soliloquize, to be facetious, to have his last grim laugh at
+life, but his lips made only incoherent sounds. The thought came to
+him that the emetic had failed, and that nothing remained but the drug
+store. He looked toward the door and drew himself to his feet. There he
+saved himself from falling by clutching the chair. Another paroxysm had
+begun. And in the midst of the paroxysm, with his body and all the parts
+of it flying apart and writhing and twisting back again into knots, he
+clung to the chair and shoved it before him across the floor. The last
+shreds of his will were leaving him when he gained the door. He turned
+the key and shot back one bolt. He fumbled for the second bolt, but
+failed. Then he leaned his weight against the door and slid down gently
+to the floor.
+
+
+
+
+CREATED HE THEM
+
+She met him at the door.
+
+"I did not think you would be so early."
+
+"It is half past eight." He looked at his watch. "The train leaves at
+9.12."
+
+He was very businesslike, until he saw her lips tremble as she abruptly
+turned and led the way.
+
+"It'll be all right, little woman," he said soothingly. "Doctor
+Bodineau's the man. He'll pull him through, you'll see."
+
+They entered the living-room. His glance quested apprehensively about,
+then turned to her.
+
+"Where's Al?"
+
+She did not answer, but with a sudden impulse came close to him and
+stood motionless. She was a slender, dark-eyed woman, in whose face
+was stamped the strain and stress of living. But the fine lines and the
+haunted look in the eyes were not the handiwork of mere worry. He knew
+whose handiwork it was as he looked upon it, and she knew when she
+consulted her mirror.
+
+"It's no use, Mary," he said. He put his hand on her shoulder. "We've
+tried everything. It's a wretched business, I know, but what else can we
+do? You've failed. Doctor Bodineau's all that's left."
+
+"If I had another chance..." she began falteringly.
+
+"We've threshed that all out," he answered harshly. "You've got to buck
+up, now. You know what conclusion we arrived at. You know you haven't
+the ghost of a hope in another chance."
+
+She shook her head. "I know it. But it is terrible, the thought of his
+going away to fight it out alone."
+
+"He won't be alone. There's Doctor Bodineau. And besides, it's a
+beautiful place."
+
+She remained silent.
+
+"It is the only thing," he said.
+
+"It is the only thing," she repeated mechanically.
+
+He looked at his watch. "Where's Al?"
+
+"I'll send him."
+
+When the door had closed behind her, he walked over to the window and
+looked out, drumming absently with his knuckles on the pane.
+
+"Hello."
+
+He turned and responded to the greeting of the man who had just entered.
+There was a perceptible drag to the man's feet as he walked across
+toward the window and paused irresolutely halfway.
+
+"I've changed my mind, George," he announced hurriedly and nervously.
+"I'm not going."
+
+He plucked at his sleeve, shuffled with his feet, dropped his eyes, and
+with a strong effort raised them again to confront the other.
+
+George regarded him silently, his nostrils distending and his lean
+fingers unconsciously crooking like an eagle's talons about to clutch.
+
+In line and feature, there was much of resemblance between the two men;
+and yet, in the strongest resemblances there was a radical difference.
+Theirs were the same black eyes, but those of the man at the window were
+sharp and straight looking, while those of the man in the middle of the
+room were cloudy and furtive. He could not face the other's gaze, and
+continually and vainly struggled with himself to do so. The high cheek
+bones with the hollows beneath were the same, yet the texture of the
+hollows seemed different. The thin-lipped mouths were from the same
+mould, but George's lips were firm and muscular, while Al's were soft
+and loose--the lips of an ascetic turned voluptuary. There was also a
+sag at the corners. His flesh hinted of grossness, especially so in the
+eagle-like aquiline nose that must once have been like the other's, but
+that had lost the austerity the other's still retained.
+
+Al fought for steadiness in the middle of the floor. The silence
+bothered him. He had a feeling that he was about to begin swaying back
+and forth. He moistened his lips with his tongue.
+
+"I'm going to stay," he said desperately.
+
+He dropped his eyes and plucked again at his sleeve.
+
+"And you are only twenty-six years old," George said at last. "You poor,
+feeble old man."
+
+"Don't be so sure of that," Al retorted, with a flash of belligerence.
+
+"Do you remember when we swam that mile and a half across the channel?"
+
+"Well, and what of it?" A sullen expression was creeping across Al's
+face.
+
+"And do you remember when we boxed in the barn after school?"
+
+"I could take all you gave me."
+
+"All I gave you!" George's voice rose momentarily to a higher pitch.
+"You licked me four afternoons out of five. You were twice as strong as
+I--three times as strong. And now I'd be afraid to land on you with a
+sofa cushion; you'd crumple up like a last year's leaf. You'd die, you
+poor, miserable old man."
+
+"You needn't abuse me just because I've changed my mind," the other
+protested, the hint of a whine in his voice.
+
+His wife entered, and he looked appealingly to her; but the man at the
+window strode suddenly up to him and burst out--
+
+"You don't know your own mind for two successive minutes! You haven't
+any mind, you spineless, crawling worm!"
+
+"You can't make me angry." Al smiled with cunning, and glanced
+triumphantly at his wife. "You can't make me angry," he repeated, as
+though the idea were thoroughly gratifying to him. "I know your game.
+It's my stomach, I tell you. I can't help it. Before God, I can't! Isn't
+it my stomach, Mary?"
+
+She glanced at George and spoke composedly, though she hid a trembling
+hand in a fold of her skirt.
+
+"Isn't it time?" she asked softly.
+
+Her husband turned upon her savagely. "I'm not going to go!" he cried.
+"That's just what I've been telling... him. And I tell you again, all of
+you, I'm not going. You can't bully me."
+
+"Why, Al, dear, you said--" she began.
+
+"Never mind what I said!" he broke out. "I've said something else right
+now, and you've heard it, and that settles it."
+
+He walked across the room and threw himself with emphasis into a Morris
+chair. But the other man was swiftly upon him. The talon-like fingers
+gripped his shoulders, jerked him to his feet, and held him there.
+
+"You've reached the limit, Al, and I want you to understand it. I've
+tried to treat you like... like my brother, but hereafter I shall treat
+you like the thing that you are. Do you understand?"
+
+The anger in his voice was cold. The blaze in his eyes was cold. It was
+vastly more effective than any outburst, and Al cringed under it and
+under the clutching hand that was bruising his shoulder muscles.
+
+"It is only because of me that you have this house, that you have the
+food you eat. Your position? Any other man would have been shown the
+door a year ago--two years ago. I have held you in it. Your salary has
+been charity. It has been paid out of my pocket. Mary... her dresses...
+that gown she has on is made over; she wears the discarded dresses of
+her sisters, of my wife. Charity--do you understand? Your children--they
+are wearing the discarded clothes of my children, of the children of my
+neighbours who think the clothes went to some orphan asylum. And it is
+an orphan asylum... or it soon will be."
+
+He emphasized each point with an unconscious tightening of his grip
+on the shoulder. Al was squirming with the pain of it. The sweat was
+starting out on his forehead.
+
+"Now listen well to me," his brother went on. "In three minutes you will
+tell me that you are going with me. If you don't, Mary and the children
+will be taken away from you--to-day. You needn't ever come to the
+office. This house will be closed to you. And in six months I shall
+have the pleasure of burying you. You have three minutes to make up your
+mind."
+
+Al made a strangling movement, and reached up with weak fingers to the
+clutching hand.
+
+"My heart... let me go... you'll be the death of me," he gasped.
+
+The hand thrust him down forcibly into the Morris chair and released
+him.
+
+The clock on the mantle ticked loudly. George glanced at it, and
+at Mary. She was leaning against the table, unable to conceal her
+trembling. He became unpleasantly aware of the feeling of his brother's
+fingers on his hand. Quite unconsciously he wiped the back of the hand
+upon his coat. The clock ticked on in the silence. It seemed to George
+that the room reverberated with his voice. He could hear himself still
+speaking.
+
+"I'll go," came from the Morris chair.
+
+It was a weak and shaken voice, and it was a weak and shaken man that
+pulled himself out of the Morris chair. He started toward the door.
+
+"Where are you going?" George demanded.
+
+"Suit case," came the response. "Mary'll send the trunk later. I'll be
+back in a minute."
+
+The door closed after him. A moment later, struck with sudden suspicion,
+George was opening the door. He glanced in. His brother stood at a
+sideboard, in one hand a decanter, in the other hand, bottom up and to
+his lips, a whisky glass.
+
+Across the glass Al saw that he was observed. It threw him into a panic.
+Hastily he tried to refill the glass and get it to his lips; but glass
+and decanter were sent smashing to the floor. He snarled. It was like
+the sound of a wild beast. But the grip on his shoulder subdued and
+frightened him. He was being propelled toward the door.
+
+"The suit case," he gasped. "It's there in that room. Let me get it."
+
+"Where's the key?" his brother asked, when he had brought it.
+
+"It isn't locked."
+
+The next moment the suit case was spread open, and George's hand was
+searching the contents. From one side it brought out a bottle of whisky,
+from the other side a flask. He snapped the case to.
+
+"Come on," he said. "If we miss one car, we miss that train."
+
+He went out into the hallway, leaving Al with his wife. It was like a
+funeral, George thought, as he waited.
+
+His brother's overcoat caught on the knob of the front door and delayed
+its closing long enough for Mary's first sob to come to their ears.
+George's lips were very thin and compressed as he went down the steps.
+In one hand he carried the suit case. With the other hand he held his
+brother's arm.
+
+As they neared the corner, he heard the electric car a block away,
+and urged his brother on. Al was breathing hard. His feet dragged and
+shuffled, and he held back.
+
+"A hell of a brother YOU are," he panted.
+
+For reply, he received a vicious jerk on his arm. It reminded him of his
+childhood when he was hurried along by some angry grown-up. And like a
+child, he had to be helped up the car step. He sank down on an outside
+seat, panting, sweating, overcome by the exertion. He followed George's
+eyes as the latter looked him up and down.
+
+"A hell of a brother YOU are," was George's comment when he had finished
+the inspection.
+
+Moisture welled into Al's eyes.
+
+"It's my stomach," he said with self-pity.
+
+"I don't wonder," was the retort. "Burnt out like the crater of a
+volcano. Fervent heat isn't a circumstance."
+
+Thereafter they did not speak. When they arrived at the transfer point,
+George came to himself with a start. He smiled. With fixed gaze that
+did not see the houses that streamed across his field of vision, he had
+himself been sunk deep in self-pity. He helped his brother from the car,
+and looked up the intersecting street. The car they were to take was not
+in sight.
+
+Al's eyes chanced upon the corner grocery and saloon across the way.
+At once he became restless. His hands passed beyond his control, and he
+yearned hungrily across the street to the door that swung open even as
+he looked and let in a happy pilgrim. And in that instant he saw the
+white-jacketed bartender against an array of glittering glass. Quite
+unconsciously he started to cross the street.
+
+"Hold on." George's hand was on his arm.
+
+"I want some whisky," he answered.
+
+"You've already had some."
+
+"That was hours ago. Go on, George, let me have some. It's the last
+day. Don't shut off on me until we get there--God knows it will be soon
+enough."
+
+George glanced desperately up the street. The car was in sight.
+
+"There isn't time for a drink," he said.
+
+"I don't want a drink. I want a bottle." Al's voice became wheedling.
+"Go on, George. It's the last, the very last."
+
+"No." The denial was as final as George's thin lips could make it.
+
+Al glanced at the approaching car. He sat down suddenly on the
+curbstone.
+
+"What's the matter?" his brother asked, with momentary alarm.
+
+"Nothing. I want some whisky. It's my stomach."
+
+"Come on now, get up."
+
+George reached for him, but was anticipated, for his brother sprawled
+flat on the pavement, oblivious to the dirt and to the curious glances
+of the passers-by. The car was clanging its gong at the crossing, a
+block away.
+
+"You'll miss it," Al grinned from the pavement. "And it will be your
+fault."
+
+George's fists clenched tightly.
+
+"For two cents I'd give you a thrashing."
+
+"And miss the car," was the triumphant comment from the pavement.
+
+George looked at the car. It was halfway down the block. He looked at
+his watch. He debated a second longer.
+
+"All right," he said. "I'll get it. But you get on that car. If you miss
+it, I'll break the bottle over your head."
+
+He dashed across the street and into the saloon. The car came in and
+stopped. There were no passengers to get off. Al dragged himself up the
+steps and sat down. He smiled as the conductor rang the bell and the car
+started. The swinging door of the saloon burst open. Clutching in
+his hand the suit case and a pint bottle of whisky, George started in
+pursuit. The conductor, his hand on the bell cord, waited to see if it
+would be necessary to stop. It was not. George swung lightly aboard, sat
+down beside his brother, and passed him the bottle.
+
+"You might have got a quart," Al said reproachfully.
+
+He extracted the cork with a pocket corkscrew, and elevated the bottle.
+
+"I'm sick... my stomach," he explained in apologetic tones to the
+passenger who sat next to him.
+
+In the train they sat in the smoking-car. George felt that it was
+imperative. Also, having successfully caught the train, his heart
+softened. He felt more kindly toward his brother, and accused himself of
+unnecessary harshness. He strove to atone by talking about their mother,
+and sisters, and the little affairs and interests of the family. But Al
+was morose, and devoted himself to the bottle. As the time passed, his
+mouth hung looser and looser, while the rings under his eyes seemed to
+puff out and all his facial muscles to relax.
+
+"It's my stomach," he said, once, when he finished the bottle and
+dropped it under the seat; but the swift hardening of his brother's face
+did not encourage further explanations.
+
+The conveyance that met them at the station had all the dignity and
+luxuriousness of a private carriage. George's eyes were keen for the ear
+marks of the institution to which they were going, but his apprehensions
+were allayed from moment to moment. As they entered the wide gateway
+and rolled on through the spacious grounds, he felt sure that the
+institutional side of the place would not jar upon his brother. It was
+more like a summer hotel, or, better yet, a country club. And as they
+swept on through the spring sunshine, the songs of birds in his ears,
+and in his nostrils the breath of flowers, George sighed for a week
+of rest in such a place, and before his eyes loomed the arid vista of
+summer in town and at the office. There was not room in his income for
+his brother and himself.
+
+"Let us take a walk in the grounds," he suggested, after they had met
+Doctor Bodineau and inspected the quarters assigned to Al. "The carriage
+leaves for the station in half an hour, and we'll just have time."
+
+"It's beautiful," he remarked a moment later. Under his feet was
+the velvet grass, the trees arched overhead, and he stood in mottled
+sunshine. "I wish I could stay for a month."
+
+"I'll trade places with you," Al said quickly.
+
+George laughed it off, but he felt a sinking of the heart.
+
+"Look at that oak!" he cried. "And that woodpecker! Isn't he a beauty!"
+
+"I don't like it here," he heard his brother mutter.
+
+George's lips tightened in preparation for the struggle, but he said--
+
+"I'm going to send Mary and the children off to the mountains. She needs
+it, and so do they. And when you're in shape, I'll send you right on to
+join them. Then you can take your summer vacation before you come back
+to the office."
+
+"I'm not going to stay in this damned hole, for all you talk about it,"
+Al announced abruptly.
+
+"Yes you are, and you're going to get your health and strength back
+again, so that the look of you will put the colour in Mary's cheeks
+where it used to be."
+
+"I'm going back with you." Al's voice was firm. "I'm going to take the
+same train back. It's about time for that carriage, I guess."
+
+"I haven't told you all my plans," George tried to go on, but Al cut him
+off.
+
+"You might as well quit that. I don't want any of your soapy talking.
+You treat me like a child. I'm not a child. My mind's made up, and I'll
+show you how long it can stay made up. You needn't talk to me. I don't
+care a rap for what you're going to say."
+
+A baleful light was in his eyes, and to his brother he seemed for all
+the world like a cornered rat, desperate and ready to fight. As George
+looked at him he remembered back to their childhood, and it came to him
+that at last was aroused in Al the same old stubborn strain that had
+enabled him, as a child, to stand against all force and persuasion.
+
+George abandoned hope. He had lost. This creature was not human. The
+last fine instinct of the human had fled. It was a brute, sluggish
+and stolid, impossible to move--just the raw stuff of life, combative,
+rebellious, and indomitable. And as he contemplated his brother he felt
+in himself the rising up of a similar brute. He became suddenly aware
+that his fingers were tensing and crooking like a thug's, and he knew
+the desire to kill. And his reason, turned traitor at last, counselled
+that he should kill, that it was the only thing left for him to do.
+
+He was aroused by a servant calling to him through the trees that the
+carriage was waiting. He answered. Then, looking straight before him, he
+discovered his brother. He had forgotten it was his brother. It had been
+only a thing the moment before. He began to talk, and as he talked the
+way became clear to him. His reason had not turned traitor. The brute in
+him had merely orientated his reason.
+
+"You are no earthly good, Al," he said. "You know that. You've made
+Mary's life a hell. You are a curse to your children. And you have not
+made life exactly a paradise for the rest of us."
+
+"There's no use your talking," Al interjected. "I'm not going to stay
+here."
+
+"That's what I'm coming to," George continued. "You don't have to stay
+here." (Al's face brightened, and he involuntarily made a movement, as
+though about to start toward the carriage.) "On the other hand, it is
+not necessary that you should return with me. There is another way."
+
+George's hand went to his hip pocket and appeared with a revolver. It
+lay along his palm, the butt toward Al, and toward Al he extended it. At
+the same time, with his head, he indicated the near-by thicket.
+
+"You can't bluff me," Al snarled.
+
+"It is not a bluff, Al. Look at me. I mean it. And if you don't do it
+for yourself, I shall have to do it for you."
+
+They faced each other, the proffered revolver still extended. Al debated
+for a moment, then his eyes blazed. With a quick movement he seized the
+revolver.
+
+"My God! I'll do it," he said. "I'll show you what I've got in me."
+
+George felt suddenly sick. He turned away. He did not see his brother
+enter the thicket, but he heard the passage of his body through the
+leaves and branches.
+
+"Good-bye, Al," he called.
+
+"Good-bye," came from the thicket.
+
+George felt the sweat upon his forehead. He began mopping his face with
+his handkerchief. He heard, as from a remote distance, the voice of
+the servant again calling to him that the carriage was waiting. The
+woodpecker dropped down through the mottled sunshine and lighted on the
+trunk of a tree a dozen feet away. George felt that it was all a dream,
+and yet through it all he felt supreme justification. It was the right
+thing to do. It was the only thing.
+
+His whole body gave a spasmodic start, as though the revolver had been
+fired. It was the voice of Al, close at his back.
+
+"Here's your gun," Al said. "I'll stay."
+
+The servant appeared among the trees, approaching rapidly and calling
+anxiously. George put the weapon in his pocket and caught both his
+brother's hands in his own.
+
+"God bless you, old man," he murmured; "and"--with a final squeeze of
+the hands--"good luck!"
+
+"I'm coming," he called to the servant, and turned and ran through the
+trees toward the carriage.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHINAGO
+
+   "The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs."
+                                  --Tahitian proverb.
+
+Ah Cho did not understand French. He sat in the crowded court room, very
+weary and bored, listening to the unceasing, explosive French that now
+one official and now another uttered. It was just so much gabble to Ah
+Cho, and he marvelled at the stupidity of the Frenchmen who took so long
+to find out the murderer of Chung Ga, and who did not find him at all.
+The five hundred coolies on the plantation knew that Ah San had done the
+killing, and here was Ah San not even arrested. It was true that all
+the coolies had agreed secretly not to testify against one another; but
+then, it was so simple, the Frenchmen should have been able to discover
+that Ah San was the man. They were very stupid, these Frenchmen.
+
+Ah Cho had done nothing of which to be afraid. He had had no hand in
+the killing. It was true he had been present at it, and Schemmer, the
+overseer on the plantation, had rushed into the barracks immediately
+afterward and caught him there, along with four or five others; but what
+of that? Chung Ga had been stabbed only twice. It stood to reason that
+five or six men could not inflict two stab wounds. At the most, if a man
+had struck but once, only two men could have done it.
+
+So it was that Ah Cho reasoned, when he, along with his four companions,
+had lied and blocked and obfuscated in their statements to the court
+concerning what had taken place. They had heard the sounds of the
+killing, and, like Schemmer, they had run to the spot. They had got
+there before Schemmer--that was all. True, Schemmer had testified that,
+attracted by the sound of quarrelling as he chanced to pass by, he had
+stood for at least five minutes outside; that then, when he entered, he
+found the prisoners already inside; and that they had not entered just
+before, because he had been standing by the one door to the barracks.
+But what of that? Ah Cho and his four fellow-prisoners had testified
+that Schemmer was mistaken. In the end they would be let go. They were
+all confident of that. Five men could not have their heads cut off for
+two stab wounds. Besides, no foreign devil had seen the killing. But
+these Frenchmen were so stupid. In China, as Ah Cho well knew, the
+magistrate would order all of them to the torture and learn the truth.
+The truth was very easy to learn under torture. But these Frenchmen did
+not torture--bigger fools they! Therefore they would never find out who
+killed Chung Ga.
+
+But Ah Cho did not understand everything. The English Company that owned
+the plantation had imported into Tahiti, at great expense, the five
+hundred coolies. The stockholders were clamouring for dividends, and
+the Company had not yet paid any; wherefore the Company did not want its
+costly contract labourers to start the practice of killing one another.
+Also, there were the French, eager and willing to impose upon the
+Chinagos the virtues and excellences of French law. There was nothing
+like setting an example once in a while; and, besides, of what use was
+New Caledonia except to send men to live out their days in misery and
+pain in payment of the penalty for being frail and human?
+
+Ah Cho did not understand all this. He sat in the court room and waited
+for the baffled judgment that would set him and his comrades free to go
+back to the plantation and work out the terms of their contracts. This
+judgment would soon be rendered. Proceedings were drawing to a close. He
+could see that. There was no more testifying, no more gabble of tongues.
+The French devils were tired, too, and evidently waiting for the
+judgment. And as he waited he remembered back in his life to the time
+when he had signed the contract and set sail in the ship for Tahiti.
+Times had been hard in his sea-coast village, and when he indentured
+himself to labour for five years in the South Seas at fifty cents
+Mexican a day, he had thought himself fortunate. There were men in his
+village who toiled a whole year for ten dollars Mexican, and there were
+women who made nets all the year round for five dollars, while in the
+houses of shopkeepers there were maidservants who received four dollars
+for a year of service. And here he was to receive fifty cents a day; for
+one day, only one day, he was to receive that princely sum! What if the
+work were hard? At the end of the five years he would return home--that
+was in the contract--and he would never have to work again. He would
+be a rich man for life, with a house of his own, a wife, and children
+growing up to venerate him. Yes, and back of the house he would have a
+small garden, a place of meditation and repose, with goldfish in a tiny
+lakelet, and wind bells tinkling in the several trees, and there would
+be a high wall all around so that his meditation and repose should be
+undisturbed.
+
+Well, he had worked out three of those five years. He was already a
+wealthy man (in his own country) through his earnings, and only two
+years more intervened between the cotton plantation on Tahiti and the
+meditation and repose that awaited him. But just now he was losing money
+because of the unfortunate accident of being present at the killing of
+Chung Ga. He had lain three weeks in prison, and for each day of those
+three weeks he had lost fifty cents. But now judgment would soon be
+given, and he would go back to work.
+
+Ah Cho was twenty-two years old. He was happy and good-natured, and it
+was easy for him to smile. While his body was slim in the Asiatic way,
+his face was rotund. It was round, like the moon, and it irradiated a
+gentle complacence and a sweet kindliness of spirit that was unusual
+among his countrymen. Nor did his looks belie him. He never caused
+trouble, never took part in wrangling. He did not gamble. His soul was
+not harsh enough for the soul that must belong to a gambler. He was
+content with little things and simple pleasures. The hush and quiet in
+the cool of the day after the blazing toil in the cotton field was
+to him an infinite satisfaction. He could sit for hours gazing at a
+solitary flower and philosophizing about the mysteries and riddles
+of being. A blue heron on a tiny crescent of sandy beach, a silvery
+splatter of flying fish, or a sunset of pearl and rose across the
+lagoon, could entrance him to all forgetfulness of the procession of
+wearisome days and of the heavy lash of Schemmer.
+
+Schemmer, Karl Schemmer, was a brute, a brutish brute. But he earned
+his salary. He got the last particle of strength out of the five hundred
+slaves; for slaves they were until their term of years was up. Schemmer
+worked hard to extract the strength from those five hundred sweating
+bodies and to transmute it into bales of fluffy cotton ready for export.
+His dominant, iron-clad, primeval brutishness was what enabled him to
+effect the transmutation. Also, he was assisted by a thick leather belt,
+three inches wide and a yard in length, with which he always rode and
+which, on occasion, could come down on the naked back of a stooping
+coolie with a report like a pistol-shot. These reports were frequent
+when Schemmer rode down the furrowed field.
+
+Once, at the beginning of the first year of contract labour, he had
+killed a coolie with a single blow of his fist. He had not exactly
+crushed the man's head like an egg-shell, but the blow had been
+sufficient to addle what was inside, and, after being sick for a week,
+the man had died. But the Chinese had not complained to the French
+devils that ruled over Tahiti. It was their own look out. Schemmer was
+their problem. They must avoid his wrath as they avoided the venom
+of the centipedes that lurked in the grass or crept into the sleeping
+quarters on rainy nights. The Chinagos--such they were called by
+the indolent, brown-skinned island folk--saw to it that they did not
+displease Schemmer too greatly. This was equivalent to rendering up to
+him a full measure of efficient toil. That blow of Schemmer's fist had
+been worth thousands of dollars to the Company, and no trouble ever came
+of it to Schemmer.
+
+The French, with no instinct for colonization, futile in their childish
+playgame of developing the resources of the island, were only too glad
+to see the English Company succeed. What matter of Schemmer and his
+redoubtable fist? The Chinago that died? Well, he was only a Chinago.
+Besides, he died of sunstroke, as the doctor's certificate attested.
+True, in all the history of Tahiti no one had ever died of sunstroke.
+But it was that, precisely that, which made the death of this Chinago
+unique. The doctor said as much in his report. He was very candid.
+Dividends must be paid, or else one more failure would be added to the
+long history of failure in Tahiti.
+
+There was no understanding these white devils. Ah Cho pondered their
+inscrutableness as he sat in the court room waiting the judgment. There
+was no telling what went on at the back of their minds. He had seen a
+few of the white devils. They were all alike--the officers and sailors
+on the ship, the French officials, the several white men on the
+plantation, including Schemmer. Their minds all moved in mysterious ways
+there was no getting at. They grew angry without apparent cause, and
+their anger was always dangerous. They were like wild beasts at such
+times. They worried about little things, and on occasion could out-toil
+even a Chinago. They were not temperate as Chinagos were temperate; they
+were gluttons, eating prodigiously and drinking more prodigiously. A
+Chinago never knew when an act would please them or arouse a storm of
+wrath. A Chinago could never tell. What pleased one time, the very next
+time might provoke an outburst of anger. There was a curtain behind the
+eyes of the white devils that screened the backs of their minds from the
+Chinago's gaze. And then, on top of it all, was that terrible efficiency
+of the white devils, that ability to do things, to make things go, to
+work results, to bend to their wills all creeping, crawling things,
+and the powers of the very elements themselves. Yes, the white men were
+strange and wonderful, and they were devils. Look at Schemmer.
+
+Ah Cho wondered why the judgment was so long in forming. Not a man on
+trial had laid hand on Chung Ga. Ah San alone had killed him. Ah San
+had done it, bending Chung Ga's head back with one hand by a grip of his
+queue, and with the other hand, from behind, reaching over and driving
+the knife into his body. Twice had he driven it in. There in the court
+room, with closed eyes, Ah Cho saw the killing acted over again--the
+squabble, the vile words bandied back and forth, the filth and insult
+flung upon venerable ancestors, the curses laid upon unbegotten
+generations, the leap of Ah San, the grip on the queue of Chung Ga, the
+knife that sank twice into his flesh, the bursting open of the door, the
+irruption of Schemmer, the dash for the door, the escape of Ah San, the
+flying belt of Schemmer that drove the rest into the corner, and the
+firing of the revolver as a signal that brought help to Schemmer. Ah
+Cho shivered as he lived it over. One blow of the belt had bruised his
+cheek, taking off some of the skin. Schemmer had pointed to the bruises
+when, on the witness-stand, he had identified Ah Cho. It was only just
+now that the marks had become no longer visible. That had been a blow.
+Half an inch nearer the centre and it would have taken out his eye. Then
+Ah Cho forgot the whole happening in a vision he caught of the garden
+of meditation and repose that would be his when he returned to his own
+land.
+
+He sat with impassive face, while the magistrate rendered the judgment.
+Likewise were the faces of his four companions impassive. And they
+remained impassive when the interpreter explained that the five of them
+had been found guilty of the murder of Chung Ga, and that Ah Chow
+should have his head cut off, Ah Cho serve twenty years in prison in New
+Caledonia, Wong Li twelve years, and Ah Tong ten years. There was no use
+in getting excited about it. Even Ah Chow remained expressionless as
+a mummy, though it was his head that was to be cut off. The magistrate
+added a few words, and the interpreter explained that Ah Chow's face
+having been most severely bruised by Schemmer's strap had made his
+identification so positive that, since one man must die, he might as
+well be that man. Also, the fact that Ah Cho's face likewise had been
+severely bruised, conclusively proving his presence at the murder and
+his undoubted participation, had merited him the twenty years of penal
+servitude. And down to the ten years of Ah Tong, the proportioned reason
+for each sentence was explained. Let the Chinagos take the lesson to
+heart, the Court said finally, for they must learn that the law would be
+fulfilled in Tahiti though the heavens fell.
+
+The five Chinagos were taken back to jail. They were not shocked
+nor grieved. The sentences being unexpected was quite what they were
+accustomed to in their dealings with the white devils. From them a
+Chinago rarely expected more than the unexpected. The heavy punishment
+for a crime they had not committed was no stranger than the countless
+strange things that white devils did. In the weeks that followed, Ah Cho
+often contemplated Ah Chow with mild curiosity. His head was to be cut
+off by the guillotine that was being erected on the plantation. For him
+there would be no declining years, no gardens of tranquillity. Ah Cho
+philosophized and speculated about life and death. As for himself, he
+was not perturbed. Twenty years were merely twenty years. By that much
+was his garden removed from him--that was all. He was young, and the
+patience of Asia was in his bones. He could wait those twenty years, and
+by that time the heats of his blood would be assuaged and he would be
+better fitted for that garden of calm delight. He thought of a name for
+it; he would call it The Garden of the Morning Calm. He was made happy
+all day by the thought, and he was inspired to devise a moral maxim on
+the virtue of patience, which maxim proved a great comfort, especially
+to Wong Li and Ah Tong. Ah Chow, however, did not care for the maxim.
+His head was to be separated from his body in so short a time that he
+had no need for patience to wait for that event. He smoked well, ate
+well, slept well, and did not worry about the slow passage of time.
+
+Cruchot was a gendarme. He had seen twenty years of service in the
+colonies, from Nigeria and Senegal to the South Seas, and those
+twenty years had not perceptibly brightened his dull mind. He was as
+slow-witted and stupid as in his peasant days in the south of France. He
+knew discipline and fear of authority, and from God down to the sergeant
+of gendarmes the only difference to him was the measure of slavish
+obedience which he rendered. In point of fact, the sergeant bulked
+bigger in his mind than God, except on Sundays when God's mouthpieces
+had their say. God was usually very remote, while the sergeant was
+ordinarily very close at hand.
+
+Cruchot it was who received the order from the Chief Justice to the
+jailer commanding that functionary to deliver over to Cruchot the person
+of Ah Chow. Now, it happened that the Chief Justice had given a dinner
+the night before to the captain and officers of the French man-of-war.
+His hand was shaking when he wrote out the order, and his eyes were
+aching so dreadfully that he did not read over the order. It was only a
+Chinago's life he was signing away, anyway. So he did not notice that he
+had omitted the final letter in Ah Chow's name. The order read "Ah Cho,"
+and, when Cruchot presented the order, the jailer turned over to him the
+person of Ah Cho. Cruchot took that person beside him on the seat of a
+wagon, behind two mules, and drove away.
+
+Ah Cho was glad to be out in the sunshine. He sat beside the gendarme
+and beamed. He beamed more ardently than ever when he noted the mules
+headed south toward Atimaono. Undoubtedly Schemmer had sent for him to
+be brought back. Schemmer wanted him to work. Very well, he would work
+well. Schemmer would never have cause to complain. It was a hot day.
+There had been a stoppage of the trades. The mules sweated, Cruchot
+sweated, and Ah Cho sweated. But it was Ah Cho that bore the heat with
+the least concern. He had toiled three years under that sun on the
+plantation. He beamed and beamed with such genial good nature that even
+Cruchot's heavy mind was stirred to wonderment.
+
+"You are very funny," he said at last.
+
+Ah Cho nodded and beamed more ardently. Unlike the magistrate, Cruchot
+spoke to him in the Kanaka tongue, and this, like all Chinagos and all
+foreign devils, Ah Cho understood.
+
+"You laugh too much," Cruchot chided. "One's heart should be full of
+tears on a day like this."
+
+"I am glad to get out of the jail."
+
+"Is that all?" The gendarme shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Is it not enough?" was the retort.
+
+"Then you are not glad to have your head cut off?"
+
+Ah Cho looked at him in abrupt perplexity, and said--
+
+"Why, I am going back to Atimaono to work on the plantation for
+Schemmer. Are you not taking me to Atimaono?"
+
+Cruchot stroked his long moustaches reflectively. "Well, well," he said
+finally, with a flick of the whip at the off mule, "so you don't know?"
+
+"Know what?" Ah Cho was beginning to feel a vague alarm. "Won't Schemmer
+let me work for him any more?"
+
+"Not after to-day." Cruchot laughed heartily. It was a good joke. "You
+see, you won't be able to work after to-day. A man with his head off
+can't work, eh?" He poked the Chinago in the ribs, and chuckled.
+
+Ah Cho maintained silence while the mules trotted a hot mile. Then he
+spoke: "Is Schemmer going to cut off my head?"
+
+Cruchot grinned as he nodded.
+
+"It is a mistake," said Ah Cho, gravely. "I am not the Chinago that
+is to have his head cut off. I am Ah Cho. The honourable judge has
+determined that I am to stop twenty years in New Caledonia."
+
+The gendarme laughed. It was a good joke, this funny Chinago trying to
+cheat the guillotine. The mules trotted through a coconut grove and for
+half a mile beside the sparkling sea before Ah Cho spoke again.
+
+"I tell you I am not Ah Chow. The honourable judge did not say that my
+head was to go off."
+
+"Don't be afraid," said Cruchot, with the philanthropic intention of
+making it easier for his prisoner. "It is not difficult to die that
+way." He snapped his fingers. "It is quick--like that. It is not like
+hanging on the end of a rope and kicking and making faces for five
+minutes. It is like killing a chicken with a hatchet. You cut its head
+off, that is all. And it is the same with a man. Pouf!--it is over. It
+doesn't hurt. You don't even think it hurts. You don't think. Your head
+is gone, so you cannot think. It is very good. That is the way I want to
+die--quick, ah, quick. You are lucky to die that way. You might get the
+leprosy and fall to pieces slowly, a finger at a time, and now and again
+a thumb, also the toes. I knew a man who was burned by hot water. It
+took him two days to die. You could hear him yelling a kilometre away.
+But you? Ah! so easy! Chck!--the knife cuts your neck like that. It is
+finished. The knife may even tickle. Who can say? Nobody who died that
+way ever came back to say."
+
+He considered this last an excruciating joke, and permitted himself
+to be convulsed with laughter for half a minute. Part of his mirth was
+assumed, but he considered it his humane duty to cheer up the Chinago.
+
+"But I tell you I am Ah Cho," the other persisted. "I don't want my head
+cut off."
+
+Cruchot scowled. The Chinago was carrying the foolishness too far.
+
+"I am not Ah Chow--" Ah Cho began.
+
+"That will do," the gendarme interrupted. He puffed up his cheeks and
+strove to appear fierce.
+
+"I tell you I am not--" Ah Cho began again.
+
+"Shut up!" bawled Cruchot.
+
+After that they rode along in silence. It was twenty miles from Papeete
+to Atimaono, and over half the distance was covered by the time the
+Chinago again ventured into speech.
+
+"I saw you in the court room, when the honourable judge sought after our
+guilt," he began. "Very good. And do you remember that Ah Chow, whose
+head is to be cut off--do you remember that he--Ah Chow--was a tall man?
+Look at me."
+
+He stood up suddenly, and Cruchot saw that he was a short man. And just
+as suddenly Cruchot caught a glimpse of a memory picture of Ah Chow, and
+in that picture Ah Chow was tall. To the gendarme all Chinagos looked
+alike. One face was like another. But between tallness and shortness he
+could differentiate, and he knew that he had the wrong man beside him on
+the seat. He pulled up the mules abruptly, so that the pole shot ahead
+of them, elevating their collars.
+
+"You see, it was a mistake," said Ah Cho, smiling pleasantly.
+
+But Cruchot was thinking. Already he regretted that he had stopped the
+wagon. He was unaware of the error of the Chief Justice, and he had
+no way of working it out; but he did know that he had been given this
+Chinago to take to Atimaono and that it was his duty to take him to
+Atimaono. What if he was the wrong man and they cut his head off? It
+was only a Chinago when all was said, and what was a Chinago, anyway?
+Besides, it might not be a mistake. He did not know what went on in the
+minds of his superiors. They knew their business best. Who was he to
+do their thinking for them? Once, in the long ago, he had attempted to
+think for them, and the sergeant had said: "Cruchot, you are a fool! The
+quicker you know that, the better you will get on. You are not to think;
+you are to obey and leave thinking to your betters." He smarted under
+the recollection. Also, if he turned back to Papeete, he would delay the
+execution at Atimaono, and if he were wrong in turning back, he would
+get a reprimand from the sergeant who was waiting for the prisoner. And,
+furthermore, he would get a reprimand at Papeete as well.
+
+He touched the mules with the whip and drove on. He looked at his watch.
+He would be half an hour late as it was, and the sergeant was bound to
+be angry. He put the mules into a faster trot. The more Ah Cho persisted
+in explaining the mistake, the more stubborn Cruchot became. The
+knowledge that he had the wrong man did not make his temper better. The
+knowledge that it was through no mistake of his confirmed him in the
+belief that the wrong he was doing was the right. And, rather than incur
+the displeasure of the sergeant, he would willingly have assisted a
+dozen wrong Chinagos to their doom.
+
+As for Ah Cho, after the gendarme had struck him over the head with the
+butt of the whip and commanded him in a loud voice to shut up, there
+remained nothing for him to do but to shut up. The long ride continued
+in silence. Ah Cho pondered the strange ways of the foreign devils.
+There was no explaining them. What they were doing with him was of a
+piece with everything they did. First they found guilty five innocent
+men, and next they cut off the head of the man that even they, in their
+benighted ignorance, had deemed meritorious of no more than twenty
+years' imprisonment. And there was nothing he could do. He could only
+sit idly and take what these lords of life measured out to him. Once, he
+got in a panic, and the sweat upon his body turned cold; but he fought
+his way out of it. He endeavoured to resign himself to his fate by
+remembering and repeating certain passages from the "Yin Chih Wen" ("The
+Tract of the Quiet Way"); but, instead, he kept seeing his dream-garden
+of meditation and repose. This bothered him, until he abandoned himself
+to the dream and sat in his garden listening to the tinkling of the
+windbells in the several trees. And lo! sitting thus, in the dream,
+he was able to remember and repeat the passages from "The Tract of the
+Quiet Way."
+
+So the time passed nicely until Atimaono was reached and the mules
+trotted up to the foot of the scaffold, in the shade of which stood the
+impatient sergeant. Ah Cho was hurried up the ladder of the scaffold.
+Beneath him on one side he saw assembled all the coolies of the
+plantation. Schemmer had decided that the event would be a good
+object-lesson, and so he called in the coolies from the fields and
+compelled them to be present. As they caught sight of Ah Cho they
+gabbled among themselves in low voices. They saw the mistake; but they
+kept it to themselves. The inexplicable white devils had doubtlessly
+changed their minds. Instead of taking the life of one innocent man,
+they were taking the life of another innocent man. Ah Chow or Ah
+Cho--what did it matter which? They could never understand the white
+dogs any more than could the white dogs understand them. Ah Cho was
+going to have his head cut off, but they, when their two remaining years
+of servitude were up, were going back to China.
+
+Schemmer had made the guillotine himself. He was a handy man, and though
+he had never seen a guillotine, the French officials had explained the
+principle to him. It was on his suggestion that they had ordered the
+execution to take place at Atimaono instead of at Papeete. The scene
+of the crime, Schemmer had argued, was the best possible place for the
+punishment, and, in addition, it would have a salutary influence
+upon the half-thousand Chinagos on the plantation. Schemmer had also
+volunteered to act as executioner, and in that capacity he was now on
+the scaffold, experimenting with the instrument he had made. A banana
+tree, of the size and consistency of a man's neck, lay under the
+guillotine. Ah Cho watched with fascinated eyes. The German, turning a
+small crank, hoisted the blade to the top of the little derrick he had
+rigged. A jerk on a stout piece of cord loosed the blade and it dropped
+with a flash, neatly severing the banana trunk.
+
+"How does it work?" The sergeant, coming out on top the scaffold, had
+asked the question.
+
+"Beautifully," was Schemmer's exultant answer. "Let me show you."
+
+Again he turned the crank that hoisted the blade, jerked the cord, and
+sent the blade crashing down on the soft tree. But this time it went no
+more than two-thirds of the way through.
+
+The sergeant scowled. "That will not serve," he said.
+
+Schemmer wiped the sweat from his forehead. "What it needs is more
+weight," he announced. Walking up to the edge of the scaffold, he called
+his orders to the blacksmith for a twenty-five-pound piece of iron. As
+he stooped over to attach the iron to the broad top of the blade, Ah Cho
+glanced at the sergeant and saw his opportunity.
+
+"The honourable judge said that Ah Chow was to have his head cut off,"
+he began.
+
+The sergeant nodded impatiently. He was thinking of the fifteen-mile
+ride before him that afternoon, to the windward side of the island, and
+of Berthe, the pretty half-caste daughter of Lafiere, the pearl-trader,
+who was waiting for him at the end of it.
+
+"Well, I am not Ah Chow. I am Ah Cho. The honourable jailer has made a
+mistake. Ah Chow is a tall man, and you see I am short."
+
+The sergeant looked at him hastily and saw the mistake. "Schemmer!" he
+called, imperatively. "Come here."
+
+The German grunted, but remained bent over his task till the chunk
+of iron was lashed to his satisfaction. "Is your Chinago ready?" he
+demanded.
+
+"Look at him," was the answer. "Is he the Chinago?"
+
+Schemmer was surprised. He swore tersely for a few seconds, and looked
+regretfully across at the thing he had made with his own hands and
+which he was eager to see work. "Look here," he said finally, "we can't
+postpone this affair. I've lost three hours' work already out of those
+five hundred Chinagos. I can't afford to lose it all over again for the
+right man. Let's put the performance through just the same. It is only a
+Chinago."
+
+The sergeant remembered the long ride before him, and the pearl-trader's
+daughter, and debated with himself.
+
+"They will blame it on Cruchot--if it is discovered," the German urged.
+"But there's little chance of its being discovered. Ah Chow won't give
+it away, at any rate."
+
+"The blame won't lie with Cruchot, anyway," the sergeant said. "It must
+have been the jailer's mistake."
+
+"Then let's go on with it. They can't blame us. Who can tell one Chinago
+from another? We can say that we merely carried out instructions with
+the Chinago that was turned over to us. Besides, I really can't take all
+those coolies a second time away from their labour."
+
+They spoke in French, and Ah Cho, who did not understand a word of it,
+nevertheless knew that they were determining his destiny. He knew,
+also, that the decision rested with the sergeant, and he hung upon that
+official's lips.
+
+"All right," announced the sergeant. "Go ahead with it. He is only a
+Chinago."
+
+"I'm going to try it once more, just to make sure." Schemmer moved the
+banana trunk forward under the knife, which he had hoisted to the top of
+the derrick.
+
+Ah Cho tried to remember maxims from "The Tract of the Quiet Way." "Live
+in concord," came to him; but it was not applicable. He was not going to
+live. He was about to die. No, that would not do. "Forgive malice"--yes,
+but there was no malice to forgive. Schemmer and the rest were doing
+this thing without malice. It was to them merely a piece of work that
+had to be done, just as clearing the jungle, ditching the water, and
+planting cotton were pieces of work that had to be done. Schemmer jerked
+the cord, and Ah Cho forgot "The Tract of the Quiet Way." The knife shot
+down with a thud, making a clean slice of the tree.
+
+"Beautiful!" exclaimed the sergeant, pausing in the act of lighting a
+cigarette. "Beautiful, my friend."
+
+Schemmer was pleased at the praise.
+
+"Come on, Ah Chow," he said, in the Tahitian tongue.
+
+"But I am not Ah Chow--" Ah Cho began.
+
+"Shut up!" was the answer. "If you open your mouth again, I'll break
+your head."
+
+The overseer threatened him with a clenched fist, and he remained
+silent. What was the good of protesting? Those foreign devils always had
+their way. He allowed himself to be lashed to the vertical board that
+was the size of his body. Schemmer drew the buckles tight--so tight that
+the straps cut into his flesh and hurt. But he did not complain. The
+hurt would not last long. He felt the board tilting over in the air
+toward the horizontal, and closed his eyes. And in that moment he caught
+a last glimpse of his garden of meditation and repose. It seemed to him
+that he sat in the garden. A cool wind was blowing, and the bells in
+the several trees were tinkling softly. Also, birds were making sleepy
+noises, and from beyond the high wall came the subdued sound of village
+life.
+
+Then he was aware that the board had come to rest, and from muscular
+pressures and tensions he knew that he was lying on his back. He opened
+his eyes. Straight above him he saw the suspended knife blazing in the
+sunshine. He saw the weight which had been added, and noted that one
+of Schemmer's knots had slipped. Then he heard the sergeant's voice in
+sharp command. Ah Cho closed his eyes hastily. He did not want to see
+that knife descend. But he felt it--for one great fleeting instant. And
+in that instant he remembered Cruchot and what Cruchot had said. But
+Cruchot was wrong. The knife did not tickle. That much he knew before he
+ceased to know.
+
+
+
+
+MAKE WESTING
+
+     Whatever you do, make westing! make westing!
+                    --Sailing directions for Cape Horn.
+
+For seven weeks the Mary Rogers had been between 50 degrees south in the
+Atlantic and 50 degrees south in the Pacific, which meant that for seven
+weeks she had been struggling to round Cape Horn. For seven weeks
+she had been either in dirt, or close to dirt, save once, and then,
+following upon six days of excessive dirt, which she had ridden out
+under the shelter of the redoubtable Terra del Fuego coast, she had
+almost gone ashore during a heavy swell in the dead calm that had
+suddenly fallen. For seven weeks she had wrestled with the Cape Horn
+graybeards, and in return been buffeted and smashed by them. She was a
+wooden ship, and her ceaseless straining had opened her seams, so that
+twice a day the watch took its turn at the pumps.
+
+The Mary Rogers was strained, the crew was strained, and big Dan Cullen,
+master, was likewise strained. Perhaps he was strained most of all, for
+upon him rested the responsibility of that titanic struggle. He slept
+most of the time in his clothes, though he rarely slept. He haunted the
+deck at night, a great, burly, robust ghost, black with the sunburn
+of thirty years of sea and hairy as an orang-outang. He, in turn, was
+haunted by one thought of action, a sailing direction for the Horn:
+Whatever you do, make westing! make westing! It was an obsession. He
+thought of nothing else, except, at times, to blaspheme God for sending
+such bitter weather.
+
+Make westing! He hugged the Horn, and a dozen times lay hove to with the
+iron Cape bearing east-by-north, or north-north-east, a score of miles
+away. And each time the eternal west wind smote him back and he made
+easting. He fought gale after gale, south to 64 degrees, inside the
+antarctic drift-ice, and pledged his immortal soul to the Powers of
+Darkness for a bit of westing, for a slant to take him around. And he
+made easting. In despair, he had tried to make the passage through the
+Straits of Le Maire. Halfway through, the wind hauled to the north'ard
+of north-west, the glass dropped to 28.88, and he turned and ran before
+a gale of cyclonic fury, missing, by a hair's-breadth, piling up the
+Mary Rogers on the black-toothed rocks. Twice he had made west to the
+Diego Ramirez Rocks, one of the times saved between two snow-squalls by
+sighting the gravestones of ships a quarter of a mile dead ahead.
+
+Blow! Captain Dan Cullen instanced all his thirty years at sea to prove
+that never had it blown so before. The Mary Rogers was hove to at the
+time he gave the evidence, and, to clinch it, inside half an hour the
+Mary Rogers was hove down to the hatches. Her new maintopsail and brand
+new spencer were blown away like tissue paper; and five sails, furled
+and fast under double gaskets, were blown loose and stripped from the
+yards. And before morning the Mary Rogers was hove down twice again, and
+holes were knocked in her bulwarks to ease her decks from the weight of
+ocean that pressed her down.
+
+On an average of once a week Captain Dan Cullen caught glimpses of the
+sun. Once, for ten minutes, the sun shone at midday, and ten minutes
+afterward a new gale was piping up, both watches were shortening sail,
+and all was buried in the obscurity of a driving snow-squall. For
+a fortnight, once, Captain Dan Cullen was without a meridian or a
+chronometer sight. Rarely did he know his position within half of a
+degree, except when in sight of land; for sun and stars remained hidden
+behind the sky, and it was so gloomy that even at the best the horizons
+were poor for accurate observations. A gray gloom shrouded the world.
+The clouds were gray; the great driving seas were leaden gray; the
+smoking crests were a gray churning; even the occasional albatrosses
+were gray, while the snow-flurries were not white, but gray, under the
+sombre pall of the heavens.
+
+Life on board the Mary Rogers was gray--gray and gloomy. The faces
+of the sailors were blue-gray; they were afflicted with sea-cuts and
+sea-boils, and suffered exquisitely. They were shadows of men. For seven
+weeks, in the forecastle or on deck, they had not known what it was to
+be dry. They had forgotten what it was to sleep out a watch, and all
+watches it was, "All hands on deck!" They caught snatches of agonized
+sleep, and they slept in their oilskins ready for the everlasting call.
+So weak and worn were they that it took both watches to do the work of
+one. That was why both watches were on deck so much of the time. And no
+shadow of a man could shirk duty. Nothing less than a broken leg could
+enable a man to knock off work; and there were two such, who had been
+mauled and pulped by the seas that broke aboard.
+
+One other man who was the shadow of a man was George Dorety. He was the
+only passenger on board, a friend of the firm, and he had elected to
+make the voyage for his health. But seven weeks of Cape Horn had not
+bettered his health. He gasped and panted in his bunk through the long,
+heaving nights; and when on deck he was so bundled up for warmth that he
+resembled a peripatetic old-clothes shop. At midday, eating at the cabin
+table in a gloom so deep that the swinging sea-lamps burned always, he
+looked as blue-gray as the sickest, saddest man for'ard. Nor did gazing
+across the table at Captain Dan Cullen have any cheering effect upon
+him. Captain Cullen chewed and scowled and kept silent. The scowls
+were for God, and with every chew he reiterated the sole thought of his
+existence, which was make westing. He was a big, hairy brute, and the
+sight of him was not stimulating to the other's appetite. He looked
+upon George Dorety as a Jonah, and told him so, once each meal, savagely
+transferring the scowl from God to the passenger and back again.
+
+Nor did the mate prove a first aid to a languid appetite. Joshua
+Higgins by name, a seaman by profession and pull, but a pot-wolloper
+by capacity, he was a loose-jointed, sniffling creature, heartless and
+selfish and cowardly, without a soul, in fear of his life of Dan Cullen,
+and a bully over the sailors, who knew that behind the mate was Captain
+Cullen, the law-giver and compeller, the driver and the destroyer, the
+incarnation of a dozen bucko mates. In that wild weather at the southern
+end of the earth, Joshua Higgins ceased washing. His grimy face usually
+robbed George Dorety of what little appetite he managed to accumulate.
+Ordinarily this lavatorial dereliction would have caught Captain
+Cullen's eye and vocabulary, but in the present his mind was filled with
+making westing, to the exclusion of all other things not contributory
+thereto. Whether the mate's face was clean or dirty had no bearing
+upon westing. Later on, when 50 degrees south in the Pacific had been
+reached, Joshua Higgins would wash his face very abruptly. In the
+meantime, at the cabin table, where gray twilight alternated with
+lamplight while the lamps were being filled, George Dorety sat between
+the two men, one a tiger and the other a hyena, and wondered why God had
+made them. The second mate, Matthew Turner, was a true sailor and a man,
+but George Dorety did not have the solace of his company, for he ate by
+himself, solitary, when they had finished.
+
+On Saturday morning, July 24, George Dorety awoke to a feeling of life
+and headlong movement. On deck he found the Mary Rogers running off
+before a howling south-easter. Nothing was set but the lower topsails
+and the foresail. It was all she could stand, yet she was making
+fourteen knots, as Mr. Turner shouted in Dorety's ear when he came on
+deck. And it was all westing. She was going around the Horn at last...
+if the wind held. Mr. Turner looked happy. The end of the struggle was
+in sight. But Captain Cullen did not look happy. He scowled at Dorety
+in passing. Captain Cullen did not want God to know that he was pleased
+with that wind. He had a conception of a malicious God, and believed
+in his secret soul that if God knew it was a desirable wind, God would
+promptly efface it and send a snorter from the west. So he walked softly
+before God, smothering his joy down under scowls and muttered curses,
+and, so, fooling God, for God was the only thing in the universe of
+which Dan Cullen was afraid.
+
+All Saturday and Saturday night the Mary Rogers raced her westing.
+Persistently she logged her fourteen knots, so that by Sunday morning
+she had covered three hundred and fifty miles. If the wind held, she
+would make around. If it failed, and the snorter came from anywhere
+between south-west and north, back the Mary Rogers would be hurled and
+be no better off than she had been seven weeks before. And on Sunday
+morning the wind was failing. The big sea was going down and running
+smooth. Both watches were on deck setting sail after sail as fast as the
+ship could stand it. And now Captain Cullen went around brazenly before
+God, smoking a big cigar, smiling jubilantly, as if the failing wind
+delighted him, while down underneath he was raging against God for
+taking the life out of the blessed wind. Make westing! So he would, if
+God would only leave him alone. Secretly, he pledged himself anew to
+the Powers of Darkness, if they would let him make westing. He pledged
+himself so easily because he did not believe in the Powers of Darkness.
+He really believed only in God, though he did not know it. And in his
+inverted theology God was really the Prince of Darkness. Captain Cullen
+was a devil-worshipper, but he called the devil by another name, that
+was all.
+
+At midday, after calling eight bells, Captain Cullen ordered the royals
+on. The men went aloft faster than they had gone in weeks. Not alone
+were they nimble because of the westing, but a benignant sun was shining
+down and limbering their stiff bodies. George Dorety stood aft, near
+Captain Cullen, less bundled in clothes than usual, soaking in the
+grateful warmth as he watched the scene. Swiftly and abruptly the
+incident occurred. There was a cry from the foreroyal-yard of "Man
+overboard!" Somebody threw a life-buoy over the side, and at the same
+instant the second mate's voice came aft, ringing and peremptory--
+
+"Hard down your helm!"
+
+The man at the wheel never moved a spoke. He knew better, for Captain
+Dan Cullen was standing alongside of him. He wanted to move a spoke, to
+move all the spokes, to grind the wheel down, hard down, for his comrade
+drowning in the sea. He glanced at Captain Dan Cullen, and Captain Dan
+Cullen gave no sign.
+
+"Down! Hard down!" the second mate roared, as he sprang aft.
+
+But he ceased springing and commanding, and stood still, when he saw
+Dan Cullen by the wheel. And big Dan Cullen puffed at his cigar and said
+nothing. Astern, and going astern fast, could be seen the sailor. He had
+caught the life-buoy and was clinging to it. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved.
+The men aloft clung to the royal yards and watched with terror-stricken
+faces. And the Mary Rogers raced on, making her westing. A long, silent
+minute passed.
+
+"Who was it?" Captain Cullen demanded.
+
+"Mops, sir," eagerly answered the sailor at the wheel.
+
+Mops topped a wave astern and disappeared temporarily in the trough.
+It was a large wave, but it was no graybeard. A small boat could live
+easily in such a sea, and in such a sea the Mary Rogers could easily
+come to. But she could not come to and make westing at the same time.
+
+For the first time in all his years, George Dorety was seeing a real
+drama of life and death--a sordid little drama in which the scales
+balanced an unknown sailor named Mops against a few miles of longitude.
+At first he had watched the man astern, but now he watched big Dan
+Cullen, hairy and black, vested with power of life and death, smoking a
+cigar.
+
+Captain Dan Cullen smoked another long, silent minute. Then he removed
+the cigar from his mouth. He glanced aloft at the spars of the Mary
+Rogers, and overside at the sea.
+
+"Sheet home the royals!" he cried.
+
+Fifteen minutes later they sat at table, in the cabin, with food served
+before them. On one side of George Dorety sat Dan Cullen, the tiger, on
+the other side, Joshua Higgins, the hyena. Nobody spoke. On deck the men
+were sheeting home the skysails. George Dorety could hear their cries,
+while a persistent vision haunted him of a man called Mops, alive and
+well, clinging to a life-buoy miles astern in that lonely ocean. He
+glanced at Captain Cullen, and experienced a feeling of nausea, for the
+man was eating his food with relish, almost bolting it.
+
+"Captain Cullen," Dorety said, "you are in command of this ship, and it
+is not proper for me to comment now upon what you do. But I wish to say
+one thing. There is a hereafter, and yours will be a hot one."
+
+Captain Cullen did not even scowl. In his voice was regret as he said--
+
+"It was blowing a living gale. It was impossible to save the man."
+
+"He fell from the royal-yard," Dorety cried hotly. "You were setting
+the royals at the time. Fifteen minutes afterward you were setting the
+skysails."
+
+"It was a living gale, wasn't it, Mr. Higgins?" Captain Cullen said,
+turning to the mate.
+
+"If you'd brought her to, it'd have taken the sticks out of her," was
+the mate's answer. "You did the proper thing, Captain Cullen. The man
+hadn't a ghost of a show."
+
+George Dorety made no answer, and to the meal's end no one spoke. After
+that, Dorety had his meals served in his state-room. Captain Cullen
+scowled at him no longer, though no speech was exchanged between them,
+while the Mary Rogers sped north toward warmer latitudes. At the end of
+the week, Dan Cullen cornered Dorety on deck.
+
+"What are you going to do when we get to 'Frisco?" he demanded bluntly.
+
+"I am going to swear out a warrant for your arrest," Dorety answered
+quietly. "I am going to charge you with murder, and I am going to see
+you hanged for it."
+
+"You're almighty sure of yourself," Captain Cullen sneered, turning on
+his heel.
+
+A second week passed, and one morning found George Dorety standing in
+the coach-house companionway at the for'ard end of the long poop,
+taking his first gaze around the deck. The Mary Rogers was reaching
+full-and-by, in a stiff breeze. Every sail was set and drawing,
+including the staysails. Captain Cullen strolled for'ard along the poop.
+He strolled carelessly, glancing at the passenger out of the corner
+of his eye. Dorety was looking the other way, standing with head and
+shoulders outside the companionway, and only the back of his head was to
+be seen. Captain Cullen, with swift eye, embraced the mainstaysail-block
+and the head and estimated the distance. He glanced about him. Nobody
+was looking. Aft, Joshua Higgins, pacing up and down, had just turned
+his back and was going the other way. Captain Cullen bent over suddenly
+and cast the staysail-sheet off from its pin. The heavy block hurtled
+through the air, smashing Dorety's head like an egg-shell and hurtling
+on and back and forth as the staysail whipped and slatted in the wind.
+Joshua Higgins turned around to see what had carried away, and met the
+full blast of the vilest portion of Captain Cullen's profanity.
+
+"I made the sheet fast myself," whimpered the mate in the first lull,
+"with an extra turn to make sure. I remember it distinctly."
+
+"Made fast?" the Captain snarled back, for the benefit of the watch as
+it struggled to capture the flying sail before it tore to ribbons. "You
+couldn't make your grandmother fast, you useless hell's scullion. If
+you made that sheet fast with an extra turn, why in hell didn't it stay
+fast? That's what I want to know. Why in hell didn't it stay fast?"
+
+The mate whined inarticulately.
+
+"Oh, shut up!" was the final word of Captain Cullen.
+
+Half an hour later he was as surprised as any when the body of George
+Dorety was found inside the companionway on the floor. In the afternoon,
+alone in his room, he doctored up the log.
+
+"Ordinary seaman, Karl Brun," he wrote, "lost overboard from
+foreroyal-yard in a gale of wind. Was running at the time, and for the
+safety of the ship did not dare come up to the wind. Nor could a boat
+have lived in the sea that was running."
+
+On another page, he wrote
+
+"Had often warned Mr. Dorety about the danger he ran because of his
+carelessness on deck. I told him, once, that some day he would get his
+head knocked off by a block. A carelessly fastened mainstaysail sheet
+was the cause of the accident, which was deeply to be regretted because
+Mr. Dorety was a favourite with all of us."
+
+Captain Dan Cullen read over his literary effort with admiration,
+blotted the page, and closed the log. He lighted a cigar and stared
+before him. He felt the Mary Rogers lift, and heel, and surge along,
+and knew that she was making nine knots. A smile of satisfaction slowly
+dawned on his black and hairy face. Well, anyway, he had made his
+westing and fooled God.
+
+
+
+
+SEMPER IDEM
+
+Doctor Bicknell was in a remarkably gracious mood. Through a minor
+accident, a slight bit of carelessness, that was all, a man who might
+have pulled through had died the preceding night. Though it had been
+only a sailorman, one of the innumerable unwashed, the steward of the
+receiving hospital had been on the anxious seat all the morning. It was
+not that the man had died that gave him discomfort, he knew the Doctor
+too well for that, but his distress lay in the fact that the operation
+had been done so well. One of the most delicate in surgery, it had been
+as successful as it was clever and audacious. All had then depended upon
+the treatment, the nurses, the steward. And the man had died. Nothing
+much, a bit of carelessness, yet enough to bring the professional wrath
+of Doctor Bicknell about his ears and to perturb the working of the
+staff and nurses for twenty-four hours to come.
+
+But, as already stated, the Doctor was in a remarkably gracious mood.
+When informed by the steward, in fear and trembling, of the man's
+unexpected take-off, his lips did not so much as form one syllable of
+censure; nay, they were so pursed that snatches of rag-time floated
+softly from them, to be broken only by a pleasant query after the health
+of the other's eldest-born. The steward, deeming it impossible that he
+could have caught the gist of the case, repeated it.
+
+"Yes, yes," Doctor Bicknell said impatiently; "I understand. But how
+about Semper Idem? Is he ready to leave?"
+
+"Yes. They're helping him dress now," the steward answered, passing on
+to the round of his duties, content that peace still reigned within the
+iodine-saturated walls.
+
+It was Semper Idem's recovery which had so fully compensated Doctor
+Bicknell for the loss of the sailorman. Lives were to him as nothing,
+the unpleasant but inevitable incidents of the profession, but cases,
+ah, cases were everything. People who knew him were prone to brand him a
+butcher, but his colleagues were at one in the belief that a bolder
+and yet a more capable man never stood over the table. He was not an
+imaginative man. He did not possess, and hence had no tolerance for,
+emotion. His nature was accurate, precise, scientific. Men were to him
+no more than pawns, without individuality or personal value. But as
+cases it was different. The more broken a man was, the more precarious
+his grip on life, the greater his significance in the eyes of Doctor
+Bicknell. He would as readily forsake a poet laureate suffering from a
+common accident for a nameless, mangled vagrant who defied every law of
+life by refusing to die, as would a child forsake a Punch and Judy for a
+circus.
+
+So it had been in the case of Semper Idem. The mystery of the man had
+not appealed to him, nor had his silence and the veiled romance which
+the yellow reporters had so sensationally and so fruitlessly exploited
+in divers Sunday editions. But Semper Idem's throat had been cut. That
+was the point. That was where his interest had centred. Cut from ear to
+ear, and not one surgeon in a thousand to give a snap of the fingers
+for his chance of recovery. But, thanks to the swift municipal ambulance
+service and to Doctor Bicknell, he had been dragged back into the world
+he had sought to leave. The Doctor's co-workers had shaken their heads
+when the case was brought in. Impossible, they said. Throat, windpipe,
+jugular, all but actually severed, and the loss of blood frightful. As
+it was such a foregone conclusion, Doctor Bicknell had employed methods
+and done things which made them, even in their professional capacities,
+shudder. And lo! the man had recovered.
+
+So, on this morning that Semper Idem was to leave the hospital, hale
+and hearty, Doctor Bicknell's geniality was in nowise disturbed by the
+steward's report, and he proceeded cheerfully to bring order out of the
+chaos of a child's body which had been ground and crunched beneath the
+wheels of an electric car.
+
+As many will remember, the case of Semper Idem aroused a vast deal
+of unseemly yet highly natural curiosity. He had been found in a slum
+lodging, with throat cut as aforementioned, and blood dripping down upon
+the inmates of the room below and disturbing their festivities. He had
+evidently done the deed standing, with head bowed forward that he might
+gaze his last upon a photograph which stood on the table propped against
+a candlestick. It was this attitude which had made it possible for
+Doctor Bicknell to save him. So terrific had been the sweep of the razor
+that had he had his head thrown back, as he should have done to have
+accomplished the act properly, with his neck stretched and the elastic
+vascular walls distended, he would have of a certainty well-nigh
+decapitated himself.
+
+At the hospital, during all the time he travelled the repugnant road
+back to life, not a word had left his lips. Nor could anything be
+learned of him by the sleuths detailed by the chief of police. Nobody
+knew him, nor had ever seen or heard of him before. He was strictly,
+uniquely, of the present. His clothes and surroundings were those of the
+lowest labourer, his hands the hands of a gentleman. But not a shred
+of writing was discovered, nothing, save in one particular, which would
+serve to indicate his past or his position in life.
+
+And that one particular was the photograph. If it were at all a
+likeness, the woman who gazed frankly out upon the onlooker from the
+card-mount must have been a striking creature indeed. It was an amateur
+production, for the detectives were baffled in that no professional
+photographer's signature or studio was appended. Across a corner of the
+mount, in delicate feminine tracery, was written: "Semper idem; semper
+fidelis." And she looked it. As many recollect, it was a face one could
+never forget. Clever half-tones, remarkably like, were published in all
+the leading papers at the time; but such procedure gave rise to nothing
+but the uncontrollable public curiosity and interminable copy to the
+space-writers.
+
+For want of a better name, the rescued suicide was known to the hospital
+attendants, and to the world, as Semper Idem. And Semper Idem he
+remained. Reporters, detectives, and nurses gave him up in despair.
+Not one word could he be persuaded to utter; yet the flitting conscious
+light of his eyes showed that his ears heard and his brain grasped every
+question put to him.
+
+But this mystery and romance played no part in Doctor Bicknell's
+interest when he paused in the office to have a parting word with his
+patient. He, the Doctor, had performed a prodigy in the matter of this
+man, done what was virtually unprecedented in the annals of surgery. He
+did not care who or what the man was, and it was highly improbable
+that he should ever see him again; but, like the artist gazing upon a
+finished creation, he wished to look for the last time upon the work of
+his hand and brain.
+
+Semper Idem still remained mute. He seemed anxious to be gone. Not a
+word could the Doctor extract from him, and little the Doctor cared.
+He examined the throat of the convalescent carefully, idling over the
+hideous scar with the lingering, half-caressing fondness of a parent.
+It was not a particularly pleasing sight. An angry line circled the
+throat--for all the world as though the man had just escaped the
+hangman's noose--and, disappearing below the ear on either side, had the
+appearance of completing the fiery periphery at the nape of the neck.
+
+Maintaining his dogged silence, yielding to the other's examination in
+much the manner of a leashed lion, Semper Idem betrayed only his desire
+to drop from out of the public eye.
+
+"Well, I'll not keep you," Doctor Bicknell finally said, laying a hand
+on the man's shoulder and stealing a last glance at his own handiwork.
+"But let me give you a bit of advice. Next time you try it on, hold
+your chin up, so. Don't snuggle it down and butcher yourself like a cow.
+Neatness and despatch, you know. Neatness and despatch."
+
+Semper Idem's eyes flashed in token that he heard, and a moment later
+the hospital door swung to on his heel.
+
+It was a busy day for Doctor Bicknell, and the afternoon was well along
+when he lighted a cigar preparatory to leaving the table upon which it
+seemed the sufferers almost clamoured to be laid. But the last one, an
+old rag-picker with a broken shoulder-blade, had been disposed of, and
+the first fragrant smoke wreaths had begun to curl about his head, when
+the gong of a hurrying ambulance came through the open window from
+the street, followed by the inevitable entry of the stretcher with its
+ghastly freight.
+
+"Lay it on the table," the Doctor directed, turning for a moment to
+place his cigar in safety. "What is it?"
+
+"Suicide--throat cut," responded one of the stretcher bearers. "Down on
+Morgan Alley. Little hope, I think, sir. He's 'most gone."
+
+"Eh? Well, I'll give him a look, anyway." He leaned over the man at the
+moment when the quick made its last faint flutter and succumbed.
+
+"It's Semper Idem come back again," the steward said.
+
+"Ay," replied Doctor Bicknell, "and gone again. No bungling this time.
+Properly done, upon my life, sir, properly done. Took my advice to the
+letter. I'm not required here. Take it along to the morgue."
+
+Doctor Bicknell secured his cigar and relighted it. "That," he said
+between the puffs, looking at the steward, "that evens up for the one
+you lost last night. We're quits now."
+
+
+
+
+A NOSE FOR THE KING
+
+In the morning calm of Korea, when its peace and tranquillity truly
+merited its ancient name, "Cho-sen," there lived a politician by name Yi
+Chin Ho. He was a man of parts, and--who shall say?--perhaps in no wise
+worse than politicians the world over. But, unlike his brethren in other
+lands, Yi Chin Ho was in jail. Not that he had inadvertently diverted to
+himself public moneys, but that he had inadvertently diverted too much.
+Excess is to be deplored in all things, even in grafting, and Yi Chin
+Ho's excess had brought him to most deplorable straits.
+
+Ten thousand strings of cash he owed the Government, and he lay
+in prison under sentence of death. There was one advantage to the
+situation--he had plenty of time in which to think. And he thought well.
+Then called he the jailer to him.
+
+"Most worthy man, you see before you one most wretched," he began. "Yet
+all will be well with me if you will but let me go free for one short
+hour this night. And all will be well with you, for I shall see to
+your advancement through the years, and you shall come at length to the
+directorship of all the prisons of Cho-sen."
+
+"How now?" demanded the jailer. "What foolishness is this? One short
+hour, and you but waiting for your head to be chopped off! And I, with
+an aged and much-to-be-respected mother, not to say anything of a wife
+and several children of tender years! Out upon you for the scoundrel
+that you are!"
+
+"From the Sacred City to the ends of all the Eight Coasts there is no
+place for me to hide," Yi Chin Ho made reply. "I am a man of wisdom, but
+of what worth my wisdom here in prison? Were I free, well I know I could
+seek out and obtain the money wherewith to repay the Government. I know
+of a nose that will save me from all my difficulties."
+
+"A nose!" cried the jailer.
+
+"A nose," said Yi Chin Ho. "A remarkable nose, if I may say so, a most
+remarkable nose."
+
+The jailer threw up his hands despairingly. "Ah, what a wag you are,
+what a wag," he laughed. "To think that that very admirable wit of yours
+must go the way of the chopping-block!"
+
+And so saying, he turned and went away. But in the end, being a man soft
+of head and heart, when the night was well along he permitted Yi Chin Ho
+to go.
+
+Straight he went to the Governor, catching him alone and arousing him
+from his sleep.
+
+"Yi Chin Ho, or I'm no Governor!" cried the Governor. "What do you here
+who should be in prison waiting on the chopping-block?"
+
+"I pray Your Excellency to listen to me," said Yi Chin Ho, squatting on
+his hams by the bedside and lighting his pipe from the fire-box. "A dead
+man is without value. It is true, I am as a dead man, without value to
+the Government, to Your Excellency, or to myself. But if, so to say,
+Your Excellency were to give me my freedom--"
+
+"Impossible!" cried the Governor. "Beside, you are condemned to death."
+
+"Your Excellency well knows that if I can repay the ten thousand strings
+of cash, the Government will pardon me," Yi Chin Ho went on. "So, as I
+say, if Your Excellency were to give me my freedom for a few days, being
+a man of understanding, I should then repay the Government and be in
+position to be of service to Your Excellency. I should be in position to
+be of very great service to Your Excellency."
+
+"Have you a plan whereby you hope to obtain this money?" asked the
+Governor.
+
+"I have," said Yi Chin Ho.
+
+"Then come with it to me to-morrow night; I would now sleep," said the
+Governor, taking up his snore where it had been interrupted.
+
+On the following night, having again obtained leave of absence from the
+jailer, Yi Chin Ho presented himself at the Governor's bedside.
+
+"Is it you, Yi Chin Ho?" asked the Governor. "And have you the plan?"
+
+"It is I, Your Excellency," answered Yi Chin Ho, "and the plan is here."
+
+"Speak," commanded the Governor.
+
+"The plan is here," repeated Yi Chin Ho, "here in my hand."
+
+The Governor sat up and opened his eyes. Yi Chin Ho proffered in his
+hand a sheet of paper. The Governor held it to the light.
+
+"Nothing but a nose," said he.
+
+"A bit pinched, so, and so, Your Excellency," said Yi Chin Ho.
+
+"Yes, a bit pinched here and there, as you say," said the Governor.
+
+"Withal it is an exceeding corpulent nose, thus, and so, all in one
+place, at the end," proceeded Yi Chin Ho. "Your Excellency would seek
+far and wide and many a day for that nose and find it not!"
+
+"An unusual nose," admitted the Governor.
+
+"There is a wart upon it," said Yi Chin Ho.
+
+"A most unusual nose," said the Governor. "Never have I seen the like.
+But what do you with this nose, Yi Chin Ho?"
+
+"I seek it whereby to repay the money to the Government," said Yi Chin
+Ho. "I seek it to be of service to Your Excellency, and I seek it to
+save my own worthless head. Further, I seek Your Excellency's seal upon
+this picture of the nose."
+
+And the Governor laughed and affixed the seal of State, and Yi Chin Ho
+departed. For a month and a day he travelled the King's Road which leads
+to the shore of the Eastern Sea; and there, one night, at the gate of
+the largest mansion of a wealthy city he knocked loudly for admittance.
+
+"None other than the master of the house will I see," said he fiercely
+to the frightened servants. "I travel upon the King's business."
+
+Straightway was he led to an inner room, where the master of the house
+was roused from his sleep and brought blinking before him.
+
+"You are Pak Chung Chang, head man of this city," said Yi Chin Ho in
+tones that were all-accusing. "I am upon the King's business."
+
+Pak Chung Chang trembled. Well he knew the King's business was ever a
+terrible business. His knees smote together, and he near fell to the
+floor.
+
+"The hour is late," he quavered. "Were it not well to--"
+
+"The King's business never waits!" thundered Yi Chin Ho. "Come apart
+with me, and swiftly. I have an affair of moment to discuss with you.
+
+"It is the King's affair," he added with even greater fierceness; so
+that Pak Chung Chang's silver pipe dropped from his nerveless fingers
+and clattered on the floor.
+
+"Know then," said Yi Chin Ho, when they had gone apart, "that the King
+is troubled with an affliction, a very terrible affliction. In that he
+failed to cure, the Court physician has had nothing else than his head
+chopped off. From all the Eight Provinces have the physicians come to
+wait upon the King. Wise consultation have they held, and they have
+decided that for a remedy for the King's affliction nothing else is
+required than a nose, a certain kind of nose, a very peculiar certain
+kind of nose.
+
+"Then by none other was I summoned than His Excellency the Prime
+Minister himself. He put a paper into my hand. Upon this paper was
+the very peculiar kind of nose drawn by the physicians of the Eight
+Provinces, with the seal of State upon it.
+
+"'Go,' said His Excellency the Prime Minister. 'Seek out this nose, for
+the King's affliction is sore. And wheresoever you find this nose upon
+the face of a man, strike it off forthright and bring it in all haste to
+the Court, for the King must be cured. Go, and come not back until your
+search is rewarded.'
+
+"And so I departed upon my quest," said Yi Chin Ho. "I have sought
+out the remotest corners of the kingdom; I have travelled the Eight
+Highways, searched the Eight Provinces, and sailed the seas of the Eight
+Coasts. And here I am."
+
+With a great flourish he drew a paper from his girdle, unrolled it with
+many snappings and cracklings, and thrust it before the face of Pak
+Chung Chang. Upon the paper was the picture of the nose.
+
+Pak Chung Chang stared upon it with bulging eyes.
+
+"Never have I beheld such a nose," he began.
+
+"There is a wart upon it," said Yi Chin Ho.
+
+"Never have I beheld--" Pak Chung Chang began again.
+
+"Bring your father before me," Yi Chin Ho interrupted sternly.
+
+"My ancient and very-much-to-be-respected ancestor sleeps," said Pak
+Chung Chang.
+
+"Why dissemble?" demanded Yi Chin Ho. "You know it is your father's
+nose. Bring him before me that I may strike it off and be gone. Hurry,
+lest I make bad report of you."
+
+"Mercy!" cried Pak Chung Chang, falling on his knees. "It is impossible!
+It is impossible! You cannot strike off my father's nose. He cannot
+go down without his nose to the grave. He will become a laughter and a
+byword, and all my days and nights will be filled with woe. O reflect!
+Report that you have seen no such nose in your travels. You, too, have a
+father."
+
+Pak Chung Chang clasped Yi Chin Ho's knees and fell to weeping on his
+sandals.
+
+"My heart softens strangely at your tears," said Yi Chin Ho. "I, too,
+know filial piety and regard. But--" He hesitated, then added, as though
+thinking aloud, "It is as much as my head is worth."
+
+"How much is your head worth?" asked Pak Chung Chang in a thin, small
+voice.
+
+"A not remarkable head," said Yi Chin Ho. "An absurdly unremarkable
+head; but, such is my great foolishness, I value it at nothing less than
+one hundred thousand strings of cash."
+
+"So be it," said Pak Chung Chang, rising to his feet.
+
+"I shall need horses to carry the treasure," said Yi Chin Ho, "and men
+to guard it well as I journey through the mountains. There are robbers
+abroad in the land."
+
+"There are robbers abroad in the land," said Pak Chung Chang,
+sadly. "But it shall be as you wish, so long as my ancient and
+very-much-to-be-respected ancestor's nose abide in its appointed place."
+
+"Say nothing to any man of this occurrence," said Yi Chin Ho, "else will
+other and more loyal servants than I be sent to strike off your father's
+nose."
+
+And so Yi Chin Ho departed on his way through the mountains, blithe
+of heart and gay of song as he listened to the jingling bells of his
+treasure-laden ponies.
+
+There is little more to tell. Yi Chin Ho prospered through the years. By
+his efforts the jailer attained at length to the directorship of all the
+prisons of Cho-sen; the Governor ultimately betook himself to the Sacred
+City to be Prime Minister to the King, while Yi Chin Ho became the
+King's boon companion and sat at table with him to the end of a round,
+fat life. But Pak Chung Chang fell into a melancholy, and ever after he
+shook his head sadly, with tears in his eyes, whenever he regarded the
+expensive nose of his ancient and very-much-to-be-respected ancestor.
+
+
+
+
+THE "FRANCIS SPAIGHT"
+
+(A TRUE TALE RETOLD)
+
+The Francis Spaight was running before it solely under a mizzentopsail,
+when the thing happened. It was not due to carelessness so much as
+to the lack of discipline of the crew and to the fact that they were
+indifferent seamen at best. The man at the wheel in particular, a
+Limerick man, had had no experience with salt water beyond that of
+rafting timber on the Shannon between the Quebec vessels and the shore.
+He was afraid of the huge seas that rose out of the murk astern and
+bore down upon him, and he was more given to cowering away from their
+threatened impact than he was to meeting their blows with the wheel and
+checking the ship's rush to broach to.
+
+It was three in the morning when his unseamanlike conduct precipitated
+the catastrophe. At sight of a sea far larger than its fellows, he
+crouched down, releasing his hands from the spokes. The Francis Spaight
+sheered as her stern lifted on the sea, receiving the full fling of the
+cap on her quarter. The next instant she was in the trough, her lee-rail
+buried till the ocean was level with her hatch-coamings, sea after sea
+breaking over her weather rail and sweeping what remained exposed of the
+deck with icy deluges.
+
+The men were out of hand, helpless and hopeless, stupid in their
+bewilderment and fear, and resolute only in that they would not obey
+orders. Some wailed, others clung silently in the weather shrouds, and
+still others muttered prayers or shrieked vile imprecations; and neither
+captain nor mate could get them to bear a hand at the pumps or at
+setting patches of sails to bring the vessel up to the wind and sea.
+Inside the hour the ship was over on her beam ends, the lubberly cowards
+climbing up her side and hanging on in the rigging. When she went over,
+the mate was caught and drowned in the after-cabin, as were two sailors
+who had sought refuge in the forecastle.
+
+The mate had been the ablest man on board, and the captain was now
+scarcely less helpless than his men. Beyond cursing them for their
+worthlessness, he did nothing; and it remained for a man named Mahoney,
+a Belfast man, and a boy, O'Brien, of Limerick, to cut away the fore and
+main masts. This they did at great risk on the perpendicular wall of the
+wreck, sending the mizzentopmast overside along in the general crash.
+The Francis Spaight righted, and it was well that she was lumber
+laden, else she would have sunk, for she was already water-logged.
+The mainmast, still fast by the shrouds, beat like a thunderous
+sledge-hammer against the ship's side, every stroke bringing groans from
+the men.
+
+Day dawned on the savage ocean, and in the cold gray light all that
+could be seen of the Francis Spaight emerging from the sea were the
+poop, the shattered mizzenmast, and a ragged line of bulwarks. It was
+midwinter in the North Atlantic, and the wretched men were half-dead
+from cold. But there was no place where they could find rest. Every sea
+breached clean over the wreck, washing away the salt incrustations from
+their bodies and depositing fresh incrustations. The cabin under the
+poop was awash to the knees, but here at least was shelter from the
+chill wind, and here the survivors congregated, standing upright,
+holding on by the cabin furnishings, and leaning against one another for
+support.
+
+In vain Mahoney strove to get the men to take turns in watching aloft
+from the mizzenmast for any chance vessel. The icy gale was too much for
+them, and they preferred the shelter of the cabin. O'Brien, the boy, who
+was only fifteen, took turns with Mahoney on the freezing perch. It was
+the boy, at three in the afternoon, who called down that he had sighted
+a sail. This did bring them from the cabin, and they crowded the poop
+rail and weather mizzen shrouds as they watched the strange ship. But
+its course did not lie near, and when it disappeared below the skyline,
+they returned shivering to the cabin, not one offering to relieve the
+watch at the mast head.
+
+By the end of the second day, Mahoney and O'Brien gave up their attempt,
+and thereafter the vessel drifted in the gale uncared for and without a
+lookout. There were thirteen alive, and for seventy-two hours they stood
+knee-deep in the sloshing water on the cabin floor, half-frozen, without
+food, and with but three bottles of wine shared among them. All food and
+fresh water were below, and there was no getting at such supplies in
+the water-logged condition of the wreck. As the days went by, no food
+whatever passed their lips. Fresh water, in small quantities, they were
+able to obtain by holding a cover of a tureen under the saddle of the
+mizzenmast. But the rain fell infrequently, and they were hard put. When
+it rained, they also soaked their handkerchiefs, squeezing them out into
+their mouths or into their shoes. As the wind and sea went down, they
+were even able to mop the exposed portions of the deck that were free
+from brine and so add to their water supply. But food they had none, and
+no way of getting it, though sea-birds flew repeatedly overhead.
+
+In the calm weather that followed the gale, after having remained on
+their feet for ninety-six hours, they were able to find dry planks in
+the cabin on which to lie. But the long hours of standing in the salt
+water had caused sores to form on their legs. These sores were extremely
+painful. The slightest contact or scrape caused severe anguish, and in
+their weak condition and crowded situation they were continually hurting
+one another in this manner. Not a man could move about without being
+followed by volleys of abuse, curses, and groans. So great was their
+misery that the strong oppressed the weak, shoving them aside from
+the dry planks to shift for themselves in the cold and wet. The boy,
+O'Brien, was specially maltreated. Though there were three other
+boys, it was O'Brien who came in for most of the abuse. There was no
+explaining it, except on the ground that his was a stronger and more
+dominant spirit than those of the other boys, and that he stood up more
+for his rights, resenting the petty injustices that were meted out to
+all the boys by the men. Whenever O'Brien came near the men in search
+of a dry place to sleep, or merely moved about, he was kicked and cuffed
+away. In return, he cursed them for their selfish brutishness, and blows
+and kicks and curses were rained upon him. Miserable as were all of
+them, he was thus made far more miserable; and it was only the flame of
+life, unusually strong in him, that enabled him to endure.
+
+As the days went by and they grew weaker, their peevishness and
+ill-temper increased, which, in turn, increased the ill-treatment and
+sufferings of O'Brien. By the sixteenth day all hands were far gone with
+hunger, and they stood together in small groups, talking in undertones
+and occasionally glancing at O'Brien. It was at high noon that the
+conference came to a head. The captain was the spokesman. All were
+collected on the poop.
+
+"Men," the captain began, "we have been a long time without food--two
+weeks and two days it is, though it seems more like two years and two
+months. We can't hang out much longer. It is beyond human nature to go
+on hanging out with nothing in our stomachs. There is a serious question
+to consider: whether it is better for all to die, or for one to die. We
+are standing with our feet in our graves. If one of us dies, the rest
+may live until a ship is sighted. What say you?"
+
+Michael Behane, the man who had been at the wheel when the Francis
+Spaight broached to, called out that it was well. The others joined in
+the cry.
+
+"Let it be one of the b'ys!" cried Sullivan, a Tarbert man, glancing at
+the same time significantly at O'Brien.
+
+"It is my opinion," the captain went on, "that it will be a good deed
+for one of us to die for the rest."
+
+"A good deed! A good deed!" the men interjected.
+
+"And it is my opinion that 'tis best for one of the boys to die. They
+have no families to support, nor would they be considered so great a
+loss to their friends as those who have wives and children."
+
+"'Tis right." "Very right." "Very fit it should be done," the men
+muttered one to another.
+
+But the four boys cried out against the injustice of it.
+
+"Our lives is just as dear to us as the rest iv yez," O'Brien protested.
+"An' our famblies, too. As for wives an' childer, who is there savin'
+meself to care for me old mother that's a widow, as you know well,
+Michael Behane, that comes from Limerick? 'Tis not fair. Let the lots be
+drawn between all of us, men and b'ys."
+
+Mahoney was the only man who spoke in favour of the boys, declaring that
+it was the fair thing for all to share alike. Sullivan and the captain
+insisted on the drawing of lots being confined to the boys. There
+were high words, in the midst of which Sullivan turned upon O'Brien,
+snarling--
+
+"'Twould be a good deed to put you out of the way. You deserve it.
+'Twould be the right way to serve you, an' serve you we will."
+
+He started toward O'Brien, with intent to lay hands on him and proceed
+at once with the killing, while several others likewise shuffled toward
+him and reached for him. He stumbled backwards to escape them, at the
+same time crying that he would submit to the drawing of the lots among
+the boys.
+
+The captain prepared four sticks of different lengths and handed them to
+Sullivan.
+
+"You're thinkin' the drawin'll not be fair," the latter sneered to
+O'Brien. "So it's yerself'll do the drawin'."
+
+To this O'Brien agreed. A handkerchief was tied over his eyes,
+blindfolding him, and he knelt down on the deck with his back to
+Sullivan.
+
+"Whoever you name for the shortest stick'll die," the captain said.
+
+Sullivan held up one of the sticks. The rest were concealed in his hand
+so that no one could see whether it was the short stick or not.
+
+"An' whose stick will it be?" Sullivan demanded.
+
+"For little Johnny Sheehan," O'Brien answered.
+
+Sullivan laid the stick aside. Those who looked could not tell if it
+were the fatal one. Sullivan held up another stick.
+
+"Whose will it be?"
+
+"For George Burns," was the reply.
+
+The stick was laid with the first one, and a third held up.
+
+"An' whose is this wan?"
+
+"For myself," said O'Brien.
+
+With a quick movement, Sullivan threw the four sticks together. No one
+had seen.
+
+"'Tis for yourself ye've drawn it," Sullivan announced.
+
+"A good deed," several of the men muttered.
+
+O'Brien was very quiet. He arose to his feet, took the bandage off, and
+looked around.
+
+"Where is ut?" he demanded. "The short stick? The wan for me?"
+
+The captain pointed to the four sticks lying on the deck.
+
+"How do you know the stick was mine?" O'Brien questioned. "Did you see
+ut, Johnny Sheehan?"
+
+Johnny Sheehan, who was the youngest of the boys, did not answer.
+
+"Did you see ut?" O'Brien next asked Mahoney.
+
+"No, I didn't see ut."
+
+The men were muttering and growling.
+
+"'Twas a fair drawin'," Sullivan said. "Ye had yer chanct an' ye lost,
+that's all iv ut."
+
+"A fair drawin'," the captain added. "Didn't I behold it myself? The
+stick was yours, O'Brien, an' ye may as well get ready. Where's the
+cook? Gorman, come here. Fetch the tureen cover, some of ye. Gorman, do
+your duty like a man."
+
+"But how'll I do it," the cook demanded. He was a weak-eyed,
+weak-chinned, indecisive man.
+
+"'Tis a damned murder!" O'Brien cried out.
+
+"I'll have none of ut," Mahoney announced. "Not a bite shall pass me
+lips."
+
+"Then 'tis yer share for better men than yerself," Sullivan sneered. "Go
+on with yer duty, cook."
+
+"'Tis not me duty, the killin' of b'ys," Gorman protested irresolutely.
+
+"If yez don't make mate for us, we'll be makin' mate of yerself," Behane
+threatened. "Somebody must die, an' as well you as another."
+
+Johnny Sheehan began to cry. O'Brien listened anxiously. His face was
+pale. His lips trembled, and at times his whole body shook.
+
+"I signed on as cook," Gorman enounced. "An' cook I wud if galley there
+was. But I'll not lay me hand to murder. 'Tis not in the articles. I'm
+the cook--"
+
+"An' cook ye'll be for wan minute more only," Sullivan said grimly, at
+the same moment gripping the cook's head from behind and bending it back
+till the windpipe and jugular were stretched taut. "Where's yer knife,
+Mike? Pass it along."
+
+At the touch of the steel, Gorman whimpered.
+
+"I'll do ut, if yez'll hold the b'y."
+
+The pitiable condition of the cook seemed in some fashion to nerve up
+O'Brien.
+
+"It's all right, Gorman," he said. "Go on with ut. 'Tis meself knows yer
+not wantin' to do ut. It's all right, sir"--this to the captain, who
+had laid a hand heavily on his arm. "Ye won't have to hold me, sir. I'll
+stand still."
+
+"Stop yer blitherin', an' go an' get the tureen cover," Behane commanded
+Johnny Sheehan, at the same time dealing him a heavy cuff alongside the
+head.
+
+The boy, who was scarcely more than a child, fetched the cover. He
+crawled and tottered along the deck, so weak was he from hunger. The
+tears still ran down his cheeks. Behane took the cover from him, at the
+same time administering another cuff.
+
+O'Brien took off his coat and bared his right arm. His under lip still
+trembled, but he held a tight grip on himself. The captain's penknife
+was opened and passed to Gorman.
+
+"Mahoney, tell me mother what happened to me, if ever ye get back,"
+O'Brien requested.
+
+Mahoney nodded.
+
+"'Tis black murder, black an' damned," he said. "The b'y's flesh'll do
+none iv yez anny good. Mark me words. Ye'll not profit by it, none iv
+yez."
+
+"Get ready," the captain ordered. "You, Sullivan, hold the cover--that's
+it--close up. Spill nothing. It's precious stuff."
+
+Gorman made an effort. The knife was dull. He was weak. Besides, his
+hand was shaking so violently that he nearly dropped the knife. The
+three boys were crouched apart, in a huddle, crying and sobbing. With
+the exception of Mahoney, the men were gathered about the victim,
+craning their necks to see.
+
+"Be a man, Gorman," the captain cautioned.
+
+The wretched cook was seized with a spasm of resolution, sawing back
+and forth with the blade on O'Brien's wrist. The veins were severed.
+Sullivan held the tureen cover close underneath. The cut veins gaped
+wide, but no ruddy flood gushed forth. There was no blood at all. The
+veins were dry and empty. No one spoke. The grim and silent figures
+swayed in unison with each heave of the ship. Every eye was turned
+fixedly upon that inconceivable and monstrous thing, the dry veins of a
+creature that was alive.
+
+"'Tis a warnin'," Mahoney cried. "Lave the b'y alone. Mark me words. His
+death'll do none iv yez anny good."
+
+"Try at the elbow--the left elbow, 'tis nearer the heart," the captain
+said finally, in a dim and husky voice that was unlike his own.
+
+"Give me the knife," O'Brien said roughly, taking it out of the cook's
+hand. "I can't be lookin' at ye puttin' me to hurt."
+
+Quite coolly he cut the vein at the left elbow, but, like the cook, he
+failed to bring blood.
+
+"This is all iv no use," Sullivan said. "'Tis better to put him out iv
+his misery by bleedin' him at the throat."
+
+The strain had been too much for the lad.
+
+"Don't be doin' ut," he cried. "There'll be no blood in me throat. Give
+me a little time. 'Tis cold an' weak I am. Be lettin' me lay down an'
+slape a bit. Then I'll be warm an' the blood'll flow."
+
+"'Tis no use," Sullivan objected. "As if ye cud be slapin' at a time
+like this. Ye'll not slape, and ye'll not warm up. Look at ye now.
+You've an ague."
+
+"I was sick at Limerick wan night," O'Brien hurried on, "an' the dochtor
+cudn't bleed me. But after slapin' a few hours an' gettin' warm in
+bed the blood came freely. It's God's truth I'm tellin' yez. Don't be
+murderin' me!"
+
+"His veins are open now," the captain said. "'Tis no use leavin' him in
+his pain. Do it now an' be done with it."
+
+They started to reach for O'Brien, but he backed away.
+
+"I'll be the death iv yez!" he screamed. "Take yer hands off iv me,
+Sullivan! I'll come back! I'll haunt yez! Wakin' or slapin', I'll haunt
+yez till you die!"
+
+"'Tis disgraceful!" yelled Behane. "If the short stick'd ben mine, I'd
+a-let me mates cut the head off iv me an' died happy."
+
+Sullivan leaped in and caught the unhappy lad by the hair. The rest of
+the men followed, O'Brien kicked and struggled, snarling and snapping at
+the hands that clutched him from every side. Little Johnny Sheehan broke
+out into wild screaming, but the men took no notice of him. O'Brien was
+bent backward to the deck, the tureen cover under his neck. Gorman was
+shoved forward. Some one had thrust a large sheath-knife into his hand.
+
+"Do yer duty! Do yer duty!" the men cried.
+
+The cook bent over, but he caught the boy's eyes and faltered.
+
+"If ye don't, I'll kill ye with me own hands," Behane shouted.
+
+From every side a torrent of abuse and threats poured in upon the cook.
+Still he hung back.
+
+"Maybe there'll be more blood in his veins than O'Brien's," Sullivan
+suggested significantly.
+
+Behane caught Gorman by the hair and twisted his head back, while
+Sullivan attempted to take possession of the sheath-knife. But Gorman
+clung to it desperately.
+
+"Lave go, an' I'll do ut!" he screamed frantically. "Don't be cuttin' me
+throat! I'll do the deed! I'll do the deed!"
+
+"See that you do it, then," the captain threatened him.
+
+Gorman allowed himself to be shoved forward. He looked at the boy,
+closed his eyes, and muttered a prayer. Then, without opening his eyes,
+he did the deed that had been appointed him. O'Brien emitted a shriek
+that sank swiftly to a gurgling sob. The men held him till his struggles
+ceased, when he was laid upon the deck. They were eager and impatient,
+and with oaths and threats they urged Gorman to hurry with the
+preparation of the meal.
+
+"Lave ut, you bloody butchers," Mahoney said quietly. "Lave ut, I tell
+yez. Ye'll not be needin' anny iv ut now. 'Tis as I said: ye'll not
+be profitin' by the lad's blood. Empty ut overside, Behane. Empty ut
+overside."
+
+Behane, still holding the tureen cover in both his hands, glanced to
+windward. He walked to the rail and threw the cover and contents into
+the sea. A full-rigged ship was bearing down upon them a short mile
+away. So occupied had they been with the deed just committed, that
+none had had eyes for a lookout. All hands watched her coming on--the
+brightly coppered forefoot parting the water like a golden knife, the
+headsails flapping lazily and emptily at each downward surge, and the
+towering canvas tiers dipping and curtsying with each stately swing of
+the sea. No man spoke.
+
+As she hove to, a cable length away, the captain of the Francis Spaight
+bestirred himself and ordered a tarpaulin to be thrown over O'Brien's
+corpse. A boat was lowered from the stranger's side and began to pull
+toward them. John Gorman laughed. He laughed softly at first, but he
+accompanied each stroke of the oars with spasmodically increasing glee.
+It was this maniacal laughter that greeted the rescue boat as it hauled
+alongside and the first officer clambered on board.
+
+
+
+
+A CURIOUS FRAGMENT
+
+     [The capitalist, or industrial oligarch, Roger Vanderwater,
+     mentioned in the narrative, has been identified as the ninth
+     in the line of the Vanderwaters that controlled for hundreds
+     of years the cotton factories of the South. This Roger
+     Vanderwater flourished in the last decades of the twenty-
+     sixth century after Christ, which was the fifth century of
+     the terrible industrial oligarchy that was reared upon the
+     ruins of the early Republic.
+
+     From internal evidences we are convinced that the narrative
+     which follows was not reduced to writing till the twenty-
+     ninth century. Not only was it unlawful to write or print
+     such matter during that period, but the working-class was so
+     illiterate that only in rare instances were its members able
+     to read and write. This was the dark reign of the overman,
+     in whose speech the great mass of the people were
+     characterized as the "herd animals." All literacy was
+     frowned upon and stamped out. From the statute-books of the
+     times may be instanced that black law that made it a capital
+     offence for any man, no matter of what class, to teach even
+     the alphabet to a member of the working-class. Such
+     stringent limitation of education to the ruling class was
+     necessary if that class was to continue to rule.
+
+     One result of the foregoing was the development of the
+     professional story-tellers. These story-tellers were paid by
+     the oligarchy, and the tales they told were legendary,
+     mythical, romantic, and harmless. But the spirit of freedom
+     never quite died out, and agitators, under the guise of
+     story-tellers, preached revolt to the slave class. That the
+     following tale was banned by the oligarchs we have proof
+     from the records of the criminal police court of Ashbury,
+     wherein, on January 27, 2734, one John Tourney, found guilty
+     of telling the tale in a boozing-ken of labourers, was
+     sentenced to five years' penal servitude in the borax mines
+     of the Arizona Desert.--EDITOR'S NOTE.]
+
+
+Listen, my brothers, and I will tell you a tale of an arm. It was the
+arm of Tom Dixon, and Tom Dixon was a weaver of the first class in a
+factory of that hell-hound and master, Roger Vanderwater. This factory
+was called "Hell's Bottom"... by the slaves who toiled in it, and I
+guess they ought to know; and it was situated in Kingsbury, at the other
+end of the town from Vanderwater's summer palace. You do not know where
+Kingsbury is? There are many things, my brothers, that you do not know,
+and it is sad. It is because you do not know that you are slaves. When I
+have told you this tale, I should like to form a class among you for the
+learning of written and printed speech. Our masters read and write and
+possess many books, and it is because of that that they are our masters,
+and live in palaces, and do not work. When the toilers learn to read
+and write--all of them--they will grow strong; then they will use their
+strength to break their bonds, and there will be no more masters and no
+more slaves.
+
+Kingsbury, my brothers, is in the old State of Alabama. For three
+hundred years the Vanderwaters have owned Kingsbury and its slave pens
+and factories, and slave pens and factories in many other places and
+States. You have heard of the Vanderwaters--who has not?--but let me
+tell you things you do not know about them. The first Vanderwater was
+a slave, even as you and I. Have you got that? He was a slave, and that
+was over three hundred years ago. His father was a machinist in the
+slave pen of Alexander Burrell, and his mother was a washerwoman in the
+same slave pen. There is no doubt about this. I am telling you truth. It
+is history. It is printed, every word of it, in the history books of our
+masters, which you cannot read because your masters will not permit you
+to learn to read. You can understand why they will not permit you to
+learn to read, when there are such things in the books. They know, and
+they are very wise. If you did read such things, you might be wanting
+in respect to your masters, which would be a dangerous thing... to your
+masters. But I know, for I can read, and I am telling you what I have
+read with my own eyes in the history books of our masters.
+
+The first Vanderwater's name was not Vanderwater; it was Vange--Bill
+Vange, the son of Yergis Vange, the machinist, and Laura Carnly, the
+washerwoman. Young Bill Vange was strong. He might have remained with
+the slaves and led them to freedom; instead, however, he served the
+masters and was well rewarded. He began his service, when yet a small
+child, as a spy in his home slave pen. He is known to have informed on
+his own father for seditious utterance. This is fact. I have read it
+with my own eyes in the records. He was too good a slave for the slave
+pen. Alexander Burrell took him out, while yet a child, and he was
+taught to read and write. He was taught many things, and he was entered
+in the secret service of the Government. Of course, he no longer wore
+the slave dress, except for disguise at such times when he sought to
+penetrate the secrets and plots of the slaves. It was he, when but
+eighteen years of age, who brought that great hero and comrade, Ralph
+Jacobus, to trial and execution in the electric chair. Of course, you
+have all heard the sacred name of Ralph Jacobus, but it is news to you
+that he was brought to his death by the first Vanderwater, whose
+name was Vange. I know. I have read it in the books. There are many
+interesting things like that in the books.
+
+And after Ralph Jacobus died his shameful death, Bill Vange's name began
+the many changes it was to undergo. He was known as "Sly Vange" far and
+wide. He rose high in the secret service, and he was rewarded in grand
+ways, but still he was not a member of the master class. The men were
+willing that he should become so; it was the women of the master class
+who refused to have Sly Vange one of them. Sly Vange gave good service
+to the masters. He had been a slave himself, and he knew the ways of the
+slaves. There was no fooling him. In those days the slaves were braver
+than now, and they were always trying for their freedom. And Sly Vange
+was everywhere, in all their schemes and plans, bringing their schemes
+and plans to naught and their leaders to the electric chair. It was in
+2255 that his name was next changed for him. It was in that year that
+the Great Mutiny took place. In that region west of the Rocky Mountains,
+seventeen millions of slaves strove bravely to overthrow their masters.
+Who knows, if Sly Vange had not lived, but that they would have
+succeeded? But Sly Vange was very much alive. The masters gave him
+supreme command of the situation. In eight months of fighting, one
+million and three hundred and fifty thousand slaves were killed. Vange,
+Bill Vange, Sly Vange, killed them, and he broke the Great Mutiny. And
+he was greatly rewarded, and so red were his hands with the blood of
+the slaves that thereafter he was called "Bloody Vange." You see, my
+brothers, what interesting things are to be found in the books when one
+can read them. And, take my word for it, there are many other things,
+even more interesting, in the books. And if you will but study with me,
+in a year's time you can read those books for yourselves--ay, in six
+months some of you will be able to read those books for yourselves.
+
+Bloody Vange lived to a ripe old age, and always, to the last, was he
+received in the councils of the masters; but never was he made a master
+himself. He had first opened his eyes, you see, in a slave pen. But oh,
+he was well rewarded! He had a dozen palaces in which to live. He, who
+was no master, owned thousands of slaves. He had a great pleasure yacht
+upon the sea that was a floating palace, and he owned a whole island in
+the sea where toiled ten thousand slaves on his coffee plantations. But
+in his old age he was lonely, for he lived apart, hated by his brothers,
+the slaves, and looked down upon by those he had served and who refused
+to be his brothers. The masters looked down upon him because he had
+been born a slave. Enormously wealthy he died; but he died horribly,
+tormented by his conscience, regretting all he had done and the red
+stain on his name.
+
+But with his children it was different. They had not been born in the
+slave pen, and by the special ruling of the Chief Oligarch of that time,
+John Morrison, they were elevated to the master class. And it was then
+that the name of Vange disappears from the page of history. It becomes
+Vanderwater, and Jason Vange, the son of Bloody Vange, becomes Jason
+Vanderwater, the founder of the Vanderwater line. But that was
+three hundred years ago, and the Vanderwaters of to-day forget their
+beginnings and imagine that somehow the clay of their bodies is
+different stuff from the clay in your body and mine and in the bodies
+of all slaves. And I ask you, Why should a slave become the master of
+another slave? And why should the son of a slave become the master of
+many slaves? I leave these questions for you to answer for yourselves,
+but do not forget that in the beginning the Vanderwaters were slaves.
+
+And now, my brothers, I come back to the beginning of my tale to tell
+you of Tom Dixon's arm. Roger Vanderwater's factory in Kingsbury was
+rightly named "Hell's Bottom," but the men who toiled in it were men, as
+you shall see. Women toiled there, too, and children, little children.
+All that toiled there had the regular slave rights under the law, but
+only under the law, for they were deprived of many of their rights by
+the two overseers of Hell's Bottom, Joseph Clancy and Adolph Munster.
+
+It is a long story, but I shall not tell all of it to you. I shall tell
+only about the arm. It happened that, according to the law, a portion of
+the starvation wage of the slaves was held back each month and put
+into a fund. This fund was for the purpose of helping such unfortunate
+fellow-workmen as happened to be injured by accidents or to be overtaken
+by sickness. As you know with yourselves, these funds are controlled
+by the overseers. It is the law, and so it was that the fund at Hell's
+Bottom was controlled by the two overseers of accursed memory.
+
+Now, Clancy and Munster took this fund for their own use. When accidents
+happened to the workmen, their fellows, as was the custom, made grants
+from the fund; but the overseers refused to pay over the grants. What
+could the slaves do? They had their rights under the law, but they
+had no access to the law. Those that complained to the overseers were
+punished. You know yourselves what form such punishment takes--the fines
+for faulty work that is not faulty; the overcharging of accounts in the
+Company's store; the vile treatment of one's women and children; and the
+allotment to bad machines whereon, work as one will, he starves.
+
+Once, the slaves of Hell's Bottom protested to Vanderwater. It was the
+time of the year when he spent several months in Kingsbury. One of the
+slaves could write; it chanced that his mother could write, and she had
+secretly taught him as her mother had secretly taught her. So this slave
+wrote a round robin, wherein was contained their grievances, and all the
+slaves signed by mark. And, with proper stamps upon the envelope, the
+round robin was mailed to Roger Vanderwater. And Roger Vanderwater did
+nothing, save to turn the round robin over to the two overseers. Clancy
+and Munster were angered. They turned the guards loose at night on the
+slave pen. The guards were armed with pick handles. It is said that next
+day only half of the slaves were able to work in Hell's Bottom. They
+were well beaten. The slave who could write was so badly beaten that he
+lived only three months. But before he died, he wrote once more, to what
+purpose you shall hear.
+
+Four or five weeks afterward, Tom Dixon, a slave, had his arm torn off
+by a belt in Hell's Bottom. His fellow-workmen, as usual, made a grant
+to him from the fund, and Clancy and Munster, as usual, refused to pay
+it over from the fund. The slave who could write, and who even then was
+dying, wrote anew a recital of their grievances. And this document was
+thrust into the hand of the arm that had been torn from Tom Dixon's
+body.
+
+Now it chanced that Roger Vanderwater was lying ill in his palace at the
+other end of Kingsbury--not the dire illness that strikes down you and
+me, brothers; just a bit of biliousness, mayhap, or no more than a bad
+headache because he had eaten too heartily or drunk too deeply. But it
+was enough for him, being tender and soft from careful rearing. Such
+men, packed in cotton wool all their lives, are exceeding tender and
+soft. Believe me, brothers, Roger Vanderwater felt as badly with his
+aching head, or THOUGHT he felt as badly, as Tom Dixon really felt with
+his arm torn out by the roots.
+
+It happened that Roger Vanderwater was fond of scientific farming, and
+that on his farm, three miles outside of Kingsbury, he had managed to
+grow a new kind of strawberry. He was very proud of that new strawberry
+of his, and he would have been out to see and pick the first ripe ones,
+had it not been for his illness. Because of his illness he had ordered
+the old farm slave to bring in personally the first box of the berries.
+All this was learned from the gossip of a palace scullion, who slept
+each night in the slave pen. The overseer of the plantation should have
+brought in the berries, but he was on his back with a broken leg from
+trying to break a colt. The scullion brought the word in the night, and
+it was known that next day the berries would come in. And the men in the
+slave pen of Hell's Bottom, being men and not cowards, held a council.
+
+The slave who could write, and who was sick and dying from the
+pick-handle beating, said he would carry Tom Dixon's arm; also, he said
+he must die anyway, and that it mattered nothing if he died a little
+sooner. So five slaves stole from the slave pen that night after the
+guards had made their last rounds. One of the slaves was the man who
+could write. They lay in the brush by the roadside until late in the
+morning, when the old farm slave came driving to town with the precious
+fruit for the master. What of the farm slave being old and rheumatic,
+and of the slave who could write being stiff and injured from his
+beating, they moved their bodies about when they walked, very much in
+the same fashion. The slave who could write put on the other's clothes,
+pulled the broad-brimmed hat over his eyes, climbed upon the seat of the
+wagon, and drove on to town. The old farm slave was kept tied all day
+in the bushes until evening, when the others loosed him and went back to
+the slave pen to take their punishment for having broken bounds.
+
+In the meantime, Roger Vanderwater lay waiting for the berries in his
+wonderful bedroom--such wonders and such comforts were there that they
+would have blinded the eyes of you and me who have never seen such
+things. The slave who could write said afterward that it was like
+a glimpse of Paradise! And why not? The labour and the lives of ten
+thousand slaves had gone to the making of that bedchamber, while they
+themselves slept in vile lairs like wild beasts. The slave who could
+write brought in the berries on a silver tray or platter--you see, Roger
+Vanderwater wanted to speak with him in person about the berries.
+
+The slave who could write tottered his dying body across the wonderful
+room and knelt by the couch of Vanderwater, holding out before him the
+tray. Large green leaves covered the top of the tray, and these the
+body-servant alongside whisked away so that Vanderwater could see.
+And Roger Vanderwater, propped upon his elbow, saw. He saw the fresh,
+wonderful fruit lying there like precious jewels, and in the midst of it
+the arm of Tom Dixon as it had been torn from his body, well washed,
+of course, my brothers, and very white against the blood-red fruit. And
+also he saw, clutched in the stiff, dead fingers, the petition of his
+slaves who toiled in Hell's Bottom.
+
+"Take and read," said the slave who could write. And even as the master
+took the petition, the body-servant, who till then had been motionless
+with surprise, struck with his fist the kneeling slave upon the mouth.
+The slave was dying anyway, and was very weak, and did not mind. He made
+no sound, and, having fallen over on his side, he lay there quietly,
+bleeding from the blow on the mouth. The physician, who had run for the
+palace guards, came back with them, and the slave was dragged upright
+upon his feet. But as they dragged him up, his hand clutched Tom Dixon's
+arm from where it had fallen on the floor.
+
+"He shall be flung alive to the hounds!" the body-servant was crying in
+great wrath. "He shall be flung alive to the hounds!"
+
+But Roger Vanderwater, forgetting his headache, still leaning on his
+elbow, commanded silence, and went on reading the petition. And while
+he read, there was silence, all standing upright, the wrathful
+body-servant, the physician, the palace guards, and in their midst the
+slave, bleeding at the mouth and still holding Tom Dixon's arm. And when
+Roger Vanderwater had done, he turned upon the slave, saying--
+
+"If in this paper there be one lie, you shall be sorry that you were
+ever born."
+
+And the slave said, "I have been sorry all my life that I was born."
+
+Roger Vanderwater looked at him closely, and the slave said--
+
+"You have done your worst to me. I am dying now. In a week I shall be
+dead, so it does not matter if you kill me now."
+
+"What do you with that?" the master asked, pointing to the arm; and the
+slave made answer--
+
+"I take it back to the pen to give it burial. Tom Dixon was my friend.
+We worked beside each other at our looms."
+
+There is little more to my tale, brothers. The slave and the arm were
+sent back in a cart to the pen. Nor were any of the slaves punished for
+what they had done. Indeed, Roger Vanderwater made investigation and
+punished the two overseers, Joseph Clancy and Adolph Munster. Their
+freeholds were taken from them. They were branded, each upon the
+forehead, their right hands were cut off, and they were turned loose
+upon the highway to wander and beg until they died. And the fund was
+managed rightfully thereafter for a time--for a time only, my brothers;
+for after Roger Vanderwater came his son, Albert, who was a cruel master
+and half mad.
+
+Brothers, that slave who carried the arm into the presence of the master
+was my father. He was a brave man. And even as his mother secretly
+taught him to read, so did he teach me. Because he died shortly after
+from the pick-handle beating, Roger Vanderwater took me out of the slave
+pen and tried to make various better things out of me. I might
+have become an overseer in Hell's Bottom, but I chose to become a
+story-teller, wandering over the land and getting close to my brothers,
+the slaves, everywhere. And I tell you stories like this, secretly,
+knowing that you will not betray me; for if you did, you know as well as
+I that my tongue will be torn out and that I shall tell stories no more.
+And my message is, brothers, that there is a good time coming, when all
+will be well in the world and there will be neither masters nor slaves.
+But first you must prepare for that good time by learning to read. There
+is power in the printed word. And here am I to teach you to read, and as
+well there are others to see that you get the books when I am gone
+along upon my way--the history books wherein you will learn about your
+masters, and learn to become strong even as they.
+
+[EDITOR'S NOTE.--From "Historical Fragments and Sketches," first
+published in fifty volumes in 4427, and now, after two hundred years,
+because of its accuracy and value, edited and republished by the
+National Committee on Historical Research.]
+
+
+
+
+A PIECE OF STEAK
+
+With the last morsel of bread Tom King wiped his plate clean of the last
+particle of flour gravy and chewed the resulting mouthful in a slow and
+meditative way. When he arose from the table, he was oppressed by the
+feeling that he was distinctly hungry. Yet he alone had eaten. The two
+children in the other room had been sent early to bed in order that in
+sleep they might forget they had gone supperless. His wife had touched
+nothing, and had sat silently and watched him with solicitous eyes. She
+was a thin, worn woman of the working-class, though signs of an earlier
+prettiness were not wanting in her face. The flour for the gravy she had
+borrowed from the neighbour across the hall. The last two ha'pennies had
+gone to buy the bread.
+
+He sat down by the window on a rickety chair that protested under his
+weight, and quite mechanically he put his pipe in his mouth and dipped
+into the side pocket of his coat. The absence of any tobacco made him
+aware of his action, and, with a scowl for his forgetfulness, he put the
+pipe away. His movements were slow, almost hulking, as though he were
+burdened by the heavy weight of his muscles. He was a solid-bodied,
+stolid-looking man, and his appearance did not suffer from being
+overprepossessing. His rough clothes were old and slouchy. The uppers of
+his shoes were too weak to carry the heavy re-soling that was itself
+of no recent date. And his cotton shirt, a cheap, two shilling affair,
+showed a frayed collar and ineradicable paint stains.
+
+But it was Tom King's face that advertised him unmistakably for what he
+was. It was the face of a typical prize-fighter; of one who had put in
+long years of service in the squared ring and, by that means, developed
+and emphasized all the marks of the fighting beast. It was distinctly a
+lowering countenance, and, that no feature of it might escape notice, it
+was clean-shaven. The lips were shapeless and constituted a mouth harsh
+to excess, that was like a gash in his face. The jaw was aggressive,
+brutal, heavy. The eyes, slow of movement and heavy-lidded, were almost
+expressionless under the shaggy, indrawn brows. Sheer animal that he
+was, the eyes were the most animal-like feature about him. They were
+sleepy, lion-like--the eyes of a fighting animal. The forehead slanted
+quickly back to the hair, which, clipped close, showed every bump of a
+villainous-looking head. A nose twice broken and moulded variously
+by countless blows, and a cauliflower ear, permanently swollen and
+distorted to twice its size, completed his adornment, while the beard,
+fresh-shaven as it was, sprouted in the skin and gave the face a
+blue-black stain.
+
+Altogether, it was the face of a man to be afraid of in a dark alley or
+lonely place. And yet Tom King was not a criminal, nor had he ever done
+anything criminal. Outside of brawls, common to his walk in life, he had
+harmed no one. Nor had he ever been known to pick a quarrel. He was a
+professional, and all the fighting brutishness of him was reserved
+for his professional appearances. Outside the ring he was slow-going,
+easy-natured, and, in his younger days, when money was flush, too
+open-handed for his own good. He bore no grudges and had few enemies.
+Fighting was a business with him. In the ring he struck to hurt, struck
+to maim, struck to destroy; but there was no animus in it. It was
+a plain business proposition. Audiences assembled and paid for the
+spectacle of men knocking each other out. The winner took the big end of
+the purse. When Tom King faced the Woolloomoolloo Gouger, twenty years
+before, he knew that the Gouger's jaw was only four months healed after
+having been broken in a Newcastle bout. And he had played for that jaw
+and broken it again in the ninth round, not because he bore the Gouger
+any ill-will, but because that was the surest way to put the Gouger
+out and win the big end of the purse. Nor had the Gouger borne him any
+ill-will for it. It was the game, and both knew the game and played it.
+
+Tom King had never been a talker, and he sat by the window, morosely
+silent, staring at his hands. The veins stood out on the backs of the
+hands, large and swollen; and the knuckles, smashed and battered and
+malformed, testified to the use to which they had been put. He had never
+heard that a man's life was the life of his arteries, but well he knew
+the meaning of those big upstanding veins. His heart had pumped too much
+blood through them at top pressure. They no longer did the work. He
+had stretched the elasticity out of them, and with their distension had
+passed his endurance. He tired easily now. No longer could he do a fast
+twenty rounds, hammer and tongs, fight, fight, fight, from gong to gong,
+with fierce rally on top of fierce rally, beaten to the ropes and
+in turn beating his opponent to the ropes, and rallying fiercest and
+fastest of all in that last, twentieth round, with the house on its
+feet and yelling, himself rushing, striking, ducking, raining showers
+of blows upon showers of blows and receiving showers of blows in return,
+and all the time the heart faithfully pumping the surging blood through
+the adequate veins. The veins, swollen at the time, had always
+shrunk down again, though each time, imperceptibly at first, not
+quite--remaining just a trifle larger than before. He stared at them and
+at his battered knuckles, and, for the moment, caught a vision of the
+youthful excellence of those hands before the first knuckle had been
+smashed on the head of Benny Jones, otherwise known as the Welsh Terror.
+
+The impression of his hunger came back on him.
+
+"Blimey, but couldn't I go a piece of steak!" he muttered aloud,
+clenching his huge fists and spitting out a smothered oath.
+
+"I tried both Burke's an' Sawley's," his wife said half apologetically.
+
+"An' they wouldn't?" he demanded.
+
+"Not a ha'penny. Burke said--" She faltered.
+
+"G'wan! Wot'd he say?"
+
+"As how 'e was thinkin' Sandel ud do ye to-night, an' as how yer score
+was comfortable big as it was."
+
+Tom King grunted, but did not reply. He was busy thinking of the bull
+terrier he had kept in his younger days to which he had fed steaks
+without end. Burke would have given him credit for a thousand
+steaks--then. But times had changed. Tom King was getting old; and old
+men, fighting before second-rate clubs, couldn't expect to run bills of
+any size with the tradesmen.
+
+He had got up in the morning with a longing for a piece of steak, and
+the longing had not abated. He had not had a fair training for this
+fight. It was a drought year in Australia, times were hard, and even
+the most irregular work was difficult to find. He had had no sparring
+partner, and his food had not been of the best nor always sufficient.
+He had done a few days' navvy work when he could get it, and he had run
+around the Domain in the early mornings to get his legs in shape. But
+it was hard, training without a partner and with a wife and two kiddies
+that must be fed. Credit with the tradesmen had undergone very slight
+expansion when he was matched with Sandel. The secretary of the Gayety
+Club had advanced him three pounds--the loser's end of the purse--and
+beyond that had refused to go. Now and again he had managed to borrow a
+few shillings from old pals, who would have lent more only that it was a
+drought year and they were hard put themselves. No--and there was no
+use in disguising the fact--his training had not been satisfactory.
+He should have had better food and no worries. Besides, when a man is
+forty, it is harder to get into condition than when he is twenty.
+
+"What time is it, Lizzie?" he asked.
+
+His wife went across the hall to inquire, and came back.
+
+"Quarter before eight."
+
+"They'll be startin' the first bout in a few minutes," he said. "Only a
+try-out. Then there's a four-round spar 'tween Dealer Wells an' Gridley,
+an' a ten-round go 'tween Starlight an' some sailor bloke. I don't come
+on for over an hour."
+
+At the end of another silent ten minutes, he rose to his feet.
+
+"Truth is, Lizzie, I ain't had proper trainin'."
+
+He reached for his hat and started for the door. He did not offer to
+kiss her--he never did on going out--but on this night she dared to kiss
+him, throwing her arms around him and compelling him to bend down to her
+face. She looked quite small against the massive bulk of the man.
+
+"Good luck, Tom," she said. "You gotter do 'im."
+
+"Ay, I gotter do 'im," he repeated. "That's all there is to it. I jus'
+gotter do 'im."
+
+He laughed with an attempt at heartiness, while she pressed more closely
+against him. Across her shoulders he looked around the bare room. It was
+all he had in the world, with the rent overdue, and her and the kiddies.
+And he was leaving it to go out into the night to get meat for his mate
+and cubs--not like a modern working-man going to his machine grind, but
+in the old, primitive, royal, animal way, by fighting for it.
+
+"I gotter do 'im," he repeated, this time a hint of desperation in his
+voice. "If it's a win, it's thirty quid--an' I can pay all that's owin',
+with a lump o' money left over. If it's a lose, I get naught--not even
+a penny for me to ride home on the tram. The secretary's give all that's
+comin' from a loser's end. Good-bye, old woman. I'll come straight home
+if it's a win."
+
+"An' I'll be waitin' up," she called to him along the hall.
+
+It was full two miles to the Gayety, and as he walked along he
+remembered how in his palmy days--he had once been the heavyweight
+champion of New South Wales--he would have ridden in a cab to the fight,
+and how, most likely, some heavy backer would have paid for the cab and
+ridden with him. There were Tommy Burns and that Yankee nigger, Jack
+Johnson--they rode about in motor-cars. And he walked! And, as any man
+knew, a hard two miles was not the best preliminary to a fight. He was
+an old un, and the world did not wag well with old uns. He was good for
+nothing now except navvy work, and his broken nose and swollen ear were
+against him even in that. He found himself wishing that he had learned
+a trade. It would have been better in the long run. But no one had
+told him, and he knew, deep down in his heart, that he would not have
+listened if they had. It had been so easy. Big money--sharp, glorious
+fights--periods of rest and loafing in between--a following of eager
+flatterers, the slaps on the back, the shakes of the hand, the toffs
+glad to buy him a drink for the privilege of five minutes' talk--and
+the glory of it, the yelling houses, the whirlwind finish, the referee's
+"King wins!" and his name in the sporting columns next day.
+
+Those had been times! But he realized now, in his slow, ruminating way,
+that it was the old uns he had been putting away. He was Youth, rising;
+and they were Age, sinking. No wonder it had been easy--they with their
+swollen veins and battered knuckles and weary in the bones of them from
+the long battles they had already fought. He remembered the time he put
+out old Stowsher Bill, at Rush-Cutters Bay, in the eighteenth round,
+and how old Bill had cried afterward in the dressing-room like a baby.
+Perhaps old Bill's rent had been overdue. Perhaps he'd had at home a
+missus an' a couple of kiddies. And perhaps Bill, that very day of the
+fight, had had a hungering for a piece of steak. Bill had fought game
+and taken incredible punishment. He could see now, after he had gone
+through the mill himself, that Stowsher Bill had fought for a bigger
+stake, that night twenty years ago, than had young Tom King, who had
+fought for glory and easy money. No wonder Stowsher Bill had cried
+afterward in the dressing-room.
+
+Well, a man had only so many fights in him, to begin with. It was the
+iron law of the game. One man might have a hundred hard fights in him,
+another man only twenty; each, according to the make of him and the
+quality of his fibre, had a definite number, and, when he had fought
+them, he was done. Yes, he had had more fights in him than most of
+them, and he had had far more than his share of the hard, gruelling
+fights--the kind that worked the heart and lungs to bursting, that took
+the elastic out of the arteries and made hard knots of muscle out of
+Youth's sleek suppleness, that wore out nerve and stamina and made brain
+and bones weary from excess of effort and endurance overwrought. Yes,
+he had done better than all of them. There were none of his old fighting
+partners left. He was the last of the old guard. He had seen them all
+finished, and he had had a hand in finishing some of them.
+
+They had tried him out against the old uns, and one after another he had
+put them away--laughing when, like old Stowsher Bill, they cried in
+the dressing-room. And now he was an old un, and they tried out the
+youngsters on him. There was that bloke, Sandel. He had come over from
+New Zealand with a record behind him. But nobody in Australia knew
+anything about him, so they put him up against old Tom King. If Sandel
+made a showing, he would be given better men to fight, with bigger
+purses to win; so it was to be depended upon that he would put up a
+fierce battle. He had everything to win by it--money and glory and
+career; and Tom King was the grizzled old chopping-block that guarded
+the highway to fame and fortune. And he had nothing to win except thirty
+quid, to pay to the landlord and the tradesmen. And, as Tom King thus
+ruminated, there came to his stolid vision the form of Youth, glorious
+Youth, rising exultant and invincible, supple of muscle and silken of
+skin, with heart and lungs that had never been tired and torn and
+that laughed at limitation of effort. Yes, Youth was the Nemesis. It
+destroyed the old uns and recked not that, in so doing, it destroyed
+itself. It enlarged its arteries and smashed its knuckles, and was in
+turn destroyed by Youth. For Youth was ever youthful. It was only Age
+that grew old.
+
+At Castlereagh Street he turned to the left, and three blocks along came
+to the Gayety. A crowd of young larrikins hanging outside the door made
+respectful way for him, and he heard one say to another: "That's 'im!
+That's Tom King!"
+
+Inside, on the way to his dressing-room, he encountered the secretary, a
+keen-eyed, shrewd-faced young man, who shook his hand.
+
+"How are you feelin', Tom?" he asked.
+
+"Fit as a fiddle," King answered, though he knew that he lied, and
+that if he had a quid, he would give it right there for a good piece of
+steak.
+
+When he emerged from the dressing-room, his seconds behind him, and came
+down the aisle to the squared ring in the centre of the hall, a burst
+of greeting and applause went up from the waiting crowd. He acknowledged
+salutations right and left, though few of the faces did he know. Most
+of them were the faces of kiddies unborn when he was winning his first
+laurels in the squared ring. He leaped lightly to the raised platform
+and ducked through the ropes to his corner, where he sat down on a
+folding stool. Jack Ball, the referee, came over and shook his hand.
+Ball was a broken-down pugilist who for over ten years had not entered
+the ring as a principal. King was glad that he had him for referee. They
+were both old uns. If he should rough it with Sandel a bit beyond the
+rules, he knew Ball could be depended upon to pass it by.
+
+Aspiring young heavyweights, one after another, were climbing into the
+ring and being presented to the audience by the referee. Also, he issued
+their challenges for them.
+
+"Young Pronto," Bill announced, "from North Sydney, challenges the
+winner for fifty pounds side bet."
+
+The audience applauded, and applauded again as Sandel himself sprang
+through the ropes and sat down in his corner. Tom King looked across
+the ring at him curiously, for in a few minutes they would be locked
+together in merciless combat, each trying with all the force of him
+to knock the other into unconsciousness. But little could he see, for
+Sandel, like himself, had trousers and sweater on over his ring costume.
+His face was strongly handsome, crowned with a curly mop of yellow hair,
+while his thick, muscular neck hinted at bodily magnificence.
+
+Young Pronto went to one corner and then the other, shaking hands with
+the principals and dropping down out of the ring. The challenges
+went on. Ever Youth climbed through the ropes--Youth unknown, but
+insatiable--crying out to mankind that with strength and skill it would
+match issues with the winner. A few years before, in his own heyday
+of invincibleness, Tom King would have been amused and bored by these
+preliminaries. But now he sat fascinated, unable to shake the vision
+of Youth from his eyes. Always were these youngsters rising up in the
+boxing game, springing through the ropes and shouting their defiance;
+and always were the old uns going down before them. They climbed to
+success over the bodies of the old uns. And ever they came, more and
+more youngsters--Youth unquenchable and irresistible--and ever they put
+the old uns away, themselves becoming old uns and travelling the same
+downward path, while behind them, ever pressing on them, was Youth
+eternal--the new babies, grown lusty and dragging their elders down,
+with behind them more babies to the end of time--Youth that must have
+its will and that will never die.
+
+King glanced over to the press box and nodded to Morgan, of the
+Sportsman, and Corbett, of the Referee. Then he held out his hands,
+while Sid Sullivan and Charley Bates, his seconds, slipped on his gloves
+and laced them tight, closely watched by one of Sandel's seconds, who
+first examined critically the tapes on King's knuckles. A second of his
+own was in Sandel's corner, performing a like office. Sandel's trousers
+were pulled off, and, as he stood up, his sweater was skinned off over
+his head. And Tom King, looking, saw Youth incarnate, deep-chested,
+heavy-thewed, with muscles that slipped and slid like live things under
+the white satin skin. The whole body was a-crawl with life, and Tom King
+knew that it was a life that had never oozed its freshness out through
+the aching pores during the long fights wherein Youth paid its toll and
+departed not quite so young as when it entered.
+
+The two men advanced to meet each other, and, as the gong sounded and
+the seconds clattered out of the ring with the folding stools, they
+shook hands and instantly took their fighting attitudes. And instantly,
+like a mechanism of steel and springs balanced on a hair trigger, Sandel
+was in and out and in again, landing a left to the eyes, a right to the
+ribs, ducking a counter, dancing lightly away and dancing menacingly
+back again. He was swift and clever. It was a dazzling exhibition. The
+house yelled its approbation. But King was not dazzled. He had fought
+too many fights and too many youngsters. He knew the blows for what they
+were--too quick and too deft to be dangerous. Evidently Sandel was going
+to rush things from the start. It was to be expected. It was the way
+of Youth, expending its splendour and excellence in wild insurgence and
+furious onslaught, overwhelming opposition with its own unlimited glory
+of strength and desire.
+
+Sandel was in and out, here, there, and everywhere, light-footed and
+eager-hearted, a living wonder of white flesh and stinging muscle that
+wove itself into a dazzling fabric of attack, slipping and leaping like
+a flying shuttle from action to action through a thousand actions, all
+of them centred upon the destruction of Tom King, who stood between him
+and fortune. And Tom King patiently endured. He knew his business, and
+he knew Youth now that Youth was no longer his. There was nothing to do
+till the other lost some of his steam, was his thought, and he grinned
+to himself as he deliberately ducked so as to receive a heavy blow on
+the top of his head. It was a wicked thing to do, yet eminently fair
+according to the rules of the boxing game. A man was supposed to take
+care of his own knuckles, and, if he insisted on hitting an opponent on
+the top of the head, he did so at his own peril. King could have ducked
+lower and let the blow whiz harmlessly past, but he remembered his own
+early fights and how he smashed his first knuckle on the head of the
+Welsh Terror. He was but playing the game. That duck had accounted for
+one of Sandel's knuckles. Not that Sandel would mind it now. He would go
+on, superbly regardless, hitting as hard as ever throughout the fight.
+But later on, when the long ring battles had begun to tell, he would
+regret that knuckle and look back and remember how he smashed it on Tom
+King's head.
+
+The first round was all Sandel's, and he had the house yelling with the
+rapidity of his whirlwind rushes. He overwhelmed King with avalanches of
+punches, and King did nothing. He never struck once, contenting
+himself with covering up, blocking and ducking and clinching to avoid
+punishment. He occasionally feinted, shook his head when the weight of
+a punch landed, and moved stolidly about, never leaping or springing or
+wasting an ounce of strength. Sandel must foam the froth of Youth away
+before discreet Age could dare to retaliate. All King's movements were
+slow and methodical, and his heavy-lidded, slow-moving eyes gave him the
+appearance of being half asleep or dazed. Yet they were eyes that saw
+everything, that had been trained to see everything through all his
+twenty years and odd in the ring. They were eyes that did not blink
+or waver before an impending blow, but that coolly saw and measured
+distance.
+
+Seated in his corner for the minute's rest at the end of the round, he
+lay back with outstretched legs, his arms resting on the right angle of
+the ropes, his chest and abdomen heaving frankly and deeply as he gulped
+down the air driven by the towels of his seconds. He listened with
+closed eyes to the voices of the house, "Why don't yeh fight, Tom?" many
+were crying. "Yeh ain't afraid of 'im, are yeh?"
+
+"Muscle-bound," he heard a man on a front seat comment. "He can't move
+quicker. Two to one on Sandel, in quids."
+
+The gong struck and the two men advanced from their corners. Sandel came
+forward fully three-quarters of the distance, eager to begin again; but
+King was content to advance the shorter distance. It was in line with
+his policy of economy. He had not been well trained, and he had not had
+enough to eat, and every step counted. Besides, he had already walked
+two miles to the ringside. It was a repetition of the first round, with
+Sandel attacking like a whirlwind and with the audience indignantly
+demanding why King did not fight. Beyond feinting and several slowly
+delivered and ineffectual blows he did nothing save block and stall
+and clinch. Sandel wanted to make the pace fast, while King, out of his
+wisdom, refused to accommodate him. He grinned with a certain wistful
+pathos in his ring-battered countenance, and went on cherishing his
+strength with the jealousy of which only Age is capable. Sandel was
+Youth, and he threw his strength away with the munificent abandon of
+Youth. To King belonged the ring generalship, the wisdom bred of long,
+aching fights. He watched with cool eyes and head, moving slowly
+and waiting for Sandel's froth to foam away. To the majority of the
+onlookers it seemed as though King was hopelessly outclassed, and they
+voiced their opinion in offers of three to one on Sandel. But there were
+wise ones, a few, who knew King of old time, and who covered what they
+considered easy money.
+
+The third round began as usual, one-sided, with Sandel doing all the
+leading, and delivering all the punishment. A half-minute had passed
+when Sandel, over-confident, left an opening. King's eyes and right arm
+flashed in the same instant. It was his first real blow--a hook, with
+the twisted arch of the arm to make it rigid, and with all the weight
+of the half-pivoted body behind it. It was like a sleepy-seeming lion
+suddenly thrusting out a lightning paw. Sandel, caught on the side of
+the jaw, was felled like a bullock. The audience gasped and murmured
+awe-stricken applause. The man was not muscle-bound, after all, and he
+could drive a blow like a trip-hammer.
+
+Sandel was shaken. He rolled over and attempted to rise, but the sharp
+yells from his seconds to take the count restrained him. He knelt on
+one knee, ready to rise, and waited, while the referee stood over him,
+counting the seconds loudly in his ear. At the ninth he rose in fighting
+attitude, and Tom King, facing him, knew regret that the blow had
+not been an inch nearer the point of the jaw. That would have been a
+knock-out, and he could have carried the thirty quid home to the missus
+and the kiddies.
+
+The round continued to the end of its three minutes, Sandel for the
+first time respectful of his opponent and King slow of movement and
+sleepy-eyed as ever. As the round neared its close, King, warned of the
+fact by sight of the seconds crouching outside ready for the spring in
+through the ropes, worked the fight around to his own corner. And when
+the gong struck, he sat down immediately on the waiting stool, while
+Sandel had to walk all the way across the diagonal of the square to his
+own corner. It was a little thing, but it was the sum of little things
+that counted. Sandel was compelled to walk that many more steps, to give
+up that much energy, and to lose a part of the precious minute of rest.
+At the beginning of every round King loafed slowly out from his corner,
+forcing his opponent to advance the greater distance. The end of every
+round found the fight manoeuvred by King into his own corner so that he
+could immediately sit down.
+
+Two more rounds went by, in which King was parsimonious of effort and
+Sandel prodigal. The latter's attempt to force a fast pace made King
+uncomfortable, for a fair percentage of the multitudinous blows showered
+upon him went home. Yet King persisted in his dogged slowness, despite
+the crying of the young hot-heads for him to go in and fight. Again,
+in the sixth round, Sandel was careless, again Tom King's fearful right
+flashed out to the jaw, and again Sandel took the nine seconds count.
+
+By the seventh round Sandel's pink of condition was gone, and he settled
+down to what he knew was to be the hardest fight in his experience. Tom
+King was an old un, but a better old un than he had ever encountered--an
+old un who never lost his head, who was remarkably able at defence,
+whose blows had the impact of a knotted club, and who had a knockout in
+either hand. Nevertheless, Tom King dared not hit often. He never
+forgot his battered knuckles, and knew that every hit must count if the
+knuckles were to last out the fight. As he sat in his corner, glancing
+across at his opponent, the thought came to him that the sum of
+his wisdom and Sandel's youth would constitute a world's champion
+heavyweight. But that was the trouble. Sandel would never become a world
+champion. He lacked the wisdom, and the only way for him to get it was
+to buy it with Youth; and when wisdom was his, Youth would have been
+spent in buying it.
+
+King took every advantage he knew. He never missed an opportunity to
+clinch, and in effecting most of the clinches his shoulder drove stiffly
+into the other's ribs. In the philosophy of the ring a shoulder was as
+good as a punch so far as damage was concerned, and a great deal better
+so far as concerned expenditure of effort. Also, in the clinches
+King rested his weight on his opponent, and was loath to let go. This
+compelled the interference of the referee, who tore them apart, always
+assisted by Sandel, who had not yet learned to rest. He could not
+refrain from using those glorious flying arms and writhing muscles of
+his, and when the other rushed into a clinch, striking shoulder against
+ribs, and with head resting under Sandel's left arm, Sandel almost
+invariably swung his right behind his own back and into the projecting
+face. It was a clever stroke, much admired by the audience, but it was
+not dangerous, and was, therefore, just that much wasted strength. But
+Sandel was tireless and unaware of limitations, and King grinned and
+doggedly endured.
+
+Sandel developed a fierce right to the body, which made it appear that
+King was taking an enormous amount of punishment, and it was only the
+old ringsters who appreciated the deft touch of King's left glove to the
+other's biceps just before the impact of the blow. It was true, the blow
+landed each time; but each time it was robbed of its power by that touch
+on the biceps. In the ninth round, three times inside a minute, King's
+right hooked its twisted arch to the jaw; and three times Sandel's body,
+heavy as it was, was levelled to the mat. Each time he took the nine
+seconds allowed him and rose to his feet, shaken and jarred, but still
+strong. He had lost much of his speed, and he wasted less effort. He was
+fighting grimly; but he continued to draw upon his chief asset, which
+was Youth. King's chief asset was experience. As his vitality had dimmed
+and his vigour abated, he had replaced them with cunning, with wisdom
+born of the long fights and with a careful shepherding of strength. Not
+alone had he learned never to make a superfluous movement, but he had
+learned how to seduce an opponent into throwing his strength away. Again
+and again, by feint of foot and hand and body he continued to inveigle
+Sandel into leaping back, ducking, or countering. King rested, but he
+never permitted Sandel to rest. It was the strategy of Age.
+
+Early in the tenth round King began stopping the other's rushes with
+straight lefts to the face, and Sandel, grown wary, responded by drawing
+the left, then by ducking it and delivering his right in a swinging hook
+to the side of the head. It was too high up to be vitally effective; but
+when first it landed, King knew the old, familiar descent of the black
+veil of unconsciousness across his mind. For the instant, or for the
+slighest fraction of an instant, rather, he ceased. In the one moment he
+saw his opponent ducking out of his field of vision and the background
+of white, watching faces; in the next moment he again saw his opponent
+and the background of faces. It was as if he had slept for a time and
+just opened his eyes again, and yet the interval of unconsciousness was
+so microscopically short that there had been no time for him to fall.
+The audience saw him totter and his knees give, and then saw him recover
+and tuck his chin deeper into the shelter of his left shoulder.
+
+Several times Sandel repeated the blow, keeping King partially dazed,
+and then the latter worked out his defence, which was also a counter.
+Feinting with his left he took a half-step backward, at the same time
+upper cutting with the whole strength of his right. So accurately was
+it timed that it landed squarely on Sandel's face in the full, downward
+sweep of the duck, and Sandel lifted in the air and curled backward,
+striking the mat on his head and shoulders. Twice King achieved this,
+then turned loose and hammered his opponent to the ropes. He gave Sandel
+no chance to rest or to set himself, but smashed blow in upon blow till
+the house rose to its feet and the air was filled with an unbroken roar
+of applause. But Sandel's strength and endurance were superb, and he
+continued to stay on his feet. A knock-out seemed certain, and a captain
+of police, appalled at the dreadful punishment, arose by the ringside
+to stop the fight. The gong struck for the end of the round and Sandel
+staggered to his corner, protesting to the captain that he was sound
+and strong. To prove it, he threw two back-air-springs, and the police
+captain gave in.
+
+Tom King, leaning back in his corner and breathing hard, was
+disappointed. If the fight had been stopped, the referee, perforce,
+would have rendered him the decision and the purse would have been his.
+Unlike Sandel, he was not fighting for glory or career, but for thirty
+quid. And now Sandel would recuperate in the minute of rest.
+
+Youth will be served--this saying flashed into King's mind, and he
+remembered the first time he had heard it, the night when he had put
+away Stowsher Bill. The toff who had bought him a drink after the fight
+and patted him on the shoulder had used those words. Youth will be
+served! The toff was right. And on that night in the long ago he had
+been Youth. To-night Youth sat in the opposite corner. As for himself,
+he had been fighting for half an hour now, and he was an old man. Had
+he fought like Sandel, he would not have lasted fifteen minutes. But the
+point was that he did not recuperate. Those upstanding arteries and
+that sorely tried heart would not enable him to gather strength in the
+intervals between the rounds. And he had not had sufficient strength in
+him to begin with. His legs were heavy under him and beginning to cramp.
+He should not have walked those two miles to the fight. And there was
+the steak which he had got up longing for that morning. A great and
+terrible hatred rose up in him for the butchers who had refused him
+credit. It was hard for an old man to go into a fight without enough
+to eat. And a piece of steak was such a little thing, a few pennies at
+best; yet it meant thirty quid to him.
+
+With the gong that opened the eleventh round, Sandel rushed, making a
+show of freshness which he did not really possess. King knew it for what
+it was--a bluff as old as the game itself. He clinched to save himself,
+then, going free, allowed Sandel to get set. This was what King desired.
+He feinted with his left, drew the answering duck and swinging upward
+hook, then made the half-step backward, delivered the upper cut full to
+the face and crumpled Sandel over to the mat. After that he never
+let him rest, receiving punishment himself, but inflicting far more,
+smashing Sandel to the ropes, hooking and driving all manner of
+blows into him, tearing away from his clinches or punching him out of
+attempted clinches, and ever when Sandel would have fallen, catching him
+with one uplifting hand and with the other immediately smashing him into
+the ropes where he could not fall.
+
+The house by this time had gone mad, and it was his house, nearly every
+voice yelling: "Go it, Tom!" "Get 'im! Get 'im!" "You've got 'im, Tom!
+You've got 'im!" It was to be a whirlwind finish, and that was what a
+ringside audience paid to see.
+
+And Tom King, who for half an hour had conserved his strength, now
+expended it prodigally in the one great effort he knew he had in him. It
+was his one chance--now or not at all. His strength was waning fast, and
+his hope was that before the last of it ebbed out of him he would have
+beaten his opponent down for the count. And as he continued to strike
+and force, coolly estimating the weight of his blows and the quality of
+the damage wrought, he realized how hard a man Sandel was to knock out.
+Stamina and endurance were his to an extreme degree, and they were the
+virgin stamina and endurance of Youth. Sandel was certainly a coming
+man. He had it in him. Only out of such rugged fibre were successful
+fighters fashioned.
+
+Sandel was reeling and staggering, but Tom King's legs were cramping
+and his knuckles going back on him. Yet he steeled himself to strike the
+fierce blows, every one of which brought anguish to his tortured hands.
+Though now he was receiving practically no punishment, he was weakening
+as rapidly as the other. His blows went home, but there was no longer
+the weight behind them, and each blow was the result of a severe effort
+of will. His legs were like lead, and they dragged visibly under
+him; while Sandel's backers, cheered by this symptom, began calling
+encouragement to their man.
+
+King was spurred to a burst of effort. He delivered two blows in
+succession--a left, a trifle too high, to the solar plexus, and a right
+cross to the jaw. They were not heavy blows, yet so weak and dazed was
+Sandel that he went down and lay quivering. The referee stood over him,
+shouting the count of the fatal seconds in his ear. If before the tenth
+second was called, he did not rise, the fight was lost. The house stood
+in hushed silence. King rested on trembling legs. A mortal dizziness was
+upon him, and before his eyes the sea of faces sagged and swayed, while
+to his ears, as from a remote distance, came the count of the referee.
+Yet he looked upon the fight as his. It was impossible that a man so
+punished could rise.
+
+Only Youth could rise, and Sandel rose. At the fourth second he rolled
+over on his face and groped blindly for the ropes. By the seventh second
+he had dragged himself to his knee, where he rested, his head rolling
+groggily on his shoulders. As the referee cried "Nine!" Sandel stood
+upright, in proper stalling position, his left arm wrapped about his
+face, his right wrapped about his stomach. Thus were his vital points
+guarded, while he lurched forward toward King in the hope of effecting a
+clinch and gaining more time.
+
+At the instant Sandel arose, King was at him, but the two blows he
+delivered were muffled on the stalled arms. The next moment Sandel was
+in the clinch and holding on desperately while the referee strove to
+drag the two men apart. King helped to force himself free. He knew the
+rapidity with which Youth recovered, and he knew that Sandel was his if
+he could prevent that recovery. One stiff punch would do it. Sandel
+was his, indubitably his. He had out-generalled him, out-fought him,
+out-pointed him. Sandel reeled out of the clinch, balanced on the hair
+line between defeat or survival. One good blow would topple him over
+and down and out. And Tom King, in a flash of bitterness, remembered
+the piece of steak and wished that he had it then behind that necessary
+punch he must deliver. He nerved himself for the blow, but it was
+not heavy enough nor swift enough. Sandel swayed, but did not fall,
+staggering back to the ropes and holding on. King staggered after him,
+and, with a pang like that of dissolution, delivered another blow.
+But his body had deserted him. All that was left of him was a fighting
+intelligence that was dimmed and clouded from exhaustion. The blow that
+was aimed for the jaw struck no higher than the shoulder. He had willed
+the blow higher, but the tired muscles had not been able to obey. And,
+from the impact of the blow, Tom King himself reeled back and nearly
+fell. Once again he strove. This time his punch missed altogether, and,
+from absolute weakness, he fell against Sandel and clinched, holding on
+to him to save himself from sinking to the floor.
+
+King did not attempt to free himself. He had shot his bolt. He was
+gone. And Youth had been served. Even in the clinch he could feel Sandel
+growing stronger against him. When the referee thrust them apart, there,
+before his eyes, he saw Youth recuperate. From instant to instant Sandel
+grew stronger. His punches, weak and futile at first, became stiff and
+accurate. Tom King's bleared eyes saw the gloved fist driving at his
+jaw, and he willed to guard it by interposing his arm. He saw the
+danger, willed the act; but the arm was too heavy. It seemed burdened
+with a hundredweight of lead. It would not lift itself, and he strove to
+lift it with his soul. Then the gloved fist landed home. He experienced
+a sharp snap that was like an electric spark, and, simultaneously, the
+veil of blackness enveloped him.
+
+When he opened his eyes again he was in his corner, and he heard the
+yelling of the audience like the roar of the surf at Bondi Beach. A wet
+sponge was being pressed against the base of his brain, and Sid Sullivan
+was blowing cold water in a refreshing spray over his face and chest.
+His gloves had already been removed, and Sandel, bending over him, was
+shaking his hand. He bore no ill-will toward the man who had put him
+out and he returned the grip with a heartiness that made his battered
+knuckles protest. Then Sandel stepped to the centre of the ring and
+the audience hushed its pandemonium to hear him accept young Pronto's
+challenge and offer to increase the side bet to one hundred pounds. King
+looked on apathetically while his seconds mopped the streaming water
+from him, dried his face, and prepared him to leave the ring. He felt
+hungry. It was not the ordinary, gnawing kind, but a great faintness,
+a palpitation at the pit of the stomach that communicated itself to all
+his body. He remembered back into the fight to the moment when he had
+Sandel swaying and tottering on the hair-line balance of defeat. Ah,
+that piece of steak would have done it! He had lacked just that for
+the decisive blow, and he had lost. It was all because of the piece of
+steak.
+
+His seconds were half-supporting him as they helped him through the
+ropes. He tore free from them, ducked through the ropes unaided, and
+leaped heavily to the floor, following on their heels as they forced a
+passage for him down the crowded centre aisle. Leaving the dressing-room
+for the street, in the entrance to the hall, some young fellow spoke to
+him.
+
+"W'y didn't yuh go in an' get 'im when yuh 'ad 'im?" the young fellow
+asked.
+
+"Aw, go to hell!" said Tom King, and passed down the steps to the
+sidewalk.
+
+The doors of the public-house at the corner were swinging wide, and
+he saw the lights and the smiling barmaids, heard the many voices
+discussing the fight and the prosperous chink of money on the bar.
+Somebody called to him to have a drink. He hesitated perceptibly, then
+refused and went on his way.
+
+He had not a copper in his pocket, and the two-mile walk home seemed
+very long. He was certainly getting old. Crossing the Domain, he sat
+down suddenly on a bench, unnerved by the thought of the missus sitting
+up for him, waiting to learn the outcome of the fight. That was harder
+than any knockout, and it seemed almost impossible to face.
+
+He felt weak and sore, and the pain of his smashed knuckles warned him
+that, even if he could find a job at navvy work, it would be a week
+before he could grip a pick handle or a shovel. The hunger palpitation
+at the pit of the stomach was sickening. His wretchedness overwhelmed
+him, and into his eyes came an unwonted moisture. He covered his face
+with his hands, and, as he cried, he remembered Stowsher Bill and how
+he had served him that night in the long ago. Poor old Stowsher Bill!
+He could understand now why Bill had cried in the dressing-room.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's When God Laughs and Other Stories, by Jack London
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