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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sundry Accounts, by Irvin S. Cobb
+
+
+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: Sundry Accounts
+
+
+Author: Irvin S. Cobb
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 7, 2008  [eBook #27439]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUNDRY ACCOUNTS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Audrey Longhurst, Martin Pettit, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+SUNDRY ACCOUNTS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BY IRVIN S. COBB
+
+
+FICTION
+
+SUNDRY ACCOUNTS
+J. POINDEXTER, COLORED
+BACK HOME
+FROM PLACE TO PLACE
+OLD JUDGE PRIEST
+LOCAL COLOR
+THOSE TIMES AND THESE
+THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM
+
+
+WIT AND HUMOR
+
+ONE THIRD OFF
+A PLEA FOR OLD CAP COLLIER
+THE ABANDONED FARMERS
+THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
+EATING IN TWO OR THREE LANGUAGES
+"OH, WELL, YOU KNOW HOW WOMEN ARE!"
+FIBBLE D. D.
+"SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS----"
+EUROPE REVISED
+ROUGHING IT DE LUXE
+COBB'S BILL OF FARE
+COBB'S ANATOMY
+
+
+MISCELLANY
+
+THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE
+THE GLORY OF THE COMING
+PATHS OF GLORY
+"SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS----"
+
+
+NEW YORK
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+SUNDRY ACCOUNTS
+
+by
+
+IRVIN S. COBB
+
+Author of "Back Home," "Speaking of Operations--,"
+"Old Judge Priest," Etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+New York
+George H. Doran Company
+
+Copyright, 1922,
+by George H. Doran Company
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+TO JOHN WILSON TOWNSEND, ESQUIRE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER                                  PAGE
+
+   I DARKNESS                              11
+
+  II THE CATER-CORNERED SEX                57
+
+ III A SHORT NATURAL HISTORY              104
+
+  IV IT COULD HAPPEN AGAIN TO-MORROW      157
+
+   V THE RAVELIN' WOLF                    212
+
+  VI "WORTH 10,000"                       246
+
+ VII MR. LOBEL'S APOPLEXY                 300
+
+VIII ALAS, THE POOR WHIFFLETIT!           341
+
+  IX PLENTIFUL VALLEY                     392
+
+   X A TALE OF WET DAYS                   424
+
+
+
+
+SUNDRY ACCOUNTS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DARKNESS
+
+
+There was a house in this town where always by night lights burned. In
+one of its rooms many lights burned; in each of the other rooms at least
+one light. It stood on Clay Street, on a treeless plot among flower
+beds, a small dull-looking house; and when late on dark nights all the
+other houses on Clay Street were solid blockings lifting from the lesser
+blackness of their background, the lights in this house patterned its
+windows with squares of brilliancy so that it suggested a grid set on
+edge before hot flames. Once a newcomer to the town, a transient guest
+at Mrs. Otterbuck's boarding house, spoke about it to old Squire Jonas,
+who lived next door to where the lights blazed of nights, and the answer
+he got makes a fitting enough beginning for this account.
+
+This stranger came along Clay Street one morning, and Squire Jonas, who
+was leaning over his gate contemplating the world as it passed in
+review, nodded to him and remarked that it was a fine morning; and the
+stranger was emboldened to stop and pass the time of day, as the saying
+goes.
+
+"I'm here going over the books of the Bernheimer Distilling Company," he
+said when they had spoken of this and that, "and, you know, when a
+chartered accountant gets on a job he's supposed to keep right at it
+until he's done. Well, my work keeps me busy till pretty late. And the
+last three nights, passing that place yonder adjoining yours, I've
+noticed she was all lit up like as if for a wedding or a christening or
+a party or something. But I didn't see anybody going in or coming out,
+or hear anybody stirring in there, and it struck me as blamed curious.
+Last night--or this morning, rather, I should say--it must have been
+close on to half-past two o'clock when I passed by, and there she was,
+all as quiet as the tomb and still the lights going from top to bottom.
+So I got to wondering to myself. Tell me, sir, is there somebody sick
+over there next door?"
+
+"Yes, suh," stated the squire, "I figure you might say there is somebody
+sick there. He's been sick a powerful long time too. But it's not his
+body that's sick; it's his soul."
+
+"I don't know as I get you, sir," said the other man in a puzzled sort
+of way.
+
+"Son," stated the squire, "I reckin you've been hearin' 'em, haven't
+you, singin' this here new song that's goin' 'round about, 'I'm Afraid
+to Go Home in the Dark'? Well, probably the man who wrote that there
+song never was down here in these parts in his life; probably he just
+made the idea of it up out of his own head. But he might 'a' had the
+case of my neighbor in his mind when he done so. Only his song is kind
+of comical and this case here is about the most uncomic one you'd be
+likely to run acrost. The man who lives here alongside of me is not only
+afraid to go home in the dark but he's actually feared to stay in the
+dark after he gets home. Once he killed a man and he come clear of the
+killin' all right enough, but seems like he ain't never got over it; and
+the sayin' in this town is that he's studied it out that ef ever he gets
+in the dark, either by himself or in company, he'll see the face of that
+there man he killed. So that's why, son, you've been seein' them lights
+a-blazin'. I've been seein' 'em myself fur goin' on twenty year or more,
+I reckin 'tis by now, and I've got used to 'em. But I ain't never got
+over wonderin' whut kind of thoughts he must have over there all alone
+by himself at night with everything lit up bright as day around him,
+when by rights things should be dark. But I ain't ever asted him, and
+whut's more, I never will. He ain't the kind you could go to him astin'
+him personal questions about his own private affairs. We-all here in
+town just accept him fur whut he is and sort of let him be. He's whut
+you might call a town character. His name is Mr. Dudley Stackpole."
+
+In all respects save one, Squire Jonas, telling the inquiring stranger
+the tale, had the rights of it. There were town characters aplenty he
+might have described. A long-settled community with traditions behind it
+and a reasonable antiquity seems to breed curious types of men and women
+as a musty closet breeds mice and moths. This town of ours had its town
+mysteries and its town eccentrics--its freaks, if one wished to put the
+matter bluntly; and it had its champion story-teller and its champion
+liar and its champion guesser of the weight of livestock on the hoof.
+
+There was crazy Saul Vance, the butt of cruel small boys, who deported
+himself as any rational creature might so long as he walked a straight
+course; but so surely as he came to where the road forked or two streets
+crossed he could not decide which turning to take and for hours angled
+back and forth and to and fro, now taking the short cut to regain the
+path he just had quitted, now retracing his way over the long one, for
+all the world like a geometric spider spinning its web. There was old
+Daddy Hannah, the black root-and-yarb doctor, who could throw spells and
+weave charms and invoke conjures. He wore a pair of shoes which had been
+worn by a man who was hanged, and these shoes, as is well known, leave
+no tracks which a dog will nose after or a witch follow, or a ha'nt.
+Small boys did not gibe at Daddy Hannah, you bet you! There was Major
+Burnley, who lived for years and years in the same house with the wife
+with whom he had quarreled and never spoke a word to her or she to him.
+But the list is overlong for calling. With us, in that day and time,
+town characters abounded freely. But Mr. Dudley Stackpole was more than
+a town character. He was that, it is true, but he was something else
+besides; something which tabbed him a mortal set apart from his fellow
+mortals. He was the town's chief figure of tragedy.
+
+If you had ever seen him once you could shut your eyes and see him over
+again. Yet about him there was nothing impressive, nothing in his port
+or his manner to catch and to hold a stranger's gaze. With him,
+physically, it was quite the other way about. He was a short spare man,
+very gentle in his movements, a toneless sort of man of a palish gray
+cast, who always wore sad-colored clothing. He would make you think of a
+man molded out of a fog; almost he was like a man made of smoke. His
+mode of living might testify that a gnawing remorse abode ever with him,
+but his hair had not turned white in a single night, as the heads of
+those suddenly stricken by a great shock or a great grief or any greatly
+upsetting and disordering emotion sometimes are reputed to turn. Neither
+in his youth nor when age came to him was his hair white. But for so
+far back as any now remembered it had been a dullish gray, suggesting at
+a distance dead lichens.
+
+The color of his skin was a color to match in with the rest of him. It
+was not pale, nor was it pasty. People with a taste for comparisons were
+hard put to it to describe just what it was the hue of his face did
+remind them of, until one day a man brought in from the woods the
+abandoned nest of a brood of black hornets, still clinging to the
+pendent twig from which the insect artificers had swung it. Darkies used
+to collect these nests in the fall of the year when the vicious swarms
+had deserted them. Their shredded parchments made ideal wadding for
+muzzle-loading scatter-guns, and sufferers from asthma tore them down,
+too, and burned them slowly and stooped over the smoldering mass and
+inhaled the fumes and the smoke which arose, because the country
+wiseacres preached that no boughten stuff out of a drug store gave such
+relief from asthma as this hornet's-nest treatment. But it remained for
+this man to find a third use for such a thing. He brought it into the
+office of Gafford's wagon yard, where some other men were sitting about
+the fire, and he held it up before them and he said:
+
+"Who does this here hornet's nest put you fellers in mind of--this gray
+color all over it, and all these here fine lines runnin' back and forth
+and every which-a-way like wrinkles? Think, now--it's somebody you all
+know."
+
+And when they had given it up as a puzzle too hard for them to guess he
+said:
+
+"Why, ain't it got percisely the same color and the same look about it
+as Mr. Dudley Stackpole's face? Why, it's a perfect imitation of him!
+That's whut I said to myself all in a flash when I first seen it
+bouncin' on the end of this here black birch limb out yonder in the
+flats."
+
+"By gum, if you ain't right!" exclaimed one of the audience. "Say, come
+to think about it, I wonder if spendin' all his nights with bright
+lights burnin' round him is whut's give that old man that gray color
+he's got, the same as this wasp's nest has got it, and all them puckery
+lines round his eyes. Pore old devil, with the hags furever ridin' him!
+Well, they tell me he's toler'ble well fixed in this world's goods, but
+poor as I am, and him well off, I wouldn't trade places with him fur any
+amount of money. I've got my peace of mind if I ain't got anything else
+to speak of. Say, you'd 'a' thought in all these years a man would get
+over broodin' over havin' killed another feller, and specially havin'
+killed him in fair fight. Let's see, now, whut was the name of the
+feller he killed that time out there at Cache Creek Crossin's? I
+actually disremember. I've heard it a thousand times, too, I reckin, if
+I've heard it oncet."
+
+For a fact, the memory of the man slain so long before only endured
+because the slayer walked abroad as a living reminder of the taking off
+of one who by all accounts had been of small value to mankind in his day
+and generation. Save for the daily presence of the one, the very
+identity even of the other might before now have been forgotten. For
+this very reason, seeking to enlarge the merits of the controversy which
+had led to the death of one Jesse Tatum at the hands of Dudley
+Stackpole, people sometimes referred to it as the Tatum-Stackpole feud
+and sought to liken it to the Faxon-Fleming feud. But that was a real
+feud with fence-corner ambuscades and a sizable mortality list and
+nighttime assassinations and all; whereas this lesser thing, which now
+briefly is to be dealt with on its merits, had been no more than a
+neighborhood falling out, having but a solitary homicide for its
+climactic upshot. So far as that went, it really was not so much the
+death of the victim as the survival of his destroyer--and his fashion of
+living afterwards--which made warp and woof for the fabric of the
+tragedy.
+
+With the passage of time the actuating causes were somewhat blurred in
+perspective. The main facts stood forth clear enough, but the underlying
+details were misty and uncertain, like some half-obliterated scribble on
+a badly rubbed slate upon which a more important sum has been overlaid.
+One rendition had it that the firm of Stackpole Brothers sued the two
+Tatums--Harve and Jess--for an account long overdue, and won judgment in
+the courts, but won with it the murderous enmity of the defendant pair.
+Another account would have it that a dispute over a boundary fence
+marching between the Tatum homestead on Cache Creek and one of the
+Stackpole farm holdings ripened into a prime quarrel by reasons of
+Stackpole stubbornness on the one hand and Tatum malignity on the other.
+By yet a third account the lawsuit and the line-fence matter were
+confusingly twisted together to form a cause for disputation.
+
+Never mind that part though. The incontrovertible part was that things
+came to a decisive pass on a July day in the late 80's when the two
+Tatums sent word to the two Stackpoles that at or about six o'clock of
+that evening they would come down the side road from their place a mile
+away to Stackpole Brothers' gristmill above the big riffle in Cache
+Creek prepared to fight it out man to man. The warning was explicit
+enough--the Tatums would shoot on sight. The message was meant for two,
+but only one brother heard it; for Jeffrey Stackpole, the senior member
+of the firm, was sick abed with heart disease at the Stackpole house on
+Clay Street in town, and Dudley, the junior, was running the business
+and keeping bachelor's hall, as the phrase goes, in the living room of
+the mill; and it was Dudley who received notice.
+
+Now the younger Stackpole was known for a law-abiding and a
+well-disposed man, which reputation stood him in stead subsequently; but
+also he was no coward. He might crave peace, but he would not flee from
+trouble moving toward him. He would not advance a step to meet it,
+neither would he give back a step to avoid it. If it occurred to him to
+hurry in to the county seat and have his enemies put under bonds to keep
+the peace he pushed the thought from him. This, in those days, was not
+the popular course for one threatened with violence by another; nor,
+generally speaking, was it regarded exactly as the manly one to follow.
+So he bided that day where he was. Moreover, it was not of record that
+he told anyone at all of what impended. He knew little of the use of
+firearms, but there was a loaded pistol in the cash drawer of the mill
+office. He put it in a pocket of his coat and through the afternoon he
+waited, outwardly quiet and composed, for the appointed hour when
+single-handed he would defend his honor and his brother's against the
+unequal odds of a brace of bullies, both of them quick on the trigger,
+both smart and clever in the handling of weapons.
+
+But if Stackpole told no one, someone else told someone. Probably the
+messenger of the Tatums talked. He currently was reputed to have a leaky
+tongue to go with his jimberjaws; a born trouble maker, doubtless, else
+he would not have loaned his service to such employment in the first
+place. Up and down the road ran the report that before night there would
+be a clash at the Stackpole mill. Peg-Leg Foster, who ran the general
+store below the bridge and within sight of the big riffle, saw fit to
+shut up shop early and go to town for the evening. Perhaps he did not
+want to be a witness, or possibly he desired to be out of the way of
+stray lead flying about. So the only known witness to what happened,
+other than the parties engaged in it, was a negro woman. She, at least,
+was one who had not heard the rumor which since early forenoon had been
+spreading through the sparsely settled neighborhood. When six o'clock
+came she was grubbing out a sorghum patch in front of her cabin just
+north of where the creek cut under the Blandsville gravel pike.
+
+One gets a picture of the scene: The thin and deficient shadows
+stretching themselves across the parched bottom lands as the sun slid
+down behind the trees of Eden's swamp lot; the heat waves of a
+blistering hot day still dancing their devil's dance down the road like
+wriggling circumflexes to accent a false promise of coolness off there
+in the distance; the ominous emptiness of the landscape; the brooding
+quiet, cut through only by the frogs and the dry flies tuning up for
+their evening concert; the bandannaed negress wrangling at the weeds
+with her hoe blade inside the rail fence; and, half sheltered within
+the lintels of the office doorway of his mill, Dudley Stackpole, a slim,
+still figure, watching up the crossroad for the coming of his
+adversaries.
+
+But the adversaries did not come from up the road as they had advertised
+they would. That declaration on their part had been a trick and device,
+cockered up in the hope of taking the foe by surprise and from the rear.
+In a canvas-covered wagon--moving wagons, we used to call them in Red
+Gravel County--they left their house half an hour or so before the time
+set by them for the meeting, and they cut through by a wood lane which
+met the pike south of Foster's store; and then very slowly they rode up
+the pike toward the mill, being minded to attack from behind, with the
+added advantage of unexpectedness on their side.
+
+Chance, though, spoiled their strategy and made these terms of primitive
+dueling more equal. Mark how: The woman in the sorghum patch saw it
+happen. She saw the wagon pass her and saw it brought to a standstill
+just beyond where she was; saw Jess Tatum slide stealthily down from
+under the overhanging hood of the wagon and, sheltered behind it, draw a
+revolver and cock it, all the while peeping out, searching the front and
+the nearer side of the gristmill with his eager eyes. She saw Harve
+Tatum, the elder brother, set the wheel chock and wrap the lines about
+the sheathed whipstock, and then as he swung off the seat catch a boot
+heel on the rim of the wagon box and fall to the road with a jar which
+knocked him cold, for he was a gross and heavy man and struck squarely
+on his head. With popped eyes she saw Jess throw up his pistol and fire
+once from his ambush behind the wagon, and then--the startled team
+having snatched the wagon from before him--saw him advance into the open
+toward the mill, shooting again as he advanced.
+
+All now in the same breath and in a jumble of shock and terror she saw
+Dudley Stackpole emerge into full sight, and standing clear a pace from
+his doorway return the fire; saw the thudding frantic hoofs of the nigh
+horse spurn Harve Tatum's body aside--the kick broke his right leg, it
+turned out--saw Jess Tatum suddenly halt and stagger back as though
+jerked by an unseen hand; saw him drop his weapon and straighten again,
+and with both hands clutched to his throat run forward, head thrown back
+and feet drumming; heard him give one strange bubbling, strangled
+scream--it was the blood in his throat made this outcry sound thus--and
+saw him fall on his face, twitching and heaving, not thirty feet from
+where Dudley Stackpole stood, his pistol upraised and ready for more
+firing.
+
+As to how many shots, all told, were fired the woman never could say
+with certainty. There might have been four or five or six, or even
+seven, she thought. After the opening shot they rang together in almost
+a continuous volley, she said. Three empty chambers in Tatum's gun and
+two in Stackpole's seemed conclusive evidence to the sheriff and the
+coroner that night and to the coroner's jurors next day that five shots
+had been fired.
+
+On one point, though, for all her fright, the woman was positive, and to
+this she stuck in the face of questions and cross-questions. After Tatum
+stopped as though jolted to a standstill, and dropped his weapon,
+Stackpole flung the barrel of his revolver upward and did not again
+offer to fire, either as his disarmed and stricken enemy advanced upon
+him or after he had fallen. As she put it, he stood there like a man
+frozen stiff.
+
+Having seen and heard this much, the witness, now all possible peril for
+her was passed, suddenly became mad with fear. She ran into her cabin
+and scrouged behind the headboard of a bed. When at length she
+timorously withdrew from hiding and came trembling forth, already
+persons out of the neighborhood, drawn by the sounds of the fusillade,
+were hurrying up. They seemed to spring, as it were, out of the ground.
+Into the mill these newcomers carried the two Tatums, Jess being
+stone-dead and Harve still senseless, with a leg dangling where the
+bones were snapped below the knee, and a great cut in his scalp; and
+they laid the two of them side by side on the floor in the gritty dust
+of the meal tailings and the flour grindings. This done, some ran to
+harness and hitch and to go to fetch doctors and law officers, spreading
+the news as they went; and some stayed on to work over Harve Tatum and
+to give such comfort as they might to Dudley Stackpole, he sitting dumb
+in his little, cluttered office awaiting the coming of constable or
+sheriff or deputy so that he might surrender himself into custody.
+
+While they waited and while they worked to bring Harve Tatum back to his
+senses, the men marveled at two amazing things. The first wonder was
+that Jess Tatum, finished marksman as he was, and the main instigator
+and central figure of sundry violent encounters in the past, should have
+failed to hit the mark at which he fired with his first shot or with his
+second or with his third; and the second, a still greater wonder, was
+that Dudley Stackpole, who perhaps never in his life had had for a
+target a living thing, should have sped a bullet so squarely into the
+heart of his victim at twenty yards or more. The first phenomenon might
+perhaps be explained, they agreed, on the hypothesis that the mishap to
+his brother coming at the very moment of the fight's beginning, unnerved
+Jess and threw him out of stride, so to speak. But the second was not in
+anywise to be explained excepting on the theory of sheer chance. The
+fact remained that it was so, and the fact remained that it was strange.
+
+By form of law Dudley Stackpole spent two days under arrest; but this
+was a form, a legal fiction only. Actually he was at liberty from the
+time he reached the courthouse that night, riding in the sheriff's buggy
+with the sheriff and carrying poised on his knees a lighted lantern.
+Afterwards it was to be recalled that when, alongside the sheriff, he
+came out of his mill technically a prisoner he carried in his hand this
+lantern, all trimmed of wick and burning, and that he held fast to it
+through the six-mile ride to town. Afterwards, too, the circumstance was
+to be coupled with multiplying circumstances to establish a state of
+facts; but at the moment, in the excited state of mind of those present,
+it passed unremarked and almost unnoticed. And he still held it in his
+hand when, having been released under nominal bond and attended by
+certain sympathizing friends, he walked across town from the county
+building to his home on Clay Street. That fact, too, was subsequently
+remembered and added to other details to make a finished sum of
+deductive reasoning.
+
+Already it was a foregone conclusion that the finding at the coroner's
+inquest, to be held the next day, would absolve him; foregone, also,
+that no prosecutor would press for his arraignment on charges and that
+no grand jury would indict. So, soon all the evidence in hand was
+conclusively on his side. He had been forced into a fight not of his own
+choosing; an effort, which had failed, had been made to take him
+unfairly from behind; he had fired in self-defense after having first
+been fired upon; save for a quirk of fate operating in his favor, he
+should have faced odds of two deadly antagonists instead of facing one.
+What else then than his prompt and honorable discharge? And to top all,
+the popular verdict was that the killing off of Jess Tatum was so much
+good riddance of so much sorry rubbish; a pity, though, Harve had
+escaped his just deserts.
+
+Helpless for the time being, and in the estimation of his fellows even
+more thoroughly discredited than he had been before, Harve Tatum here
+vanishes out of our recital. So, too, does Jeffrey Stackpole, heretofore
+mentioned once by name, for within a week he was dead of the same heart
+attack which had kept him out of the fight at Cache Creek. The rest of
+the narrative largely appertains to the one conspicuous survivor, this
+Dudley Stackpole already described.
+
+Tradition ever afterwards had it that on the night of the killing he
+slept--if he slept at all--in the full-lighted room of a house which was
+all aglare with lights from cellar to roof line. From its every opening
+the house blazed as for a celebration. At the first, so the tale of it
+ran, people were of two different minds to account for this. This one
+rather thought Stackpole feared punitive reprisals under cover of night
+by vengeful kinsmen of the Tatums, they being, root and branch, sprout
+and limb, a belligerent and an ill-conditioned breed. That one suggested
+that maybe he took this method of letting all and sundry know he felt no
+regret for having gunned the life out of a dangerous brawler; that
+perhaps thereby he sought to advertise his satisfaction at the outcome
+of that day's affair. But this latter theory was not to be credited. For
+so sensitive and so well-disposed a man as Dudley Stackpole to joy in
+his own deadly act, however justifiable in the sight of law and man that
+act might have been--why, the bare notion of it was preposterous! The
+repute and the prior conduct of the man robbed the suggestion of all
+plausibility. And then soon, when night after night the lights still
+flared in his house, and when on top of this evidence accumulated to
+confirm a belief already crystallizing in the public mind, the town came
+to sense the truth, which was that Mr. Dudley Stackpole now feared the
+dark as a timid child might fear it. It was not authentically chronicled
+that he confessed his fears to any living creature. But his fellow
+townsmen knew the state of his mind as though he had shouted of it from
+the housetops. They had heard, most of them, of such cases before. They
+agreed among themselves that he shunned darkness because he feared that
+out of that darkness might return the vision of his deed, bloodied and
+shocking and hideous. And they were right. He did so fear, and he
+feared mightily, constantly and unendingly.
+
+That fear, along with the behavior which became from that night
+thenceforward part and parcel of him, made Dudley Stackpole as one set
+over and put apart from his fellows. Neither by daytime nor by nighttime
+was he thereafter to know darkness. Never again was he to see the
+twilight fall or face the blackness which comes before the dawning or
+take his rest in the cloaking, kindly void and nothingness of the
+midnight. Before the dusk of evening came, in midafternoon sometimes, of
+stormy and briefened winter days, or in the full radiance of the sun's
+sinking in the summertime, he was within doors lighting the lights which
+would keep the darkness beyond his portals and hold at bay a gathering
+gloom into which from window or door he would not look and dared not
+look.
+
+There were trees about his house, cottonwoods and sycamores and one
+noble elm branching like a lyre. He chopped them all down and had the
+roots grubbed out. The vines which covered his porch were shorn away. To
+these things many were witnesses. What transformations he worked within
+the walls were largely known by hearsay through the medium of Aunt
+Kassie, the old negress who served him as cook and chambermaid and was
+his only house servant. To half-fearsome, half-fascinated audiences of
+her own color, whose members in time communicated what she told to
+their white employers, she related how with his own hands, bringing a
+crude carpentry into play, her master ripped out certain dark closets
+and abolished a secluded and gloomy recess beneath a hall staircase, and
+how privily he called in men who strung his ceilings with electric
+lights, although already the building was piped for gas; and how, for
+final touches, he placed in various parts of his bedroom tallow dips and
+oil lamps to be lit before twilight and to burn all night, so that
+though the gas sometime should fail and the electric bulbs blink out,
+there still would be abundant lighting about him. His became the house
+which harbored no single shadow save only the shadow of morbid dread
+which lived within its owner's bosom. An orthodox haunted house should
+by rights be deserted and dark. This house, haunted if ever one was,
+differed from the orthodox conception. It was tenanted and it shone with
+lights.
+
+The man's abiding obsession--if we may call his besetment thus--changed
+in practically all essential regards the manners and the practices of
+his daily life. After the shooting he never returned to his mill. He
+could not bring himself to endure the ordeal of revisiting the scene of
+the killing. So the mill stood empty and silent, just as he left it that
+night when he rode to town with the sheriff, until after his brother's
+death; and then with all possible dispatch he sold it, its fixtures,
+contents and goodwill, for what the property would fetch at quick sale,
+and he gave up business. He had sufficient to stay him in his needs. The
+Stackpoles had the name of being a canny and a provident family, living
+quietly and saving of their substance. The homestead where he lived,
+which his father before him had built, was free of debt. He had funds in
+the bank and money out at interest. He had not been one to make close
+friends. Now those who had counted themselves his friends became rather
+his distant acquaintances, among whom he neither received nor bestowed
+confidences.
+
+In the broader hours of daylight his ways were such as any man of
+reserved and diffident ways, having no fixed employment, might follow in
+a smallish community. He sat upon his porch and read in books. He worked
+in his flower beds. With flowers he had a cunning touch, almost like a
+woman's. He loved them, and they responded to his love and bloomed and
+bore for him. He walked downtown to the business district, always alone,
+a shy and unimpressive figure, and sat brooding and aloof in one of the
+tilted-back cane chairs under the portico of the old Richland House,
+facing the river. He took long solitary walks on side streets and
+byways; but it was noted that, reaching the farther outskirts, he
+invariably turned back. In all those dragging years it is doubtful if
+once he set foot past the corporate limits into the open country. Dun
+hued, unobtrusive, withdrawn, he aged slowly, almost imperceptibly. Men
+and women of his own generation used to say that save for the wrinkles
+ever multiplying in close cross-hatchings about his puckered eyes, and
+save for the enhancing of that dead gray pallor--the wasp's-nest
+overcasting of his skin--he still looked to them exactly as he had
+looked when he was a much younger man.
+
+It was not so much the appearance or the customary demeanor of the
+recluse that made strangers turn about to stare at him as he passed, and
+that made them remember how he looked when he was gone from their sight.
+The one was commonplace enough--I mean his appearance--and his conduct,
+unless one knew the underlying motives, was merely that of an
+unobtrusive, rather melancholy seeming gentleman of quiet tastes and
+habits. It was the feeling and the sense of a dismal exhalation from
+him, an unhealthy and unnatural mental effluvium that served so
+indelibly to fix the bodily image of him in the brainpans of casual and
+uninformed passers-by. The brand of Cain was not on his brow. By every
+local standard of human morality it did not belong there. But built up
+of morbid elements within his own conscience, it looked out from his
+eyes and breathed out from his person.
+
+So year by year, until the tally of the years rolled up to more than
+thirty, he went his lone unhappy way. He was in the life of the town,
+to an extent, but not of it. Always, though, it was the daylit life of
+the town which knew him. Excepting once only. Of this exceptional
+instance a story was so often repeated that in time it became
+permanently embalmed in the unwritten history of the place.
+
+On a summer's afternoon, sultry and close, the heavens suddenly went all
+black, and quick gusts smote the earth with threats of a great
+windstorm. The sun vanished magically; a close thick gloaming fell out
+of the clouds. It was as though nightfall had descended hours before its
+ordained time. At the city power house the city electrician turned on
+the street lights. As the first great fat drops of rain fell, splashing
+in the dust like veritable clots, citizens scurrying indoors and
+citizens seeing to flapping awnings and slamming window blinds halted
+where they were to peer through the murk at the sight of Mr. Dudley
+Stackpole fleeing to the shelter of home like a man hunted by a terrible
+pursuer. But with all his desperate need for haste he ran no
+straightaway course. The manner of his flight was what gave added
+strangeness to the spectacle of him. He would dart headlong, on a sharp
+oblique from the right-hand corner of a street intersection to a point
+midway of the block--or square, to give it its local name--then go
+slanting back again to the right-hand corner of the next street
+crossing, so that his path was in the pattern of one acutely slanted
+zigzag after another. He was keeping, as well as he could, within the
+circles of radiance thrown out by the municipal arc lights as he made
+for his house, there in his bedchamber to fortify himself about, like
+one beset and besieged, with the ample and protecting rays of all the
+methods of artificial illumination at his command--with incandescent
+bulbs thrown on by switches, with the flare of lighted gas jets, with
+the tallow dip's slim digit of flame, and with the kerosene's wick
+three-finger breadth of greasy brilliance. As he fumbled, in a very
+panic and spasm of fear, with the latchets of his front gate Squire
+Jonas' wife heard him screaming to Aunt Kassie, his servant, to turn on
+the lights--all of them.
+
+That once was all, though--the only time he found the dark taking him
+unawares and threatening to envelop him in thirty years and more than
+thirty. Then a time came when in a hospital in Oklahoma an elderly man
+named A. Hamilton Bledsoe lay on his deathbed and on the day before he
+died told the physician who attended him and the clergyman who had
+called to pray for him that he had a confession to make. He desired that
+it be taken down by a stenographer just as he uttered it, and
+transcribed; then he would sign it as his solemn dying declaration, and
+when he had died they were to send the signed copy back to the town from
+whence he had in the year 1889 moved West, and there it was to be
+published broadcast. All of which, in due course of time and in
+accordance with the signatory's wishes, was done.
+
+With the beginning of the statement as it appeared in the _Daily Evening
+News_, as with Editor Tompkins' introductory paragraphs preceding it, we
+need have no interest. That which really matters began two-thirds of the
+way down the first column and ran as follows:
+
+"How I came to know there was likely to be trouble that evening at the
+big-riffle crossing was this way"--it is the dying Bledsoe, of course,
+who is being quoted. "The man they sent to the mill with the message did
+a lot of loose talking on his way back after he gave in the message, and
+in this roundabout way the word got to me at my house on the Eden's
+Swamp road soon after dinnertime. Now I had always got along fine with
+both of the Stackpoles, and had only friendly feelings toward them; but
+maybe there's some people still alive back there in that county who can
+remember what the reason was why I should naturally hate and despise
+both the Tatums, and especially this Jess Tatum, him being if anything
+the more low-down one of the two, although the youngest. At this late
+day I don't aim to drag the name of anyone else into this, especially a
+woman's name, and her now dead and gone and in her grave; but I will
+just say that if ever a man had a just cause for craving to see Jess
+Tatum stretched out in his blood it was me. At the same time I will
+state that it was not good judgment for a man who expected to go on
+living to start out after one of the Tatums without he kept on till he
+had cleaned up the both of them, and maybe some of their cousins as
+well. I will not admit that I acted cowardly, but I will state that I
+used my best judgment.
+
+"Therefore and accordingly, no sooner did I hear the news about the dare
+which the Tatums had sent to the Stackpoles than I said to myself that
+it looked like here was my fitting chance to even up my grudge with Jess
+Tatum and yet at the same time not run the prospect of being known to be
+mixed up in the matter and maybe getting arrested, or waylaid afterwards
+by members of the Tatum family or things of such a nature. Likewise I
+figured that with a general amount of shooting going on, as seemed
+likely to be the case, one shot more or less would not be noticed,
+especially as I aimed to keep out of sight at all times and do my work
+from under safe cover, which it all of it turned out practically exactly
+as I had expected. So I took a rifle which I owned and which I was a
+good shot with and I privately went down through the bottoms and came
+out on the creek bank in the deep cut right behind Stackpole Brothers'
+gristmill. I should say offhand this was then about three o'clock in the
+evening. I was ahead of time, but I wished to be there and get
+everything fixed up the way I had mapped it out in my mind, without
+being hurried or rushed.
+
+"The back door of the mill was not locked, and I got in without being
+seen, and I went upstairs to the loft over the mill and I went to a
+window just above the front door, which was where they hoisted up grain
+when brought in wagons, and I propped the wooden shutter of the window
+open a little ways. But I only propped it open about two or three
+inches; just enough for me to see out of it up the road good. And I made
+me a kind of pallet out of meal sacks and I laid down there and I
+waited. I knew the mill had shut down for the week, and I didn't figure
+on any of the hands being round the mill or anybody finding out I was up
+there. So I waited, not hearing anybody stirring about downstairs at
+all, until just about three minutes past six, when all of a sudden came
+the first shot.
+
+"What threw me off was expecting the Tatums to come afoot from up the
+road, but when they did come it was in a wagon from down the main
+Blandsville pike clear round in the other direction. So at this first
+shot I swung and peeped out and I seen Harve Tatum down in the dust
+seemingly right under the wheels of his wagon, and I seen Jess Tatum
+jump out from behind the wagon and shoot, and I seen Dudley Stackpole
+come out of the mill door right directly under me and start shooting
+back at him. There was no sign of his brother Jeffrey. I did not know
+then that Jeffrey was home sick in bed.
+
+"Being thrown off the way I had been, it took me maybe one or two
+seconds to draw myself around and get the barrel of my rifle swung round
+to where I wanted it, and while I was doing this the shooting was going
+on. All in a flash it had come to me that it would be fairer than ever
+for me to take part in this thing, because in the first place the Tatums
+would be two against one if Harve should get back upon his feet and get
+into the fight; and in the second place Dudley Stackpole didn't know the
+first thing about shooting a pistol. Why, all in that same second, while
+I was righting myself and getting the bead onto Jess Tatum's breast, I
+seen his first shot--Stackpole's, I mean--kick up the dust not twenty
+feet in front of him and less than halfway to where Tatum was. I was as
+cool as I am now, and I seen this quite plain.
+
+"So with that, just as Stackpole fired wild again, I let Jess Tatum have
+it right through the chest, and as I did so I knew from the way he acted
+that he was done and through. He let loose of his pistol and acted like
+he was going to fall, and then he sort of rallied up and did a strange
+thing. He ran straight on ahead toward the mill, with his neck craned
+back and him running on tiptoe; and he ran this way quite a little ways
+before he dropped flat, face down. Somebody else, seeing him do that,
+might have thought he had the idea to tear into Dudley Stackpole with
+his bare hands, but I had done enough shooting at wild game in my time
+to know that he was acting like a partridge sometimes does, or a wild
+duck when it is shot through the heart or in the head; only in such a
+case a bird flies straight up in the air. Towering is what you call it
+when done by a partridge. I do not know what you would call it when done
+by a man.
+
+"So then I closed the window shutter and I waited for quite a little
+while to make sure everything was all right for me, and then I hid my
+rifle under the meal sacks, where it stayed until I got it privately two
+days later; and then I slipped downstairs and went out by the back door
+and came round in front, running and breathing hard as though I had just
+heard the shooting whilst up in the swamp. By that time there were
+several others had arrived, and there was also a negro woman crying
+round and carrying on and saying she seen Jess Tatum fire the first shot
+and seen Dudley Stackpole shoot back and seen Tatum fall. But she could
+not say for sure how many shots there were fired in all. So I saw that
+everything was all right so far as I was concerned, and that nobody, not
+even Stackpole, suspicioned but that he himself had killed Jess Tatum;
+and as I knew he would have no trouble with the law to amount to
+anything on account of it, I felt that there was no need for me to
+worry, and I did not--not worry then nor later. But for some time past I
+had been figuring on moving out here on account of this new country
+opening up. So I hurried up things, and inside of a week I had sold out
+my place and had shipped my household plunder on ahead; and I moved out
+here with my family, which they have all died off since, leaving only
+me. And now I am about to die, and so I wish to make this statement
+before I do so.
+
+"But if they had thought to cut into Jess Tatum's body after he was
+dead, or to probe for the bullet in him, they would have known that it
+was not Dudley Stackpole who really shot him, but somebody else; and
+then I suppose suspicion might have fell upon me, although I doubt it.
+Because they would have found that the bullet which killed him was fired
+out of a forty-five-seventy shell, and Dudley Stackpole had done all of
+the shooting he done with a thirty-eight caliber pistol, which would
+throw a different-sized bullet. But they never thought to do so."
+
+Question by the physician, Doctor Davis: "You mean to say that no
+autopsy was performed upon the body of the deceased?"
+
+Answer by Bledsoe: "If you mean by performing an autopsy that they
+probed into him or cut in to find the bullet I will answer no, sir, they
+did not. They did not seem to think to do so, because it seemed to
+everybody such a plain open-and-shut case that Dudley Stackpole had
+killed him."
+
+Question by the Reverend Mr. Hewlitt: "I take it that you are making
+this confession of your own free will and in order to clear the name of
+an innocent party from blame and to purge your own soul?"
+
+Answer: "In reply to that I will say yes and no. If Dudley Stackpole is
+still alive, which I doubt, he is by now getting to be an old man; but
+if alive yet I would like for him to know that he did not fire the shot
+which killed Jess Tatum on that occasion. He was not a bloodthirsty man,
+and doubtless the matter may have preyed upon his mind. So on the bare
+chance of him being still alive is why I make this dying statement to
+you gentlemen in the presence of witnesses. But I am not ashamed, and
+never was, at having done what I did do. I killed Jess Tatum with my own
+hands, and I have never regretted it. I would not regard killing him as
+a crime any more than you gentlemen here would regard it as a crime
+killing a rattlesnake or a moccasin snake. Only, until now, I did not
+think it advisable for me to admit it; which, on Dudley Stackpole's
+account solely, is the only reason why I am now making this statement."
+
+And so on and so forth for the better part of a second column, with a
+brief summary in Editor Tompkins' best style--which was a very dramatic
+and moving style indeed--of the circumstances, as recalled by old
+residents, of the ancient tragedy, and a short sketch of the deceased
+Bledsoe, the facts regarding him being drawn from the same veracious
+sources; and at the end of the article was a somewhat guarded but
+altogether sympathetic reference to the distressful recollections borne
+for so long and so patiently by an esteemed townsman, with a concluding
+paragraph to the effect that though the gentleman in question had
+declined to make a public statement touching on the remarkable
+disclosures now added thus strangely as a final chapter to the annals of
+an event long since occurred, the writer felt no hesitancy in saying
+that appreciating, as they must, the motives which prompted him to
+silence, his fellow citizens would one and all join the editor of the
+_Daily Evening News_ in congratulating him upon the lifting of this
+cloud from his life.
+
+"I only wish I had the language to express the way that old man looked
+when I showed him the galley proofs of Bledsoe's confession," said
+Editor Tompkins to a little interested group gathered in his sanctum
+after the paper was on the streets that evening. "If I had such a power
+I'd have this Frenchman Balzac backed clear off the boards when it came
+to describing things. Gentlemen, let me tell you--I've been in this
+business all my life, and I've seen lots of things, but I never saw
+anything that was the beat of this thing.
+
+"Just as soon as this statement came to me in the mails this morning
+from that place out in Oklahoma I rushed it into type, and I had a set
+of galley proofs pulled and I stuck 'em in my pocket and I put out for
+the Stackpole place out on Clay Street. I didn't want to trust either of
+the reporters with this job. They're both good, smart, likely boys; but,
+at that, they're only boys, and I didn't know how they'd go at this
+thing; and, anyway, it looked like it was my job.
+
+"He was sitting on his porch reading, just a little old gray shell of a
+man, all hunched up, and I walked up to him and I says: 'You'll pardon
+me, Mr. Stackpole, but I've come to ask you a question and then to show
+you something. Did you,' I says, 'ever know a man named A. Hamilton
+Bledsoe?'
+
+"He sort of winced. He got up and made as if to go into the house
+without answering me. I suppose it'd been so long since he had anybody
+calling on him he hardly knew how to act. And then that question coming
+out of a clear sky, as you might say, and rousing up bitter
+memories--not probably that his bitter memories needed any rousing,
+being always with him, anyway--may have jolted him pretty hard. But if
+he aimed to go inside he changed his mind when he got to the door. He
+turned round and came back.
+
+"'Yes,' he says, as though the words were being dragged out of him
+against his will, 'I did once know a man of that name. He was commonly
+called Ham Bledsoe. He lived near where'--he checked himself up,
+here--'he lived,' he says, 'in this county at one time. I knew him
+then.'
+
+"'That being so,' I says, 'I judge the proper thing to do is to ask you
+to read these galley proofs,' and I handed them over and he read them
+through without a word. Without a word, mind you, and yet if he'd spoken
+a volume he couldn't have told me any clearer what was passing through
+his mind when he came to the main facts than the way he did tell me just
+by the look that came into his face. Gentlemen, when you sit and watch a
+man sixty-odd years old being born again; when you see hope and life
+come back to him all in a minute; when you see his soul being remade in
+a flash, you'll find you can't describe it afterwards, but you're never
+going to forget it. And another thing you'll find is that there is
+nothing for you to say to him, nothing that you can say, nor nothing
+that you want to say.
+
+"I did manage, when he was through, to ask him whether or not he wished
+to make a statement. That was all from me, mind you, and yet I'd gone
+out there with the idea in my head of getting material for a long newsy
+piece out of him--what we call in this business heart-interest stuff.
+All he said, though, as he handed me back the slips was, 'No, sir; but I
+thank you--from the bottom of my heart I thank you.' And then he shook
+hands with me--shook hands with me like a man who'd forgotten almost
+how 'twas done--and he walked in his house and shut the door behind him,
+and I came on away feeling exactly as though I had seen a funeral turned
+into a resurrection."
+
+Editor Tompkins thought he had that day written the final chapter, but
+he hadn't. The final chapter he was to write the next day, following
+hard upon a dénouement which to Mr. Tompkins, he with his own eyes
+having seen what he had seen, was so profound a puzzle that ever
+thereafter he mentally catalogued it under one of his favorite
+headlining phrases: "Deplorable Affair Shrouded in Mystery."
+
+
+Let us go back a few hours. For a fact, Mr. Tompkins had been witness to
+a spirit's resurrection. It was as he had borne testimony--a life had
+been reborn before his eyes. Even so, he, the sole spectator to and
+chronicler of the glory of it, could not know the depth and the sweep
+and the swing of the great heartening swell of joyous relief which
+uplifted Dudley Stackpole at the reading of the dead Bledsoe's words.
+None save Dudley Stackpole himself was ever to have a true appreciation
+of the utter sweetness of that cleansing flood, nor he for long.
+
+As he closed his door upon the editor, plans, aspirations, ambitions
+already were flowing to his brain, borne there upon that ground swell of
+sudden happiness. Into the back spaces of his mind long-buried desires
+went riding like chips upon a torrent. The substance of his patiently
+endured self-martyrdom was lifted all in a second, and with it the
+shadow of it. He would be thenceforth as other men, living as they
+lived, taking, as they did, an active share and hand in communal life.
+He was getting old. The good news had come late, but not too late. That
+day would mark the total disappearance of the morbid lonely recluse and
+the rejuvenation of the normal-thinking, normal-habited citizen. That
+very day he would make a beginning of the new order of things.
+
+And that very day he did; at least he tried. He put on his hat and he
+took his cane in his hand and as he started down the street he sought to
+put smartness and springiness into his gait. If the attempt was a sorry
+failure he, for one, did not appreciate the completeness of the failure.
+He meant, anyhow, that his step no longer should be purposeless and
+mechanical; that his walk should hereafter have intent in it. And as he
+came down the porch steps he looked about him, not dully, with sick and
+uninforming eyes, but with a livened interest in all familiar homely
+things.
+
+Coming to his gate he saw, near at hand, Squire Jonas, now a gnarled but
+still sprightly octogenarian, leaning upon a fence post surveying the
+universe at large, as was the squire's daily custom. He called out a
+good morning and waved his stick in greeting toward the squire with a
+gesture which he endeavored to make natural. His aging muscles, staled
+by thirty-odd years of lack of practice at such tricks, merely made it
+jerky and forced. Still, the friendly design was there, plainly to be
+divined; and the neighborly tone of his voice. But the squire,
+ordinarily the most courteous of persons, and certainly one of the most
+talkative, did not return the salutation. Astonishment congealed his
+faculties, tied his tongue and paralyzed his biceps. He stared dumbly a
+moment, and then, having regained coherent powers, he jammed his
+brown-varnished straw hat firmly upon his ancient poll and went
+scrambling up his gravel walk as fast as two rheumatic underpinnings
+would take him, and on into his house like a man bearing incredible and
+unbelievable tidings.
+
+Mr. Stackpole opened his gate and passed out and started down the
+sidewalk. Midway of the next square he overtook a man he knew--an
+elderly watchmaker, a Swiss by birth, who worked at Nagel's jewelry
+store. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times he had passed this man upon
+the street. Always before he had passed him with averted eyes and a
+stiff nod of recognition. Now, coming up behind the other, Mr. Stackpole
+bade him a cheerful good day. At the sound of the words the Swiss spun
+on his heel, then gulped audibly and backed away, flinching almost as
+though a blow had been aimed at him. He muttered some meaningless
+something, confusedly: he stared at Mr. Stackpole with widened eyes like
+one who beholds an apparition in the broad of the day; he stepped on his
+own feet and got in his own way as he shrank to the outer edge of the
+narrow pavement. Mr. Stackpole was minded to fall into step alongside
+the Swiss, but the latter would not have it so. He stumbled along for a
+few yards, mute and plainly terribly embarrassed at finding himself in
+this unexpected company, and then with a muttered sound which might be
+interpreted as an apology or an explanation, or as a token of profound
+surprise on his part, or as combination of them all, he turned abruptly
+off into a grassed side lane which ran up into the old Enders orchard
+and ended nowhere at all in particular. Once his back was turned to Mr.
+Stackpole, he blessed himself fervently. On his face was the look of one
+who would fend off what is evil and supernatural.
+
+Mr. Stackpole continued on his way. On a vacant lot at Franklin and Clay
+Streets four small boys were playing one-eyed-cat. Switching his cane at
+the weed tops with strokes which he strove to make casual, he stopped to
+watch them, a half smile of approbation on his face. Pose and expression
+showed that he desired their approval for his approval of their skill.
+They stopped, too, when they saw him--stopped short. With one accord
+they ceased their play, staring at him. Nervously the batsman withdrew
+to the farther side of the common, dragging his bat behind him. The
+three others followed, casting furtive looks backward over their
+shoulders. Under a tree at the back of the lot they conferred together,
+all the while shooting quick diffident glances toward where he stood. It
+was plain something had put a blight upon their spirits; also, even at
+this distance, they radiated a sort of inarticulate suspicion--a
+suspicion of which plainly he was the object.
+
+For long years Mr. Stackpole's faculties for observation of the motives
+and actions of his fellows had been sheathed. Still, disuse had not
+altogether dulled them. Constant introspection had not destroyed his
+gift for speculation. It was rusted, but still workable. He had read
+aright Squire Jonas' stupefaction, the watchmaker's ludicrous alarm. He
+now read aright the chill which the very sight of his altered
+mien--cheerful and sprightly where they had expected grim aloofness--had
+thrown upon the spirits of the ball players. Well, he could understand
+it all. The alteration in him, coming without prior warning, had
+startled them, frightened them, really. Well, that might have been
+expected. The way had not been paved properly for the transformation. It
+would be different when the _Daily Evening News_ came out. He would go
+back home--he would wait. When they had read what was in the paper
+people would not avoid him or flee from him. They would be coming into
+his house to wish him well, to reëstablish old relations with him. Why,
+it would be almost like holding a reception. He would be to those of his
+own age as a friend of their youth, returning after a long absence to
+his people, with the dour stranger who had lived in his house while he
+was away now driven out and gone forever.
+
+He turned about and he went back home and he waited. But for a while
+nothing happened, except that in the middle of the afternoon Aunt Kassie
+unaccountably disappeared. She was gone when he left his seat on the
+front porch and went back to the kitchen to give her some instruction
+touching on supper. At dinnertime, entering his dining room, he had,
+without conscious intent whistled the bars of an old air, and at that
+she had dropped a plate of hot egg bread and vanished into the pantry,
+leaving the split fragments upon the floor. Nor had she returned. He had
+made his meal unattended. Now, while he looked for her, she was hurrying
+down the alley, bound for the home of her preacher. She felt the need of
+his holy counsels and the reading of scriptural passages. She was used
+to queerness in her master, but if he were going crazy all of a sudden,
+why that would be a different matter altogether. So, presently, she was
+confiding to her spiritual adviser.
+
+Mr. Stackpole returned to the porch and sat down again and waited for
+what was to be. Through the heat of the waning afternoon Clay Street
+was almost deserted; but toward sunset the thickening tides of
+pedestrian travel began flowing by his house as men returned homeward
+from work. He had a bowing acquaintance with most of those who passed.
+
+Two or three elderly men and women among them he had known fairly well
+in years past. But no single one of those who came along turned in at
+his gate to offer him the congratulation he so eagerly desired; no
+single one, at sight of him, all poised and expectant, paused to call
+out kindly words across the palings of his fence. Yet they must have
+heard the news. He knew that they had heard it--all of them--knew it by
+the stares they cast toward the house front as they went by. There was
+more, though, in the staring than a quickened interest or a sharpened
+curiosity.
+
+Was he wrong, or was there also a sort of subtle resentment in it? Was
+there a sense vaguely conveyed that even these old acquaintances of his
+felt almost personally aggrieved that a town character should have
+ceased thus abruptly to be a town character--that they somehow felt a
+subtle injustice had been done to public opinion, an affront offered to
+civic tradition, through this unexpected sloughing off by him of the
+rôle he for so long had worn?
+
+He was not wrong. There was an essence of a floating, formless
+resentment there. Over the invisible tendons of mental telepathy it
+came to him, registering emphatically.
+
+As he shrank back in his chair he summoned his philosophy to give him
+balm and consolation for his disappointment. It would take time, of
+course, for people to grow accustomed to the change in him--that was
+only natural. In a few days, now, when the shock of the sensation had
+worn off, things would be different. They would forgive him for breaking
+a sort of unuttered communal law, but one hallowed, as it were, by rote
+and custom. He vaguely comprehended that there might be such a law for
+his case--a canon of procedure which, unnatural in itself, had come with
+the passage of the passing years to be quite naturally accepted.
+
+Well, perhaps the man who broke such a law, even though it were
+originally of his own fashioning, must abide the consequences. Even so,
+though, things must be different when the minds of people had
+readjusted. This he told himself over and over again, seeking in its
+steady repetition salve for his hurt, overwrought feelings.
+
+And his nights--surely they would be different! Therein, after all, lay
+the roots of the peace and the surcease which henceforth would be his
+portion. At thought of this prospect, now imminent, he uplifted his soul
+in a silent pæan of thanksgiving.
+
+Having no one in whom he ever had confided, it followed naturally that
+no one else knew what torture he had suffered through all the nights of
+all these years stretching behind him in so terribly long a perspective.
+No one else knew how he had craved for the darkness which all the time
+he had both feared and shunned. No one else knew how miserable a
+travesty on sleep his sleep had been, he reading until a heavy physical
+weariness came, then lying in his bed through the latter hours of the
+night, fitfully dozing, often rousing, while from either side of his
+bed, from the ceiling above, from the headboard behind him, and from the
+footboard, strong lights played full and flary upon his twitching,
+aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his
+eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness
+of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the
+stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in
+his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured
+unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely
+worse--the agonized, twisted, dying face of Jess Tatum leaping at him
+out of shadows. But now, thank God, that ghost of his own conjuring,
+that wraith never seen but always feared, was laid to rest forever.
+Never again would conscience put him, soul and body, upon the rack. This
+night he would sleep--sleep as little children do in the all-enveloping,
+friendly, comforting dark.
+
+Scarcely could he wait till a proper bedtime hour came. He forgot that
+he had had no supper; forgot in that delectable anticipation the
+disillusionizing experiences of the day. Mechanically he had, as dusk
+came on, turned on the lights throughout the house, and force of habit
+still operating, he left them all on when at eleven o'clock he quitted
+the brilliantly illuminated porch and went to his bedroom on the second
+floor. He undressed and he put on him his night wear, becoming a
+grotesque shrunken figure, what with his meager naked legs and his ashen
+eager face and thin dust-colored throat rising above the collarless
+neckband of the garment. He blew out the flame of the oil lamp which
+burned on a reading stand at the left side of his bed and extinguished
+the two candles which stood on a table at the right side.
+
+Then he got in the bed and stretched out his arms, one aloft, the other
+behind him, finding with the fingers of this hand the turncock of the
+gas burner which swung low from the ceiling at the end of a goosenecked
+iron pipe, finding with the fingers of that hand the wall switch which
+controlled the battery of electric lights roundabout, and with a
+long-drawn sigh of happy deliverance he turned off both gas and
+electricity simultaneously and sank his head toward the pillow.
+
+The pæaned sigh turned to a shriek of mortal terror. Quaking in every
+limb, crying out in a continuous frenzy of fright, he was up again on
+his knees seeking with quivering hands for the switch; pawing about then
+for matches with which to relight the gas. For the blackness--that
+blackness to which he had been stranger for more than half his life--had
+come upon him as an enemy smothering him, muffling his head in its
+terrible black folds, stopping his nostrils with its black fingers,
+gripping his windpipe with black cords, so that his breathing stopped.
+
+That blackness for which he had craved with an unappeasable hopeless
+craving through thirty years and more was become a horror and a devil.
+He had driven it from him. When he bade it return it returned not as a
+friend and a comforter but as a mocking fiend.
+
+For months and years past he had realized that his optic nerves,
+punished and preyed upon by constant and unwholesome brilliancy, were
+nearing the point of collapse, and that all the other nerves in his
+body, frayed and fretted, too, were all askew and jangled. Cognizant of
+this he still could see no hope of relief, since his fears were greater
+than his reasoning powers or his strength of will. With the fear lifted
+and eternally dissipated in a breath, he had thought to find solace and
+soothing and restoration in the darkness. But now the darkness, for
+which his soul in its longing and his body in its stress had cried out
+unceasingly and vainly, was denied him too. He could face neither the
+one thing nor the other.
+
+Squatted there in the huddle of the bed coverings, he reasoned it all
+out, and presently he found the answer. And the answer was this: Nature
+for a while forgets and forgives offenses against her, but there comes a
+time when Nature ceases to forgive the mistreatment of the body and the
+mind, and sends then her law of atonement, to be visited upon the
+transgressor with interest compounded a hundredfold. The user of
+narcotics knows it; the drunkard knows it; and this poor self-crucified
+victim of his own imagination--he knew it too. The hint of it had that
+day been reflected in the attitude of his neighbors, for they merely had
+obeyed, without conscious realization or analysis on their part, a law
+of the natural scheme of things. The direct proof of it was, by this
+nighttime thing, revealed and made yet plainer. He stood convicted, a
+chronic violator of the immutable rule. And he knew, likewise, there was
+but one way out of the coil--and took it, there in his bedroom, vividly
+ringed about by the obscene and indecent circlet of his lights which
+kept away the blessed, cursed darkness while the suicide's soul was
+passing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE CATER-CORNERED SEX
+
+
+They had a saying down our way in the old days that Judge Priest
+administered law inside his courthouse and justice outside of it.
+Perhaps they were right. Certainly he had a way of seeking short cuts
+through thickets of legal verbiage to the rights of things, the which
+often gave acute sorrow to the souls of those members of the bar who
+venerated the very ink in which the statutory act had been printed and
+worshiped manfully before the graven images of precedent. But elsewise,
+generally speaking, it appeared to give satisfaction. Nobody ever beat
+the judge in any of his races for reëlection, and after a while they
+just naturally quit trying.
+
+Nor did it seem to distress him deeply when the grave and learned lords
+of the highest tribunal of the commonwealth saw fit, as they sometimes
+did, to quarrel with a decision of his which, according to their lights,
+ran counter to the authorities and the traditions revered by these
+august gentlemen.
+
+"Ah-hah!" he would say in his high penny-flute voice when such a thing
+happened. "I see where the honorable court of appeals has disagreed with
+me agin. Well, they've still got quite a piece to go yit before they
+ketch up with the number of times I've disagreed with them."
+
+But he never said such a thing in open court. Such utterances he
+reserved for his cronies and confidants. Once he was under the dented
+tin dome where he sat for so many years he became so firm a stickler for
+the forms and the dignities that practically a sacerdotal air was
+imparted to the proceedings. As you might say, he was almost high church
+in his adherence to the ritualisms. Lawyers coming before him did not
+practice the law in their shirt sleeves. They might do this when
+appearing on certain neighbor circuits, but not here. They did not smoke
+while court was in session, or sit reared back in their chairs with
+their feet up on the counsel tables and on the bar railings. Of course
+when not actually engaged in addressing the court one might chew tobacco
+in moderation, it being an indisputable fact that such was conducive to
+lubrication of the mental processes and a sedative for the nerves
+besides; but the act of chewing must be discreetly and inaudibly carried
+on, and he who in the heat of argument or under the stress of
+cross-questioning a perverse witness failed to patronize the cuspidors
+which dotted the floor at suitable intervals stood in peril of a stern
+admonishment for the first offense and a fine for the second.
+
+Off the bench our judge was the homeliest and simplest of men. On the
+bench he wore his baggy old alpaca coat as though it were a silken robe.
+And, as has been heretofore remarked, he had for his official and his
+private lives two different modes of speech. As His Honor, presiding,
+his language was invariably grammatical and precise and as carefully
+accented as might be expected of a man whose people never had very much
+use anyway for the consonant "r." As William Pitman Priest, Esq.,
+citizen, taxpayer, and Confederate veteran he mishandled the king's
+English as though he had but small personal regard for the king or his
+English either.
+
+Similarly he always showed respect, outwardly at least, for the written
+letter of the statute as written and cited. But when it seemed to him
+that justice tempered with mercy stood in danger of being choked in a
+lawyer's loop of red tape he sheared through the entanglements with a
+promptitude which appealed more strongly, perhaps, to the lay mind than
+to the professional. And if, from the bench, he might not succor the
+deserving litigant or the penitent offender without violation to the
+given principles of the law, which, aiming ever for the greater good to
+the greater number, threatened present disaster for one deserving, he
+very often privily would busy himself in the matter. This, then, was why
+they had that saying about him.
+
+It largely was in a private capacity that Judge Priest figured in the
+various phases relating to the Millsap case, with which now we are about
+to deal. The beginning of this was the ending of Felix Millsap, but from
+its start to its finish he alone held the secrets of all its aspects.
+The best people in town, those who made up the old families, knew the
+daughter of this Felix Millsap; the people whose families were not so
+old perhaps, but by way of compensation more likely to be large ones,
+the common people, as the word goes, knew the father. The best people
+commiserated decorously with the daughter when her father was abruptly
+taken from this life; the others wondered what was going to become of
+his widow. For, you see, the daughter moved in very different circles
+from the one in which her parents moved. Their lines did not touch. But
+Judge Priest had the advantage on his side of moving at will in both
+circles. Indeed he moved in all circles without serious impairment to
+his social position in the community at large.
+
+Briefly, the case of her who had been Eleanor Millsap was the case of a
+child who, diligently climbing out of the environment of her childhood,
+has attained to heights where her parents may never hope to come, a
+common enough case here in flux and fluid America, and one which some
+will applaud and some will deplore, depending on how they view such
+matters; a daughter proclaiming by her attitude that she is ashamed of
+the sources of her origin; a father and a mother visibly proud of their
+offspring's successful rise, yet uncomplainingly accepting the rôles to
+which she has assigned them--there you have this small family tragedy in
+forty words or less.
+
+When the Millsaps moved to our town their baby was in her second summer.
+With the passage of years the father and the mother came, as suitably
+mated couples often do, to look rather like each other. But then,
+probably there never had been a time when they, either in temperament or
+port, had appeared greatly unlike, seeing that both the pair were
+colorless, prosaic folk. So for Nature to mold them into a common
+pattern was merely a detail of time and patience. But their little
+Eleanor betrayed no resemblance to either in figure or face or
+personality. It was in this instance as though hereditary traits had
+been thwarted; as though two sober barnyard fowl had mated to bear a
+golden pheasant. They were secluded, shy, unimaginative; she was vivid
+and sprightly, with dash to her, and audacity.
+
+They lived in one of those small gloomy houses whose shutters always are
+closed and whose fronts always are blank; a house where the business of
+living seems to be carried on surreptitiously, almost by stealth. She,
+from the time she could walk alone, was actively abroad, a bright splash
+of color in the small oblong of shabby front yard. The father, Felix
+Millsap, was an odd-jobs woodworker. He made his living by undertakings
+too trivial for a contracting carpenter and joiner to bid on and too
+complicated for an amateur to attempt. The mother, Martha by name, took
+in plain sewing to help out. She had about her the air of the needle
+drudge, with shoulders bowed in and the pricked, scored fingers of a
+seamstress, and a permanent pucker at one corner of her mouth from
+holding pins there. The daughter showed trim, slender limbs and a bodily
+grace and a piquant face which generations of breeding and wealth so
+very often fail to fashion.
+
+When she graduated as the valedictorian of her class in the high school
+she cut a far better figure in the frock her mother had made for her
+than did any there on the stage at St. Clair Hall; she had a trick of
+wearing simple garments which gave them distinction. Already she had
+half a dozen sweethearts. Boys were drawn to her; girls she repelled
+rather. Girls found her too self-centered, too intent on attaining her
+own aims to give much heed to companionships. They called her selfish.
+Well, if selfishness is another name for a constant, bounding ambition
+to get on and up in the world Eleanor Millsap was selfish. But for the
+boys she had a tremendous attraction. They admired her quick, cruel wit,
+her energy, her good looks. She met her sweethearts on the street, at
+the soda fountain, in that trysting place for juvenile sweetheartings,
+the far corner of the post-office corridor.
+
+She never invited any of these youthful squires of hers to her house;
+they kept rendezvous with her at the corner below and they parted from
+her at the gate. They somehow gathered, without being told it in so many
+words, that she was ashamed of the poverty of her home, and, boylike,
+they felt a dumb sympathy for her that she should be denied what so many
+girls had. But for all her sidewalk flirtations, she kept herself aloof
+from any touch of scandal; the very openness of her gaddings protected
+her from that. Besides, she seemed instinctively to know that if she
+meant to make the best possible bargain for herself in life she must
+keep herself unblemished--must give of her charms but not give too
+freely. Town gossips might call her a forward piece, as they did;
+jealousy among girls of her own age might have it that she was flip and
+fresh; but no one, with truth, might brand her as fast.
+
+Having graduated with honors, she learned stenography--learned it
+thoroughly and well, as was her way with whatever she undertook--and
+presently found a place as secretary to Dallam Wybrant, the leading
+merchandise broker of the three in town. Now Dallam Wybrant was youngish
+and newly widowed--bereft but rallying fast from the grief of losing a
+wife who had been his senior by several years. Knowing people--persons
+who could look through a grindstone as far as the next one, and maybe
+farther--smiled with meaning when they considered the prospect. A
+good-looking, shrewd girl, always smart and trig and crisp, always with
+an eye open for the main chance, sitting hour by hour and day by day in
+the same office with a lonely, impressionable, conceited man--well,
+there was but one answer to it. But one answer to it there was. Nobody
+was very much surprised, although probably some mothers with
+marriageable daughters on their hands were wrung by pangs of envy, when
+Dallam Wybrant and Eleanor Millsap slipped away one day to Memphis and
+there were married.
+
+As Eleanor Millsap, self-reliant, self-sufficient and latterly
+self-supporting, the girl through the years had steadily been growing
+out of the domestic orbit which bounded the lives of her parents. As
+Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bride of an up-and-coming business man, with an
+assured social position and wealth--as our town measured wealth--in his
+own name she was now to pass entirely beyond their humble horizon and
+vanish out of their narrowed social ken. True enough, they kept right on
+living, all three of them, in the same town and indeed upon paralleling
+and adjacent streets; only the parents lived in their shabby little
+sealed-up coffin box of a house down at the poorer end of Yazoo Street;
+the daughter, in her handsome new stucco house, as formal and slick as a
+wedding cake, up at the aristocratic head of Chickasaw Drive. And yet to
+all intents and purposes they were as far apart, these two Millsaps and
+their only child, as though they abode in different countries. For she,
+mind you, had been taken up by the best people. But none of the best
+people had the least intention of taking up her father and mother as
+well. She probably was as far from expecting it or desiring it as any
+other could be. In fact a tale ran about that she served notice upon her
+parents that thereafter their lives were to run in different grooves.
+They were not to seek to see her without her permission; she did not
+mean to see them except when and where she chose, or if she chose--and
+she did not choose.
+
+One evening--it might have been about a year and a half after the
+marriage of his daughter--Felix Millsap was on his way home from work, a
+middle-aged figure, moving with the clunking gait of a tired laborer who
+wears cheap, heavy shoes, his broad splayed hands dangling at the ends
+of his arms as though in either of them he carried an invisible weight.
+It had been a hot day, and where he had been toiling on a roof shed
+which required reshingling the sun had blazed down upon him until it
+sucked his strength out of him, leaving him limp and draggy. He walked
+with his head down, indifferent in his sweated weariness to things about
+him. All the same, the motorman on the Belt Line car swinging out of
+Yazoo Street into Commercial should have sounded his gong for the
+turning. Therein lay his contributory negligence. Also, disinterested
+witnesses subsequently agreed that he took the curve at high speed. It
+was one of these witnesses who saw what was about to happen and cried
+out a vain warning even as the motorman ground on his brakes in a
+belated effort to avoid the inevitable. Felix Millsap was dead when they
+got him out from under the forward trucks. The doctors said he must have
+died instantly; probably he never knew what hit him.
+
+In all the short and simple annals of the poor nothing, usually, is
+shorter and simpler than the funeral of one of them. For the putting
+away underground of the odd-jobs man perhaps thirty persons of his own
+walk in life assembled, attesting their sympathies by their presence.
+But the daughter of the deceased neither attended the brief services at
+the place of his late residence nor rode to the cemetery to witness the
+burial. It was explained by the minister and by the undertaker to those
+who made inquiry that for good and sufficient reasons Mrs. Wybrant was
+not going anywhere at present. But she sent a great stiff set piece of
+flowers, an elaborate, inadequate thing with a wire back to it and a
+tin-foil footing, which sat alongside the black box during the service
+and afterwards was propped upright in the rank grass at the head of the
+grave. It was doubly conspicuous by reason of being the only example of
+what greenhouse men call floral offerings that graced the occasion. And
+she had written her mother a nice letter; the clergyman made this point
+plain to such as spoke to him regarding the absence of Mrs. Wybrant. He
+had seen the letter; that is to say, he had seen the envelope containing
+it. What the clergyman did not know was that to the letter the daughter
+had added a paragraph, underscored, suggesting the name of a leading
+firm of lawyers as suitable and competent to defend their interests--her
+mother's and her own--in an action for damages against the street-car
+company.
+
+However, as it developed, there was no need for the pressing of suit.
+The street-railway company, tacitly confessing fault on the part of one
+of its employees, preferred to compromise out of hand and so avoid the
+costs of litigation and the vexations of a trial. The sum paid in
+settlement was by order of the circuit court lodged in the hands of a
+special administrator, as temporary custodian of the estate of the late
+Felix Millsap, by him to be handed over to the heirs at law. So far as
+the special administrator was concerned, this would end his duties in
+the premises, seeing that other than this sum there was no property to
+be divided.
+
+The little house at the foot of Yazoo Street belonged to the widow. It
+had been deeded to her at the time of its purchase years and years
+before, and she had been a copartner in the undertaking of paying off
+the mortgage upon it by dribs and bitlets which represented hard work
+and the strictest economy. Naturally her husband had made no will.
+Probably it had never occurred to him that he would have any property to
+bequeath to anyone. But by virtue of his having died under a street car
+rather than in his bed he was worth more dead than ever, living, he had
+dreamed of being worth. He was worth eight thousand dollars in cash. So,
+as it turned out, he had left something other than a name for sober
+reliability and a reputation for paying his debts. And no doubt, in that
+bourn to which his spirit had been translated out of a battered body,
+his spirit rejoiced that the manner of his taking off had been as it
+was.
+
+But if the special administrator rested content in the thought that his
+share in the transaction practically would end with but few added
+details, his superior, the chief judicial officer of the district, felt
+called upon to take certain steps on his own initiative solely, and
+without consulting any person regarding the advisability of his action.
+It was characteristic of Judge Priest that he should move promptly in
+the matter. To a greater degree it also was characteristic of him that,
+setting out for a visit to one of no social account whatsoever, he
+should garb himself with more care than he might have shown had he been
+going to see one of those mighty ones who sit in the high places. In a
+suit of rumply but spotless white linen, and carrying in one hand his
+best tape-edged palm-leaf fan, he rather suggested a plump old mandarin
+as, on that same evening of the day when the street-railway company
+effected settlement, he knocked at the front door of the cottage of the
+Widow Millsap.
+
+She was in and she was alone. She was one of those women who always are
+in and nearly always are alone. Immediately, then, they sat in her front
+room, which was her best room. Her sewing machine was there, and her
+biggest oil lamp and her few small sticks of company furniture, her few
+scraps of parlor ornamentation; a bad picture or two, gaudily framed;
+china vases on a mantel-shelf; two golden-oak rockers, wearing on their
+slick and shiny frontlets the brand of an installment-house Cain who
+murdered beauty and yet failed in his designings to achieve comfort. It
+was as hot as a Dutch oven, that little box of a room inclosed within
+its thin-planked walls. It was not a place where one would care to
+linger longer than one had to. Judge Priest came swiftly to the heart of
+the business which had sent him thither.
+
+"Ma'am," he was saying, "this is a kind of a pussonal matter that's
+brought me down here this hot night, and with your consent I'll git
+right to the point of it. Ordinarily I'm a poor hand at diggin' into the
+business of other people. But seein' that I knowed your late lamented
+husband both ez a worthy citizen and ez an honest, hard-workin' man, and
+seein' that in my official capacity it has been incumbent upon me to
+issue certain orders in connection with your rights and claims arisin'
+out of his ontimely death, I have felt emboldened to interest myself,
+privately, in your case--and that's why I'm here now.
+
+"To-day at the cotehouse, when the settlement wuz formally agreed to by
+the legal representatives of both sides, an idea come to me. And that
+idea is this: Now there's eight thousand dollars due the heirs, you
+bein' one and your daughter, Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bein' the other. Half
+of eight thousand dollars wouldn't be so very much to help take keer of
+a person, no matter how keerful they wuz; but eight thousand dollars,
+put out at interest, would provide a livin' in a way fur one who lived
+simply, and more especially in the case of one who owned their own home
+and had it free from debt, ez I understand is the situation with
+reguards to you.
+
+"On the other hand, your daughter is well fixed. Her husband is a rich
+man, ez measured by the standards of our people. It's probable that
+she'll always be well and amply provided fur. Moreover, she's young, and
+you, ma'am, will some day come to the time when you won't be able to go
+on workin' with your hands ez you now do.
+
+"So things bein' thus and so, it seems to me that ef the suggestion was
+made to your daughter, Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, that she should waive her
+claim to her share of them eight thousand dollars and sign over her
+rights to you, thereby inshorin' you frum the fear of actual want in
+your declinin' years; and her, ez I have jest been statin', not needin'
+the money--well, it seems to me that she would jest naturally jump at
+the notion. So if you would go to her yourself with the suggestion, or
+git somebody in whose good sense and judgment you've got due confidence
+to go to her and her husband and lay the facts before them, I, fur one,
+knowin' a little somethin' of human nature, feel morally sure of the
+outcome. Why, I expect she'd welcome the idea; maybe she's already
+thinkin' of the same thing and wonderin' how, legally, it kin be done.
+And that, ma'am, is what brings me here to your residence to-night. And
+I trust you will appreciate the motive which has prompted me and furgive
+me if I, who's almost a stranger to you, seem to have meddled in your
+affairs without warrant or justification."
+
+He reared back in his chair, a plump hand upon either knee.
+
+Through this the widow had not spoken, or offered to speak. Now that he
+had finished, she answered him from the half shadow in which she sat on
+the farther side of the sewing machine upon which the lamp burned. There
+was no bitterness, he thought, in her words; merely a sense of
+resignation to and acceptance of a state of things not of her own
+contriving, and not, conceivably, to be of her own undoing.
+
+"Judge," she said, "perhaps you know by hearsay at least that since my
+daughter's marriage she has lived apart from us. Neither my husband nor
+I ever set foot in the house where she lives. It was her wish"--she
+caught herself here, and he, sensing that she was equivocating,
+nevertheless inwardly approved of the deceit--"I mean to say that it was
+not my wish to go among her friends, who are not my friends, or to
+embarrass her in any way. I am proud that in marrying she has done so
+well for herself. In thinking of her happiness I shall always try to
+find happiness for myself.
+
+"But, judge, you must know this too: She did not come to the--the
+funeral. Well, there was a cause for that; she had a reason. But--but
+she had not been here for months before that. She--oh, you might as well
+hear it if you are to understand--she has never once been here since she
+married!
+
+"And so, Judge Priest, I cannot go to her until I am sent for--not under
+any circumstances nor for any purpose. If she has her pride, I in my
+poor small way have my pride, too, my self-respect. When she needs
+me--if ever she does--I'll go to her wherever she may be if I have to
+crawl there on my hands and knees. What has gone before will all be
+forgotten. But don't you see, sir?--I can't go until she sends for me.
+And so, Judge Priest, while I thank you with all my heart for your
+thoughtfulness and your kindness, and while I'd be glad, too, if Ellie
+saw fit or could be made to see that it would be a fine thing to give me
+this money in the way you have suggested, I say to you again that I
+cannot be the one to go to her. I will not even write to her on the
+subject. That, with me, is final."
+
+"But, ma'am," he said, "ef somebody else went--some friend of yours and
+of hers--how about it then?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Her friends--now--are not my friends. My friends are not hers any more;
+most of them never were her friends. Besides, the idea did not originate
+with me. Either the proposition must come from her direct or it must be
+presented to her by some third party. And I can think of no third party
+of my choosing that she would care to hear. No, Judge Priest, I have
+nobody to send."
+
+"All right then," he stated, "since I set this here ball in motion I'll
+keep it rollin'. Ma'am, I'll take it on myself to speak to Mrs. Dallam
+Wybrant in your behalf."
+
+"But, Judge Priest," she protested, "I couldn't ask you to do that for
+me--I couldn't!"
+
+"Ma'am, you ain't asked me and you don't need to ask me. I'm askin'
+myself--I'm doin' this on my own hook, and ef you'll excuse me I'll
+start at it right away. When there's a thing which needs to be done ez
+bad ez this thing needs to be done, there oughtn't to be no time lost."
+He stood up and looked about him for his hat. "Ma'am, I confidently
+expect to be back here inside of half an hour, or an hour at most, with
+some good news fur you."
+
+To one who had traveled about more and seen the homes of wealthy
+folk--to a professional decorator, say, or an expert in furnishing
+values--the drawing-room into which Judge Priest presently was being
+ushered might have seemed overdone, overly cluttered up with drapery and
+adornment. But to Judge Priest's eye the room was all that a rich man's
+best room should be. The thick stucco walls cut out the heat of the
+night; an electric fan whirred upon him as he sat in a deep chair of
+puffed red damask. A mulatto girl in neat uniform--this uniform itself
+an astonishing innovation--had answered his ring at the door and had
+ushered him into this wonderful parlor and had taken his name and had
+gone up the broad stairs with the word that he desired to see the lady
+of the house for a few minutes upon important business. He had asked
+first for Mr. and Mrs. Dallam Wybrant; but Mr. Wybrant, it seemed, was
+out of town; Mrs. Wybrant, then, would do. The maid, having delivered
+the message, had returned to say her mistress would be down presently
+and the caller was to wait, please. Waiting, he had had opportunity to
+contrast the present settings with those he had just quitted. Perhaps
+the contrast between them appeared all the greater by reason of the
+freshness of his recollection of the physical surroundings at the scene
+of his first visit of that evening.
+
+She came down soon, wearing a loose, frilly, wrapperlike garment which
+hid her figure. Approaching maternity had not softened her face, had not
+given to it the glorified Madonna look. Rather it had drawn her features
+to haggardness and put in her eyes a look of sharpened apprehension as
+though dread of the nearing ordeal of suffering and danger overrode the
+hope which, along with the new life, was quick within her. She greeted
+Judge Priest with a matter-of-fact directness. Her expression plainly
+enough told him she was at a loss to account for his coming.
+
+"I'm sorry, sir," she said in her rather metallic fashion of speaking,
+"that Dallam isn't here. But he was called to St. Louis this morning on
+business. I hope you will pardon my receiving you in negligée. I'm not
+seeing much company at present. The maid, though, said the business was
+imperative."
+
+"Yes, ma'am, it is," answered Judge Priest, rather ceremoniously for
+him, "and I am grateful to you fur lettin' me see you and I don't aim to
+detain you very long. I kin tell you in a few words whut it is that has
+brought me."
+
+He was as good as his promise--he did tell her in a few words. Outlining
+his suggestion, he used much the same language which he had used once
+already that night. He did not tell her, though, he had come to her
+direct from her mother. He did not tell her he had been to her mother at
+all. It might have been inferred that his present hearer was the first
+to hear that which now he set forth.
+
+"Well, ma'am," he concluded, "that's the condition ez I view it. And if
+you likewise see your way clear to view it ez I do the whole thing kin
+be accomplished with the scratch of a pen. And you'll have the
+satisfaction of knowin' that through your act your mother will be well
+provided fur fur the rest of her life." He added a final argument, being
+moved thereto perhaps by the fact that she had heard him without change
+of expression and with no glance which might be interpreted as approval
+for his plan. "I take it, ma'am, that you do not need the money
+involved. You never will need it, the chances are. You are rich fur this
+town--your husband is, anyway."
+
+She replied then, and to the old man, harkening, it seemed that her
+words fell sharp and brittle like breaking icicles. One thing, though,
+might be said for her--she sought no roundabout course. She did not
+quibble or seek to enwrap the main issue in specious excuses or
+apologies for her position.
+
+"I decline to do it," she said. "I do not feel that I have the right to
+do it. I understand the motives which may have actuated you to interest
+yourself in this affair, but I tell you very frankly that I have no
+intention of surrendering my legal rights in the slightest degree. You
+say I do not need the money, but in the very same breath you go on to
+say the chances are that I shall never need it. So there you yourself
+practically admit there is a chance that some day I might need it.
+Besides, I do not rate my husband a rich man, though you may do so. He
+is well-to-do, nothing more. And his business is uncertain--all business
+is. He might lose every cent he has to-morrow in some bad investment or
+some poor speculation.
+
+"There is still another reason I think of: I have nothing--absolutely
+nothing--in my own name. It irks me to ask my husband, generous though
+he is, for every cent I use, to have to account to him for my personal
+expenditures. Before I married him I earned my own living and I paid my
+own way and learned to love the feeling of independence, the feeling of
+having a little money that was all my own. My share of this inheritance
+will provide me with a private fund, a fund upon which I may draw at
+will, or which I may put away for a possible rainy day, just as I
+choose."
+
+"But ma'am," he blurted, knowing full well he was beaten, yet inspired
+by a desperate, forlorn hope that some added plea from him might break
+through the shell of this steel-surfaced selfishness--"but, ma'am, do
+you stop to realize that it's your own mother who'd benefit by this
+sacrifice on your part? Do you stop to consider that if there's one
+person in all this world who's entitled--"
+
+"Pardon me, sir, for interrupting you," she said crisply, her tone icy
+and sharp, "but the one person who is entitled to most consideration at
+my hands has not actually come into the world yet. It is of that person
+that I must think. I had not meant to speak of this, but your insistence
+forces me to it. As you may guess, Judge Priest, I am about to become a
+mother myself. If my baby lives--and my baby is going to live--that
+money will belong to my child should anything happen to me. I must think
+of what lies ahead of me, not of what has gone before. My mother owns
+the home where she lives; she will have her half of this sum of money;
+she is, I believe, in good health; she is amply able to go on, as she
+has in the past, adding to her income with her needle. So much for my
+mother. As a mother myself it will be my duty, as I see it, to safeguard
+the future of my own child, and I mean to do it, regardless of
+everything else. That is all I have to say about it--that is, if I have
+made myself sufficiently plain to you, Judge Priest."
+
+"Madam," said he, and for once at least he dropped his lifelong
+affectation of ungrammatical speech and reverted to that more stately
+and proper English which he reserved for his judgments from the bench,
+"you have indeed made your position so clear by what you have just said
+that I feel there is nothing whatsoever to be added by either one of us.
+Madam, I have the pleasure to bid you good night."
+
+He clamped his floppy straw hat firmly down upon his head--a thing the
+old judge in all his life never before had done in the presence of a
+woman of his race--and he turned the broad of his back upon her; and if
+a man whose natural gait was a waddle could be said to stride, then be
+it stated that Judge Priest strode out of that room and out of that
+house. Had he looked back before he reached the door he would have seen
+that she sat in her chair, huddled in her silken garments, on her face a
+half smile of tolerant contempt for his choler and in her eye a light
+playing like winter sunlight on frozen water; would have seen that about
+her there was no suggestion whatsoever that she was ruffled or upset or
+in the least regretful of the course she had elected to follow. But
+Judge Priest did not look back. He was too busy striding.
+
+Perhaps it was the heat or perhaps it was inability long to maintain a
+gait so forced, but the volunteer emissary ceased to stride long before
+he had traversed the three-quarters of a mile--and yet, when one came to
+think it over, a span as wide as a continent--which lay between the
+restricted, not to say exclusive, head of Chickasaw Drive and the
+shabby, not to say miscellaneous, foot of Yazoo Street. It was a very
+wilted, very lag-footed, very droopy old gentleman who, come another
+half hour or less, let himself drop with an audible thump into a
+golden-oak rocker alongside the Widow Millsap's sewing machine.
+
+"Ma'am," he had confessed, without preamble, as he entered her house,
+she holding the door open for his passage, "I come back to you licked.
+Your daughter absolutely declines even to consider the proposition I put
+before her. As a plenipotentiary extraordinary I admit I'm a teetotal
+failure. I return to you empty-handed--and licked."
+
+To this she had said nothing. She had waited until he was seated; then
+as she seated herself in her former place, with the lamp between them,
+she asked quietly, almost listlessly, "My daughter saw you then?"
+
+"She did, ma'am, she did. And she refused point-blank!"
+
+"I am sorry, Judge Priest--sorry that you should have been put to so
+much trouble needlessly," she said, still holding her voice at that
+emotionless level. "I am sorry, sir, for your sake; but it is no more
+than I expected. I let you go to her against my better judgment. I
+should have known that your errand would be useless. Knowing Ellie, I
+should have known better than to send you."
+
+He snorted.
+
+"Ma'am, when a little while ago, settin' right here, I told you I
+thought I knowed a little something about human nature I boasted too
+soon. Sech a thing ez this thing which has happened to-night is
+brand-new in my experience. You will excuse my sayin' so, but I kin not
+fathom the workin's of a mind that would--that would--" He floundered
+for words in his indignation. "It is not natural, this here thing I have
+just seen and heard. How your own flesh and blood could--"
+
+"Judge Priest," she said steadily, "it is not my own flesh and blood
+that you accuse. That is my consolation now. For I know the stock that
+is in me. I know the stock that was in my husband. My own flesh and
+blood could never treat me so."
+
+He stared at her, his forehead twisted in a perplexed frown.
+
+"I mean to say just this," she went on: "Ellie is not my own child. She
+has not a drop of my blood or my husband's blood in her. Judge Priest, I
+am about to tell you something which not another soul in this town
+excepting me--now that my husband is gone--has ever known. We never had
+any children, Felix and I. Always we wanted children, but none came to
+us. Nearly twenty-three years ago it is now, we had for a neighbor a
+young woman whose husband had deserted her--had run away with another
+woman, leaving her without a cent, in failing health and with a
+six-month-old girl baby. That was less than two years before we came to
+this town. We lived then in a little town called Calais, on the Eastern
+Shore of Maryland.
+
+"Three months after the husband ran away the wife died. I guess it was
+shame and a broken heart more than anything else that killed her. She
+had not a soul in the world to whom she could turn for help when she was
+dying. We two did what we could for her. We didn't have much--we never
+have had much all through our lives--but what we had we divided with
+her. We were literally the only friends she had in this world. At the
+last we took turns nursing her, my husband and I did. When she was dying
+she put her baby in my arms and asked me to take her and to care for
+her. That was what I had been praying all along that she would do, and I
+was glad and I gave her my promise and she lay back on the pillow and
+died.
+
+"Well, she was buried and we took the child and cared for her. We came
+to love her as though she had been our own; we always loved her as
+though she had been our own. Less than a year after the mother
+died--that was when Ellie was about eighteen months old--we brought her
+with us out here to this town. Her baptismal name was Eleanor, which had
+been her mother's name--Eleanor Major. The father who ran away was named
+Richard Major. We went on calling her Eleanor, but as our child she
+became Eleanor Millsap. She has never suspected--she has never for one
+moment dreamed that she was not our own. After she grew up and showed
+indifference to us, and especially after she had married and began to
+behave toward us in a way which has caused her, I expect, to be
+criticized by some people, we still nursed that secret and it gave us
+comfort. For we knew, both of us, that it was the alien blood in her
+that made her turn her back upon us. We knew the reason, if no one else
+did, for she was not our own flesh and blood. Our own could never have
+served us so. And to-night I know better than ever before, and it
+lessens my sense of disappointment and distress.
+
+"Judge Priest, perhaps you will not understand me, but the mother
+instinct is a curious thing. Through these last few years of my life I
+have felt as though there were two women inside of me. One of these
+women grieved because her child had denied her. The other of these women
+was reconciled because she could see reflected in the actions of that
+child the traits of a breed of strangers. And yet both these women can
+still find it in them to forgive her for all that she has done and all
+that she may ever do. That's motherhood, I suppose."
+
+"Yes, ma'am," he said slowly, "I reckin you're right--that's
+motherhood." He tugged at his tab of white chin whisker, and his
+puckered old eyes behind their glasses were shadowed with a deep
+compassion. Then with a jerk he sat erect.
+
+"I take it that you adopted the child legally?" he said, seeking to make
+his tone casual.
+
+"We took her just as I told you," she answered. "We always treated her
+as though she had been ours. She never knew any difference."
+
+"Yes, ma'am, quite so. You've made that clear enough. But by law, before
+you left Maryland, you gave her your name, I suppose? You went through
+the legal form of law of adoptin' her, didn't you?"
+
+"No, sir, we didn't do that. It didn't seem necessary--it never occurred
+to us to do it. Her mother was dead and her father was gone nobody knew
+where. He had abandoned her, had shown he didn't care what might become
+of her. And her mother on her deathbed had given her to me. Wasn't that
+sufficient?"
+
+Apparently he had not heard her question. Instead of answering it he put
+one of his own:
+
+"Do you reckin now, ma'am, by any chance that there are any people still
+livin' back there in that town of Calais--old neighbors of yours, or
+kinfolks maybe--who'd remember the circumstances in reguard to your
+havin' took this baby in the manner which you have described?"
+
+"Yes, sir; two at least that I know of are still living. One is my half
+sister. I haven't seen her in twenty-odd years, but I hear from her
+regularly. And another is a man who boarded with us at the time. He was
+young then and very poor, but he has become well-to-do since. He lives
+in Baltimore now; is prominent there in politics. Occasionally I see his
+name in the paper. He has been to Congress and he ran for senator once.
+And there may be still others if I could think of them."
+
+"Never mind the others; the two you've named will be sufficient. Whut
+did you say their names were, ma'am?"
+
+She told him. He repeated them after her as though striving to fix them
+in his memory.
+
+"Ah-hah," he said. "Ma'am, have you got some writin' material handy? Any
+blank paper will do--and a pen and ink?"
+
+From a little stand in a corner she brought him what he required, and
+wonderingly but in silence watched him as he put down perhaps a dozen
+close-written lines. She bided until he had concluded his task and read
+through the script, making a change here and there. Then all at once
+some confused sense of realization of his new purpose came to her. She
+stood up and took a step forward and laid one apprehensive hand upon the
+paper as though to stay him.
+
+"Judge Priest," she said, "what have you written down here? And what do
+you mean to do with what you have written?"
+
+"Whut I have written here is a short statement--a memorandum, really, of
+whut you have been tellin' me, ma'am," he explained. "I'll have it
+written out more fully in the form of an affidavit, and then to-morrow I
+want you to sign it either here or at my office in the presence of
+witnesses."
+
+"But is it necessary?" she demurred. "I'm ignorant of the law, and you
+spoke just now of my failure to adopt Ellie by law. But if at this late
+date I must do it, can't it be done privately, in secret, so that
+neither Ellie nor anyone else will ever know?"
+
+"Ellie will have to know, I reckin," he stated grimly, "and other folks
+will know too. But this here paper has nothin' to do with any sech
+proceedin' ez you imagine. It's too late now fur you legally to adopt
+Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, even though any person should suggest sech a thing,
+and I, fur my part, don't see how any right-thinkin' person could or
+would do so. She's a free agent, of full age, and she's a married woman.
+No, ma'am, she has no legal claim on you and to my way of thinkin' she
+has no moral claim on you neither. She's not your child, a fact which
+I'm shore kin mighty easy be proved ef anyone should feel inclined to
+doubt your word. She ain't your legal heir. She ain't got a leg--excuse
+me, ma'am--she ain't got a prop to stand on. I thought Ellie had us
+licked. Instid it would seem that we've got Ellie licked."
+
+He broke off, checked in his exultant flight by the look upon her face.
+Her fingers turned inward, the blunted nails scratching at the sheet of
+paper as though she would tear it from him.
+
+"No, no, no!" she cried. "I won't do that! I can't do that! You mustn't
+ask me to do that, judge!"
+
+"But, ma'am, don't you git my meanin' yit? Don't you realize that not a
+penny of this eight thousand dollars belongs to Mrs. Dallam Wybrant?
+That she has no claim upon any part of it? That it's all yours and that
+you're goin' to have it all for yourself--every last red cent of
+it--jest ez soon ez the proof kin be filed and the order made by me in
+court?"
+
+"I'm not thinking of that," she declared. "It's Ellie I think of. Her
+happiness means more to me than a million dollars would. What I have
+told you was in confidence, and, judge, you must treat it so. I beg you,
+I demand it of you. You must promise me not to go any further in this.
+You must promise me not to tell a living soul what I have told you
+to-night. I won't sign any affidavit. I won't sign anything. I won't do
+anything to humiliate her. Don't you see, Judge Priest--oh, don't you
+see? She feels shame already because she thinks she was humbly born.
+She would be more deeply ashamed than ever if she knew how humbly she
+really was born--knew that her father was a scoundrel and her mother
+died a pauper and was buried in a potter's field; that the name she has
+borne is not her own name; that she has eaten the bread of charity
+through the most of her life. No, Judge Priest, I tell you no, a
+thousand times no. She doesn't know. Through me she shall never know. I
+would die to spare her suffering--die to spare her humiliation or
+disgrace. Before God's eyes I am her mother, and it is her mother who
+tells you no, not that, not that!"
+
+He got upon his feet too. He crumpled the paper into a ball and thrust
+it out of sight as though it had been a thing abominable and unclean. He
+took no note that in wadding the sheet he had overturned the inkwell and
+a stream from it was trickling down his trouser legs, marking them with
+long black zebra streaks. He looked at her, she standing there, a
+stooped and meager shape in her scant, ill-fitting gown of sleazy black,
+yet seeming to him an embodiment of all the beatitudes and all the
+beauties of this mortal world.
+
+"Ma'am," he said, "your wishes shall be respected. It shall be ez you
+say. My lawyer's sense tells me that you are wrong--foolishly, blindly
+wrong. But my memory of my own mother tells me that you are right, and
+that no mother's son has got the right to question you or try to
+persuade you to do anything different. Ma'am, I'd count it an honor to
+be able to call myself your friend."
+
+Already, within the hour, Judge Priest had broken two constant rules of
+his daily conduct. Now, involuntarily, without forethought on his part,
+he was about to break another. This would seem to have been a night for
+the smashing of habits by our circuit judge. For she put out to him her
+hand--a most unlovely hand, all wrinkled at the back where dimples might
+once have been and corded with big blue veins and stained and shriveled
+and needle scarred. And he took her hand in his fat, pudgy, awkward one,
+and then he did this thing which never before in all his days he had
+done, this thing which never before he had dreamed of doing. Really,
+there is no accounting for it at all unless we figure that somewhere far
+back in Judge Priest's ancestry there were Celtic gallants, versed in
+the small sweet tricks of gallantry. He bent his head and he kissed her
+hand with a grace for which a Tom Moore or a Raleigh might have envied
+him.
+
+
+Let us now for a briefened space cast up in a preliminary way the tally
+on behalf of the whimsical devils of circumstance and the part they are
+to play in the culminating and concluding periods of this narrative. On
+the noon train of the day following the night when that occurred which
+has been set forth in the foregoing pages, Judge Priest, in the company
+of Doctor Lake and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of King's Hell Hounds,
+C.S.A., departs for Reelfoot Lake upon his annual fishing trip. In the
+afternoon Jeff Poindexter, the judge's body servant, going through his
+master's wardrobe seeking articles suitable for his own adornment in the
+master's absence, is pained to discern stripings of spilled ink down the
+legs of a pair of otherwise unmarred white trousers, and, having no
+intention that garments which will one day come into his permanent
+possession shall be thus disfigured and sullied, promptly bundles them
+up and bears them to the cleansing, pressing and repairing establishment
+of one Hyman Pedaloski. The coat which matches the trousers goes along
+too. Upon the underside of one of its sleeves there is a big ink blob.
+Include in the equation this _emigré_, Hyman Pedaloski, newly landed
+from Courland and knowing as yet but little of English, whether written
+or spoken, yet destined to advance by progressive stages until a day
+comes when we proudly shall hail him as our most fashionable merchant
+prince--Hy Clay Pedaloski, the Square Deal Clothier, Also Hats, Caps &
+Leather Goods. Include as a factor Hyman by all means, for lacking him
+our chain of chancy coincidence would lack a most vital link.
+
+At Reelfoot Lake many black bass, bronze-backed and big-mouthed, meet
+the happy fate which all true anglers wish for them; and the white
+perch do bite with a whole-souled enthusiasm only equaled by the
+whole-souled enthusiasm with which also the mosquitoes bite. This brings
+us to the end of the week and to the fifth day of the expedition, with
+Judge Priest at rest at the close of a satisfactory day's sports,
+exhaling scents of the oil of penny-royal. Sitting-there under a tent
+fly, all sun blistered and skeeter stung, all tired out but most
+content, he picks up a two-day-old copy of the _Daily Evening News_
+which the darky boatman has just brought over to camp from the post
+office at Walnut Log, and he opens it at the department headed Local
+Laconics, and halfway down the first column his eye falls upon a
+paragraph at sight of which he gives so deep a snort that Doctor Lake
+swings about from where he is shaving before a hand mirror hung on a
+tree limb and wants to know whether the judge has happened upon
+disagreeable tidings. What the judge has read is a small item in this
+wise, namely:
+
+
+     Born last evening to Mr. and Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, at their palatial
+     mansion on Chickasaw Drive, in the new Beechmont Park Realty
+     Development tract, an infant daughter, their first-born. Mother and
+     child both doing well; the proud papa reported this morning as
+     being practically out of danger and is expected to be entirely
+     recovered shortly, as Dock Boyd, the attending medico, says he has
+     brought three hundred babies into the world and never lost a father
+     yet. Ye editor extends heartiest congrats. Dal, it looks like the
+     cigars were on you!
+
+
+The next chapter in the sequence of chapters leading to our climax is
+short but essential. Returning home Sunday evening, Judge Priest is
+informed that twice that day a strange young white lady has stopped at
+the house urgently requesting that immediately upon his arrival he be so
+good as to call on Mrs. Dallam Wybrant on a matter of pressing moment.
+Bidden to describe the messenger, Jeff Poindexter can only say that she
+'uz a powerful masterful-lookin' Yankee-talkin' lady, all dressed up lak
+she mout belong to some kind of a new secret s'ciety lodge, which is
+Jeff's way of summing up his impressions of the first professional
+trained nurse ever imported, capped, caped and white shod, to our town.
+
+It was this same professional, a cool and starchy vision, who led the
+way up the wide stairs of the Chickasaw Drive house, the old judge, much
+mystified, following close behind her. She ushered him into a bedroom,
+bigger and more gorgeous than any bedroom he had ever seen, and leaving
+him standing, hat in hand, at the bedside of her chief charge, she went
+out and closed the door behind her.
+
+From the pillows there looked up at him a face that was paler than when
+he had last seen it, a face still drawn from pangs of agony recently
+endured, but a face transfigured and radiant. The Madonna look was in it
+now. Outside, the dusk of an August evening was thickening; and inside,
+the curtains were half drawn and the electrics not yet turned on, but
+even so, in that half light, the judge could mark the change here
+revealed to him. He could sense, too, that the change was more spiritual
+than physical, and he could feel his animosity for this woman softening
+into something distantly akin to sympathy. At her left side, harbored in
+the crook of her elbow, lay a cuddling bundle; a tiny head, all red and
+bare, as though offering to Judge Priest's own bald, pinkish pate the
+sincere flattery of imitation, was exposed; and the tip of a very small
+ear, curled and crinkled like a sea shell. You take the combination of a
+young mother cradling her first-born within the hollow of her arm and
+you have the combination which has tautened the heartstrings of man
+since the first man child came from the womb. The old man made a silent
+obeisance of reverence; then waited for her to speak and expose the
+purpose behind this totally unexpected summons.
+
+"Judge Priest," she said, "I have been lying here all day hoping you
+would come before night. I have been wishing for you to come ever since
+I came out from under the ether. Thank you for coming."
+
+"Ma'am, I started fur here ez soon ez I got your word," he said. "In
+whut way kin I be of service to you? I'm at your command."
+
+She slid her free hand beneath the pillow on which her head rested and
+brought forth a crinkled sheet of paper and held it out to him.
+
+"Didn't you write this?" she asked.
+
+He took it and looked at it, and a great astonishment and a great
+chagrin screwed his eyes and slackened his lower jaw.
+
+"Yes, ma'am," he admitted, "I wrote it. But it wuzn't meant fur you to
+see. It wuzn't meant fur anybody a-tall to see--ever. And I'm wonderin',
+ma'am, and waitin' fur you to tell me how come it to reach you."
+
+"I'll tell you," she answered. "But first, before we get to that, would
+you mind telling me how you came to write it, and when, and all? I think
+I can guess. I think I have already pieced the thing together for
+myself. Women can't reason much, you know; but they have intuition." She
+smiled a little at this conceit. "And I want to know if my deductions
+and my conclusions are correct."
+
+"Well, ma'am," he said, "ez I wuz sayin', no human eye wuz to have read
+this here. But since you have read it, I feel it's my bounden duty, in
+common justice to another, to tell you the straight of it, even though
+in doin' so I'm breakin' a solemn pledge."
+
+So he told her--the how and the why and the where and the when of it;
+details of which the reader is aware.
+
+"I thought I wasn't very far wrong, and I wasn't," she said when he had
+finished his confession. She was quiet for a minute, her eyes fixed on
+the farther wall. Then: "Judge Priest, unwittingly, it seems, you have
+been the god of the machine. I wonder if you'd be willing to continue
+to serve?"
+
+"Ef it lies within my powers to do so--yessum, and gladly."
+
+"It does lie within your power. I want you to have the necessary papers
+drawn up which will signalize my giving over to my mother my share of
+that money which the railway paid two weeks ago, and then if you will
+send them to me I will sign them. I want this done at once, please--as
+soon as possible."
+
+"Ma'am," he said, "it shall be as you desire; but ef it's all the same
+to you I'd like to write out that there paper with my own hand. I kin
+think of no act of mine, official or private, in my whole lifetime which
+would give me more honest pleasure. I'll do so before I leave this
+house." He did not tell her that by the letter of the law she would be
+giving away what by law was not hers to give. He would do nothing to
+spoil for her the sweet savor of her surrender. Instead he put a
+question: "It would appear that you have changed your mind about this
+here matter since I seen you last?"
+
+"It was changed for me," she said. "This paper helped to change it for
+me; and you, too, helped without your knowledge; and one other, and most
+of all my baby here, helped to change it for me. Judge Priest, since my
+baby came to me my whole view of life seems somehow to have been
+altered. I've been lying here to-day with her beside me, thinking
+things out. Suppose I should be taken from her, and suppose her father
+should be taken, too, and she should be left, as I was, to the mercy of
+the world and the charity of strangers. Suppose she should grow up, as I
+did--although until I read that paper I didn't know it--beholden to the
+goodness and the devotion and the love of one who was not her real
+mother. Wouldn't she owe to that other woman more than she could have
+owed to me, her own mother, had I been spared to rear her? I think
+so--no, I know it is so. Every instinct of motherhood in me tells me it
+is so."
+
+"Lady," he answered, "to a mere man woman always will be an everlastin'
+puzzle and a riddle; but even a man kin appreciate, in a poor, faint
+way, the depths of mother love. It's ez though he looked through a break
+in the clouds and ketched a vision of the glories of heaven. But you
+ain't told me yit how you come to be in possession of this here sheet of
+note paper."
+
+"Oh, that's right! I had forgotten," she answered. "Try to think now,
+judge--when my mother refused to let you go farther with your plan that
+night at her house, what did you do with the paper?"
+
+"I shoved it out of sight quick ez ever I could. I recall that much
+anyway."
+
+"Did you by any chance put it in your pocket?"
+
+"Well, by Nathan Bedford Forrest!" he exclaimed. "I believe that's
+purzackly the very identical thing I did do. And bein' a careless old
+fool, I left it there instid of tearin' it up or burnin' it, and then I
+went on home and plum' furgot it wuz still there--not that I now regret
+havin' done so, seein' whut to-night's outcome is."
+
+"And did your servant, after you were gone, send the suit you had worn
+that night downtown to be cleaned or repaired? Or do you know about
+that?"
+
+"I suspicion that he done that very thing," he said, a light beginning
+to break in upon him. "Jeff is purty particular about keepin' my clothes
+in fust-rate order. He aims fur them to be in good condition when he
+decides it's time to confiscate 'em away frum me and start in wearin'
+'em himself. Yessum, my Jeff's mighty funny that way. And now, come to
+think of it, I do seem to reckerlect that I spilt a lot of ink on 'em
+that same night."
+
+"Well, then, the mystery is no mystery at all," she said. "On that very
+same day--the day your darky sent your clothes to the cleaner's--I had
+two of Dallam's suits sent down to be pressed. That little man at the
+tailor shop--Pedaloski--found this paper crumpled up in your pocket and
+took it out and then later forgot where he had found it. So, as I
+understand, he tried to read it, seeking for a clue to its ownership. He
+can't read much English, you know, so probably he has had no idea then
+or thereafter of the meaning of it; but he did know enough English to
+make out the name of Wybrant. Look at it and you'll see my name occurs
+twice in it, but your name does not occur at all. So don't you see what
+happened--what he did? Thinking the paper must have come from one of my
+husband's pockets, he smoothed it out as well as he could and folded it
+up and pinned it to the sleeve of Dallam's blue serge and sent it here.
+My maid found it when she was undoing the bundle before hanging up the
+clothes in Dallam's closet, and she brought it to me, thinking, I
+suppose, it was a bill from the cleaner's shop, and I read it. Simple
+enough explanation, isn't it, when you know the facts?"
+
+"Simple," he agreed, "and yit at the same time sort of wonderful too.
+And whut did you do when you read it?"
+
+"I was stunned at first. I tried at first not to believe it. But I
+couldn't deceive myself. Something inside of me told me that it was
+true--every word of it. I suppose it was the woman in me that told me.
+And somehow I knew that you had written it, although really that part
+was not so very hard a thing to figure out, considering everything. And
+somehow--I can't tell you why though--I was morally sure that after you
+had written it some other person had forbidden your making use of it in
+any way, and instinctively--anyhow, I suppose you might say it was by
+instinct--I knew that it had reached me, of all persons, by accident and
+not by design.
+
+"I tried to reach you--you were gone away. But I did reach that funny
+little man Pedaloski by telephone, and found out from him why he had
+pinned the paper on Dallam's coat. I did not tell my husband about it.
+He doesn't know yet. I don't think I shall ever tell him. For two days,
+judge, I wrestled with the problem of whether I should send for my
+mother and tell her that now I knew the thing which all her life she had
+guarded from me. Finally I decided to wait and see you first, and try to
+find out from you the exact circumstances under which the paper was
+written, and the reason why, after writing it, you crumpled it up and
+hid it away.
+
+"And then--and then my baby came, and since she came my scheme of life
+seems all made over. And oh, Judge Priest"--she reached forth a white,
+weak hand and caught at his--"I have you and my baby and--yes, that
+little man to thank that my eyes have been opened and that my heart has
+melted in me and that my soul has been purged from a terrible selfish
+deed of cruelty and ingratitude. And one thing more I want you to know:
+I'm not really sorry that I was born as I was. I'm glad, because--well,
+I'm just glad, that's all. And I suppose that, too, is the woman in me."
+
+One given to sonorous and orotund phrases would doubtless have coined a
+most splendid speech here. But all the old judge, gently patting her
+hand, said was:
+
+"Well, now, ma'am, that's powerful fine--the way it's all turned out.
+And I'm glad I had a blunderin' hand in it to help bring it about. I
+shorely am, ma'am. I'd like to keep on havin' a hand in it. I wonder now
+ef you wouldn't like fur me to be the one to go right now and fetch your
+mother here to you?"
+
+She shook her head, smiling.
+
+"Thank you, judge, that's not necessary. She's here now. She was here
+when the baby came. I sent for her. She's in her room right down the
+hall; it'll be her room always from now on. I expect she's sewing on
+things for the baby; we can't make her stop it. She's terribly jealous
+of Miss McAlpin--that's the trained nurse Dallam brought back with him
+from St. Louis--but Miss McAlpin will be going soon, and then she'll be
+in sole charge. She doesn't know, Judge Priest, that what she told to
+you I now know. She never shall know if I can prevent it, and I know
+you'll help me guard our secret from her."
+
+"I reckin you may safely count on me there, ma'am," he promised. "I've
+frequently been told by disinterested parties that I snore purty loud
+sometimes, but I don't believe anybody yit caught me talkin' in my
+sleep. And now I expect you're sort of tired out. So ef you'll excuse
+me I'll jest slip downstairs, and before I go do that there little piece
+of writin' we spoke about a while ago."
+
+"Wouldn't you like to see my baby before you go?" she asked. Her left
+hand felt for the white folds which half swaddled the tiny sleeper.
+"Judge Priest, let me introduce you to little Miss Martha Millsap
+Wybrant, named for her grandmammy."
+
+"Pleased to meet you, young lady," said he, bowing low and elaborately.
+"At your early age, honey, it's easier fur a man, to understand you than
+ever it will be agin after you start growin' up. Pleased indeed to meet
+you."
+
+
+If memory serves him aright, this chronicler of sundry small happenings
+in the life and times of the Honorable William Pitman Priest has more
+than once heretofore commented upon the fact that among our circuit
+judge's idiosyncrasies was his trick, when deeply moved, of talking to
+himself. This night as he went slowly homeward through the soft and
+velvety cool of the summer darkness he freely indulged himself in this
+habit. Oddly enough, he punctuated his periods, as it were, with
+lamp-posts. When he reached a street light he would speak musingly to
+himself, then fall silent until he had trudged along to the next light.
+Something after this fashion:
+
+Corner of Chickasaw Drive and Exall Boulevard:
+
+"Well, sir, the older I git the more convinced I am that jest about the
+time a man decides he knows a little something about human nature it's a
+shore sign he don't know nothin' a-tall about it, 'specially human
+nature ez it applies to the female of the species. Now, f'rinstance, you
+take this here present instance: A woman turns aginst the woman she
+thinks is her own mother. Then she finds out the other woman ain't her
+own mother a-tall, and she swings right back round agin and--well, it's
+got me stumped. Now ef in her place it had 'a' been a man. But a
+woman--oh, shuckin's, whut's the use?"
+
+Corner of Chickasaw Drive and Sycamore Avenue:
+
+"Still, of course we've got to figger the baby as a prime factor
+enterin' into the case and helpin' to straighten things out. Spry little
+trick fur three days old, goin' on four, wuzn't she? Ought to be purty,
+too, when she gits herself some hair and a few teeth and plumps out so's
+she taken up the slack of them million wrinkles, more or less, that
+she's got now. Babies, now--great institutions anyway you take 'em."
+
+Corner of Sycamore Avenue, turning into Clay Street:
+
+"And still, dog-gone it, you'll find folks in this world so blind that
+they'll tell you destiny or fate, or whutever you want to call it, jest
+goes along doin' things by haphazard without no workin' plans and no
+fixed designs. But me, I'm different--me. I regard the scheme of
+creation ez a hell of a success. Look at this affair fur a minute. I go
+meddlin' along like an officious, absent-minded idiot, which I am, and
+jest when it looks like nothin' is goin' to result frum my interference
+but fresh heartaches fur one of the noblest souls that ever lived on
+this here footstool, why the firm of Providence, Pedaloski and
+Poindexter steps in, and bang, there you are! It wouldn't happen agin
+probably in a thousand years, but it shore happened this oncet, I'll
+tell the world. Let's see, now, how does that there line in the hymn
+book run?--'moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.' Ain't it
+the truth?"
+
+Last street lamp on Clay Street before you come to Judge Priest's house:
+
+"And they call 'em the opposite sex! I claim the feller that fust coined
+that there line wuz a powerful conservative pusson. Opposite? Huh!
+Listen here to me: They're so dad-gum opposite they're plum'
+cater-cornered!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A SHORT NATURAL HISTORY
+
+
+If ever a person might be said to have dedicated his being to the
+pursuit of leisure, that selfsame was Red Hoss Shackleford, of color,
+and highly so. He was one who specialized in the deft and fine high art
+of doing nothing at all. With him leisure was at once a calling to be
+followed regularly and an ideal to be fostered. But also he loved to
+eat, and he had a fancy for wearing gladsome gearings, and these
+cravings occasionally interfered with the practice of his favorite
+vocation. In order that he might enjoy long periods of manual inactivity
+it devolved upon him at intervals to devote his reluctant energies to
+gainful labor. When driven to it by necessity, which is said to be the
+mother of invention and which certainly is the full sister to appetite,
+Red Hoss worked. He just naturally had to--sometimes.
+
+You see, in the matter of being maintained vicariously he was less
+fortunately circumstanced than so many of his fellows in our town were,
+and still are. He had no ministering parent doing cookery for the white
+folks, and by night, in accordance with a time-hallowed custom with
+which no sane housekeeper dared meddle, bringing home under a dolman
+cape loaded tin buckets and filled wicker baskets. Ginger Dismukes,
+now--to cite a conspicuous example--was one thus favored by the
+indulgent fates.
+
+Aunt Ca'line Dismukes, mother of the above, was as honest as the day was
+long; but when the evening of that day came, such trifles, say, as part
+of a ham or a few left-over slices of cake fell to her as a legitimate
+if unadvertised salvage. Every time the quality in the big house had
+white meat for their dinner, Ginger, down the alley, enjoyed drumsticks
+and warmed-up stuffing for his late supper. He might be like the
+tapeworm in that he rarely knew in advance what he would have to eat,
+but still, like the tapeworm, he gratefully absorbed what was put before
+him and asked no questions of the benefactor. Without prior effort on
+his part he was fed even as the Prophet Elijah was fed by the ravens of
+old. This simile would acquire added strength if you'd ever seen Aunt
+Ca'line, her complexion being a crow's-wing sable.
+
+Red Hoss had no dependable helpmate, such as Luther Maydew had, with a
+neatly lettered sign in her front window: GOING-OUT WASHING TAKEN IN
+HERE. Luther's wife was Luther's only visible means of support, yet
+Luther waxed fat and shiny and larded the earth when he walked abroad.
+Neither had Red Hoss an indulgent and generous patron such as Judge
+Priest's Jeff--Jeff Poindexter--boasted in the person of his master.
+Neither was he gifted in the manipulation of the freckled bones as the
+late Smooth Crumbaugh had been; nor yet possessed he the skill of shadow
+boxing as that semiprofessional pugilist, Con Lake, possessed it. Con
+could lick any shadow that ever lived, and the punching bag that could
+stand up before his onslaughts was not manufactured yet; wherefore he
+figured in exhibition bouts and boxing benefits, and between these lived
+soft and easy. He enjoyed no such sinecure as fell to the lot of Uncle
+Zack Matthews, who waited on the white gentlemen's poker game at the
+Richland House, thereby harvesting many tips and whose otherwise nimble
+mind became a perfect blank twice a year when he was summoned before the
+grand jury.
+
+Red Hoss did, indeed, have a sister, but the relations between them were
+strained since the day when Red Hoss' funeral obsequies had been
+inopportunely interrupted by the sudden advent among the mourners of the
+supposedly deceased, returning drippingly from the river which
+presumably had engulfed him. His unexpected and embarrassing
+reappearance had practically spoiled the service for his chief relative.
+She never had forgiven Red Hoss for his failure to stay dead, and he
+long since had ceased to look for free pone bread and poke chops in that
+quarter.
+
+So when he had need to eat, or when his wardrobe required replenishing,
+he worked at odd jobs; but not oftener. Ordinarily speaking, his heart
+was not in it at all. But at the time when this narrative begins his
+heart was in it. One speaks figuratively here in order likewise to speak
+literally. A romantic enterprise carried on by Red Hoss Shackleford
+through a period of months promised now a delectable climax. As between
+him and one Melissa Grider an engagement to join themselves together in
+the bonds of matrimony had been arranged.
+
+Before he fell under Melissa's spell Red Hoss had been regarded as one
+of the confirmed bachelors of the Plunkett's Hill younger set. He had
+never noticeably favored marriage and giving in marriage--especially
+giving himself in marriage. It may have been--indeed the forked tongue
+of gossip so had it--that the fervor of Red Hoss' courting, when once he
+did turn suitor, had been influenced by the fortuitous fact that Melissa
+ran as chambermaid on the steamboat _Jessie B._ The fact outstanding,
+though, was that Red Hoss, having ardently wooed, seemed now about to
+win.
+
+But Melissa, that comely and comfortable person, remained practical even
+when most loving. The grandeur of Red Hoss' dress-up clothes may have
+entranced her, and certainly his conversational brilliancy was
+altogether in his favor, but beyond the glamour of the present, Melissa
+had the vision to appraise the possibilities of the future. Before
+finally committing herself to the hymeneal venture she required it of
+her swain that he produce and place in her capable hands for
+safe-keeping, first, the money required to purchase the license; second,
+the amount of the fee for the officiating clergyman; and third, cash
+sufficient to pay the expenses of a joint wedding journey to St. Louis
+and return. It was specified that the traveling must be conducted on a
+mutual basis, which would require round-trip tickets for both of them.
+Melissa, before now, had heard of these one-sided bridal tours. If Red
+Hoss went anywhere to celebrate being married she meant to go along with
+him.
+
+Altogether, under these headings, a computed aggregate of at least
+eighty dollars was needed. With his eyes set then on this financial
+goal, Red Hoss sought service in the marts of trade. Perhaps the
+unwonted eagerness he displayed in this regard may have been quickened
+by the prospect that the irksomeness of employment before marriage would
+be made up to him after the event in a vacation more prolonged than any
+his free spirit had ever known. Still, that part of it is none of our
+affair. For our purposes it is sufficient to record that the campaign
+for funds had progressed to a point where practically fifty per cent of
+the total specified by his prudent inamorata already had been earned,
+collected and, in accordance with the compact, intrusted to the
+custodianship of one who was at once fiancée and trustee.
+
+On a fine autumnal day Red Hoss made a beginning at the task of amassing
+the remaining half of the prenuptial sinking fund by accepting an
+assignment to deliver a milch cow, newly purchased by Mr. Dick Bell, to
+Mr. Bell's dairy farm three miles from town on the Blandsville Road.
+This was a form of toil all the more agreeable to Red Hoss--that is to
+say, if any form of toil whatsoever could be deemed agreeable to
+him--since cows when traveling from place to place are accustomed to
+move languidly. By reason of this common sharing of an antipathy against
+undue haste, it was late afternoon before the herder and the herded
+reached the latter's future place of residence; and it was almost dusk
+when Red Hoss, returning alone, came along past Lone Oak Cemetery. Just
+ahead of him, from out of the weed tangle hedging a gap in the cemetery
+fence, a half-grown rabbit hopped abroad. The cottontail rambled a few
+yards down the road, then erected itself on its rear quarters and with
+adolescent foolhardiness contemplated the scenery. In his hand Red Hoss
+still carried the long hickory stick with which he had guided the steps
+of Mr. Bell's new cow. He flung his staff at the inviting mark now
+presented to him. Whirling in its flight, it caught its target squarely
+across the neck, and the rabbit died so quickly it did not have time to
+squeak, and barely time to kick.
+
+Now it is known of all men that luck of two widely different kinds
+resides in the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit. There is bad luck
+in it for the rabbit itself, seeing that the circumstance of its having
+a left hind foot, to begin with, renders life for that rabbit more
+perilous even than is the life of a commonplace rabbit. But there is
+abiding good luck in it for the human who falls heir to the foot after
+the original possessor has passed away. To insure the maximum of fair
+fortune for the legatee, the rabbit while in the act of jumping over a
+sunken grave in the dark of the moon should be killed with a crooked
+stick which a dead man has carried; but since there is no known record
+of a colored person hanging round sunken graves in the dark of the moon,
+the left hind foot of an authentic graveyard rabbit slain under any
+circumstances is a charm of rare preciousness.
+
+With murky twilight impending, it was not for Red Hoss Shackleford to
+linger for long in the vicinity of a burying ground. Already, in the
+gloaming, the white fence palings gleamed spectrally and the shadows
+were thickening in the honeysuckle jungles beyond them. Nor was it for
+him to think of eating the flesh of a graveyard rabbit, even though it
+be plump and youthful, as this one was.
+
+Graveyard rabbits, when indubitably known to be such, decorate no
+Afro-American skillet. Destiny has called them higher than frying pans.
+
+Almost before the victim of his aim had twitched its valedictory twitch
+he was upon it. In his hand, ready for use, was his razor; not his
+shaving razor, but the razor he carried for social purposes. He bent
+down, and with the blade made swift slashes right and left at a limber
+ankle joint, then rose again and was briskly upon his homeward way,
+leaving behind him the maimed carcass, a rumpled little heap, lying in
+the dust. A dozen times before he reached his boarding house he fingered
+the furry talisman where it rested in the bottom of his hip pocket, and
+each touching of it conveyed to him added confidences in propitious
+auguries.
+
+Surely enough, on the very next day but one, events seemed organizing
+themselves with a view to justifying his anticipations. As a consequence
+of the illness of Tom Montjoy he was offered and accepted what promised
+to be for the time being a lucrative position as Tom Montjoy's
+substitute on the back end of one of Fowler & Givens' ice wagons. The
+Eighteenth Amendment was not as yet an accomplished fact, though the
+dread menace of it hung over that commonwealth which had within its
+confines the largest total number of distilleries and bonded warehouses
+to be found in any state of this union. Observing no hope of legislative
+relief, sundry local saloon keepers had failed to renew their licenses
+as these expired. But for every saloon which closed its doors it seemed
+there was a soda fountain set up to fizz and to spout; and the books of
+Fowler & Givens showed the name of a new customer to replace each
+vanished old one. So trade ran its even course, and Red Hoss was
+retained temporarily to understudy, as it were, the invalid Montjoy.
+
+In an afternoon lull following the earlier rush of deliveries Mr. Ham
+Givens came out to where Tallow Dick Evans, Bill Tilghman and Red Hoss
+reclined at ease in the lee of the ice factory's blank north wall and
+bade Red Hoss hook up one of the mules to the light single wagon and
+carry three of the hundred-pound blocks out to Biederman's ex-corner
+saloon, now Biederman's soft-drink and ice-cream emporium, at Ninth and
+Washington.
+
+"Better let him take Blue Wing," said Mr. Givens, addressing Bill
+Tilghman, who by virtue of priority of service and a natural affinity
+for draft stock was stable boss for the firm.
+
+It was Bill Tilghman who once had delivered himself of the sage remark
+that "A mule an' a nigger is 'zackly alike--'specially de mule."
+
+"Can't tek Blue Wing, Mist' Givens," answered Bill. "She done went up to
+Mist' Gallowayses' blacksmith shop to git herse'f some new shoes."
+
+This pluralization of a familiar name was evidence on Bill Tilghman's
+part of the estimation in which he held our leading farrier, Mr. P. J.
+Galloway.
+
+"All right, take one of the other mules then. But get a hustle on,"
+ordered Mr. Givens as he reëntered his office.
+
+"Dat bein' de case, I reckin I'll tek dat white Frank mule," said Red
+Hoss. "'Tain't no use of him standin' in de stall eatin' his ole fool
+haid off jes' 'cause Tom Montjoy is laid up."
+
+"Boy," said Bill Tilghman, "lissen! You 'cept a word of frien'ship an'
+warnin' f'um somebody dat's been kicked by more mules 'en whut you ever
+seen in yore whole life, an' you let dat Frank mule stay right whar he
+is. You kin have yore choice of de Maud mule or de Maggie mule or Friday
+or January Thaw; but my edvice to you is, jes' leave dat Frank mule be
+an' don't pester him none."
+
+"How come?" demanded Red Hoss. "I reckin I got de strength to drive ary
+mule dey is."
+
+"I ain't sayin' you ain't," stated Bill Tilghman. "A born ijiot could
+drive dat mule, so I jedge you mout mek out to qualify. 'Tain't de
+drivin' of him--hit's de hitchin' up of him which I speaks of."
+
+Tallow Dick put in, "Hit's dis way wid dat Frank: In his early chilehood
+somebody muster done somethin' painful to dat mule's haid, an' it seem
+lak it lef' one ondurin' scar in his mind. Anyway, f'um dat day
+hencefor'ard he ain't let nobody a-tall, let alone hit's a plum'
+stranger to him lak you is, go prankin' round his haid. Ef you think a
+mule's back end is his dangersome end you jes' try to walk up to ole
+Frank face to face, ez nigger to mule, an' try to hang de mule jewelry
+over his years. Da's all, jes' try it! Tom Montjoy is de onliest one
+which kin slip de bit in dat mule's mouf, an' de way he do it is to go
+into de nex' stall an' keep speakin' soothin' words to him, an' put de
+bridle on him f'um behinehand of his shoulder lak. But when Tom Montjoy
+ain't wukkin', de Frank mule he ain't wukkin' neither any. Yessuh, Tom
+Montjoy is de sole one which dat Frank mule gives his confidences to,
+sech as dey is."
+
+Red Hoss snorted his contempt for his warning.
+
+"Huh, de trouble wid dat mule is he's pampered! You niggers done pamper
+him twell he think he owns dese whole ice-factory premises. Whut he need
+fur whut ails him is somebody which ain't skeered of him. Me, I aims to
+go 'crost to dat stable barn over yonder 'crost de street an' walk right
+in de same stall wid dat Frank same ez whut I would wid ary other mule,
+an' ef he mek jes' one pass at me I'm gwine up wid my fistes an' give
+him somethin' to brood over."
+
+Bill Tilghman looked at Tallow Dick, looking at him sorrowfully, as
+though haunted by forebodings of an impending tragedy, and shook his
+head slowly from side to side. Tallow Dick returned the glance in kind,
+and then both of them gazed steadfastly at the vainglorious new hand.
+
+"Son, boy," inquired old Bill softly, "whut is de name of yore mos'
+favorite hymn?"
+
+"Whut my favorite hymn got to do wid it?"
+
+"Oh, nothin', only I wuz jes' studyin'. Settin' yere, I got to thinkin'
+dat mebbe dey wuz some purticular tune you might lak sung at de grave."
+
+"An' whilst you's tellin' Unc' Bill dat much, you mout also tell us whar
+'bouts in dis town you lives at?" added Tallow Dick.
+
+"You knows good an' well whar I lives at," snapped Red Hoss.
+
+"I thought mebbe you mout 'a' moved," said Tallow Dick mildly.
+"'Twouldn't never do fur me an' Bill yere to be totin' de remains to de
+wrong address. Been my experience dat nothin' ain't mo' onwelcome at a
+strange house 'en a daid nigger, especially one dat's about six feet two
+inches long an' all mussed up wid fresh mule tracks."
+
+"Huh! You two ole fools is jes' talkin' to hear yo'se'fs talk," quoth
+Red Hoss. "All I axes you to do is jes' set quiet yere, an' in 'bout six
+minutes f'um now you'll see me leadin' a tamed-down white mule wid de
+britchin' all on him outen through dem stable barn do's."
+
+"All right, honey, have it yo' own way. Ef you won't hearken an' you
+won't heed, go ahaid!" stated Uncle Bill, with a wave of his hand. "You
+ain't too young to die, even ef you is too ole to learn. Only I trust
+an' prays dat you won't be blamin' nobody but yo'se'f 'bout this time
+day after to-mor' evenin' w'en de sexton of Mount Zion Cullud Cemetery
+starts pattin' you in de face wid a spade."
+
+"Unc' Bill, you said a moufful den," added Tallow Dick. "De way I looks
+at it, dey ain't no use handin' out sense to a nigger ef he ain't got no
+place to put it. 'Sides, dese things offen-times turns out fur de best;
+orphants leaves de fewest mourners. Good-by, Red Hoss, an' kindly give
+my reguards to any frien's of mine dat you meets up wid on 'yother side
+of Jordan."
+
+With another derisive grunt, Red Hoss rose from where he had been
+resting, angled to the opposite side of the street and disappeared
+within the stable. For perhaps ninety seconds after he was gone the
+remaining two sat in an attitude of silent waiting. Their air was that
+of a pair of black seers who likewise happen to be fatalists, and who
+having conscientiously discharged a duty of prophecy now await with
+calmness the fulfillment of what had been foretold. Then they heard,
+over there where Red Hoss had vanished, a curious muffled outcry. As
+they subsequently described it, this sound was neither shriek nor moan,
+neither oath nor prayer. They united in the declaration that it was more
+in the nature of a strangled squeak, as though a very large rat had
+suddenly been trodden beneath an even larger foot. However, for all its
+strangeness, they rightfully interpreted it to be an appeal for succor.
+Together they rose and ran across Water Street and into the stable.
+
+The Frank mule had snapped his tether and, freed, was backing himself
+out into the open. If a mule might be said to pick his teeth, here was a
+mule doing that very thing. Crumpled under the manger of the stall he
+just had quitted was a huddled shape. The rescuers drew it forth, and in
+the clear upon the earthen stable floor they stretched it. It was
+recognizable as the form of Red Hoss Shackleford.
+
+Red Hoss seemed numbed rather than unconscious. Afterward Bill Tilghman
+in recounting the affair claimed that Red Hoss, when discovered, was
+practically nude clear down to his shoes, which being of the variety
+known as congress gaiters had elastic uppers to hug the ankles. This
+snugness of fit, he thought, undoubtedly explained why they had stayed
+on when all the rest of the victim's costume came off. In his version,
+Tallow Dick averred he took advantage of the circumstance of Red Hoss'
+being almost totally undressed to tally up bruise marks as
+counter-distinguished from tooth marks, and found one of the former for
+every two sets of the latter. From this disparity in the count, and
+lacking other evidence, he was bound to conclude that considerable
+butting had been done before the biting started.
+
+However, these conclusions were to be arrived at later. For the moment
+the older men busied themselves with fanning Red Hoss and with sluicing
+a bucket of water over him. His first intelligible words upon partially
+reviving seemed at the moment of their utterance to have no direct
+bearing upon that which had just occurred. It was what he said next
+which, in the minds of the hearers, established the proper connection.
+
+"White folks suttinly is curious." Such was his opening remark,
+following the water application. "An' also, dey suttinly do git up some
+mouty curious laws." He paused a moment as though in a still slightly
+dazed contemplation of the statutory idiosyncrasies of the Caucasian,
+and then added the key words: "F'rinstance, now, dey got a law dat you
+got to keep lions an' tigers in a cage. Yassuh, da's de law. Can't no
+circus go 'bout de country widout de lions an' de tigers an' de
+highyenas is lock' up hard an' fas' in a cage." Querulously his voice
+rose in a tone of wondering complaintfulness: "An' yit dey delibert'ly
+lets a man-eatin' mule go ramblin' round loose, wid nothin' on him but a
+rope halter."
+
+Across the prostrate form of the speaker Bill Tilghman eyed Tallow Dick
+in the reminiscent manner of one striving to recall the exact words of a
+certain quotation and murmured, "De trouble wid dat Frank mule is dat
+he's pampered."
+
+"Br'er Tilghman," answered back Tallow Dick solemnly, "you done said
+it--de mule is been pampered!"
+
+The sufferer stirred and blinked and sat up dizzily.
+
+"Uh-huh," he assented. "An' jes' ez soon ez I gits some of my strength
+back ag'in, an' some mo' clothes on, I'm gwine tek de longes', sharpes'
+pitchfork dey is in dis yere stable an' I'm gwine pamper dat devilish
+mule wid it fur 'bout three-quarters of an hour stiddy."
+
+But he didn't. If he really cherished any such disciplinary designs he
+abandoned them next morning at sunup, when, limping slightly, he propped
+open the stable doors preparatory to invading its interior. The white
+demon, which appeared to have the facility of snapping his bonds
+whenever so inclined, came sliding out of the darkness toward him, a
+malignant and menacing apparition, with a glow of animosity in two
+deep-set eyes and with a pair of prehensile lips curled back to display
+more teeth than by rights an alligator should have. It was immediately
+evident to Red Hoss that in the Frank mule's mind a deep-seated aversion
+for him had been engendered. He had the feeling that potential ill
+health lurked in that neighborhood; that death and destruction, riding
+on a pale mule, might canter up at any moment. Personally, he decided to
+let bygones be bygones. He dropped the grudge as he tumbled backward
+through the stable doors and slammed them behind him. That same day he
+went to Mr. Ham Givens and announced his intention of immediately
+breaking off his present associations with the firm.
+
+"Me, I is done quit foolin' wid ole ice waggins," he announced airily
+after Mr. Givens had given him his time. "Hit seems lak my gift is fur
+machinery."
+
+"A pusson which wuz keerful wouldn't trust you wid a shoe
+buttoner--dat's how high I reguards yore gift fur machinery," commented
+Bill Tilghman acidly. Red Hoss chose to ignore the slur. Anyhow, at the
+moment he could put his tongue to no appropriate sentence of counter
+repartee. He continued as though there had been no interruption:
+
+"Yassuh, de nex' time you two pore ole foot-an'-mouth teamsters sees me
+I'll come tearin' by yere settin' up on de boiler deck of a taxiscab.
+You better step lively to git out of de way fur me den."
+
+"I 'lows to do so," assented Bill. "I ain't aimin' to git shot wid no
+stray bullets."
+
+"How come stray bullets?"
+
+"Anytime I sees you runnin' a taxiscab I'll know by dat sign alone dat
+de sheriff an' de man which owns de taxiscab will be right behine
+you--da's whut I means."
+
+"Don't pay no 'tention to Unc' Bill," put in Tallow Dick. "Whar you aim
+to git dis yere taxiscab, Red Hoss?"
+
+"Mist' Lee Farrell he's done start up a regular taxiscab line,"
+expounded Red Hoss. "He's lookin' fur some smart, spry cullid men ez
+drivers. Dat natchelly bars you two out, but it lets me in. Mist' Lee
+Farrell he teach you de trade fust, an' den he gives you three dollars a
+day, an' you keeps all de tips you teks in. So it's so long and fare you
+well to you mule lovers, 'ca'se Ise on my way to pick myse' out my
+taxiscab."
+
+"Be sure to pick yo'se'f out one which ain't been pampered," was Bill
+Tilghman's parting shot.
+
+"Nummine dat part," retorted Red Hoss. "You jes' remember dis after I'm
+gone: Mules' niggers an' niggers' mules is 'bout to go out of style in
+dis man's town."
+
+In a way of speaking, Red Hoss in his final taunt had the rights of it.
+Lumbering drays no longer runneled with their broad iron tires the
+red-graveled flanks of the levee leading down to the wharf boats. They
+had given way almost altogether to bulksome motor trucks. Closed hacks
+still found places in funeral processions, but black chaser craft,
+gasoline driven and snorting furiously, met all incoming trains and sped
+to all outgoing ones. Betimes, beholding as it were the handwriting on
+the wall, that enterprising liveryman, Mr. Lee Farrell, had set up a
+garage and a service station on the site of his demolished stable, and
+now was the fleet commander of a whole squadron of these tin-armored
+destroyers.
+
+Under his tutelage Red Hoss proved a reasonably apt pupil. At the end of
+an apprenticeship covering a fortnight he matriculated into a regular
+driver, with a badge and a cap to prove it and a place on the night
+shift. Red Hoss felt impressive, and bore himself accordingly. He began
+taking sharp turns on two wheels. He took one such turn too many. On
+Friday night of his first week as a graduate chauffeur he steered his
+car headlong into a smash-up from which she emerged with a dished front
+wheel and a permanent marcel wave in one fender. As he nursed the
+cripple back to the garage Red Hoss exercised an imagination which never
+yet had failed him, and fabricated an explanation so plausibly shaped
+and phrased as to absolve him of all blameful responsibility for the
+mishap.
+
+Mr. Farrell listened to and accepted this account of the accident with
+no more than a passing exhibition of natural irritation; but next
+morning when Attorney Sublette called, accompanied by an irate client
+with a claim for damages sustained to a market wagon, and bringing with
+him also the testimony of at least two disinterested eye-witnesses to
+prove upon whose shoulders the fault must rest, Mr. Farrell somewhat
+lost his customary air of sustained calm. Cursing softly under his
+breath, he settled on the spot with a cash compromise; and then calling
+the offender to his presence, he used strong and bitter words.
+
+"Look here, boy," he proclaimed, "I've let you off this time with a
+cussing, but next time anything happens to a car that you are driving
+you've got to come clean with me. It ain't to be expected that a lot of
+crazy darkies can go sky-hooting round this town driving pot-metal
+omnibuses for me without one of them getting in a smash-up about every
+so often, and I'm carrying accident insurance and liability insurance to
+cover my risks; but next time you get into a jam I want you to come
+through with the absolute facts in the case, so's I'll know where I
+stand and how to protect myself in court or out of it. I don't care two
+bits whose fault it is--your fault or some other lunatic's fault. The
+truth is what I want--the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
+truth, so help you God. And He'll need to help you if I catch you lying
+again! Get me?"
+
+"Boss," said Red Hoss fervently, "I gits you."
+
+Two nights later the greater disaster befell. It was a thick, drizzly,
+muggy night, when the foreground of one's perspective was blurred by the
+murk and when there just naturally was not any background at all. Down
+by the Richland House a strange white man wearing a hand-colored
+mustache and a tiger-claw watch charm hailed Red Hoss. This person
+desired to be carried entirely out of town, to the south yards of the P.
+T. & A. Railroad, where Powers Brothers' Carnival Company was detraining
+from its cars with intent to pitch camp in the suburb of Mechanicsville
+hard by and furnish the chief attractions for a three days' street fair
+to be given under the auspices of the Mechanicsville lodge of Knights of
+Damon.
+
+After they had quit the paved streets, Red Hoss drove a bumpy course
+diagonally across many switch spurs, and obeying instructions from his
+fare brought safely up alongside a red-painted sleeping car which formed
+the head end of the show train where it stood on a siding. But starting
+back he decided to skirt alongside the track, where he hoped the going
+might be easier. As he backed round and started off, directly in front
+of him he made out through the encompassing mists the dim flare of a
+gasoline torch, and he heard a voice uplifted in pleading:
+
+"Come on, Lena! Come on, Baby Doll! Come on out of that, you Queenie!"
+
+Seemingly an unseen white man was urging certain of his lady friends to
+quit some mysterious inner retreat and join him where he stood; all of
+which, as Red Hoss figured it, was none of his affair. Had he known more
+he might have moved more slowly; indeed might have stopped moving
+altogether. But--I ask you--how was Red Hoss to know that the chief bull
+handler for Powers Brothers was engaged in superintending the unloading
+of his large living charges from their traveling accommodations in the
+bull car?
+
+There were three of these bulls, all of them being of the gentler sex.
+Perhaps it might be well to explain here that the word "bull," in the
+language of the white tops, means elephant. To a showman all cow
+elephants are bulls just as in a mid-Victorian day, more refined than
+this one, all authentic bulls were, to cultured people, cows.
+
+Obeying the insistent request of their master, forth now and down a
+wooden runway filed the members of Powers Brothers' World Famous Troupe
+of Ponderous Pachydermic Performers. First came Lena, then Baby Doll and
+last of all the mighty Queenie; and in this order they lumberingly
+proceeded, upon huge but silent feet, to follow him alongside the
+cindered right of way, feeling their way through the fog.
+
+Now it is a fact well established in natural history--and in this
+instance was to prove a lamentable one--that elephants, unlike lightning
+bugs, carry no tail lamps. Of a sudden Red Hoss was aware of a vast,
+indefinite, mouse-colored bulk looming directly in the path before him.
+He braked hard and tried to swing out, but he was too close upon the
+obstacle to avoid a collision.
+
+With a loud metallic smack the bow of the swerving taxicab, coming up
+from the rear, treacherously smote the mastodonic Queenie right where
+her wrinkles were thickest. Her knees bent forward, and involuntarily
+she squatted. She squatted, as one might say, on all points south.
+Simultaneously there was an agonized squeal from Queenie and a crunching
+sound from behind and somewhat under her, and the tragic deed was done.
+The radiator of Red Hoss' car looked something like a concertina which
+had seen hard usage and something like a folded-in crush hat, but very
+little, if any, like a radiator.
+
+At seven o'clock next morning, when Mr. Farrell arrived at his
+establishment, his stricken gaze fastened upon a new car of his which
+had become to all intents and purposes practically two-thirds of a car.
+The remnant stood at the curbing, where his service car, having towed it
+in, had left it as though the night foreman had been unwilling to give
+so complete a ruin storage space within the garage. Alongside the
+wreckage was Red Hoss, endeavoring more or less unsuccessfully to make
+himself small and inconspicuous. Upon him menacingly advanced his
+employer.
+
+"The second time in forty-eight hours for you, eh?" said Mr. Farrell.
+"Well, boy, you do work fast! Come on now, and give me the cold facts.
+How did the whole front end of this car come to get mashed off?"
+
+Tone and mien alike were threatening. Red Hoss realized there was no
+time for extended preliminary remarks. From him the truth came
+trippingly on the tongue.
+
+"Boss, man, I ain't aimin' to tell you no lies dis time. I comes clean."
+
+"Come clean and come fast."
+
+"A elephint set down on it."
+
+"What!"
+
+"I sez, suh, a elephint set down on it."
+
+In moments of stress, when tempted beyond his powers of self-control,
+Mr. Farrell was accustomed to punctuate physically, as it were, the
+spoken word. What he said--all he said--before emotion choked him was:
+"Why--you--you--" What he did was this: His right arm crooked upward
+like a question mark; it straightened downward like an exclamation
+point; his fist made a period, or, as the term goes, a full stop on the
+point of Red Hoss Shackleford's jaw. What Red Hoss saw resembled this:
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Only they were all printed flashingly in bright primary colors, reds and
+greens predominating.
+
+As the last gay asterisk faded from before his blinking eyes Red Hoss
+found himself sitting down on a hard concrete sidewalk. Coincidentally
+other discoveries made themselves manifest to his understanding. One was
+that the truth which often is stranger than fiction may also on occasion
+be a more dangerous commodity to handle. Another was that abruptly he
+had severed all business connections with Mr. Lee Farrell's industry.
+His resignation had been accepted on the spot, and the spot was the
+bulge of his left jaw.
+
+Somewhat dazed, filled with an inarticulate but none the less sincere
+conviction that there was neither right nor justice left in a misshapen
+world, Red Hoss got up and went away from there. He deemed it the part
+of prudence to go utterly and swiftly away from there. It seemed
+probable that at any moment Mr. Farrell might emerge from his inner
+office, whither, as might be noted through an open window, he had
+retired to pour cold water on his bruised knuckles, and get violent
+again. The language he was using so indicated.
+
+Presently Red Hoss, with one side of his face slightly swollen and a
+curious taste in his mouth, might have been seen boarding a Locust
+Street car southbound. He was on his way to Mechanicsville. In the back
+part of his brain lurked vaguely a project to seek out the man who owned
+those elephants and plead for some fashion of redress for painful
+injuries innocently sustained. Perhaps the show gentleman might incline
+a charitable ear upon hearing Red Hoss' story. Just how the sufferer
+would go about the formality of presenting himself to the consideration
+of the visiting dignitary he did not yet know. It was all nebulous and
+cloudy; a contingency to be shaped by circumstances as they might
+develop. Really sympathy was the balm Red Hoss craved most.
+
+He quit the car when the car quit him--at the end of the line where the
+iron bridge across Island Creek marked the boundary between the
+municipality and its principal suburb. Even at this hour
+Mechanicsville's broadest highway abounded in fascinating sights and
+alluring zoölogical aromas. The carnival formally would not open till
+the afternoon, but by Powers Brothers' crews things already had been
+prepared against the coming of that time. In all available open spaces,
+such as vacant lots abutting upon the sidewalks and the junctions of
+cross streets, booths and tents and canvas-walled arenas had been set
+up. Boys of assorted sizes and colors hung in expectant clumps about
+marquees and show fronts. Also a numerous assemblage of adults of the
+resident leisure class, a majority of these being members of Red Hoss'
+own race, moved back and forth through the line of fairings, inspired by
+the prospect of seeing something interesting without having to pay for
+it.
+
+Red Hoss forgot temporarily the more-or-less indefinite purpose which
+had brought him hither. He joined a cluster of watchful persons who
+hopefully had collected before the scrolled and ornamented wooden
+entrance of a tarpaulin structure larger than any of the rest. From
+beneath the red-and-gold portico of this edifice there issued a blocky
+man in a checkered suit, with a hard hat draped precariously over one
+ear and with a magnificent jewel gleaming out of the bosom of a
+collarless shirt. All things about this man stamped him as one having
+authority over the housed mysteries roundabout. Visibly he rayed that
+aura of proprietorship common to some monarchs and to practically all
+owners of traveling caravansaries. Seeing him, Red Hoss promptly
+detached himself from the group he had just joined, and advanced, having
+it in mind to seek speech with this superior-appearing personage. The
+white man beat him to it.
+
+"Say, boy, that's right, keep a-coming," he called. His experienced eye
+appraised Red Hoss' muscular proportions. "Do you want a job?"
+
+"Whut kinder job, boss?"
+
+"Best job you ever had in your life," declared the white man. "You get
+fourteen a week and cakes. Get me? Fourteen dollars just as regular as
+Saturday night comes, and your scoffing free--all the chow you can eat
+thrown in. Then you hear the band play absolutely free of charge, and
+you see the big show six times a day without having to pay for it, and
+you travel round and see the country. Don't that sound good to you? Oh,
+yes, there's one thing else!" He dangled a yet more alluring temptation.
+"And you wear a red coat with brass buttons on it and a cap with a plume
+in it."
+
+"Sho' does sound good," said Red Hoss, warming. "Whut else I got to do,
+cunnel?"
+
+"Oh, just odd jobs round this pitch here--this animal show."
+
+"Hole on, please, boss! I don't have no truck wid elephints, does I?"
+
+"Nope. The elephants are down the line in a separate outfit of their
+own. You work with this show--clean out the cages and little things like
+that. Don't get worried," he added quickly, interpreting aright a look
+of sudden concern upon Red Hoss' face. "You don't have to go inside the
+cages to clean 'em out. You stay outside and do it with a long-handled
+tool. I had a good man on this job, but he quit on me unexpectedly night
+before last."
+
+The speaker failed to explain that the recent incumbent had quit thus
+abruptly as a result of having a forearm clawed by a lady leopard named
+Violet.
+
+"'Bout how long is dis yere job liable to last?" inquired Red Hoss. "You
+see, cunnel, Ise 'spectin' to have some right important private business
+in dis town 'fore so very long."
+
+"Then this is the very job you want. After we leave here to-morrow night
+we strike down across the state line and play three more stands, and
+then we wind up with a week in Memphis. We close up the season there and
+go into winter quarters, and you come on back home. What's your name?"
+
+"My full entitled name is Roscoe Conklin' Shackleford, but 'count of my
+havin' a kinder brightish complexion dey mos' gin'rally calls me Red
+Hoss. I reckin mebbe dey's Injun blood flowin' in me."
+
+"All right, Red Hoss, let it flow. You just come on with me and I'll
+show you what you'll have to do. My name is Powers--Captain Powers."
+
+Proudly sensing that already he was an envied figure in the eyes of the
+group behind him, Red Hoss followed the commanding Powers back through a
+canvas-sided marquee into a circular two-poled tent. There were no
+seats. The middle spaces were empty. Against the side walls were ranged
+four cages. One housed a pair of black bears of a rather weather-beaten
+and travel-worn aspect. Next to the bears, the lady leopard, Violet,
+through the bars contemplated space, meanwhile wearing that air of
+intense boredom peculiar to most caged animals. A painted inscription
+above the front of the third cage identified its occupant as none other
+than The Educated Ostrich; the Bird That Thinks.
+
+Red Hoss' conductor indicated these possessions with a lordly wave of
+his arm, then led the way to the fourth cage. It was the largest cage of
+all; it was painted a bright and passionate red. It had gilded
+scrollings on it. Upon the ornamented façade which crossed its front
+from side to side a lettered legend ran. Red Hoss spelled out the
+pronouncement:
+
+Chieftain, King of Feline Acrobats! The Largest Black-maned Nubian Lion
+in Captivity! Danger!
+
+The face of the cage was boarded halfway up, but above the top line of
+the planked cross panel Red Hoss could make out in the foreground of the
+dimmed interior a great tawny shape, and at the back, in one corner, an
+orderly clutter of objects painted a uniform circus blue. There was a
+barrel or two, an enormous wooden ball, a collapsible fold-up seesaw and
+other impedimenta of a trained-animal act. Red Hoss had heard that the
+lion was a noble brute--in short, was the king of beasts. He now was
+prepared to swear it had a noble smell. Beneath the cage a white man in
+overalls slumbered audibly upon a tarpaulin folded into a pallet.
+
+"There's the man you take your orders from if you join us," explained
+Powers, flirting a thumb toward the sleeper. "Name of Riley, he is. But
+you draw your pay from me." With his arm he described a circle. "And
+here's the stock you help take care of. The only one you need to be
+careful about is that leopard over yonder. She gets a little peevish
+once in a while. Well, I would sort of keep an eye on the ostrich here
+alongside you too. The old bird's liable to cut loose when you ain't
+looking and kick the taste out of your mouth. You give them both their
+distances. But those bears behind you is just the same as a pair of
+puppies, and old Chieftain here--well, he looks pretty fierce and he
+acts sort of fierce too when he's called on for it, but it's just acting
+with him; he's trained to it. Off watch, he's just as gentle as an
+overgrown kitten. Riley handles him and works him, and all you've got to
+do when Riley is putting him through his stunts is to stand outside here
+and hand him things he wants in through the bars. Well, is it a go?
+Going to take the job?"
+
+"Boss," said Red Hoss, "you speaks late--I done already tooken it."
+
+"Good!" said Powers. "That's the way I love to do business--short and
+sweet. You hang round for an hour or two and sort of get acquainted with
+things until Riley has his nap out. When he wakes up, if I ain't back by
+that time, you tell him you're the new helper, and he'll wise you up."
+
+"Yas suh," said Red Hoss. "But say, boss, 'scuse me, but did I
+understand you to mention dat eatin' was in de contract?"
+
+"Sure! Hungry already?"
+
+"Well, suh, you see I mos' gin'rally starts de day off wid breakfust,
+an' to tell you de truth I ain't had nary grain of breakfust yit!"
+
+"Got the breakfast habit, eh? Well, come on with me to the cook house
+and I'll see if there ain't something left over."
+
+Despite the nature of his calling as a tamer of ferocious denizens of
+the tropic jungle, Mr. Riley, upon wakening, proved to be a person of a
+fairly amiable disposition. He made it snappy but not unduly burdensome
+as he initiated Red Hoss into the rudimentary phases of the new
+employment. As the forenoon wore on the conviction became fixed in Red
+Hoss' mind that for an overlord he had a white man who would be apt to
+listen to reason touching on any proposition promising personal profits
+with no personal risks.
+
+Sharp upon this diagnosis of his new master's character, a magnificent
+idea, descending without warning like a bolt from the blue, struck Red
+Hoss on top of his head and bored in through his skull and took prompt
+root in his entranced and dazzled brain. It was a gorgeous conception;
+one which promised opulent returns for comparatively minor exertions. To
+carry it out, though, required coöperation, and in Riley he saw with a
+divining glance--or thought he saw--the hope of that coöperation.
+
+In paving the way for confidential relations he put to Riley certain
+leading questions artfully disguised, and at the beginning seemingly
+artlessly presented. By the very nature of Riley's answers he was
+further assured of the safety of the ground on which he trod, whereupon
+Red Hoss cautiously broached the project, going on to amplify it in
+glowing colors the while Riley hearkened attentively.
+
+It was a sheer pleasure to outline a proposition to a white gentleman
+who received it so agreeably. Fifteen minutes after the first tentative
+overtures had been thrown out feeler-wise, Red Hoss found that he and
+Riley were in complete accord on all salient points. Indeed they already
+were as partners jointly committed to a joint undertaking.
+
+After the third and last afternoon performance, in which Red Hoss,
+wearing a proud mien and a somewhat spotty uniform coat, had acquitted
+himself in all regards creditably, Riley gave him a leave of absence of
+two hours, ostensibly for the purpose of quitting his boarding house and
+collecting his traveling wardrobe. As a matter of fact, these details
+really required but a few minutes, and it had been privily agreed
+between them that the rest of the time should be devoted by Red Hoss to
+setting in motion the actual preliminaries of their scheme.
+
+This involved a personal call upon Mr. Moe Rosen, who conducted a hide,
+pelt, rag, junk, empty-bottle and old-iron emporium on lower Court
+Street, just off the Market Square. September's hurried twilight had
+descended upon the town when the scouting conspirator tapped for
+admission at the alley entrance to the back room of Mr. Rosen's
+establishment, where the owner sat amid a variegated assortment of
+choicer specimens culled from his collected wares. Mr. Rosen needed no
+sign above his door to inform the passing public of the nature of his
+business. When the wind was right you could stand two blocks away and
+know it without being told. Here at Mr. Rosen's side door Red Hoss
+smacked his nostrils appreciatively. Even to one newly come from a
+wild-animal show, and even when smelled through a brick wall, Mr.
+Rosen's place had a graphic and striking atmosphere which was all its
+own.
+
+As one well acquainted with the undercurrents of community life, Red
+Hoss shared, with many others, the knowledge that Mr. Rosen, while
+ostensibly engaged in one industry, carried on another as a sort of
+clandestine by-product. Now this side line, though surreptitiously
+conducted and perilous in certain of its aspects, was believed by the
+initiated to be really more lucrative than his legitimatized and avowed
+calling. Mr. Rosen was by way of being--by a roundabout way of
+being--what technically is known as a bootlegger. He bootlegged upon a
+larger scale than do most of those pursuing this precarious avocation.
+
+It was stated in an earlier paragraph that national prohibition had not
+yet come to pass. But already local option held the adjoining
+commonwealth of Tennessee in a firm and arid grasp; wherefore Mr.
+Rosen's private dealings largely had to do with discreet clients
+thirstily residing below the state line. It was common rumor in certain
+quarters that lately this traffic had suffered a most disastrous
+interruption. Tennessee revenue agents suddenly had evinced an
+unfriendly curiosity touching on vehicular movements from the Kentucky
+side.
+
+A considerable chunk of Mr. Rosen's profits for the current year had
+been irretrievably swallowed up when a squad of these suspicious
+excisemen laid their detaining hands upon a sizable order of case stuff
+which--disguised and broadly labeled as crated household goods--was
+traveling southward by nightfall in a truck, heading toward a
+destination in a district which that truck was destined never to reach.
+
+Bottle by bottle the aromatic contents of the packages had been poured
+into the wayside ditch to be sucked up by an unappreciative if porous
+soil. The truck itself had been confiscated. Its driver barely had
+escaped, to return homeward afoot across country bearing dire tidings to
+his employer, who was reported, upon hearing the lamentable news,
+literally to have scrambled the air with disconsolate flappings of his
+hands, meanwhile uttering shrill cries of grief.
+
+Moreover, as though to top this stroke of ill luck, further activities
+in the direction of his most profitable market practically had been
+brought to a standstill by reason of enhanced vigilance on the part of
+the Tennessee authorities along the main highroads running north and
+south. Between supply and demand, or perhaps one should say between
+purveyor and consumer, the boundary mark dividing the sister
+commonwealths stretched its dead line like a narrow river of despair. It
+was not to be wondered at, therefore, that the sorely pestered Mr. Rosen
+should be at this time a prey to care so carking as to border on
+forthright melancholia. Never a particularly cheerful person, at Red
+Hoss' soft knock upon his outer door he raised a countenance completely
+clothed in moroseness where not clothed in whiskers and grunted
+briefly--a sound which might or might not be taken as an invitation to
+enter. Nor was his greeting, following upon the caller's soft-footed
+entrance, calculated to promote cordial intercourse.
+
+"What you want, nigger?" he demanded, breaking in on Red Hoss' politely
+phrased greeting. Then without waiting for a reply, "Well, whatever it
+is, you don't get it. Get out!"
+
+Nevertheless, Red Hoss came right on in. Carefully he closed the door
+behind him, shutting himself in with Mr. Rosen and privacy and a
+symposium of strong, rich smells.
+
+"'Scuse me, Mist' Rosen," he said, "fur bre'kin' in on you lak dis, but
+I got a little sumpin' to say to you in mos' strictes' confidence. Seems
+lak to me I heard tell lately dat you'd had a little trouble wid some
+white folkses down de line. Co'se dat ain't none o' my business. I jes'
+mentioned it so's you'd understan' whut it is I wants to talk wid you
+about."
+
+He drew up an elbow length away from Mr. Rosen and sank his voice to an
+intimate half whisper.
+
+"Mist' Rosen, le's you an' me do a little s'posin'. Le's s'posen' you
+has a bar'l of vinegar or molasses or sumpin' which you wants delivered
+to a frien' in Memphis, Tennessee. Seems lak I has heared somewhars dat
+you already is got a frien' or two in Memphis, Tennessee? All right den!
+S'posin', den, dat you wrote to your frien' dat dis yere bar'l would be
+comin' along to him inside of a week or ten days f'um now wid me in de
+full charge of it. S'posin', den, on top o' dat I could guarantee you to
+deliver dat bar'l to your frien' widout nobody botherin' dat bar'l on de
+way, and widout nobody 'spectin' whut wuz in dat bar'l, an' widout
+nobody axin' no hard questions about dat bar'l. S'posin' all dem things,
+ef you please, suh, an' den I axes you dis question: How much would dat
+favor be wuth to you in cash money?"
+
+As a careful business man, Mr. Rosen very properly pressed for further
+particulars before in any way committing himself in the matter of the
+amount of remuneration to be paid for the accommodation proposed. At
+this evidence of interest on the other's part Red Hoss grinned in happy
+optimism.
+
+"Mist' Rosen, 'twon't hardly be no trouble a-tall," he stated. "In de
+fust place, you teks a pot o' blue paint an' you paints dat bar'l blue
+f'um head to foot. De bluer dat bar'l is de more safer she'll be. An' to
+mek sure dat de color will be right yere's a sample fur you to go by."
+
+With that, Red Hoss produced from a hip pocket a sliver of plank
+painted on both sides in the cerulean hue universally favored by circus
+folk for covering seat boards, tent poles and such paraphernalia of a
+portable caravansary as is subject to rough treatment and frequent
+handling. At this the shock of surprise was such as almost to lift Mr.
+Rosen up on top of the cluttered desk which separated him from his
+visitor. It did lift him halfway out of his chair.
+
+"Nigger," he declared incredulously, "you talk foolishness! A mile away
+those dam Tennessee constables would be able to see a plain barrel which
+ain't got no paint on it at all, and now you tell me I should paint a
+barrel so blue as the sky, and yet it should get through from here to
+Memphis. Are you crazy in the head or something, or do you maybe think I
+am?"
+
+"Nummine dat," went on Red Hoss. "You do lak I tells you, an' you paints
+de bar'l right away so de paint'll git good an' dry twixt now an'
+We'n'sday night. Come We'n'sday night, you loads dat blue bar'l in a
+waggin an' covers it up an' you fetches it to me at de back do' of de
+main wild animal tent of dat carnival show which is now gwine on up yere
+in Mechanicsville. Don't go to de tent whar de elephints is. Go to de
+tent whar de educated ostrich is. Dar you'll fin' me. I done tuk a job
+as de fust chief 'sistant wild-animal trainer, an' right dar I'll be
+waitin'. So den you turns de bar'l over to me an' you goes on back home
+an' you furgits all 'bout it. Den in 'bout two weeks mo' when I gits
+back yere I brings you a piece o' writin' f'um de gen'elman in Memphis
+sayin' dat de bar'l has been delivered to him in good awder, an' den you
+pays me de rest o' de money dat's comin' to me." He had a canny second
+thought. "Mebbe," he added, "mebbe it would be better for all concern'
+ef you wrote to yore frien' in Memphis to hand me over de rest of de
+money when I delivers de bar'l. Yassuh, I reckins dat would be de best."
+
+"The rest of what money?" demanded Mr. Rosen sharply. "I ain't said
+nothing about giving no money to nobody. What do you mean--money?"
+
+"I mean de rest of de money which'll be comin' to me ez my share,"
+explained Red Hoss patiently. "De white man dat's goin' to he'p me wid
+dis yere job, he 'sists p'intedly dat he must have his share paid down
+cash in advance 'count of him not bein' able to come back yere an'
+collek it fur hisse'f, an' likewise 'count of him not keerin' to have no
+truck wid de gen'elman at de other end of de line. De way he put it, he
+wants all of his'n 'fore he starts. But me, Ise willin' to wait fur de
+bes' part of mine anyhow. So dat's how it stands, Mist' Rosen, an'
+'scusin' you an' me an' dis yere white man an' your frien' in Memphis,
+dey ain't nary pusson gwine know nothin' 'bout it a-tall, 'ceptin' mebbe
+hit's de lion. An' ez fur dat, w'y de lion don't count noways, 'count
+of him not talkin' no language 'ceptin' 'tis his own language."
+
+"The lion?" echoed Mr. Rosen blankly. "What lion? First you tell me blue
+barrel and then you tell me lion."
+
+"I means Chieftain--de larges' black-mangy Nubbin lion in captivation,"
+stated Red Hoss grandly, quoting from memory his own recollection of an
+inscription he but lately had read for the first time. "Mist' Rosen,
+twixt you an' me, I reckins dey ain't no revenue officer in de whole
+state of Tennessee which is gwine go projeckin' round a lion cage
+lookin' fur evidence."
+
+Disclosing the crux of his plot, his voice took on a jubilant tone.
+"Mist' Rosen, please, suh, lissen to me whut Ise revealin' to you. Dat
+blue bar'l of yourn is gwine ride f'um yere plum' to Memphis, Tennessee,
+in a cage wid a lion ez big ez ary two lions got ary right to be! An'
+now den, Mist' Rosen, le's you an' me talk 'bout de money part of it;
+'cause when all is said an' done, dat's de principalest part, ain't it?"
+
+
+The town of Wyattsville was, as the saying goes, all agog. Indeed, as
+the editor of the Wyattsville Tri-Weekly Statesman most aptly phrased it
+in the introductory sentence of a first-page, full-column article in his
+latest issue: "This week all roads run to Wyattsville."
+
+The occasion for all this pleasurable excitement wast the annual fair
+and races of the Forked Deer County Jockey Club, and superimposed upon
+that the street carnival conducted under the patronage and for the
+benefit of Wyattsville Herd Number 1002 of the Beneficent and Patriotic
+Order of American Bison. Each day would be a gala day replete with
+thrills and abounding in incident; in the forenoons grand free
+exhibitions upon the streets, also judgings and awards of prizes in
+various classes, such as farm products, livestock, poultry, needlework,
+pickles, preserves and art objects; in the afternoons, on the half-mile
+track out at the fair grounds, trotting, pacing and running events; in
+the evenings the carnival spirit running high and free, with
+opportunities for innocent mirth, merriment and entertainment afforded
+upon every hand.
+
+This was Monday night, the opening night. The initial performance of the
+three on the nightly schedule of Powers Brothers' Trained Wild Animal
+Arena approached now its climax, the hour approximately being
+eight-forty-five. The ballyhoo upon the elevated platform without had
+been completed. Hard upon this an audience of townspeople and visitors
+which taxed the standing capacity of the tented enterprise had flowed
+in, after first complying with the necessary financial details at the
+ticket booth. The Educated Ostrich, the Bird That Thinks, had performed
+to the apparent satisfaction of all, though it might as well be
+confessed that if one might judge by the intelligent creature's
+expression, the things it thought while going through its paces scarcely
+would be printable. Violet, the lady leopard, had obliged by yowling in
+a spirited and spitty manner when stirred up with a broom handle. The
+two bears had given a complete if somewhat lackadaisical rendition of
+their act. And now the gentlemanly orator in charge, who, after his
+ballyhoos, doubled as master of ceremonies and announcer of events,
+directed the attention of the patrons to the largest cage of the four.
+
+As was customary, the culminating feature of the program had been
+invested with several touches of skillful stage management, the purpose
+being to enhance the thrills provided and send the audience forth
+pleased and enthusiastic. In high boots and a tiger-skin tunic, Mr.
+Riley, armed with an iron bar held in one hand and a revolver loaded
+with blank cartridges in the other, stood poised and prepared to leap
+into the den at the ostensible peril of his life and put his ferocious
+charge through a repertoire of startling feats. His eye was set, his
+face determined; his lower jaw moved slowly. This steel-hearted man was
+chewing tobacco to hide any concern he might feel.
+
+Red Hoss Shackleford, resplendent in his official trappings, made an
+elaborate ceremonial of undoing the pins and bolts which upheld the
+wooden panels across the front elevation of the cage. The announcer took
+advantage of the pause thus artfully contrived to urge upon the
+spectators the advisability of standing well back from the guard ropes.
+Every precaution had been taken, he informed them, every possible
+safeguard provided, but for their own sakes it were well to be on the
+prudent side in case the dauntless trainer should lose control over his
+dangerous pupil. This warning had its usual effect. With a forward rush
+everyone instantly pressed as closely as possible into the zone of
+supposed menace.
+
+Here a curious psychological fact obtrudes. In each gathering of this
+character is at least one parent, generally a father, who habitually
+conveys his offsprings of tender years to places where they will be
+acutely uncomfortable, and by preference more especially to spots where
+there is a strong likelihood that they may meet with a sudden and
+violent end. Wyattsville numbered at least one such citizen within her
+enrolled midst. He was here now, jammed up against the creaking rope,
+holding fast with either clutch to a small and a sorely frightened child
+who wept.
+
+Red Hoss finished with the iron catches. Behind the shielding falsework
+he heard and felt the rustle and the heave of a great sinewy body
+threshing about in a confined space. He turned his head toward the
+announcer, awaiting the ordained signal.
+
+"Are you all ready?" clarioned that person. "Then go!"
+
+With a clatter and crash down came the wooden frontage. It was a part
+of the mechanics intrusted to the docile and intelligent Chieftain that
+so soon as the woodwork had dropped he, counterfeiting an unappeasable
+bloodthirstiness, should fling himself headlong against the straining
+bars, uttering hair-raising roars. This also was the cue for Riley to
+wriggle nimbly through a door set in the end of the cage and slam the
+door behind him; then to outface the great beast and by threats, with
+bar and pistol both extended, to force him backward step by step, still
+snarling but seemingly daunted, round and round the cage. Finally, when
+through the demonstrated power of the human eye Chieftain had been
+sufficiently cowed, Riley would begin the stirring entertainment for
+which all this had been a spectacular overture. Such was the preliminary
+formula, but for once in his hitherto blameless life Chieftain failed to
+sustain his rôle.
+
+He did not dash at his prison bars as though to rend them from their
+sockets; he did not growl in an amazingly deep bass, as per inculcated
+schooling; he did not bare the yellow fang nor yet unsheathe the cruel
+claw. With apparent difficulty, rising on his all fours from where he
+was crouched in the rear left-hand corner of his den, Chieftain advanced
+down stage with what might properly be called a rolling gait. Against
+the iron uprights he lurched, literally; then, as though grateful for
+their support, remained fixed there at a slanted angle for a brief
+space.
+
+A faunal naturalist, versed in the ways of lions, would promptly have
+taken cognizance of the fact that Chieftain, upon his face, wore an
+expression unnatural for lions to wear. It was an expression which might
+be classified as dreamily good-natured. His eyes drooped heavily, his
+lips were wreathed in a jovial feline smile. Transfixed as he was by a
+shock of astonishment and chagrin, Riley under his breath snapped a word
+of command.
+
+In subconscious obedience to his master's voice, Chieftain slowly
+straightened himself, came to an about face, and with his massive head
+canted far to one side and all adroop as though its weight had become to
+him suddenly burdensome, and his legs spraddled widely apart to hold him
+upright, he benignantly contemplated the sea of expectant and eager
+faces that stretched before him. Slowly he lifted a broad forefoot and
+with its padded undersurface made a fumbling gesture which might have
+been interpreted as an attempt on his part to wipe his nose.
+
+The effort proved too much for him. Lacking one important prop, he lost
+his balance, toppled over and fell heavily upon his side. The fall
+jolted his mouth widely ajar, and from the depths of his great throat
+was emitted an immense but unmistakable hiccup--a hiccup deep, sincere
+and sustained, having a high muzzle velocity and humidly freighted with
+an aroma as of a hundred hot mince pies.
+
+From the spellbound crowd rose a concerted gasp of surprise. Chieftain
+heeded it not. With the indubitable air of just recalling a pleasant but
+novel experience, and filled with a newborn desire to renew the
+sensation, he groggily regained his feet and reeled back to the corner
+from whence he had come. Here, with the other properties of his act, a
+slickly painted blue barrel stood upended. Applying his nose to a spot
+at the base of it, he lapped greedily at a darkish aromatic liquid
+which, as the entranced watchers now were aware, oozed forth in a stream
+upon the cage floor through a cranny treacherously opened between two
+sprung staves. And all the while he tongued up the escaping runlet of
+fluid he purred and rumbled joyously and his tawny sides heaved and
+little tremors of pure ecstasy ran lengthwise through him to expire
+diminishingly in lesser wriggles at the tufted tip of his gently
+flapping tail.
+
+Then all at once understanding descended upon the audience, and from
+them together rose a tremendous whoop. A joyous whoop it was, yet tinged
+with a feather edging of jealous regret on the part of certain adult
+whoopers there. They had paid their quarters, these worthy folk, to see
+a lion perform certain tricks and antics; and lo, they had been
+vouchsafed the infinitely more unique spectacle of a lion with a jag
+on! It was a boon such as comes but once in many lifetimes, this
+opportunity to behold majestic Leo, converted into a confirmed inebriate
+by his first indulgence in strong and forbidden waters, returning to his
+tippling.
+
+To some perhaps in this land of ours the scene would have served to
+point a moral and provide a text--a lamentable picture of the evils of
+intemperance as exemplified in its effects upon a mere unreasoning dumb
+brute. But in this assemblage were few or none holding the higher view.
+Unthoughtedly they yelled their appreciation, yelling all the louder
+when Chieftain, having copiously refreshed himself, upreared upon his
+hind legs, with both his forepaws winnowing the perfumed air, and after
+executing several steps of a patently impromptu dance movement, tumbled
+with a happy, intoxicated gurgle flat upon his back and lapsed into a
+coma of total insensibility.
+
+But there was one among them who did not cheer. This one was a
+square-jawed person who, shoving and scrooging, cleft a passage through
+the applauding multitude, and slipped deftly under the ropes and laid a
+detaining grasp upon the peltry-clad shoulder of the astonished Riley.
+With his free hand he flipped back the lapel of his coat to display a
+badge of authority pinned on the breast of his waistcoat.
+
+"What's the main idea?" His tone was rough. "Who's the chief booze
+smuggler of this outfit? How'd that barrel yonder come to be traveling
+across country with a soused lion?"
+
+"You can search me!" lied Riley glibly. "So help me, Mike, all I know is
+that that barrel was slipped over on me by a big nigger that joined out
+with us up here in Kentucky a week ago! I told him to get me a barrel,
+meaning to teach the lion a new trick, and he stuck that one in there.
+But I hadn't never got round to using it yet, and I didn't know it was
+loaded--I'll swear to that!"
+
+Cast in another environment, Mr. Riley might have made a good actor.
+Even here, in an embarrassing situation calling for lines spoken ad lib.
+and without prior rehearsals, he had what the critics term sincerity.
+His fine dissembling deceived the revenue man.
+
+"Well, that being the case, where is this here nigger, then?" demanded
+the officer.
+
+Riley looked about him.
+
+"I don't see him," he said. "He was right alongside just a moment ago
+too. I guess he's gone."
+
+This, in a sense, was the truth, and in still another sense an
+exaggeration. Red Hoss was not exactly gone, but he certainly was going.
+A man on horseback might have overtaken him, but with the handicap of
+Red Hoss' flying start against the pursuing forces no number of men
+afoot possibly could hope to do so.
+
+At the end of the second mile, and still going strong, the fugitive
+bethought him to part with his red coat. He already had run out from
+under his uniform cap, but a red coat with a double row of brass buttons
+and brass-topped epaulettes on it flashing next morning across a bland
+autumnal landscape would be calculated to attract undesired attention.
+So without slackening speed he took it off and cast it behind him into
+the darkness. Figuratively speaking, he breathed easier when he crossed
+the state line at or about five A.M. As a matter of fact, though, he was
+breathing harder. Some hours elapsed before he caught up with his
+panting.
+
+Traveling in his shirt sleeves, he reached home too late for the
+wedding. Still, considering everything, he hardly would have cared to
+attend anyhow. Either he would have felt embarrassed to be present or
+else the couple would, or perhaps all three. On such occasions nothing
+is more superfluous than an extra bridegroom. The wedding in question
+was the one uniting Melissa Grider and Homer Holmes. It was generally
+unexpected--in fact, sudden.
+
+The marriage took place on a Wednesday at high noon in the office of
+Justice of the Peace Dycus. Red Hoss arrived the same afternoon, shortly
+after the departure of the happy pair for Cairo, Illinois, on a
+honeymoon tour. All along, Melissa had had her heart set on going to
+St. Louis; but after the license had been paid for and the magistrate
+had been remunerated there remained but thirty-four dollars of the fund
+she had been safeguarding, dollar by dollar, as her other, or regular,
+fiancé earned it. So she and Homer compromised on Cairo, and by their
+forethought in taking advantage of a popular excursion rate they had, on
+their return, enough cash left over to buy a hanging lamp with which to
+start up housekeeping.
+
+Late that evening, while Red Hoss still wrestled mentally with the
+confusing problem of being engaged to a girl who just had been married
+to another, a disquieting thought came abruptly to him, jolting him like
+a blow. Looking back on events, he was reminded that the sequence of
+painful misadventures which had befallen him recently dated, all and
+sundry, from that time when he was coming back down the Blandsville Road
+after delivering Mr. Dick Bell's new cow and acquired a fresh hind foot
+of a graveyard rabbit. He had been religiously toting that presumably
+infallible charm against disaster ever since--and yet just see what had
+happened to him! Surely here was a situation calling for interpretive
+treatment by one having the higher authority. In the person of the
+venerable Daddy Hannah--root, herb and conjure doctor--he found such a
+one.
+
+Before going into consultation the patriarch forethoughtedly collected a
+fee of seventy-five cents from Red Hoss. At the outset he demanded two
+dollars, but accepted the six bits, because that happened to be all the
+money the client had. This formality concluded, he required it of Red
+Hoss that he recount in their proper chronological order those various
+strokes of ill fortune which lately had plagued him; after which Daddy
+Hannah asked to see the talisman which coincidentally had been in the
+victim's ownership from beginning to culmination of the enumerated
+catastrophes. He took it in his wrinkled hand and studied it, sides, top
+and bottom, the while Red Hoss detailed the exact circumstances
+attending the death of the bunny. Then slowly the ancient delivered his
+findings.
+
+"In de fust an' fo'mos' place," stated Daddy Hannah, "dis yere warn't no
+reg'lar graveyard rabbit to start off wid. See dis li'l' teeny black
+spot on de und'neath part? Well, dat's a sho' sign of a witch rabbit. A
+witch rabbit he hang round a buryin' ground, but he don't go inside of
+one--naw, suh, not never nur nary. He ain't dare to. He stay outside an'
+frolic wid de ha'nts w'en dey comes fo'th, but da's all. De onliest
+thing which dey is to do when you kills a witch rabbit is to cut off de
+haid f'um de body an' bury de haid on de north side of a log, an' den
+bury de body on de south side so's dey can't jine together ag'in an'
+resume witchin'. So you havin' failed to do so, 'tain't no wonder you
+been havin' sech a powerful sorry time." He started to return the foot
+to its owner, but snatched it back.
+
+"Hole on yere a minute, boy! Lemme tek' nuther look at dat thing." He
+took it, then burst forth with a volley of derisive chuckling. "Huh,
+huh, well ef dat ain't de beatenes' part of it all!" wheezed Daddy
+Hannah. "Red Hoss, you sho' muster been in one big hurry to git away
+f'um dat spot whar you kilt your rabbit and ketched your charm. Looky
+yere at dis yere shank j'int! Don't you see nothin' curious about de
+side of de leg whar de hock sticks out? Well den, cullid boy, ef you
+don't, all I got to say is you mus' be total blind ez well ez monst'ous
+ignunt. Dis ain't no lef' hind foot of no rabbit."
+
+"Whut is it den?"
+
+"It's de right hind foot, dat's whut 'tis!" He tossed it away
+contemptuously.
+
+After a long minute Red Hoss, standing at Daddy Hannah's doorstep with
+his hands rammed deep in pockets, which were both empty, spoke in tones
+of profound bitterness. He addressed his remarks to space, but Daddy
+Hannah couldn't help overhearing.
+
+"Fust off, I gits fooled by de right laig of de wrong rabbit. Den a
+man-eatin' mule come a-browsin' on me an' gnaw a suit of close right
+offen my back. Den I runs into a elephint in a fog an' busts one of
+Mist' Lee Farrell's taxiscabs fur him an' he busts my jaw fur me. Den I
+gits tuk advantage of by a fool lion dat can't chamber his licker lak a
+gen'l'man, in consequence of which I loses me a fancy job an' a chunk of
+money. Den Melissa, she up an'--well, suh, I merely wishes to say dat
+f'um now on, so fur ez I is concerned, natchel history is a utter
+failure."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+IT COULD HAPPEN AGAIN TO-MORROW
+
+
+"Sorry, ma'am," said the Pullman conductor, "but there's not a bit of
+space left in the chair car, nor the sleeper neither."
+
+"I'm sorry too," said the young woman in the tan-colored tailor-mades.
+She was smartly hatted and smartly spatted; smart all over from
+toque-tip to toe-tip. "I didn't know until almost the last minute that
+I'd have to catch this train, and trusted to chance for a seat."
+
+"Yes'm, I see," commiserated the man in blue. "But you know what the
+rush is this time of year, and right now on top of all that so many of
+the soldiers getting home from the other side and their folks coming
+East to meet 'em and everything. I guess though, miss, you won't have
+much trouble getting accommodated in one of the day coaches."
+
+"I'll try it," she said, "and thank you all the same."
+
+She picked up her hand bag.
+
+"Wait a minute," he suggested. "I'll have my porter carry your valise on
+up to the other cars."
+
+Men of all stations in life were rather given to offering help to Miss
+Mildred Smith, the distinguished interior decorator and--on the
+side--amateur investigator for Uncle Sam with a wartime record for
+services rendered which many a professional might have envied. Perhaps
+they were the more ready to offer it since the young woman seemed so
+rarely to need it.
+
+This man's reward was a brisk little nod.
+
+"Please don't bother," she said. "This bag isn't at all heavy, and I'm
+used to traveling alone and looking out for myself." She footed it
+briskly along the platform of the Dobb's Ferry station. At the door of
+the third coach back from the baggage car a flagman stopped her.
+
+"All full up in here, lady," he told her, "but I think maybe you might
+find some place to sit in the next car beyond. If you'll just leave your
+grip here I'll bring it along to you after we pull out."
+
+As she reached the door of the coach ahead the train began to move. This
+coach was comfortably filled--and more than comfortably filled. Into the
+aisles projected elbows and feet and at either side doubled rows of
+backs of heads showed above the red plush seats. She shrugged her
+shoulders; it meant standing for a while at least; probably someone
+would be getting off soon--this train was a local, making frequent
+stops. It was not the train she would have chosen had the choosing been
+left altogether to her, but Mullinix of the Secret Service, her
+unofficial chief, had called her away from a furnishing and finishing
+contract at a millionaire's mansion in the country back of Dobb's Ferry
+to run up state to Troy, where there had arisen a situation which in the
+opinion of the espionage squad a woman was best fitted to handle,
+provided only that woman be Miss Mildred Smith. And so on an hour's
+notice she had dropped her own work and started.
+
+Now, though, near the more distant end of the car she saw a break in one
+line of heads. Perhaps the gap might mean there would be room for her.
+She made her way toward the spot, her trim small figure swaying to the
+motion as the locomotive picked up speed. Drawing nearer, she saw the
+back of one seat had been turned so that its occupants faced rearward
+toward her. In this seat, the one farther from her as she went up the
+aisle, were a man and a woman; in the nearer seat, facing this pair and
+sitting next the window, was a second woman--a girl rather--all three of
+them, she deduced from the seating arrangement, being members of the
+same party. A suitcase rested upon the cushions alongside the younger
+woman.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the lone passenger, halting here, "but is
+this place taken?"
+
+The man's face twisted as though in annoyance. He made an undecided
+gesture which might be interpreted either as an affirmative or the other
+thing. "I'm sorry if I am disturbing you," added Miss Smith, "but the
+car is crowded--every inch of it except this seems to be occupied."
+
+"Oh, I guess it's all right," he said, though in his begrudged consent
+was a sort of indirect intimation that it was not altogether all right.
+He half rose and swung the suitcase up into the luggage rack overhead,
+then tucked in his knees so she might slip into the place opposite him
+next the aisle.
+
+"Excuse me," he said a moment later, "but I could change seats with you
+if you don't mind."
+
+Her eyebrows went up a trifle.
+
+In her experiences it had not often happened that seemingly without
+reason a male fellow traveler had suggested that she give him a place
+commonly regarded as preferable to his own.
+
+"I do mind, rather," she answered. "Riding backward makes me carsick
+sometimes. Still I will change with you if you insist on it. I'm the
+intruder, you know."
+
+"No, no, never mind!" he hastened to say. "I guess it don't make any
+difference. And there's no intrusion, miss--honest now, there ain't."
+
+Miss Smith opened the book she had brought along and began to read. She
+felt that obliquely her enforced companions were studying her--at least
+two of them were. The one with whom she shared a seat had not looked her
+way; except to draw in her body a trifle as Miss Smith sat down she had
+made no movement of any sort. Certainly she had manifested no interest
+in the new arrival. In moments when her glance did not cross theirs,
+Miss Smith, turning the pages of her book, considered the two who faced
+her, subconsciously trying--as was her way--to appraise them for what
+outwardly they presumably were. Offhand she decided the man might be the
+superintendent of an estate; or then again he might be somebody's head
+gardener. He was heavily built and heavily mustached with a reddish cast
+to his skin and fat broad hands. The woman alongside him had the look
+about her of being a high-class domestic employee, possibly a
+housekeeper or perhaps a seamstress. Miss Smith decided that if not
+exactly a servant she was accustomed to dealing with servants and in her
+own sphere undoubtedly would figure as a competent and authoritative
+person.
+
+Of her own seat mate she could make out little except that she was
+young--young enough to be the daughter of the woman across from her, and
+yet plainly enough not the woman's daughter. Indeed if first impressions
+counted for anything she was of a different type and a different fiber
+from the pair who rode in her company. One somehow felt that she was
+with them but not of them; that she formed the alien apex of a triangle
+otherwise harmonious in its social composition. She was muffled cheek to
+knees in a loose cape of blue military cloth which quite hid the
+outlines of her figure, yet nevertheless revealed that she was slimly
+formed and of fair height. The flaring collar of the garment was
+upturned, shielding her face almost to the line of her brows. But out of
+the tail of her eye Miss Smith caught a suggestion of a youthful regular
+profile and admiringly observed the texture of a mass of thick, fine,
+auburn hair. Miss Smith was partial to auburn hair; she wondered if this
+girl had a coloring to match the rich reddish tones that glinted in the
+smooth coils about her head.
+
+Presently the man fumbled in a breast pocket of his waistcoat and found
+a long malignant-looking cigar. He bit the end of it and inserted the
+bitten end in his mouth, rolling it back and forth between his lips.
+Before long this poor substitute of the confirmed nicotinist for a smoke
+failed to satisfy his cravings. He whispered a word to his middle-aged
+companion, who nodded, and then with a mutter of apology to Miss Smith
+for troubling her he scrouged out into the aisle and disappeared in the
+direction of the smoker.
+
+Left alone, the woman very soon began to yawn. It was to be judged that
+the stuffy air of the car made her dozy. She kept her eyes open with an
+effort, her head lolling in spite of her drowsy efforts to hold it
+straight, yet all the while bearing herself after the fashion of one
+determined not to fall asleep.
+
+A voice spoke in Miss Smith's ear--a low and well-bred and musical
+voice.
+
+"I beg your pardon," it said hesitatingly, then stopped.
+
+Miss Smith turned her head toward the speaker and now for the first time
+had a fair chance to look into the face of the voice's owner. She looked
+and saw the oval of a most comely face, white and drawn as though by
+exhaustion or by deep sorrow, or perhaps by both. For all their pallor
+the cheeks were full and smooth; the brow was broad and low; the mouth
+firm and sweet. From between the tall collars of the cape the throat,
+partly revealed, rose as a smooth fair column. What made the girl almost
+beautiful were her eyes--eyes big and brown with a fire in them to
+suggest the fine high mettle of a resolute character, but out of them
+there looked--or else the other was woefully wrong--a great grief, a
+great distress bravely borne. To herself--all in that instant of
+looking--she said mentally that these were the saddest, most courageous
+eyes she ever had seen set in a face so young and seemingly bespeaking
+so healthful a body. For a moment Miss Smith was so held by what she saw
+that she forgot to speak.
+
+"I beg your pardon," repeated the girl. "I wonder if you would be good
+enough to bring me a drink of water--if it isn't too much trouble. I'm
+so thirsty. I can't very well go myself--there are reasons why I can't.
+And I don't think she"--with a sidelong glance toward the nodding figure
+opposite--"I don't think she would feel that she could go and leave me.'
+
+"Certainly I will," said Miss Smith. "It's not a bit of bother."
+
+"What is it?" The woman had been roused to full wakefulness by the
+movement of the stranger in rising.
+
+"Please don't move," said Miss Smith. "Your young lady is thirsty and
+I'm going to bring her a drink of water--that's all."
+
+"It's very good of you, miss," said the elder woman. She reached for her
+hand bag. "I think I've got a penny here for the cup."
+
+"I've plenty of pennies," said Miss Smith.
+
+At the cooler behind the forward door she filled a paper cup and brought
+it back to where the two were. To her surprise the elder woman reached
+for the cup and took it from her and held it to the girl's lips while
+she drank. With a profound shock of sympathy the realization went
+through Miss Smith that the girl had not the use of her hands.
+
+Having drunk, the girl settled back in her former posture, her face half
+turned toward the window and her head drooping as if from weariness. The
+woman laid the emptied cup aside and at once was dozing off again. The
+third member of the group sat in pitying wonder. She wondered what
+affliction had made a cripple of this wholesome-looking bonny creature.
+She thought of ghastly things she had read concerning the dreadful after
+effects of infantile paralysis, but rejected the suggestion, because no
+matter what else of dread and woe the girl's eyes had betrayed the face
+was too plump and the body, which she could feel touching hers, too firm
+and well nourished to betoken a present and wasting infirmity. So then
+it must have been some accident--some maiming mishap which probably had
+not been of recent occurrence, since nothing else about the girl
+suggested physical impairment. If this deduction were correct, the
+wearing of the shrouding blue cape in an atmosphere almost stiflingly
+close stood explained. It was so worn to hide the injured limbs from
+view. That, of course, would be the plausible explanation. Yet at the
+same time an inner consciousness gave Miss Smith a certain and absolute
+conviction that the specter of tearfulness lurking at the back of those
+big brown eyes meant more than the ever-present realization of some
+bodily disfigurement.
+
+Fascinated, she found her eyes searching the shape beside her for a clew
+to the answer of this lamentable mystery. In her covert scrutiny there
+was no morbid desire to spy upon another's hidden miseries--our Miss
+Smith was too well-bred for that--only was there a sudden quickened
+pity and with that pity a yearning to offer, if opportunity served, any
+small comfort of act or word which might fitly come her way. As her
+glance--behind the cover of her reopened book--traveled over the cloaked
+shape searching for a clew to the secret she saw how that chance
+promised to serve her ends. The girl was half turned from her, a
+shoulder pressing against the window ledge; the twist of her body had
+drawn one front breadth of the cape awry so that no longer did it
+completely overlap its fellow. In the slight opening thus unwittingly
+contrived Miss Smith could make out at the wearer's belt line a partly
+obscured inch or two of what seemed to be a heavy leathern gear, or
+truss, which so far as the small limits of the exposed area gave hint as
+to its purpose appeared to engage the forearms like a surgical device,
+supporting their weight below the bend of the elbows. With quickening
+and enhanced sympathy the little woman winced.
+
+Then she started, her gaze lifting quickly. Of a sudden she became aware
+that the girl was regarding her straightforwardly with those haggard
+eyes.
+
+"Can you tell what the--the trouble is with me?" she asked.
+
+She spoke under her breath, the wraith of a weary little smile about her
+mouth.
+
+"Oh, I'm so sorry," answered Miss Smith contritely. "But please believe
+me--it was not mere cheap inquisitiveness that made me look."
+
+"I think I know," said the girl softly. "You were sorry. And it doesn't
+matter much--your seeing. Somehow I don't mind your seeing."
+
+"But I haven't really seen--I only caught a glimpse. And I'm afraid now
+that I've been pressing too closely against your side; perhaps giving
+you pain by touching your arms."
+
+"My arms are not hurting me," said the girl, still with that queer ghost
+of a smile at her lips. "I've not been hurt or injured in any way."
+
+"Not hurt? Then why--"
+
+She choked the involuntary question even as she was framing it.
+
+"This--this has been done, I suppose, to keep me from hurting anyone
+else."
+
+"But--but I don't understand."
+
+"Don't you--yet? Then lift a fold of my wrap--carefully, so no one else
+can see while you are looking. I'd rather you did," she continued,
+seeing how Miss Smith hesitated.
+
+"But I am a stranger to you. I don't wish to pry. I----"
+
+"Please do! Then perhaps you won't be worrying later on about--about me
+if you know the truth now."
+
+With one hand Miss Smith turned back the edge of the cape, enlarging
+slightly the opening, and what she saw shocked her more deeply than
+though she had beheld some hideous mutilation. She saw that about both
+of the girl's wrists were snugly strapped broad leather bands, designed
+something after the fashion of the armlets sometimes worn by athletes
+and artisans, excepting that here the buckle fastenings were set upon
+the tops of the wrists instead of upon the inner sides; saw, too, that
+these cuffs were made fast to a wide leather belt, which in an unbroken
+band encircled the girl's trunk, so that her prisoned forearms were
+pressed in and confined closely against her body at the line of her
+waist. Her elbows she might move slightly and her fingers freely; but
+the hands were held well apart and the fingers in play might touch only
+the face of the broad girthing, which presumably was made fast by
+buckles or lacings at her back. As if the better to indicate how firmly
+she was secured, the wearer of these strange bonds flexed her arm
+muscles slightly; the result was a little creaking sound as the harness
+answered the strain. Then the girl relaxed and the sound ended.
+
+"Oh, you poor child!" The gasped exclamation came involuntarily,
+carrying all the deeper burden of compassion because it was uttered in a
+half whisper. Quickly she snugged the cloak in to cover the ugly thing
+she had looked upon. "What have you done that you should be treated so?"
+
+Indignation was in the asking--that and an incredulous disbelief that
+here had been any wrongdoing.
+
+"It isn't what I've done--exactly. I imagine it is their fear of what
+they think I might do if my hands were free."
+
+"But where are you going? Where are these people taking you? You're no
+criminal. I know you're not. You couldn't be!"
+
+"I am being taken to a place up the road to be confined as a dangerous
+lunatic."
+
+In the accenting of the words was no trace of rebellion or even of
+self-pity, but merely there was the dead weight and numbness of a
+hopeless resignation to make the words sound flat and listless.
+
+"I don't believe one word of it!" exclaimed Miss Smith, then broke off
+short, realizing that the shock of the girl's piteous admission had sent
+her own voice lifting and that now she had a second listener. The woman
+diagonally across from her was sitting bolt upright and a pair of small
+eyes were narrowing upon her in a squint of watchful and hostile
+suspicion. Instantly she stood up--a small, competent, determined body.
+
+"I'll be back," she stated, disregarding the elder woman and speaking to
+the younger. "And I'm going to find out more about you, too, before I'm
+done."
+
+Her step, departing, was brisk and resolute.
+
+In the aisle near the forward door she encountered the flagman.
+
+"There is a man in the smoker I must see at once," she said. "Will you
+please go in there and find him and tell him I wish--no, never mind. I
+see him coming now."
+
+She went a step or two on to meet the person she sought, halting him in
+the untenanted space at the end of the coach.
+
+"I want to speak with you, please," she began.
+
+"Well, you'll have to hurry," he told her, "because I'm getting off with
+my party in less'n five minutes from now. What was it you wanted to say
+to me?"
+
+"That young girl yonder--I became interested in her. I thought perhaps
+she had been injured. Then more or less by chance I found out the true
+facts. I spoke to her; she told me a little about her plight."
+
+"Well, if you've been talking to her what's the big idea in talking to
+me?"
+
+His tone was churlish.
+
+"This isn't mere vulgar curiosity on my part. I have a perfectly proper
+motive, I think, in inquiring into her case. What is her name."
+
+"Margaret Vinsolving."
+
+"Spell it for me, please--the last name?"
+
+He spelled it out, and she after him to fix it in her mind.
+
+"Where does she live--I mean where is her home?"
+
+"Village of Pleasantdale, this state," shortly.
+
+"Who are her people?"
+
+"She's got a mother and that's all, far as I know."
+
+"What asylum are you taking her to?"
+
+"No asylum. We're taking her to Doctor Shorter's Sanitarium back of
+Peekskill two miles--Dr. Clement Shorter, specialist in nervous
+disorders--he's the head."
+
+"It is a private place then and not a state asylum?"
+
+"You said it."
+
+"You are connected with this Doctor Shorter's place, I assume?"
+
+"Yep."
+
+"In what capacity?"
+
+"Oh, sort of an outside man--look after the grounds and help out
+generally with the patients and all. And now, say, lady, if that'll
+satisfy you I guess I better be stepping along. I got to see about
+getting this here patient and the matron off the train; that's the
+matron that's setting with her."
+
+"Just a moment more, please."
+
+She felt in a fob set under the cuff of her left sleeve and brought
+forth a small gold badge and held it cupped in her gloved hand for him
+to see. As he bent his head and made out the meaning of the badge the
+gruff air dropped from him magically.
+
+"Oh, I see!" he said. "Secret Service, eh? All right, ma'am, what more
+did you want to know? Only I'd ask you speak brisk because there ain't
+so much time."
+
+"Tell me briefly what you know of that child."
+
+"Not such a lot, excepting she's a dangerous lunatic, having been
+legally adjudged so yestiddy. And her mother's paying for her keep at a
+high-class place where she can have special treatment and special care
+instead of letting her be put away in one of the state asylums. And so
+I'm taking her there--me and the matron yonder. That's about all, I
+guess."
+
+"I don't believe it."
+
+"You don't believe what?"
+
+He was beginning to bristle anew.
+
+"Don't believe she is insane at all, much less dangerously so. Why, I've
+just been talking with her. We exchanged only a few words, but in all
+that she said she was so perfectly rational, so perfectly sensible.
+Besides, one has only to look at her to feel sure some terrible mistake
+or some terrible injustice is being done. Surely there is nothing
+eccentric, nothing erratic about her; now is there? You must have been
+studying her. Don't you yourself feel that there might have been
+something wrong about her commitment?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Not a chancet. Everything's been positively regular and aboveboard. You
+can't railroad folks into Doctor Shorter's place; he's got too high a
+standing. Shorter takes no chances with anybody."
+
+"But she seemed so absolutely normal in speech, manner--everything. I've
+seen insane persons before now and--"
+
+"Excuse me, but about how many have you seen?"
+
+"Not many, I admit, but--"
+
+"Well, excuse me again, lady, but I thought as much. Well, I
+have--plenty of 'em I've seen in my time. See 'em every day for the
+matter of that. Listen to me! For instance, now, we've got a case up
+there with us now. He's been there going on fifteen years; used to be a
+preacher, highly educated and all that. Look at him and you wouldn't see
+a thing out of the way with him except that he'd be wearing a
+strait-jacket. Talk to him for maybe a week and you wouldn't notice a
+single thing wrong about him. He'd just strike you all along as being
+one of the nicest, mildest, old Christian gents you ever met up with in
+your whole life. But get him on a certain subject; just mention a
+certain word to him and he'd tear your throat out with his bare hands if
+he could get at you."
+
+"But this poor girl, surely her case is different? Was it really
+necessary to bind her hands as you've done?"
+
+"Lady, about these here violent ones you can't never tell. Me, I never
+saw her in my life before I went down after her this morning, and up to
+now she hasn't made me a mite of trouble. But I had my warning from them
+that turned her over to me. Anyhow, all I needed was the story of her
+own mother, as fine a lady as you'd care to see and just about
+broken-hearted over all this. You'd think from the way she carried on
+she was the one that was being put away and not the daughter. And yet,
+what did the mother swear to on her sacred oath? She swore to the
+daughter's having tried, not once but half a dozen separate times to
+kill her, till she was afraid for her own life--positively!
+
+"Besides, lady, it's been my experience, and I've had a heap of it, that
+it's the quiet-acting ones that are apt to strike the quickest and do
+the most damage when the fit comes on 'em. So taking everything into
+consideration, I felt like as if I oughter be purty careful handling her
+on this trip. But she's all right. Probably nobody on this train,
+outside of you, knows there's anything wrong with her and it was
+accidental-like, so you tell me, the way you come to find out--you
+taking that seat alongside her and getting into talk with her whilst I
+was in yonder smoking. It's better she should be under control thataway
+than that she should maybe get a spell on her right here in this car or
+somewheres and me be forced to hold her down by main strength and
+possibly have to handle her pretty rough. I put it to you now, ain't it?
+The way she's fixed she can't harm herself nor no one else. You take it
+from me, lady, that while I've been in this business for so long I don't
+always get my private feelings harrowed up over the case of a
+nice-looking young girl like this one is, like an outsider might, still
+at that I ain't hard-hearted and I ain't aiming to be severe just
+because I can. But what else is there for me to do except what I'm
+doing? I ask you. Say, it's funny she talked to you. She ain't said
+hardly a word to us since she started. Didn't even say nothing when I
+put the hobbles on her."
+
+"I'm not questioning your judgment," said Miss Smith, "but she is so
+pitiable! She seemed to me like some dumb, frightened, wild creature
+caught in a trap. And despite what you say I'm sure she can't be mad.
+Please, may I speak with her again--if she herself doesn't mind?"
+
+"I'm afeared it's too late," he said not unkindly. "We're slowing down
+for Peekskill now. I'll have to step lively as it is to get 'em off
+shipshape. But if you've still got any doubts left in your mind you can
+look up the court records at White Plains. You'll find everything's been
+done positively legal and regular. And if you should want to reach me
+any time to find out how she's getting along or anything like that, why
+my name is Abram Foley, care of Doctor Shorter."
+
+He cast this farewell information back over his shoulder as he hurried
+from her.
+
+Half convinced yet doubting still, and filled wholly with an
+overmastering pity, Miss Smith stood where she was while the train
+jerkily came to a standstill. There she stayed, watching, as the trio
+quitted the car. Past her where she stood the man Foley led the way,
+burdened with the heavy suitcase. Next came his charge, walking steadily
+erect, mercifully cloaked to her knees in the blue garment; and the
+matron, in turn behind her, bearing a hand bag and an odd parcel or two.
+About the departing group a casual onlooker would have sensed nothing
+unusual. But our Miss Smith, knowing what she did know, held a clenched
+hand to the lump that had formed in her throat. She was minded to speak
+in farewell to the prisoner, and yet a second impulse held her mute.
+
+She fell in behind the three of them though, following as far as the
+platform, being minded to witness the last visible act of the tragedy
+upon which she had stumbled. Her eyes and her heart went with them as
+they crossed through the open shed of the station, the man still
+leading, the matron with one hand guiding their unresisting ward toward
+where a closed automobile, a sort of hybrid between a town car and an
+ambulance, was drawn up on the driveway just beyond the eaves of the
+building. A driver in a gray livery opened the door of the car for its
+occupants.
+
+Alongside the automobile the girl swung herself round, her head thrown
+back, as a felon might face about at the gateway of his prison--for a
+last view of the free world he was leaving behind. Seemingly the
+vigilant woman misinterpreted this movement as the first indication of
+a spirit of kindling obstinacy. Alarmed, she caught at the girl to
+restrain her. Her grasp closed upon the shoulder of the cape and as the
+wrenched garment came away in her hand the prisoner stood revealed in
+her bonds--a slim graceful figure, for all the disfigurement of the
+clumsy harness work which fettered her.
+
+An instant later the cape had been replaced upon her shoulders, hiding
+her state from curious eyes, but in that same brief space of time she
+must have seen leaning from the train, which now again was in motion,
+the shape of her unknown champion, for she nodded her head as though in
+gratitude and good-by and her white face suddenly was lighted with what
+the passenger upon the car platform, seeing this through a sudden mist
+of tears, thought to be the bravest, most pitiable smile that ever she
+had seen.
+
+The train doubled round an abrupt curve, in the sharpness of its swing
+almost throwing her off her feet, and when she had regained her balance
+and looked again the station was furlongs behind her, hidden from sight
+by intervening buildings.
+
+It was that smile of farewell which acted as a flux to carry into the
+recipient's mind a resolution already forming. Into things her emotions
+were likely to lead her headlong and impetuously, but for a way out of
+them this somewhat unusual young woman named Smith generally had for
+her guide a certain clear quality of reasoning, backed by an intuition
+which helped her frequently to achieve satisfactory results. So it was
+with her in this instance.
+
+Her share of the business in Troy completed, as speedily it was, she
+stayed in Albany for half a day on her way back and called upon the
+governor. At first sight he liked her, for her good looks, for her
+trigness, her directness and more than any of these for the excellent
+mental poise which so patently was a part of her. The outcome of her
+visit to him and his enthusiastic admiration for her was that the
+district attorney of Westchester County shortly thereafter instituted an
+investigation, the chief fruitage of that investigation being embodied
+in a somewhat longish letter from him, which Miss Smith read in her
+studio apartment one afternoon perhaps three weeks after the date of her
+meeting on trainboard with that adjudged maniac, the girl Margaret
+Vinsolving.
+
+To the letter was a polite preamble. She skipped it. We may do well to
+follow her lead and come to the body of it, which ran like this:
+
+
+"Mrs. Janet Vinsolving is the widow of a colonel in our Regular Army. My
+information is that she is a woman of culture and refinement. Since the
+death of her husband some eight years ago she has been residing in a
+small home which she owns in the outskirts of Pleasantdale village in
+this county. From the fact that she keeps no servants and from other
+facts brought to me I gather that she is in very modest circumstances.
+She has been living quite alone except for the daughter, Margaret, who
+is her only child. The daughter was educated in the public schools of
+the county. Lately she has been studying applied designing with a view
+to becoming an interior decorator."
+
+"Ah, now I know another reason why I was drawn to her!" interpolated the
+reader, speaking to herself. With heightened interest she read on:
+
+"On inquiry it appears that among her former schoolmates and teachers
+she was popular, though not inclined to make intimates. She is reputed
+to have been rather high-tempered, but seemingly throughout her
+childhood and young girlhood there was nothing about her conduct or
+appearance to indicate a disordered mind. Indeed there was no suggestion
+of mental aberration on her part from any source until within the past
+month. However, I should add that it is rather hard to arrive at any
+accurate estimate of her general behavior by reason of the fact that
+mother and daughter led so secluded a life. They had acquaintances in
+the community, but apparently no close friends there or elsewhere.
+
+"About four weeks ago, on the twenty-eighth of last month to be exact,
+the mother, described to me as being in a state of great distress,
+visited Justice Cannavan, then sitting in chambers at White Plains, and
+asking for a private interview with him, requested an inquiry into the
+sanity of the girl Margaret, with a view, as she explained, of
+protecting her own life. Her daughter, she alleged, had without warning
+developed a homicidal tendency aimed at the applicant.
+
+"According to Mrs. Vinsolving, the girl, who always theretofore had been
+a devoted and affectionate child, had made at least five separate and
+distinct attempts to kill her, first by putting poison into her food and
+later by attempting to strangle her at night in her bed. Next only to a
+natural desire to have her own physical safety insured, the mother was
+apparently inspired by a wish to surround the truth regarding her
+beloved child's aberration with as much secrecy as possible. At the same
+time she realized that a certain amount of publicity was inevitable.
+
+"Acting under the statutes, the justice appointed two reputable
+practicing physicians of the county, namely Dr. Ernest Malt, of
+Wincorah, and Dr. James P. McGlore, of Pleasantdale, to sit as a
+commission for the purpose of inquiring into Miss Vinsolving's mental
+state. The mother, still exhibiting every evidence of maternal grief,
+appeared before these gentlemen and repeated in detail the account of
+the attacks made upon her, as previously described to His Honor.
+
+"The girl was then brought before the commission. It was explained to
+her that under the law she had the right to demand a hearing in open
+court before a jury chosen to pass upon her sanity. This she waived, but
+from this point on throughout the inquiry she steadfastly declined to
+make answers to the questions propounded to her by the members of the
+commission in an effort to ascertain her mental status, but on the
+contrary persistently maintained a silence which they interpreted as a
+phase of insane cunning characteristic of a type of abnormality not
+often encountered, but in their opinion the more sinister and
+significant because of its rarity.
+
+"They accordingly drew up a finding setting forth that in their opinion
+and deliberate judgment the unfortunate young woman was suffering from a
+progressive and therefore probably incurable form of dementia. The
+justice immediately signed the necessary orders for her detention and
+commitment. To save the daughter from being sent to a state institution
+the mother provided funds sufficient for her care at Doctor Shorter's
+sanitarium, an establishment of unimpeachable reputation, and she
+accordingly was taken there in proper custody, as you yourself are
+aware.
+
+"My information from the sanitarium, which I procured in response to
+your request, and the governor's instructions to me for a full inquiry
+into all the circumstances is that since her confinement Miss
+Vinsolving has been under constant observation. She has been orderly and
+obedient and except for slightly melancholic tendencies, which might
+easily be provoked by the nature of her environment, is quite natural in
+her behavior. I draw the inference, however, that this docility may be
+merely the forerunner of an outburst at any time.
+
+"Altogether my investigation convinces me that no miscarriage of the law
+could possibly have occurred in this instance. There is certainly no
+ground for suspecting that the mother had any ulterior or improper
+motive in seeking to have her daughter and sole companion deprived of
+liberty. Neither the mother nor any other person alive can hope to
+profit in a financial sense by reason of the girl's temporary or
+permanent detention.
+
+"The girl herself is without means of her own. The mother for her
+maintenance is largely dependent upon the pension she receives from the
+United States Government. The girl had no income or estate of her own
+and no expectancy of any inheritance from any imaginable source other
+than the small estate she will legally inherit at the death of her
+mother. Finally I may add that nowhere in the case has there developed
+any suggestion of a scandal in the life of mother or daughter or of any
+clandestine love affair on the part of either.
+
+"These briefly are the available facts as compiled by a trustworthy
+member of my staff, Assistant District Attorney Horace Wilkes, to whom
+I detailed the duty of making a painstaking inquiry. If I may hereafter
+be of service to you in this matter or any other matter, kindly command
+me. I have the honor to be,
+
+"Yours etc., etc."
+
+
+With a little gesture of despairful resignation Miss Smith laid the
+letter down. Well, there was nothing more she could do; nothing more to
+be done. She had come to a blind end. The proof was conclusive of the
+worst. But in her thoughts, waking and sleeping, persisted the image of
+that gallant, pathetic little figure which she had seen last at the
+Peekskill station, bound, helpless, alone and all so courageously facing
+what to most of us would be worse than death itself. Awake or in sleep
+she could not get it out of her mind.
+
+At length one night following on a day which for the greater part she
+had spent in a study of the somewhat curious laws that in New York
+State--as well as in divers other states of the Union--govern the
+procedure touching certain classes coming within purview of the code,
+she awoke in the little hours preceding the dawn to find herself saying
+aloud: "There's something wrong--there must be--there has to be!"
+
+Until daylight and after she lay there planning a course of action until
+finally she had it completed. True, it was a grasping at feeble straws,
+but even so she meant to follow along the only course which seemed open
+to her.
+
+First she did some long-distance telephoning. Then immediately after
+breakfast she sent to the garage round the corner for her runabout and
+in it she rode up through the city and on into Westchester, now
+beginning to flaunt the circus colors of a gorgeous Indian summer. An
+hour and a half of steady driving brought her to the village of
+Pleasantdale. She found it a place well named, seeing that it was tucked
+down in a cove among the hills between the Hudson on the one side and
+the Sound on the other.
+
+Following the directions given her by a lone policeman on duty in the
+tiny public square, she ran two blocks along the main street and drew up
+where a window sign giving name and hours advertised that James P.
+McGlore, M.D., here professionally received patients in his office on
+the lower floor of his place of residence. A maidservant answered the
+caller's knock, and showing her into a chamber furnished like a parlor
+which had started out to be a reception room and then had tried--too
+late--to change back again into a parlor, bade her wait. She did not
+have long to wait. Almost immediately an inner door opened and in the
+opening appeared the short and blocky figure of a somewhat elderly,
+old-fashioned-looking man with a square homely face--a face which
+instantly she classified as belonging to a rather stupid, very dogmatic
+and utterly honest man. He had outjutting, belligerent eyebrows and a
+stubborn underjaw that was badly undershot. He spoke as he entered and
+his tone was noticeably not cordial.
+
+"The girl tells me your name is Smith. I suppose from that you're the
+young person that the district attorney telephoned me about an hour or
+so ago. Well, how can I serve you?"
+
+"Perhaps, doctor, the district attorney told you I had interested myself
+in the case of the Vinsolving girl--Margaret Vinsolving," she began. "I
+had intended to call also upon your associate, Doctor Malt, over at
+Wincorah, but I learn he is away."
+
+"Yes, yes," he said with a sort of hurried petulance. "Know all about
+that. Malt's like a lot of these young new physicians--always running
+off on vacations. Mustn't hold me responsible for his absences. Got no
+time to think about the other fellow. Own affairs are enough--keep me
+busy. Well, go on, why don't you? You were speaking of the Vinsolving
+girl. Well, what of her?"
+
+"I was saying that I had interested myself in her case and--"
+
+He snapped in: "One moment. Let's get this all straightened out before
+we start. May I inquire if you are closely related to the young person
+in question?"
+
+"I am not. I never saw her but once."
+
+"Are you by any chance a close friend of the young woman?"
+
+He towered over her, for she was seated and he had not offered to sit
+down. Indeed throughout the interview he remained standing.
+
+Looking up at him, where he glowered above her, she answered back
+promptly:
+
+"As I was saying, I never saw her but once--that was on the day she
+was carried away to be placed in confinement. So I cannot call myself
+her friend exactly, though I would like to be her friend. It was
+because of the sympathy which her position--and I might add, her
+personality--roused in me that I have taken the liberty of coming here
+to see you about her."
+
+Under his breath he growled and grunted and puffed certain sounds. She
+caught the purport of at least two of the words.
+
+"Pardon me, doctor," she said briskly, "but I am not an amateur
+philanthropist. I trust I'm not an amateur anything. I am a business
+woman earning my own living by my own labors and I pay taxes and for the
+past year or so I have been a citizen and a voter. Please do not regard
+me merely as an officious meddler--a busybody with nothing to do except
+to mind other people's affairs. It was quite by chance that I came upon
+this poor child and learned something of her unhappy state."
+
+The choleric brows went up like twin stress marks accenting unspoken
+skepticism.
+
+"A child--of twenty-four?" he commented ironically.
+
+"A child, measured by my age or yours. As I told you, I met her quite
+accidentally. She appealed to me so--such a plucky, helpless, friendless
+little thing she seemed with those hideous leather straps binding her."
+
+"Do you mean to imply that she was being mistreated by those who had her
+in charge?"
+
+"No, her escorts--or attendants or warders or guards or whatever one
+might call them--seemed kindly enough, according to their lights. But
+she was so quiet, so passive that I--"
+
+"Well, would you expect anyone who felt a proper sense of responsibility
+to suffer dangerous maniacs to run at large without restraint or control
+of any sort upon their limbs and their actions?"
+
+"But, doctor, that is just the point--are you so entirely sure that she
+is a dangerous maniac? That is what I want to ask you--whether there
+isn't a possibility, however remote, that a mistake may conceivably have
+been made? Please don't misunderstand me," she interjected quickly,
+seeing how he--already stiff and bristly--had at her words stiffened and
+bristled still more. "I do not mean to intimate that anything unethical
+has been done. In fact I am quite sure that everything has been quite
+ethical. And I am not questioning your professional standing or decrying
+your abilities.
+
+"But as I understand it, neither you nor Doctor Malt is avowedly an
+alienist. I assume that neither of you has ever specialized in nervous
+or mental disorders. Such being the case, don't you agree with me--this
+idea has just occurred to me--that if an alienist, a man especially
+versed in these things rather than a general practitioner, however
+experienced and competent, were called in even now--"
+
+"And you just said you were not reflecting upon my professional
+abilities!"
+
+His tone was heavily sarcastic.
+
+"Of course I am not! I beg your pardon if my poor choice of language has
+conveyed any such impression. What I am trying to get at, doctor, in my
+inexpert way, is that I talked with this girl, and while I exchanged
+only a few words with her, nevertheless what she said--yes, and her
+bearing as well, her look, everything about her--impressed me as being
+entirely rational."
+
+He fixed her with a hostile glare and at her he aimed a blunt gimlet of
+a forefinger.
+
+"Are you quite sure you are entirely sane yourself?"
+
+"I trust I am fairly normal."
+
+"Got any little funny quirks in your brain? Any little temperamental
+crotchets in which you differ from the run of people round you? Think
+now!"
+
+"Well," she confessed, "I don't like cats--I hate cats. And I don't like
+figured wall paper. And I don't like--"
+
+"That will be sufficient. Take the first point: You hate cats. On that
+count alone any confirmed cat lover would regard you as being as crazy
+as a March hare. But until you start going round trying to kill other
+people's cats or trying to kill other people who own cats there's
+probably no danger that anyone will prefer charges of lunacy against you
+and have you locked up."
+
+She smiled a little in spite of her earnestness.
+
+"Perhaps it is symptomatic of a lesion in my brain that I should be
+concerning myself in the case of a strange girl whom I have seen but
+once--is that also in your thoughts, Doctor McGlore?"
+
+"We'll waive that," he said. "For the sake of argument we'll concede
+that your indicative peculiarities assume a harmless phase at present.
+But this Vinsolving girl's case is different--hers were not harmless.
+Her acts were amply conclusive to establish proof of her mental
+condition."
+
+"From the district attorney's statement to me I rather got the
+impression that she did not indulge in any abnormal conduct while before
+you for examination."
+
+"Did he tell you of her blank refusal to answer the simplest of the
+questions my associate and I put to her?"
+
+"Doctor," she countered, seeking to woo him into a better humor, "would
+you construe silence on a woman's part as necessarily a mark of
+insanity? It is a rare thing, I concede. But might it not sometimes be
+an admirable thing as well?"
+
+But this gruff old man was not to be cajoled into pleasanter channels
+than the course his mood steered for him.
+
+"We'll waive that too. Anyhow, the mother's evidence was enough."
+
+"But was there anything else other than the mother's unsupported story
+for you to go on and be guided by?"
+
+"What else was needed?" he retorted angrily. "What motive could the
+mother have except the motives that were prompted by mother love? That
+was a devoted, desolated woman if ever I saw one. Look here! A daughter
+without cause suddenly turns upon her mother and tries to kill her.
+Well, then, either she's turned criminal or she has gone crazy!
+
+"But why should I go on debating with you a matter which you don't know
+anything about in the first place and in which you have no call to
+interfere in the second place?
+
+"I don't want to be sharp with you, young woman, but that's the plain
+fact. The duty which I undertook under the law and as a reputable
+physician was not a pleasant one, and it becomes all the less pleasant
+when an unqualified layman--laywoman if you prefer to phrase it that
+way--cross-examines me on my judgment."
+
+"Doctor, let me repeat again I have not sought to cross-question you or
+belittle your knowledge. But you speak of the law. Do you not think it a
+monstrous thing that two men even though they be of high standing in
+their profession as general practitioners, but without special
+acquaintance with mental derangements--I am not speaking of this
+particular case now but of hundreds of other cases--do you not think it
+a wrong thing that two such persons may pass upon a third person's
+sanity and upon the uncorroborated testimony of some fourth person
+recommend the confinement of the accused third person in an asylum for
+the insane?"
+
+"I suppose you know a person so complained of--or accused, as you put
+it--has the right to a jury trial in open court. This girl that you're
+so worked up about had that right. She waived it."
+
+"But is a presumably demented person a fit judge of his or her own best
+course of conduct? In your opinion shouldn't there be other safeguards
+in their interests to insure against what conceivably might be a
+terrible error or a terrible injustice?"
+
+He didn't exactly sneer, but he indulged himself in the first cousin of
+a sneer.
+
+"You've evidently been fortifying yourself to give me a battle--reading
+up on the subject, eh?"
+
+"I've been reading up on the subject--not, though, for the purpose of
+entering into a joint debate on the subject with anyone. But, doctor, I
+have read enough to startle me. I never knew before there were such laws
+on the statute books. And I have learned about another case, the case of
+that rich man--a multimillionaire the papers called him, which means I
+suppose that at least he was well-to-do. You remember about him, I am
+sure? A commission declared him of unsound mind. He got away to another
+state where the legal processes of this state could not reach him. The
+courts of that other state declared him mentally competent and capable
+of managing his own affairs--and for a period of years he did manage
+them. Here the other month, under a pledge of safe conduct, he returned
+to New York on legal business and while he was here he carried his cause
+to a higher court and that court ruled him to be sane and entitled to
+his complete freedom of body and action. But for years he had been a
+pseudofugitive in enforced exile and for years he had carried the stigma
+of having been adjudged insane. This thing happened, incredible as it
+sounds. It might happen again to-day or to-morrow. It--"
+
+"Excuse me for interrupting your flow of eloquence," he said with a
+labored politeness, "but I thought you came here to discuss the case of
+a girl named Vinsolving, not the case of a man I never heard of before.
+Now, at least I'm not going to discuss generalities with you and I'm not
+going to sit here and join with you in questioning the workings of the
+law either. The laws are good enough for me as they stand. I'm a
+law-abiding citizen, not one of these red-eyed socialistic Bolsheviks
+that are forever trying to tear down things. I believe in taking the
+laws as I find them. Let well enough alone--that's my motto, young
+woman. And there are a whole lot more like me in this country."
+
+"Pardon me for breaking in on you, sir," she said, fighting hard to keep
+her temper, "but neither am I a socialist or a Bolshevik."
+
+"Then I reckon probably you're one of these rampant suffragists. Anyhow,
+what's the use of discussing abstracts? If you don't like the law why
+don't you have it changed?"
+
+"That's one of the very things I hope before long to try to do," she
+replied.
+
+"It'll keep you pretty busy," he responded with a sniff of profound
+disapproval. "But then you seem to have a lot of spare time on your
+hands to spend in crusading round. Well, I haven't. I've got my patients
+to see to. One of 'em is waiting for me now--if you'll kindly excuse
+me?"
+
+She rose.
+
+"I'm sorry," she said sincerely, "if either my mission or my language
+has irritated you. I seem somehow to have defeated the purpose that
+brought me--I mean a faint hope that perhaps somehow I might help that
+girl. Something tells me--call it intuition or sentimentality or what
+you will--but something tells me I must keep on trying to help her. I
+only wish I could make you share my point of view."
+
+"Well, you can't. Say, see here, why don't you go to see the mother? I
+judge she might convince you that you are on the wrong tack, even if I
+can't."
+
+"That's exactly what I mean to do," she declared.
+
+Something inside her brain gave a little jump. It was curious that she
+had not thought of it before; even more curious that his labored
+sarcasms had been required to set her on this new trail.
+
+"Well, at that, you'd better think twice before you go," he retorted.
+"She was a mighty badly broken-up woman the last time I saw her, but
+even so I judge she's still got spunk enough left in her to resent
+having an unauthorized and uninvited stranger coming about, seeking to
+pry into her own private sorrow. But it's your affair, not mine.
+Besides, judging by everything, you probably don't think my advice is
+worth much anyhow."
+
+"Oh, yes, but I do--I do indeed! And I thank you for it."
+
+"Don't mention it! And good day!"
+
+The slamming of the inner door behind him made an appropriate
+exclamation point to punctuate the brevity of his offended and indignant
+departure. For a moment she felt like laughing outright. Then she felt
+like crying. Then she did neither. She left.
+
+"Poor, old opinionated, stupid old, conscientious old thing!" she was
+saying to herself as she let herself, unattended, out of the front door.
+"And yet I'll wager he would sit up all night and work his fingers to
+the bone trying to save a life. And when it comes to serving poor people
+without expecting payment or even asking for it, I know he is a perfect
+dear. Besides, I should be grateful to him--he gave me an idea. I don't
+know where he got it from either--I don't believe he ever had so very
+many of his own."
+
+Again the handy cop in the communal center set her upon her way. But
+when she came to the destination she sought--a small, rather shabby
+cottage standing a mile or so westward from the middle of things
+communal, out in the fringes of the village where outlying homesteads
+tailed away into avowed farmsteads--the house itself was closed up fast
+and tight. The shutters all were closely drawn and against the gatepost
+was fastened a newly painted sign reading: "For Sale or Rent. Apply to
+Searle, the Up-to-Date Real Estate Man, Next Door to Pythian Hall."
+
+Not quite sure she had stopped at the right place, Miss Smith hailed a
+man pottering in a chrysanthemum bed in the yard of the adjoining
+cottage.
+
+"Mrs. Vinsolving?" he said, lifting a tousled head above his palings.
+"Yessum, she lives there--leastwise she did. She moved away only the day
+before yesterday. Sort of sudden, I think it must have been. I didn't
+know she was going till she was gone." He grinned in extenuation of the
+unaccountable failure of a small-town man to acquaint himself with all
+available facts regarding a neighbor's private affairs. "But then she
+never wasn't much of a hand, Mrs. Vinsolving wasn't, for mixing with
+folks. I'll say she wasn't!"
+
+Back she turned to seek out Searle, he of up-to-date real estate. In a
+dingy office upstairs over the local harness store a lean and rangy
+gentleman raised a brindled beard above a roll-top desk and in answer to
+her first question crisply remarked, "Can't tell."
+
+"But surely if she put her property in your hands for disposal she must
+have given you some address where you might communicate with her?"
+pressed Miss Smith.
+
+"Oh, yes, she done that all right, but that ain't the question you ast
+me first. You ast me if I could tell you where she was--and that I can't
+do."
+
+"I see. Then I presume she left instructions with you not to give her
+present whereabouts to anyone?"
+
+"Well, you might figger it out that way and mebbe not so far wrong,"
+said the cryptic Mr. Searle. "But if you think you'd like to buy or rent
+her place I'm fully empowered to act. Got the keys right here and a car
+standing outside--take you right on out there in a jiffy if you say the
+word."
+
+He rose up and followed her halfway down the steps, plainly torn
+between a desire to make a commission and a regret that under orders
+from his client he could furnish no details regarding her late
+movements.
+
+"If you're interested in any other piece of property in this vicinity--"
+were the last words she heard floating down the stair well as she passed
+out upon the uneven sidewalk.
+
+She knew exactly what she meant to do next. At sight of her badge, as
+shown to him through his wicketed window marked "General Delivery," the
+village postmaster gave her a number on a side street well up-town in
+New York, adding: "Going away, Mrs. Vinsolving particularly asked me not
+to tell anybody where her mail was to be sent on to. Kind of a secretive
+woman anyhow, she was, and besides she's had some very pressing trouble
+come on her lately. I presume you've heard something about that matter?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"I suppose now," went on the postmaster, his features sharpening with
+curiosity, "that the Federal authorities ain't looking into that
+particular matter? Not that I care to know myself, but I just thought it
+wouldn't be any harm to ask."
+
+"No," said Miss Smith, "I merely wanted to see her on a personal matter
+and I only let you see my credential in order to learn her forwarding
+address."
+
+Provided with the requisite information, she figured that before night
+she would interview the widow or know good reasons why. That the other
+woman had quitted her home seemingly in a hurry and with efforts at
+secrecy gave zest to the quest and added a trace of bepuzzlement to it
+too. Even so, she did not herself know what she meant to say to the
+woman when she had found her in her present abiding place or what
+questions she would ask. Only she knew that an inner prompting stronger
+than any reasoned-out process drove her forward upon her vague and
+blinded mission. Fool's errand it might be--probably was--yet she meant
+to see it through.
+
+But she had not reckoned upon the contingency that on this fine October
+forenoon, for the first time since buying his new touring car, Mr. Jake
+Goebel, shirt-waist manufacturer in a small way in Broome Street and
+head of a family in a large way in West One Hundred and Ninety-ninth
+Street, would be undertaking to drive the said car unaided and untutored
+by a more experienced charioteer on a trial spin up the Albany Post
+Road, accompanied--it being merely a five-passenger car--only by Mrs.
+Rosa Goebel, wife of the above, six little Goebels of assorted sizes and
+ages and Mrs. Goebel's unmated sister, Miss Freda Hirschfeld of
+Rivington Street. In Getty Square, Yonkers, about noontime occurred a
+head-on collision, the subsequent upshots of which were variously that
+divers of those figuring in the accident went in the following
+directions:
+
+
+Miss Smith to a doctor's office near by to have a sprained wrist
+bandaged; and thence home in a hired automobile.
+
+Her runabout to a Yonkers repair shop and garage.
+
+Mr. Goebel, with lamentations, to the office of an attorney making a
+specialty of handling damage suits, thence home by train with the seven
+members of his family party, all uninjured as to their limbs and members
+but in a highly distracted state nervously.
+
+Mr. Goebel's car to another repair shop and garage.
+
+The traffic policeman on duty in Getty Square to the station house to
+make a report of the fifth smash-up personally officered by him within
+eight hours--on a Sunday his casualty list would have been longer, but
+this was a week day, when pleasure travel was less fraught with highway
+perilousness.
+
+
+It so happened that Mullinix came to town from Washington next morning
+and, following his custom, rang up his unpaid but none the less valued
+aid to inquire whether he might come a-calling. No, he might not, Miss
+Smith being confined to her room with cold compresses on her injured
+wrist, but he might render a service for her if so minded--and he was.
+To him, then, over the wire Miss Smith stated her requirements.
+
+"I want you please to go to this address"--giving it--"and see whether
+you find there a Mrs. Janet Vinsolving, a widow. I rather imagine the
+place may be a boarding house, though I won't be sure as to that. It
+will not be necessary for you to see her in person; in fact I'd rather
+you did not. What I want you to do is to learn whether she is still
+there, and if so how long she expects to stay there, and generally
+anything you can about her movements. She went there only three days ago
+and inasmuch as she has a reputation in her former home for keeping very
+much to herself this may be a more difficult job than it sounds. But do
+the best you can, won't you, and then notify me of the results by
+telephone? No, it is a personal affair--nothing to do with any of our
+official undertakings. I'll tell you more about it when I see you. I
+expect I shall be able to receive visitors in a day or two; just now I
+feel a bit shaken up and unstrung. That's all, and thank you ever so
+much."
+
+Within an hour he had her on the telephone again.
+
+"Hello!" she said. "Yes, this is Miss Smith. Oh, it's you, is it? Well,
+what luck?... Oh, so it was a boarding house, after all.... And you
+found her there?... No? Then where is she?... What? Where did you say?
+Bellevue!... I knew it, I knew it, something told me!... No, no, never
+mind my ravings! Go on, please, go on!... Yes, all right. Now then,
+listen please: You jump in a taxi and get here to my apartments as soon
+as you can. I'll be dressed and ready when you arrive to go over there
+with you.... What?... Oh, bother the doctor's instructions. It's only a
+sprain anyhow and I feel perfectly fit by now, honestly I do ... tell
+you I'd get up out of my dying bed to go.... Yes, indeed, it is
+important--much more important than you think! Come on for me, I'll be
+waiting."
+
+When fifteen minutes later the perplexed Mullinix halted a taxi at the
+Deansworth Studio Building she was at the curbing, her left arm in a
+sling and her eyes ablaze with barely controlled emotions. Before he
+could move to get out and help her in she was already in.
+
+"Bellevue Hospital, psychopathic ward," he told the driver as she
+climbed nimbly inside.
+
+As the taxi started she turned to Mullinix, demanding: "Now tell it to
+me all over again. When you are through, then I'll explain to you why I
+am so interested."
+
+"Well," he said, "there isn't so very much to tell. The address you gave
+me turned out to be a boarding house just as you suspected it might--a
+second-rate place but apparently highly respectable, kept by a Mrs.
+Sheehan. It's been under the same management at the same place for a
+good many years. It wasn't very much trouble for me to find out what
+you wanted to know, because the whole place was in turmoil after what
+had happened just an hour or so before I got there. And when it
+developed that I had come to inquire about the cause of all the
+excitement every old-lady boarder in the house wanted to tell me about
+it all at the same time.
+
+"It seems that three days ago this Mrs. Vinsolving applied at the place
+for room and board. Mrs. Sheehan vaguely remembered her as having been
+her guest for a short time ten or twelve years ago. At that time she was
+with her husband, Colonel Vinsolving, who it appears has since died, and
+a daughter about ten years or twelve years of age--a little girl with
+red hair, as Mrs. Sheehan recalls. This time, though, she came alone,
+carrying only hand baggage. Except that she seemed to be nervous and
+rather harassed and unhappy looking, there was nothing noticeably
+unusual about her. Mrs. Sheehan took her in willingly enough.
+
+"She went straight to her room on the third floor and stayed there,
+having her meals brought up to her. But this morning early she went to
+the landlady and begged for protection, saying she was in fear of her
+life. Mrs. Sheehan very naturally inquired to know what was up--and then
+Mrs. Vinsolving told her this story:
+
+"She said she had discovered a conspiracy to murder her, headed
+by--guess who? The late Kaiser, no less! She said that the Kaiser in
+disguise had escaped from Holland, leaving behind him in his recent
+place of exile over there a double made up to look like him, and was now
+in hiding in this country for the sole purpose of having Mrs. Vinsolving
+assassinated in revenge, because her late husband, while an officer in
+the Army, had perfected a poison gas deadlier than any other known,
+which, being kept a secret by this Government and used against the
+German army in the war, had brought about the victory for our side and
+led to the overthrow of the Kaiser's outfit.
+
+"She went on to say she had run away from some suburban town or other to
+hide in New York and that was why she had taken refuge at Mrs.
+Sheehan's, thinking she would be in safety. But now she knew the
+plotters had tracked her, because she had just detected that the maid
+who had been bringing up her meals to her was really a German agent, and
+acting under orders from the Kaiser had put poison into her food. All of
+which naturally surprised Mrs. Sheehan considerably, especially as the
+accused servant happened to be a perfectly reliable Finnish girl who has
+been working for Mrs. Sheehan for five years and who had two brothers in
+the Seventy-seventh Division overseas.
+
+"It didn't take Mrs. Sheehan two minutes--she being a pretty
+level-headed person evidently--to see what ailed her new boarder. She
+managed to get Mrs. Vinsolving quieted down and get her back again into
+her room, and then she called in the policeman on the post and inside
+of an hour the woman had been smuggled out of the house and was on her
+way to Bellevue in an ambulance with a doctor and a policeman guarding
+her. But by that time, of course, the news had leaked out among the
+other boarders and the whole place was beginning to stew with
+excitement. It was still stewing when I got there.
+
+"Well, as soon as you told me over the telephone that you were bent and
+determined on going to Bellevue, though I do not see why you should be
+in such a hurry about it and taking chances on setting up an
+inflammation in your injured arm, because even though you do know the
+poor crazed creature you can't be of any help--"
+
+"I don't know her. I never saw her in my life."
+
+"Then why--"
+
+"That part can wait. I'll explain later. You were saying that as soon as
+you talked with me over the telephone you did something. What was it?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I called up Doctor Steele, chief surgeon in the psychopathic
+ward, who happens to be a friend of mine and one of us besides"--he
+tapped the badge he wore under his coat lapel--"and told him I was
+bringing you down to see this woman, and he volunteered some information
+of the case in advance of your coming. I've forgotten just what he
+called the form of insanity which has seized her--it's a jaw-breaking
+Latin name--but anyhow, he said his preliminary diagnosis convinced him
+that it must have been coming on her for some time; that it was marked
+by delusions of persecution and by an exaggerated ego, causing its
+victims to imagine themselves the objects of plots engineered by the
+most distinguished personages, such as rulers and high dignitaries; and
+that while in this state a man or a woman suffering from this particular
+brand of lunacy was apt to shift his or her suspicion from one person to
+another--first perhaps accusing some perfectly harmless and well-meaning
+individual, who might be a relative or a near friend, and then nearly
+always progressing to the point in his or her madness where the charge
+was directed against some famous character."
+
+"Did you hear anywhere any mention made of a daughter--the red-haired
+child of twelve years ago?" inquired Miss Smith.
+
+"To be sure I did, but I'd forgotten about her," said Mullinix. "Mrs.
+Sheehan told me that somewhere in her excited narrative Mrs. Vinsolving
+did say something about the daughter. As nearly as I can recall, she
+told Mrs. Sheehan that five or six weeks ago, or some such matter, her
+daughter had tried to kill her and that she thought then the daughter
+had gone mad, but that now she knew the girl had joined the Kaiser's
+gang for pay. I made a mental note of this part of the rigmarole at the
+time Mrs. Sheehan was repeating it to me, and then it slipped my mind.
+But now putting that yarn alongside of what Doctor Steele tells me about
+the symptoms of the disease, I see the connection--first the daughter,
+then the strange servant girl and finally the Kaiser. But say, I wonder
+why the daughter hasn't been keeping some sort of a guard over the poor
+demented creature? What can she have been thinking about herself to let
+her mother go running foot-loose round the country, nursing these
+changing delusions?"
+
+"She couldn't very well help herself," put in Miss Smith. "The daughter
+is in an asylum--put there five weeks ago on the mother's complaint."
+
+"But heavens alive, how could that have happened?"
+
+"Very easily--under the laws of this state," she answered grimly. Then
+speaking more quickly: "I've changed my mind about going to Bellevue
+with you. Please tell the driver to take me to the Grand Central
+Station. I don't know what train I'm going to catch, except that it's
+the next one leaving on the Hudson River Division for up state. You go
+on then, please, to the hospital and find out all you can about this
+case and call me on the long-distance to-night--no, that won't do
+either. I don't know where I'll be. I may be in Peekskill or in
+Albany--I can't say which. I tell you--I'll call you at eight o'clock;
+that will be better.
+
+"No, no!" she went on impetuously, reading on his face the protest he
+meant to utter. "My wrist is well bandaged and giving me no pain. I'm
+thinking now of what a poor brave girl had on both her wrists when last
+I saw her and of what she must have been enduring since then. I'll
+explain the biggest chapter of the story to you on the way over before
+you drop me at the station."
+
+At the Grand Central she left behind a thoroughly astonished gentleman.
+He was clear on some points which had been puzzling him from time to
+time during this exceedingly busy morning, but still much mystified to
+make out the meaning of Miss Smith's farewell remark as he put her
+aboard her train.
+
+"I only wish one thing," she had said. "I only wish I might take the
+time to stop at the village of Pleasantdale and break the news to a
+certain Doctor McGlore who lives there. I trust I am not unduly cattish,
+but I dearly would love to watch the expression on his face when he
+heard it. I think I'd do it, too, if I were not starting on the most
+imperative errand that ever called me in my life."
+
+
+A week later, to the day, two expected visitors were ushered into the
+private chamber of the governor at Albany--one of them a small,
+exceedingly well-groomed and good-looking woman in her thirties, and
+one a slender pretty girl with big brown eyes and wonderful auburn hair.
+
+"Governor," said Miss Smith, "I want the pleasure of introducing to you
+the gamest girl in the whole world--Margaret Vinsolving."
+
+He took the firm young hand she offered him. "Miss Vinsolving," he said,
+"in the name of the State of New York and on behalf of it I ask your
+forgiveness for the great and cruel wrong which unintentionally was done
+to you."
+
+"And I want to thank you for what you have done for me, sir," she
+answered him simply.
+
+"Don't thank me," he said. "You know the one to thank. If I had not set
+the machinery of my office in motion on your behalf within five minutes
+after your benefactress here reached me the other day I should have
+deserved impeachment. But I should never have lived to face impeachment.
+I'm sure the slightest sign of hesitation on my part would have been the
+signal for your advocate to brain me with my own inkstand." His face
+sobered. "But, my child, for my own information there are some things I
+want cleared up. Why in the face of the monstrous charges laid against
+you did you keep silent--that is one of the things I want to know?"
+
+Before answering, the girl glanced inquiringly at her companion.
+
+"Tell him," counseled Miss Smith.
+
+Steadily the girl made answer.
+
+"When my poor mother accused me of trying to kill her I realized for the
+first time that her mind had become affected. No one else, though,
+appeared to suspect the real truth. Perhaps this was because she seemed
+so normal on every other subject. So I decided to keep silent. I thought
+that if I were taken away from her for a while possibly the separation
+and with it the lifting of the imaginary fear of injury at my hands,
+which had upset her, might help her to regain her reason and no outsider
+be ever the wiser for it. I am young and strong; I believed I could bear
+the imprisonment without serious injury to me. I believe yet--for her
+sake--I could have borne it. And I knew--I realized what would happen to
+her if she were placed in such surroundings as I have been in and made
+to pass through such experiences as those through which I have passed. I
+felt that all hope of a cure for her would then be gone forever. And I
+love my mother." She faltered, her voice trembling a bit, then added:
+"That is why I kept silent, sir."
+
+"But, my dear child," he said, "what a wrong thing for you to have done.
+It was a splendid, chivalrous, gallant sacrifice, but it was wrong. And
+if you don't mind I'd like to shake hands with you again."
+
+"You see, sir, there was no one with whom I might advise in the
+emergency that came upon me without warning," she explained. "I had no
+confidante except my mother, and she--through madness--had turned
+against me. I had no friend then--I have one now, though."
+
+And she went to Miss Smith and put her head on the elder woman's
+shoulder.
+
+With her arms about the girl, Miss Smith addressed the governor.
+
+"We are going away a while together for a rest," she told him. "We both
+need it. And when we come back she is going to join me in my work. Some
+day Margaret will be a better interior decorator than her teacher can
+ever hope to be."
+
+"Then from now on, so far as you two are concerned, this ghastly thing
+should be only an unhappy dream which you'll strive to forget, I'm
+sure," he said. "It's all over and done with, isn't it?"
+
+"Over and done with for her--yes," said Miss Smith. "But how about your
+duty as governor? How about my duty as a citizen? Shouldn't we each of
+us, you in your big way and I in my small way, work to bring about a
+reform in the statutes under which such errors are possible? Think,
+governor, of what happened to this child! It may happen again to-day or
+to-morrow to some other equally innocent sufferer. It might happen to
+any one of us--to me or to someone dear to you."
+
+"Miss Smith," he stated, "if ever it happens to you I shall take the
+witness stand on your account and testify to two things: First, that you
+are the sanest human being in this state; and second, that you certainly
+do know how to play a hunch when you get one. If I had your intuition,
+plus my ambition, I wouldn't be governor--I'd be running for president.
+And I'd win out too!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE RAVELIN' WOLF
+
+
+When the draft came to our town as it came to all towns it enmeshed Jeff
+Poindexter, who to look at him might be any age between twenty-one and
+forty-one. Jeff had a complexion admirably adapted for hiding the wear
+and tear of carking years and as for those telltale wrinkles which
+betray care he had none, seeing that care rarely abode with him for
+longer than twenty-four hours on a stretch. Did worry knock at the front
+door Jeff had a way of excusing himself out of the back window. But this
+dread thing they called a draft was a worry which just opened the door
+and walked right in--and outside the window stood a jealous Government,
+all organized to start a rookus if anybody so much as stepped sideways.
+
+Jeff had no ambition to engage in the jar and crash of actual combat;
+neither did the idea of serving in a labor battalion overseas appeal to
+one of his habits. The uniform had its lure, to be sure, but the
+responsibilities presaged by the putting on of the uniform beguiled him
+not a whipstitch. Anyhow, his ways were the ways of peace. As a diplomat
+he had indubitable gifts; as a warrior he felt that he would be out of
+his proper element. So when answering a summons which was not to be
+disregarded Jeff appeared before the draft board he was not noticeably
+happy.
+
+"Unmarried, eh?" inquired his chief inquisitor.
+
+"Yas, suh--I means, naw, suh," stated Jeff. "I ain't never been much of
+a hand fur marryin' round."
+
+He forced an ingratiating smile. The smile fell as seed on barren
+soil--fell and died there.
+
+"Mother and father? Either one or both of them living?"
+
+Never had Jeff looked more the orphan than as he stood there confessing
+himself one. He fumbled his hat in his hands.
+
+"No dependents at all then, I take it?"
+
+"Yas, suh, dey shorely is," answered Jeff smartly, hope rekindling
+within him.
+
+"Well, who is it that you help support--if it's anybody?"
+
+"Hit's Jedge Priest--tha's who. Jedge, he jes' natchelly couldn't git
+'long noways 'thout me lookin' after him, suh. The older he git the more
+it seem lak he leans heavy on me."
+
+"Well, Judge Priest may have to lean on himself for a while. Uncle Sam
+needs every able-bodied man he can get these times and you look to be as
+strong as a mule. Here, take this card and go on through that door
+yonder to the second room down the hall and let Doctor Dismukes look you
+over."
+
+Jeff cheered up slightly. He knew Doctor Dismukes--knew him mighty well.
+In Doctor Dismukes' hands he would be in the hands of a friend. Beyond
+question the doctor would understand the situation as this strange and
+most unsympathetic white man undoubtedly did not.
+
+But Doctor Dismukes, all snap and smartness, went over him as though he
+had never seen him before in all his life. If Jeff had been a horse for
+sale and the doctor a professional horse coper, scarcely could the
+examination have been carried forward with a more businesslike dispatch.
+
+"Jeff," said the doctor when he had finished and the other was
+rearranging his wardrobe, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself for being
+so healthy. Take your teeth now--your teeth are splendid. I only wish I
+had a set like 'em."
+
+"Is dey?" said Jeff despondently, for the first time in his life
+regretting his unblemished ivory.
+
+"They certainly are. You wouldn't need a gun, not with those teeth you
+wouldn't--you could just naturally bite a German in two."
+
+Jeff shivered. The very suggestion was abhorrent to his nature.
+
+"Please suh, don't--don't talk lak that," he entreated. "I ain't
+cravin' to bite nobody a-tall, 'specially 'tis Germans. Live an' let
+live--tha's my sayin'."
+
+"Yep," went on the doctor, prolonging the agony for the victim, "your
+teeth are perfect and your lungs are sound, your heart action is
+splendid and I know something about your appetite myself, having seen
+you eat. Black boy, listen to me! In every respect you are absolutely
+qualified physically to make a regular man-eating bearcat of a
+soldier"--he paused--"in every respect excepting one--no, two."
+
+If a drowning man clutching for a straw might be imagined as
+coincidentally asking a question, it is highly probable he would ask it
+in the tone now used by Jeff.
+
+"Meanin'--meanin' w'ich, suh?"
+
+"I mean your feet. You've got flat feet, Jeff--you've got the flattest
+feet I ever saw. I don't understand it either. So far as I've been able
+to observe you've spent the greater part of your life sitting down.
+Somebody must have hit you on the head with an ax when you were standing
+on a plowshare and broke your arches down."
+
+It was an old joke, but it fitted the present case, and Jeff, not to be
+outdone in politeness, laughed louder at it than its maker did. Indeed
+Jeff felt he had reason to laugh; a great load was lifting from his
+soul.
+
+"Jeff," went on the doctor, "deeply though it may grieve both of us, it
+nevertheless is my painful duty to inform you that you have two
+perfectly good exemptions from military service--a right one and a left
+one. Now grab your hat and get out of here."
+
+"Boss," cried Jeff, "Ise gone. Exemptions, tek me away frum yere!"
+
+So while many others went away to fight or to learn how to fight, as the
+case might be, Jeff stayed behind and did his bit by remaining
+steadfastly cheerful. Never before, sartorially speaking, had he cut so
+splendid a figure as now when such numbers of young white gentlemen of
+his acquaintance were putting aside civilian garb to put on khaki. Jeff
+had one of those adaptable figures. The garments to which he fell heir
+might never have fitted their original owner, but always they would fit
+Jeff. Gorgeous in slightly worn but carefully refurbished raiment, he
+figured in the wartime activities of the colored population and in
+ostensibly helpful capacities figured in some of the activities of the
+white folks too.
+
+Going among his own set his frequent companion was that straw-colored
+light of his social hours, Ophelia Stubblefield. It helped to reconcile
+Jeff to the rigors of the period of enforced rationing as he reflected
+that the same issues and causes which made lump sugar a rarity and fat
+meat a scarcity had rid him of his more dangerous competition in the
+quarter where his affections centered. Particularly on one account did
+he feel reconciled. A spirit of the most soothful resignation filled him
+when he gave thought to the moral certainty that the most formidable and
+fearsome of his rivals, that bloody-minded bravo, Smooth Crumbaugh,
+would daunt him never again with threats of articular dismemberment with
+a new-honed razor. For Smooth Crumbaugh was gone and gone for good.
+First the draft had carried him away and then the pneumonia had carried
+him off. War had its compensations after all.
+
+Wearing Ophelia upon one arm and wearing in the crook of the other a
+high hat which once had been the property of a young man now bossing an
+infantry battalion in the muddiest part of France, Jeff appeared
+prominently in the Armistice celebration at the First Ward Colored
+Baptist Church. Still so accoutered--Ophelia on his one hand and the
+high hat held in proper salute against his breast--he served upon the
+official reception committee headed by the Rev. Potiphar Grasty and by
+Prof. Rutherford B. H. Champers, principal of the Colored High School,
+which greeted the first returning squad of service men of color.
+
+Home-comers who had been clear across the ocean brought back with them
+almost unbelievable but none the less fascinating accounts of life and
+customs in foreign parts. The tales these traveled ones had to tell were
+eagerly listened to and as eagerly passed along, dowered at each time
+of retelling with prodigal enlargements and amplifications the most
+generous.
+
+A ferment of discontent began to stir under the surface of things; a
+sort of inarticulate rebellion against existing conditions, which
+presently manifested itself in small irritations at various points of
+contact with the white race. It was nothing tangible as yet, nothing
+upon which one might put a hand or cap with a word of comprehensive
+description. Indeed it had been working for weeks like a yeast in the
+minds of sundry black folk before their Caucasian neighbors began to
+sense it at all, and for this there was a reason easily understandable
+by anyone born and reared in any sizable town in any one of the older
+states lying below Mason and Dixon's Line. For in each such community
+there are two separate and distinct worlds--a black one and a white
+one--interrelated by necessities of civic coördination and in an
+economic sense measurably dependent one upon the other, and yet in many
+other aspects as far apart as the North Pole is from the South.
+
+Regarding what the white world is feeling and thinking and saying, the
+lesser black world that is set down within it is nearly always better
+informed than is the other and larger group touching on new movements
+and growing sentiments amongst the darker-skinned factors. Into the
+white man's house, serving in this or that domestic capacity, goes the
+negro as an observant witness to the moods and emotions of his or her
+employer and bringing away an understanding of the family complexities
+and the current trend of opinion as it shapes itself beneath that roof.
+
+But the white man, generally speaking, views the negro's private life
+only from the outside, and if he be a Southern-born white man, wise in
+his generation, seeks to look no further, for surface garrulity and
+surface exuberance do not deceive him, but serve only to make him
+realize all the more clearly that he is dealing with members of what at
+heart is one of the most secretive and sensitive of all the breeds of
+men. But since this started out to be the chronicle of an episode
+largely relating to Jeff Poindexter and one other and not a
+psychological study of actions and reactions as between the two most
+numerous races in this republic, it is perhaps as well that we should
+get on with our narrative.
+
+If the leaven of unrest, vague and formless as it was at the outset,
+properly might be said to date from the time of the return of divers
+black veterans, it took on shape and substance after the advent of one
+Dr. J. Talbott Duvall, an individual engaging in manner, and in
+language, dress and deportment fascinating beyond degree; likewise an
+organizer by profession and a charmer of the opposite sex by reason of
+qualifications both natural and acquired.
+
+A doctor he was, as witness the handle to his name, and yet a doctor of
+any known variety he was not. Confessedly he was no doctor of medicine,
+though his speech dripped gorgeous ear-filling Latin words which sounded
+as though they might be the names of difficult and sinister diseases;
+nor was he doctor of divinity, though speedily he proved himself to be
+at home in pulpits. He was not a horse doctor or a corn doctor or a
+conjure doctor or a root-and-herb doctor or a healer by faith or the
+laying on of hands. His title, it seemed, was his by virtue of a degree
+conferred upon him by a college--a white man's college--somewhere in the
+North. His accent was that of a traveled cosmopolite superimposed upon
+the speech of a place away off somewhere called the West Indies. He had
+money and he spent it; he had a wardrobe of distinction and he wore it;
+he had a gift for argumentation and he exercised it; he had a way with
+the ladies and he used it. His coming had created a social furor; his
+subsequent ministrations amounted to what for lack of a better word is
+commonly called a sensation.
+
+If there were those who from motives, let us say, of envy looked with
+the jaundiced eye of disfavor upon his mounting popularity and his
+constantly widening scope of influence they mainly kept their own
+counsel or at least refrained from voicing their private prejudices in
+public places. One gets fewer bumps traveling with the crowd than
+against it.
+
+Even so bold a spirit and customarily so outspoken a speaker as Aunt
+Dilsey Turner, Judge Priest's black cook of many years' incumbency, saw
+fit somewhat to dissemble on the occasion of a call paid by Sister
+Eldora Menifee, who came dressed to kill and inspired by the zeal of the
+new convert to win yet other converts. Entering by way of the alley gate
+one fine forenoon, Sister Eldora found Aunt Dilsey sitting in the
+kitchen doorway hulling out a mess of late green peas newly picked from
+the house garden.
+
+"Sist' Turner," began the visitor, "I hopes I ain't disturbin' you by
+runnin' in on you this mawnin'."
+
+"Honey," said Aunt Dilsey, "you're jes' ez welcome ez day is frum night.
+Lemme fetch you a cheer out yere on the gallery." And she made as if to
+heave her vast comfortable bulk upright.
+
+"No'm, set right where you is," begged Sister Menifee. "I ain't got only
+jes' a few minutes to stay. Things is mighty pressin' with me. I got
+quite a number of my lady frien's to see to-day an' you happens to be
+the fust one on de list."
+
+"Is tha' so?" inquired Aunt Dilsey. Her tone was cordiality itself, but
+one less carried away by the enthusiasm of the mission which had brought
+her than Sister Eldora Menifee was might have caught a latent gleam of
+hostility in the elder woman's eye. "Well, go on, Ise lis'enin'."
+
+"Well, Sist' Turner, ef you's heared 'bout de work I been doin' lately
+I reckin mebbe you kin guess whut brung me to yore do'. I is solicitin'
+you fur yore fellership ez a reg'lar member of de ladies' auxiliary of
+de new s'ciety w'ich Doct' J. Talbott Duvall is got up."
+
+"Meanin' perzactly w'ich s'ciety? Dis yere Doct' Duvall 'pears to be so
+busy gittin' up fust one thing an' then 'nother seems lak I ain't been
+able to keep track of his doin's, 'count of my bein' so slow gittin'
+round on my feet by reason of de rheumatism."
+
+"Meanin' de Shinin' Star Cullid Uplift and Progress League--dat's de
+principalest activity in w'ich he's now engaged. De dues is one dollar
+down on 'nitiation an' twenty cents a week an'--"
+
+"Wait jes' one minute, Sist' Menifee, ef you please. 'Fore we gits any
+furder 'long answer me dis one question Ise fixin' to ast you--do dis
+yere new lodge perpose to fune'lize de daid?"
+
+"We ain't tuck up dat point yit; doubtless we'll come to de plans fur
+dat part later. Fur de time bein' de work is jes' to form de ladies'
+auxiliary an' git de main objec's set fo'th."
+
+"Lis'en, chile. Me, I don't aim never so long as I lives an' keeps my
+reason to jine no lodge w'ich don't start out fust thing by fune'lizin'
+de daid. Ise thinkin' now of de case of dat pore shif'less Sist'
+Clarabelle Hardin dat used to live out yere on Plunkett's Hill. She up
+an' jined one of dese newfandangle' lodges w'ich didn't have nothin' to
+it but a fancy name an' a fancy strange nigger man runnin' it, an' right
+on top of dat she up an' died 'thout a cent to her back. An' you know
+whut happen den? Well, I'm gwine tell you. Dat pore chile laid round de
+house daid fur gwine on three days an' den she jes' natchelly had to git
+out to de cemetery de bes' way she could. Not fur me, honey, not fur me.
+Dey got to have de money in de bank waitin' an' ready to bury de fus'
+member dat passes frum dis life before dey gits a cent of mine."
+
+"But dis yere lodge is gwine have a more 'portant puppose 'en jes' to
+fune'lize de daid," protested Sister Eldora. "We aims to do somethin'
+fur de livin' whilst yet dey's still alive. Curious you ain't tuck
+notice of de signs of de times ez dey's been expounded 'mongst de people
+by Doct' Duvall. He sho' kin 'splain things in a way to mek you a true
+believer." The advocate of the new order of things sank her voice to a
+discreet half whisper. "Sist' Turner, we aims at gittin' mo' of de
+rights dat's due us. We aims to see dat de pore an' de lowly an' de
+downtrodden-on is purtected in dey rights. We aims--"
+
+"Num'mine whut you aims at--de question is, is you gwine be able hit
+whar you aims? An' lemme tell you somethin' more, Sist' Eldora Menifee.
+I ain't needin' no ladies' auxiliary to tell me whut my rights is.
+Neither I ain't needin' to pay out no twenty cents a week to find out
+neither. W'en it comes to dat, all de ladies' auxiliary w'ich I needs is
+jes' me, myse'f. I knows good an' well whut my rights is already an' Ise
+gwine have 'em, too, or somebody'll sho' git busted plum wide open. Mind
+you, I ain't sayin' nothin' 'ginst dis new man nur 'ginst dem w'ich
+chooses to follow 'long after his teachin's. Ise jes' sayin' dat so fur
+ez my jinin' in wid dis yere lodge is concern' you's wastin' yore
+breath. Better pass along, honey, to de nex' one on dat list of your'n,
+'thout you's a mind to stay yere an' watch me dish up Jedge Priest's
+vittles fur 'im."
+
+"Mebbe if Doct' Duvall wuz to come hisse'f an' mek manifest to you de
+high pupposes--" began Sister Eldora. But Aunt Dilsey cut her off short.
+
+"Wouldn't mek no diffe'nce ef he come eighty times a day an' twice ez
+offen on Sunday. Anyway, I reckins my day fur jinin' things is done
+over."
+
+There was a dead weight of finality in her words. She rose heavily. As
+Sister Menifee departed Aunt Dilsey became aware of the presence of Jeff
+Poindexter. He was emerging from behind the door.
+
+"Been hidin' inside dat kitchen lis'enin', I s'pose?" demanded Aunt
+Dilsey.
+
+"Couldn't help frum hearin'," admitted Jeff. It was evident that he was
+not deeply grieved over the failure of Sister Menifee to make headway
+against Aunt Dilsey's opposition. "At the last you suttinly give dat
+woman her marchin' orders, didn't you, Aunt Dilsey?"
+
+"An' sech wuz my intention frum de start off," she confided. "Minute she
+come th'ough dat back gate yonder I knowed whut she wuz comin' fur an' I
+wuz set an' ready wid de words waitin' on de tip of my tongue."
+
+"Me, I don't fancy dat Duvall neither," stated Jeff. "I ain't been
+sayin' much 'bout him one way or 'nother but I been doin' a heap o'
+steddyin'."
+
+"Yas, I knows all 'bout dat too," snapped Aunt Dilsey. "I got eyes in my
+haid. You los' yore taste fur dis yere big-talkin', fine-lookin' man jes
+ez soon ez he started sparkin' round dat tore-down limb of a 'Phelia
+Stubblefield. Whut ails you is you is jealous; hadn't been fur dat I lay
+you'd be runnin' round wid yore tongue hangin' out suckin' in ever'thing
+he sez ez de gospil truth same ez a lot of dese other weak-minded ones
+is doin'. Oh, I know you, boy, frum ze ground up! An' furthermo' I knows
+dis Doct' Duvall likewise also, even ef I ain't never seen him but oncet
+or twicet sence fust he come yere to dis town all dress' up lak a
+persidin' elder. I don't lak his looks an' I don't lak his ways, jedgin'
+by whut I hears of 'em frum dis one an' dat one, an' most in special I
+don't lak his color. He ain't clear brown lak whut I is, an' he ain't
+muddy black lak whut you is, neither he ain't high yaller lak some is.
+To me he looks most of all lak de ground side of a nickel wahtermelon.
+An' in all de goin' on sixty-two yeahs of my life I ain't never seen no
+pusson callin' theyselves Affikins dat had dat kind of a sickly
+greenish-yaller-whitish complexion but whut trouble come pourin' frum
+'em sooner or later, an' most gin'rally sooner, lak manna pourin' from
+de gourd of de Prophet Jonah. Dat man is a ravelin' wolf, ef ever I seen
+one."
+
+"Whut kind of a wolf did you say, Aunt Dilsey?" asked Jeff.
+
+"Consult de Scriptures an' you won't be so ignunt," she answered
+crushingly. "Consult de Scriptures an' you'll read whar de ravelin' wolf
+come down on de fold, an' whut he done to de fold after he'd done come
+down on it wuz more'n aplenty. An' now, boy, you git on out of my
+kitchen an' go on 'bout yore business--ef you's got any business, w'ich
+I doubts. I ain't got no mo' time to waste on you den whut I is on dat
+flighty-haided Eldora Menifee, a-traipsin' round frum one back do' to
+'nother with her talk 'bout ladies' auxiliaries an' gittin' yo rights
+fur a dollah down an' twenty cents a week."
+
+Jeff faded away. It was comforting in a way to find Aunt Dilsey on his
+side, even though her manner rather indicated she resented the fact that
+he was on hers. A few evenings later he found out something else. He was
+made to know that in another and entirely unsuspected quarter the
+endeavors of the diligently crusading and organizing Duvall person had
+roused more than a passing curiosity.
+
+One evening, supper being over, Judge Priest lingered on in his
+low-ceiled dining room smoking his corncob pipe while Jeff cleared away
+the supper dishes. It was the same high-voiced deliberately
+ungrammatical Judge Priest that the kindly reader may recall--somewhat
+older than at last accounts, somewhat slower in his step--but then he
+never had been given to fast movements--and perhaps just a trifle
+balder.
+
+"Wuz dey anythin' else you wanted, jedge, 'fore I locks up the back of
+the house an' lights out?" Jeff inquired when the table had been reset
+for breakfast.
+
+"Yes, I think mebbe there wuz," drawled the old man. He hesitated a
+moment almost as though at a loss for a proper phrasing of the thing he
+meant to say next. Then: "Jeff, what's come over your race in this town
+here lately?"
+
+"Meanin' w'ich, suh?" countered Jeff. "Me, I ain't notice nothin' out of
+the way--nothin' particular."
+
+"Haven't you? Well, I think I have. Jeff, I don't want to be put in the
+position of pryin' into the private and the personal affairs of other
+folks, reguardless of color. I have to do enough of that sort of thing
+in my official capacity when I'm settin' in judgment up at the big cote
+house. But unless I can get some confidential information frum you I
+don't know where else I'm likely to git it, and at the same time I sort
+of feel as ef I should try to get hold of it somewheres or other ef it's
+humanly possible."
+
+"Yas, suh."
+
+"Now heretofore in this community the two races--white and black--have
+got along purty tolerably well together. We managed to put up with your
+shortcomings and you managed to put up with ours, which at times may
+have been considerable of a strain on both sides. Still we've done it.
+But it seems to me here of late there's been a kind of an undercurrent
+of discontent stirrin' amongst your people--and no logical reason fur it
+either, so fur as I kin see. Yet there it is.
+
+"There wuz that rumpus two-three weeks ago down in Market Square. A
+little more and that affair could have growed into a first-class race
+riot. And here last Saturday night followed that mix-up out by the Union
+Depot when Policeman Gip Futtrell got all carved up and two darkies got
+purty extensively shot. And night before last the trouble that occurred
+on that Belt Line car out in Hollandville; that looked mighty
+threatenin', too, fur a while. And in between all these more serious
+things a lot of little unpleasantnesses keep croppin' up--always takin'
+the form of friction between whites and blacks.
+
+"One of these here occurrences might be what you'd call an accident and
+two of them in rapid succession a coincidence, but it looks to me like
+now it's gittin' to be a habit. It's leadin' to bad blood and what's
+worse it's leadin' to a lot of spilt blood and our city gittin' a bad
+name and all that.
+
+"And I know the respectable black folks in this town don't want that to
+happen any more than the respectable white people do.
+
+"Now then, Jeff, whut's at the bottom of all this--I mean on your side
+of the color line? Who's stirrin' up old grudges and kindlin' new ones?
+I've sort of got my own private suspicions, but I'd like to see ef your
+ideas run along with mine. Got any suggestions as to the underlying
+causes of this ill feelin' that's sprung up so lately and without any
+good reason for it either so fur ez I kin see?"
+
+Now ordinarily Jeff would have held firmly to the doctrine that white
+folks should tend to their business and let black folks tend to theirs.
+For all his loyalty to his master, a certain race consciousness in him
+would have bade him keep hands off and tongue locked. But here a strong
+personal prejudice operated to steer Jeff away from what otherwise would
+have been his customary course.
+
+"Jedge," he said, drawing a pace or two nearer his employer, "did you
+ever hear tell of a pale-yaller party w'ich calls hisse'f Doct' J.
+Talbott Duvall dat come yere a few weeks ago?"
+
+"Ah, hah!" said the judge as though satisfied of the correctness of a
+prior conclusion. "I thought possibly my mind might be on the right
+track. Yes, I've heard of him and I've seen him. Whut of him?"
+
+"Jedge, I trusts you won't tell nobody else whut I'm tellin' you, but
+dat's sho' de one dat's at the bottom of the whole mess. He's the one
+dat's plantin' the pizen. Me, I ain't had no truck wid him myse'f, but
+dat ain't sayin' I don't know whut he's doin', case I do. He calls
+hisse'f a organizer."
+
+"Ah, hah! And whut is he organizin'?"
+
+"Trouble, jedge. Dat's whut--trouble fur a lot of folks. Jedge, fo' we
+goes any further lemme ast you a coupler questions, please, suh. Is it
+true dat over dere in some of dem Youropean countries black folks is
+jes' the same ez white folks, ef not more so?"
+
+Choosing his words, the old man elucidated his understanding of the
+social order as it prevailed in certain geographical divisions and
+subdivisions of the continent of Europe.
+
+"Yas, suh, thanky, suh," said Jeff when the judge had finished. "I
+reckin mebbe one main trouble over dere is, jedge, dat dem folks ain't
+been raised de way you an' me is."
+
+"Jeff," said the judge, "I'm inclined to think probably you're right."
+
+"Yas, suh. Now den, jedge, here's one mo' thing. Is it true dat in all
+dem furrin countries--Russia an' Germany an' Bombay an' all--dat the
+po' people, w'ite or black or whutever dey color is, is fixin' to rise
+up in they might an' tek the money an' de gover'mint an' de fine houses
+an' the cream of ever'thing away frum dem dat's had it all 'long?"
+
+Again the judge expounded at length, touching both upon upheavals abroad
+and on discords nearer home. Next it was Jeff's turn to make disclosures
+having a purely local application and he made them. Listening intently,
+Judge Priest puckered his bald brow into furrows of perplexity.
+
+"Jeff," he said finally, "I'm much obliged to you fur tellin' me all
+this. It backs up what I'd sort of figgered out all by myself. The whole
+world appears to be engaged in standin' on its esteemed head at this
+writin'. I reckin when old Mister Kaiser turned loose the war he didn't
+stop to think that mebbe the war was only one of a whole crop of evils
+he wuz lettin' out of his box of tricks. Or mebbe he didn't care--bein'
+the kind of a person he wuz. And I'm prone to believe also that when the
+Germans stopped fightin' us with guns they begun fightin' us with other
+weapons almost as dangersome to our peace of mind and future well-bein'.
+Different parts of this country are in quite a swivet--agitators
+preachin' bad doctrine--some of 'em drawin' pay from secret enemies
+across the sea fur preachin' it, too, I figger--and a lot of highly
+disagreeable disturbances croppin' up here and there. But I was hopin'
+that mebbe our little corner of the world wouldn't be pestered. But now
+it looks ez ef we weren't goin' to escape our share of the trouble."
+
+"Jedge," asked Jeff, "ain't they some way dis Duvall pusson could be
+fetched up in cote? I suttinly would admire to see dat yaller man
+wearin' a striped suit of clothes."
+
+"Well, Jeff," said the judge, "I doubt either the legality or the
+propriety of such a step, ef you get what I mean. From whut you tell me
+I don't see where he's really broken any laws. He's got a right to come
+here and organize his societies and lodges and things so long as he
+don't actually come out in the open and preach violence. He's got a
+perfect right under the law to organize this here new drill company you
+speak about. I sometimes think that ef all the young men in this country
+had been required to do a little more drillin' in years gone by we'd be
+feelin' somewhat safer to-day. Anyway, it's a mighty great mistake
+sometimes to make a martyr out of a rascal. Puttin' him in jail, unless
+you're absolutely certain that a jail is where he properly belongs,
+gives him a chance to raise the cry of persecution and gives his
+followers an excuse to cut loose and smash up things. You git my drift,
+don't you?"
+
+"Yas, suh, think I do. Well den, suh, ef I wuz runnin' dis town seems to
+me I'd git a crowd of strong-minded gen'elmen together some evenin' in
+the dark of the moon an' let 'em call on dis yere slick-haided
+half-strainer an' invite him to tek his foot in his hand an' marvil
+further. Ef one of 'em wuz totin' a rope in his hand sorter keerless lak
+it might help. Ropes is powerful influential. An' the sight of tar an'
+feathers meks a mighty strong argument, too, Ise heared tell."
+
+"Jeff," said the judge, "I'm astonished that you'd even suggest sech a
+thing! Mob law is worse even than no law at all. Besides," he added--and
+now there was a small twinkle in his eye to offset to a degree the
+severity in his tones--"besides, the feller that was bein' called on by
+the committee might decline to take the hint and then purty soon you
+might have another self-made martyr on your hands. But ef he ran away on
+his own hook now--ef something came up that made him go of his own
+accord and go fast and cut a sort of a cheap figure in the eyes of his
+deluded followers whilst he was goin'--that'd be a different thing
+altogether. Start a crowd of folks, white or black or brown, to laughin'
+at a feller and they'll quit believin' in him. Worshipin' a false god
+and laughin' at him at the same time never has been successfully done
+yit."
+
+He sucked his pipe. "Jeff," he resumed, "what do you know, ef anything,
+about the past career and movements of this here J. Talbott Et Cetery?"
+
+Jeff knew a good deal--at second hand. Didn't the object of his deepest
+aversions persist in almost nightly calls upon the object of his
+deepest affections? Paying such calls, didn't the enemy spend
+hours--hours upon hours doubtless--pouring into Ophelia's ear accounts
+of his recent triumphs as an uplifter in other towns and other states?
+Didn't the fascinated and flattered Ophelia in turn recount these tales
+to one whose opportunities for traveling and seeing the great world had
+been more circumscribed? Had not Jeff writhed in jealous misery the
+while he heard the annals of a rival's successes? So Jeff made prompt
+answer.
+
+"Yas, suh, I suttinly does. Ise heared a right smart 'bout dis yere
+Duvall's past life frum--frum somebody. 'Cordin' to the way he norrates
+it, he wuz in Nashville, Tennessee 'fore he come yere; an' 'fore dat in
+Mobile, Alabama; an' 'fore dat in Little Rock, Arkansaw. Seem lak w'en
+he ain't organizin' or speechifyin' he ain't got nothin' better to do
+den run round amongst young cullid gals braggin' 'bout the places he's
+been an' the things he done whilst in 'em."
+
+Jeff spoke with an enhanced bitterness.
+
+"I see. Then I take it ef he spends so much time in seekin' out female
+society that he's not a married man?"
+
+"So he say--so he say! But, Jedge Priest, ef ever I looked on the
+spittin'-image of a natchel-born marryin' nigger, dat ver' same Duvall
+is de one."
+
+Judge Priest seemed not to have heard this last. He sat for a bit
+apparently studying the tips of his square-toed, low-quarter shoes.
+
+"Jeff," he said when he had given his feet a long half minute of seeming
+consideration, "I would like to know some facts about the previous life
+and general history of the individual we've been discussin'--I really
+would. In fact my curiosity is sech that I might even be willin' to
+spend a little money out of my own pocket, ef needs be, in order to find
+out. So I was jest wonderin' whether you wouldn't like to take a little
+trip, with all expenses paid, and tour round through some of our sister
+states and make a few private inquiries. It occurs to me that everything
+considered you might make a better job of it as an amateur investigator
+than a regular professional detective of a different color might. Do you
+know where by any chance you could git hold of a good photograph of this
+here individual--I mean without lettin' him know anything about it?"
+
+"Yas, suh, dat I does," stated Jeff briskly.
+
+The conference between master and man lasted perhaps fifteen minutes
+longer before Jeff was dismissed for the night. Mainly it dealt with
+ways, means and purposes. Upon the heels of it, within forty-eight hours
+two events--seemingly nowise related or bearing one upon the
+other--occurred. An ornately framed photograph lately bestowed as a gift
+and treasured as a trophy of sentimental value mysteriously vanished
+from the mantelpiece of the front room of Ophelia Stubblefield's pa's
+house; and Jefferson Poindexter, carrying a new and very shiny suitcase,
+unostentatiously left town late at night on a southbound train.
+
+Darktown in Nashville knew him for a brief space as a visiting nobleman
+with money in all his pockets and apparently nothing of importance to do
+except to spend it in divertisements suitable to the social instincts of
+a capitalist of leisure. In Mobile at the Elite Colored Beauty Parlors
+for the first time in his life he tendered his finger nails for
+ministrations at the hands of a dashing chocolate-ice-cream-colored
+manicurist and spent the remainder of that same afternoon in a sunny
+spot, glistening pleasantly.
+
+If in both these cities and likewise in Little Rock, which next he
+favored with his presence, he made himself known to brothers of his
+particular lodge--the Afro-American Order of Supreme Kings of the
+Universe has a large and a widely distributed membership--and if under
+the sacred pledge of secrecy which only may be broken on pain of
+mutilation and death by torture he--with the aid of these fraternal
+allies of his--conducted certain discreet inquiries, why, that was his
+own private business. Assuredly, so far as surface indications counted,
+he appeared to have no business other than pleasurable pursuits. From
+Little Rock he turned his face southeastward, landing at Macon, Georgia,
+where he lingered on for upward of a week, breaking his visit only by a
+day's side trip to a smaller town south of Macon. Altogether Jeff was
+an absentee from his favorite haunts back home for the greater part of a
+month.
+
+He reached town on a Monday. Betimes Tuesday morning, inspired outwardly
+by the zeal of one just won over from skepticism to the immediate
+advisability of following a sapient course, he sought opportunity to
+become a member in good standing of the Shining Star Colored Uplift and
+Progress League, a simple ceremony and a brief, since it involved merely
+the signing of one's name on Dotted Line A of a printed form card and
+the paying of a dollar into the hand of Dr. J. Talbott Duvall. On
+Tuesday evening the league met in stated session at Hillman's Hall on
+Yazoo Street and Jeff was early on hand, visibly enthusiastic and
+professedly ready to do all within his power to further the aims and
+intents of the organization. As a brand snatched from the burning he was
+elevated before the eyes of the assemblage so that all might see him and
+mark his mien of newborn fervor, for Doctor Duvall, following his
+custom, called to places upon the platform the proselytes enrolled since
+the previous meeting, to the end that older members might observe the
+physical proof of a steady and a healthful growth.
+
+So there sat Jefferson in the very front row of wooden chairs, where all
+might behold him and he might behold all and sundry. About him were his
+recent fellow converts. Almost directly behind him was a door giving
+upon a side entrance; there was another door serving similar purposes
+upon the opposite side of the stage. Beyond him to the left in the
+center of the stage were grouped the honorary officers of the league,
+flanking and supporting their chief.
+
+Being an honorary officer carried with it, as the title might imply,
+honor and prominence second only to that enjoyed by the
+president-organizer, but it entailed no great weight of responsibility,
+since practically all the actual work of the league had from the very
+outset been generously assumed by Doctor Duvall. It was he who cared for
+the funds, he who handled disbursements, he who conducted the
+proceedings, he who made the principal addresses on meeting nights, he
+who between meetings labored without cessation to spread educational
+propaganda. That he found time for all these purposeful endeavors and
+yet crowded in such frequent opportunity for mingling socially among the
+lambs of his flock--notably the ewe lambs--was but evidence,
+accumulating daily, of his genius for leadership and direction.
+
+This night the session opened with a prayer--by Doctor Duvall; an
+eloquent and a moving prayer indeed, its sonorous periods set off and
+adorned with noble big words and quotations in foreign tongues. The
+prayer would be followed, it had been announced, by the reading of the
+minutes of the previous session, after which Doctor Duvall would speak
+at length with particular reference to things lately accomplished and
+the even more important things in contemplation for the near future.
+
+Standing for the prayer, Jeff could look out over what a master of words
+before now has fitly described as a sea of upturned faces--faces black,
+brown and yellow. Had he been minded to give thought to details he might
+have noted how at every polysyllabic outburst from the inspired
+invocationist old Uncle Ike Fauntleroy, himself accounted a powerful
+hand at wrestling with sinners in prayer, was visibly jolted by
+admiration; might, if he had had a head for figures, have kept count of
+the hearty amens with which Sister Eldora Menifee punctuated each pause
+when Doctor Duvall was taking a fresh breath; might have cast a side
+glance upon Ophelia Stubblefield in a new and most becoming hat with
+ostrich plumage grandly surmounting it. But under the hand which he held
+reverently cupped over his brow Jeff's eyes were fixed upon a certain
+focal point,--to wit, the door of the main entrance at the length of the
+hall from him. It was as though Jeff waited for something or somebody he
+was expecting.
+
+Nor did he have so very long to wait. The prayer was done and well done.
+In its wake, so to speak, there spouted up from every side veritable
+geysers of hallelujahs and amens. The honorary secretary, Brother Lemuel
+Diuguid, smelling grandly of expensive hair ointments--Brother Diuguid
+being by calling a head barber--stood up to read the minutes of the
+preceding regular session, and having read them sat down again. A
+friendly and flattering bustle of anticipation filled the body of the
+hall as Doctor Duvall rose and moved one pace forward and--raising a
+hand for silence--began to speak. But he had no more than begun, had
+progressed no farther than part way of his first smoothly launched
+sentence, when he was made to break off by an unseemly interruption at
+the rear. The honorary grand inner guard on duty at the far street door,
+after a brief and unsuccessful struggle with unseen forces, was observed
+to be shoved violently aside from his post. Bursting in together there
+entered two strangers--a tall yellow woman and a short black man, and
+both of them of a most grim and determined aspect. He moved fast, this
+man, but even so his companion moved faster still. She was three paces
+ahead of him when, bulging impetuously past those who sprang into the
+center aisle as though to halt her onward rush--all others present being
+likewise up on their feet--she came to a halt near the middle of the
+hall and, glaring about her defiantly, just double-dog-dared any present
+to lay so much as the weight of one detaining finger upon her. There was
+something about her calculated to daunt the most willing of volunteer
+opponents, and so while those at a safe distance demanded the ejection
+of the intruders, those nearer her hesitated.
+
+"Th'ow me out?" she whooped, echoing the words of outraged and startled
+members of the Shining Star. "I'd lak to see de one dat's gwine try it!
+An' 'fo' anybody talk 'bout th'owin' out lettum heah me whilst I sez my
+say!"
+
+Towering until she seemed to increase in stature by inches, she aimed a
+long and bony finger dead ahead.
+
+"Ax dat slinky yaller man up yonder on dat flatfo'm ef he gwine give de
+order to th'ow me out!" she clarioned in a voice which rose to a
+compelling shriek. "But fust off ax him whut he meant--marryin' me in
+Mobile, Alabama, an' den runnin' 'way frum his lawful wedded wife under
+cover of de night! Ax him--dat's all, ax him!"
+
+"An' ax him one thing mo'!" It was the voice of her short companion
+rising above the tumult. "Ax him whut he done wid de funds of de s'ciety
+he 'stablished at Little Rock, Arkansaw, all of w'ich he absconded wid
+dis last spring!"
+
+As though the same set of muscles controlled every neck the heads of all
+swung about, their eyes following where the accusers pointed, their ears
+twitching for the expected blast of denial and denunciation which would
+wither these mad and scandalous detractors in their tracks.
+
+Alas and alackaday! With his splendid figure suddenly all diminished and
+shrunken, with distress writ large and plain upon his features, the
+popular idol was step by step flinching backward from the edge of the
+platform--was step by step inching, edging toward the side door in the
+right-hand wall.
+
+And in this same instant the stunned assemblage realized that Jeff
+Poindexter, by nimble maneuvering, had thrust himself between the
+retreating figure and the exit, and Jeff was crying out: "Not dis way
+out, Doct' Duvall. Not dis way! The one you married down below Macon is
+waitin' fur you behin' dis do'!"
+
+The doctor stopped in midflight and swung about and his eye fell upon
+the right-hand door and he moved a yard or two in that direction; but no
+more than a yard or two, for again Jeff spoke in warning, halting him
+short:
+
+"Not dat way neither! The one frum dat other town whar you uster live is
+waitin' outside dat do'--wid a pistil! Seems lak you's entirely
+s'rounded by wives dis evenin'!"
+
+To the verge of the footlights the beset man darted, and like a
+desperate swimmer plunging from a foundering bark into a stormy sea he
+leaped far out and projected himself, a living catapult, along the
+middle aisle. He struck the tall yellow woman as the irresistible force
+strikes the supposedly immovable object of the scientists' age-old
+riddle, but on his side was impetus and on hers surprise. She was bowled
+over flat and her hands, clutching as she went down, closed, but on
+empty and unresisting air. Literally he hurdled over the stocky form of
+the little black man behind her, but as the other flitted by him the
+fists of the stranger knotted firmly into the skirts of its wearer's
+long black frock coat and held on. There was a rending, tearing sound
+and as the back breadth of the garment ripped bodily away from the
+waistband there flew forth from the capsized tail pockets a veritable
+cloudburst of currency--floating, fluttering green and yellow bills and
+with them pattering showers of dollars and halves and dimes and quarters
+and nickels.
+
+That canny instinct which had led the fugitive apostle of the uplift to
+hide the collected funds of the league upon his person rather than trust
+to banks and strong boxes was to prove his ruination financially but his
+salvation physically. While those who had believed in him, now
+forgetting all else, scrambled for the scattered money--their money--he
+fled out of the unguarded door and was instantly gone into the shielding
+night--a sorry shape in a bob-tailed garment.
+
+At a somewhat later hour Judge Priest in his living room was receiving
+from Jefferson Poindexter a much lengthier and more elaborated account
+of the main occurrences of the evening at Hillman's Hall than has here
+been presented. Speaking as he did in the dual rôle of spectator and of
+an actuating force in the events of that crowded and exciting night,
+Jeff spared no details. He had come to the big scene of his narrative
+when his master interrupted him:
+
+"Hold on a minute, Jeff! I don't know ez I get the straight of it all
+yit. I rather gathered frum whut you told me yesterday when you landed
+back home and made your report that you'd only been able to dig up one
+certain-sure wife of this feller's--the one that came along with you and
+that little Arkansaw darky. You didn't say anything then about bein'
+able to prove he wuz a bigamist."
+
+"Huh, jedge, I didn't have to prove it! Dat man wuz more'n jes' a plain
+bigamist. He sho' wuz a trigamist, an' ef the full truth wuz knowed I
+'spects he wuz a quadrupler at the very least. He proved it hisself--way
+he act' w'en the big 'splosion come."
+
+"But the two women you told him were waitin' behind those side doors for
+him--how about them?"
+
+"Law, jedge, dey wuzn't dere--neither one of 'em wuzn't. Jes' lak I told
+you yistiddy, I couldn't find only jest one woman dat nigger'd married
+an' run off frum, an' her I fetched 'long wid me. But lak I also told
+you, I got kind of traces of one dat uster live below Macon but w'ich is
+now vanished, an' ever'whar else I went whar he'd lived befo' he come
+yere de signs wuz manifold dat he wuz a natchel-born marryin' fool, jes'
+lak I 'spicioned fust time ever I see him. So w'en he started fur dat
+fust do' I taken a chancet on him an' w'en I seen how he cringed an'
+ducked back I taken another chancet on him, an' the subsequent evidences
+offers testimony dat both times I reckined right. Jedge, the late Doct'
+Duvall muster married some powerful rough-actin' gals in his time ef he
+thought the Mobile one wuz the gentlest out of three. Well, anyway, suh,
+the ravelin' wolf is gone frum us, an' fur one I ain't 'spectin' him
+back never no mo'. An' I reckin dat's the main pint wid you an' me
+both."
+
+"The ravelin' whut?"
+
+"Dat's whut Aunt Dilsey called him oncet, speechifyin' to me 'bout
+him--the ravelin' wolf. Only he suttinly did look he wuz comin'
+unraveled mighty fast the last I seen of him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+"WORTH 10,000"
+
+
+You might have called Vincent C. Marr a self-made man and be making no
+mistake about it. For he was self-made; not merely self-assembled, as so
+many men are who attain distinction in this profession or that calling.
+Entirely through his own efforts, with only his native wit to light the
+way for him, he had pulled himself up, step by step, from the very
+bottom of his trade to the very top of it. His trade was the applied
+trade of crookedness; his pursuit the pursuit of other folks' cash
+resources. He had the envy and admiration of his friends in allied
+branches of the same general industry; he had the begrudged respect of
+his official enemies, the police; while his accomplishments--the tricks
+he pulled, the coups he scored, the purses he garnered--were discussed
+and praised by the human nits and lice of the Seamy Side, just as the
+achievements in a legitimate field of a Hill or a Schwab or a
+Rockefeller might be talked of among petty shopkeepers and little
+business men. He had, as the phrase goes, everything--imagination,
+resource, ingenuity, audacity, utter ruthlessness.
+
+Yet it would seem hard to conceive a more humble beginning than his had
+been. His father was a cobbler in a little West Virginia coal town. At
+sixteen he ran away from home to go with a small circus. This circus was
+a traveling shield for all manner of rough extortioners. Card sharps,
+shell workers, petermen, sneak thieves, pickpockets, even burglars rode
+its train. They had a saying that the owner of this show sold the
+safe-blowing privileges outright but retained a one-third interest in
+the hold-up concession. That was a whimsical exaggeration of what
+perhaps had a kern of truth in it. Certainly it was the fact of the case
+that the owner depended more upon his lion's cut of the swag which the
+trailing jackals amassed than upon the intake at the ticket windows. Bad
+weather might kill his business for a week; a crop failure might lame it
+for a month; but the graft was as sure as anything graftified can be.
+When the runaway youth, Vince Marr, inserted himself beneath the
+protecting wing of this patron he knew exactly whither his ultimate
+ambitions tended. He had no vague boyish design to serve a 'prenticeship
+as stake driver or roustabout in the hope some day of graduating into a
+rider or a tumbler, a ringmaster or a clown. He joined out in order that
+among these congenial influences he might the quicker become an
+accomplished thief.
+
+Starting as a novice he had to carve out his own little niche in
+company where the competition already was fierce. His rise, though, was
+rapid. So far as the records show he was the first of the Monday guys.
+He developed the line himself and gave to it its name. A Monday guy was
+a plunderer of clotheslines. He followed the route of the daily street
+parade; rather he followed a route running roughly parallel to it. He
+set out coincidentally with it and he aimed to have his pilfering stint
+finished when the parade was over. He prowled in alleys and skinned over
+back fences, progressing from house yard to house yard while the parade
+passed through the streets upon which the houses faced. From kitchen
+boilers and laundry heaps, from wash baskets and drying ropes, he
+skimmed the pick of what was offered--silk shirts, fancy hose, women's
+embroidered blouses, women's belaced under-things. His work was made
+comparatively easy for him, since the dwellers of the houses would be
+watching the parade.
+
+His strippings he carried to the show lot and there he hid them away.
+That night in the privilege car the collections of the day would be
+disposed of by sale or trade to members of the troupe and the affiliated
+rogues. Especially desirable pieces might be reserved to be shipped on
+to a professional receiver of stolen goods in a certain city. Naturally,
+pickings were at their best on a Monday, for since Mother Eve on the
+first Monday hanged her fig leaf out to dry, Monday has been wash day
+the world over. Hence the name for the practitioner of the business.
+
+Vince Marr did not very long remain a Monday guy. The risks were not
+very great, everything considered. Suppose detection did come; suppose
+the cry of "Stop thief!" was raised. Who would quit watching a circus
+parade to join in a hunt for a marauder already vanished in a maze of
+outbuildings and alleyways? Still there were risks to be taken, and the
+rewards on the whole were small and uncertain. Before he reached his
+nineteenth year young Marr was the manager of a weighing pitch.
+Apparently he had but one associate in the enterprise; as a matter of
+fact he had four. In the place where holidaying crowds gathered--on a
+circus lot, at a street carnival, outside the gates of a county fair--he
+and his visible partner would set up his weighing device, and then
+stationing himself near it he would beseech you to let him guess your
+correct weight. If he guessed within three pounds of it, as recorded by
+the machine, you owed him a nickel; if he failed to guess within three
+pounds of it you owed him nothing. "Take a chance, brother!" he would
+entreat you with friendly jovial banter. "Be a sport--take a chance!"
+Let us say you accepted his proposition. Swiftly he would flip with his
+hands along your sides, would slap your flanks, would pinch you gently
+as though testing your flesh for solidity, then would call out loudly
+so that all within earshot might hear: "I figure that the gentleman
+weighs--let me see--exactly one hundred and forty-seven pounds." Or
+perhaps he would predict: "This big fellow will pull her down at two
+hundred and eight pounds, no more and no less." Then you placed yourself
+in the swinging seat of the machine with your feet clear of the earth,
+and his partner duly weighed you. Sometimes Marr guessed your weight;
+quite as often, though, he failed to come within three pounds of it and
+you paid him nothing for his pains. It was difficult to figure how so
+precarious a means of income could be made to yield a proper return
+unless the scales were dishonest.
+
+The scales were honest enough. The real profits were derived from quite
+a different source. Three master dips--pickpockets--were waiting for you
+as you moved off; they attended to your case with neatness and dispatch.
+Their work was expedited for them by reason that already they knew where
+you carried your valuables. Once Marr ran his swift and practiced
+fingers over your body he knew where your watch was, your wallet, your
+purse for small change, your roll of bills.
+
+A code word in his patter advertised to his confederates exactly
+whereabouts upon your person the treasure was carried. Really the
+business gave splendid returns. It was Marr, though, who had seized upon
+it when it merely was a catchpenny carnival device and made of it a
+real money earner. Moreover, the pickpockets took the real peril. Even
+in the infrequent event of the detection of them there was no evidence
+to justify the suspicion that the proprietors of the weighing machine
+were accessories to the pocket looting. Vince Marr was like that--always
+playing safe for himself, always thinking a jump ahead of his crowd and
+a jump and a half ahead of the police.
+
+He was never the one to get into a rut and stay there. Long before the
+old-time grafting circuses grew scarce and scarcer, and before the
+street-fairing concessions progressed out of their primitive beginnings
+into orderly and recognized organizations, he had quitted both fields
+for higher and more lucrative ramifications of his craft. Ask any
+old-time con man who ostensibly has reformed. If he tells you the
+truth--which is doubtful--he will tell you it was Chappy Marr who really
+evolved the fake foot-racing game, who patched up the leaks in the
+wireless wire-tapping game, who standardized at least two popular forms
+of the send game, who improved marvelously upon three differing versions
+of the pay-off game.
+
+All the time he was perfecting himself in his profession, fitting
+himself for the practice of it in its highermost departments. He learned
+to tone down his wardrobe. He polished his manners until they had a
+gloss on them. He labored assiduously to correct his grammar, and so
+well succeeded at the task that except when he was among associates and
+relapsed into the argot of the breed, he used language fit for a college
+professor--fit for some college professors anyway. At thirty he was a
+glib, spry person with a fancy for gay housings. At forty-five, when he
+reached the top of his swing, he had the looks, the vocabulary and the
+presence of an educated and a traveled person.
+
+He had one technical defect, if defect it might be called. In the larger
+affairs of his unhallowed business he displayed a mental adaptability, a
+talent to think quickly and shift his tactics to meet the suddenly
+arisen emergency, which was the envy of lesser underworld notables; but
+in smaller details of life he was prone to follow the line of least
+resistance, which is true of the most of us, honest and dishonest men
+the same. For instance, though he had half a dozen or more common
+aliases--names which he changed as he changed his collars--he pursued a
+certain fixed rule in choosing them, just as a man in picking out
+neckties might favor mixed weaves and varied patterns but stick always
+to the same general color scheme. He might be Vincent C. Marr, which was
+his proper name, or among intimates Chappy Marr. Then again he might be
+Col. Van Camp Morgan, of Louisiana; or Mr. Vance C. Michaels, a Western
+mine owner; or Victor C. Morehead; he might be a Markham or a Murrill or
+a Marsh or a Murphy as the occasion and the rôle and his humor suited.
+Always, though, the initials were the same. Partly this was for
+convenience--the name was so much easier to remember then--but partly it
+was due to that instinct for ordered routine which in a reputable sphere
+of endeavor would have made this man rather conventional and methodical
+in his personal habits, however audacious and resourceful he might have
+been on his public side and his professional. He especially was lucky in
+that he never acquired any of those mouth-filling nicknames such as
+Paper Collar Joe wore, and Grand Central Pete and Appetite Willie and
+the Mitt-and-a-Half Kid and the late Soapy Smith--picturesque enough,
+all of them, but giving to the wearers thereof an undesirable prominence
+in newspapers and to that added extent curtailing their usefulness in
+their own special areas of operation.
+
+Nor had he ever smelled the chloride-of-lime-and-circus-cage smell of
+the inside of a state's prison; no Bertillon sharp had on file his
+measurements and thumb prints, nor did any central office or detective
+bureau contain his rogues-gallery photograph. Times almost past counting
+he had been taken up on suspicion; more than once had been arrested on
+direct charges, and at least twice had been indicted. But because of
+connections with crooked lawyers and approachable politicians and venal
+police officials and because also of his own individual canniness, he
+always had escaped conviction and imprisonment. There was no stink of
+the stone hoosgow on his correctly tailored garments, and no barber
+other than one of his own choosing had ever shingled Chappy Marr's hair.
+Within reason, therefore, he was free to come and go, to bide and to
+tarry; and come and go at will he did until that unfortuitous hour when
+the affair of the wealthy Mrs. Propbridge and her husband came to pass.
+
+When the period of post-wartime inflation came upon this country
+specialized thievery marched abreast with legitimate enterprise; with it
+as with the other, rewards became tremendously larger; small turnovers
+were regarded as puny and contemptible, and operators thought in terms
+of pyramiding thousands of dollars where before they had been glad to
+strive for speculative returns of hundreds. By now Chappy Marr had won
+his way to the forefront of his kind. The same intelligence invoked, the
+same energies exercised, and in almost any proper field he would before
+this have been a rich man and an honored one. By his twisted code of
+ethics and unmorals, though, the dubious preëminence he enjoyed was
+ample reward. He stood forth from the ruck and run, a creator and a
+leader who could afford to pass by the lesser, more precarious games,
+with their prospect of uncertain takings, for the really big and
+important things. He was like a specialist who having won a prominent
+position may now say that he will accept only such patients as he
+pleases and treat only such cases as appeal to him.
+
+This being so, there were open to him two especially favored lines: he
+might be a deep-sea fisherman, meaning by that a crooked card player
+traveling on ocean steamers; or he might be the head of a swell mob of
+blackmailers preying upon more or less polite society. For the first he
+had not the digital facility which was necessary; his fingers lacked the
+requisite deftness, however agile and flexible the brain which directed
+the fingers might be. So Chappy Marr turned his talents to blackmailing.
+Blackmailing plants had acquired a sudden vogue; nearly all the
+wise-cracking kings and queens of Marr's world had gone or were going
+into them. Moreover, blackmailing offered an opportunity for variety of
+scope and ingenuity in the mechanics of its workings which appealed
+mightily to a born originator. Finally there was a paramount
+consideration. Of all the tricks and devices at the command of the
+top-hole rogue it was the very safest to play. Ninety-nine times out of
+a hundred the victim had his social position or his business reputation
+to think of, else in the first place he would never have been picked on
+as a fit subject for victimizing. Therefore he was all the more disposed
+to pay and keep still, and pay again.
+
+The bait in the trap of the average blackmailing plant is a woman--a
+young woman, good-looking, well groomed and smart. It is with her that
+the quarry is compromisingly entangled. But against women confederates
+Chappy Marr had a strong prejudice. They were such uncertain quantities;
+you never could depend upon them. They were emotional, temperamental;
+they let their sentimental attachments run away with their judgment;
+they fell in love, which was bad; they talked too much, which was worse;
+they were fickle-minded and jealous; they were given to falling out with
+male pals, and they had been known to carry a jealous grudge to the
+point of turning informer. So he set his inventions to the task of
+evolving a blackmailing snare which might be set and sprung, and
+afterwards dismantled and hidden away without the intervention of the
+female knave of the species in any of its stages. Trust him--smooth as
+lubricating oil, a veritable human graphite--to turn the trick. He
+turned it.
+
+The upshot was a lovely thing, almost foolproof and practically
+cop-proof. To be sure, a woman figured in it, but her part was that of
+the chosen prey, not the part of an accessory and accomplice. The
+greater simplicity of the device was attested by the fact that for its
+mounting, from beginning to end, only three active performers were
+needed. The chief rôle he would play. For his main supporting cast he
+needed two men, and knew moreover exactly where to find them. Of these
+two only one would show ever upon the stage. The other would bide out
+of sight behind the scenes, doing his share of the work, unsuspected,
+from under cover.
+
+For the part which he intended her to take in his production--the part
+of dupe--Mrs. Justus Propbridge was, as one might say, made to order.
+Consider her qualifications: young, pretty, impressionable, vain and
+inexperienced; the second wife of a man who even in these times of
+suddenly inflated fortunes was reckoned to be rich; newly come out of
+the boundless West, bringing a bounding social ambition with her;
+spending money freely and having plenty more at command to spend when
+the present supply was gone; her name appearing frequently in those
+newspapers and those weekly and monthly magazines catering particularly
+to the so-called smart set, which is so called, one gathers, because it
+is not a set and is not particularly smart.
+
+Young Mrs. Propbridge figured that her name was becoming tolerably well
+known along the Gold Coast of the North Atlantic Seaboard. It was too.
+For example, there was at least one person entirely unknown to her who
+kept a close tally of her comings and her goings, of her social
+activities, of her mode of daily life. This person was Vincent Marr.
+Thanks to the freedom with which a certain type of journal discusses the
+private and the public affairs of those men and women most commonly
+mentioned in its columns, he presently had in his mind a very clear
+picture of this lady, and he followed her movements, as reflected in
+print, with care and fidelity; it was as though he had a deep personal
+interest in her. For a matter of fact, he did; he had a very personal
+interest in her. He had been doing this for months; in his trade, as in
+many others, patience was not only a virtue but a necessity. For
+example, he knew that her determined and persistent but somewhat crudely
+engineered campaigning to establish herself in what New York calls--with
+a big S--Society was the subject in some quarters of a somewhat thinly
+veiled derision; he knew that her husband was rather an elemental, not
+to say a primitive creature, but genuine and aboveboard and generous, as
+elemental beings are likely to be. Marr figured him to be of the jealous
+type. He hoped he was; it might simplify matters tremendously.
+
+On a certain summer morning a paragraph appeared in at least three daily
+papers to the effect that Mr. and Mrs. Justus Propbridge had gone down
+to Gulf Stream City, on the Maryland coast; they would be at the
+Churchill-Fontenay there for a week or ten days. It was at his breakfast
+that Marr read this information. At noon, having in the meantime done a
+considerable amount of telephoning, he was on his way to the seaside
+too. Mentally he was shaking hands with himself in a warmly
+congratulatory way. Gulf Stream City was a place seemingly designed,
+both by Nature and by man, for the serving of his purposes.
+
+Residing there were persons of his own kidney and persuasion, on whom
+he might count for at least one detail of invaluable coöperation. For a
+certain act of his piece, a short but highly important one, he also must
+have a borrowed stage setting and a supernumerary actor or so.
+
+Immediately upon his arrival he sought out certain dependable
+individuals and put them through a rough rehearsal. This he did before
+he claimed the room he had engaged by wire at the Hotel Crofter. The
+Hotel Crofter snuggled its lesser bulk under an imposing flank of the
+supposedly exclusive and admittedly expensive Churchill-Fontenay. From
+its verandas one might command a view of the main entrance of the
+greater hotel.
+
+It was on a Tuesday that the Propbridges reached Gulf Stream City. It
+was on Wednesday afternoon that the husband received a telegram, signed
+with the name of a business associate, calling him to Toledo for a
+conference--so the wire stated--upon an urgent complication newly
+arisen. Mr. Propbridge, as all the world knew, was one of the heaviest
+stockholders and a member of the board of the Sonnesbein-Propbridge Tire
+Company, which, as the world likewise knew, had had tremendous dealings
+in contracts with the Government and now was having trouble closing up
+the loose ends of its wartime activities.
+
+He packed a bag and caught a night train West. On the following morning,
+which would be Thursday, Mrs. Propbridge took a stroll on Gulf Stream
+City's famous boardwalk. It was rather a lonely stroll. She had no
+particular objective. It was too early in the day for a full display of
+vivid costumes among the bathers on the beach. She encountered no one
+she knew.
+
+Really, for a resort so extensively advertised, Gulf Stream City was not
+a particularly exciting place. For lack of anything better to do she had
+halted to view the contents of a shop window when an exclamation of
+happy surprise from someone immediately behind her caused Mrs.
+Propbridge to turn around.
+
+Immediately it was her turn to register astonishment. A tall,
+well-dressed, gray-haired man, a stranger to her, was taking possession
+of her right hand and shaking it warmly.
+
+"Why, my dear Mrs. Watrous," he was saying, "how do you do? Well, this
+is an unexpected pleasure! When did you come down from Wilmington? And
+who is with you? And how long are you going to stay? General Dunlap and
+his daughter Claire--you know, the second daughter--and Mrs.
+Gordon-Tracy and Freddy Urb will be here in a little while. They'll be
+delighted to see you! Why, we'll have a reunion! Well, well, well!"
+
+He had said all this with scarcely a pause for breath and without giving
+her an opportunity to speak, as though surprise made him disregardful of
+labial punctuation of his sentences. Indeed, Mrs. Propbridge did not
+succeed in getting her hand free from his grasp until he had uttered
+the final "well."
+
+"You have the advantage of me," she said. "I do not know you. I am sure
+I never saw you before."
+
+At this his sudden shift from cordiality to a look half incredulous,
+half embarrassed was almost comic.
+
+"What?" he demanded, falling back a pace. "Surely this is Mrs. Beeman
+Watrous of Wilmington? I can't be mistaken!"
+
+"But you are mistaken," she insisted; "very much mistaken. My name is
+not Watrous; my name is Propbridge."
+
+"Madam," he cried, "I beg ten thousand pardons! Really, though, this is
+one of the most remarkable things I ever saw in my life--one of the most
+remarkable cases of resemblance, I mean. I am sure anyone would be
+deceived by it; that is my apology. In my own behalf, madam, I must tell
+you that you are an exact counterpart of someone I know--of Mrs. Beeman
+Watrous, a very good friend of mine. Pardon me once more, but may I ask
+if you are related to Mrs. Beeman Watrous? Her cousin perhaps? It isn't
+humanly possible that two persons should look so much alike and not be
+related?"
+
+"I don't think I ever heard of the lady," stated Mrs. Propbridge
+somewhat coldly.
+
+"Again, madam, please excuse me," he said. "I am very, very sorry to
+have annoyed you." He bowed his bared head and turned away. Then
+quickly he swung on his heel and returned to her, his hat again in his
+left hand.
+
+"Madam," he said, "I am fearful that you are suspecting me of being one
+of the objectionable breed of he-flirts who infest this place. At the
+risk of being tiresome I must repeat once more that your wonderful
+resemblance to another person led me into this awkward error. My name,
+madam, is Murrill--Valentine C. Murrill--and I am sure that if you only
+had the time and the patience to bear with me I could find someone
+here--some acquaintance of yours perhaps--who would vouch for me and
+make it plain to you that I am not addicted to the habit of forcing
+myself upon strangers on the pretext that I have met them somewhere."
+
+His manner was disarming. It was more than that; it was outright
+engaging. He was carefully groomed, smartly turned out; he had the
+manner and voice of a well-bred person. To Mrs. Propbridge he seemed a
+candid, courteous soul unduly distressed over a small matter.
+
+"Please don't concern yourself about it," she said. "I didn't suspect
+you of being a professional masher; I was only rather startled, that's
+all."
+
+"Thank you for telling me so," he said. "You take a load off my mind, I
+assure you. Pardon me again, please--but did I understand you to say a
+moment ago that your name was Propbridge?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It isn't a very common name. Surely you are not the Mrs. Propbridge?"
+
+Without being in the least presuming he somehow had managed to convey a
+subtle tribute.
+
+"I am Mrs. Justus Propbridge, if that is what you mean," she said.
+
+"Well, then," he said in tones of relief, "that simplifies matters. Is
+your husband about, madam? If he is I will do myself the honor of
+introducing myself to him and repeating to him the explanation I have
+just made to you. You see, I am by way of being one of the small fish
+who circulate on the outer edge of the big sea where the large financial
+whales swim, and it is possible that he may have heard my name and may
+know who I am."
+
+"My husband isn't here," she explained. "He was called away last night
+on business."
+
+"Again my misfortune," he said.
+
+They were in motion now; he had fallen into step alongside her as she
+moved on back up the boardwalk. Plainly her amazing resemblance to
+someone else was once more the uppermost subject in his mind. He went
+back to it.
+
+"I've heard before now of dual personalities," he said, "but this is my
+first actual experience with a case of it. When I first saw you standing
+there with your back to me and even when you turned round facing me
+after I spoke to you, I was ready to swear that you were Mrs. Beeman
+Watrous. Look, manner, size, voice, hair, eyes--all identical. I know
+her very well too. I've been a guest at one or two of her house parties.
+It's curious that you never heard of her, Mrs. Propbridge; she's the
+widow of one of the Wilmington Watrouses--the firearms people, you
+know--guns, rifles, all that sort of thing--and he left her more
+millions than she knows what to do with."
+
+Now Mrs. Propbridge had never heard of any Wilmington Watrouses, but
+plainly, here in the East they were persons of consequence--persons who
+would be worth knowing.
+
+She nodded as though to indicate that now she did faintly recall who it
+was this kindly stranger had meant.
+
+He went on. It was evident that he was inclined to be talkative. The
+impression was conveyed to her that here was a well-meaning but rather
+shallow-minded gentleman who was reasonably fond of the sound of his own
+voice. Yet about him was nothing to suggest over-effusiveness or
+familiarity.
+
+"I've a sort of favor to ask of you," he said. "I've some friends who're
+motoring over to-day from Philadelphia. I had to run on down ahead of
+them to see a man on business. They're to join me in about an hour from
+now"--he consulted his watch--"and we're all driving back together
+to-night. General Dunlap and Mrs. Claire Denton, his daughter--she's the
+amateur tennis champion, you know--and Mrs. Gordon-Tracy, of Newport,
+and Freddy Urb, the writer--they're all in the party. And the favor I'm
+asking is that I may have the pleasure of presenting them to you--that
+is, of course, unless you already know them--so that I may enjoy the
+looks on their faces when they find out that you are not Mrs. Beeman
+Watrous. I know they'll behave as I did. They won't believe it at first.
+May I?"
+
+What could Mrs. Propbridge do except consent? Indeed, inwardly she
+rejoiced at the prospect. She did not know personally the four named by
+this Mr. Murrill, but she knew mighty well who they were. What person
+familiar with the Social Register could fail to know who they were?
+Another thing had impressed her: The stranger had mentioned these
+notables with no especial emphasis on the names; but instead, quite
+casually and in a manner which carried with it the impression that such
+noted folk as Mrs. Denton and her distinguished father, and Freddy Urb
+the court jester of the innermost holies of holies of Newport and Bar
+Harbor and Palm Beach, and Mrs. Gordon-Tracy, the famous beauty, were of
+the sort with whom customarily he associated. Plainly here was a
+gentleman who not only belonged to the who's-who but had a very clear
+perception of the what-was-what. So fluttered little Mrs. Propbridge
+promptly said yes--said it with a gratified sensation in her heart.
+
+"That's fine of you!" said Murrill, visibly elated. It would appear
+that small favors were to him great pleasures. "That's splendid!
+Up until now the joke of this thing has been on me. I want to
+transfer it to them. I'm to meet them up here in the lounge of the
+Churchill-Fontenay."
+
+"That's where I am stopping," said Mrs. Propbridge.
+
+"Is it? Better and better! We might stroll along that way if you don't
+mind. By Jove, I've an idea! Suppose when they arrive they found us
+chatting together like old friends--suppose as they came up they were to
+overhear me calling you Mrs. Beeman Watrous. That would make the shock
+all the greater for them when they found out you really weren't Mrs.
+Watrous at all, but somebody they'd never seen before! Are you game for
+it?... Capital! Only, if we mean to do that we'll have to kill the time,
+some way, for forty or fifty minutes or so. Do you mind letting me bore
+you for a little while? I know it's unconventional--but I like to do the
+unconventional things when they don't make one conspicuous."
+
+Mrs. Propbridge did not in the least mind. So they killed the time and
+it died a very agreeable death, barring one small incident. On Mr.
+Murrill's invitation they took a short turn in a double-seated roller
+chair, Mr. Murrill chatting briskly all the while and savoring his
+conversation with offhand reference to this well-known personage and
+that. At his suggestion they quit the wheel chair at a point well down
+the boardwalk to drink orangeades in a small glass-fronted café which
+faced the sea. He had heard somewhere, he said, that they made famous
+orangeades in this shop. They might try for themselves and find out.
+
+The experiment was not entirely a success. To begin with, a waiter
+person--Mr. Murrill referred to him as a waiter person--sat them down
+near the front at a small, round table whose enamel top was decorated
+with two slopped glasses and a bottle one-third filled with wine gone
+stale. At least the stuff looked and smelled like wine--like a poor
+quality of champagne.
+
+"Ugh!" said Mr. Murrill, tasting the air. "Somebody evidently couldn't
+wait until lunch time before he started his tippling. And I didn't
+suspect either that this place might be a bootlegging place in disguise.
+Well, since prohibition came in it's hard to find a resort shop anywhere
+where you can't buy bad liquor--if only you go about it the right way."
+
+When the waiter person brought their order he bade him remove the bottle
+and the slopped glasses, and the waiter person obliged, but so sulkily
+and with such slowness of movement that Mr. Murrill was moved to speak
+to him rather sharply. Even so, the sullen functionary took his time
+about the thing. Nor did the orangeade prove particularly appetizing.
+Mr. Murrill barely tasted his.
+
+"Shall we clear out?" he asked, making a fastidious little grimace.
+
+At the door, on the way out, he made excuses.
+
+"Sorry I suggested coming into this place," he said, sinking his voice.
+"Either it is a shop which has gone off badly or its merits have been
+overadvertised by its loving friends. To me the whole atmosphere of the
+establishment seemed rather dubious, eh, what? Well, what shall we do
+next? I see a few bathers down below. Shall we go down on the beach and
+find a place to sit and watch them for a bit?"
+
+They went; and he found a bench in a quiet place under the shorings of
+the boardwalk close up alongside one of the lesser bathing pavilions,
+and they sat there, and he talked and she listened. The man had an
+endless fund of gossip about amusing and noted people; most of them, it
+would seem, were his intimates. Telling one or two incidents in which
+these distinguished friends had figured, he felt it expedient to sink
+his voice to a discreet undertone. There was plainly apparent a delicacy
+of feeling in this; one did not shout out the names of such persons for
+any curious passer-by to hear. It developed that there was one specially
+close bond between him and the members of General Dunlap's family, an
+attachment partly based upon old acquaintance and partly upon the fact
+that the Dunlaps thought he once upon a time had saved the life of the
+general's youngest daughter, Millicent.
+
+"Really, though, it was nothing," he said deprecatingly, as befitted a
+modest and a mannerly man. "The thing came about like this: It was once
+when we were all out West together. We were spending a week at the Grand
+Cañon. One morning we took the Rim Drive over to Mohave Point. No doubt
+you know the spot? I was standing with Millicent on the outer edge of
+the cliff and we were looking down together into that tremendous void
+when all of a sudden she fainted dead away. Her heart isn't very
+strong--she isn't athletic as Claire, her older sister, and the other
+Dunlap girls are--and I suppose the altitude got her. Luckily I was as
+close to her as I am to you now, and I saw her totter and I threw out my
+arms--pardon me--like this." He illustrated with movements of his arms.
+"And luckily I managed to catch her about the waist as she fell forward.
+I held on and dragged her back out of danger. Otherwise she would have
+dropped for no telling how many hundreds of feet. Of course it was only
+a chance that I happened to be touching elbows with the child, and
+naturally I only did what anyone would have done in the same
+circumstances, but the whole family were tremendously grateful and made
+a great pother over it. By the way, speaking of rescues, have you heard
+about the thing that happened to the two Van Norden girls at Bailey's
+Beach last week? I must tell you about that."
+
+Presently they both were surprised to find that forty-five minutes had
+passed. Mr. Murrill said they had better be getting along; he made so
+bold as to venture the suggestion that possibly Mrs. Propbridge might
+want to go to her rooms before the automobile party arrived, to change
+her frock or something. Not that he personally thought she should change
+it. If he might be pardoned for saying so, he thought it a most becoming
+frock; but women were curious about such things, now honestly weren't
+they? And Mrs. Propbridge was constrained to confess that about such
+things women were curious. She had a conviction that if all things moved
+smoothly she presently would be urged to waive formality and join the
+party at luncheon. Mr. Murrill had not exactly put the idea into words
+yet, but she sensed that the thought of offering the invitation was in
+his mind. In any event the impending meeting called for efforts on her
+part to appear at her best.
+
+"I believe I will run up to our rooms for a few minutes before your
+friends arrive," she said as they arose from the bench. "I want to
+freshen up a bit."
+
+"Quite so," he assented.
+
+He left her at the doors of the Churchill-Fontenay, saying he would idle
+about and watch for the others in case they should arrive ahead of time.
+
+Ten minutes later, while she was still trying to make a choice between
+three frocks, her telephone rang. She answered the ring; it was Mr.
+Murrill, who was at the other end of the line. He was distressed to have
+to tell her that word had just reached him that on the way down from
+Philadelphia General Dunlap had been taken suddenly ill--an attack of
+acute indigestion, perhaps, or possibly a touch of the sun--and the
+motor trip had been halted at a small town on the mainland fifteen miles
+back of Gulf Stream City. He was starting immediately for the town in a
+car with a physician. He trusted the general's indisposition was not
+really serious but of course the party would be called off; and the
+invalid would return to Philadelphia as soon as he felt well enough to
+move. He was awfully sorry--Mr. Murrill was--terribly put out, and all
+that sort of thing; hoped that another opportunity might be vouchsafed
+him of meeting Mrs. Propbridge; he had enjoyed tremendously meeting her
+under these unconventional circumstances; and now he must go.
+
+It was not to be denied that young Mrs. Propbridge felt distinctly
+disappointed. The start of the little adventure had had promise in it.
+She had forecast all manner of agreeable contingencies as the probable
+outcome.
+
+For some reason, though, or perhaps for no definite reason at all, she
+said nothing to her husband, on his return from Toledo, of her encounter
+with the agreeable Mr. Murrill. Anyway, he arrived in no very affable
+state of mind. As a matter of fact he was most terrifically out of
+temper. Somebody or other--presumably some ass of a practical joker, he
+figured, or possibly a person with a grudge against him who had curious
+methods of taking vengeance--had lured him into taking a hot, dusty,
+tiresome and entirely useless trip. There was no business conference on
+out at Toledo; no need for his presence there. If he could lay hands on
+the idiot who had sent him that forged telegram--well, the angered Mr.
+Propbridge indicated with a gesture of a large and knobby fist what he
+would do to the aforesaid idiot.
+
+The next time Mr. Propbridge was haled to the broiling Corn Belt he made
+very sure that the warrant was genuine. One of these wild-goose chases a
+summer was quite enough for a man with a size-nineteen collar and a
+forty-six-inch waistband.
+
+The next time befell some ten days after the Propbridges returned from
+the shore to their thirty-thousand-dollars-a-year apartment on Upper
+Park Avenue. The very fact that they did live in an apartment and that
+they did spend a good part of their time there would stamp them for what
+they were--persons not yet to be included among the really fashionable
+group. The really fashionable maintained large homes which they occupied
+when they came to town to have dental work done or to launch a débutante
+daughter into society; the rest of the year they usually were elsewhere.
+It was the thing.
+
+Business of importance sent Mr. Propbridge to Detroit, and then on to
+Chicago and Des Moines. On a certain afternoon he caught the Wolverine
+Limited. Almost before his train had passed One Hundred and Twenty-fifth
+Street Mrs. Propbridge had a caller. She was informed that a member of
+the staff of that live paper, People You Know, desired to see her for a
+few minutes. Persons of social consequence or persons who craved to be
+of social consequence did not often deny themselves to representatives
+of People You Know. Mrs. Propbridge told the switchboard girl downstairs
+to tell the hallman to invite the gentleman to come up.
+
+He proved to be a somewhat older man than she had expected to see. He
+was well dressed enough, but about him was something hard and
+forbidding, almost formidable in fact. Yet there was a soothing,
+conciliatory tone in his voice when he spoke.
+
+"Mrs. Propbridge," he began, "my name is Townsend. I am one of the
+editors of People You Know. I might have sent one of our reporters to
+see you, but in a matter so important--and so delicate as this one is--I
+felt it would be better if I came personally to have a little talk with
+you and get your side of the affair for publication."
+
+"My side of what affair?" she asked, puzzled.
+
+He lifted one lip in a cornerwise smile.
+
+"Let me give you a little advice, Mrs. Propbridge," he said. "I've had a
+lot of experience in such matters as these. The interested parties will
+be better off if they're perfectly frank in talking to the press. Then
+all misunderstandings are avoided and everybody gets a fair deal in
+print. Don't you agree with me that I am right?"
+
+"You may be right," she said, "but I haven't the least idea what you are
+talking about."
+
+"I mean your trouble with your husband--if you force me to speak
+plainly; I'd like to have your statement, that's all."
+
+"But I haven't had any trouble with my husband!" she said. Her amazement
+made her voice shrill. "My husband and I are living together in perfect
+happiness. You've made a mistake."
+
+"No chance," he said, and suddenly his manner changed from the
+sympathetic to the accusing. "Mrs. Propbridge, we have exclusive advance
+information from reliable sources--a straight tip--that the proof
+against you is about to be turned over to your husband and we've every
+reason to believe that when he gets it in his hands he's going to sue
+you for divorce, naming as corespondent a certain middle-aged man. Do
+you mean to tell me you don't know anything about that?"
+
+"Of course I mean to! Why, you're crazy! You're--"
+
+"Wait just one minute please," he interrupted the distressed lady. "Wait
+until I get through telling you how much I know already; then you'll see
+that denials won't help you any. As a matter of fact we're ready now to
+go ahead and spring the story in next week's issue, but I thought it
+was only fair to come to you and give you a chance to make your defense
+in print--if you care to make one."
+
+"I still tell you that you've made a terrible mistake," she declared.
+Her anger began to stir within her, as indignation succeeded to
+astonishment. "How dare you come here accusing me of doing anything
+wrong!"
+
+"I'm accusing you of nothing. I'm only going by the plain evidence. I
+might be lying to you. Other people might lie to you. But, madam,
+photographs don't lie. That's why they're the best possible evidence in
+a divorce court. And I've seen the evidence. I've got it in my pocket
+right now."
+
+"Evidence against me? Photographs of me?"
+
+"Sure. Photographs of you and the gray-haired party." He reached in a
+breast pocket and brought out a thin sheaf of unmounted photographs and
+handed them to her. "Mrs. Propbridge, just take a look at these and then
+tell me if you blame me for assuming that there's bound to be trouble
+when your husband sees them?"
+
+She looked, and her twirling brain told her it was all a nightmare, but
+her eyes told her it was not. Here were five photographs, enlarged
+snapshots apparently: One, a profile view, showing her standing on a
+boardwalk, her hand held in the hand of the man she had known as
+Valentine C. Murrill; one, a quartering view, revealing them riding
+together in a wheel chair, their heads close together, she smiling and
+he apparently whispering something of a pleasing and confidential nature
+to her, the posture of both almost intimate; one, a side view, showing
+the pair of them emerging from an open-fronted café--she recognized the
+façade of the place where they had found the orangeades so
+disappointing--and in this picture Mr. Murrill had been caught by the
+camera as he was saying something of seeming mutual interest, for she
+was glancing up sidewise at him and he had lowered his head until his
+lips almost touched her ear; one, showing them sitting at a small round
+table with a wine bottle and glasses in front of them and behind them a
+background suggesting the interior of a rather shabby drinking place, a
+distinct impression of sordidness somehow conveyed; and one, a rear
+view, showing them upon a bench alongside a seemingly deserted wooden
+structure of some sort, and in this one the man had been snapped in the
+very act of putting his arms about her and drawing her toward him.
+
+That was all--merely five oblong slips of chemically printed paper, and
+yet on the face of them they told a damning and a condemning story.
+
+She stared at them, she who was absolutely innocent of thought or intent
+of wrong-doing, and could feel the fabric of her domestic life trembling
+before it came crashing down.
+
+"Oh, but this is too horrible for words!" the distressed lady cried
+out. "How could anybody have been so cruel, so malicious, as to follow
+us and waylay us and catch us in these positions? It's monstrous!"
+
+"Somebody did catch you, then, in compromising attitudes--you admit
+that?"
+
+"You twist my words to give them a false meaning!" she exclaimed. "You
+are trying to trap me into saying something that would put me in a wrong
+light. I can explain--why, the whole thing is so simple when you
+understand."
+
+"Suppose you do explain, then. Get me right, Mrs. Propbridge--I'm all
+for you in this affair. I want to give you the best of it from every
+standpoint."
+
+So she explained, her words pouring forth in a torrent. She told him in
+such details as she recalled the entire history of her meeting with the
+vanished Mr. Murrill--how a doctored telegram sent her husband away and
+left her alone, how Murrill had accosted her, and why and what
+followed--all of it she told him, withholding nothing.
+
+He waited until she was through. Then he sped a bolt, watching her
+closely, for upon the way she took it much, from his viewpoint,
+depended.
+
+"Well," he said, "if that's the way this thing happened and if you've
+told your husband about it"--he dragged his words just a trifle--"why
+should you be so worried, even if these pictures should reach him?"
+
+Her look told him the shot had struck home. Inwardly he rejoiced,
+knowing, before she answered, what her answer would be.
+
+"But I didn't tell him," she confessed, stricken with a new cause for
+concern. "I--I forgot to tell him."
+
+"Oh, you forgot to tell him?" he repeated. Now suddenly he became a
+cross-examiner, snapping his questions at her, catching her up sharply
+in her replies. "And you say you never saw this Mr. Murrill--as you call
+him--before in all your life?"
+
+"No."
+
+"And you've never seen the mysterious stranger since?"
+
+"There was nothing mysterious about him, I tell you. He was merely
+interesting."
+
+"Anyhow, you've never seen him since?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Nor had any word from him other than that telephone talk you say you
+had with him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Did you ever make any inquiries with a view to finding out whether
+there was such a person as this Mrs. Beeman Watrous?"
+
+"No; why should I?"
+
+"That's a question for you to decide. Did you think to look in the
+papers to see whether General Dunlap had really been taken ill on a
+motor trip?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Yet he's a well-known person. Surely you expected the papers would
+mention his illness?"
+
+"It never occurred to me to look. I tell you there was nothing wrong
+about it. Why do you try to trip me up so?"
+
+"Excuse me, I'm only trying to help you out of what looks like a pretty
+bad mess. But I've got to get the straight of it. Let me run over the
+points in your story: No sooner do you land in Gulf Stream City than
+your husband gets a faked-up telegram and goes away? And you are left
+all alone? And you go for a walk all by yourself? And a man you never
+laid eyes on before comes up to you and tells you that you look a lot
+like a friend of his, a certain very rich widow, Mrs. Watrous--somebody,
+though, that I for one never heard of, and I know the Social Register
+from cover to cover, and know something about Wilmington too. And on the
+strength of your imaginary resemblance to an imaginary somebody he
+introduced himself to you? And then you let him walk with you? And you
+let him whisper pleasant things in your ear? Two of those pictures that
+you've got in your hand prove that. And you let him take you into one of
+the most notorious blind tigers on the beach? And you sit there with him
+in this dump--this place with a shady reputation--"
+
+"I've explained to you how that happened. We didn't stay there. We came
+right out."
+
+"Let me go on, please. And you let him buy you wine there?"
+
+"I've told you about that part, too--how the bottles and the glasses
+were already on the table when we sat down."
+
+"I'm merely going by what the photographs tell, Mrs. Propbridge. I'm
+merely saying to you what a smart divorce lawyer would say to you if
+ever he got you on the witness stand; only he'd be trying to convict you
+by your own words and I'm trying to give you every chance to clear
+yourself. And then after that you go and sit with him--this perfect
+stranger--in a lonely place alongside a deserted bath house and nobody
+else in sight?"
+
+"There were people bathing right in front of us all the time."
+
+"Were there? Well, take a look at Photograph Number Five and see if it
+shows any bathers in sight. And he slips his arm around you and draws
+you to him?"
+
+"I explained to you how that happened," protested the badgered,
+desperate woman. "No matter what the circumstances seem to be, I did
+nothing wrong, I tell you."
+
+"All right, just as you say. Remember, I'm taking your side of it; I'm
+trying to be your friend. But here's the important thing for you to
+consider: With those pictures laid before them would any jury on earth
+believe your side of it? Would they believe you had no hand in sending
+your husband that faked-up telegram? Would they believe it wasn't a
+trick to get him away so you could keep an appointment with this man?
+Would any judge believe you? Would your friends believe you? Or would
+they all say that they never heard such a transparent cock-and-bull
+story in their lives?"
+
+"Oh, oh!" she cried chokingly, and put her face in her hands. Then she
+threw up her head and stared at him out of her miserable eyes. "Where
+did those pictures come from? You say you believe in me, that you are
+willing to help me. Then tell me where they came from and who took them?
+And how did you manage to get hold of them?"
+
+His baitings had carried her exactly to the desired place--the turning
+point, they call it in the vernacular of the confidence sharp. The rest
+should be easy.
+
+"Mrs. Propbridge," he said, "you've been pretty frank with me. I'll be
+equally frank with you. Those pictures were brought to our office by the
+man who took them. I have his name and address, but am not at liberty to
+tell them to anyone. I don't know what his motives were in taking them;
+we did not ask him that either. We can't afford to question the motives
+of people who bring us these exclusive tips. We pay a fancy price for
+them and that lets us out. Besides, these photographs seemed to speak
+for themselves. So we paid him the price he asked for the use of them.
+Destroying these copies wouldn't help you any. That man still has the
+plates; he could print them over again. The only hope you've got is to
+get hold of those plates. And I'm afraid he'll ask a big price for
+them."
+
+"How big a price?"
+
+"That I couldn't say without seeing him. Knowing the sort of person he
+is, my guess is that he'd expect you to hand him over a good-sized chunk
+of money to begin with--as a proof of your intentions to do business
+with him. You'd have to pay him in cash; he'd be too wise to take a
+check. And then he might want so much apiece for each plate or he might
+insist on your paying him a lump sum for the whole lot. You see, what he
+evidently expects to do is to sell them to your husband, and he'd expect
+you at least to meet the price your husband would have to pay. Any way
+you look at it he's got you at his mercy--and, as I see it, you'll
+probably have to come to his terms if you want to keep this thing a
+secret."
+
+"Where is this man? You keep saying you want to serve me--can't you
+bring him to me?"
+
+"I'm afraid he wouldn't come. If he's engaged in a shady business--if
+he's cooked up a deliberate scheme to trap you--he won't come near you.
+That's my guess. But if you are willing to trust me to act as your
+representative maybe the whole thing might be arranged and no one except
+us ever be the wiser for it."
+
+Mrs. Propbridge being an average woman did what the average woman, thus
+cruelly circumstanced and sorely frightened and half frantic and
+lacking advice from honest folk, would do. She paid and she paid and she
+kept on paying. First off, it appeared the paper had to be recompensed
+for its initial outlay and for various vaguely explained incidental
+expenses which it had incurred in connection with the affair. Then,
+through Townsend, the unknown principal demanded that a larger sum
+should be handed over as an evidence of good faith on her part before he
+would consider further negotiations. This, though, turned out to be only
+the beginning of the extortion processes.
+
+When, on this pretext and that, she had been mulcted of nearly fourteen
+thousand dollars, when her personal bank account had been exhausted,
+when most of her jewelry was secretly in pawn, when still she had not
+yet been given the telltale plates, but daily was being tortured by
+threats of exposure unless she surrendered yet more money, poor badgered
+beleaguered little Mrs. Propbridge, being an honest and a
+straightforward woman, took the course she should have taken at the
+outset. She went to her husband and she told him the truth. And he
+believed her.
+
+He did not stop with believing her; he bestirred himself. He had money;
+he had the strength and the authority which money gives. He had
+something else--he had that powerful, intangible thing which among
+police officials and in the inner politics of city governments is
+variously known as a pull and a drag. Straightway he invoked it.
+
+Of a sudden Chappy Marr was aware that he had made a grievous mistake.
+He had calculated to garner for himself a fat roll of the Propbridge
+currency; had counted upon enjoying a continuing source of income for so
+long as the wife continued to hand over hush money. Deduct the cuts
+which went to Zach Traynor, alias Townsend, for playing the part of the
+magazine editor, and to Cheesy Mike Zaugbaum, that camera wizard of
+newspaper staff work turned crook's helper--Zaugbaum it was who had
+worked the trick of the photographs--and still the major share of the
+spoils due him ought, first and last, to run into five gratifying
+figures. On this he confidently had figured. He had not reckoned into
+the equation the possibility of invoking against him the Propbridge pull
+backed by the full force of this double-fisted, vengeful millionaire's
+rage. Indeed he never supposed that there might be any such pull. And
+here, practically without warning, he found his influence arrayed
+against an infinitely stronger influence, so that his counted for
+considerably less than nothing at all.
+
+Still, there was a warning. He got away to Toronto. Traynor made Chicago
+and went into temporary seclusion there. Cheesy Zaugbaum lacked the luck
+of these two. As soon as Mrs. Propbridge had described the ingratiating
+Mr. Murrill and the obliging Mr. Townsend to M. J. Brock, head of the
+Brock private-detective agency, that astute but commonplace-appearing
+gentleman knew whom she meant. Knowing so much, it was not hard for him
+to add one to one and get three. He deduced who the third member of the
+triumvirate must be. Mr. Brock owed his preëminence in his trade to one
+outstanding faculty--he was an honest man who could think like a thief.
+Three hours after he concluded his first interview with the lady one of
+his operatives walked up behind Cheesy and tapped him on the shoulder
+and inquired of him whether he would go along nice and quiet for a talk
+with the boss or was inclined to make a fuss about it. In either event,
+so Cheesy was assured, he, could have his wish gratified. And Cheesy,
+who had the heart of a rabbit--a rabbit feeding on other folks' cabbage,
+but a timorous, nibbling bunny for all that--Cheesy, he went.
+
+In Toronto Marr peaked and pined. He probably was safe enough for so
+long as he bided there; there had been no newspaper publicity, and he
+felt reasonably sure that openly, at least, the aid of regular police
+departments would not be set in motion against him; so he put the
+thoughts of arrest and extradition and such like unpleasant
+contingencies out of his mind. But li'l' old N'York was his proper
+abiding place. The smell of its streets had a lure for him which no
+other city's streets had. His crowd was there--the folk who spoke his
+tongue and played his game. And there the gudgeons on which his sort
+fed schooled the thickest and carried the most savory fat on their bones
+as they skittered over the asphaltum shoals of the Main Stem.
+
+For a month, emulating Uncle Remus' Brer Fox, he lay low, resisting the
+gnawing discontent that kept screening delectable visions of Broadway
+and the Upper Forties and Seventh Avenue before his homesick eyes. It
+was a real nostalgia from which he suffered. He endured it, though, with
+what patience he might lest a worse thing befall. And at the end of that
+month he went back to the big town; an overpowering temptation was the
+reason for his going. There had arisen a chance for a large turnover and
+a quick get-away again, with an attractively large sum to stay him and
+comfort him after he resumed his enforced exile. An emissary from the
+Gulwing mob ran up to Toronto and dangled the lure before his eyes.
+
+Harbored in New York at the present moment was a beautiful prospect--a
+supremely credulous cattleman from the Far West, who had been playing
+the curb market. A crooks' tipster who was a clerk in a bucket shop
+downtown had for a price passed the word to the Gulwings, and the
+Gulwings--Sig and Alf--were intentful to strip the speculative Westerner
+before the curb took from him the delectable core of his bank roll. But
+the Gulwing organization, complete as it is in most essential details,
+lacked in its personnel for the moment a person of address to undertake
+the steering and the convincing--to worm a way into the good graces of
+the prospective quarry; to find out approximately about how much in
+dollars and cents he might reasonably be expected to yield, and then to
+stand by in the pose of a pretended fellow investor and fellow loser,
+while the cleaning up of the plunger was done by the competent but
+crude-mannered Messrs. Sigmund and Alfred Gulwing and their associates.
+For the important rôle of the convincer Marr was suited above all
+others. It was represented to him that he could slip back to town and,
+all the while keeping well under cover, rib up the customer to go, as
+the trade term has it, and then withdraw again to the Dominion. A price
+was fixed, based on a sliding scale, and Marr returned to New York.
+
+Three days from the day he reached town the Westerner, whose name was
+Hartridge, lunched with him as his guest at the Roychester, a small,
+discreetly run hotel in Forty-sixth Street. After luncheon they sat down
+in the lobby for a smoke. For good and sufficient reasons Marr preferred
+as quiet a spot and as secluded a one as the lobby of the hotel might
+offer. He found it where a small red-leather sofa built for two stood in
+a sort of recess formed on one side by a jog in the wall and on the
+other side by the switchboard and the two booths which constituted the
+Roychester's public telephone equipment. To call the guest rooms one
+made use of an instrument on the clerk's desk, farther over to the left.
+
+To this retreat Marr guided the big Oregonian. From it he had a fairly
+complete view of the lobby. This was essential since presently, if
+things went well or if they did not go well, he must privily give a
+designated signal for the benefit of a Gulwing underling, a lesser
+member of the mob, who was already on hand, standing off and on in the
+offing. Sitting there Marr was well protected from the view of persons
+passing through, bound to or from the grill room, the desk or the
+elevators. This also was as it should be. Better still, he was
+practically out of sight of those who might approach the telephone
+operator to enlist her services in securing outside calls. The
+outjutting furniture of her desk and the flanks of the nearermost pay
+booth hid him from them; only the top of the young woman's head was
+visible as she sat ten feet away, facing her perforated board.
+
+The voices of her patrons came to him, and her voice as she repeated the
+numbers after them: "Greenwich 978, please."
+
+"Larchmont 54 party J."
+
+"Worth 9009, please, miss."
+
+"Vanderbilt 100."
+
+And so on and so forth, in a steady patter, like raindrops falling; but
+though he could hear he could not be seen. Altogether, the spot was, for
+his own purposes, admirably arranged.
+
+So they sat and smoked, and pretty soon, the occasion and the conditions
+and the time being ripe, Marr outlined to his new friend Hartridge, on
+pledge of secrecy, a wonderfully safe and wonderfully simple plan for
+taking its ill-gotten money away from a Tenderloin pool room. Swiftly he
+sketched in the details; the opportunity, he divulged in strict
+confidence, had just come to him. He confessed to having taken a great
+liking to Hartridge during their short acquaintance; Hartridge had
+impressed him as one who might be counted upon to know a good thing when
+he saw it, and so, inspired by these convictions, he was going to give
+Hartridge a chance to join him in the plunge and share with him the
+juicy proceeds. Besides, the more money risked the greater the killing.
+He himself had certain funds in hand, but more funds were needed if a
+real fortune was to be realized.
+
+There was need, though, for prompt decision on the part of all
+concerned, because that very afternoon--in fact, within that same
+hour--there in the Roychester he was to meet, by appointment, the
+conniving manager of an uptown branch office of the telegraph company,
+who would coöperate in the undertaking and upon whose good offices in
+withholding flashed race results at Belmont Park until his fellow
+conspirators, acting on the information, could get their bets down upon
+the winners, depended the success of the venture. Only, strictly
+speaking, it would not be a venture at all, but a moral certainty, a
+cinch, the surest of all sure things. Guaranties against mischance
+entailing loss would be provided; he could promise his friend Hartridge
+that; and the telegraph manager, when he came shortly, would add further
+proof.
+
+The question then was: Would Hartridge join him as a partner? And if so,
+about how much, in round figures, would Hartridge be willing to put up?
+He must know this in advance because he was prepared to match
+Hartridge's investment dollar for dollar.
+
+And at that Hartridge, to Marr's most sincere discomfiture, shook his
+head.
+
+"I'll tell you how it is with me," said Hartridge. "These broker fellows
+downtown have been touchin' me up purty hard. I guess this here New York
+game ain't exactly my game. I'm aimin' to close up what little deals
+I've still got on here and beat it back to God's country while I've
+still got a shirt on my back. I'm much obliged to you, Markham, for
+wantin' to take me into your scheme. It sounds good the way you tell it,
+but it seems like ever'thing round this burg sounds good till you test
+it out--and so I guess you better count me out and find yourself a
+partner somewheres else."
+
+There was definiteness in his refusal; the shake of his head emphasized
+it too. Marr's rôle should have been the persuasive, the insistent, the
+argumentative, the cajoling; but Marr was distinctly out of temper.
+
+Here he had ventured into danger to play for a fat purse and all he
+would get for his trouble and his pains and the risk he had run would
+be just those things--pains and trouble and risk--these, and nothing
+more nourishing.
+
+"Oh, very well then, Hartridge," he said angrily, "if you haven't any
+confidence in me--if you can't see that this is a play that naturally
+can't go wrong--why, we'll let it drop."
+
+"Oh, I've got confidence in you--" began Hartridge, but Marr, no
+patience left in him, cut him short.
+
+"Looks like it, doesn't it?" he snapped. "Forget it! Let's talk about
+the weather."
+
+He lifted his straw hat as though to ease its pressure upon his head and
+then settled it well down over his eyes. This was the sign to the
+Gulwings' messenger, watching him covertly from behind a newspaper over
+on the far side of the lobby, that the plan had failed. The signal he
+had so confidently expected to give--a trick of relighting his cigar and
+flipping the match into the air--would have conveyed to the watcher the
+information that all augured well. The latter's job then would have been
+to get up from his chair and step outside and bear the word to Sig
+Gulwing, who, letter-perfect in the part of the conspiring telegraph
+manager, would promptly enter and present himself to Marr, and by Marr
+be introduced to the Westerner. The hat-shifting device had been devised
+in the remote contingency of failure on Marr's part to win over the
+chosen victim. Plainly the collapse of the plot had been totally
+unexpected by the messenger. Over his paper he stared at Marr until
+Marr repeated the gesture. Then, fully convinced now that there had been
+no mistake, the messenger arose and headed for the door, the whole
+thing--signaling, duplicated signaling and all--having taken very much
+less time for its action than has here been required to describe it.
+
+The signal bearer had taken perhaps five steps when Hartridge spoke
+words which instantly filled Marr with regret that he had been so
+impetuously prompt to take a no for a no.
+
+"Say, hold your hosses, Markham," said Hartridge contritely. "Don't be
+in such a hurry! Come to think about it, I might go so far as to risk
+altogether as much, say, as eight or ten thousand dollars in this scheme
+of yours--I don't want to be a piker."
+
+In the hundredth part of a second Marr's mind reacted; his brain was
+galvanized into speedy action. Ten thousand wasn't very much--not nearly
+so much as he had counted on--still, ten thousand dollars was ten
+thousand dollars; besides, if the Gulwings did their work cannily the
+ten thousand ought to be merely a starter, an initiation fee, really,
+for the victim. Once he was enmeshed, trust Sig and Alf to trim him to
+his underwear; the machinery of the wire-tapping game was geared for
+just that.
+
+He must stop the departing messenger then, must make him understand that
+the wrong sign had been given and that the fish was nibbling the bait.
+Yet the messenger's back was to them; ten steps, fifteen steps more, and
+he would be out of the door.
+
+For Marr suddenly to hail a man he was supposed not to know might be
+fatal; almost surely at this critical moment it would stir up suspicion
+in Hartridge's mind. Yet some way, somehow, at once, he must stop the
+word bearer. But how? That was it--how?
+
+Ah, he had it! In the fraction of a moment he had it. It came to him
+now, fully formed, the shape of it conjured up out of that jumble of
+words which had been flowing to him from the telephone desk all the
+while he had been sitting there and which had registered subconsciously
+in his quick brain. The pause, naturally spaced, which fell between
+Hartridge's 'bout-faced concession and Marr's reply, was not unduly
+lengthened, yet in that flash of time Marr had analyzed the puzzle of
+the situation and had found the answer to it.
+
+"Bully, Hartridge!" he exclaimed. "You'll never regret it. Our man ought
+to be here any minute now.... By Jove! That reminds me--I meant to
+telephone for some tickets for to-night's Follies--you're going with me
+as my guest. Just a moment!"
+
+He got on his feet and as he came out of the corner and still was eight
+feet distant from the telephone girl, he called out loudly, as a man
+might call whose hurried anxiety to get an important number made him
+careless of the pitch of his voice: "Worth 10,000! Worth 10,000!"
+
+He feared to look toward the door--yet. For the moment he must seem
+concerned only with the hasty business of telephoning.
+
+Annoyed by his shouting, the girl raised her head and stared at him as
+he came toward her.
+
+"What's the excitement?" she demanded.
+
+With enhanced vehemence he answered, putting on the key words all the
+emphasis he dared employ:
+
+"I should think anybody in hearing could understand what I said and what
+I meant--_Worth 10,000_!"
+
+He was alongside her now; he could risk a glance toward the door. He
+looked, and his heart rejoiced inside of him, for the messenger had
+swung about, as had half a dozen others, all arrested by the harshness
+of his words--and the messenger was staring at him. Marr gave the
+correct signal--with quick well-simulated nervousness drew a loose match
+from his waistcoat pocket, struck it, applied it to his cigar, then
+flipped the still burning match halfway across the floor. No need for
+him again to look--he knew the artifice had succeeded.
+
+"Here's your number," said the affronted young woman. With a vicious
+little slam she stuck a metal plug into its proper hole.
+
+Marr had not the least idea what concern or what individual owned Worth
+10,000 for a telephone number. Nor did it concern him now. Even so, he
+must of course carry out the pretense which so well had served him in
+the emergency. He entered the booth, leaving the door open for
+Hartridge's benefit.
+
+"Hello, hello!" he called into the transmitter. "This is V. C. Markham
+speaking. I want to speak to"--he uttered the first name which popped
+into his mind--"to George Spillane. Want to order some tickets for a
+show to-night." He paused a moment for the sake of the verities; then,
+paying no heed to the confused rejoinder coming to him from the other
+end of the wire, and improvising to round out his play, went on: "What's
+that?... Not there? Oh, very well! I'll call him later.... No, never
+mind, Spillane's the man I want. I'll call again."
+
+He hung up the receiver. Out of the tail of his eye as he hung it up he
+saw Sig Gulwing just entering the hotel, in proper disguise for the
+character of the district telegraph manager with a grudge against pool
+rooms and a plan for making enough at one coup to enable him to quit his
+present job; the job was mythical, and the grudge, too--bits merely of
+the fraudulent drama now about to be played--but surely Gulwing was most
+solid and dependable and plausible looking. His make-up was perfect. To
+get here so soon after receiving the cue he must have been awaiting the
+word just outside the entrance. Gulwing was smart but he was not so
+smart as Marr--Marr exulted to himself. In high good humor, he dropped
+a dollar bill at the girl's elbow.
+
+"Pay for the call out of that, miss, and keep the change," he said
+genially. "Sorry I was so boisterous just now."
+
+Thirty minutes later, still radiating gratification, Marr stood at the
+cigar stand making a discriminating choice of the best in the humidor of
+imported goods. Gulwing and Hartridge were over there on the sofa, cheek
+by jowl, and all was going well.
+
+Half aloud, to himself, he said, smiling in prime content: "Well, I
+guess I'm bad!"
+
+"I guess you are!" said a voice right in his ear; "and you're due to be
+worse, Chappy, old boy--much worse!"
+
+The smile slipped. He turned his head and looked into the complacent,
+chubby face and the pleased eyes of M. J. Brock, head of Brock's
+Detective Agency--the man of all men in this world he wished least to
+see. For once, anyhow, in his life Marr was shaken, and showed it.
+
+"That's all right, Chappy," said Brock soothingly, rocking his short
+plump figure on his heels; "there won't be any rough stuff. I've got a
+cop off the corner who's waiting outside if I should need him--in case
+of a jam--but I guess we won't need him, will we? You'll go along with
+me nice and friendly in a taxicab, won't you?" He flirted his thumb over
+his shoulder. "And you needn't bother about Gulwing either. I've seen
+him--saw him as soon as I came in. I guess he'll be seeing me in a
+minute, too, and then he'll suddenly remember where it was he left his
+umbrella and take it on the hop."
+
+Marr said not a word. Brock rattled on in high spirits, still
+maintaining that cat-with-a-mouse attitude which was characteristic of
+him.
+
+"Never mind worrying about old pal Gulwing--I don't want him now. You're
+the one you'd better be worrying about; because that's going to be a
+mighty long taxi ride that you're going to take with me, Chappy--fifteen
+minutes to get there, say, and anywhere from five to ten years to get
+back--or I miss my guess.... Yes, Chappy, you're nailed with the goods
+this time. Propbridge is going through; his wife too. They'll go to
+court; they'll shove the case. And Cheesy Zaugbaum has come clean. Oh, I
+guess it's curtains for you all right, all right."
+
+"You don't exactly hate yourself, do you?" gibed Marr. "Sort of pleased
+with yourself?"
+
+"Not so much pleased with myself as disappointed in you, Chappy,"
+countered the exultant Brock. "I figured you were different from the
+rest of your crowd, maybe; but it turns out you're like all the
+others--you will do your thinking in a groove." He shook his head in
+mock sorrow. "Chappy, tell me--not that it makes any difference
+particularly, but just to satisfy my curiosity--curiosity being my
+business, as you might say--what number was it you called up from here
+about thirty minutes back? Come on. The young lady over yonder will tell
+me if you don't. Was it Worth 10,000?"
+
+"Yes," said Marr, "it was."
+
+"I thought so," said Brock. "I guessed as much. But say Chappy, that's
+the trunk number of the Herald. Before this you never were the one to
+try to break into the newspapers on your own hook. What did you want
+with that number?"
+
+"That's my business," said Marr.
+
+"Have it your way," assented Brock with ironic mildness. "Now, Chappy,
+follow me a minute and you'll see how you dished your own beans: You
+call up Worth 10,000--that's a private matter, as you say. But Central
+gets the call twisted and gives you another number--that's a mistake.
+And the number she happens to give you is the number of my new branch
+office down in the financial district--that's an accident. And the
+fellow who answers the call at my shop happens to be Costigan, my chief
+assistant, who's been working on the Propbridge case for five weeks
+now--and that's a coincidence. He doesn't recognize your voice over the
+wire--that would be luck. But when, like a saphead, you pull your new
+moniker, but with the same old initials hitched to it, and when on top
+of that you ask for George Spillane, which is Cheesy by his most popular
+alias--when you do these things, why Chappy, it's your own fault.
+
+"Because Costigan is on then, bigger than a house. You've tipped him
+your hand, see? And with our connections it's easy--and quick--for
+Costigan to trace the call to this hotel. And inside of two minutes
+after that he has me on the wire at my uptown office over here in West
+Fortieth. And here I am; as a matter of fact, I've been here all of
+fifteen minutes.
+
+"It all proves one thing to me, Chappy. You're wiser than the run of
+'em, but you've got your weak spot, and now I know what it is: You think
+in a groove, Chappy, and this time, by looking at the far end of the
+groove, you can see little old Warble-Twice-on-the-Hudson looming up.
+And you won't have to look very hard to see it, either.... Well, I see
+Gulwing has taken a tumble to himself and has gone on a run to look for
+his umbrella. Suppose we start on our little taxi ride, old groove
+thinker?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MR. LOBEL'S APOPLEXY
+
+
+The real purpose of this is to tell about Mr. Lobel's attack of
+apoplexy. What comes before must necessarily be in its nature
+preliminary and preparatory, leading up to the climactic stroke which
+leaves the distinguished victim stretched upon the bed of affliction.
+
+First let us introduce our principal. Reader, meet Mr. Max Lobel,
+president of Lobel Masterfilms, Inc., also its founder, its chief
+stockholder and its general manager. He is a short, broad, thick,
+globular man and a bald one, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, carrying a
+gold-headed cane and using a private gold-mounted toothpick after meals.
+His collars are of that old-fashioned open-faced kind such as our
+fathers and Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., used to wear; collars rearing
+at the back but shorn widely away in front to show two things--namely,
+the Adam's apple and that Mr. Lobel is conservative. But for his
+neckwear he patronizes those shops where ties are exclusively referred
+to as _scarves_ and cost from five dollars apiece up, which proves also
+he is progressive and keeps abreast of the times. When he walks he
+favors his feet. Mostly, though, he rides in as good a car as domestic
+currency can buy in foreign marts.
+
+Aside from his consuming desire to turn out those surpassing
+achievements of the cellular-cinema art known as Lobel's Masterfilms, he
+has in life two great passions, one personal in its character, the other
+national in its scope--the first a craving for fancy waistcoats, the
+second a yearning to see the name of Max Lobel in print as often as
+possible and in as large letters as likewise is possible; and for either
+of these is a plausible explanation. Mr. Lobel has a figure excellently
+shaped for presenting the patternings of a fanciful stomacher to the
+world and up until a few years ago there were few occasions when he
+might hope to see the name Lobel in print. For, know you, Mr. Lobel has
+not always been in the moving-picture business. Nobody in the
+moving-picture business has always been in the moving-picture
+business--excepting some of the child wonders under ten years of age.
+And ten years ago our hero was the M. Lobel Company, cloak and suit
+jobbers in rather an inconspicuous Eastern town.
+
+What was true of him as regards his comparatively recent advent into the
+producing and distributing fields was true of his major associates.
+Back in 1911 the vice president and second in command, Mr. F. X.
+Quinlan, moved upward into a struggling infantile industry via the
+stepping-stone of what in the vernacular of his former calling is known
+as a mitt joint--summers at Coney, winters in store pitches--where he
+guided the professional destinies of Madame Zaharat, the Egyptian
+seeress, in private, then as now, Mrs. F. X. Quinlan née Clardy.
+
+The treasurer and secretary, Mr. Simeon Geltfin, had once upon a time
+been proprietor of the Ne Plus Ultra Misfit Clothing Parlors at Utica,
+New York, a place where secondhand habiliments, scoured and ironed,
+dangled luringly in show windows bearing such enticing labels as
+"Tailor's Sample--Nobby--$9.80," "Bargain--Take Me Home For $5.60," and
+"These Trousers Were Uncalled For--$2.75."
+
+The premier director, Mr. Bertram Colfax, numbered not one but two
+chrysalis changes in his career. In the grub stage, as it were, he had
+begun life as Lemuel Sims, a very grubby grub indeed, becoming Colfax at
+the same time he became property man for a repertoire troupe playing
+county-fair weeks in the Middle West.
+
+As for the scenario editor and continuity writer, he in a prior
+condition of life had solicited advertisements for a trade journal. So
+it went right down the line.
+
+At the time of the beginning of this narrative Lobel Masterfilms, Inc.,
+had attained an eminence of what might be called fair-to-medium
+prominence in the moving-picture field. In other words, it now was able
+to pay its stars salaries running up into the multiples of tens of
+thousands of dollars a year and the bank which carried its paper had not
+yet felt justified in installing a chartered accountant in the home
+offices to check the finances and collect the interest on the loans
+outstanding. Before reaching this position the concern had passed
+through nearly all the customary intervening stages. Nearly a decade
+rearward, back in the dark ages of the filmic cosmos, the Jurassic
+Period of pictures, so to speak, this little group of pathfinders
+tracking under the chieftainship of Mr. Lobel into almost uncharted
+wilds of artistic endeavor had dabbled in slap-stick one reelers
+featuring the plastic pie and the treacherous seltzer siphon, also the
+trick staircase, the educated mustache and the performing doormat.
+
+Next--following along the line of least resistance--the adventurers went
+in more or less extensively for wild-western dramas replete with
+stagecoach robberies and abounding in hair pants. If the head bad
+man--not the secondary bad man who stayed bad all through, or the
+tertiary bad man who was fatally extinguished with gun-fire in Reel Two,
+but the chief, or primary, bad man who reformed and married Little Nell,
+the unspoiled child of Death Valley--wore the smartest frontier get-up
+of current year's vintage that the Chicago mail-order houses could turn
+out; if Little Nell's father, appearing contemporaneously, dressed
+according to the mode laid down for Forty-niners by such indubitable
+authorities as Bret Harte; if the sheriff stalked in and out of lens
+range attired as a Mississippi River gambler was popularly supposed to
+have been attired in the period 1860 to 1875; and if finally the cavalry
+troopers from the near-by army post sported the wide hats and khaki
+shirts which came into governmental vogue about the time of the Spanish
+War, all very well and good. The action was everything; the sartorial
+accessories were as they might be and were and frequently still are.
+
+Along here there intruded a season when the Lobel shop tentatively
+experimented with costume dramas--the Prisoner of Chillon wearing the
+conventional black and white in alternating stripes of a Georgia chain
+gang and doing the old Sing Sing lock step and retiring for the night to
+his donjon cell with a set of shiny and rather modern-looking leg irons
+on his ankles; Mary Queen of Scots and Catharine de' Medici in costumes
+strikingly similar; Oliver Goldsmith in Sir Walter Raleigh's neck ruff
+and Captain Kidd's jack boots.
+
+But this season endured not for long. Costume stuff was nix. It was not
+what the public wanted. It was over their heads. Mr. Lobel himself said
+so. Wake him up in the middle of the night and he could tell you exactly
+what the public did and did not want. Divining the popular will amounted
+with him to a gift; it approximated an exact art; really it formed the
+corner stone of his success. Likewise he knew--but this knowledge
+perhaps had come to him partly by experience rather than altogether by
+intuition--that historical ten reelers dealing with epochal events in
+the life of our own people were entirely unsuited for general
+consumption.
+
+When this particular topic untactfully was broached in his presence Mr.
+Lobel, recalling the fate of the elaborate feature entitled Let Freedom
+Ring, had been known to sputter violently and vehemently. Upon this
+production--now abiding as a memory only, yet a memory bitter as
+aloes--he had spared neither expense nor pains, even going so far as
+personally to direct the filming of all the principal scenes. And to
+what ends? Captious critics, including those who wrote for the daily
+press and those who merely sent in offensive letters--college professors
+and such like cheap high-brows--had raised yawping voices to point out
+that Paul Revere galloping along the pre-Revolutionary turnpike to
+spread the alarm passed en route two garages and one electric power
+house; that Washington crossing the Delaware stood in the bow of his
+skiff half shrouded in an American flag bearing forty-eight stars upon
+its field of blue; that Andrew Jackson's riflemen filing out from New
+Orleans to take station behind their cotton-bale breastworks marched for
+some distance beneath a network of trolley wires; that Abraham Lincoln
+signing the Emancipation Proclamation did so while seated at a desk in a
+room which contained in addition to Lincoln and the desk and the
+Proclamation a typewriter and a Persian rug; that at Manila Bay Admiral
+Dewey wore spats and a wrist watch.
+
+But these primitive adventurings, these earlier pioneering quests into
+the realm of the speculative were all in limbo behind them, all wiped
+off the slate, in part forgiven, in a measure forgotten. Since that
+primitive beginning and those formulative middle periods Lobel
+Masterfilms had found their field, and having found it, now plowed and
+tilled it. To those familiar with the rise and the ever-forward movement
+of this, now the fourth largest industry in the civilized globe--or is
+it the third?--it sufficiently will fix the stage of evolutionary
+development attained by this component unit of that industry when I
+state that Lobel Masterfilms now dealt preponderantly with vampires. To
+be sure, it continued to handle such side lines as taffy-haired ingénues
+from the country, set adrift among the wiles and pitfalls of a cruel
+city; such incidentals as soft-pie comickers and chin-whiskered
+by-Hectors; such necessary by-products as rarely beautiful he-juveniles
+with plush eyelashes and the hair combed slickly back off the forehead
+in the approved Hudson seal effect--splendid, manly youths these, who
+might have dodged a draft or two but never yet had flinched from before
+the camera's aiming muzzle. But even though it had to be conceded that
+Goldilockses and Prince Charmings endure and that while drolls and
+jesters may come and go, pies are permanent and stale not, neither do
+they wither; still, and with all that, such like as these were, in the
+Lobel scheme of things, merely so many side lines and incidentals and
+by-products devised and designed to fatten out a program.
+
+Where Mr. Lobel excelled was in the vamp stuff. Even his competitors
+admitted it the while they vainly strove to rival him. In this, his own
+chosen realm of exploration and conquest he stood supremely alone; a
+monarch anointed with the holy oils of superiority, coroneted with
+success's glittering diadem. Look at his Woman of a Million Sins! Look
+at his Satan's Stepchild, or How Human Souls are Dragged Down to Hell,
+in six reels! Look at A Daughter of Darkness! Look at The Wrecker of
+Lives! Look at The Spider Lady, or The Net Where Men Were the Flies!
+Look at Fair of Face Yet Black of Heart! All of them his, all box-office
+best bets and all still going strong!
+
+Moreover by now Lobel Masterfilms had progressed to that milestone on
+the path of progress and enterprise where genuine live authors--guys
+that wrote regular books--frequently furnished vehicles for stardom's
+regal usages. By purchase, upon the basis of so much cash or--as the
+case might be--so little cash down on the signing of the contract and
+the promise of so much more--often very very much more--to be paid in
+royalties out of accrued net profits, the rights to a published work
+would be acquired. Its name, say, was A Commonplace Person, which
+promptly would be changed in executive conclave to The Cataract of
+Destiny, or perhaps Fate's Plaything, or in any event some good catchy
+title which would look well in electrics and on three sheets.
+
+This important point having been decided on, Mr. Ab Connors, the
+scenario editor, would take the script in hand to labor and bring forth
+the screen adaptation. If the principal character in the work, as
+originally evolved by her creator, was the daughter of a storekeeper in
+a small town in Indiana who ran away from home and went to Chicago to
+learn the millinery business, he, wielding a ruthless but gifted blue
+pencil, would speedily transform her into the ebon-hearted heiress of a
+Klondyke millionaire, an angel without but a harpy within, and after
+opening up Reel One with scenes in a Yukon dance hall speedily would
+move all the important characters to New York, where the plot thickened
+so fast that only a succession of fade-outs and fade-ins, close-ups and
+cut-backs saved it from clabbering right on Mr. Connors' hands.
+
+The rest would be largely a matter of continuity and after that there
+was nothing to worry about except picking out the cast and the locations
+and building the sets and starting to shoot and mayhap detailing a head
+office boy to stall off the author in case that poor boob came butting
+in kicking about changes in his story or squawking about overdue royalty
+statements or something. Anyhow, what did he know--what could he be
+expected to know--about continuity or what the public wanted or what the
+limitations and the possibilities of the screen were? He merely was the
+poor fish who'd wrote the book and he should ought to be grateful that a
+fellow with a real noodle had took his stuff and cut all that dull
+descriptive junk out of it and stuck some pep and action and punch and
+zip into the thing and wrote some live snappy subtitles, instead of
+coming round every little while, like he was, horning in and beefing all
+over the place.
+
+And besides, wasn't he going to have his name printed in all the
+advertising matter and flashed on the screen, too, in letters nearly a
+fifth as tall as the letters of Mr. Lobel's name and nearly one-third as
+tall as the name of the star and nearly one-half as tall as the name of
+the director and nearly--if not quite--as tall as the name of the camera
+man, and so get a lot of absolutely free advertising that would be
+worth thousands of dollars to him and start people all over the country
+to hearing about him? Certainly he was! And yet, with all that, was
+there any satisfying some of these cheap ginks? The answer was that
+there was not.
+
+There was never any trouble, though, about casting the principal rôle.
+That was easy--a matter of natural selection. If it could be played
+vampishly from the ground up, and it usually could--trust Mr. Connors
+for that--it went without question to Vida Monte, greatest of all the
+luminaries in the Lobel constellation and by universal acknowledgment
+the best vampire in the business. In vampiring Vida Monte it was who
+led; others imitatively followed. Compared with her these envying lady
+copy cats were as pale paprikas are to the real tabasco. Five pictures
+she had done for Lobel Masterfilms since placing herself under Lobel's
+management and a Lobel contract, all of them overpowering knock-outs,
+sensations, sure-fire hits. On the sixth she now was at work and her
+proud employer in conversation and in announcements to the trade stood
+sponsor for the pledge that in its filming Monte literally would
+out-Monte Monte.
+
+Making his word good, he took over volunteer supervision of the main
+scenes. His high-domed forehead glistening with sweat, his spectacles
+aflame like twin burning glasses, his coat off, his collar off, his
+waistcoat off, he snorted and churned, a ninety-horse dynamo of a
+little fat man, through the hot glary studio, demanding this
+improvement, detecting that defect, calling for this, that or the other
+perfect thing in a voice which would have detained the admiring ear of
+an experienced bull whacker. Before him Josephson, the little camera
+man, quailed. From his path extra people departed, fleeing headlong; and
+in his presence property men were as though they were not and never had
+been. Out of the hands of Bertram Colfax, born Sims, he wrenched a
+megaphone and through it he bellowed:
+
+"Put more punch in it, Monte--that's what I'm asking you for--the punch!
+Choke her, Harcourt! Choke him right back, Monte! Now-w-w then, clinch!
+Clinch and hang on! Good! And now the kiss! You know, Monte, the long
+kiss--the genuwine Monte kiss! Oh, if you love me, Monte, give me
+footage on that kiss! That's it--hold it! Hold it! Keep on holding it!"
+
+"But, Mr. Lobel, now," protested Colfax, born a Sims but living it down
+and feeling that never more than at this minute, when rudely the
+steersman's helm had been snatched from his grasp, was there greater
+need that he should be a Colfax through and through----"but, Mr. Lobel,
+it was my idea that up to this point anyway the action should be played
+with restraint to sort of prepare the way for----"
+
+"What do you mean restraint?"
+
+"Well, I thought to emphasize what comes later--for a sort of
+comparative value--that if we were just a little subtle at the
+beginning--"
+
+"Sufficient, Colfax! Listen! Don't come talking to me about no subtles!
+When you're working the supporting members of the cast you maybe could
+stick in some subtles once in a while to salve them censors, but so far
+as Monte is concerned you leave 'em out!"
+
+"But--but--"
+
+"Don't but me any buts! Listen! Ain't I taken my paralyzed oath that
+this here picture should make all the other vamp pictures which ever
+were taken look like pikers? I have! Listen! For Monte, the way I feel,
+I shouldn't care if she don't do a single subtle in the whole damn
+picture."
+
+He had taken his paralyzed oath and he kept it. It was a wonderful
+story. The queen of the apaches, ruling the Parisian underworld by her
+fire, her beauty, her courage, accepts German gold to betray her
+country, and attempts by siren wiles to seduce from the path of duty
+Capt. Stuyvesant Schuyler of the U. S. A. general staff; almost succeeds
+too because of his blind passion for this glorious, sinful creature. At
+the crucial moment, when about to surrender to his Delilah secrets which
+would destroy the entire Allied cause and open the gates of Paris to the
+conquering foe, he is saved by a vision of his sainted,
+fade-in-and-fade-out mother's face. Overcome with remorse, he resigns
+his commission, and fleeing from temptation returns to America, a
+broken-hearted man; proves heart is broken by constantly pressing
+clenched hand to left breast as though to prevent pieces from slipping
+down into the abdominal cavity. Distress of the apache queen on finding
+her intended victim gone. Suddenly a real love, not the love of the
+wanton, but a purer, deeper emotion wakens in her breast. Close-up
+showing muscular reflexes produced upon the human face by wakening
+processes in the heart.
+
+Quitting the gay life, she follows him to Land of Free. Finds him about
+to marry his sweetheart of childhood, a New York society girl worth
+uncounted millions but just middling looking. Prompt bust-up of
+childhood sweetheart's romance. Abandonment of social position, wealth,
+everything by Schuyler, who declares he will make the stranger his
+bride--accompanying subtitle, "What should we care what the world may
+say? For after all, love is all!" Discovery on day before marriage of
+papers proving that Lolita--that's the lady apache's name--is really
+Schuyler's half sister, due to carryings-on of Schuyler's late father as
+a young art student in Paris with Lolita's mother, a famous gypsy model.
+Renunciation by Lolita of Schuyler. Her suicide by imbibing poison from
+secret receptacle in ring. Schuyler, after registering copious grief,
+reënters American Army under assumed name as a private in the ranks.
+Returns to battlefield in time to take part in decisive action of the
+war. All the officers in his brigade above the rank of corporal having
+apparently been killed by one devastating blast of high explosive, he
+assumes command and leads dauntless charge of the heavy artillery
+through the Hindenburg Line. Is made a colonel on the spot. Rides up
+Fifth Avenue alongside of Pershing in grand triumphant parade of
+home-coming First Division, carrying a large flag and occasionally
+chatting pleasantly with Pershing. On eve of marriage to childhood's
+sweetheart, who remains faithful, he goes to lonely spot where Lolita
+lies buried and places upon the silent mound her favorite flower, a
+single long-stemmed tiger lily. Fade out--finish!
+
+Artistically, picturesquely, from the standpoint of timeliness, from the
+standpoint of vampirishness, from any standpoint at all, it satisfied
+fully every demand. It was one succession of thrilling, gripping,
+heart-lifting scenes set amid vividly contrasting surroundings--the
+lowest dive in all Paris; the citadel at Verdun; grand ballroom of the
+Schuyler mansion at Newport; the Place Vendôme on a day when it was
+entirely unoccupied except by moving-picture actors; Fifth Avenue on its
+most gala occasion--these were but a few samples. The subtitles fairly
+hissed to the sibilant swishing of such words as traitress, temptress,
+tigress and sorceress. And the name of it--you'd never guess--the name
+of it was The She-Demon's Doom! When Mr. Lobel spoke those words
+inspired he literally took them up in his arms and fondled them and
+kissed them on the temples. And why not? They were his own brain
+children.
+
+He had kept his paralyzed word and he could prove it. For because this
+Vida Monte was one of those mimetic pieces of flesh which, without any
+special mental coöperation, may alter the body, the face, the muscles,
+the expression, the very look out of the eyes, to suit the demands of
+prompters and teachers; because of the plan of direction so powerfully
+engineered by the master mind of Lobel and, under Lobel, the lesser mind
+of Colfax, born Sims; because of the very nature of the rôle of Lolita
+the abandoned, this picture was more daring, more sensual, more filled
+up with voluptuous suggestion, with coiling, clinging, writhing
+snakiness, with rampant, naked sexuality--in short and in fine was more
+vampirishly vampiratious than this, the greatest of all modern mediums
+for the education, the moral uplift and the entertainment of the masses,
+had ever known.
+
+And then one week to the day after Mr. Lobel shot the last scene she up
+and died on him.
+
+That is to say, a woman named Glassman, a Hungarian by birth, in age
+thirty-two years, widowed and without children or known next of kin,
+died in a small bungalow in a small town up in the coast range north of
+Los Angeles. When the picture was done and Vida Monte took off the
+barbaric trappings and the heavy paste jewels and the clinging reptilian
+half gowns of the rôle she played, with them she took off and laid aside
+the animal emotionalism, the theatricalistic fever and fervor, the
+passion and the lure that professionally made up Vida Monte, movie star.
+She took off even the very aspect of herself as the show shop and as
+patrons of the cinemas knew her; and she put on a simple traveling gown
+and she tucked her black hair up in coils beneath a severely plain hat
+and she became what really she was and always had been--a quiet,
+self-contained, frugal and--except for her splendid eyes, her fine
+figure and her full mobile mouth--a not particularly striking-looking
+woman, by name Sarah Glassman, which was, in fact, her name; and quite
+alone she got on a train and she went up into the foothills to a tiny
+bungalow which she had rented there for a month or so to live alone, to
+do her own simple housekeeping, to sew and to read and to rest.
+
+It was the day after the taking of the last segment of the picture that
+she went away. It was four days later that she sickened of the Spanish
+influenza, so called. It was not Spanish and not influenza, though by
+any other name it would have been as deadly in its devastating sweep
+across this country. And it was within forty-eight hours after that, on
+a November afternoon, that word came to the Lobel plant that she was
+dead. Down there they had not known even that she was sick.
+
+"The doctor in that there little jay town up there by the name
+Hamletsburg is the one which just gets me on the long-distance telephone
+and tells me that she died maybe half an hour ago."
+
+Mr. Lobel in his private office was telling it to Vice President Quinlan
+and Secretary-Treasurer Geltfin, the only two among his associates that
+his messenger had been able to find about the executive department at
+the moment. He continued:
+
+"Coming like a complete shock, you could 'a' knocked me down with a
+feather, I assure you. For a minute I couldn't believe it. This doctor
+he has to say it to me twice before I get it into my head.
+Shocking--huh? Sudden--huh? Awful--what? You bet you! That poor girl,
+for her my heart is bleeding. Dead and gone like that, with absolutely
+practically no warning! It don't seem possible! Taken down day before
+yesterday, the doctor says, and commenced getting from bad to worse
+right away. And this morning she goes out of her head and at
+two-forty-five this afternoon all of a sudden her heart gives out on her
+and she is dead before anybody knows it. Awful, awful!"
+
+Mr. Lobel wagged a mournful poll.
+
+"More than awful--actually it is horrifying!" quoth Mr. Geltfin. Visibly
+at least his distress seemed greater than the distress of either of the
+others. "All off alone up there by herself in some little rube town it
+must come to her! Maybe if she had been down here with specialists and
+surgeons and nurses and all she would 'a' been saved. Too bad, too bad!
+People got no business going away from a big town! Me, I get nervous
+even on a motor trip in the country and--"
+
+"Everything possible which could be done was done," resumed Mr. Lobel.
+"So you don't need you should worry there, Geltfin. The doctor tells me
+he can't get no regular trained nurse on account there is so much
+sickness from this flu and no regular nurses there anyway, but he tells
+me he brings in his wife which she understands nursing and he says the
+wife sticks right there day and night and gives every attention. There
+ain't nothing we should reproach ourselves about, and besides we didn't
+know even she was sick--nobody knew.
+
+"Dead and gone, poor girl, and not one week ago--six days, if I got to
+be exact--she is sitting right there in that same seat where you're
+sitting now, Geltfin, looking just as natural and healthy as what you
+look, Geltfin; looking just as if nothing is ever going to happen to
+her."
+
+Mr. Geltfin had hastily risen and moved nearer the outer door.
+
+"An awful thing--that flu!" he declared. "Lobel, do you think maybe she
+could 'a' had the germs of it on her then?"
+
+"Don't be a coward, Geltfin!" rebuked his senior severely. "Look at me
+how I am not frightened, and yet it was me she seen last, not you!
+Besides, only to-day I am reading where that big doctor in Cincinnati,
+Ohio--Silverwater--says it is not a disease which you could catch from
+somebody else until after they have actually got down sick with it. Yes,
+sir, she sits right there telling me good-by. 'Mr. Lobel,' she says to
+me--I had just handed her her check--'Mr. Lobel,' she says, 'always to
+you,' she says, 'I should be grateful. Always to you,' she says, 'I
+should give thanks that two years ago when I am practically
+comparatively unknown you should 'a' given me my big chance.' In them
+very words she says it, and me setting here at this desk listening at
+her while she said so!
+
+"Well, I ain't lost no time, boys. Before even I sent to find you I
+already got busy. I've got Appel starting for up there in half an hour
+in my car to take charge of everything and with orders to spare no
+expense. The funeral what I am going to give that girl! Well, she
+deserves it. Always a hard worker, always on the job, always she minds
+her own business, always she saves her money, always a perfect lady,
+never throwing any of these here temperamentals, never going off in any
+of these here highsterics, never making a kick if something goes wrong
+because it happens I ain't on the lot to run things, never----"
+
+It threatened to become a soliloquy. This time it was Quinlan who
+interrupted:
+
+"You said it all, Lobel, and it's no need that you should go on saying
+it any more. The main points, I take it, are that we're all sorry and
+that we've lost one swell big asset by her dying--only it's lucky for us
+she didn't take ill before we got through shooting The She-Demon."
+
+"Lucky? Huh! Actually, lucky ain't the right word for it!" said the
+president. "When I think of the fix we should 'a' been in if she hadn't
+finished up the picture first, I assure you, boys, it gives me the
+shivers. Right here and now in the middle of being sorry it gives me the
+shivers!"
+
+"It does, does it?" There was something so ominous in Mr. Geltfin's
+sadly ironic remark--something in tone and accent so lugubriously
+foreboding that his hearers swung about to stare at him. "It does, does
+it? Well, all what I've got to say is, Lobel, you've got some shivers
+coming to you! We've all got some shivers coming to us! Having this girl
+die on us is bad business!"
+
+"Sure it is," agreed the head, "but it might be worse. There's one
+awful big salary cut off the pay roll and if we can't have her with
+us no longer there's nobody else can have her. And the profits
+from that last picture should ought to be something positively
+enormous--stupendous--sensational. Listen! I bet you that from the hour
+we release----"
+
+"You ain't going to release!" broke in Geltfin, his wizen features
+sharpening into a peaky mask of grief.
+
+"Don't talk foolishness!" snapped Mr. Lobel. "For why shouldn't we be
+going to release?"
+
+"That's it--why?" Mr. Quinlan seconded the demand.
+
+"Because you wouldn't dare do it!" In his desire to make clear his point
+Mr. Geltfin fairly shoveled the words out of himself, bringing them
+forth overlapping one another like shingles on a roof. "Because the
+public wouldn't stand for it! Always you brag, Lobel, that you know what
+the public want! Well then, would the public stand for a picture where a
+good, decent, straight girl that's dead and will soon be in her grave is
+for six reels doing all them suggestive vampire stunts like what you
+yourself, Lobel, made her do? Would the public stand for calling a dead
+woman names like she-demon? They would not--not in a thousand years--and
+you should both know it without I should have to tell you! With some
+pretty rough things we could get by, but with that thing we could never
+get by! The public, I tell you, would not stand for it. No, sir; when
+that girl died the picture died with her. You just think it over once!"
+
+Out of popped eyes he glared at them. They glared at him, then they
+looked at each other. Slowly Mr. Lobel's head drooped forward as though
+an unseen hand pressed against the back of his neck. Quinlan casting his
+eyes downward traced with one toe the pattern of the rug under his feet.
+
+On top of one sudden blow, heavy and hard to bear, another now had
+followed. Since Lobel had become one of the topnotchers with a
+reputation to maintain, expenses had been climbing by high jumps, but
+receipts had not kept pace with expenses. There were the vast salaries
+which even the lesser drawing cards among the stars now demanded--and
+got. There were war taxes, excess profit taxes, amusement taxes. There
+was to be included in the reckoning the untimely fate of Let Freedom
+Ring, a vastly costly thing and quickly laughed to death, yet a smarting
+memory still. Its failure had put a crimp in the edge of the exchequer.
+This stroke would run a wide fluting of deficit right through the middle
+of it.
+
+The pall of silence lasted no longer than it has here taken to describe
+how it fell and enveloped them. Mr. Geltfin broke the silence without
+lifting the prevalent gloom. Indeed his words but depressingly served to
+darken it to a very hue of midnight.
+
+"Besides," he added, "there is anyhow another reason. We know what a
+nice clean girl she was in private life. We know that all them wild
+romance stories about her was cooked up in the press department to make
+the suckers believe that both on and off the screen she was the same.
+But she wasn't, and so I for one should be afraid that if we put that
+fillum out she'd come back from the dead to stop it!"
+
+He sank his voice, glancing apprehensively over his shoulder.
+
+"Lobel, you wouldn't dare do it!"
+
+"Lobel," said Quinlan, "he's right! We wouldn't dare do it!"
+
+"Quinlan," admitted Lobel, "it's right--I wouldn't dare do it."
+
+In that same instant of his confession, though, Mr. Lobel bounded out of
+his chair, magically changing from a dumpy static figure of woe into the
+dynamo of energy and resourcefulness the glassed-in studios and the
+out-of-door locations knew.
+
+"I got it!" he whooped. "I got it!" He threw himself at an inner door of
+the executive suite and jerked it open. "Appel," he shouted, "don't
+start yet! I got more instructions still for you. And say, Appel, you
+ain't seen nobody but only Quinlan and Geltfin--eh? You ain't told
+nobody only just them? Good! Well, don't! Don't telephone nobody! Don't
+speak a word to nobody! Don't move from where you are!"
+
+He closed the door and stood against it as though to hold his private
+secretary a close prisoner within, and faced his amazed partners.
+
+"It's a cinch!" he proclaimed to them. "I just this minute thought it up
+myself. If I must say it myself, always in a big emergency I can think
+fast. Listen! Nobody ain't going to know Monte is dead; not for a year,
+not maybe for two years; not until this last big picture is old and worn
+out; not until we get good and ready they should know. Vida Monte, she
+goes right on living till we say the word."
+
+"But--but--"
+
+"Wait, wait, can't you? If I must do all the quick thinking for this
+shop shouldn't I sometimes get a word in sideways? What I'm telling you,
+if you'll please let me, is this: The girl is dead all right! But nobody
+knows it only me and you, Quinlan, and you, Geltfin, and Appel in this
+next room here. Even the doctor up there at Hamletsburg he don't know it
+and his wife she don't know it and nobody in all that town knows it. And
+why don't they know? Because they think only it is a woman named Sarah
+Glassman that is dead. Actually that sickness no doubt changed her so
+that even if them rubes ever go to see high-class feature fillums there
+didn't nobody recognize her. If they didn't suspect nothing when she was
+alive, for why should they suspect something now she is dead? They
+shouldn't and they won't and they can't!
+
+"What give me the idea was, I just remembered that when the doctor
+called me up he spoke only the name Glassman, not the name Monte. He
+tells me he calls up here because he finds in her room where she died a
+card with the name Lobel Masterfilms on it. And likewise also I just
+remembered that in the excitement of getting such a sad news over the
+telephone I don't tell him who really she is neither."
+
+"Holy St. Patrick!" blurted Quinlan, up now on his feet. "You mean,
+Lobel----"
+
+"Wait, wait, I ain't done--I ain't hardly started!" With flapperlike
+motions of his hands Mr. Lobel waved him down. "It's easy--a pipe.
+Listen! To date her salary is paid. The day she went away I gave her a
+check in full, and if she done what always before she does, it's in the
+bank drawing interest. Let it go on staying in the bank drawing
+interest. So far as we know, she ain't got no people in this country at
+all. In the old country, in Hungary? Maybe, yes. But Hungary is yet all
+torn up by this war--no regular government there, no regular mails, no
+American consuls there, no nothing. Time for them foreigners that they
+should get their hands on her property one year from now or two years or
+three. They couldn't come to claim it even if we should notify them,
+which we can't. They don't lose nothing by waiting. Instead they
+gain--the interest it piles up.
+
+"Should people ask questions, why then through the papers we give it out
+that Miss Vida Monte is gone far off away somewhere for a long rest;
+that maybe she don't take no more pictures for a long time. That should
+make The She-Demon go all the better. And to-morrow up there in that
+little rube town very quietly we bury Sarah Glassman, deceased, with
+the burial certificate made out in her own name." He paused a moment to
+enjoy his triumph. "Boys, when I myself think out something, am I right
+or am I wrong?"
+
+He answered his own question.
+
+"I'm right!"
+
+By the look on Quinlan's face he read conviction, consent, full and
+hearty approval. But Geltfin wavered. Inside Geltfin superstition
+wrestled with opposing thoughts. Upon him then Lobel, the master mind,
+advanced, dominating the scene and the situation and determined also to
+dominate the lesser personality.
+
+"But--but say--but look here now, Lobel," stammered Geltfin, hesitating
+on the verge of a decision, "she might come back."
+
+"Geltfin," commanded Lobel, "you should please shut up. Do you want that
+we should make a lot of money or do you want that we should lose a lot
+of money? I ask you. Listen! The dead they don't come back. When just
+now you made your spiel, that part of it which you said about the dead
+coming back didn't worry me. It was the part which you said about the
+public not standing for it that got me, because for once, anyhow, in
+your life you were right and I give you right. But what the public don't
+know don't hurt 'em. And the public won't know. You leave it to me!"
+
+It was as though this argument had been a mighty arm outstretched to
+shove him over the edge. Geltfin ceased to teeter on the brim--he fell
+in. He nodded in surrender and Lobel quit patting him on the back to
+wave the vice president into activity.
+
+"Quinlan," he ordered as he might order an office boy, "get busy! Tell
+'em to rush The She-Demon! Tell 'em to rush the subtitles and all! Tell
+'em to rush out an announcement that the big fillum is going to be
+released two months before expected--on account the demand of the public
+is so strong to see sooner the greatest vampire feature ever fillumed."
+
+Quinlan was no office boy, but he obeyed as smartly as might any newly
+hired office boy.
+
+
+If it was Mr. Lobel's genius which guided the course of action,
+energizing and speeding it, neither could it be denied that circumstance
+and yet again circumstance and on top of that more circumstance matched
+in with hue and shade to give protective coloration to his plan.
+Continued success for it as time should pass seemed assured and
+guaranteed, seeing that Vida Monte, beyond the studios and off the
+locations, had all her life walked a way so secluded, so inconspicuous
+and so utterly commonplace that no human being, whether an attaché of
+the company or an outsider, would be likely to miss her, or missing her,
+to pry deeply into the causes for her absence. So much for the
+contingencies of the future as those in the secret foresaw it. As for
+the present, that was simplicity.
+
+As quietly as she had moved in those earlier professional days of hers,
+when she played small rôles in provincial stock companies; as quietly as
+she had gone on living after film fame and film money came her way; as
+quietly as she had laid her down and died, so--very quietly--was her
+body put away in the little cemetery at Hamletsburg. To the physician
+who had ministered to her, to his good-hearted wife, to the official who
+issued the burial certificate, to the imported clergyman who held the
+service, to the few villagers who gathered for the funeral, drawn by the
+morbid lure which in isolated communities brings folk to any funeral--to
+all of these the dead woman merely was a stranger with a strange name
+who, temporarily abiding here, had fallen victim to the plague which
+filled the land.
+
+Of those who had a hand in the last mortal rôle she would ever play only
+Lobel's private secretary, young Appel, who came to pay the bills and
+take over the private effects of this Sarah Glassman and after some
+fashion to play the rôles of next friend and chief mourner, kenned the
+truth. The clergyman having done his duty by a deceased coreligionist,
+to him unknown, went back to the city where he belonged. The physician
+hurried away from the cemetery to minister to more patients than he
+properly could care for. The townspeople scattered, intent upon their
+own affairs. Appel returned to headquarters, reporting all well.
+
+At headquarters all likewise went well--so briskly well in fact that
+under the urge for haste things essential were accomplished in less time
+by fewer craftsmen than had been the case since those primitive
+beginnings when Lobel's, then a struggling short-handed concern,
+frequently had doubled up its studio staffs for operative service in the
+makeshift laboratory. Reporting progress to the president, Mr. Quinlan
+expanded with self-satisfaction.
+
+"I'm fixing to show you something in the way of a speed record," he
+proudly proclaimed. "The way I looked at it, the fewer people I had
+rushing this thing through the factory the less chance there was for
+loose talk round the plant and the less loose talk there was going on
+round the plant the less chance there was for maybe more loose talk
+outside. Yes, I know we'd figured we'd got everything caulked up
+air-tight, but I says to myself, 'What's the use in taking a chance on a
+leak if you don't have to?'
+
+"So I practically turned the big part of the job--developing and all the
+rest of it--over to Josephson, same as we used to do back yonder when we
+was starting out in this game and didn't have a regular film cutter and
+the camera man had to jump in and develop and cut and assemble and print
+and everything. Josephson shot all the scenes for The She-Demon--he
+knows the run of it better even than the director does. Besides,
+Josephson is naturally close-mouthed. He minds his own business and
+never butts in anywhere. To look at him you can't never tell what he's
+thinking about. But even if he suspected anything--and, of course, he
+don't--he's the kind that'd know enough to keep his trap shut. So I've
+had him working like a nailer and he's pretty near done.
+
+"Soon as he had the negative ready, which was late yesterday afternoon
+after you'd went home, I had it run off with nobody there but me and
+Josephson, and I took a flash at it--and, Lobel, it's a bear! No need
+for you to worry about the negative--it was a heap too long, of course,
+in the shape it was yesterday, but it had everything in it we hoped
+would be in it--and more besides.
+
+"So then without losing a minute I stuck Josephson on the printing
+machine himself. I'd already gave the girl on the machine a couple of
+days off to get her out of the way. Josephson stayed on the job alone
+pretty near all last night, I guess. He had things to himself without
+anybody to bother him and I tell you he shoved it along.
+
+"Connors ain't lost no time neither. He's got the subtitles pretty near
+done, and believe it or not, as you're a mind to, but, Lobel, I'm
+telling you that this time to-morrow morning and not a minute later I'll
+have the first sample print all cut and assembled and ready for you to
+give it a look! Then it'll just be a job of matching up the negative and
+sticking in the subtitles and starting to turn out the positives faster
+than the shipping-room gang can handle 'em. I guess that ain't moving,
+heh?"
+
+"Quinlan," said Mr. Lobel, "I give you right."
+
+
+By making his word good to the minute the gratified Mr. Quinlan derived
+additional gratification. At the time appointed they sat in darkness in
+the body of the projection room--Lobel, Quinlan, Geltfin and Appel,
+these four and none other--behind a door locked and barred. Promptly on
+Quinlan's order the operator in the box behind them started his machine
+and the accomplished rough draft of the great masterpiece leaped into
+being and actuality upon the lit square toward which they faced.
+
+The beginning was merely a beginning--graphic enough and offering
+abundant proof that in this epochal undertaking the Lobel shop had
+spared no expense to make the production sumptuous, but after all only
+preliminary stuff to sauce the palate of the patron for a greater feast
+to come and suitably to lead up to the introduction of the star. Soon
+the star was projected upon the screen, a purring, graceful panther of a
+woman, to change at once into a sinuous python of a woman and then to
+merge the feline and the ophidian into a sinister, splendid, menacing
+composite bespeaking the dramatic conception and the dramatic
+presentment of all feminine evil, typifying in every move of the lithe,
+half-clad body, in every shift of the big eyes, wickedness unleashed and
+unashamed.
+
+Mr. Lobel sitting unseen in the velvet blackness uttered grunts of
+approbation. The greatest of all film vampires certainly had delivered
+the goods in this her valedictory. Never before had she so well
+delivered them. The grunting became a happy rumble.
+
+But all this, too, was in a measure dedicatory--a foretaste of more
+vivid episodes to follow, when the glorious siren, displaying to the
+full her powers of fascination over the souls and the bodies of men,
+would rise to heights yet greater and the primitive passion she so well
+simulated would shine forth like a malignant jewel in a setting that was
+semibarbaric and semicivilized, too, and altogether prodigal and lavish.
+The first of these bigger scenes started--the scene where the queen of
+the apaches set herself to win the price of her hire from the Germans by
+seducing the young army officer into a betrayal of the Allied cause; the
+same scene wherein at the time of filming it Mr. Lobel himself had taken
+over direction from Colfax's hands.
+
+The scene was launched, acquired headway, then was halted as a bellow
+from Mr. Lobel warned the operator behind him to cut off the power.
+
+"What the hell!" sputtered the master. "There's a blur on the picture
+here, a sort of a kind of smokiness. Did you see it, Geltfin? Right
+almost directly in front of Monte it all of a sudden comes! Did you,
+Quinlan?"
+
+"Sure I seen it," agreed Geltfin. "Like a spot--sort of."
+
+"It wasn't on the negative when I seen it day before yesterday," stated
+Quinlan. "I can swear to that. A little defect from faulty printing, I
+guess."
+
+"All right then," said Mr. Lobel. "Only where you got efficiency like I
+got it in this plant such things should have no business occurring.
+
+"Go on, operator--let's see how goes it from now on."
+
+Out again two shadow figures--the vampire and the vampire's
+prey--flashed in motion. Yes, the cloudy spot was there, a bit of murky
+shadow drifting between the pair of figures and the audience. It
+thickened and broadened--and then from the suddenly constricted throats
+of the four watchers, almost as though all in the same moment an
+invisible hand had laid gripping hold on each of their several
+windpipes, came a chorused gasp.
+
+For they saw how out of the drifting patch of spumy wrack there emerged
+a shape vague and indistinct and ghostly, but taking on instantly the
+sharpened outlines of one they recognized. It was the shape, not of Vida
+Monte, the fabled wrecker of lives, but the shape of her other self,
+Sarah Glassman, and the face it wore was not the face of the stage
+vampire, aflame with the counterfeited evil which the actor woman had so
+well known how to simulate but the real face of the real woman, who lay
+dead and buried under a mound of fresh-cut sods seventy miles away--her
+own face, melancholy and sadly placid, as God had fashioned it for her.
+
+Out from the filmy umbra it advanced to the center, thus hiding its
+half-naked double writhing in the embrace of the deluded lover, and
+clearly revealed itself in long sweeping garments of pure white--fit
+grave clothes for one lately entombed--with great masses of loosened
+black hair falling like a pall about the passionless brooding face; and
+now lifting reproachful eyes, it looked out across the intervening void
+of blackness into their staring eyes, and from the folds of the cerement
+robes raised a bare arm high as though to forbid a lying sacrilege. And
+stood there then as a wraith newly freed from the burying mold, filling
+and dominating the picture so that one looking saw nothing else save the
+shrouded figure and the head and the face and those eyes and that upheld
+white arm.
+
+Cowering low in his seat with a sleeve across his eyes to shut out the
+accusing apparition, Mr. Geltfin whispered between chattering teeth: "I
+told him! I told him the dead could maybe come back!"
+
+Mr. Quinlan, a bolder nature but even so terribly shaken, was muttering
+to himself: "But it wasn't in the negative! I swear to God it wasn't in
+the negative!"
+
+It is probable that Mr. Lobel heard neither of them, or if he heard he
+gave no heed. He had a feeling that the darkness was smothering him.
+
+"Shut off the machine!" he roared as he wrenched his body free of the
+snug opera chair in which he sat. "And turn on the lights in this
+room--quick! And let me out of here--quick!"
+
+Lunging into the darkness he stumbled over Appel's legs and tumbled
+headlong out into the narrow aisle. On all fours as the lights flashed
+on, he gave in a choking bellow his commands.
+
+"Burn that print--you hear me, burn it now! And then burn the negative
+too! Quick you burn it, like I am telling you!"
+
+"But, Lobel, I'll swear to the negative!" protested Quinlan, jealous
+even in his fright for his own vindication. "If you'll look at the
+neg--"
+
+"I wouldn't touch it for a million dollars!" roared Lobel. "Burn it up,
+I tell you! And bury the ashes!"
+
+Still choking, still bellowing, he scrambled to his feet, an ungainly
+embodiment of mortal agitation, and ran for the door. But Mr. Geltfin
+beat him to it and through it, Quinlan and Appel following in the order
+named.
+
+Outside their chief fell up against a wall, panting and wheezing for
+breath, his face swollen and all congested with purple spots. They
+thought he was about to have a stroke or a seizure of some sort. But
+they were wrong. This merely was Nature's warning to a man with a size
+seventeen neckband and a forty-six-inch girth measurement. The stroke he
+was to have on the following day.
+
+Probably Quinlan and Geltfin as experienced business men should have
+known better than to come bursting together into the office of a stout
+middle-aged man who so lately had suffered a considerable nervous shock
+and still was unstrung; and having after such unseemly fashion burst in,
+then to blurt out their tidings in concert without first by soft and
+soothing words preparing their hearer's system to receive the tidings
+they bore. But themselves, they were upset by what they just had learned
+and so perhaps may be pardoned for a seeming unthoughtfulness. Both
+speaking at once, both made red of face and vehement by mingled emotions
+of rage and chagrin, each nourishing a perfectly natural and human
+desire to place the blame for a catastrophe on shoulders other than
+their own two pairs, they sought to impart the tale they brought. Ensued
+for an exciting moment a baffling confusion of tongues.
+
+"It was that Josephson done it--the mousy little sneak!"
+
+These words became intelligible as Quinlan, exerting his superior vocal
+powers, dinned out the sputtering inarticulate accents of Geltfin.
+
+"He fixed it so that you'd spill the beans, Lobel! He fixed The
+She-Demon--Josephson. And me trusting him!
+
+"How should I be knowing that all this time him and that girl was
+secretly engaged to be married? How should I be knowing that he would
+find out for himself the day after the funeral that she was dead and yet
+never say a word about it? How should I be knowing that he would have
+all tucked away somewhere a roll of film showing her dressed up like a
+madonna or a saint or a martyr or a ghost or something which he took
+privately one time when they was out together on location--slipping away
+with her and taking 'em without nobody knowing about it? How should I be
+knowing that without tipping his hand he would cook up the idea to work
+a slick fake on you, Lobel, and scare you into killing off the whole
+thing? How should I be knowing that while he was on the printing machine
+all by himself the other night that he would work the old double
+exposure stunt and throw such a scare into you in the projecting room
+yesterday?"
+
+By reason of his valvular resources Mr. Quinlan might shout louder than
+Geltfin. But he could not shout louder than Mr. Lobel. Nobody in that
+section of Southern California could. Mr. Lobel outblared him:
+
+"How should you be knowing? You come now and ask me that when all along
+it was you that had the swell idee to stick him into the laboratory all
+by himself where he could play some funny business? You!"
+
+"But it was you, Lobel, that wouldn't listen to me when I begged you to
+wait and not burn up the negative. I tried to tell you that the negative
+was O. K. when I'd seen it run off."
+
+"You told me? It's a lie!"
+
+"Sure I told you! Geltfin remembers my telling you, don't you, Geltfin?
+You're an old bird, Lobel--you ought to know by now about retouching and
+doctoring and all. You know how easy it is to slip over a double
+exposure. But it was only the sample print that was doctored. The
+negative was all right, but you wouldn't listen."
+
+"That's right too, Lobel!" shrilled Geltfin. "I heard him when he yelled
+out to you that you should wait!"
+
+Quinlan amplified the indictment.
+
+"Sure he heard me--and so did you! But no, you had to lose your nerve
+and lose your head just because you'd had a scare throwed into you."
+
+"I never lose my head! I never lose my nerve!" denied Mr. Lobel. He
+turned the counter tide of recriminations on Geltfin.
+
+"Anyhow,--it was you started it, Geltfin--you in the first place, right
+here in this room, with your craziness about the dead coming back. Only
+for your fool talk I would never have had the idee of a ghost at all.
+And now--now when the cow is all spilt milk you two come and--"
+
+"Oh, but Lobel," countered Geltfin, "remember you was the one that made
+'em burn up the negative without giving it a look at all!"
+
+"He said it, Lobel!" reënforced Quinlan. "You was the one that just
+would have the negative burned up whether or no. And now it's burned
+up!"
+
+Mr. Lobel was not used to being bullied in his own office or elsewhere.
+If there was bullying to be done by anyone, he was his own candidate
+always. Surcharged with distracting regrets as he was, he had an
+inspiration. He would turn the flood of accusation away from himself.
+
+"Where is that Josephson?" he whooped. "He is the one actually to blame,
+not us. Let me get my hands on that Josephson once!"
+
+"You can't!" jeered Quinlan. "He's quit--he's gone--he's beat it! He
+wrote me a note, though, and mailed it back to me when he was beating it
+out of town, telling me to tell you how slick he'd worked it on you." He
+felt in his pockets. "I got that note here somewhere--here it is. I'll
+read it to you, Lobel--he calls you an old scoundrel in one place and an
+old sucker in another."
+
+"Look out--catch him, Quinlan!" cried Mr. Geltfin. "Look at his
+face--he's fixing to faint or something."
+
+
+The prime intent of this recital, as set forth at the beginning, was to
+tell why Mr. Max Lobel had an attack of apoplexy. That original purpose
+having been now carried out, there remains nothing more to be added and
+the chapter ends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ALAS, THE POOR WHIFFLETIT!
+
+
+Over Jefferson Poindexter's usually buoyant spirits a fabric of gloom,
+black, thick, and heavy, was spread like a burying-pall. His thoughts
+were the color of twelve o'clock at night at the bottom of a coal-mine
+and it the dark of the moon. Moroseness crowned his brow; sorrow berode
+his soul, and on his under lip the bull-bat, that eccentric bird which
+has to sit lengthwise of the limb, might have perched with room to
+spare. You couldn't see the ointment for the flies, and Gilead had gone
+out of the balm business. There was a reason. The reason was Ophelia
+Stubblefield.
+
+On an upturned watering-piggin alongside Mittie May's stall in the
+stable back of the house, Jeff sat and just naturally gloomed. To this
+retreat he had been harried against his will. Out of her domain, which
+was the kitchen, Aunt Dilsey had driven him with words barbed and
+bitter.
+
+"Tek yo'se'f on 'way f'um yere, black boy!" Such had been her command.
+"Me, I's plum distracted an' wore out jes' f'um lookin' at you settin'
+'round sullin' lak a' ole possum. Ef Satan fine some labor still fur
+idle hands to do, same ez de Holy Word say he do, he suttinly must be
+stedyin' 'bout openin' up a branch employmint agency fur cullid only,
+'specially on yore account. You ain't de Grand President of de Order of
+de Folded Laigs, tho' you shorely does ack lak it. You's s'posed to be
+doin' somethin' fur yore keep an' wages. H'ist yo'se'f an' move."
+
+"I ain't doin' nothin'!" Jeff protested spiritlessly.
+
+"Dat you ain't!" agreed Aunt Dilsey. "An' whut you better do is better
+do somethin'--tha's my edvices to you. S'posin' ole boss-man came back
+yere to dis kitchen an' ketch you 'cumberin' de earth de way you is. You
+knows, well ez I does, w'ite folks suttinly does hate to see a strappin'
+nigger settin' 'round doin' nothin'."
+
+"Boss-man ain't yere," said Jeff. "He's up at the cote-house. Mos'
+doubtless jes' about right now he's sendin' some flippy cullid woman to
+the big jail fur six months fur talkin' too much 'bout whut don't
+concern her."
+
+"Is tha' so?" she countered. "Well, ef he should come back home he'll
+find one of de most fragrant cases of vagromcy he ever run acrost right
+yere 'pon his own household premises. Boy, is you goin' move, lak I
+patiently is warned you, or ain't you? Git on out yander to de stable
+an' confide yo' sorrows to de Jedge's old mare. Mebbe she mout be able
+to endure you, but you p'intedly gives me de fidgits. Git--befo' I
+starts findin' out ef dat flat haid of yourn fits up smooth ag'inst de
+back side of a skillit."
+
+Nervously she fingered the handle of her largest frying-pan. Jeff knew
+the danger-signals. Too deeply sunken in melancholy to venture any
+further retorts, he withdrew himself, seeking sanctuary in the lee of
+Mittie May. He squatted upon the capsized keeler, automatically
+balancing himself as it wabbled under him on its one projecting handle,
+and, with his eyes fixed on nothing, gave himself over unreservedly to a
+consuming canker. For all that unhappiness calked his ears as with
+pledgets of cotton wool, there presently percolated to his aloof
+understanding the consciousness that somebody was speaking on the other
+side of the high board fence which marked the dividing line between
+Judge Priest's place and the Enders' place next door. Listlessly he
+identified the voice as the property of the young gentleman from up
+North who was staying with his kinsfolk, the Enders family. This was a
+gentleman already deeply admired by Jeff at long distance for the
+sprightliness of his wardrobe and for his gay and gallus ways. Against
+his will--for he craved to be quite alone with his griefs and no
+distracting influences creeping in--Jeff listened. Listening, he heard
+language of such splendor as literally to force him to rise up and
+approach the fence and apply his eye to a convenient cranny between two
+whitewashed boards.
+
+Under an Injun-cigar tree which grew in the Enders' back yard the
+fascinating visitor out of Northern parts was stretched in a hammock,
+between draws on a cigarette discoursing grandiloquently to a
+half-incredulous but wholly delighted audience of three. His three small
+nephews were hunkered on the earth beside him, their grinning faces
+upturned to his the while he dealt first with this and then with that
+variety of curious fauna which, he alleged, were to be encountered in
+the wilds of a strange place called the State of Rhode Island, where, it
+seemed, he had spent the greater part of an adventurous and crowded
+youth.
+
+"Well," he was saying now, beginning, as it were, a new chapter, "if you
+think the sulfur-crested parabola is a funny bird you should hear about
+the great flannel-throated golosh, or arctic bird of the polar seas,
+which is a creature so rare that nobody ever saw one, although Dr. Cook,
+the imminent ex-explorer, made an exhaustive study of its habits and
+peculiarities and told the King of Denmark about them, afterward
+amplifying his remarks on the subject in the lecture which he delivered
+in this, his native land, under the auspices of the International
+School of Poor Fish. By the way, I'm sure the Doctor must have visited
+this town on his tour. Only yesterday, I think it was, I saw an
+illuminated sign down on Franklin Street which surely was used
+originally to advertise his lecture. It was a sign which said, 'Cook
+With Gas!' But speaking of fish, I am reminded of the fur-bearing
+whiffletit; only some authorities say the whiffletit is not a fish at
+all, but a subspecies of the wampus family. Now, the wampus--"
+
+"Say, tell us about the whiffletit next," begged one wriggling
+youngster, plainly allured by the sound of the name.
+
+"With pleasure," said the speaker. "The whiffletit is found only in
+streams running in a south-northerly direction. This is because the
+whiffletit, being a sensitive creature with poor vision, insists on
+having the light falling over its left shoulder at all times. A creek,
+river, inlet, or estuary which has a wide mouth and a narrow head, such
+as a professional after-dinner speaker has, is a favorite haunt for the
+whiffletit. To the naturalist it is a constant source of joy. It always
+swims backward upstream, to keep the water out of its eyes, and it has
+only one fin, which grows just under its chin, so that the whiffletit
+can fan itself in warm weather, thus keeping cool, calm, and collected.
+Most marvelous thing of all about this marvelous creature is its diet.
+For the whiffletit, my dear young friends, lives exclusively on imported
+Brie cheese.
+
+"Did I say exclusively? Ah, there I fell into error. It has been known
+to nibble at a chiropodist's finger, but it prefers imported Brie
+cheese, aged in the wood. The mode employed in catching it is very
+interesting, and I shall now describe it to you. Selecting a body of
+water wherein the whiffletit resides, you enter a round-bottomed boat
+and row out to the middle of it. Then you take a square timber, and,
+driving it into the water, withdraw it very swiftly so as to leave a
+square hole in the water. Care should be taken to use a perfectly square
+timber because the whiffletit being, as I forgot to tell you, shaped
+like a brick, cannot move up and down a round hole without barking its
+shins, much to the discomfort of the pretty creature.
+
+"Pray follow me closely now, for at this juncture we come to the most
+important phase of the undertaking. You bait the edges of the hole with
+the cheese cut in small cubes and quietly await results. Nor do you have
+long to wait. Far down below in his watery retreat the whiffletit
+catches the alluring aroma of the cheese. He swims to the surface and
+devours it to the last crumb. But alas for the greedy whiffletit!
+Instantly the cheese swells him up so that he cannot change gears nor
+retreat back down the hole, and as he circles about, flapping
+helplessly, you lean over the side of the boat and laugh him to death!
+And such, my young friends, such is the fate of the whiffletit."
+
+"'Scuse me, suh."
+
+The amateur aspirant for the robe of Munchausen paused from lighting a
+fresh cigarette and lifted his eyes, and was aware of an
+anthracite-colored face risen, like some new kind of crayoned full moon,
+above the white skyline of the side fence.
+
+"'Scuse me, suh, fur interruptin'," repeated the voice belonging to the
+apparition, "but I couldn't he'p frum overhearin' whut you wuz tellin'
+the boys yere. An' I got sort of interested myse'f."
+
+"It's Judge Priest's Jeff, Uncle Dwight," explained the oldest nephew.
+"Jeff makes us fluttermills out of corn-stalks, and he learned
+us--taught us, I mean--to call a brickbat an alley-apple, and he can
+make his ears wiggle just like a rabbit and everything. Don't you,
+Jeff?--I mean, can't you, Jeff?"
+
+"Ah, I see," said the fabulist with a wink aside for Jeff's benefit. "I
+am indeed delighted to make the acquaintance of one thus gifted, even
+under the present informal circumstances. In what way, if any, may I be
+of service to you, Judge Priest's Jeff?"
+
+"That air thing you named the whiffletit--near ez I made out you said,
+boss, that fust you tolled him up to whar you wanted him wid cheese an'
+'en you jest natchelly laffed him to death?"
+
+"Such are the correct facts accurately repeated, Judge Priest's Jeff,"
+gravely assented this affable faunalist.
+
+"Yas, suh," said Jeff. "D'ye s'pose now, boss, it would he'p any ef
+they wuz a whole passel of folks to do the laffin' 'stid of jes' one?"
+
+"Beyond the peradventure of a doubt. Concerted action on the part of
+many, guffawing merrily in chorus, assuredly would hasten the death of
+the ill-starred victim, if you get what I mean, Judge Priest's most
+estimable Jeff?"
+
+"Yas, suh," said Jeff. "Thanky, suh." He did not exactly smile his
+thanks, but the mask of his melancholy crinkled round the edges and
+raised slightly. One who knew Jeff, and more particularly one who had
+been cognizant of his depressed state during the past fortnight, would
+have said that a heartening thought suddenly had come to him, lightening
+and lifting in ever so small a degree the funereal mantlings. He made as
+though to withdraw from sight. A gesture from the visiting naturalist
+detained him.
+
+"One moment," said Uncle Dwight. "Might I, a comparative stranger, be
+pardoned for inquiring into the motives underlying the interest you have
+evinced in my perhaps poorly expressed but veracious narration?"
+
+The wraith of Jeff's grin took on flesh visibly. It was a pleasure--even
+to one beset by grievous perplexities--it was a pleasure to hear such
+noble big words fall thus trippingly from human lips. His answer, tho,
+was in a measure evasive, not to say cryptic.
+
+"I wuz jes' stedyin', tha's all, suh," he fenced. He ducked from view,
+then bobbed his head up again.
+
+"'Scuse me, suh, but they is one mo' thing I craves to ast you."
+
+"Proceed, I pray you. Our aim is to please and instruct."
+
+"Well, suh, I jes' wanted to ast you ef you ever run acrost one of these
+yere whiffletits w'ich played on the jazzin'-valve?"
+
+"Prithee?"
+
+"Naw, suh, not the prith--prith--whut you jes' said. I mentioned the
+jazzin'-valve--whut some folks calls the saxophone. D'ye reckin they
+mout' 'a' been a whiffletit onct 'at played on one?"
+
+"Oh, the saxophone! Well, as to that I could not with certainty speak.
+But, mark you, the whiffletit is a creature of infinite
+resources--versatile, abounding in quaint conceits and whimsies, and,
+having withal a wide repertoire. Sometimes its repertoire is twice as
+wide as it is, thus producing a peculiar effect when the whiffletit is
+viewed from behind. On second thought, I have no doubt that in the
+privacy of its subterranean fireside the whiffletit wiles away the
+tedium of the long winter evenings by playing on the saxophone."
+
+"Come on over, Jeff, and Uncle Dwight will tell us some more," urged the
+hospitable oldest nephew.
+
+But Jeff had vanished. He wished to be alone for the working out of a
+project as yet vague and formless, but having a most definite object to
+be attained. Stimulated by hope new-born, he was now a sort of twelfth
+carbon-copy of the regular Jeff--faint, perhaps, and blurry, but
+recognizable. Through the clouds which encompassed him the faint promise
+of a rift was apparent.
+
+By rights one would have said that Jeff had no excuse for hiding in a
+shadowed hinterland at all. The world might have been excused for its
+failure to plumb the underlying causes which roiled the waters of his
+soul. Seemingly the currents of life ran for him in agreeable channels.
+He had an indulgent employer whose clothes fitted Jeff. Indeed,
+anybody's clothes fitted Jeff. He had one of those figures which seem to
+give and take. He was well nourished, gifted conversationally, of a
+nimble wit, resourceful, apt. Moreover, home-grown watermelons were
+ripe. The Eighth of August, celebrated in these parts by the race as
+Emancipation Day, impended. The big revival--the biggest and most
+tremendously successful revival in his people's local history--was in
+full swing at the Twelfth Ward tabernacle, affording thrill and
+entertainment every week-night and thrice on Sundays.
+
+There never had been such a revival; probably there never would be
+another such. Justifiably, the pastor of Emmanuel Chapel took credit to
+himself that he had planted the seed which at this present time so
+gloriously yielded harvest. Theretofore his chief claim to public
+attention had rested upon the sound of the name he wore. He had been
+born a Shine and christened a Rufus. But to him the name of Rufus Shine
+had seemed lacking in impressiveness and euphony for use by one about
+entering the ministry. Thanks to the ingenuity of a white friend who was
+addicted to puns and plays upon words, the defect had been cured. As the
+Rev. A. Risen Shine he bore a name which fitted its bearer and its
+bearer's calling--at once it was a slogan and a testimony, a trade-mark
+and a watch-cry.
+
+Proudly now he walked the earth, broadcasting the favor of his smile on
+every side. For it had been he who divined that the times were ripe for
+the importation of that greatest of all exhorting evangelists of his
+denomination, the famous Sin Killer Wickliffe, of Nashville, Tenn. His
+had been the zeal which inspired the congregation to form committees on
+ways and means, on place and time, on finance; his, mainly, the energy
+behind the campaign for subscriptions which filled the war-chest. As
+resident pastor, chief promotor, and general manager of the project, he
+had headed the delegation which personally waited upon the great man at
+his home and extended the invitation. Almost immediately, upon learning
+that the amount of his customary guaranty already had been raised and
+deposited in bank, the Rev. Wickliffe felt that he had a call to come
+and labor, and he obeyed it. He brought with him his entire
+organization--his private secretary, his treasurer, his musical
+director. For, mind you, the Sin Killer had borrowed a page from the
+book of certain distinguished revivalists of a paler skin-pigmentation
+than his. As the saying goes among the sinful, he saw his Caucasian
+brethren and went them one better. His musical director was not only an
+instrumentalist but a composer as well. He adapted, he wrote, he
+originated, he improvised, he interpolated, he orchestrated, he played.
+As one inspired, this genius played the saxophone.
+
+Now, in the world at large the saxophone has its friends and its foes.
+Its detractors agree that the late Emperor Nero was a maligned man;
+cruel, perhaps, in some of his aspects, but not so cruel as has been
+made out in the case against him. It was a fiddle he played while Rome
+burned--it might have been a saxophone. But to the melody-loving heart
+of the black race in our land the mooing tones of this long-waisted,
+dark-complected horn carry messages as of great joy. It had remained,
+though, for the resourceful Rev. Wickliffe to prove that it might be
+made to fill a nobler and a higher destiny than setting the feet of the
+young men to dancing and the daughters to treading the syncopated
+pathways of the ungodly. Discerning this by a sort of higher intuition,
+he had thrown himself into the undertaking of luring the most expert
+saxophone performer of his acquaintance away from the flaunting tents of
+the transgressor and herding him into the fold of the safely regenerate.
+He succeeded. He saved Cephus Fringe, plucking him up as a brand from
+the burning, to remold him into a living torch fitted to light the way
+for others.
+
+Of Cephus it might be said, paraphrasing the lines about little dog
+Rover, that when he was saved he was saved all over. Being redeemed, he
+straightway disbanded his orchestra. He tore up his calling-card
+reading,
+
+
+     +-----------------------------------------+
+     |     PROFESSOR CEPHUS FRINGE ESQUIRE     |
+     |        THE ANGLO-SAXOPHONE KING         |
+     |   Address: Care Champey's Barber-Shop   |
+     |SOLE PROPRIETOR FRINGE'S ALL-STAR TROUPE |
+     +-----------------------------------------+
+
+
+He enlisted under the militant banners and on the personal staff of the
+Sin Killer. Amply then was the prior design of his new commander
+justified. For if it was the eloquence, the magnetism, the compelling
+force of the revivalist which brought the penitents shouting down the
+tan-bark trail to the mourner's bench, it was the harmonious croonings
+of Prof. Fringe as he conducted the introductory program--now rendering
+as a solo his celebrated original composition, "The Satan Blues," now
+leading the special choir--which psychologically paved the way for the
+greater scene to follow after. There was distress in the devil's
+glebe-lands when this pair struck their proper stride--first the
+Fringian outpourings harmoniously exalting the spirits of the assemblage
+and then the exhorters tying his hands to the Gospel plow and driving
+down into the populous valleys of sin, there to furrow and harrow, to
+sow and tend, to garner and glean.
+
+The team had struck its stride early at the protracted meeting so
+competently fostered by the resident pastor of Emmanuel Chapel, the Rev.
+A. Risen Shine. To himself, as already stated, the latter took prideful
+credit for results achieved and results promised. Well he might. Already
+hundreds of converts had come halleluiahing through; hundreds more
+teetered and swayed, back and forth, between doubt and conviction, ready
+at a touch to fall like the ripe and sickled grain in the lap of the
+husbandman. Wavering brethren had been fortified and were made stalwart
+again. Confirmed backsliders rubbed their wayward feet in the resin of
+faith and were boosted up the treacherous skids of their temptation and
+over the citadel walls to bask among the chosen in a Jericho City of
+repentance. Proselytes from other and hostile creeds trooped over with
+hosannas and loud outcries of rejoicing. Even the place where, each
+evening, the triumph of the preceding evening was repeated and amplified
+seemed appropriate for such scenes. For the Twelfth Ward tabernacle had
+not always been a tabernacle; it had been a tobacco-warehouse--but it
+was converted. And its present chief ornament, next only to the Sin
+Killer himself--indeed, its chiefest ornament of all in the estimation
+of impressionable younger unmarried female members--was Prof. Cephus
+Fringe.
+
+At thought of him and of this, Jeff Poindexter, reperched on his wabbly
+piggin, wove his furrowed brow into a closer and more intricate pattern
+of cordial dislike. For if the main reason of his unhappiness was
+Ophelia Stubblefield, the secondary reason and principal contributory
+cause was this same Cephus Fringe. Ophelia's favorite letter may not
+have been F, but it should have been. She was fair, fickle, fawn-toned,
+flirty, flighty, and frequently false. Jeff cast back in his mind. He
+certainly had had his troubles since he became permanently engaged to
+Ophelia. For instance, there had been her affair with that ferocious
+razor-wielder Smooth Crumbaugh. In this matter the fortuitous return
+from the dead of Red Hoss Shackleford, as skilfully engineered by Jeff,
+had broken up Red Hoss's own memorial services, had also operated to
+scare Smooth Crumbaugh clean out of Colored Odd Fellows' Hall and leave
+the fainting Ophelia in the rescuing arms of Jeff. But there had been
+half a dozen other affairs, each of such intensity as temporarily to
+undermine Jeff's peace of mind. Between spells of infatuations for
+attractive strangers, she accepted Jeff's devotions. The trouble was,
+though, that life, with Ophelia, seemed to be just one infatuation after
+another. And now, to cap all, she had suffered herself, nay, offered
+herself, to fall thrall to the dashing personality and the varied
+accomplishments of this Fringe person. It was this entanglement which
+for two weeks past had made Jeff, her official 'tween-times fiancé, a
+prey to carking cares and dark forebodings.
+
+Hourly and daily the situation, from Jeff's point of view, had grown
+more desperate as Ophelia's passion for the fascinating sojourner grew.
+He had even lost his relish for victuals which, with Jeff, was indeed a
+serious sign. In long periods of self-imposed solitude he had devised
+and discarded as hopeless various schemes for bringing discomfiture upon
+his latest and most dangerous rival. For a while he had thought somehow,
+somewhere, to rake up proofs of the interloper's former wild and
+reckless life. But of what avail to do that?
+
+By his own frank avowal the Professor had had a spangled past; had been
+an adventurer and a wanton, a wandering minstrel bard; had even been in
+jail. This background of admitted transgressions, now that he was so
+completely reformed and reclaimed, merely made him an all-the-more
+attractive figure in the eyes of those to whom he offered confession.
+Again, Jeff had trifled with a vague design of taunting Fringe into a
+quarrel and beating him up something scandalous. To this end he
+tentatively had approached our leading exponent of the art of
+self-defense and our most dependable sporting authority, one Mr. Jerry
+Ditto.
+
+Mr. Ditto had grown out of a clerkship at Gus Neihiem's cigar-store into
+the realm of fistiana. As a shadow-boxer he excelled; as a bag-puncher
+also. But in an incautious hour for himself and his backer, Flash Purdy,
+owner of Purdy's Dixieland Bar, he had permitted himself to be entered
+for a match before an athletic club at Louisville against one Max
+Schorrer, a welter-weight appearing professionally under the _nom de
+puge_ of Slugging Fogarty. It was to have been a match of twelve rounds,
+but early in the second round Mr. Ditto suddenly lost all conscious
+interest in the proceedings.
+
+He retired from the ring after this with a permanent lump on the point
+of his jaw and a profound conviction that the Lord had made a mistake
+and drowned the wrong crowd that time at the Red Sea. He fitted up a
+gymnasium in the old plow factory and gave instructions in sparring to
+the youth of the town. Naturally, his patronage was all-white, but he
+offered to take Jeff on for a few strictly private lessons at night
+provided Jeff would promise not to tell anybody about it. But at last
+the prospective client drew back. His ways were the ways of peace and
+diplomacy. Why depart from them? And, anyhow, this Cephus Fringe was so
+dog-goned sinewy-looking. Playing a saxophone ought to give a man wind
+and endurance. If not knocked cold in the first onslaught he might
+become seriously antagonized toward Jeff.
+
+But now, in the sportive fablings of the young white gentleman from up
+North who was visiting the Enders family, he had found a clue to what he
+sought. The difficult point, though, was to evolve the plan for the plot
+nebulously floating about in his brain; for while he envisaged the
+delectable outcome, the scheme of procedure was as yet entirely without
+form and substance. It was as though he looked through a tunnel under a
+hill. At the far end he beheld the sunlight, but all this side of it was
+utter darkness. Seeking to pluck inspiration out of the air, his roving
+eye fell upon the dappled rump of Mittie May as she stood in her stall
+placidly munching provender, and with that, _bang_! inspiration hit him
+spang between the eyes.
+
+To look on her, ruminative, ewe-like, fringed of fetlock and deliberate
+in her customary amblings, you would never have reckoned Mittie May to
+be a mare with a past. But such was the case. Her youth had been spent
+in travel over the continent with a tented caravan; in short, a circus.
+Her broad flat top-side, her dependable gait, her amiable disposition,
+her color--white with darkish half-moons on shoulder and flank--all
+these admirably had fitted her for the ring. When, long years before,
+Hooper's wagon-shows came to grief in our town Mittie May had been
+seized by Farrell Brothers to satisfy an unpaid hay-bill.
+
+Through her sobering maturer years she had passed from one set of hands
+to another, until finally, in her declining days, she found asylum in
+the affectionate ownership of Judge Priest, with Jeff to curry her fat
+sides and no more arduous labor to perform than occasionally to draw the
+Judge about from place to place in his ancient shovel-topped buggy.
+About her now there was naught to suggest the prancing rozin-back she
+once had been; the very look of her eye conjured up images of simple
+pastoral scenes--green meadows and purling brooks.
+
+But let a certain signal be sounded and on top of that let a certain air
+be played and Mittie May, instantly losing that air she had of a
+venerable and dignified sheep, became a Mittie May transformed; a Mittie
+May reverted to another and more feverish time; a Mittie May stirred by
+olden memories to nightmarish performances. By chance once Jeff had
+happened upon her secret, and now, all in one illuminating flash,
+recalling the conditions governing this discovery, he gave vent to a low
+anticipatory chuckle. It was the first chuckle he had uttered in a
+fortnight, and this one was edged with a sinister portent. He had his
+idea now. He had at hand the agency for bringing the scheme to fruition.
+But yet there remained much of preliminary detail to be worked out. His
+plan still was like a fine-toothed comb which has seen hard usage in a
+wiry thatch--there were wide gaps between its prongs.
+
+Jeff gave himself over to sustained thought. He made calculations
+calendar-wise. This was the first day of August; the eighth, therefore,
+was but seven short days removed. This plot of his seemed to resemble a
+number of things. It was like a piece of pottery, too. First the plastic
+clay must be assembled, then the vessel itself turned from it; finally
+the completed product must be given time to harden before it would be
+ready for use. He must move fast but warily.
+
+To begin with, now, he must create a setting of plausibility for the
+rôle he meant, in certain quarters, to essay; must dress the character,
+as it were, in its correct housings and provide just the right touches
+of local color. Ready at hand was Aunt Dilsey; he would make her,
+unwittingly so far as she kenned, a supporting member of the cast. She
+would never know it, but she would play an accessory part, small but
+important, in his prologue.
+
+Five minutes later she lifted her eyebrows in surprise. As he reinserted
+himself halfway across the portals of the realm where she queened it his
+recent moroseness was quite gone from him. About him now was the
+suggestion, subtly conveyed, that here stood one who, after profound
+cogitation, had found out what ailed him and, by the finding out, was
+filled with a gentle, chastened satisfaction. He seated himself on the
+kitchen door-step, facing outward so that comparative safety might be
+attained with a single flying leap did her uncertain temper, flaring up
+suddenly, lead her to acts of hostility before he succeeded in winning
+her over. He uttered a long-drawn sigh, then sat a minute in silence. In
+silence, too--a suspicious, menacing silence--she glared at him.
+
+"Aunt Dilsey," he ventured, speaking over his shoulder, with his face
+averted from her, "mebbe you been noticin' yere lately I seemed kind of
+downcasted an' shiftless, lak ez ef I had a mood on me?"
+
+"Has I noticed it?" she repeated--"huh!" The punctuating grunt was
+non-committal. It might mean nothing; it might mean anything.
+
+He cleared his throat and went on,
+
+"An', mebbe--I ain't sayin' you actually is; I's sayin' it with a
+mebbe--mebbe you been marvelin' in yore mind whut it wuz w'ich pestered
+me an' made me ack so kind of no-'count?"
+
+"I ain't needin' to marvel," she stated coldly. "I knows. Laziness! Jes'
+pyure summer-time nigger laziness, wid a rich streak of meanness th'owed
+in."
+
+"Nome, you is wrong," he corrected her gently. "You is wrong there.
+'Ca'se likewise an' furthermo' I also is been off my feed--ain't that a
+sign to you?"
+
+"Sign of a tapeworm, I 'spects."
+
+"Don't say that, please, Ma'am," he humbly pleaded. "You speakin' in
+sich a way meks me 'most discouraged to confide in you whut I aims to
+confide in you. I'm tellin' it to you the fust one, too. 'Tain't nary
+'nother soul heared it. Aunt Dilsey, I's grateful to you in my heart,
+honest I is, fur runnin' me 'way frum yore presence yere jes' a little
+w'ile ago. You never knowed it at the time--I didn't s'picion it also
+neither--but you done me a favor. 'Ca'se settin' out yonder in the
+stable all alone and ponderin' deep, all of a sudden somethin' jes' come
+right over me an' I knowed whut's been the matter wid me lately. Aunt
+Dilsey, I's felt the quickenin' tech."
+
+"Better fur you ef somebody made you feel de quickenin' buggy-whup."
+
+He disregarded the brutal suggestion.
+
+"Yessum, I's felt the quickenin' tech. Ez you doubtless full well knows,
+I ain't been 'tendin' much 'pon the big revival. But even so--even an'
+evermo' so--the influence frum it done stretch fo'th its hand an' reach
+me. I ain't sayin' I's plum won over yit, but 'way down deep insides of
+me I's stirred--yessum, tha's the word--stirred. I ain't sayin' the
+spirit of grace is actually th'owed me, but I feel prone to say I thinks
+it's fixin' to rassle wid me. I ain't sayin' I stands convicted, but I
+aims to be a searcher fur the truth; I aims to stop, look, an' lissen. I
+ain't sayin'--" He broke off, the floods of his imagery dammed by the
+skeptical eye which swept him; then made a lame conclusion, "Tha's whut
+I sez, Ma'am, to you in strict confidences."
+
+"Den lemme say somethin' to you. You figgers it's salvation you needs,
+huh? I figgers it's vermifuge. Oh, I knows you, boy--I knows you f'um de
+grass-roots up. Still an' wid all dat, ef you should crave to mend yo'
+ways--an' de Heavens above knows dey kin stand a heap of mendin'!--I
+ain't gwine be de one to hender you."
+
+Against her better judgment her tone was softening. For she gave her
+allegiance unrestrainedly to the doctrine preached at Emmanuel Chapel.
+She was one of its stanch pillows. Indeed, it might be said of her that
+she was one of its plumpest bolsters; and Jeff, although admittedly of
+no religious persuasion, had grown up in the shadow of a differing
+creed. The winning over of the black ram of another fold would be a
+greater victory than the reclamation of any wandering sheep who had been
+reared as a true believer.
+
+"Well, boy," she went on, in this new mood, "let us hope an' pray dat in
+yore case dey's yit hope. De ways of de Almighty is pas' findin' out.
+Fur do not de Scriptures say dey's room fur both man an' beast?--de maid
+servant an' de man servant, de ox an' de ass, dey all may enter in? So
+dey mout be a skimsy, bare chanct fur sech even ez you is. One thing
+shore--ef dey's ary grain of contritefulness in yore soul, trust de Sin
+Killer to fetch it fo'th to de light of day. He's de ole fambly doctor
+w'en it come to dat kind of sickness. You go to dat tabernickle to-night
+an' you keep on goin' an' le's see whut come to pass.... Jeffy, dey's a
+little mossil of cold peach cobbler lef over f'um dinner yistiddy
+settin' up yonder amongst de shelfs of my cu'board!"
+
+"Nome, thank you," said Jeff. "The emotions w'ich is in me seems lak
+they ain't left me no room fur nothin' else. Seems lak I can't git my
+mind on vittles yit. But I shore aims to be at the tabernickle to-night,
+Aunt Dilsey--I means, Sist' Dilsey. You jes' watch me. Tha's all I asts
+of you now--jes' watch me!"
+
+Head down and shoulders hunched, in the manner of one harkening to inner
+voices, Jeff betook himself around the corner of the back porch. Once
+out of her sight, though, he flung from him his mien of absorption. The
+overture had been rendered; there remained much to be done before the
+curtain rose. The languorous shade invited one to tarry and rest, but
+Jeff breasted the sunshine, going hither and yon upon his errands. Back
+of a cabin on Plunket's Hill he had private conference with one Gumbo
+Rollins, by profession a carnival concessionaire and purveyor of
+amusements in a small way. No cash actually changed hands, but on Jeff's
+part there was a promise of moneys to be paid in the event of certain
+as-yet-problematical contingencies.
+
+Next he sought for and, at the Bleeding Heart restaurant, found a limber
+individual named Tecumseh Sherman Glass, called Cump for short. This
+Tecumseh Sherman Glass was a person of two trades and one outstanding
+trait. By day a short-order cook, by night he played in 'Gustus
+Hillman's Colored String Band. It is to be marked down in the reader's
+memory that the instrument he played was the saxophone; also that he was
+heavily impregnated with that form of professional jealousy which lurks
+in the souls of so many _artistes_; likewise that he was a member in
+fair standing of the Rev. A. Risen Shine's congregation, and, finally,
+that he was a born meddler in other folks' affairs. These facts all
+should be borne in mind; they have their value.
+
+With Tecumseh Sherman Glass, Jeff spent some time in a confidential
+exchange of words. Here, again, the matter of a subsequent financial
+reward, to be paid by the party of the first part, meaning Jeff, to the
+party of the second part, meaning Cump, following the satisfactory
+outcome of sundry developments, was arranged. Would there were space to
+tell how cunningly, how craftily Jeff, in the subtleties marking this
+interview, played upon three chords in the other's being--the chord of
+vengeful envy, the chord of malice, the chord of avarice. There is not
+space.
+
+Four o'clock found the plotter entering the parlor of what once had
+been the establishment of T. Marshall, undertaker, now the Elite Colored
+Funeral Home, Marshall & Kivil, proprietors. These transformations had
+dated from the time Percy C. Kivil (Tuskegee '18) entered the firm. Here
+was no plain undertaker. Here was an expert and a graduate mortician,
+with diploma to prove it; also one gifted of the pen. Two inscriptions
+done in flowing type hung on the wall. One of these inscriptions read:
+
+
+     Oh, Death, where is thy sting
+       When we officiates?
+     Embalming done attentively
+       At standard pre-war rates.
+
+
+And the other:
+
+
+     Blest be the tie that binds!
+       Tho death thy form may shake.
+     Call in a brother of thy race
+       And let him undertake!
+
+
+At a desk between these two decorative objects and half shadowed by the
+bright-green fronds of a large artificial palm, sat Æsop Loving,
+son-in-law of the senior partner. From his parent-by-marriage Æsop had
+borrowed desk-room for the carrying on of the multitudinous business
+relating to the general management of one of the celebrations projected
+in honor, and on account of, the Eighth of August. He might appear to be
+absorbed in important details, as he now did. But inside of him he was
+not happy and Jeff knew the reasons; the reasons were common rumor.
+This year there was to be more than one celebration; there were to be
+two; and the opposition, organizing secretly and stealing a march on
+that usually wide-awake person, Æsop, had rented Belt Line Park, thus
+forcing Æsop's crowd to make a poor second choice of the old
+show-grounds, a treeless common away out near the end of Tennessee
+Street. On top of this and in an unexpected quarter, even more
+formidable competition was foreshadowed. A scant eighth of a mile
+distant from the show-lot and on the same thoroughfare stood the Twelfth
+Ward tabernacle, and here services would be held both afternoon and
+evening of the Eighth. The Rev. Wickliffe had so announced, and the Rev.
+Shine had backed him in the decision.
+
+It was inevitable, with this surpassing magnet of popular interest so
+near at hand, that for every truant convert who might halt to taste of
+the pleasures provided by Æsop Loving and his associate promoters, half
+a dozen possible patrons would pass on by and beyond, drawn away by the
+compelling power of the Sin Killer's eloquence. Representations had been
+made to the revivalist that, with propriety, he might suspend his
+ministry for the great day. His answer was the declaration that on the
+Eighth he would preach not merely once, but twice.
+
+By him and his there would be no temporizing with the powers of evil,
+however insidiously cloaked. Would not dancing be included in the
+entertainments planned by these self-seeking laymen who now approached
+him? Would not there be idle sports and vain pastimes calculated to
+entice the hearts of the populace away from consideration of the welfare
+of their own souls? Admittedly there would be drinking of soft drinks.
+And into the advertised softness some hardness assuredly would slip. You
+could not fool the Sin Killer. Having taken a firm stand, his rectitude
+presently moved him to further steps. On his behalf it was stated that
+he, personally, would lead the elect in triumphant procession out
+Tennessee Street to the tabernacle between the afternoon preaching and
+the evening. As an army with banners, the saved, the sober, and the
+seeking would march past, thus attesting their fealty to the cause which
+moved them. He defied all earthly forces to lure a single one from the
+ranks.
+
+And, after the preaching, under his auspices, there would be a mighty
+cutting of watermelons for those deemed to be qualified to participate
+therein. By the strict tenets of the Rev. Wickliffe's theology it seemed
+that watermelons were almost the only luscious things of this carnal
+world not held to be potentially or openly sinful. Small wonder then
+that Jeff, jauntily entering the Elite Funeral Home, read traces of an
+ill-concealed distress writ plain upon the face of Æsop Loving.
+
+"Well, Brother Lovin', you shore does look lak you'd hung yore harp
+'pon the willer-tree an' wuz fixin' to tek in sorrow fur a livin'," he
+said in greeting. "Cheer yo'se'f up; 'tain't nothin' so worse but whut
+it mout be worser."
+
+"Easy fur you to say so, Brother Poindexter; harder fur me to do so,"
+stated Æsop. "Gallivantin' 'round the way you is, you ain't got no idea
+of the aggervations w'ich keeps comin' up in connection wid an occasion
+sech ez this one, an' mo' 'specially the aggervations w'ich pussonally
+afflicts the director-general of the same, w'ich I is him."
+
+"I been hearin' somethings myse'f," said Jeff. "Word is come to me, fur
+one thing, that this yere smart-ellicky gang out at the Belt Line Park
+is aimin' to try to cut some of the groun' frum under yore feet. I
+regrets to hear it."
+
+"'Tain't them so much," said Æsop. "We couldn't 'spect to go 'long
+havin' a nomopoly furever. Sooner or late they wuz bound to be
+opposition arisin' up. 'Tain't them so much, although I will say it wuz
+a low-flung trick to tek an' rent that park right out frum under our
+noses 'thout givin' us no warnin' so's we mout go an' rent it fu'st. No,
+hit's the action of that Emmanuel Chapel bunch w'ich gives me the mos'
+deepest concern. Seems lak ev'ry time that Rev'n' Sin Killer open his
+mouth I kin feel cold cash crawlin' right out of my pocket. Mind you,
+Brother Poindexter, I ain't got a word to say ag'in religion. I's strong
+fur it on Sundays, ez you well knows, but dog-gone religion w'en it
+come interferin' wid a pusson's chanct to pick up a little spare change
+fur hisse'f on a week-day!"
+
+"Spoke lak a true business man, Brother Lovin'," said Jeff. "Still, I
+reckin you's mebbe countin' the spoilt eggs 'fore they's all laid. The
+way I sees it, you'll do fairly well, nevertheless an' to the contrary
+notwithstandin'. Le's see. Ain't you goin' to have the dancin'-pavilion
+goin' all day?"
+
+"Yas, but--"
+
+"Ain't you goin' to have money rollin' in frum all the snack-stands an'
+frum the fried-fish privilege an' frum the cane rackits an' frum the
+knock-the-babies-down an' all?"
+
+"Tubby shore, but--"
+
+"Ain't you due to pick up a right smart frum the kitty of the private
+crap game an' the chuck-a-luck layout?"
+
+"Natchelly. But--"
+
+"Hole on; I ain't th'ough yit. Seems lak to me you ain't properly
+counted up yore blessin's a-tall. Ain't the near-beer--" he sank his
+voice discreetly, although there was no one to overhear "ain't the
+near-beer an' the _still nearer_ beer goin' fetch you in a right peart
+lil' income? I'll say they is. An' ain't you goin' do mighty well on
+yore own account out of yore share of the commission frum Gumbo
+Rollinses' Flyin' Jinny?"
+
+"Hole on, hole on! How come Gumbo Rollins?"
+
+"W'y tha's all fixed," stated Jeff. "Gumbo he'll be out there 'fore
+sunup on the 'p'inted day wid his ole Flyin' Jinny an' his ole
+grind-organ an'--"
+
+"Tain't nothin' fixed," demurred the astonished and indignant Æsop.
+"'Tain't nothin' fixed 'thout I fixes it. Ain't I had pestermints 'nuff
+las' yeah settlin' up, or tryin' to, wid that Rollins? Ain't I told him
+then that never ag'in would I--"
+
+"Oh, tha's settled," announced Jeff soothingly.
+
+"Who settled it?"
+
+"Me."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yas, me--out of pyure frien'ship fur you. Lissen, Brother Lovin', an'
+give due heed. I comes to you d'rect frum Gumbo Rollins. He's done seen
+the error of the way he acked tow'ds you that time. He's cravin' that
+all the grudges of the bygone past shall be disremembered. Here's whut
+he's goin' to do: He's goin' give yore organization the reg'lar cut, an'
+'pon top of that he's goin' hand you, pussonally an' private, a special
+extra five pur cent, on all he teks in; that comes ez a free-will
+offerin' to you. He's goin' 'bandon his plan to run ez a independint
+attraction on the Eighth down back of the market-house. He's goin' be
+wid you heart an' soul an' Flyin' Jinny. All he asts, through me, is
+that he kin have the right to set her up on the purtic'lar spot w'ich
+he's got in mind out there on them show-ground lots. An' finally an'
+furthermo' he's done commission me to hand you ten dollars, unbeknownst
+to anybody, jes' to prove to you that his heart's in the right place an'
+that he's wishful fur to do the square thing." He felt in his pockets,
+producing a crumpled bill. "An' here 'tis!"
+
+Æsop pouched the currency on the flank where he carried his personal
+funds before his commercial instinct inspired him to seek out the
+motives actuating the volunteer peacemaker. Experience had taught him to
+beware of Greeks bearing gifts--not of the gifts particularly, but of
+the Greeks.
+
+"Well," he said, "ef Gumbo Rollins aims to be honest an' open an'
+abovebode wid us, w'y that puts a diff'unt face on it. But so fur ez I
+heared tell, you an' Gumbo Rollins ain't been so thick ez all this up
+till now. I's wonderin' whut does you 'spect to git out of the little
+transaction fur yo'se'f? 'Ca'se I gives you warnin' right yere an' now
+that ef you's hopin' to git a split out of me you mout jes' ez well stop
+dreamin' ary sech a delusion an' become undelirious ag'in."
+
+"Stop, Brother Lovin'," broke in Jeff in the tone of one aggrieved at
+being unjustly accused. "Has I asted you fur anything? Then wait till I
+does so."
+
+"All right," agreed Æsop. "I'll wait till you does so an' w'en you does
+so I'll say no, same ez I's already sayin' it to you in advance. Say,
+boy, you must have yore reasons fur the int'rust you is displayin' in
+dis matter."
+
+"Whutever 'tis 'taint got nothin' to do wid lurin' no money out of yore
+possession," said Jeff. His voice changed to one of deep gravity.
+"Brother Lovin', look yere at me."
+
+He glanced about him, making doubly sure they were alone. He advanced
+one step and came to a halt; he made his figure rigid and gave first the
+grand hailing-sign of the Afro-American Society of Supreme Kings of the
+Universe, then the private signal of distress which invokes succor and
+support, and he wound up by uttering the cabalistic words which bind a
+fellow Supreme King in the vows of eternal secrecy on pain of having his
+heart cut out of his bosom and burned and the ashes scattered to the
+four winds. For his part, Æsop Loving arose and, obeying the ritual,
+made the proper responses. In a solemn silence they exchanged the
+symbolic grip which is reserved only for occasions of emergency and
+stress and which unites brother to brother in bonds stronger than steel.
+A moment later Æsop Loving was alone.
+
+It was not Jeff, the intriguer, who had colleagued with Gumbo Rollins
+and conspired with Cump Glass, who came in the evening to the Twelfth
+Ward tabernacle and sought a seat on a bench well up toward the front
+where he could be fairly conspicuous and yet not too conspicuous;
+neither was it the persuasive person who had dangled the bait of
+private profit before the beguiled eyes of Æsop Loving. Rather was it
+the serious, self-searching, introspective Jeff, who earlier that day
+had besought counsel and comfort of Aunt Dilsey Turner. He came alone,
+walking with head bowed as walks one who is wrapped in his own thoughts.
+He arrived betimes; he remained silent and apart, inwardly communing,
+one would have said, while the audience rustled in.
+
+So engrossed was he that he seemed to have no eyes even for Ophelia, who
+perched high aloft, the brightest flower in the hanging garden of color
+that banked the tiers of the choir division terracing up behind the
+platform. She, in turn, had no eyes for any there save Prof. Cephus
+Fringe, who, it should be added, had one eye for Ophelia and the other
+for his own person. Even by those prejudiced in his favor it was not to
+be denied that the Professor was, as one might say, passionately
+addicted to himself. When, with Cephus Fringe accompanying and
+directing, the opening hymn was offered, Ophelia, lifting high her
+soprano voice, sang directly at, to, and for him. From the front this
+plainly was to be observed; in fact was the subject of whispered comment
+among some of Jeff's neighbors.
+
+As though he heard them not nor saw the byplay, he gave no sign which
+might be interpreted as denoting annoyance or chagrin. There was only a
+friendly and whole-souled approval in his look when, following the
+song, Prof. Fringe rendered--I believe this is the customary
+phrase--rendered as a solo on his saxophone one of the compositions
+bearing his name as author. There was rapt attention and naught else in
+his pose and on his face the while the Rev. Wickliffe, swinging his
+scythe of righteousness, mowed for a solid hour in Satan's weedy back
+yard, so that the penitents fell in a broad swath.
+
+From her place hard by, Aunt Dilsey vigilantly watched Jeff and was, in
+spite of herself, convinced of his sincerity. She marked how, at the
+close of the meeting, he passed slowly, almost reluctantly out, stopping
+more than once and looking rearward as though half inclined to turn back
+and join the ranks of those who clustered still at the foot of the
+pulpit, completely and utterly won over. She was moved to direct the
+notice of certain of the sistren and brethren to his behavior as
+conspicuous proof of the compelling fervor of the Sin Killer. Swiftly
+the word spread that Jeff Poindexter magically had ceased to be a
+horrible example and was betraying evidences that he might yet become
+what insurance agents call a prospect.
+
+As though to justify this hope Jeff attended Tuesday night; his presence
+attesting him a well-wisher, his deportment an added testimony that he
+deeply had been stirred by the outpoured words of the revivalist. Before
+the service got under way he seized upon an opportunity to be
+introduced to the Rev. Wickliffe. Many were spectators to the meeting
+between them, and speculation ran higher upon the possibility that
+before the week ended he would be enrolled among the avowedly convicted.
+Again on Wednesday night he was on hand, an attentive and earnest
+listener.
+
+Prior to the preliminary exercise of song on this night, the Rev.
+Wickliffe outlined the amplified plans for the great moral jubilation on
+the evening of the Eighth and invited suggestions from the assemblage to
+the end that naught be overlooked which might add to its splendors. At
+this invitation, almost as though he had been awaiting some such
+favorable opening, there stood up promptly Tecumseh Sherman Glass, and
+Tecumseh made a certain motion which on being put to the vote of the
+house carried unanimously amid sounds of a general approval. Some
+applauded, no doubt, because of the popularity of the idea embodied in
+the motion and some perhaps because the brother, in offering it, was
+deemed to have displayed a most generous, a most becoming, and a totally
+unexpected spirit of magnanimity toward a fellow professional occupying
+a place which Cump Glass or any other saxophonist might well envy him.
+
+If at this Jeff's heart gave a joyous jump inside of him, his face
+remained a mask to hide his real feelings. If, privily, by day he
+labored to gather up all the loose ends of his shaping design, publicly
+by night he patronized the tabernacle. He was present on Thursday night
+and on Friday and on Saturday, and three times on Sunday he was present,
+maintaining still his outward bearing of interest and sympathy. He was
+like a tree which bends before the compelling blast yet refuses for a
+little while longer to topple headlong. This brings us up to Monday, the
+Glorious Eighth.
+
+With the morning of that day or with its nooning or with its
+afternooning we need have no concern, replete though they were in
+variety of entertainment and abounding in pleasurable incident. For us
+the interest chiefly centers in the early evening and especially in that
+part of the evening falling between seven o'clock and forty minutes past
+seven. At seven, prompt on the clock's stroke and as guaranteed in the
+announcements, the parade fathered by the Rev. Wickliffe, started from
+the corner of Tennessee and Front Streets, down by the river, and
+wended, as the saying goes, its way due westward into the sunset's
+painted afterglow.
+
+This was a parade! A great man had sired it; a tried organizer had
+fostered it; proved executives had worked out the problems of its
+divisions and its groupings. At its head, suitably mounted upon a white
+steed, rode a grand marshal who was more than a grand marshal. For in
+his one person this dignitary combined two parts: not only was he the
+grand marshal with a broad sash draped diagonally across his torso to
+prove it, but likewise he was the official trumpeter. At intervals he
+raised his horn to his lips and sounded forth inspiring notes. That his
+horn was neither a trumpet nor yet a bugle but a long, goose-necked
+thing might be regarded as merely a detail. Only one who was overly
+technical would have noted the circumstance at all. Behind him, sixteen
+abreast, appeared the special tabernacle choristers with large
+fluttering badges of royal purple. They came on magnificently, filling
+the street from curb-line to curb-line, and the sound of their singing
+was as a great wind gathering. The second one on the left, counting from
+the end, in the front row, was Ophelia Stubblefield, tawny and splendid
+as a lithesome tiger-lily. She wore white with long white kid gloves and
+a beflowered hat which represented the hoarded total of six weeks'
+wages. You would have said it was worth the money. Anybody would.
+
+In the second section rode the Rev. Wickliffe and the Rev. Shine; they
+were in a touring-car with its top flattened back. You might say they
+composed the second section. Carriages and automobiles rolling along
+immediately behind them bore the members of the official board of
+Emmanuel Chapel in sets of fours, and the chief financial contributors
+to the revival which this night would reach its climax. Flanking the
+carriages and following after them marched the living garnerings of the
+campaign--the converts to date, a veritable Gideon's Band of them, in
+number amounting to a host, and all afoot as befitting the palmer and
+the pilgrim. Established members of the congregation, in hired hacks, in
+jitneys, in rented and privately owned equipages, and also afoot came
+next.
+
+Voluntarily aligned representatives of the colored population at large
+formed the tail of the column. Of these last there surely were hundreds.
+Hundreds more, in holiday dress now somewhat rumpled after a day of
+pleasure-seeking and pleasure-finding, lined the sidewalks to see this
+spectacle. Nowhere along the straightaway of the line of march did the
+pavements lack for onlookers, but nearing the end of the route, and
+especially where the wide vacant spaces of the Tennessee Street common
+had been preëmpted by the festal enterprises of Director General Æsop
+Loving and his confrères, the press became thicker and ever thicker.
+Here the crowds overflowed upon the gravel roadway, narrowing the
+thoroughfare to a lane through which the paraders barely might pass.
+They did pass, though at a lessened pace, until their front ranks had
+reached the approximate middle breadth of the old show-grounds, with the
+tabernacle looming against the sunset's dying fires an eighth of a mile
+on beyond.
+
+It is necessary here and now that, taking our eyes from this scene, we
+hark back to the Wednesday evening preceding. It will be recalled that
+on this evening a certain motion was made and by acclamation adopted.
+The maker of the motion, as we know, was Tecumseh Sherman Glass; its
+beneficiary, as the reader shrewdly may have divined, was Cephus Fringe.
+Beforehand perhaps the Professor had had vague misgivings as to the part
+he was to play in the pageantry on the Eighth; perhaps in his mind he
+had forecast the probability that he might suffer eclipse--a temporary
+eclipse--but to an _artiste_ none the less distasteful--in the shadow of
+the Sin Killer, for since the Sin Killer had originally promulgated the
+idea of the procession it was only natural and only human that the Sin
+Killer should devise to himself the outstanding place of honor in it.
+
+Be these conjectures as they may be, it is not to be gainsaid that the
+suggestion embodied in Cump Glass's motion was to Prof. Fringe highly
+agreeable, insuring, as it did, a fair measure of prominence for him
+without infringing upon his chief's distinctions. He showed his
+approbation. I believe I already have intimated that Prof. Fringe was
+not exactly prejudiced against himself. Any lingering aversions he may
+have entertained in this quarter had long since been overcome.
+Nevertheless a fresh doubt, arising from fresh causes, assailed him as
+the first flush of satisfaction abated within him.
+
+This new-born uneasiness betrayed itself in his voice and his manner
+when, at the conclusion of the night's services, he encountered Cump
+Glass in the middle aisle. The meeting was not entirely by chance; if
+the truth is to be known, Cump had maneuvered to bring it about. The act
+was his; a greater mind than his, though, had sponsored the act. And
+Cump Glass, rightly interpreting the look upon Prof. Fringe's large,
+plump face, guilefully set himself to play upon the emotional nature of
+the other. With a gracious wave of his hand he checked the Professor's
+expression of thanks.
+
+"Don't mention it," he said generously, "don't mention it. It teks a
+purformer to understand another purformer's feelin's. So I therefo'
+teken it 'pon myse'f to nomernate you fur the gran' marshal and also ez
+the proper one to sound the buglin' blasts endurin' of the turnout.
+Seems lak somebody else would 'a' had the sense to do so, but w'en they
+wuzn't nobody w'ich did so, I steps in. But right soon afterwards I gits
+to stedyin' 'bout the hoss you'll be ridin', an' it's been worryin' me
+quite some little--the question of the hoss."
+
+"I been thinkin' concernin' of 'at very same thing," confessed Cephus
+Fringe.
+
+"Is that possible?" exclaimed Cump Glass with well-simulated surprise.
+"Well, suh, smart minds shorely runs in the same grooves, ez the sayin'
+goes. Yas, suh, settin' yonder after I made that motion, I sez to
+myse'f, I sez, 'Glass, you done started this thing an' you must see it
+th'ough. 'Twon't never do in this world fur the gran' marshal to be
+stuck up 'pon the top side of a skittish, skeery liver'-stable hoss
+that'll mebbe start cuttin' up right in the smack middle of things and
+distrac' the gran' marshal's mind frum his business.' I seen that happen
+mo' times 'en onct, wid painful results. I s'pose, tho, you kin ride
+mighty nigh ary hoss they is, can't you, Purfessor?"
+
+"Well, I could do so onct," stated Cephus in the manner of one who
+formerly had followed rough-riding for a calling, "but leadin' a public
+life fur so long, lak I has, I ain't had much time fur private
+pleasures. 'Sides w'ich, ef I'm goin' sound the notes I'll be needin'
+both hands free fur my instermint."
+
+"Puzzactly the same thought w'ich came to me, jes' lak I'm tellin' it to
+you," agreed Cump. "It teks a musician to think of things w'ich an
+ordinary pusson wouldn't never dream of. So, fur the las' hour or so I
+been castin' about in my mind an' jes' a minute ago the idee come to me.
+I feels shore I kin arrange wid a frien' of mine to he'p us out. I
+s'pose you is acquainted with this yere Jeffy Poindexter?"
+
+"I has met him," said Cephus with chill creeping into his tones. "An' I
+has observed him present yere the last two-three nights. But I ain't
+aimin' to ax no favors frum him."
+
+"You ain't needin' to," said Cump. "I'll 'tend to that myse'f. Besides,
+Purfessor, you is sizin' up Jeffy Poindexter wrong. He's went an'
+'sperienced a change of heart in his feelin's tow'ds whut's goin' on
+yere. Furthermo'"--and here he favored his flattered listener with a
+confidential and a meaning wink--"he got sense 'nuff, Jeffy has, to know
+w'en he's crowded plum out of the runnin' by somebody w'ich is mo'
+swiftly gaited 'en whut he is, an' natchelly he crave to stand in well
+wid a winner. Naw, suh, that Jeffy, he'd be most highly overjoyed to
+haul off an' lend a helpin' hand, ef by so doin' he mout put you onder a
+favor to him."
+
+Cephus sniffed, half disarmed but wavering.
+
+"Wharin' could he he'p out? He ain't ownin' no private string of
+ridin'-hosses so fur ez I've took note of."
+
+"The w'ite man he wuks fur is got one an' Jeffy gits the borrowin' use
+of her--it's a mare--w'enever he want to, ez I knows frum whut he tells
+me an' frum whut I seen. Purfessor, that mare is jes' natchelly ordained
+an' cut out fur peradin'--broad ez a feather-tick, gentle ez the onborn
+lamb, an' mouty nigh pyure white--perzactly the right color fur a gran'
+marshal's hoss. Crowds ain't goin' pester that lady-mare none. Music
+ain't goin' disturb her none whutsoever, neither."
+
+"Whut's her reg'lar gait?"
+
+"Her reg'lar gait is standin' still. But w'en she's travelin' at her
+bestest speed she uses the cemetery walk. See that mare goin' pas' you
+w'en she's in a hurry an' you say to yo'se'f, you say, 'Yere you is,
+bound fur de buryin'-groun', but how come you got separated frum the
+hearse?' Purfessor, that mare's entitled Christian name is Mittie May.
+Did you ever hear of ary thing on fo' laigs, ur two, w'ich answered to
+the name of Mittie May that wuz tricky?"
+
+"Better be mouty sure," said the cautious Cephus, concerned for the
+safety and dignity of the creature which he held most dear of all on
+this earth. "'Member, I'll be needin' both hands free--'twon't be no
+time fur me to go jerkin' on the reins w'en my saxophone is requirin' to
+be played."
+
+"You's right there," agreed Cump. "Twouldn't never do, neither, fur you
+to slip off an' mebbe git yo'se'f crippled up. Whar would this yere
+pertracted meetin' be then? Lemme think. Ah, hah! I got it--the notion
+jes' come to me. Purfessor, listen yere." He placed his lips close to
+the other's ear and spoke perhaps fifty words in a confidential whisper.
+In token of approval and acquiescence the Professor warmly clasped the
+right hand of this forethoughted Glass.
+
+After such a manner was Cephus Fringe, all unwittingly, thrust into the
+pit which had been digged for him.
+
+At the point where the narrative was broken into for the interpolation
+of the episode now set forth, the head of the parade, as will be
+remembered, was just coming abreast of the old show-grounds. Now, the
+head of the parade was Cephus Fringe, and none other. One glance at him,
+upon a white steed, all glorious in high hat and frock coat and with
+that wide crimson sash dividing his torso in two parts, would have
+proved that to the most ignorant. As for his palfrey, she ambled along
+as though Eighth of August celebrations and a saxophone blaring between
+her drooping ears, and jubilating crowds and all that singing behind
+her, and all these carnival barkers shouting alongside her, had been her
+daily portion since first she was foaled into the world. The compound
+word lady-like would be the word fittest to describe her.
+
+Not twenty feet from her, close up to where the abutting common met the
+straggling brick pavement, stood the battered Flyin' Jinny of Gumbo
+Rollins. It was nearermost to the street-line of all the attractions
+provided by Æsop Loving and his associates. Here, on the site which he
+had chosen, was Gumbo Rollins himself, competently in charge. At the
+precise moment when Mittie May and her proud rider had reached a point
+just opposite him, Gumbo Rollins elected to set his device in motion and
+with it the steam-organ which was part and parcel of the thing's
+organism. Really he might have waited a bit.
+
+Lured by the prospect of beholding something for nothing, most of his
+consistent patrons temporarily had deserted him to flock out into the
+roadway and witness the passing by of the Sin Killer's cohorts. Two
+infatuated lovers, country darkies, sat with arms entwined in a rickety
+wooden chariot. Here and there a piccaninny clung to the back of a
+spotted wooden pony or a striped wooden zebra. These, for the moment,
+were his only customers; nevertheless Gumbo Jones Rollins swung a lever
+and started the machinery. The merry-go-round moved with a shriek of
+steam; the wheezy organ began spouting forth the introductory bars of a
+rollicking _galop_, a tune so old that its very name had been forgotten,
+although the air of it lived anonymously.
+
+As though she had been bee-stung, Mittie May flung up her head. She
+arched her neck and pranced with all four of her feet. She spun about,
+scattering those of the pedestrian classes who hemmed her so closely in.
+Unmindful of a sudden anxious command from her rider, she swung her
+foreparts this way and that. She was looking for it. It must be directly
+hereabouts somewhere. In those ancient days of her youthful vagabondage
+it had always been close at hand when that tune--her own tune--was
+played.
+
+Then above the heads of the crowd she saw it--a scuffed circlet of earth
+measuring exactly fifty-two feet across and marking the location where
+the middle ring had been builded when Runyon & Bulger's Mighty United
+Railroad Shows pitched their tents on the occasion of their annual
+Spring engagement. That had been in early May and this was summer's
+third month; the attrition of the weather had worn down the sharp edges
+of that low turfen parapet; by rights, too, there should have been much
+sawdust and much smell of the same and a center pole rising like one
+lone blasted tree from the exact middle of a circular island of this
+sawdust; there should have been a ringmaster and at least two clowns and
+an orderly clutter of paraphernalia. Nevertheless there before her was
+the middle ring. And the music had started. And Mittie May answered the
+cue which had lived in her brain for fifteen long years and more, just
+as always she answered it, or sought to, when that tune smote her
+eardrums.
+
+The startled spectators gave backward and to either side in scrambling
+retreat as she lunged forward, cleaving a passage for herself to the
+proper spot of entrance. She whisked in. Around the ring she sped, her
+hoofs drumming against the flanks of the ring-back, her barrel slanting
+far over in obedience to the laws of centripetal force, her tail
+rippling out behind her like a homebound pennon in a fair breeze--around
+and around and yet again and then some more.
+
+To be sure there were irregularities in the procedure. Upon her back,
+springily erect, there should have been a jaunty equestrian swinging a
+gay pink leg in air and anon uttering the traditional _Hoop-la_. Instead
+there was a heavy bulk which embraced her neck with two strong arms,
+which wallowed about on her spinal column, which continually cried out
+entreaties, threats, commands, even profanities. Yet with Mittie May,
+as with most of us, habit was stronger than all else. She knew her duty
+as of old. She did it. Accommodating her gait to the quickening measures
+of the music, she stretched her legs, passing out of a rolling gallop
+into a hard run. Yet one more thing, or rather the lack of it, perplexed
+her. Attendants should be bringing forth knockdown fence-panels for her
+to leap over and hoops of paper for her rider to leap through. Never
+mind; out of her imagination she would supply these missing details when
+the proper moment came. She'd hurdle the hurdles which weren't there.
+Meanwhile she knew what to do--around and around and around, right
+willingly, right blithely went Mittie May.
+
+And, with her, around and around went also Prof. Cephus Fringe, but not
+willingly and by no means blithely. He shed his high hat and with it all
+lingering essences of his dignity. One of Mittie May's feet squashed
+down on the high hat and it folded up like a condensed time-card. He
+lost the last vestige of his vanishing authority when he lost his
+saxophone. The Professor did not understate the case when he had
+intimated that he was somewhat out of practice at equestrian exercises.
+Stark terror convulsed his frame; instinct of self-preservation made him
+careless of the language he used. Indeed, a good deal of the language he
+used was bounced right out of him.
+
+Haply perhaps for him--and surely nothing else that happened was for
+him haply circumstanced--most of the naughty words reached no ears save
+those of Mittie May. There were sounds which drowned them--sounds which
+began with a fluttered outcry of alarm, which progressed to a great gasp
+of astonishment, which swelled and rippled into a titter, which grew
+into a vast rocking roar of unrestrained joyousness. Children shrieked,
+old women cackled, old men wheezed, adults guffawed, strong men rolled
+upon the earth in uncontrollable outbursts of thunderous mirth. As
+though stricken in all his members, Gumbo Rollins fell alongside his
+whirling Flyin' Jinny, but failed not, even in that excess of his
+mounting hysteria, to see to it that the steam-driven organ continued to
+grind out the one tune of its repertoire. The members of the choir
+forgot that their mission was to sing. They were too busy laughing to
+sing. And high and clear above the chorus of their glad outcry rose the
+soprano gurglings of Ophelia Stubblefield as she leaned for support up
+against somebody.
+
+You ask, Why did not Prof. Cephus Fringe fall off of Mittie May? He
+tried to. At first he sought only to stay on; then after a bit he sought
+to get off; he couldn't. The cause for his staying on was revealed when
+Mittie May took the first of those mental hazards of hers. As she rose
+grandly into space to clear the imagined top-rail of the imagined panel
+and with hind heels drawn well in under her, descended and continued on
+her circling way, a keen-eyed spectator, all bent double though he was,
+alongside the ring, and beating himself in the short ribs, caught a
+flashing glimpse of a strong but narrow strap which bound the rider's
+ankles to the saddle-girth and which, through the ordered march of the
+parade, had been safely hidden from view behind the ornament housings of
+the broad Spanish stirrups. Cump Glass had done his fiendish work well;
+those straps strained, but they held.
+
+"Name of Glory!" shouted out the observer. "He done tie hisse'f on! He
+done tie hisse'f--" Overcome he choked.
+
+With a great sweeping, swooping heave Mittie May made the last leap. And
+then at the precise second when the music stopped, the leathern thongs
+parted, and as the burden on her tumbled off and lay struggling in the
+dust, Mittie May swerved from the ring and, magically and
+instantaneously becoming once more Judge Priest's staidly respectable
+old buggy-mare, stood waiting for Jeff Poindexter to come and lead her
+out of all this shrieking, whooping jam of folks back to her stable. And
+Jeff came. He had been there all the time. It was against his supporting
+frame that Ophelia had slanted limply the while she laughed.
+
+Here the curtain is lowered for two seconds to denote the passage of two
+days. At its rise Jeff Poindexter and Gumbo Rollins are discovered
+sitting side by side on the back step of a cabin in the Plunket's Hill
+neighborhood.
+
+"An' so they ain't nobody seen him sence?" It is Jeff who is speaking.
+
+"So they tells me," answers Gumbo. "Ain't nary soul seen hair nur hide
+of him frum the moment he riz out 'en that ring an' tuk his foot in his
+hand an' marviled further. Yas, suh, the pertracted meetin' will have to
+worry 'long the best way it kin 'thout its champion purty man. Well,
+sometimes it seems lak these things turns out fur the bes'. It suttin'ly
+would damage his lacinated feelin's still mo' ef he wus yere an' heared
+folks all over town callin' him the Jazzed-up Circus Rider."
+
+"I got a better name fur him 'en that," says Jeff, "Whiffletit."
+
+"W'ich?" asks Gumbo.
+
+Seemingly Jeff has not heard his friend's question. In an undertone, and
+as though seeking to recall the words of a given formula, he communes
+with himself, "Fust you baits him wid the cheese. An' 'en w'en he nibble
+the cheese, he git all swelled up an' 'en whilst he's flappin' helpless
+you leans over the side of the boat an jes' natchelly laffs him to
+death."
+
+"Whut-all is you mumblin'?" demands Gumbo Rollins, puzzled by these
+seemingly unrelated and irrelevant mouthings. "Is you crazy?"
+
+"Yas," concurs Jeff, "crazy lak the king of the weazels."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+PLENTIFUL VALLEY
+
+
+"So this here head brakeman, the same being a large, coarse, hairy,
+rectangular person with a square-toed jaw and a square-jawed toe, he up
+and boots the two of us right off this here freight train."
+
+My old and revered friend, Scandalous Doolan, is much addicted to
+opening a narrative smack down the middle, as though it were an oyster,
+and then, by degrees, working both ways--toward the start and the
+finish. So it did not greatly surprise me that without preface,
+dedication, index or chapter-heading, he should suddenly introduce a
+head brakeman and a freight train into a conversation which until that
+moment had dealt with topics not in the least akin to these. Indeed,
+knowing him as I did, it seemed to me all the better reason why I should
+promptly incline the greedy ear, for over and above his eccentricities
+in the matter of launching a subject, Mr. Doolan is the only member of
+his calling I ever saw who talks in real life as all the members of his
+calling are fondly presumed to talk, in story-books and on the stage.
+
+I harkened, therefore, saying nothing, and sure enough, having dealt for
+a brief passage of time with the incident of a certain enforced
+departure from a certain as yet unnamed common carrier, he presently
+retraced his verbal footsteps and began at the beginning.
+
+I quote in full:
+
+
+"Yes, sir, that's what he does. Refusing to listen to reason, this here
+head brakeman, which anybody could tell just by looking at him that he
+didn't have no heart a-tall and no soul, so as you could notice it, he
+just red lights us off into the peaceful and sun-lit bosom of the rooral
+New York State landscape. But before reaching the landscape it becomes
+necessary for us to slide down a grade of a perpendicular character, and
+in passing I am much pleased to note that the right-of-way is
+self-trimmed to match the prevalent style of scenery, with maybe a few
+cinders interspersed for decorations. There is one class of travelers
+which prefers a road-bed rock-ballasted, and these is those which goes
+on trains from place to place. There's another kind which likes a
+road-bed done in the matched or natural materials, and them's the kind
+which goes off trains from time to time. And us two, being for the
+moment in this class, we are much gratified by the circumstance.
+
+"And we sits up and dusts ourselves off in a nonchalant manner while
+the little old choo-choo continues upon her way to Utica, Syracuse, and
+all points west, leaving me and the Sweet Caps Kid with all the bright
+world before us, and nothing behind us but the police force.
+
+"For some months previous to this, me and the Sweet Caps Kid has been
+sojourning in that favored metropolis which is bounded on one side by a
+loud Sound and on the other by a steep Bluff, and is doing her constant
+best at all times to live up to the surroundings. Needless to say, I
+refer to little Noo Yawk, the original haunt of the come-on and the
+native habitat of the sure thing, where the jays bite freely and the
+woods are full of fish. We have been doing very well there--very, very
+well, considering. What with working the nuts on the side streets right
+off Broadway and playing a little three-card monte down round Coney in
+the cool of the evening and once in a while selling a sturdy husbandman
+from over Jersey way a couple of admission tickets to Central Park, we
+have found no cause to complain at the business depression. It sure
+looks to us like confidence has been restored and any time she seems a
+little backward we take steps to restore her some ourselves. But all of
+a sudden, something seems to tell me that we oughter be moving.
+
+"You know how them mysterious premonitions comes to a feller. A little
+bird whispers to you, or you have a dream, or else you walk into the
+mitt-joint and hand a he-note to a dark complected lady wearing a red
+kimono and a brown mustache, and she takes a flash at your palm and
+seems to see a dark man coming with a warrant, followed by a trip up a
+great river to a large stone building like a castle. Or else
+Headquarters issues a general alarm, giving names, dates, personal
+description, size of reward and place where last seen. This time it's a
+general alarm. From what I could gather, a downcasted Issy Wisenheimer
+has been up to the front parlor beefing about his vanishing bankroll and
+his disappearing breast-pin. You wouldn't think a self-respecting
+citizen of a great Republic like this'n would carry on so over
+thirty-eight dollars in currency and a diamond so yeller it woulda been
+a topaz if it had been any yellower. But such was indeed the case. I
+gleans a little valuable information from a friendly barkeeper who's got
+a brother-in-law at the Central Office, and so is in position to get
+hold of much interesting and timely chit-chat before it becomes common
+gossip throughout the neighborhood. So then I takes the Sweet Caps Kid
+off to one side and I says to him, I says:
+
+"'Kiddo,' I says, 'listen: I've got a strong presentiment that we should
+oughter be going completely away from here. If we don't, the first thing
+you know some plain-clothes bull with fallen arches and his neck shaved
+'way up high in the back will be coming round asking us to go riding
+with him down town into the congested district, and if we declines the
+invitation, like as not he'll muss our clothes all up. Do you seem to
+get my general drift?' I says.
+
+"'Huh,' he says, 'you talk as if there'd been a squeal.'
+
+"'Squeal?' I says. 'Squeal? Son, you can take it from me there's been a
+regular season of grand opera. You and me are about to be accused of
+pernicious activity. What's more, they're liable to prove it. There's a
+movement on foot in influential quarters to provide us with board and
+lodgings at a place which I will not name to you in so many words on
+account of your weak heart. The work there,' I says, 'is regular, and
+the meals is served on time, and you're protected from the damp night
+air; but,' I says, 'the hours is too long and too confining to suit me.'
+I've knowed probably a thousand fellers in my time that sojourned up at
+Bird Center-on-the-Hudson anywhere from one to fifteen years on a
+stretch, and I never seen one of them yet but had some fault to find
+with the place.
+
+"'Whereas, on the other hand,' I says, 'all nature seems to beckon to
+us. Let's you and me steal forth under the billowy blue caliber of
+Heaven and make hay while the haymakers are good. Let us quit the city
+with its temptations and its snares and its pitfalls, 'specially the
+last named,' I says, 'and in some peaceful spot far, far away, let us
+teach Uncle Joshua Whitcomb that the hand is quicker than the eye, him
+paying cash down in advance for the lessons. Tubby sure, the pickings
+has been excellent here in the shadow of the skyscrapers, and it'll
+probably be harder sledding out amongst the disk-harrow boys. Everybody
+reads the papers these days, only the Rube believes what he reads and
+the city guy don't. I hate to go, but I ain't comfortable where I am.
+When my scalp begins to itch like it does now that's a sign of a close
+hair-cut coming on. I've got educated dandruff,' I says, 'and it ain't
+never fooled me yet. In short,' I says, 'I've been handed the office to
+skiddoo, and in such cases I believe in skiddooing. Let us create a
+vacancy in these parts _sine quinine_--which,' I says, 'is Latin,
+meaning it's a bitter dose but you gotta take it.'
+
+"'I can start right this minute,' says Sweet Caps; 'my tooth-brush is
+packed and all I've got to do is to put on my hat. S'pose we run up to a
+Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, which is a nice secluded spot,' he
+says, 'and catch the rattler.'
+
+"'How are you fixed for currency?' I says.
+
+"'Fixed?' he says. 'I ain't fixed a-tall. A'int you been carrying the
+firm's bank-roll? Say, ain't you?'
+
+"Well, right there I has to break the sad news to him. I does it as
+gentle as I could but still he seems peeved. Money has caused a lot of
+suffering in this world, they tell me, but I'm here to tell you the lack
+of it's been responsible for consider'ble many heartburnings too. Up
+until that minute I hadn't had the heart to tell the Sweet Caps Kid that
+our little joint partnership bank-roll is no longer with us. I'd been
+saving back them tidings for a more suitable moment, but now I has to
+tell him.
+
+"It seems that the night before, I had been tiger hunting in the jungle
+down at Honest John Donohue's. Of course I should have knowed better
+than to go up against a game run by anybody calling hisself Honest John.
+Them complimentary monakers always work with the reverse English. You
+are walking along and you see a gin-mill across the street with a sign
+over the door which says it's Smiling Pete's Place, and you cross over
+and look in, and behind the bar is an old guy who ain't heard anything
+that really pleased him since the Martinique disaster. He's standing
+there with his lip stuck out like a fender on a street car, and a bung
+starter handy, just hoping that somebody will come in and start to start
+something. That's Smiling Pete. As for this here Donohue, he's so
+crooked he can't eat nothing such as stick candy and cheese straws
+without he gets cramps in his stomach. He'd take the numbers off your
+house. That's why they call him Honest John. I know all this, good and
+well, but what's a feller going to do when his is the only place in
+town that's open? You've got to play somewheres, ain't you? Somehow, I
+always was sort of drawed to faro.
+
+"Well, you know the saying--one man's meat is another's pizen. He was my
+pizen and I certainly was his meat. So now, I ain't got nothing in my
+pockets except the linings.
+
+"I tells the Sweet Caps Kid just how it was--how right up to the very
+last minute I kept expecting the luck to turn and how even then I mighta
+got it all back if the game-keeper hadn't been so blamed unreasonable
+and mercenary. When my last chip is gone I holds up a finger for a
+marker and tells him I'll take another stack of fifty, all blues this
+time, but he only looks at me sort of chilly and distrustful and remarks
+in a kind of a bored way that there's nothing doing.
+
+"'That'll be all right,' I says to him. 'I'll see you to-morrow.'
+
+"'No, you wont,' he says, spiteful-like.
+
+"'Why,' I says, 'wont you be here to-morrow?'
+
+"'Oh, yes,' he says, 'we'll be here to-morrow, but you wont.'
+
+"'Is that so?' I says, sarcastical. 'Coming in,' I says, 'I thought I
+seen the word _Welcome_ on the doormat.'
+
+"'Going out,' he says, 'you'll notice that, spelled backward, it's a
+French word signifying _Mind Your Step_.'
+
+"And while I'm thinking up a proper comeback for that last remark of
+his'n somebody hands me my hat, and in less'n a minute, seems-like, I'm
+out in the street keeping company with myself.
+
+"I tells all this to the Sweet Caps Kid, but still he don't seem
+satisfied with my explanation. That's one drawback to the Kid's
+disposition--he gets all put out over the least little thing. So I says
+to him: 'Cheer up,' I says, 'things ain't so worse. Due to my being in
+right with the proper parties we gets this here advance tip, and we
+beats the barrier while this here fat Central Office bull, who thinks he
+wants us, is slipping his collar on over his head in the morning.
+Remember,' I says, 'we are going to the high grass where the little
+birdies sing and the flowers bloom. Providence,' I says, 'has an eye on
+every sparrow that falls, but nothing is said about the jays,' I says,
+'and we'll see if a few of them wont fall for our little cute tricks.'
+
+"Tubby sure, I'm speaking figurative. I aint really aiming for the deep
+woods proper. Only I've been in Noo Yawk long enough to git the Noo Yawk
+habit of thinking everybody beyond Rahway, New Jersey, is the Far West.
+I'm really figuring to land in one of them small junction points, such
+as Cleveland or Pittsburgh. And we would too, if it hadn'ta been for
+that there head brakeman.
+
+"Anyway, we moons round in a kind of an unostentatious way, with the Kid
+still acting peevish and low in his mind, and me saying little things
+every now and then to chirk him up, until the shank of the evening
+arrives 'long about two A.M. Then we slips over into the yards below
+Riverside Drive, taking due care not to wake up no sleeping policeman on
+the way. There we presently observes a freight train, which is giving
+signs of getting ready to make up its mind to go somewheres.
+
+"A freight train is like a woman. When you see a woman coming out of the
+front door and running back seven or eight times to get something she's
+forgot, you know that woman is on her way. And it's the same with
+freights; that's why they call 'em '_shes_'. Pretty soon this here
+freight quits vacilliating back and forth, and comes sliding down past
+where we're waiting.
+
+"'Here comes a side-door Pullman, with the side door open,' I says.
+'Let's get on and book a couple of lowers.'
+
+"'How do you know where she's going?' says the Kid, him being greatly
+addicted to idle questions.
+
+"'I don't,' I says; 'the point is that she's going. To-night she will be
+here but to-morrow she will be extensively elsewhere; and so,' I says,
+'will we. Let us therefore depart from these parts while the departing
+is good,' I says.
+
+"Which we done so, just like I'm telling you. And for some hours we
+trundles along very snug and comfortable, both of us being engrossed in
+sleep. When we wakes up it's another day, and the wicked city is far,
+far behind us, and we are running through a district which is entirely
+surrounded by scenery. If it hadn'ta been that something keeps reminding
+me I ai'nt had no breakfast I coulda been just as happy.
+
+"'Where'll we git off?' says Sweet Caps, setting up and rubbing his
+eyes.
+
+"'Well,' I says, 'we takes our choice. Maybe Albany,' I says. 'The
+legislature is in special session there, and a couple of grafters more
+or less wont make no material difference--they'll probably take us for
+members. Maybe Rochester,' I says, 'which is a pleasant city, full of
+large and thriving industries. Maybe,' I says, 'if this here train don't
+take a notion to climb down off the track and go berry-picking, maybe
+Chicago. Of course,' I says, 'Chi ain't quite so polished as Noo Yawk.
+Chi has been called crude by some. When I think of Noo Yawk,' I says, 'I
+think of a peroxide chorus lady going home at three o'clock in the
+morning in two taxicabs, but when I think of Chicago I'm reminded of a
+soused hired girl, with red hair, on a rampage. But,' I says, 'what's
+the difference? Everywhere you go,' I says, 'there's always human life,
+and Chicago is reputed to be quite full of population and very probably
+we can find a few warm-hearted persons there who are more or less
+addicted to taking a chance.'
+
+"But you know how it is in these matters--you never can tell. Just as
+I'm concluding my remarks touching on our two largest cities, this here
+brakeman comes snooping along and intimates that we better be thinking
+about getting off. He's probably the biggest brakeman living. If he was
+any bigger than what he is, he'd be twins. We endeavors to argue him out
+of the notion but it seems like he's sort of set in his mind. Besides,
+being so much larger than either one of us or both of us put together,
+for that matter, he has the advantage in repartee. So he makes an issue
+of it and we sees our way clear to getting off without waiting for the
+locomotive to slow up or anything. After our departure, the train
+continues on its way thither, we remaining hither.
+
+"'My young friend,' I says when the dust has settled down, 'the question
+which you propounded about five minutes ago is now answered in the
+affirmative. This is where we get off--right here on this identical
+spot. I don't know the name of the place,' I says; 'maybe it's so far
+out in the suburbs that they ain't found time to get round to it yet and
+give it a name; but,' I says, 'there's one consolation. By glancing
+first up this way and then down that way you will observe that from here
+to the point where the rails meet down yonder is exactly the same
+distance that it is from here to where the rails meet up
+yonderways--proving,' I says, 'that we are in the exact center of the
+country. So let us be up and doing,' I says, 'specially doing. But the
+first consideration,' I say, 'is vittles.'
+
+"You know me well enough to know," interjected Mr. Doolan, interrupting
+the thread of his narrative for a moment and turning to me with a wave
+of his stout arm, "that I ain't no glutton. I can eat my grub when it's
+set before me or I can let it alone, only I never do. I never begin to
+think about the next meal till I'm almost through with the last one. And
+right now my mind seems to dwell on breakfast.
+
+"Well, anyway we arises up and goes away from there, walking in a
+general direction, and before long we comes to a sign which says we are
+now approaching the incorporated village of Plentiful Valley--Autos
+Reduce Speed to Eight Miles an Hour--No Tramps Allowed. I kind of
+favors the sound of that name--Plentiful Valley. And as I remarks to the
+Sweet Caps Kid, 'We ain't no autos and we ain't no tramps but merely two
+professional men, looking for a chance to practise our profession.'
+
+"This here is the first valley I ever see in the course of a long and
+more or less polka-dotted career that it is all up-hill and never no
+downhill. Be that as it may, we rambles on until it must be going on
+towards nine forty-five o'clock, and comes to a neat bungalow on a green
+slope inside of a high white fence. There's a venerable party setting on
+the front porch, in his shirt-sleeves. He looks beneficent and well fed.
+
+"'Pull down your vest, son-boy,' I says to Sweet Caps, 'and please
+remember not to drink your coffee out of the sasser. I have a growing
+conviction,' I says, 'that we are about to partake of refreshment.'
+
+"'Hadn't we better sell this ancient guy a few Bermuda oats, or
+something to start off with?' says he.
+
+"'Not until after we have et,' I says; business before pleasure. And
+anyway,' I says, 'I works best on a full stomach. Follow your dear
+uncle,' I says, 'and don't do nothing till you hear from me.'
+
+"With that I opens the gate and we meanders up a neat gravel path. As we
+draws near, the venerable party takes his feet down off the railings.
+
+"'Come in,' he says cordially, 'come right in and rest your face and
+hands. You're out nice and early.'
+
+"'Suffer us,' I says, 'to introduce ourselves. We are a couple of
+prominent tourist-pedestrians walking from Noo Yawk to Portland, Oregon,
+on a bet. This,' I says, pointing to Sweet Caps, 'is Young Twinkletoes,
+and I am commonly knowed as old King Lightfoot the First. By an
+unfortunate coincidence,' I says, 'we got separated at an early hour
+from our provision wagon, as a result of which we have omitted breakfast
+and feel the omission severely. If we might impose,' I says, 'upon your
+good nature to the extent of--'
+
+"'Don't mention it,' he says; 'take two or three chairs and set down,
+and we'll talk it over. To tell you the truth,' he says, 'I was jest
+setting here wishing somebody would come along and visit with me a
+spell. I'm keeping bachelor's hall,' he says, 'and raising chickens on
+the side, and sometimes I get a mite lonely. I guess maybe the Chink
+might scare up something, although,' he says, 'to tell you the truth
+there ain't hardly a bite in the house, except a couple of milk-fed
+broilers and some fresh tomattuses right out of the garden and a few hot
+biscuits and possibly some razzberries with cream; for I'm a simple
+feeder,' he says, 'and a very little satisfies me.'
+
+"He pokes his head inside the door and yells to a Jap to put two more
+places at the table. So we reclines and indulges in edifying
+conversation upon the current topics of the day and, very shortly,
+nourishing smells begin for to percolate forth from within, causing me
+to water at the mouth until I has all the outward symptoms of being an
+ebb-tide. But this here pernicious Sweet Caps Kid, he can't let well
+enough alone. Observing copious signs of affluence upon every side he
+gets ambitious and would abuse the sacred right of hospitality about
+half to three-quarters of an hour too soon. Out of the tail of my eye I
+sees him reaching in his pocket for the educated pasteboards and I gives
+him the high sign to soft pedal, but he don't mind me. Out he comes with
+'em.
+
+"'A little harmless game of cards,' he says, addressing the elderly
+guy, 'entitled,' he says, 'California euchre. I have here, you will
+observe, two jacks and an ace--the noble ace of spades. I riffle and
+shuffle and drop 'em in a row, the trick being to pick out the ace. Now,
+then,' goes on this besetted Sweet Caps, with a winning smile, 'just to
+while away the time before breakfast, s'pose you make a small bet with
+me regarding the present whereabouts of said ace.'
+
+
+"The party with the whiskers gets up; and now, when he speaks I sees
+that in spite of him wearing a brush arbor, he aint no real rube.
+
+"'To think,' he says, more in sorrow than in anger, 'to think that I
+should live to see this day! To think that me, who helped Canady Bill
+sell the first gold brick that ever was molded in this country, should
+in my declining years have a couple of wooden-fingered amatoors come
+along and try to slip me the oldest graft in the known world! It is too
+much,' he says, 'it is too much too much. You lower a noble pursuit,' he
+says, 'and I must respectfully but firmly request you to be on your way.
+I'll try to forgive you,' he says, 'but at this moment your mere
+presence offends me. On your way out,' he says, 'kindly latch the gate
+behind you--the chickens might stray off. Chickens,' he says, 'is not
+exciting for steady company,' he says, 'but in comparison with some
+humans I've met lately, chickens is absolutely gifted intellectually.
+
+"'Furthermore,' he says, 'I would offer you a word of advice, although
+you don't really deserve it. Beware,' he says, 'of the constable in the
+village beyond. You'll recognize him by his whiskers,' he says.
+'Alongside of him, I look like an onion in the face. Ten years ago,' he
+says, 'that constable swore a solemn oath not never to shave until he'd
+locked up a thousand bums, and,' he says, 'he's now on his last lap.
+Keep moving,' he says, 'till you feel like stopping, and then don't
+stop.'
+
+"Them edifying smells has made me desperate. Besides, not counting the
+Chink, who don't count we outnumbers him two to one.
+
+"'We don't go,' I says, 'until we gets a bite.'
+
+"'Oh! I'll see that you get a bite,' he says. 'Sato,' he says, calling
+off-stage, 'kindly unchain Ophelia and Ralph Waldo. Ophelia,' he says,
+turning to us, 'is a lady Great Dane, standing four feet high at the
+shoulder and very morose in disposition. But Ralph Waldo is a
+crossbreed--part Boston bull and part snapping turtle. Sometimes I think
+they don't neither one of them care much for strangers. Here they come
+now! Sick 'em, pups!'
+
+"Sweet Caps starts first but I beats him to the gate by half a length,
+Ophelia and Ralph Waldo finishing third and fourth, respectively. We
+fades away down the big road, and the last thing we sees as we turns a
+wistful farewell look over our shoulders is them two man-eaters raging
+back and forth inside the fence trying to gnaw down the palings, and the
+old guy standing on the steps laughing.
+
+"So we pikes along, me frequently reproaching Sweet Caps for his
+precipitancy in spilling the beans. We passes through the village of
+Plentiful Valley without stopping and walks on and on and on some more,
+until we observes a large, prosperous-looking building of red brick,
+like a summer hotel with a lawn in front and a high stone wall in front
+of that. A large number of persons of both sexes, but mainly females, is
+wandering about over the front yard dressed in peculiar styles. Leaning
+over the gates is a thickset man gazing with repugnance upon a lettuce
+leaf which he is holding in his right hand. He sees us and his face
+lights up some, but not much.
+
+"'What ho, comrades!' he says; 'what's the latest and newest in the
+great world beyond?'
+
+"'Mister,' I says, disregarding these pleasantries, 'how's the prospects
+for a pair of footsore travelers to get a free snack of vittles here?'
+
+"'Poor,' he says, 'very poor. Even the pay-patients, one or two of whom
+I am which, don't get anything to eat to speak of. The diet here,' says,
+'is exclusively vegeterrible. You wouldn't scarcely believe it,' he
+says, 'but we're paying out good money for this. Some of us is here to
+get cured of what the docters think we've got, and some of us is here,'
+he says, 'because as long as we stay here they ain't so liable to lock
+us up in a regular asylum. Yes,' he says, pensively, 'we've got all
+kinds here. That lady yonder,' he says, pointing to a large female who's
+dressed all in white like a week's washing and ain't got no shoes on,
+'she's getting back to nature. She walks around in the dew barefooted.
+It takes quite a lot of dew,' he says. 'And that fat one just beyond her
+believes in reincarnation.'
+
+"'You don't say!' I says.
+
+"'Yes,' he says, 'I do. She wont eat potatoes not under no
+circumstances, because she thinks that in her last previous existence
+she was a potato herself.'
+
+"I takes a squint at the lady. She has a kind of a round face with two
+or three chins that she don't actually need, and little knobby features.
+
+"'Well,' I says, 'if I'm any judge, she ain't entirely recovered yet.
+Might I ask,' I says, 'what is your particular delusion? Are you a
+striped cabbage worm or a pet white rabbit?'
+
+"I was thinking about that lettuce leaf which he held in his mitt.
+
+"'Not exactly,' he says, 'I was such a good liver that I developed a bad
+one and so I paid a specialist eighty dollars to send me here. At this
+writing,' he says, 'the beasts of the field have but little on me. We
+both browse, but they've got cuds to chew on afterwards. It's
+sickening,' he says in tones of the uttermost conviction. 'Do you know
+what we had for breakfast this morning? Nuts,' he says, 'mostly nuts,
+which it certainly was rank cannibalism on the part of many of those
+present to partake thereof,' he says. 'This here frayed foliage which I
+hold in my hand,' he says, 'is popularly known as the mid-forenoon
+refreshment. It's got imitation salad dressing on it to make it more
+tasty. Later on there'll be more of the same, but the big doings will be
+pulled off at dinner to-night. You just oughter see us at dinner,' he
+says with a bitter laugh. 'There'll be a mess of lovely boiled carrots,'
+he says, 'and some kind of chopped fodder, and if we're all real good
+and don't spill things on our bibs or make spots on the tablecloth, why,
+for dessert we'll each have a nice dried prune. I shudder to think,' he
+says, 'what I could do right this minute to a large double sirloin
+cooked with onions _Desdemona_ style, which is to say, smothered.'
+
+"'Mister,' I says, 'I never thought I'd fall so low as to be a
+vegeterrier, but necessity,' I says, 'is the mother of vinegar. Could
+you please, sir, spare us a couple of bites out of that there ensilage
+of yourn--one large bite for me and one small bite for my young friend
+there to keep what little life we have until the coming of the corned
+beef and cabbage?'
+
+"'Fellow sufferer,' he says, 'listen here to me. I've got a dear old
+white-haired grandmother, which she was seventy-four her last birthday
+and has always been a life-long member of the First Baptist Church. I
+love my dear old grandmother, but if she was standing right here now and
+asked me for a nibble off my mid-day refreshment I'd tell her to go
+find a truck patch of her own. Yes sir, I'd turn her down cold; because
+if I don't eat enough to keep me alive to get out of here when the times
+comes I wont be alive to get out of here when the time comes. Anywhere
+else I could love you like a brother,' he says, 'and divide my last bite
+with you, but not here,' he says, 'not here! Do you get me?' he says.
+
+"'Sir,' I says, 'I get you. Take care of yourself and don't get
+foundered on the green truck,' I says. 'A bran mash now and then and a
+wisp of cured timothy hay about once in so long ought to keep off the
+grass colic,' I says. 'Come on, little playmate,' I says to Sweet Caps,
+'let us meander further into this here vale of plenty of everything
+except something to eat. Which, by rights,' I says, 'its real name
+oughter be Hungry Hollow.'
+
+"So we meanders some more miles and pretty soon I'm that empty that I
+couldn't be no emptier than I am without a surgical operation. My voice
+gets weak, and objects dance before my eyes.
+
+"After while they quits dancing, and I realizes that I'm bowing low
+before probably the boniest lady that ever lived. A gold watch has got
+more extra flesh on it than this lady has on her. She is looking out of
+the front window of a small cottage and her expression verges on the
+disapproving. As nearly as I can figure out she disapproves of
+everything in general, and a large number of things in particular. And
+I judges that if there is any two things in the world which she
+disapproves of more than any other two things, those two things is me
+and the Sweet Caps Kid.
+
+"I removes my lid and starts to speak, but she merely waves her arm in a
+majestic manner, meaning, if I know anything about the sign language,
+'Exit in case of dog.' So we exits without even passing the time of the
+day with her and continues upon our way through the bright sunshine. The
+thermometer now registers at least ninety-eight in the shade, but then
+of course we don't have to stay in the shade, and that's some
+consolation.
+
+"The next female land-owner we encounters lives away down in the woods.
+She's plump and motherly-looking, with gold bows on her spec's. She is
+out in her front garden picking pansies and potato bugs and other flora
+and fauna common to the soil. She looks up as the gate-latch clicks, and
+beholds me on the point of entering.
+
+"'Madam,' I says, 'pardon this here intrusion but in us you behold two
+weary travelers carrying no script and no purse. Might I ask you what
+the chances are of us getting a square meal before we perish?'
+
+"'You might,' she says.
+
+"'Might what?' I says.
+
+"'Might ask me,' she says,'but I warn you in advance, that I ain't very
+good at conundrums. I'm a lone widder woman,' she says, 'and I've got
+something to do,' she says, 'besides standing out here in the hot sun
+answering riddles for perfect strangers,' she says. 'So go ahead,' she
+says.
+
+"'Madam,' I says pretty severe, 'don't trifle with me. I'm a desperate
+man, and my friend here is even desperater than what I am. Remember you
+are alone, and at our mercy and--'
+
+"'Oh,' she says, with a sweet smile, 'I ain't exactly alone. There's
+Tige,' she says.
+
+"I don't see no Tige,' I says, glancing around hurriedly.
+
+"'That ain't his fault,' she says. 'I'll call him,' she says, looking
+like it wont be no trouble whatsoever to show goods.
+
+"But we don't wait. 'Sweet Caps,' I says to him as we hikes round the
+first turn in the road, 'this district ain't making no pronounced hit
+with me. Every time you ast 'em for bread they give you a dog. The next
+time,' I says,' anybody offers me a canine, I'm going to take him,' I
+says. 'If he can eat me any faster than I can eat him,' I says, 'he'll
+have to work fast. And,' I says, 'if I should meet a nice little clean
+boy with fat legs--Heaven help him!'
+
+"And just as I'm speaking them words we comes to a lovely glade in the
+woods and stops with our mouths ajar and our eyes bulged out like push
+buttons. 'Do I sleep,' I says to myself, 'or am I just plain delirious?'
+
+"For right there, out in the middle of the woods, is a table with a
+white cloth on it, and it's all covered over with the most lucivicious
+looking viands you ever see in your life, including a ham and a couple
+of chickens and a pie and some cool-looking bottles with long necks on
+'em and gilt-foil crowns upon their regal heads. And a couple of
+flunkies in long-tailed coats and knee breeches and white wigs are
+mooning round, fixing things up ship shape. And just then a tall lady
+comes sauntering out of the bushes, and she strolls up close and the
+flunkies bow and fall back and she says something about everything being
+now ready for Lady Gwyndolin's garden party and departs the same way she
+came. And the second she's out of sight, me and Sweet Caps can't hold in
+no longer. We busts through the roadside thicket and tear acrost that
+open place, licketty-split. It seems too good to be true. And it is.
+When we gets up close we realizes the horrible truth.
+
+"The ham is wood and the chickens is pasteboard and the pie is a prop
+pie and the bottles aint got nothing in 'em but the corks. As we pauses,
+stupefied with disappointment, a cheerful voice calls out: 'That's the
+ticket! Hold the spot and register grief--we can work the scene in and
+it'll be a knock-out!'
+
+"And right over yonder at the other side of the clearing stands a guy in
+a checked suit grinding the handle of a moving-picture machine. We has
+inadvertently busted right into the drammer. So we kicks over his table
+and departs on the run, with a whole troupe of them cheap fillum
+troopers chasing after us, calling hard names and throwing sticks and
+rocks and things.
+
+"After while, by superior footwork, we loses 'em and resumes our
+journey. Well, unless you've got a morbid mind you wont be interested in
+hearing about our continued sufferings. I will merely state that by the
+time five o'clock comes we have traveled upwards of nine hundred miles,
+running sometimes but mostly walking, and my feet is so full of water
+blisters I've got riparian rights. Nearly everything has happened to us
+except something to eat. So we comes to the edge of a green field
+alongside the road and I falls in a heap, and Sweet Caps he falls in
+another heap alongside of me, making two heaps in all.
+
+"'Kiddo,' I says, 'let us recline here and enjoy the beauties of
+Nature,' I says.
+
+"'Dern the beauties of Nature!' says Sweet Caps. 'I've had enough Nature
+since this morning to last me eleven thousand years. Nature,' he says,
+'has been overdone, anyway.'
+
+"'Ain't you got no soul?' I says.
+
+"'Oh yes,' he says, 'I've got a soul, but the trouble is,' he says,
+'I've got a lot of other vital organs, too. When I ponder,' he says,
+'and remember how many times I've got up from the table and gone away
+leaving bones and potato peels and clam shells and lobster claws on the
+plate--when I think,' he says, 'of them old care-free, prodigal days, I
+could bust right out crying.'
+
+"'Sh-h!' I says, 'food has gone out of fashion--the best people ain't
+eating any more. Put your mind on something else,' I says. 'Consider the
+setting sun,' I says, 'a-sinking in the golden west. Gaze yonder,' I
+says, 'upon that great yellow orb with all them fleecy white clouds
+banked up behind it.'
+
+"'I'm gazing,' he says. 'It looks something like a aig fried on one
+side. That's the way I always uster take mine,' he says, 'before I quit
+eating--fried with the sunny side up.'
+
+"I changed the subject.
+
+"'Ain't it a remarkable fact,' I says, 'how this district is addicted to
+dogs? Look at that there little stray pup, yonder,' I says, 'jumping up
+and down in the wild mustard, making himself all warm and panty. That's
+an edifying sight,' I says.
+
+"'You bet,' says the Sweet Caps Kid, kind of dreamy, 'it's a great
+combination,' he says, '--hot dog with fresh mustard. That's the way we
+got 'em at Coney,' he says.
+
+"'Sweet Caps,' I says, 'you are breaking my heart. Desist,' I says. 'I
+ask you to desist. If you don't desist,' I says, 'I'm going to tear your
+head off by the roots and after that I'll probably get right rough with
+you. Fellow me,' I says, 'and don't speak another word of no description
+whatsoever. I've got a plan,' I says, 'and if it don't work I'll know
+them calamity howlers is right and I wont vote Democratic never
+again--not,' I says, 'if I have to vote for Bryan!'
+
+"He trails along behind me, and his head is hanging low and he mutters
+to hisself. Injun file we retraces our weary footsteps until we comes
+once more to the village of Plentiful Valley. We goes along Main
+Street--I know it's Main Street because it's the only street there
+is--until we comes to a small brick building which you could tell by the
+bars at the windows that it was either the local bank or the calaboose.
+On the steps of this here establishment stands a party almost entirely
+concealed in whiskers. But on his breast I sees a German silver badge
+gleaming like a full moon seen through thick brush.
+
+"'The town constable, I believe?' I says to him.
+
+"'The same,' he says. 'What can I do for for you?'
+
+"'Lock us up,' I says, '--him and me both. We're tramps,' I says,
+'vagrants, derilicks wandering to and fro,' I says, 'like raging lions
+seeking whatsoever we might devour--and not,' I says, 'having no luck.
+We are dangerous characters,' I says, 'and it's a shame to leave us at
+large. Lock us up,' I says, 'and feed us.'
+
+"'Nothing doing,' he says. 'Try the next town--it's only nine miles and
+a good hard road all the way.'
+
+"'I thought,' I says, 'that you took a hidebound oath never to shave
+until you'd locked up a thousand tramps.'
+
+"'Yep, he says, 'that's so; but you're a little late. I pinched him
+about an hour ago.'
+
+"'Pinched who?' I says.
+
+"'The thousandth one,' he says. 'Early to-morrow morning,' he says, 'I'm
+going to get sealed bids and estimates on a clean shave. But first,' he
+says, 'in celebration of a historic occasion, I'm giving a little supper
+to-night to the regular boarders in the jail. I guess you'll have to
+excuse me--seems to me like I smell the turkey dressing scorching.'
+
+"And with that he goes inside and locks the door behind him, and don't
+pay no attention to us beating on the bars, except to open an upstairs
+window and throw a bucket of water at us.
+
+"That's the last straw. My legs gives way, both at once, in opposite
+directions. Sweet Caps he drags me across the street and props me up
+against a building, and as he fans me with his hat I speaks to him very
+soft and faint and low.
+
+"'Sweep Caps,' I says, 'I'm through. Leave me,' I says, 'and make for
+civilization. And,' I says, 'if you live to get there, come back
+sometime and collect my mortal remains and bury 'em,' I says, 'in some
+quiet, peaceful spot. No,' I says, 'don't do that neither! Bury me,' I
+says, 'in a Chinee cemetary. The Chinees,' I says, 'puts vittles on the
+graves of their dear departeds, instead of flowers. Maybe,' I says, 'my
+ghost will walk at night,' I says, 'and eat chop suey.'
+
+"'Wait,' he says, 'don't go yet. Look yonder,' he says, pointing up
+Main Street on the other side. 'Read that sign,' he says.
+
+"I looks and reads, and it says on a front window; '_Undertaking and
+Emba'ming In All Its Branches._'
+
+"I rallies a little. 'Son boy,' I says, 'you certainly are one
+thoughtful little guy--but can't you take a joke? I talk about passing
+away, and before I get the words out of my pore exhausted vacant frame
+you begin to pick out the fun'el director. What's your rush?' I says.
+'Can't you wait for the remains?'
+
+"'Keep ca'm,' he says, 'and look again. Your first look wasn't a
+success. I don't mean the undertaker's,' he says; 'I mean the place next
+door beyond. It's a delicatessen dump,' he says, 'containing cold grub
+all ready to be et without tools,' he says. 'And what's more,' he says,
+'the worthy delicatessener is engaged at this present moment in locking
+up and going away from here. In about a half an hour,' he says, 'he'll
+be setting in his happy German-American home picking his teeth after
+supper, and reading comic jokes to his little son August out of the
+_Fleagetty Bladder_. And shortly thereafter,' he says, 'what'll you and
+me be doing? We'll be there, in that vittles emporium, in the midst of
+plenty,' he says, 'filling our midsts with plenty of plenty. That's what
+we'll be doing,' he says.
+
+"'Sweet Caps,' I says, reviving slightly, remember who we are? Remember
+the profession which we adorn? Would you,' I says, 'sink to burglary?'
+
+"'Scandalous,' he says, with feeling, 'I'm so hollow I could sink about
+three feet without touching nothing whatsoever. Death before dishonor,
+but not death by quick starvation. Are you with me,' he says, 'or ain't
+you?'
+
+"Well, what could you say to an argument like that? Nothing, not a
+syllable. So eventually night ensoos. And purty soon the little stars
+come softly out and at the same juncture me and the Sweet Caps Kid goes
+in. We goes into an alley behind that row of shops and after feeling
+about in the darkness for quite a spell and falling over a couple of
+fences and a lurking wheelbarrow and one thing and another, we finds a
+back window with a weak latch on it and we pries it open and we crawls
+in.
+
+"Only, just as we gits inside all nice and snug, Sweet Caps he has to go
+and turn over a big long box that's standing up on end, and down it
+comes _ker-blim_! making a most hideous loud noise.
+
+"Then we hears somebody upstairs run across the floor over our heads and
+hears 'em pile down the steps, which is built on the outside of the
+building to save building 'em on the inside of the building, and in
+about a half a minute a fire bell or some similar appliance down the
+street a piece begins to ring its head off.
+
+"'The stuff's off,' says Sweet Caps to me in a deep, skeered whisper.
+'Let's beat it.'
+
+"'Nix,' I says. 'You fasten that there window! I'm too weak to run now,
+and if they'll give me about five minutes among the vittles I'll be too
+full to run. Either way,' I says, 'it's pinch, and,' I says, 'we'd
+better face it on a full stomach, than an empty one.'
+
+"'But they'll have the goods on us,' he says.
+
+"'Son,' I says, 'if they'll only hang back a little we'll have the goods
+in us. They won't have no trouble proving the corpus delicatessen,' I
+says, '--not if they bring a stomach pump along. Bar that window,' I
+says, 'and let joy be unconfined.'
+
+"So he fastens her up from the inside, and while we hears the aroused
+and infuriated populace surrounding the place and getting ready to begin
+to think about making up their minds to advance en massy, I pulls down
+the front shades and strikes a match and lights up a coal-oil lamp and
+reaches round for something suitable to take the first raw edge off my
+appetite--such as a couple of hams.
+
+"Then right off I sees where we has made a fatal mistake, and my heart
+dies within me and I jest plum collapses and folds up inside of myself
+like a concertina. And that explains," he concluded, "why you ain't seen
+me for going on the last eighteen months."
+
+
+"Did they give you eighteen months for breaking into the delicatessen
+shop?" I asked.
+
+Mr. Doolan fetched a long, deep, mournful sigh.
+
+"No," he said simply, "they gave us eighteen months for breaking into
+the undertaker's next door."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+A TALE OF WET DAYS
+
+
+In the days before the hydrant-headed specter of Prohibition reared its
+head in the Sunny South I had this tale from a true Kentucky gentleman.
+As he gave it to me, so, reader, do I give it to you:
+
+"Yes, suh, to this good day Colonel Bud Crittenden ain't never fergot
+that time he made the mistake about Stony Buggs and the Bear Grass
+County man. It learnt him a lesson, though. It learnt him that the
+deceivingest pusson on earth, when it comes to seeping up licker, is a
+little feller with his eyes fur apart and one of these here excitable
+Adamses' apples.
+
+"Speaking about it afterwards to a passel of boys over in the swopping
+ring, he said the experience, while dissapinting at the time, was worth
+a right smart to him subsequent. Previous to that time he said he was in
+error regarding the amount of licker a little man, with them
+peculiarities of features I just mentioned, could chamber at one
+setting.
+
+"Said he knowed some of the derndest, keenest gunfighters in the state
+was little men and he'd always acknowledged that spare-built,
+narrer-waisted men made the best hands driving trotting hawses; but he
+didn't know, not until then, that they was so gifted in the matter of
+putting away sweet'ning drams.
+
+"It happened the time we all was up at Frankfort nomernating a Clerk of
+the Court of Appeals. There'd been a deadlock for nigh on to three days.
+The up-state delegates was all solid for old General Marcellus Brutus
+Hightower of Limestone County, and our fellers to a man was pledged to
+Major Zach Taylor Simms, of Pennroyal.
+
+"Ballot after ballot it stood the same way--fifty-three to fifty-three.
+Then on the mawning of the third day one of their deligates from the
+mountains was called home suddenly by a message saying a
+misunderstanding had come up with a neighboring fambly and two of his
+boys was shot up consid'rable.
+
+"The convention had voted the first day not to recognize no proxies for
+absentees, and so, having one vote the advantage, we was beginning to
+feel like winners, when just then Breck Calloway from McCorkin County,
+he up and taken the cramps the worst way. For a spell it shore looked
+like he was going to be cholera-morbussed. Breck started in for luxuries
+in the line of vittles soon as he hit town, and between votes he kept
+filling hisself up on fried catfeesh and red bananas and pickled pigs'
+feet and gum drops and cove eyesters and cocoanut out of the shell and
+ice cream and sardines--greasy minners, Breck called 'em--and aig-kisses
+and a whole lot of them kind of knick-knacks.
+
+"That mout not a-bothered him so much if he hadn't switched from
+straight licker and taken on consid'able many drinks of this here
+new-fangled stuff called creamy de mint--green stuff like what you see
+in a big bottle in a drug store winder with a light behind it. By the
+middle of the third day Breck was trying to walk on his hands. He had a
+figger like one of them Mystic Mazes. 'Course, all kinked up that way,
+he warn't fitten for a deligate, and Colonel Bud Crittenden had to ship
+him home.
+
+"I heard tell afterwards that going back on the steam cars the conductor
+told Breck he didn't care if he was a contortionist, he couldn't
+practise none of his didoes on that there train.
+
+"So there we was, each side shy one vote and still tied--52 and 52. And
+at dinner time the convention taken a recess until ha'f past three in
+the evening with the understanding that we'd vote again at foah o'clock.
+
+"Jest as soon as our fellers had got a drink or two and a snack to eat,
+Colonel Bud Crittenden, he called a caucus, him being not only manager
+of Major Zach Taylor Simms' campaign but likewise chairman of the
+district committee. Colonel Bud rapped for order and made a speech. He
+said the paramountest issue was how to nominate Major Simms on that
+there next ballot. Said they'd done trying buying off members of the
+opposition and other regular methods without no success whatsomever.
+Said the Chair would now be glad to hear suggestions from any gen'elman
+present.
+
+"So Morg Holladay he got up and moved the Chair to appoint a committee
+of one or more to shoot up some deligate or, if desired, deligates, in
+the other crowd. But the Colonel said no. We wuz in a strange town, fur
+removed from the time-honored institutions of home, and the police mout
+be hosstile. Customs differed in different towns. Whil'st shooting up of
+a man for purely political purposes mout be accepted as necessary and
+proper in one place; then agin it mout lead to trouble, sich as
+lawsuits, in another. And so on.
+
+"Morg he got up again and said how he recognized the wisdom of the
+Chair's remarks. Then he moved to amend his motion by substituting the
+word 'kidnapping' for 'shooting up.' Said as a general proposition he
+favored shooting up, not being familiar with kidnapping; in fact not
+knowing none of the rules, but was willing to try kidnapping as an
+experiment. But Colonel Bud 'peared to be even more dead set, ef
+possible, agin kidnapping than agin shooting. He advanced the thought
+that shooting was recognized as necessary under proper conditions and
+safeguards, ever'where, but that kidnapping was looked on as bordering
+on the criminal even in the case of a child. How much more so, then, in
+the case of a growed-up adult man and Dimocrat?
+
+"Nobody couldn't think of nothing else then, but Colonel Bud 'lowed we
+was bleeged to do something. There warn't no telling, he said, when
+another one of our deligates would get to craving dainties and
+gormandize hisself with a lot of them fancy vittles the same as Breck
+Calloway had done, and go home all quiled up like a blue racer in a
+pa'tridge nest. Finally Colonel Bud he said he had a suggestion to
+advance his ownse'f, and we all set up and taken notice, knowing there
+wasn't no astuter political leader in the State and maybe none so
+astuted.
+
+"Colonel Bud he said he was shamed to admit that the scheme hadn't
+suggested itself to him or ary other gen'elman present before now--it
+was so plum doggone simple.
+
+"'We got mighty nigh three hours yet,' says Colonel Bud, 'and enduring
+of that time all we got to do is to get one of them Hightower deligates
+deef, dumb and blind drunk--so drunk he won't never git back to answer
+roll-call; and if he does, won't know his own name if he heered it. We
+will simply appint a committee of one, composed of some gen'elman from
+amongst our midst of acknowledged capacity and experience, to accomplish
+this here undertaking, and likewise also at the same time we will pick
+out some accessible deligate in the opposition and commission said
+committee of one to put said opposition deligate out of commission by
+means of social conversation and licker between the present time and the
+hour of 4 P.M. By so doing victory will perch on our banners, and there
+can't be no claim of underhand work or fraud from the other side. It'll
+all be according to the ethics made and purvided in such emergencies.'
+
+"Right off everybody seen Colonel Bud had the right idee, and he put the
+suggestion in the form of a motion and it carried unanimous. Colonel Bud
+stated that it now devolved upon the caucus to name the committee of
+one. And of course we all said that Colonel Bud was the very man for the
+place hisse'f; there wasn't none of us qualified like him for sich a
+job. Everybody was bound to admit that. But Colonel Bud said much as he
+appreciated the honor and high value his colleagues put on his humble
+abilities, he must, purforce, sacrifice pussonal ambition in the
+intrusts of his esteemed friend, Major Zach Taylor Simms. As manager of
+the campaign he must remain right there on the ground to see which way
+the cat was going to jump--and be ready to jump with her. So, if the
+caucus would kindly indulge him for one moment moah he would nominate
+for the post of honor and responsibility as noble a Dimocrat, as true a
+Kintuckian and as chivalrous a gen'elman as ever wore hair. And with
+all the requisited qualifications and gifts, too.
+
+"Needless to state he referred to that sterling leader of Fulman
+County's faithful cohorts, Captain Stonewall Jackson Bugg, Esquire.
+
+"And so everybody voted for Stony. We knowed of course that while Stony
+Bugg had both talents and education he warn't no sich genius as Colonel
+Bud Crittenden when it came to storing away licker; yet so far as the
+record showed he never had been waterlooed by anybody. And we couldn't
+ask no more than that. Stony was all hoped up and proud at being
+selected.
+
+"Then there came up the question of picking out the party of the second
+part, as Colonel Bud said he would call him for short. Colonel Bud said
+he felt the proper object for treatment, beyond the peradventure of a
+doubt, was that there Mr. Wash Burnett, of Bear Grass.
+
+"He believed the caucus would ricolect this here Burnett gen'elman
+referred to by the Chair. And when he described him we all done so,
+owing to his onusual appearance. He was a little teeny feller, rising of
+five feet tall, with a cough that unbuttoned his vest about every three
+minutes. He had eyes 'way round on the side of his head like a
+grasshopper and the blamest, busiest, biggest, scariest, nervousest
+Adamses' apple I ever see. It 'peared like it tried to beat his brains
+out every time he taken a swaller of licker--or even water.
+
+"Right there old Squire Buck Throckmorton objected to the selection of
+Mr. Wash Burnett. Near as I can recall here's what Squire says:
+
+"'You all air suttenly fixing to make a monstrous big mistake. I've give
+a heap of study in my time to this question of licker drams. I have
+observed that when you combine in a gen'elman them two features jest
+mentioned--a Adamses' apple that's always running up and down like a cat
+squirrel on a snag, and eyes away 'round yonder so's he can see both
+ways at once without moving his head--you've got a gen'elman that's
+specially created to store away licker.
+
+"'I don't care ef your Bear Grass County man is so shortwaisted he can
+use his hip pockets for year-muffs in the winter time. Concede, if you
+will, that every time he coughs it shakes the enamel off'n his teeth.
+The pint remains, I repeat, my feller citizens, that there ain't no
+licker ever distilled can throw him with them eyes and that there
+Adamses' apple. You gen'elmen 'd a sight better pick out some big feller
+which his eyes is bunched up close together like the yallers in a double
+yolk aig and which his Adamses' apple is comparatively stationary.'
+
+"But Colonel Bud, he wouldn't listen. Maybe he was kinder jealous at
+seeing old Squire Buck Throckmorton setting hisse'f up as a jedge of
+human nature that-a-way. Even the greatest of us air but mortal, and I
+reckon Colonel Bud wouldn't admit that anybody could outdo him reading
+character offhand, and he taken the floor agin. Replying to his
+venerable friend and neighbor, he would say that the Squire was talking
+like a plain derned fool. Continuing he would add that it didn't make no
+difference if both eyes was riding the bridge of the nose side-saddle,
+or if they was crowding the ears for position.
+
+"'Now, as to the Adamses' apple, which he would consider next in this
+brief reply,' he went on to explain, 'Science teached us that the
+Adamses' apple didn't have no regular functions to speak of, and what
+few it did have bore no relation to the consumption of licker in the
+reg'lar and customary manner, viz., to-wit, by swallowing of the same
+from demijohn, dipper, tumbler or gourd. The Adamses' apple was but a
+natchel ornament nestled at the base of the chin whiskers. He asked if
+any gen'elman in the sound of his voice ever see a bowlder on the side
+of a dreen, enlessen it was covered, in whole or in part, by vines? The
+same wise provision of Nature was to be observed in the Adamses' apple,
+it being, ef he mout be pardoned for using such a figger of speech, at
+sich a time, the bowlder, and the chin whiskers, the vine.
+
+"'It's the size that counts,' said Colonel Bud Crittenden. 'It natchelly
+stands to reason that a big scaffolded-up man like Stony Bugg can
+chamber more licker than a little runt like that Burnett. Why, he could
+do it if Burnett was spangled all over with Adamses' apples and all of
+them palpitating like skeered lizards. He could do it if Burnett's eyes
+were so fur apart he was cross-eyed behind. Besides, this here Burnett
+is a mountaineering gen'elman, and I mistrust not, he's been educated
+altogether on white moonshine licker fresh out of the still. When red
+licker, with some age behind it, takes holt of his abbreviated vitals
+he's shore going to wilt and wilt sudden and complete.
+
+"'Red licker, say about fourteen year old, is mighty deceivin' to a
+mountaineer. It tastes so smooth he forgets that it's strong enough to
+take off warts.'
+
+"Well, suzz, that argument fetched us and we all coincided; all but
+Squire Buck Throckmorton, who still looked mighty dubiousome. Anyway,
+Stony Bugg, he went out and found this here Mister Wash Burnett and
+invited him to see if there was anything left in the bar; and Burnett,
+he fell into the trap, not apparently suspicioning nothing, and said he
+didn't care if he did. So they sashayed off together t'wards the nighest
+grocery arm in arm.
+
+"Being puffectly easy in our minds, we all went back to the convention
+hall 'bout half past two. The Forks of Elkhorn William Jinnings Bryan
+and Silver Cornet Band was there and give a concert, playin 'Dixie' foah
+times and 'Old Kentucky Home' five. And Senator Joe Blackburn spoke
+three or foah times. I never before heard Republicans called out of
+their name like he done it. Senator Joe Blackburn shore proved hisse'f
+a statesman that day.
+
+"Well, it got on t'wards half past three, and while we warn't noways
+uneasy we taken to wishing that Stony Bugg would report back. At ten
+minutes befoah foah there warn't no signs of Stony Bugg. At five minutes
+befoah foah our fellers was gettin' shore nuff worried, and jest then
+the doah opened and in comes that there little Wash Burnett--alone! He
+was coughing fit to kill hisse'f. His Adamses' apple was sticking out
+like a guinney egg, and making about eighteen reverlutions to the
+second, and them fur-apart eyes of his'n was the glassiest I ever seen,
+but it was him all right. He stopped jest inside the hall and turned up
+his pants at the bottom and stepped high over a shadder on the floor.
+But he warn't too fur gone to walk. Nor he warn't too fur gone to vote.
+
+"'Fore we could more'n ketch our breaths the chairman called for a
+ballot and they taken it, and General Hightower was nominated--52 to
+51--Captain Stonewall J. Bugg being recorded by the secretary as absent
+and not voting. And while the up-state fellers was carrying on and
+swapping cheers with one another, our fellers sat there jest
+dumfoundered. Colonel Bud Crittenden, he was the first one to speak.
+
+"'Major Simms being beat ain't the wust of it,' he says. 'Our committee
+on irrigation is deceased. The solemn and sorryful duty devolves upon
+us, his associates, to go send a dispatch to Mrs. Stony Bugg and fambly
+informing them that they air widows. Stony, he must have choked hisse'f
+to death on some free barroom vittles, or else he got run over by a
+hawse and waggin. Otherwise he'd a' been here as arranged, and that
+there little human wart of a Wash Burnett would be spraddled out on the
+floor, face-down, right this very minute, a'trying to swim out of some
+licker store dog fashion.'
+
+"But jest then we heard a kind of to-do outside, and the doah flew open
+and something rolled in and flattened out in the main aisle. Would you
+believe me, it was Stony Bugg, more puffectly disguised in licker than I
+ever expected to see.
+
+"Two of us grabbed holt of him by the arms and pulled him up on his
+feet. He opened his eyes kind of dazed-like and looked around. Colonel
+Bud, he done the talking.
+
+"'Stony,' he says, not angry but real pitiful, in his tones, 'Stony, why
+the name of Gawd didn't you git him drunk?'
+
+"Stony, he sort of studied a minute. Then he says, slow and deliberate
+and thick:
+
+"'Drunk? Why, boys, I gozzom so drunk I couldn't see him.'
+
+"And as we came on home, we all had to admit you couldn't git a man no
+drunker than that, and live."
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUNDRY ACCOUNTS***
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sundry Accounts, by Irvin S. Cobb</title>
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+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sundry Accounts, by Irvin S. Cobb</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Sundry Accounts</p>
+<p>Author: Irvin S. Cobb</p>
+<p>Release Date: December 7, 2008  [eBook #27439]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUNDRY ACCOUNTS***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Audrey Longhurst, Martin Pettit,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[Pg i]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>SUNDRY ACCOUNTS</h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[Pg ii]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="block"><h2>BY IRVIN S. COBB</h2></div>
+
+<div class="block"><p>&nbsp; &nbsp; FICTION</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Sundry Accounts</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">J. Poindexter, Colored</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Back Home</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">From Place to Place</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Old Judge Priest</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Local Color</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Those Times and These</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">The Escape of Mr. Trimm</span></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; WIT AND HUMOR</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">One Third Off</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">A Plea for Old Cap Collier</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">The Abandoned Farmers</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">The Life of the Party</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Eating in Two Or Three Languages</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; "<span class="smcap">Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!</span>"<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Fibble D. D.</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; "<span class="smcap">Speaking of Operations&mdash;&mdash;</span>"<br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Europe Revised</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Roughing It De Luxe</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Cobb's Bill of Fare</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Cobb's Anatomy</span></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; MISCELLANY</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">The Thunders of Silence</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">The Glory of the Coming</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="smcap">Paths of Glory</span><br />
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; "<span class="smcap">Speaking of Prussians&mdash;&mdash;</span>"</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="block"><p class="center">NEW YORK<br />GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="block"><h1>SUNDRY<br />ACCOUNTS</h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>IRVIN S. COBB</h2>
+
+<h3>AUTHOR OF "BACK HOME," "SPEAKING OF<br />OPERATIONS&mdash;," "OLD JUDGE<br />PRIEST," ETC.</h3>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/logo.jpg" width='60' height='58' alt="Publisher's logo" /></div>
+
+<h3>NEW YORK<br />GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY</h3></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>COPYRIGHT, 1922,<br />BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY</h4>
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/logo2.jpg" width='55' height='42' alt="Publisher's logo" /></div>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</h4>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>TO<br />JOHN WILSON TOWNSEND, <span class="smcap">Esquire</span></h3>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class="index">
+<ul>
+<li><span class="mono">CHAPTER</span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_I">I</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Darkness</span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_II">II</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Cater-cornered Sex</span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_III">III</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">A Short Natural History</span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">It Could Happen Again To-morrow</span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_V">V</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">The Ravelin' Wolf</span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;"<span class="smcap">Worth 10,000</span>"</li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Mr. Lobel's Apoplexy</span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Alas, the Poor Whiffletit!</span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Plentiful Valley</span></li>
+<li><span class="mono">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_X">X</a></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">A Tale of Wet Days</span></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>SUNDRY ACCOUNTS</h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>DARKNESS</h3>
+
+<p>There was a house in this town where always by night lights burned. In
+one of its rooms many lights burned; in each of the other rooms at least
+one light. It stood on Clay Street, on a treeless plot among flower
+beds, a small dull-looking house; and when late on dark nights all the
+other houses on Clay Street were solid blockings lifting from the lesser
+blackness of their background, the lights in this house patterned its
+windows with squares of brilliancy so that it suggested a grid set on
+edge before hot flames. Once a newcomer to the town, a transient guest
+at Mrs. Otterbuck's boarding house, spoke about it to old Squire Jonas,
+who lived next door to where the lights blazed of nights, and the answer
+he got makes a fitting enough beginning for this account.</p>
+
+<p>This stranger came along Clay Street one morning, and Squire Jonas, who
+was leaning over his gate contemplating the world as it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> passed in
+review, nodded to him and remarked that it was a fine morning; and the
+stranger was emboldened to stop and pass the time of day, as the saying
+goes.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm here going over the books of the Bernheimer Distilling Company," he
+said when they had spoken of this and that, "and, you know, when a
+chartered accountant gets on a job he's supposed to keep right at it
+until he's done. Well, my work keeps me busy till pretty late. And the
+last three nights, passing that place yonder adjoining yours, I've
+noticed she was all lit up like as if for a wedding or a christening or
+a party or something. But I didn't see anybody going in or coming out,
+or hear anybody stirring in there, and it struck me as blamed curious.
+Last night&mdash;or this morning, rather, I should say&mdash;it must have been
+close on to half-past two o'clock when I passed by, and there she was,
+all as quiet as the tomb and still the lights going from top to bottom.
+So I got to wondering to myself. Tell me, sir, is there somebody sick
+over there next door?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, suh," stated the squire, "I figure you might say there is somebody
+sick there. He's been sick a powerful long time too. But it's not his
+body that's sick; it's his soul."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know as I get you, sir," said the other man in a puzzled sort
+of way.</p>
+
+<p>"Son," stated the squire, "I reckin you've been hearin' 'em, haven't
+you, singin' this here<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> new song that's goin' 'round about, 'I'm Afraid
+to Go Home in the Dark'? Well, probably the man who wrote that there
+song never was down here in these parts in his life; probably he just
+made the idea of it up out of his own head. But he might 'a' had the
+case of my neighbor in his mind when he done so. Only his song is kind
+of comical and this case here is about the most uncomic one you'd be
+likely to run acrost. The man who lives here alongside of me is not only
+afraid to go home in the dark but he's actually feared to stay in the
+dark after he gets home. Once he killed a man and he come clear of the
+killin' all right enough, but seems like he ain't never got over it; and
+the sayin' in this town is that he's studied it out that ef ever he gets
+in the dark, either by himself or in company, he'll see the face of that
+there man he killed. So that's why, son, you've been seein' them lights
+a-blazin'. I've been seein' 'em myself fur goin' on twenty year or more,
+I reckin 'tis by now, and I've got used to 'em. But I ain't never got
+over wonderin' whut kind of thoughts he must have over there all alone
+by himself at night with everything lit up bright as day around him,
+when by rights things should be dark. But I ain't ever asted him, and
+whut's more, I never will. He ain't the kind you could go to him astin'
+him personal questions about his own private affairs. We-all here in
+town just accept him fur whut he is and sort of let him be. He's whut
+you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> might call a town character. His name is Mr. Dudley Stackpole."</p>
+
+<p>In all respects save one, Squire Jonas, telling the inquiring stranger
+the tale, had the rights of it. There were town characters aplenty he
+might have described. A long-settled community with traditions behind it
+and a reasonable antiquity seems to breed curious types of men and women
+as a musty closet breeds mice and moths. This town of ours had its town
+mysteries and its town eccentrics&mdash;its freaks, if one wished to put the
+matter bluntly; and it had its champion story-teller and its champion
+liar and its champion guesser of the weight of livestock on the hoof.</p>
+
+<p>There was crazy Saul Vance, the butt of cruel small boys, who deported
+himself as any rational creature might so long as he walked a straight
+course; but so surely as he came to where the road forked or two streets
+crossed he could not decide which turning to take and for hours angled
+back and forth and to and fro, now taking the short cut to regain the
+path he just had quitted, now retracing his way over the long one, for
+all the world like a geometric spider spinning its web. There was old
+Daddy Hannah, the black root-and-yarb doctor, who could throw spells and
+weave charms and invoke conjures. He wore a pair of shoes which had been
+worn by a man who was hanged, and these shoes, as is well known, leave
+no tracks which a dog will nose after or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> a witch follow, or a ha'nt.
+Small boys did not gibe at Daddy Hannah, you bet you! There was Major
+Burnley, who lived for years and years in the same house with the wife
+with whom he had quarreled and never spoke a word to her or she to him.
+But the list is overlong for calling. With us, in that day and time,
+town characters abounded freely. But Mr. Dudley Stackpole was more than
+a town character. He was that, it is true, but he was something else
+besides; something which tabbed him a mortal set apart from his fellow
+mortals. He was the town's chief figure of tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>If you had ever seen him once you could shut your eyes and see him over
+again. Yet about him there was nothing impressive, nothing in his port
+or his manner to catch and to hold a stranger's gaze. With him,
+physically, it was quite the other way about. He was a short spare man,
+very gentle in his movements, a toneless sort of man of a palish gray
+cast, who always wore sad-colored clothing. He would make you think of a
+man molded out of a fog; almost he was like a man made of smoke. His
+mode of living might testify that a gnawing remorse abode ever with him,
+but his hair had not turned white in a single night, as the heads of
+those suddenly stricken by a great shock or a great grief or any greatly
+upsetting and disordering emotion sometimes are reputed to turn. Neither
+in his youth nor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> when age came to him was his hair white. But for so
+far back as any now remembered it had been a dullish gray, suggesting at
+a distance dead lichens.</p>
+
+<p>The color of his skin was a color to match in with the rest of him. It
+was not pale, nor was it pasty. People with a taste for comparisons were
+hard put to it to describe just what it was the hue of his face did
+remind them of, until one day a man brought in from the woods the
+abandoned nest of a brood of black hornets, still clinging to the
+pendent twig from which the insect artificers had swung it. Darkies used
+to collect these nests in the fall of the year when the vicious swarms
+had deserted them. Their shredded parchments made ideal wadding for
+muzzle-loading scatter-guns, and sufferers from asthma tore them down,
+too, and burned them slowly and stooped over the smoldering mass and
+inhaled the fumes and the smoke which arose, because the country
+wiseacres preached that no boughten stuff out of a drug store gave such
+relief from asthma as this hornet's-nest treatment. But it remained for
+this man to find a third use for such a thing. He brought it into the
+office of Gafford's wagon yard, where some other men were sitting about
+the fire, and he held it up before them and he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Who does this here hornet's nest put you fellers in mind of&mdash;this gray
+color all over it, and all these here fine lines runnin' back and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> forth
+and every which-a-way like wrinkles? Think, now&mdash;it's somebody you all
+know."</p>
+
+<p>And when they had given it up as a puzzle too hard for them to guess he
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"Why, ain't it got percisely the same color and the same look about it
+as Mr. Dudley Stackpole's face? Why, it's a perfect imitation of him!
+That's whut I said to myself all in a flash when I first seen it
+bouncin' on the end of this here black birch limb out yonder in the
+flats."</p>
+
+<p>"By gum, if you ain't right!" exclaimed one of the audience. "Say, come
+to think about it, I wonder if spendin' all his nights with bright
+lights burnin' round him is whut's give that old man that gray color
+he's got, the same as this wasp's nest has got it, and all them puckery
+lines round his eyes. Pore old devil, with the hags furever ridin' him!
+Well, they tell me he's toler'ble well fixed in this world's goods, but
+poor as I am, and him well off, I wouldn't trade places with him fur any
+amount of money. I've got my peace of mind if I ain't got anything else
+to speak of. Say, you'd 'a' thought in all these years a man would get
+over broodin' over havin' killed another feller, and specially havin'
+killed him in fair fight. Let's see, now, whut was the name of the
+feller he killed that time out there at Cache Creek Crossin's? I
+actually disremember. I've heard it a thousand times, too, I reckin, if
+I've heard it oncet."</p>
+
+<p>For a fact, the memory of the man slain so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> long before only endured
+because the slayer walked abroad as a living reminder of the taking off
+of one who by all accounts had been of small value to mankind in his day
+and generation. Save for the daily presence of the one, the very
+identity even of the other might before now have been forgotten. For
+this very reason, seeking to enlarge the merits of the controversy which
+had led to the death of one Jesse Tatum at the hands of Dudley
+Stackpole, people sometimes referred to it as the Tatum-Stackpole feud
+and sought to liken it to the Faxon-Fleming feud. But that was a real
+feud with fence-corner ambuscades and a sizable mortality list and
+nighttime assassinations and all; whereas this lesser thing, which now
+briefly is to be dealt with on its merits, had been no more than a
+neighborhood falling out, having but a solitary homicide for its
+climactic upshot. So far as that went, it really was not so much the
+death of the victim as the survival of his destroyer&mdash;and his fashion of
+living afterwards&mdash;which made warp and woof for the fabric of the
+tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>With the passage of time the actuating causes were somewhat blurred in
+perspective. The main facts stood forth clear enough, but the underlying
+details were misty and uncertain, like some half-obliterated scribble on
+a badly rubbed slate upon which a more important sum has been overlaid.
+One rendition had it that the firm of Stackpole Brothers sued the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> two
+Tatums&mdash;Harve and Jess&mdash;for an account long overdue, and won judgment in
+the courts, but won with it the murderous enmity of the defendant pair.
+Another account would have it that a dispute over a boundary fence
+marching between the Tatum homestead on Cache Creek and one of the
+Stackpole farm holdings ripened into a prime quarrel by reasons of
+Stackpole stubbornness on the one hand and Tatum malignity on the other.
+By yet a third account the lawsuit and the line-fence matter were
+confusingly twisted together to form a cause for disputation.</p>
+
+<p>Never mind that part though. The incontrovertible part was that things
+came to a decisive pass on a July day in the late 80's when the two
+Tatums sent word to the two Stackpoles that at or about six o'clock of
+that evening they would come down the side road from their place a mile
+away to Stackpole Brothers' gristmill above the big riffle in Cache
+Creek prepared to fight it out man to man. The warning was explicit
+enough&mdash;the Tatums would shoot on sight. The message was meant for two,
+but only one brother heard it; for Jeffrey Stackpole, the senior member
+of the firm, was sick abed with heart disease at the Stackpole house on
+Clay Street in town, and Dudley, the junior, was running the business
+and keeping bachelor's hall, as the phrase goes, in the living room of
+the mill; and it was Dudley who received notice.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p><p>Now the younger Stackpole was known for a law-abiding and a
+well-disposed man, which reputation stood him in stead subsequently; but
+also he was no coward. He might crave peace, but he would not flee from
+trouble moving toward him. He would not advance a step to meet it,
+neither would he give back a step to avoid it. If it occurred to him to
+hurry in to the county seat and have his enemies put under bonds to keep
+the peace he pushed the thought from him. This, in those days, was not
+the popular course for one threatened with violence by another; nor,
+generally speaking, was it regarded exactly as the manly one to follow.
+So he bided that day where he was. Moreover, it was not of record that
+he told anyone at all of what impended. He knew little of the use of
+firearms, but there was a loaded pistol in the cash drawer of the mill
+office. He put it in a pocket of his coat and through the afternoon he
+waited, outwardly quiet and composed, for the appointed hour when
+single-handed he would defend his honor and his brother's against the
+unequal odds of a brace of bullies, both of them quick on the trigger,
+both smart and clever in the handling of weapons.</p>
+
+<p>But if Stackpole told no one, someone else told someone. Probably the
+messenger of the Tatums talked. He currently was reputed to have a leaky
+tongue to go with his jimberjaws; a born trouble maker, doubtless, else
+he would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> not have loaned his service to such employment in the first
+place. Up and down the road ran the report that before night there would
+be a clash at the Stackpole mill. Peg-Leg Foster, who ran the general
+store below the bridge and within sight of the big riffle, saw fit to
+shut up shop early and go to town for the evening. Perhaps he did not
+want to be a witness, or possibly he desired to be out of the way of
+stray lead flying about. So the only known witness to what happened,
+other than the parties engaged in it, was a negro woman. She, at least,
+was one who had not heard the rumor which since early forenoon had been
+spreading through the sparsely settled neighborhood. When six o'clock
+came she was grubbing out a sorghum patch in front of her cabin just
+north of where the creek cut under the Blandsville gravel pike.</p>
+
+<p>One gets a picture of the scene: The thin and deficient shadows
+stretching themselves across the parched bottom lands as the sun slid
+down behind the trees of Eden's swamp lot; the heat waves of a
+blistering hot day still dancing their devil's dance down the road like
+wriggling circumflexes to accent a false promise of coolness off there
+in the distance; the ominous emptiness of the landscape; the brooding
+quiet, cut through only by the frogs and the dry flies tuning up for
+their evening concert; the bandannaed negress wrangling at the weeds
+with her hoe blade inside the rail fence; and,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> half sheltered within
+the lintels of the office doorway of his mill, Dudley Stackpole, a slim,
+still figure, watching up the crossroad for the coming of his
+adversaries.</p>
+
+<p>But the adversaries did not come from up the road as they had advertised
+they would. That declaration on their part had been a trick and device,
+cockered up in the hope of taking the foe by surprise and from the rear.
+In a canvas-covered wagon&mdash;moving wagons, we used to call them in Red
+Gravel County&mdash;they left their house half an hour or so before the time
+set by them for the meeting, and they cut through by a wood lane which
+met the pike south of Foster's store; and then very slowly they rode up
+the pike toward the mill, being minded to attack from behind, with the
+added advantage of unexpectedness on their side.</p>
+
+<p>Chance, though, spoiled their strategy and made these terms of primitive
+dueling more equal. Mark how: The woman in the sorghum patch saw it
+happen. She saw the wagon pass her and saw it brought to a standstill
+just beyond where she was; saw Jess Tatum slide stealthily down from
+under the overhanging hood of the wagon and, sheltered behind it, draw a
+revolver and cock it, all the while peeping out, searching the front and
+the nearer side of the gristmill with his eager eyes. She saw Harve
+Tatum, the elder brother, set the wheel chock and wrap the lines about
+the sheathed whipstock, and then as he swung off the seat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> catch a boot
+heel on the rim of the wagon box and fall to the road with a jar which
+knocked him cold, for he was a gross and heavy man and struck squarely
+on his head. With popped eyes she saw Jess throw up his pistol and fire
+once from his ambush behind the wagon, and then&mdash;the startled team
+having snatched the wagon from before him&mdash;saw him advance into the open
+toward the mill, shooting again as he advanced.</p>
+
+<p>All now in the same breath and in a jumble of shock and terror she saw
+Dudley Stackpole emerge into full sight, and standing clear a pace from
+his doorway return the fire; saw the thudding frantic hoofs of the nigh
+horse spurn Harve Tatum's body aside&mdash;the kick broke his right leg, it
+turned out&mdash;saw Jess Tatum suddenly halt and stagger back as though
+jerked by an unseen hand; saw him drop his weapon and straighten again,
+and with both hands clutched to his throat run forward, head thrown back
+and feet drumming; heard him give one strange bubbling, strangled
+scream&mdash;it was the blood in his throat made this outcry sound thus&mdash;and
+saw him fall on his face, twitching and heaving, not thirty feet from
+where Dudley Stackpole stood, his pistol upraised and ready for more
+firing.</p>
+
+<p>As to how many shots, all told, were fired the woman never could say
+with certainty. There might have been four or five or six, or even
+seven, she thought. After the opening<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> shot they rang together in almost
+a continuous volley, she said. Three empty chambers in Tatum's gun and
+two in Stackpole's seemed conclusive evidence to the sheriff and the
+coroner that night and to the coroner's jurors next day that five shots
+had been fired.</p>
+
+<p>On one point, though, for all her fright, the woman was positive, and to
+this she stuck in the face of questions and cross-questions. After Tatum
+stopped as though jolted to a standstill, and dropped his weapon,
+Stackpole flung the barrel of his revolver upward and did not again
+offer to fire, either as his disarmed and stricken enemy advanced upon
+him or after he had fallen. As she put it, he stood there like a man
+frozen stiff.</p>
+
+<p>Having seen and heard this much, the witness, now all possible peril for
+her was passed, suddenly became mad with fear. She ran into her cabin
+and scrouged behind the headboard of a bed. When at length she
+timorously withdrew from hiding and came trembling forth, already
+persons out of the neighborhood, drawn by the sounds of the fusillade,
+were hurrying up. They seemed to spring, as it were, out of the ground.
+Into the mill these newcomers carried the two Tatums, Jess being
+stone-dead and Harve still senseless, with a leg dangling where the
+bones were snapped below the knee, and a great cut in his scalp; and
+they laid the two of them side by side on the floor in the gritty dust
+of the meal tailings and the flour<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> grindings. This done, some ran to
+harness and hitch and to go to fetch doctors and law officers, spreading
+the news as they went; and some stayed on to work over Harve Tatum and
+to give such comfort as they might to Dudley Stackpole, he sitting dumb
+in his little, cluttered office awaiting the coming of constable or
+sheriff or deputy so that he might surrender himself into custody.</p>
+
+<p>While they waited and while they worked to bring Harve Tatum back to his
+senses, the men marveled at two amazing things. The first wonder was
+that Jess Tatum, finished marksman as he was, and the main instigator
+and central figure of sundry violent encounters in the past, should have
+failed to hit the mark at which he fired with his first shot or with his
+second or with his third; and the second, a still greater wonder, was
+that Dudley Stackpole, who perhaps never in his life had had for a
+target a living thing, should have sped a bullet so squarely into the
+heart of his victim at twenty yards or more. The first phenomenon might
+perhaps be explained, they agreed, on the hypothesis that the mishap to
+his brother coming at the very moment of the fight's beginning, unnerved
+Jess and threw him out of stride, so to speak. But the second was not in
+anywise to be explained excepting on the theory of sheer chance. The
+fact remained that it was so, and the fact remained that it was strange.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p><p>By form of law Dudley Stackpole spent two days under arrest; but this
+was a form, a legal fiction only. Actually he was at liberty from the
+time he reached the courthouse that night, riding in the sheriff's buggy
+with the sheriff and carrying poised on his knees a lighted lantern.
+Afterwards it was to be recalled that when, alongside the sheriff, he
+came out of his mill technically a prisoner he carried in his hand this
+lantern, all trimmed of wick and burning, and that he held fast to it
+through the six-mile ride to town. Afterwards, too, the circumstance was
+to be coupled with multiplying circumstances to establish a state of
+facts; but at the moment, in the excited state of mind of those present,
+it passed unremarked and almost unnoticed. And he still held it in his
+hand when, having been released under nominal bond and attended by
+certain sympathizing friends, he walked across town from the county
+building to his home on Clay Street. That fact, too, was subsequently
+remembered and added to other details to make a finished sum of
+deductive reasoning.</p>
+
+<p>Already it was a foregone conclusion that the finding at the coroner's
+inquest, to be held the next day, would absolve him; foregone, also,
+that no prosecutor would press for his arraignment on charges and that
+no grand jury would indict. So, soon all the evidence in hand was
+conclusively on his side. He had been forced into a fight not of his own
+choosing; an effort,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> which had failed, had been made to take him
+unfairly from behind; he had fired in self-defense after having first
+been fired upon; save for a quirk of fate operating in his favor, he
+should have faced odds of two deadly antagonists instead of facing one.
+What else then than his prompt and honorable discharge? And to top all,
+the popular verdict was that the killing off of Jess Tatum was so much
+good riddance of so much sorry rubbish; a pity, though, Harve had
+escaped his just deserts.</p>
+
+<p>Helpless for the time being, and in the estimation of his fellows even
+more thoroughly discredited than he had been before, Harve Tatum here
+vanishes out of our recital. So, too, does Jeffrey Stackpole, heretofore
+mentioned once by name, for within a week he was dead of the same heart
+attack which had kept him out of the fight at Cache Creek. The rest of
+the narrative largely appertains to the one conspicuous survivor, this
+Dudley Stackpole already described.</p>
+
+<p>Tradition ever afterwards had it that on the night of the killing he
+slept&mdash;if he slept at all&mdash;in the full-lighted room of a house which was
+all aglare with lights from cellar to roof line. From its every opening
+the house blazed as for a celebration. At the first, so the tale of it
+ran, people were of two different minds to account for this. This one
+rather thought Stackpole feared punitive reprisals under cover of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> night
+by vengeful kinsmen of the Tatums, they being, root and branch, sprout
+and limb, a belligerent and an ill-conditioned breed. That one suggested
+that maybe he took this method of letting all and sundry know he felt no
+regret for having gunned the life out of a dangerous brawler; that
+perhaps thereby he sought to advertise his satisfaction at the outcome
+of that day's affair. But this latter theory was not to be credited. For
+so sensitive and so well-disposed a man as Dudley Stackpole to joy in
+his own deadly act, however justifiable in the sight of law and man that
+act might have been&mdash;why, the bare notion of it was preposterous! The
+repute and the prior conduct of the man robbed the suggestion of all
+plausibility. And then soon, when night after night the lights still
+flared in his house, and when on top of this evidence accumulated to
+confirm a belief already crystallizing in the public mind, the town came
+to sense the truth, which was that Mr. Dudley Stackpole now feared the
+dark as a timid child might fear it. It was not authentically chronicled
+that he confessed his fears to any living creature. But his fellow
+townsmen knew the state of his mind as though he had shouted of it from
+the housetops. They had heard, most of them, of such cases before. They
+agreed among themselves that he shunned darkness because he feared that
+out of that darkness might return the vision of his deed, bloodied and
+shocking and hideous. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> they were right. He did so fear, and he
+feared mightily, constantly and unendingly.</p>
+
+<p>That fear, along with the behavior which became from that night
+thenceforward part and parcel of him, made Dudley Stackpole as one set
+over and put apart from his fellows. Neither by daytime nor by nighttime
+was he thereafter to know darkness. Never again was he to see the
+twilight fall or face the blackness which comes before the dawning or
+take his rest in the cloaking, kindly void and nothingness of the
+midnight. Before the dusk of evening came, in midafternoon sometimes, of
+stormy and briefened winter days, or in the full radiance of the sun's
+sinking in the summertime, he was within doors lighting the lights which
+would keep the darkness beyond his portals and hold at bay a gathering
+gloom into which from window or door he would not look and dared not
+look.</p>
+
+<p>There were trees about his house, cottonwoods and sycamores and one
+noble elm branching like a lyre. He chopped them all down and had the
+roots grubbed out. The vines which covered his porch were shorn away. To
+these things many were witnesses. What transformations he worked within
+the walls were largely known by hearsay through the medium of Aunt
+Kassie, the old negress who served him as cook and chambermaid and was
+his only house servant. To half-fearsome, half-fascinated audiences of
+her own color, whose <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>members in time communicated what she told to
+their white employers, she related how with his own hands, bringing a
+crude carpentry into play, her master ripped out certain dark closets
+and abolished a secluded and gloomy recess beneath a hall staircase, and
+how privily he called in men who strung his ceilings with electric
+lights, although already the building was piped for gas; and how, for
+final touches, he placed in various parts of his bedroom tallow dips and
+oil lamps to be lit before twilight and to burn all night, so that
+though the gas sometime should fail and the electric bulbs blink out,
+there still would be abundant lighting about him. His became the house
+which harbored no single shadow save only the shadow of morbid dread
+which lived within its owner's bosom. An orthodox haunted house should
+by rights be deserted and dark. This house, haunted if ever one was,
+differed from the orthodox conception. It was tenanted and it shone with
+lights.</p>
+
+<p>The man's abiding obsession&mdash;if we may call his besetment thus&mdash;changed
+in practically all essential regards the manners and the practices of
+his daily life. After the shooting he never returned to his mill. He
+could not bring himself to endure the ordeal of revisiting the scene of
+the killing. So the mill stood empty and silent, just as he left it that
+night when he rode to town with the sheriff, until after his brother's
+death; and then with all possible dispatch<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> he sold it, its fixtures,
+contents and goodwill, for what the property would fetch at quick sale,
+and he gave up business. He had sufficient to stay him in his needs. The
+Stackpoles had the name of being a canny and a provident family, living
+quietly and saving of their substance. The homestead where he lived,
+which his father before him had built, was free of debt. He had funds in
+the bank and money out at interest. He had not been one to make close
+friends. Now those who had counted themselves his friends became rather
+his distant acquaintances, among whom he neither received nor bestowed
+confidences.</p>
+
+<p>In the broader hours of daylight his ways were such as any man of
+reserved and diffident ways, having no fixed employment, might follow in
+a smallish community. He sat upon his porch and read in books. He worked
+in his flower beds. With flowers he had a cunning touch, almost like a
+woman's. He loved them, and they responded to his love and bloomed and
+bore for him. He walked downtown to the business district, always alone,
+a shy and unimpressive figure, and sat brooding and aloof in one of the
+tilted-back cane chairs under the portico of the old Richland House,
+facing the river. He took long solitary walks on side streets and
+byways; but it was noted that, reaching the farther outskirts, he
+invariably turned back. In all those dragging years it is doubtful if
+once he set foot past the corporate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> limits into the open country. Dun
+hued, unobtrusive, withdrawn, he aged slowly, almost imperceptibly. Men
+and women of his own generation used to say that save for the wrinkles
+ever multiplying in close cross-hatchings about his puckered eyes, and
+save for the enhancing of that dead gray pallor&mdash;the wasp's-nest
+overcasting of his skin&mdash;he still looked to them exactly as he had
+looked when he was a much younger man.</p>
+
+<p>It was not so much the appearance or the customary demeanor of the
+recluse that made strangers turn about to stare at him as he passed, and
+that made them remember how he looked when he was gone from their sight.
+The one was commonplace enough&mdash;I mean his appearance&mdash;and his conduct,
+unless one knew the underlying motives, was merely that of an
+unobtrusive, rather melancholy seeming gentleman of quiet tastes and
+habits. It was the feeling and the sense of a dismal exhalation from
+him, an unhealthy and unnatural mental effluvium that served so
+indelibly to fix the bodily image of him in the brainpans of casual and
+uninformed passers-by. The brand of Cain was not on his brow. By every
+local standard of human morality it did not belong there. But built up
+of morbid elements within his own conscience, it looked out from his
+eyes and breathed out from his person.</p>
+
+<p>So year by year, until the tally of the years rolled up to more than
+thirty, he went his lone<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> unhappy way. He was in the life of the town,
+to an extent, but not of it. Always, though, it was the daylit life of
+the town which knew him. Excepting once only. Of this exceptional
+instance a story was so often repeated that in time it became
+permanently embalmed in the unwritten history of the place.</p>
+
+<p>On a summer's afternoon, sultry and close, the heavens suddenly went all
+black, and quick gusts smote the earth with threats of a great
+windstorm. The sun vanished magically; a close thick gloaming fell out
+of the clouds. It was as though nightfall had descended hours before its
+ordained time. At the city power house the city electrician turned on
+the street lights. As the first great fat drops of rain fell, splashing
+in the dust like veritable clots, citizens scurrying indoors and
+citizens seeing to flapping awnings and slamming window blinds halted
+where they were to peer through the murk at the sight of Mr. Dudley
+Stackpole fleeing to the shelter of home like a man hunted by a terrible
+pursuer. But with all his desperate need for haste he ran no
+straightaway course. The manner of his flight was what gave added
+strangeness to the spectacle of him. He would dart headlong, on a sharp
+oblique from the right-hand corner of a street intersection to a point
+midway of the block&mdash;or square, to give it its local name&mdash;then go
+slanting back again to the right-hand corner of the next street
+crossing, so that his path was in the pattern of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> one acutely slanted
+zigzag after another. He was keeping, as well as he could, within the
+circles of radiance thrown out by the municipal arc lights as he made
+for his house, there in his bedchamber to fortify himself about, like
+one beset and besieged, with the ample and protecting rays of all the
+methods of artificial illumination at his command&mdash;with incandescent
+bulbs thrown on by switches, with the flare of lighted gas jets, with
+the tallow dip's slim digit of flame, and with the kerosene's wick
+three-finger breadth of greasy brilliance. As he fumbled, in a very
+panic and spasm of fear, with the latchets of his front gate Squire
+Jonas' wife heard him screaming to Aunt Kassie, his servant, to turn on
+the lights&mdash;all of them.</p>
+
+<p>That once was all, though&mdash;the only time he found the dark taking him
+unawares and threatening to envelop him in thirty years and more than
+thirty. Then a time came when in a hospital in Oklahoma an elderly man
+named A. Hamilton Bledsoe lay on his deathbed and on the day before he
+died told the physician who attended him and the clergyman who had
+called to pray for him that he had a confession to make. He desired that
+it be taken down by a stenographer just as he uttered it, and
+transcribed; then he would sign it as his solemn dying declaration, and
+when he had died they were to send the signed copy back to the town from
+whence he had in the year 1889 moved West, and there it was to be
+published <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>broadcast. All of which, in due course of time and in
+accordance with the signatory's wishes, was done.</p>
+
+<p>With the beginning of the statement as it appeared in the <i>Daily Evening
+News</i>, as with Editor Tompkins' introductory paragraphs preceding it, we
+need have no interest. That which really matters began two-thirds of the
+way down the first column and ran as follows:</p>
+
+<p>"How I came to know there was likely to be trouble that evening at the
+big-riffle crossing was this way"&mdash;it is the dying Bledsoe, of course,
+who is being quoted. "The man they sent to the mill with the message did
+a lot of loose talking on his way back after he gave in the message, and
+in this roundabout way the word got to me at my house on the Eden's
+Swamp road soon after dinnertime. Now I had always got along fine with
+both of the Stackpoles, and had only friendly feelings toward them; but
+maybe there's some people still alive back there in that county who can
+remember what the reason was why I should naturally hate and despise
+both the Tatums, and especially this Jess Tatum, him being if anything
+the more low-down one of the two, although the youngest. At this late
+day I don't aim to drag the name of anyone else into this, especially a
+woman's name, and her now dead and gone and in her grave; but I will
+just say that if ever a man had a just cause for craving<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> to see Jess
+Tatum stretched out in his blood it was me. At the same time I will
+state that it was not good judgment for a man who expected to go on
+living to start out after one of the Tatums without he kept on till he
+had cleaned up the both of them, and maybe some of their cousins as
+well. I will not admit that I acted cowardly, but I will state that I
+used my best judgment.</p>
+
+<p>"Therefore and accordingly, no sooner did I hear the news about the dare
+which the Tatums had sent to the Stackpoles than I said to myself that
+it looked like here was my fitting chance to even up my grudge with Jess
+Tatum and yet at the same time not run the prospect of being known to be
+mixed up in the matter and maybe getting arrested, or waylaid afterwards
+by members of the Tatum family or things of such a nature. Likewise I
+figured that with a general amount of shooting going on, as seemed
+likely to be the case, one shot more or less would not be noticed,
+especially as I aimed to keep out of sight at all times and do my work
+from under safe cover, which it all of it turned out practically exactly
+as I had expected. So I took a rifle which I owned and which I was a
+good shot with and I privately went down through the bottoms and came
+out on the creek bank in the deep cut right behind Stackpole Brothers'
+gristmill. I should say offhand this was then about three o'clock in the
+evening. I was ahead of time, but I wished to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> be there and get
+everything fixed up the way I had mapped it out in my mind, without
+being hurried or rushed.</p>
+
+<p>"The back door of the mill was not locked, and I got in without being
+seen, and I went upstairs to the loft over the mill and I went to a
+window just above the front door, which was where they hoisted up grain
+when brought in wagons, and I propped the wooden shutter of the window
+open a little ways. But I only propped it open about two or three
+inches; just enough for me to see out of it up the road good. And I made
+me a kind of pallet out of meal sacks and I laid down there and I
+waited. I knew the mill had shut down for the week, and I didn't figure
+on any of the hands being round the mill or anybody finding out I was up
+there. So I waited, not hearing anybody stirring about downstairs at
+all, until just about three minutes past six, when all of a sudden came
+the first shot.</p>
+
+<p>"What threw me off was expecting the Tatums to come afoot from up the
+road, but when they did come it was in a wagon from down the main
+Blandsville pike clear round in the other direction. So at this first
+shot I swung and peeped out and I seen Harve Tatum down in the dust
+seemingly right under the wheels of his wagon, and I seen Jess Tatum
+jump out from behind the wagon and shoot, and I seen Dudley Stackpole
+come out of the mill door right directly under me and start shooting
+back<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> at him. There was no sign of his brother Jeffrey. I did not know
+then that Jeffrey was home sick in bed.</p>
+
+<p>"Being thrown off the way I had been, it took me maybe one or two
+seconds to draw myself around and get the barrel of my rifle swung round
+to where I wanted it, and while I was doing this the shooting was going
+on. All in a flash it had come to me that it would be fairer than ever
+for me to take part in this thing, because in the first place the Tatums
+would be two against one if Harve should get back upon his feet and get
+into the fight; and in the second place Dudley Stackpole didn't know the
+first thing about shooting a pistol. Why, all in that same second, while
+I was righting myself and getting the bead onto Jess Tatum's breast, I
+seen his first shot&mdash;Stackpole's, I mean&mdash;kick up the dust not twenty
+feet in front of him and less than halfway to where Tatum was. I was as
+cool as I am now, and I seen this quite plain.</p>
+
+<p>"So with that, just as Stackpole fired wild again, I let Jess Tatum have
+it right through the chest, and as I did so I knew from the way he acted
+that he was done and through. He let loose of his pistol and acted like
+he was going to fall, and then he sort of rallied up and did a strange
+thing. He ran straight on ahead toward the mill, with his neck craned
+back and him running on tiptoe; and he ran this way quite a little ways
+before he dropped flat, face<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> down. Somebody else, seeing him do that,
+might have thought he had the idea to tear into Dudley Stackpole with
+his bare hands, but I had done enough shooting at wild game in my time
+to know that he was acting like a partridge sometimes does, or a wild
+duck when it is shot through the heart or in the head; only in such a
+case a bird flies straight up in the air. Towering is what you call it
+when done by a partridge. I do not know what you would call it when done
+by a man.</p>
+
+<p>"So then I closed the window shutter and I waited for quite a little
+while to make sure everything was all right for me, and then I hid my
+rifle under the meal sacks, where it stayed until I got it privately two
+days later; and then I slipped downstairs and went out by the back door
+and came round in front, running and breathing hard as though I had just
+heard the shooting whilst up in the swamp. By that time there were
+several others had arrived, and there was also a negro woman crying
+round and carrying on and saying she seen Jess Tatum fire the first shot
+and seen Dudley Stackpole shoot back and seen Tatum fall. But she could
+not say for sure how many shots there were fired in all. So I saw that
+everything was all right so far as I was concerned, and that nobody, not
+even Stackpole, suspicioned but that he himself had killed Jess Tatum;
+and as I knew he would have no trouble with the law to amount to
+anything on account of it, I felt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> that there was no need for me to
+worry, and I did not&mdash;not worry then nor later. But for some time past I
+had been figuring on moving out here on account of this new country
+opening up. So I hurried up things, and inside of a week I had sold out
+my place and had shipped my household plunder on ahead; and I moved out
+here with my family, which they have all died off since, leaving only
+me. And now I am about to die, and so I wish to make this statement
+before I do so.</p>
+
+<p>"But if they had thought to cut into Jess Tatum's body after he was
+dead, or to probe for the bullet in him, they would have known that it
+was not Dudley Stackpole who really shot him, but somebody else; and
+then I suppose suspicion might have fell upon me, although I doubt it.
+Because they would have found that the bullet which killed him was fired
+out of a forty-five-seventy shell, and Dudley Stackpole had done all of
+the shooting he done with a thirty-eight caliber pistol, which would
+throw a different-sized bullet. But they never thought to do so."</p>
+
+<p>Question by the physician, Doctor Davis: "You mean to say that no
+autopsy was performed upon the body of the deceased?"</p>
+
+<p>Answer by Bledsoe: "If you mean by performing an autopsy that they
+probed into him or cut in to find the bullet I will answer no, sir, they
+did not. They did not seem to think to do so, because it seemed to
+everybody such a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> plain open-and-shut case that Dudley Stackpole had
+killed him."</p>
+
+<p>Question by the Reverend Mr. Hewlitt: "I take it that you are making
+this confession of your own free will and in order to clear the name of
+an innocent party from blame and to purge your own soul?"</p>
+
+<p>Answer: "In reply to that I will say yes and no. If Dudley Stackpole is
+still alive, which I doubt, he is by now getting to be an old man; but
+if alive yet I would like for him to know that he did not fire the shot
+which killed Jess Tatum on that occasion. He was not a bloodthirsty man,
+and doubtless the matter may have preyed upon his mind. So on the bare
+chance of him being still alive is why I make this dying statement to
+you gentlemen in the presence of witnesses. But I am not ashamed, and
+never was, at having done what I did do. I killed Jess Tatum with my own
+hands, and I have never regretted it. I would not regard killing him as
+a crime any more than you gentlemen here would regard it as a crime
+killing a rattlesnake or a moccasin snake. Only, until now, I did not
+think it advisable for me to admit it; which, on Dudley Stackpole's
+account solely, is the only reason why I am now making this statement."</p>
+
+<p>And so on and so forth for the better part of a second column, with a
+brief summary in Editor Tompkins' best style&mdash;which was a very dramatic
+and moving style indeed&mdash;of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>circumstances, as recalled by old
+residents, of the ancient tragedy, and a short sketch of the deceased
+Bledsoe, the facts regarding him being drawn from the same veracious
+sources; and at the end of the article was a somewhat guarded but
+altogether sympathetic reference to the distressful recollections borne
+for so long and so patiently by an esteemed townsman, with a concluding
+paragraph to the effect that though the gentleman in question had
+declined to make a public statement touching on the remarkable
+disclosures now added thus strangely as a final chapter to the annals of
+an event long since occurred, the writer felt no hesitancy in saying
+that appreciating, as they must, the motives which prompted him to
+silence, his fellow citizens would one and all join the editor of the
+<i>Daily Evening News</i> in congratulating him upon the lifting of this
+cloud from his life.</p>
+
+<p>"I only wish I had the language to express the way that old man looked
+when I showed him the galley proofs of Bledsoe's confession," said
+Editor Tompkins to a little interested group gathered in his sanctum
+after the paper was on the streets that evening. "If I had such a power
+I'd have this Frenchman Balzac backed clear off the boards when it came
+to describing things. Gentlemen, let me tell you&mdash;I've been in this
+business all my life, and I've seen lots of things, but I never saw
+anything that was the beat of this thing.</p>
+
+<p>"Just as soon as this statement came to me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> in the mails this morning
+from that place out in Oklahoma I rushed it into type, and I had a set
+of galley proofs pulled and I stuck 'em in my pocket and I put out for
+the Stackpole place out on Clay Street. I didn't want to trust either of
+the reporters with this job. They're both good, smart, likely boys; but,
+at that, they're only boys, and I didn't know how they'd go at this
+thing; and, anyway, it looked like it was my job.</p>
+
+<p>"He was sitting on his porch reading, just a little old gray shell of a
+man, all hunched up, and I walked up to him and I says: 'You'll pardon
+me, Mr. Stackpole, but I've come to ask you a question and then to show
+you something. Did you,' I says, 'ever know a man named A. Hamilton
+Bledsoe?'</p>
+
+<p>"He sort of winced. He got up and made as if to go into the house
+without answering me. I suppose it'd been so long since he had anybody
+calling on him he hardly knew how to act. And then that question coming
+out of a clear sky, as you might say, and rousing up bitter
+memories&mdash;not probably that his bitter memories needed any rousing,
+being always with him, anyway&mdash;may have jolted him pretty hard. But if
+he aimed to go inside he changed his mind when he got to the door. He
+turned round and came back.</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes,' he says, as though the words were being dragged out of him
+against his will, 'I did once know a man of that name. He was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> commonly
+called Ham Bledsoe. He lived near where'&mdash;he checked himself up,
+here&mdash;'he lived,' he says, 'in this county at one time. I knew him
+then.'</p>
+
+<p>"'That being so,' I says, 'I judge the proper thing to do is to ask you
+to read these galley proofs,' and I handed them over and he read them
+through without a word. Without a word, mind you, and yet if he'd spoken
+a volume he couldn't have told me any clearer what was passing through
+his mind when he came to the main facts than the way he did tell me just
+by the look that came into his face. Gentlemen, when you sit and watch a
+man sixty-odd years old being born again; when you see hope and life
+come back to him all in a minute; when you see his soul being remade in
+a flash, you'll find you can't describe it afterwards, but you're never
+going to forget it. And another thing you'll find is that there is
+nothing for you to say to him, nothing that you can say, nor nothing
+that you want to say.</p>
+
+<p>"I did manage, when he was through, to ask him whether or not he wished
+to make a statement. That was all from me, mind you, and yet I'd gone
+out there with the idea in my head of getting material for a long newsy
+piece out of him&mdash;what we call in this business heart-interest stuff.
+All he said, though, as he handed me back the slips was, 'No, sir; but I
+thank you&mdash;from the bottom of my heart I thank you.' And then he shook
+hands with me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>&mdash;shook hands with me like a man who'd forgotten almost
+how 'twas done&mdash;and he walked in his house and shut the door behind him,
+and I came on away feeling exactly as though I had seen a funeral turned
+into a resurrection."</p>
+
+<p>Editor Tompkins thought he had that day written the final chapter, but
+he hadn't. The final chapter he was to write the next day, following
+hard upon a d&eacute;nouement which to Mr. Tompkins, he with his own eyes
+having seen what he had seen, was so profound a puzzle that ever
+thereafter he mentally catalogued it under one of his favorite
+headlining phrases: "Deplorable Affair Shrouded in Mystery."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Let us go back a few hours. For a fact, Mr. Tompkins had been witness to
+a spirit's resurrection. It was as he had borne testimony&mdash;a life had
+been reborn before his eyes. Even so, he, the sole spectator to and
+chronicler of the glory of it, could not know the depth and the sweep
+and the swing of the great heartening swell of joyous relief which
+uplifted Dudley Stackpole at the reading of the dead Bledsoe's words.
+None save Dudley Stackpole himself was ever to have a true appreciation
+of the utter sweetness of that cleansing flood, nor he for long.</p>
+
+<p>As he closed his door upon the editor, plans, aspirations, ambitions
+already were flowing to his brain, borne there upon that ground swell of
+sudden happiness. Into the back spaces of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> his mind long-buried desires
+went riding like chips upon a torrent. The substance of his patiently
+endured self-martyrdom was lifted all in a second, and with it the
+shadow of it. He would be thenceforth as other men, living as they
+lived, taking, as they did, an active share and hand in communal life.
+He was getting old. The good news had come late, but not too late. That
+day would mark the total disappearance of the morbid lonely recluse and
+the rejuvenation of the normal-thinking, normal-habited citizen. That
+very day he would make a beginning of the new order of things.</p>
+
+<p>And that very day he did; at least he tried. He put on his hat and he
+took his cane in his hand and as he started down the street he sought to
+put smartness and springiness into his gait. If the attempt was a sorry
+failure he, for one, did not appreciate the completeness of the failure.
+He meant, anyhow, that his step no longer should be purposeless and
+mechanical; that his walk should hereafter have intent in it. And as he
+came down the porch steps he looked about him, not dully, with sick and
+uninforming eyes, but with a livened interest in all familiar homely
+things.</p>
+
+<p>Coming to his gate he saw, near at hand, Squire Jonas, now a gnarled but
+still sprightly octogenarian, leaning upon a fence post surveying the
+universe at large, as was the squire's daily custom. He called out a
+good morning and waved his stick in greeting toward the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> squire with a
+gesture which he endeavored to make natural. His aging muscles, staled
+by thirty-odd years of lack of practice at such tricks, merely made it
+jerky and forced. Still, the friendly design was there, plainly to be
+divined; and the neighborly tone of his voice. But the squire,
+ordinarily the most courteous of persons, and certainly one of the most
+talkative, did not return the salutation. Astonishment congealed his
+faculties, tied his tongue and paralyzed his biceps. He stared dumbly a
+moment, and then, having regained coherent powers, he jammed his
+brown-varnished straw hat firmly upon his ancient poll and went
+scrambling up his gravel walk as fast as two rheumatic underpinnings
+would take him, and on into his house like a man bearing incredible and
+unbelievable tidings.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stackpole opened his gate and passed out and started down the
+sidewalk. Midway of the next square he overtook a man he knew&mdash;an
+elderly watchmaker, a Swiss by birth, who worked at Nagel's jewelry
+store. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times he had passed this man upon
+the street. Always before he had passed him with averted eyes and a
+stiff nod of recognition. Now, coming up behind the other, Mr. Stackpole
+bade him a cheerful good day. At the sound of the words the Swiss spun
+on his heel, then gulped audibly and backed away, flinching almost as
+though a blow had been aimed at him. He muttered some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> meaningless
+something, confusedly: he stared at Mr. Stackpole with widened eyes like
+one who beholds an apparition in the broad of the day; he stepped on his
+own feet and got in his own way as he shrank to the outer edge of the
+narrow pavement. Mr. Stackpole was minded to fall into step alongside
+the Swiss, but the latter would not have it so. He stumbled along for a
+few yards, mute and plainly terribly embarrassed at finding himself in
+this unexpected company, and then with a muttered sound which might be
+interpreted as an apology or an explanation, or as a token of profound
+surprise on his part, or as combination of them all, he turned abruptly
+off into a grassed side lane which ran up into the old Enders orchard
+and ended nowhere at all in particular. Once his back was turned to Mr.
+Stackpole, he blessed himself fervently. On his face was the look of one
+who would fend off what is evil and supernatural.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stackpole continued on his way. On a vacant lot at Franklin and Clay
+Streets four small boys were playing one-eyed-cat. Switching his cane at
+the weed tops with strokes which he strove to make casual, he stopped to
+watch them, a half smile of approbation on his face. Pose and expression
+showed that he desired their approval for his approval of their skill.
+They stopped, too, when they saw him&mdash;stopped short. With one accord
+they ceased their play, staring at him. Nervously the batsman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> withdrew
+to the farther side of the common, dragging his bat behind him. The
+three others followed, casting furtive looks backward over their
+shoulders. Under a tree at the back of the lot they conferred together,
+all the while shooting quick diffident glances toward where he stood. It
+was plain something had put a blight upon their spirits; also, even at
+this distance, they radiated a sort of inarticulate suspicion&mdash;a
+suspicion of which plainly he was the object.</p>
+
+<p>For long years Mr. Stackpole's faculties for observation of the motives
+and actions of his fellows had been sheathed. Still, disuse had not
+altogether dulled them. Constant introspection had not destroyed his
+gift for speculation. It was rusted, but still workable. He had read
+aright Squire Jonas' stupefaction, the watchmaker's ludicrous alarm. He
+now read aright the chill which the very sight of his altered
+mien&mdash;cheerful and sprightly where they had expected grim aloofness&mdash;had
+thrown upon the spirits of the ball players. Well, he could understand
+it all. The alteration in him, coming without prior warning, had
+startled them, frightened them, really. Well, that might have been
+expected. The way had not been paved properly for the transformation. It
+would be different when the <i>Daily Evening News</i> came out. He would go
+back home&mdash;he would wait. When they had read what was in the paper
+people would not avoid him or flee from him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> They would be coming into
+his house to wish him well, to re&euml;stablish old relations with him. Why,
+it would be almost like holding a reception. He would be to those of his
+own age as a friend of their youth, returning after a long absence to
+his people, with the dour stranger who had lived in his house while he
+was away now driven out and gone forever.</p>
+
+<p>He turned about and he went back home and he waited. But for a while
+nothing happened, except that in the middle of the afternoon Aunt Kassie
+unaccountably disappeared. She was gone when he left his seat on the
+front porch and went back to the kitchen to give her some instruction
+touching on supper. At dinnertime, entering his dining room, he had,
+without conscious intent whistled the bars of an old air, and at that
+she had dropped a plate of hot egg bread and vanished into the pantry,
+leaving the split fragments upon the floor. Nor had she returned. He had
+made his meal unattended. Now, while he looked for her, she was hurrying
+down the alley, bound for the home of her preacher. She felt the need of
+his holy counsels and the reading of scriptural passages. She was used
+to queerness in her master, but if he were going crazy all of a sudden,
+why that would be a different matter altogether. So, presently, she was
+confiding to her spiritual adviser.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stackpole returned to the porch and sat down again and waited for
+what was to be.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> Through the heat of the waning afternoon Clay Street
+was almost deserted; but toward sunset the thickening tides of
+pedestrian travel began flowing by his house as men returned homeward
+from work. He had a bowing acquaintance with most of those who passed.</p>
+
+<p>Two or three elderly men and women among them he had known fairly well
+in years past. But no single one of those who came along turned in at
+his gate to offer him the congratulation he so eagerly desired; no
+single one, at sight of him, all poised and expectant, paused to call
+out kindly words across the palings of his fence. Yet they must have
+heard the news. He knew that they had heard it&mdash;all of them&mdash;knew it by
+the stares they cast toward the house front as they went by. There was
+more, though, in the staring than a quickened interest or a sharpened
+curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>Was he wrong, or was there also a sort of subtle resentment in it? Was
+there a sense vaguely conveyed that even these old acquaintances of his
+felt almost personally aggrieved that a town character should have
+ceased thus abruptly to be a town character&mdash;that they somehow felt a
+subtle injustice had been done to public opinion, an affront offered to
+civic tradition, through this unexpected sloughing off by him of the
+r&ocirc;le he for so long had worn?</p>
+
+<p>He was not wrong. There was an essence of a floating, formless
+resentment there. Over the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> invisible tendons of mental telepathy it
+came to him, registering emphatically.</p>
+
+<p>As he shrank back in his chair he summoned his philosophy to give him
+balm and consolation for his disappointment. It would take time, of
+course, for people to grow accustomed to the change in him&mdash;that was
+only natural. In a few days, now, when the shock of the sensation had
+worn off, things would be different. They would forgive him for breaking
+a sort of unuttered communal law, but one hallowed, as it were, by rote
+and custom. He vaguely comprehended that there might be such a law for
+his case&mdash;a canon of procedure which, unnatural in itself, had come with
+the passage of the passing years to be quite naturally accepted.</p>
+
+<p>Well, perhaps the man who broke such a law, even though it were
+originally of his own fashioning, must abide the consequences. Even so,
+though, things must be different when the minds of people had
+readjusted. This he told himself over and over again, seeking in its
+steady repetition salve for his hurt, overwrought feelings.</p>
+
+<p>And his nights&mdash;surely they would be different! Therein, after all, lay
+the roots of the peace and the surcease which henceforth would be his
+portion. At thought of this prospect, now imminent, he uplifted his soul
+in a silent p&aelig;an of thanksgiving.</p>
+
+<p>Having no one in whom he ever had confided, it followed naturally that
+no one else<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> knew what torture he had suffered through all the nights of
+all these years stretching behind him in so terribly long a perspective.
+No one else knew how he had craved for the darkness which all the time
+he had both feared and shunned. No one else knew how miserable a
+travesty on sleep his sleep had been, he reading until a heavy physical
+weariness came, then lying in his bed through the latter hours of the
+night, fitfully dozing, often rousing, while from either side of his
+bed, from the ceiling above, from the headboard behind him, and from the
+footboard, strong lights played full and flary upon his twitching,
+aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his
+eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness
+of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the
+stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in
+his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured
+unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely
+worse&mdash;the agonized, twisted, dying face of Jess Tatum leaping at him
+out of shadows. But now, thank God, that ghost of his own conjuring,
+that wraith never seen but always feared, was laid to rest forever.
+Never again would conscience put him, soul and body, upon the rack. This
+night he would sleep&mdash;sleep as little children do in the all-enveloping,
+friendly, comforting dark.</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely could he wait till a proper bedtime<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> hour came. He forgot that
+he had had no supper; forgot in that delectable anticipation the
+disillusionizing experiences of the day. Mechanically he had, as dusk
+came on, turned on the lights throughout the house, and force of habit
+still operating, he left them all on when at eleven o'clock he quitted
+the brilliantly illuminated porch and went to his bedroom on the second
+floor. He undressed and he put on him his night wear, becoming a
+grotesque shrunken figure, what with his meager naked legs and his ashen
+eager face and thin dust-colored throat rising above the collarless
+neckband of the garment. He blew out the flame of the oil lamp which
+burned on a reading stand at the left side of his bed and extinguished
+the two candles which stood on a table at the right side.</p>
+
+<p>Then he got in the bed and stretched out his arms, one aloft, the other
+behind him, finding with the fingers of this hand the turncock of the
+gas burner which swung low from the ceiling at the end of a goosenecked
+iron pipe, finding with the fingers of that hand the wall switch which
+controlled the battery of electric lights roundabout, and with a
+long-drawn sigh of happy deliverance he turned off both gas and
+electricity simultaneously and sank his head toward the pillow.</p>
+
+<p>The p&aelig;aned sigh turned to a shriek of mortal terror. Quaking in every
+limb, crying out in a continuous frenzy of fright, he was up again<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> on
+his knees seeking with quivering hands for the switch; pawing about then
+for matches with which to relight the gas. For the blackness&mdash;that
+blackness to which he had been stranger for more than half his life&mdash;had
+come upon him as an enemy smothering him, muffling his head in its
+terrible black folds, stopping his nostrils with its black fingers,
+gripping his windpipe with black cords, so that his breathing stopped.</p>
+
+<p>That blackness for which he had craved with an unappeasable hopeless
+craving through thirty years and more was become a horror and a devil.
+He had driven it from him. When he bade it return it returned not as a
+friend and a comforter but as a mocking fiend.</p>
+
+<p>For months and years past he had realized that his optic nerves,
+punished and preyed upon by constant and unwholesome brilliancy, were
+nearing the point of collapse, and that all the other nerves in his
+body, frayed and fretted, too, were all askew and jangled. Cognizant of
+this he still could see no hope of relief, since his fears were greater
+than his reasoning powers or his strength of will. With the fear lifted
+and eternally dissipated in a breath, he had thought to find solace and
+soothing and restoration in the darkness. But now the darkness, for
+which his soul in its longing and his body in its stress had cried out
+unceasingly and vainly, was denied him too. He could face neither the
+one thing nor the other.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p><p>Squatted there in the huddle of the bed coverings, he reasoned it all
+out, and presently he found the answer. And the answer was this: Nature
+for a while forgets and forgives offenses against her, but there comes a
+time when Nature ceases to forgive the mistreatment of the body and the
+mind, and sends then her law of atonement, to be visited upon the
+transgressor with interest compounded a hundredfold. The user of
+narcotics knows it; the drunkard knows it; and this poor self-crucified
+victim of his own imagination&mdash;he knew it too. The hint of it had that
+day been reflected in the attitude of his neighbors, for they merely had
+obeyed, without conscious realization or analysis on their part, a law
+of the natural scheme of things. The direct proof of it was, by this
+nighttime thing, revealed and made yet plainer. He stood convicted, a
+chronic violator of the immutable rule. And he knew, likewise, there was
+but one way out of the coil&mdash;and took it, there in his bedroom, vividly
+ringed about by the obscene and indecent circlet of his lights which
+kept away the blessed, cursed darkness while the suicide's soul was
+passing.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>THE CATER-CORNERED SEX</h3>
+
+<p>They had a saying down our way in the old days that Judge Priest
+administered law inside his courthouse and justice outside of it.
+Perhaps they were right. Certainly he had a way of seeking short cuts
+through thickets of legal verbiage to the rights of things, the which
+often gave acute sorrow to the souls of those members of the bar who
+venerated the very ink in which the statutory act had been printed and
+worshiped manfully before the graven images of precedent. But elsewise,
+generally speaking, it appeared to give satisfaction. Nobody ever beat
+the judge in any of his races for re&euml;lection, and after a while they
+just naturally quit trying.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did it seem to distress him deeply when the grave and learned lords
+of the highest tribunal of the commonwealth saw fit, as they sometimes
+did, to quarrel with a decision of his which, according to their lights,
+ran counter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> to the authorities and the traditions revered by these
+august gentlemen.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah-hah!" he would say in his high penny-flute voice when such a thing
+happened. "I see where the honorable court of appeals has disagreed with
+me agin. Well, they've still got quite a piece to go yit before they
+ketch up with the number of times I've disagreed with them."</p>
+
+<p>But he never said such a thing in open court. Such utterances he
+reserved for his cronies and confidants. Once he was under the dented
+tin dome where he sat for so many years he became so firm a stickler for
+the forms and the dignities that practically a sacerdotal air was
+imparted to the proceedings. As you might say, he was almost high church
+in his adherence to the ritualisms. Lawyers coming before him did not
+practice the law in their shirt sleeves. They might do this when
+appearing on certain neighbor circuits, but not here. They did not smoke
+while court was in session, or sit reared back in their chairs with
+their feet up on the counsel tables and on the bar railings. Of course
+when not actually engaged in addressing the court one might chew tobacco
+in moderation, it being an indisputable fact that such was conducive to
+lubrication of the mental processes and a sedative for the nerves
+besides; but the act of chewing must be discreetly and inaudibly carried
+on, and he who in the heat of argument or under the stress of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+cross-questioning a perverse witness failed to patronize the cuspidors
+which dotted the floor at suitable intervals stood in peril of a stern
+admonishment for the first offense and a fine for the second.</p>
+
+<p>Off the bench our judge was the homeliest and simplest of men. On the
+bench he wore his baggy old alpaca coat as though it were a silken robe.
+And, as has been heretofore remarked, he had for his official and his
+private lives two different modes of speech. As His Honor, presiding,
+his language was invariably grammatical and precise and as carefully
+accented as might be expected of a man whose people never had very much
+use anyway for the consonant "r." As William Pitman Priest, Esq.,
+citizen, taxpayer, and Confederate veteran he mishandled the king's
+English as though he had but small personal regard for the king or his
+English either.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly he always showed respect, outwardly at least, for the written
+letter of the statute as written and cited. But when it seemed to him
+that justice tempered with mercy stood in danger of being choked in a
+lawyer's loop of red tape he sheared through the entanglements with a
+promptitude which appealed more strongly, perhaps, to the lay mind than
+to the professional. And if, from the bench, he might not succor the
+deserving litigant or the penitent offender without violation to the
+given principles of the law, which, aiming ever for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> the greater good to
+the greater number, threatened present disaster for one deserving, he
+very often privily would busy himself in the matter. This, then, was why
+they had that saying about him.</p>
+
+<p>It largely was in a private capacity that Judge Priest figured in the
+various phases relating to the Millsap case, with which now we are about
+to deal. The beginning of this was the ending of Felix Millsap, but from
+its start to its finish he alone held the secrets of all its aspects.
+The best people in town, those who made up the old families, knew the
+daughter of this Felix Millsap; the people whose families were not so
+old perhaps, but by way of compensation more likely to be large ones,
+the common people, as the word goes, knew the father. The best people
+commiserated decorously with the daughter when her father was abruptly
+taken from this life; the others wondered what was going to become of
+his widow. For, you see, the daughter moved in very different circles
+from the one in which her parents moved. Their lines did not touch. But
+Judge Priest had the advantage on his side of moving at will in both
+circles. Indeed he moved in all circles without serious impairment to
+his social position in the community at large.</p>
+
+<p>Briefly, the case of her who had been Eleanor Millsap was the case of a
+child who, diligently climbing out of the environment of her childhood,
+has attained to heights where her parents<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> may never hope to come, a
+common enough case here in flux and fluid America, and one which some
+will applaud and some will deplore, depending on how they view such
+matters; a daughter proclaiming by her attitude that she is ashamed of
+the sources of her origin; a father and a mother visibly proud of their
+offspring's successful rise, yet uncomplainingly accepting the r&ocirc;les to
+which she has assigned them&mdash;there you have this small family tragedy in
+forty words or less.</p>
+
+<p>When the Millsaps moved to our town their baby was in her second summer.
+With the passage of years the father and the mother came, as suitably
+mated couples often do, to look rather like each other. But then,
+probably there never had been a time when they, either in temperament or
+port, had appeared greatly unlike, seeing that both the pair were
+colorless, prosaic folk. So for Nature to mold them into a common
+pattern was merely a detail of time and patience. But their little
+Eleanor betrayed no resemblance to either in figure or face or
+personality. It was in this instance as though hereditary traits had
+been thwarted; as though two sober barnyard fowl had mated to bear a
+golden pheasant. They were secluded, shy, unimaginative; she was vivid
+and sprightly, with dash to her, and audacity.</p>
+
+<p>They lived in one of those small gloomy houses whose shutters always are
+closed and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> whose fronts always are blank; a house where the business of
+living seems to be carried on surreptitiously, almost by stealth. She,
+from the time she could walk alone, was actively abroad, a bright splash
+of color in the small oblong of shabby front yard. The father, Felix
+Millsap, was an odd-jobs woodworker. He made his living by undertakings
+too trivial for a contracting carpenter and joiner to bid on and too
+complicated for an amateur to attempt. The mother, Martha by name, took
+in plain sewing to help out. She had about her the air of the needle
+drudge, with shoulders bowed in and the pricked, scored fingers of a
+seamstress, and a permanent pucker at one corner of her mouth from
+holding pins there. The daughter showed trim, slender limbs and a bodily
+grace and a piquant face which generations of breeding and wealth so
+very often fail to fashion.</p>
+
+<p>When she graduated as the valedictorian of her class in the high school
+she cut a far better figure in the frock her mother had made for her
+than did any there on the stage at St. Clair Hall; she had a trick of
+wearing simple garments which gave them distinction. Already she had
+half a dozen sweethearts. Boys were drawn to her; girls she repelled
+rather. Girls found her too self-centered, too intent on attaining her
+own aims to give much heed to companionships. They called her selfish.
+Well, if selfishness is another name for a constant,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> bounding ambition
+to get on and up in the world Eleanor Millsap was selfish. But for the
+boys she had a tremendous attraction. They admired her quick, cruel wit,
+her energy, her good looks. She met her sweethearts on the street, at
+the soda fountain, in that trysting place for juvenile sweetheartings,
+the far corner of the post-office corridor.</p>
+
+<p>She never invited any of these youthful squires of hers to her house;
+they kept rendezvous with her at the corner below and they parted from
+her at the gate. They somehow gathered, without being told it in so many
+words, that she was ashamed of the poverty of her home, and, boylike,
+they felt a dumb sympathy for her that she should be denied what so many
+girls had. But for all her sidewalk flirtations, she kept herself aloof
+from any touch of scandal; the very openness of her gaddings protected
+her from that. Besides, she seemed instinctively to know that if she
+meant to make the best possible bargain for herself in life she must
+keep herself unblemished&mdash;must give of her charms but not give too
+freely. Town gossips might call her a forward piece, as they did;
+jealousy among girls of her own age might have it that she was flip and
+fresh; but no one, with truth, might brand her as fast.</p>
+
+<p>Having graduated with honors, she learned stenography&mdash;learned it
+thoroughly and well, as was her way with whatever she undertook&mdash;and
+presently found a place as secretary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> to Dallam Wybrant, the leading
+merchandise broker of the three in town. Now Dallam Wybrant was youngish
+and newly widowed&mdash;bereft but rallying fast from the grief of losing a
+wife who had been his senior by several years. Knowing people&mdash;persons
+who could look through a grindstone as far as the next one, and maybe
+farther&mdash;smiled with meaning when they considered the prospect. A
+good-looking, shrewd girl, always smart and trig and crisp, always with
+an eye open for the main chance, sitting hour by hour and day by day in
+the same office with a lonely, impressionable, conceited man&mdash;well,
+there was but one answer to it. But one answer to it there was. Nobody
+was very much surprised, although probably some mothers with
+marriageable daughters on their hands were wrung by pangs of envy, when
+Dallam Wybrant and Eleanor Millsap slipped away one day to Memphis and
+there were married.</p>
+
+<p>As Eleanor Millsap, self-reliant, self-sufficient and latterly
+self-supporting, the girl through the years had steadily been growing
+out of the domestic orbit which bounded the lives of her parents. As
+Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bride of an up-and-coming business man, with an
+assured social position and wealth&mdash;as our town measured wealth&mdash;in his
+own name she was now to pass entirely beyond their humble horizon and
+vanish out of their narrowed social ken. True enough, they kept right on
+living,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> all three of them, in the same town and indeed upon paralleling
+and adjacent streets; only the parents lived in their shabby little
+sealed-up coffin box of a house down at the poorer end of Yazoo Street;
+the daughter, in her handsome new stucco house, as formal and slick as a
+wedding cake, up at the aristocratic head of Chickasaw Drive. And yet to
+all intents and purposes they were as far apart, these two Millsaps and
+their only child, as though they abode in different countries. For she,
+mind you, had been taken up by the best people. But none of the best
+people had the least intention of taking up her father and mother as
+well. She probably was as far from expecting it or desiring it as any
+other could be. In fact a tale ran about that she served notice upon her
+parents that thereafter their lives were to run in different grooves.
+They were not to seek to see her without her permission; she did not
+mean to see them except when and where she chose, or if she chose&mdash;and
+she did not choose.</p>
+
+<p>One evening&mdash;it might have been about a year and a half after the
+marriage of his daughter&mdash;Felix Millsap was on his way home from work, a
+middle-aged figure, moving with the clunking gait of a tired laborer who
+wears cheap, heavy shoes, his broad splayed hands dangling at the ends
+of his arms as though in either of them he carried an invisible weight.
+It had been a hot day, and where he had been toiling on a roof shed
+which required reshingling the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> sun had blazed down upon him until it
+sucked his strength out of him, leaving him limp and draggy. He walked
+with his head down, indifferent in his sweated weariness to things about
+him. All the same, the motorman on the Belt Line car swinging out of
+Yazoo Street into Commercial should have sounded his gong for the
+turning. Therein lay his contributory negligence. Also, disinterested
+witnesses subsequently agreed that he took the curve at high speed. It
+was one of these witnesses who saw what was about to happen and cried
+out a vain warning even as the motorman ground on his brakes in a
+belated effort to avoid the inevitable. Felix Millsap was dead when they
+got him out from under the forward trucks. The doctors said he must have
+died instantly; probably he never knew what hit him.</p>
+
+<p>In all the short and simple annals of the poor nothing, usually, is
+shorter and simpler than the funeral of one of them. For the putting
+away underground of the odd-jobs man perhaps thirty persons of his own
+walk in life assembled, attesting their sympathies by their presence.
+But the daughter of the deceased neither attended the brief services at
+the place of his late residence nor rode to the cemetery to witness the
+burial. It was explained by the minister and by the undertaker to those
+who made inquiry that for good and sufficient reasons Mrs. Wybrant was
+not going anywhere at present. But she sent a great stiff set piece of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+flowers, an elaborate, inadequate thing with a wire back to it and a
+tin-foil footing, which sat alongside the black box during the service
+and afterwards was propped upright in the rank grass at the head of the
+grave. It was doubly conspicuous by reason of being the only example of
+what greenhouse men call floral offerings that graced the occasion. And
+she had written her mother a nice letter; the clergyman made this point
+plain to such as spoke to him regarding the absence of Mrs. Wybrant. He
+had seen the letter; that is to say, he had seen the envelope containing
+it. What the clergyman did not know was that to the letter the daughter
+had added a paragraph, underscored, suggesting the name of a leading
+firm of lawyers as suitable and competent to defend their interests&mdash;her
+mother's and her own&mdash;in an action for damages against the street-car
+company.</p>
+
+<p>However, as it developed, there was no need for the pressing of suit.
+The street-railway company, tacitly confessing fault on the part of one
+of its employees, preferred to compromise out of hand and so avoid the
+costs of litigation and the vexations of a trial. The sum paid in
+settlement was by order of the circuit court lodged in the hands of a
+special administrator, as temporary custodian of the estate of the late
+Felix Millsap, by him to be handed over to the heirs at law. So far as
+the special administrator was concerned, this would end his duties in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+the premises, seeing that other than this sum there was no property to
+be divided.</p>
+
+<p>The little house at the foot of Yazoo Street belonged to the widow. It
+had been deeded to her at the time of its purchase years and years
+before, and she had been a copartner in the undertaking of paying off
+the mortgage upon it by dribs and bitlets which represented hard work
+and the strictest economy. Naturally her husband had made no will.
+Probably it had never occurred to him that he would have any property to
+bequeath to anyone. But by virtue of his having died under a street car
+rather than in his bed he was worth more dead than ever, living, he had
+dreamed of being worth. He was worth eight thousand dollars in cash. So,
+as it turned out, he had left something other than a name for sober
+reliability and a reputation for paying his debts. And no doubt, in that
+bourn to which his spirit had been translated out of a battered body,
+his spirit rejoiced that the manner of his taking off had been as it
+was.</p>
+
+<p>But if the special administrator rested content in the thought that his
+share in the transaction practically would end with but few added
+details, his superior, the chief judicial officer of the district, felt
+called upon to take certain steps on his own initiative solely, and
+without consulting any person regarding the advisability of his action.
+It was characteristic of Judge Priest that he should move<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> promptly in
+the matter. To a greater degree it also was characteristic of him that,
+setting out for a visit to one of no social account whatsoever, he
+should garb himself with more care than he might have shown had he been
+going to see one of those mighty ones who sit in the high places. In a
+suit of rumply but spotless white linen, and carrying in one hand his
+best tape-edged palm-leaf fan, he rather suggested a plump old mandarin
+as, on that same evening of the day when the street-railway company
+effected settlement, he knocked at the front door of the cottage of the
+Widow Millsap.</p>
+
+<p>She was in and she was alone. She was one of those women who always are
+in and nearly always are alone. Immediately, then, they sat in her front
+room, which was her best room. Her sewing machine was there, and her
+biggest oil lamp and her few small sticks of company furniture, her few
+scraps of parlor ornamentation; a bad picture or two, gaudily framed;
+china vases on a mantel-shelf; two golden-oak rockers, wearing on their
+slick and shiny frontlets the brand of an installment-house Cain who
+murdered beauty and yet failed in his designings to achieve comfort. It
+was as hot as a Dutch oven, that little box of a room inclosed within
+its thin-planked walls. It was not a place where one would care to
+linger longer than one had to. Judge Priest came swiftly to the heart of
+the business which had sent him thither.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span></p><p>"Ma'am," he was saying, "this is a kind of a pussonal matter that's
+brought me down here this hot night, and with your consent I'll git
+right to the point of it. Ordinarily I'm a poor hand at diggin' into the
+business of other people. But seein' that I knowed your late lamented
+husband both ez a worthy citizen and ez an honest, hard-workin' man, and
+seein' that in my official capacity it has been incumbent upon me to
+issue certain orders in connection with your rights and claims arisin'
+out of his ontimely death, I have felt emboldened to interest myself,
+privately, in your case&mdash;and that's why I'm here now.</p>
+
+<p>"To-day at the cotehouse, when the settlement wuz formally agreed to by
+the legal representatives of both sides, an idea come to me. And that
+idea is this: Now there's eight thousand dollars due the heirs, you
+bein' one and your daughter, Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bein' the other. Half
+of eight thousand dollars wouldn't be so very much to help take keer of
+a person, no matter how keerful they wuz; but eight thousand dollars,
+put out at interest, would provide a livin' in a way fur one who lived
+simply, and more especially in the case of one who owned their own home
+and had it free from debt, ez I understand is the situation with
+reguards to you.</p>
+
+<p>"On the other hand, your daughter is well fixed. Her husband is a rich
+man, ez measured by the standards of our people. It's probable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> that
+she'll always be well and amply provided fur. Moreover, she's young, and
+you, ma'am, will some day come to the time when you won't be able to go
+on workin' with your hands ez you now do.</p>
+
+<p>"So things bein' thus and so, it seems to me that ef the suggestion was
+made to your daughter, Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, that she should waive her
+claim to her share of them eight thousand dollars and sign over her
+rights to you, thereby inshorin' you frum the fear of actual want in
+your declinin' years; and her, ez I have jest been statin', not needin'
+the money&mdash;well, it seems to me that she would jest naturally jump at
+the notion. So if you would go to her yourself with the suggestion, or
+git somebody in whose good sense and judgment you've got due confidence
+to go to her and her husband and lay the facts before them, I, fur one,
+knowin' a little somethin' of human nature, feel morally sure of the
+outcome. Why, I expect she'd welcome the idea; maybe she's already
+thinkin' of the same thing and wonderin' how, legally, it kin be done.
+And that, ma'am, is what brings me here to your residence to-night. And
+I trust you will appreciate the motive which has prompted me and furgive
+me if I, who's almost a stranger to you, seem to have meddled in your
+affairs without warrant or justification."</p>
+
+<p>He reared back in his chair, a plump hand upon either knee.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p><p>Through this the widow had not spoken, or offered to speak. Now that he
+had finished, she answered him from the half shadow in which she sat on
+the farther side of the sewing machine upon which the lamp burned. There
+was no bitterness, he thought, in her words; merely a sense of
+resignation to and acceptance of a state of things not of her own
+contriving, and not, conceivably, to be of her own undoing.</p>
+
+<p>"Judge," she said, "perhaps you know by hearsay at least that since my
+daughter's marriage she has lived apart from us. Neither my husband nor
+I ever set foot in the house where she lives. It was her wish"&mdash;she
+caught herself here, and he, sensing that she was equivocating,
+nevertheless inwardly approved of the deceit&mdash;"I mean to say that it was
+not my wish to go among her friends, who are not my friends, or to
+embarrass her in any way. I am proud that in marrying she has done so
+well for herself. In thinking of her happiness I shall always try to
+find happiness for myself.</p>
+
+<p>"But, judge, you must know this too: She did not come to the&mdash;the
+funeral. Well, there was a cause for that; she had a reason. But&mdash;but
+she had not been here for months before that. She&mdash;oh, you might as well
+hear it if you are to understand&mdash;she has never once been here since she
+married!</p>
+
+<p>"And so, Judge Priest, I cannot go to her until I am sent for&mdash;not under
+any circumstances nor for any purpose. If she has her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> pride, I in my
+poor small way have my pride, too, my self-respect. When she needs
+me&mdash;if ever she does&mdash;I'll go to her wherever she may be if I have to
+crawl there on my hands and knees. What has gone before will all be
+forgotten. But don't you see, sir?&mdash;I can't go until she sends for me.
+And so, Judge Priest, while I thank you with all my heart for your
+thoughtfulness and your kindness, and while I'd be glad, too, if Ellie
+saw fit or could be made to see that it would be a fine thing to give me
+this money in the way you have suggested, I say to you again that I
+cannot be the one to go to her. I will not even write to her on the
+subject. That, with me, is final."</p>
+
+<p>"But, ma'am," he said, "ef somebody else went&mdash;some friend of yours and
+of hers&mdash;how about it then?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Her friends&mdash;now&mdash;are not my friends. My friends are not hers any more;
+most of them never were her friends. Besides, the idea did not originate
+with me. Either the proposition must come from her direct or it must be
+presented to her by some third party. And I can think of no third party
+of my choosing that she would care to hear. No, Judge Priest, I have
+nobody to send."</p>
+
+<p>"All right then," he stated, "since I set this here ball in motion I'll
+keep it rollin'. Ma'am, I'll take it on myself to speak to Mrs. Dallam
+Wybrant in your behalf."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p><p>"But, Judge Priest," she protested, "I couldn't ask you to do that for
+me&mdash;I couldn't!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ma'am, you ain't asked me and you don't need to ask me. I'm askin'
+myself&mdash;I'm doin' this on my own hook, and ef you'll excuse me I'll
+start at it right away. When there's a thing which needs to be done ez
+bad ez this thing needs to be done, there oughtn't to be no time lost."
+He stood up and looked about him for his hat. "Ma'am, I confidently
+expect to be back here inside of half an hour, or an hour at most, with
+some good news fur you."</p>
+
+<p>To one who had traveled about more and seen the homes of wealthy
+folk&mdash;to a professional decorator, say, or an expert in furnishing
+values&mdash;the drawing-room into which Judge Priest presently was being
+ushered might have seemed overdone, overly cluttered up with drapery and
+adornment. But to Judge Priest's eye the room was all that a rich man's
+best room should be. The thick stucco walls cut out the heat of the
+night; an electric fan whirred upon him as he sat in a deep chair of
+puffed red damask. A mulatto girl in neat uniform&mdash;this uniform itself
+an astonishing innovation&mdash;had answered his ring at the door and had
+ushered him into this wonderful parlor and had taken his name and had
+gone up the broad stairs with the word that he desired to see the lady
+of the house for a few minutes upon important business. He had asked
+first for Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> and Mrs. Dallam Wybrant; but Mr. Wybrant, it seemed, was
+out of town; Mrs. Wybrant, then, would do. The maid, having delivered
+the message, had returned to say her mistress would be down presently
+and the caller was to wait, please. Waiting, he had had opportunity to
+contrast the present settings with those he had just quitted. Perhaps
+the contrast between them appeared all the greater by reason of the
+freshness of his recollection of the physical surroundings at the scene
+of his first visit of that evening.</p>
+
+<p>She came down soon, wearing a loose, frilly, wrapperlike garment which
+hid her figure. Approaching maternity had not softened her face, had not
+given to it the glorified Madonna look. Rather it had drawn her features
+to haggardness and put in her eyes a look of sharpened apprehension as
+though dread of the nearing ordeal of suffering and danger overrode the
+hope which, along with the new life, was quick within her. She greeted
+Judge Priest with a matter-of-fact directness. Her expression plainly
+enough told him she was at a loss to account for his coming.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry, sir," she said in her rather metallic fashion of speaking,
+"that Dallam isn't here. But he was called to St. Louis this morning on
+business. I hope you will pardon my receiving you in neglig&eacute;e. I'm not
+seeing much company at present. The maid, though, said the business was
+imperative."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p><p>"Yes, ma'am, it is," answered Judge Priest, rather ceremoniously for
+him, "and I am grateful to you fur lettin' me see you and I don't aim to
+detain you very long. I kin tell you in a few words whut it is that has
+brought me."</p>
+
+<p>He was as good as his promise&mdash;he did tell her in a few words. Outlining
+his suggestion, he used much the same language which he had used once
+already that night. He did not tell her, though, he had come to her
+direct from her mother. He did not tell her he had been to her mother at
+all. It might have been inferred that his present hearer was the first
+to hear that which now he set forth.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, ma'am," he concluded, "that's the condition ez I view it. And if
+you likewise see your way clear to view it ez I do the whole thing kin
+be accomplished with the scratch of a pen. And you'll have the
+satisfaction of knowin' that through your act your mother will be well
+provided fur fur the rest of her life." He added a final argument, being
+moved thereto perhaps by the fact that she had heard him without change
+of expression and with no glance which might be interpreted as approval
+for his plan. "I take it, ma'am, that you do not need the money
+involved. You never will need it, the chances are. You are rich fur this
+town&mdash;your husband is, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>She replied then, and to the old man, harkening, it seemed that her
+words fell sharp and brittle like breaking icicles. One thing, though,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+might be said for her&mdash;she sought no roundabout course. She did not
+quibble or seek to enwrap the main issue in specious excuses or
+apologies for her position.</p>
+
+<p>"I decline to do it," she said. "I do not feel that I have the right to
+do it. I understand the motives which may have actuated you to interest
+yourself in this affair, but I tell you very frankly that I have no
+intention of surrendering my legal rights in the slightest degree. You
+say I do not need the money, but in the very same breath you go on to
+say the chances are that I shall never need it. So there you yourself
+practically admit there is a chance that some day I might need it.
+Besides, I do not rate my husband a rich man, though you may do so. He
+is well-to-do, nothing more. And his business is uncertain&mdash;all business
+is. He might lose every cent he has to-morrow in some bad investment or
+some poor speculation.</p>
+
+<p>"There is still another reason I think of: I have nothing&mdash;absolutely
+nothing&mdash;in my own name. It irks me to ask my husband, generous though
+he is, for every cent I use, to have to account to him for my personal
+expenditures. Before I married him I earned my own living and I paid my
+own way and learned to love the feeling of independence, the feeling of
+having a little money that was all my own. My share of this inheritance
+will provide me with a private fund, a fund upon which I may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> draw at
+will, or which I may put away for a possible rainy day, just as I
+choose."</p>
+
+<p>"But ma'am," he blurted, knowing full well he was beaten, yet inspired
+by a desperate, forlorn hope that some added plea from him might break
+through the shell of this steel-surfaced selfishness&mdash;"but, ma'am, do
+you stop to realize that it's your own mother who'd benefit by this
+sacrifice on your part? Do you stop to consider that if there's one
+person in all this world who's entitled&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me, sir, for interrupting you," she said crisply, her tone icy
+and sharp, "but the one person who is entitled to most consideration at
+my hands has not actually come into the world yet. It is of that person
+that I must think. I had not meant to speak of this, but your insistence
+forces me to it. As you may guess, Judge Priest, I am about to become a
+mother myself. If my baby lives&mdash;and my baby is going to live&mdash;that
+money will belong to my child should anything happen to me. I must think
+of what lies ahead of me, not of what has gone before. My mother owns
+the home where she lives; she will have her half of this sum of money;
+she is, I believe, in good health; she is amply able to go on, as she
+has in the past, adding to her income with her needle. So much for my
+mother. As a mother myself it will be my duty, as I see it, to safeguard
+the future of my own child, and I mean to do it, regardless of
+everything else. That is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> all I have to say about it&mdash;that is, if I have
+made myself sufficiently plain to you, Judge Priest."</p>
+
+<p>"Madam," said he, and for once at least he dropped his lifelong
+affectation of ungrammatical speech and reverted to that more stately
+and proper English which he reserved for his judgments from the bench,
+"you have indeed made your position so clear by what you have just said
+that I feel there is nothing whatsoever to be added by either one of us.
+Madam, I have the pleasure to bid you good night."</p>
+
+<p>He clamped his floppy straw hat firmly down upon his head&mdash;a thing the
+old judge in all his life never before had done in the presence of a
+woman of his race&mdash;and he turned the broad of his back upon her; and if
+a man whose natural gait was a waddle could be said to stride, then be
+it stated that Judge Priest strode out of that room and out of that
+house. Had he looked back before he reached the door he would have seen
+that she sat in her chair, huddled in her silken garments, on her face a
+half smile of tolerant contempt for his choler and in her eye a light
+playing like winter sunlight on frozen water; would have seen that about
+her there was no suggestion whatsoever that she was ruffled or upset or
+in the least regretful of the course she had elected to follow. But
+Judge Priest did not look back. He was too busy striding.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was the heat or perhaps it was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>inability long to maintain a
+gait so forced, but the volunteer emissary ceased to stride long before
+he had traversed the three-quarters of a mile&mdash;and yet, when one came to
+think it over, a span as wide as a continent&mdash;which lay between the
+restricted, not to say exclusive, head of Chickasaw Drive and the
+shabby, not to say miscellaneous, foot of Yazoo Street. It was a very
+wilted, very lag-footed, very droopy old gentleman who, come another
+half hour or less, let himself drop with an audible thump into a
+golden-oak rocker alongside the Widow Millsap's sewing machine.</p>
+
+<p>"Ma'am," he had confessed, without preamble, as he entered her house,
+she holding the door open for his passage, "I come back to you licked.
+Your daughter absolutely declines even to consider the proposition I put
+before her. As a plenipotentiary extraordinary I admit I'm a teetotal
+failure. I return to you empty-handed&mdash;and licked."</p>
+
+<p>To this she had said nothing. She had waited until he was seated; then
+as she seated herself in her former place, with the lamp between them,
+she asked quietly, almost listlessly, "My daughter saw you then?"</p>
+
+<p>"She did, ma'am, she did. And she refused point-blank!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry, Judge Priest&mdash;sorry that you should have been put to so
+much trouble needlessly," she said, still holding her voice at that
+emotionless level. "I am sorry, sir, for your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> sake; but it is no more
+than I expected. I let you go to her against my better judgment. I
+should have known that your errand would be useless. Knowing Ellie, I
+should have known better than to send you."</p>
+
+<p>He snorted.</p>
+
+<p>"Ma'am, when a little while ago, settin' right here, I told you I
+thought I knowed a little something about human nature I boasted too
+soon. Sech a thing ez this thing which has happened to-night is
+brand-new in my experience. You will excuse my sayin' so, but I kin not
+fathom the workin's of a mind that would&mdash;that would&mdash;" He floundered
+for words in his indignation. "It is not natural, this here thing I have
+just seen and heard. How your own flesh and blood could&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Judge Priest," she said steadily, "it is not my own flesh and blood
+that you accuse. That is my consolation now. For I know the stock that
+is in me. I know the stock that was in my husband. My own flesh and
+blood could never treat me so."</p>
+
+<p>He stared at her, his forehead twisted in a perplexed frown.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean to say just this," she went on: "Ellie is not my own child. She
+has not a drop of my blood or my husband's blood in her. Judge Priest, I
+am about to tell you something which not another soul in this town
+excepting me&mdash;now that my husband is gone&mdash;has ever known. We never had
+any <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>children, Felix and I. Always we wanted children, but none came to
+us. Nearly twenty-three years ago it is now, we had for a neighbor a
+young woman whose husband had deserted her&mdash;had run away with another
+woman, leaving her without a cent, in failing health and with a
+six-month-old girl baby. That was less than two years before we came to
+this town. We lived then in a little town called Calais, on the Eastern
+Shore of Maryland.</p>
+
+<p>"Three months after the husband ran away the wife died. I guess it was
+shame and a broken heart more than anything else that killed her. She
+had not a soul in the world to whom she could turn for help when she was
+dying. We two did what we could for her. We didn't have much&mdash;we never
+have had much all through our lives&mdash;but what we had we divided with
+her. We were literally the only friends she had in this world. At the
+last we took turns nursing her, my husband and I did. When she was dying
+she put her baby in my arms and asked me to take her and to care for
+her. That was what I had been praying all along that she would do, and I
+was glad and I gave her my promise and she lay back on the pillow and
+died.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she was buried and we took the child and cared for her. We came
+to love her as though she had been our own; we always loved her as
+though she had been our own. Less than a year after the mother
+died&mdash;that was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> when Ellie was about eighteen months old&mdash;we brought her
+with us out here to this town. Her baptismal name was Eleanor, which had
+been her mother's name&mdash;Eleanor Major. The father who ran away was named
+Richard Major. We went on calling her Eleanor, but as our child she
+became Eleanor Millsap. She has never suspected&mdash;she has never for one
+moment dreamed that she was not our own. After she grew up and showed
+indifference to us, and especially after she had married and began to
+behave toward us in a way which has caused her, I expect, to be
+criticized by some people, we still nursed that secret and it gave us
+comfort. For we knew, both of us, that it was the alien blood in her
+that made her turn her back upon us. We knew the reason, if no one else
+did, for she was not our own flesh and blood. Our own could never have
+served us so. And to-night I know better than ever before, and it
+lessens my sense of disappointment and distress.</p>
+
+<p>"Judge Priest, perhaps you will not understand me, but the mother
+instinct is a curious thing. Through these last few years of my life I
+have felt as though there were two women inside of me. One of these
+women grieved because her child had denied her. The other of these women
+was reconciled because she could see reflected in the actions of that
+child the traits of a breed of strangers. And yet both these women can
+still find it in them to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>forgive her for all that she has done and all
+that she may ever do. That's motherhood, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, ma'am," he said slowly, "I reckin you're right&mdash;that's
+motherhood." He tugged at his tab of white chin whisker, and his
+puckered old eyes behind their glasses were shadowed with a deep
+compassion. Then with a jerk he sat erect.</p>
+
+<p>"I take it that you adopted the child legally?" he said, seeking to make
+his tone casual.</p>
+
+<p>"We took her just as I told you," she answered. "We always treated her
+as though she had been ours. She never knew any difference."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, ma'am, quite so. You've made that clear enough. But by law, before
+you left Maryland, you gave her your name, I suppose? You went through
+the legal form of law of adoptin' her, didn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir, we didn't do that. It didn't seem necessary&mdash;it never occurred
+to us to do it. Her mother was dead and her father was gone nobody knew
+where. He had abandoned her, had shown he didn't care what might become
+of her. And her mother on her deathbed had given her to me. Wasn't that
+sufficient?"</p>
+
+<p>Apparently he had not heard her question. Instead of answering it he put
+one of his own:</p>
+
+<p>"Do you reckin now, ma'am, by any chance that there are any people still
+livin' back there in that town of Calais&mdash;old neighbors of yours,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> or
+kinfolks maybe&mdash;who'd remember the circumstances in reguard to your
+havin' took this baby in the manner which you have described?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir; two at least that I know of are still living. One is my half
+sister. I haven't seen her in twenty-odd years, but I hear from her
+regularly. And another is a man who boarded with us at the time. He was
+young then and very poor, but he has become well-to-do since. He lives
+in Baltimore now; is prominent there in politics. Occasionally I see his
+name in the paper. He has been to Congress and he ran for senator once.
+And there may be still others if I could think of them."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind the others; the two you've named will be sufficient. Whut
+did you say their names were, ma'am?"</p>
+
+<p>She told him. He repeated them after her as though striving to fix them
+in his memory.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah-hah," he said. "Ma'am, have you got some writin' material handy? Any
+blank paper will do&mdash;and a pen and ink?"</p>
+
+<p>From a little stand in a corner she brought him what he required, and
+wonderingly but in silence watched him as he put down perhaps a dozen
+close-written lines. She bided until he had concluded his task and read
+through the script, making a change here and there. Then all at once
+some confused sense of realization of his new purpose came to her. She
+stood up and took a step forward and laid one apprehensive hand upon the
+paper as though to stay him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p><p>"Judge Priest," she said, "what have you written down here? And what do
+you mean to do with what you have written?"</p>
+
+<p>"Whut I have written here is a short statement&mdash;a memorandum, really, of
+whut you have been tellin' me, ma'am," he explained. "I'll have it
+written out more fully in the form of an affidavit, and then to-morrow I
+want you to sign it either here or at my office in the presence of
+witnesses."</p>
+
+<p>"But is it necessary?" she demurred. "I'm ignorant of the law, and you
+spoke just now of my failure to adopt Ellie by law. But if at this late
+date I must do it, can't it be done privately, in secret, so that
+neither Ellie nor anyone else will ever know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ellie will have to know, I reckin," he stated grimly, "and other folks
+will know too. But this here paper has nothin' to do with any sech
+proceedin' ez you imagine. It's too late now fur you legally to adopt
+Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, even though any person should suggest sech a thing,
+and I, fur my part, don't see how any right-thinkin' person could or
+would do so. She's a free agent, of full age, and she's a married woman.
+No, ma'am, she has no legal claim on you and to my way of thinkin' she
+has no moral claim on you neither. She's not your child, a fact which
+I'm shore kin mighty easy be proved ef anyone should feel inclined to
+doubt your word. She ain't your legal heir. She ain't got a leg&mdash;excuse
+me, ma'am&mdash;she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> ain't got a prop to stand on. I thought Ellie had us
+licked. Instid it would seem that we've got Ellie licked."</p>
+
+<p>He broke off, checked in his exultant flight by the look upon her face.
+Her fingers turned inward, the blunted nails scratching at the sheet of
+paper as though she would tear it from him.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no!" she cried. "I won't do that! I can't do that! You mustn't
+ask me to do that, judge!"</p>
+
+<p>"But, ma'am, don't you git my meanin' yit? Don't you realize that not a
+penny of this eight thousand dollars belongs to Mrs. Dallam Wybrant?
+That she has no claim upon any part of it? That it's all yours and that
+you're goin' to have it all for yourself&mdash;every last red cent of
+it&mdash;jest ez soon ez the proof kin be filed and the order made by me in
+court?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not thinking of that," she declared. "It's Ellie I think of. Her
+happiness means more to me than a million dollars would. What I have
+told you was in confidence, and, judge, you must treat it so. I beg you,
+I demand it of you. You must promise me not to go any further in this.
+You must promise me not to tell a living soul what I have told you
+to-night. I won't sign any affidavit. I won't sign anything. I won't do
+anything to humiliate her. Don't you see, Judge Priest&mdash;oh, don't you
+see? She feels shame already because she thinks she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> was humbly born.
+She would be more deeply ashamed than ever if she knew how humbly she
+really was born&mdash;knew that her father was a scoundrel and her mother
+died a pauper and was buried in a potter's field; that the name she has
+borne is not her own name; that she has eaten the bread of charity
+through the most of her life. No, Judge Priest, I tell you no, a
+thousand times no. She doesn't know. Through me she shall never know. I
+would die to spare her suffering&mdash;die to spare her humiliation or
+disgrace. Before God's eyes I am her mother, and it is her mother who
+tells you no, not that, not that!"</p>
+
+<p>He got upon his feet too. He crumpled the paper into a ball and thrust
+it out of sight as though it had been a thing abominable and unclean. He
+took no note that in wadding the sheet he had overturned the inkwell and
+a stream from it was trickling down his trouser legs, marking them with
+long black zebra streaks. He looked at her, she standing there, a
+stooped and meager shape in her scant, ill-fitting gown of sleazy black,
+yet seeming to him an embodiment of all the beatitudes and all the
+beauties of this mortal world.</p>
+
+<p>"Ma'am," he said, "your wishes shall be respected. It shall be ez you
+say. My lawyer's sense tells me that you are wrong&mdash;foolishly, blindly
+wrong. But my memory of my own mother tells me that you are right, and
+that no mother's son has got the right to question<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> you or try to
+persuade you to do anything different. Ma'am, I'd count it an honor to
+be able to call myself your friend."</p>
+
+<p>Already, within the hour, Judge Priest had broken two constant rules of
+his daily conduct. Now, involuntarily, without forethought on his part,
+he was about to break another. This would seem to have been a night for
+the smashing of habits by our circuit judge. For she put out to him her
+hand&mdash;a most unlovely hand, all wrinkled at the back where dimples might
+once have been and corded with big blue veins and stained and shriveled
+and needle scarred. And he took her hand in his fat, pudgy, awkward one,
+and then he did this thing which never before in all his days he had
+done, this thing which never before he had dreamed of doing. Really,
+there is no accounting for it at all unless we figure that somewhere far
+back in Judge Priest's ancestry there were Celtic gallants, versed in
+the small sweet tricks of gallantry. He bent his head and he kissed her
+hand with a grace for which a Tom Moore or a Raleigh might have envied
+him.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Let us now for a briefened space cast up in a preliminary way the tally
+on behalf of the whimsical devils of circumstance and the part they are
+to play in the culminating and concluding periods of this narrative. On
+the noon train of the day following the night when that occurred which
+has been set forth in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>foregoing pages, Judge Priest, in the company
+of Doctor Lake and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of King's Hell Hounds,
+C.S.A., departs for Reelfoot Lake upon his annual fishing trip. In the
+afternoon Jeff Poindexter, the judge's body servant, going through his
+master's wardrobe seeking articles suitable for his own adornment in the
+master's absence, is pained to discern stripings of spilled ink down the
+legs of a pair of otherwise unmarred white trousers, and, having no
+intention that garments which will one day come into his permanent
+possession shall be thus disfigured and sullied, promptly bundles them
+up and bears them to the cleansing, pressing and repairing establishment
+of one Hyman Pedaloski. The coat which matches the trousers goes along
+too. Upon the underside of one of its sleeves there is a big ink blob.
+Include in the equation this <i>emigr&eacute;</i>, Hyman Pedaloski, newly landed
+from Courland and knowing as yet but little of English, whether written
+or spoken, yet destined to advance by progressive stages until a day
+comes when we proudly shall hail him as our most fashionable merchant
+prince&mdash;Hy Clay Pedaloski, the Square Deal Clothier, Also Hats, Caps &amp;
+Leather Goods. Include as a factor Hyman by all means, for lacking him
+our chain of chancy coincidence would lack a most vital link.</p>
+
+<p>At Reelfoot Lake many black bass, bronze-backed and big-mouthed, meet
+the happy fate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> which all true anglers wish for them; and the white
+perch do bite with a whole-souled enthusiasm only equaled by the
+whole-souled enthusiasm with which also the mosquitoes bite. This brings
+us to the end of the week and to the fifth day of the expedition, with
+Judge Priest at rest at the close of a satisfactory day's sports,
+exhaling scents of the oil of penny-royal. Sitting-there under a tent
+fly, all sun blistered and skeeter stung, all tired out but most
+content, he picks up a two-day-old copy of the <i>Daily Evening News</i>
+which the darky boatman has just brought over to camp from the post
+office at Walnut Log, and he opens it at the department headed Local
+Laconics, and halfway down the first column his eye falls upon a
+paragraph at sight of which he gives so deep a snort that Doctor Lake
+swings about from where he is shaving before a hand mirror hung on a
+tree limb and wants to know whether the judge has happened upon
+disagreeable tidings. What the judge has read is a small item in this
+wise, namely:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Born last evening to Mr. and Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, at their palatial
+mansion on Chickasaw Drive, in the new Beechmont Park Realty
+Development tract, an infant daughter, their first-born. Mother and
+child both doing well; the proud papa reported this morning as
+being practically out of danger and is expected to be entirely
+recovered shortly, as Dock Boyd, the attending medico, says he has
+brought three hundred babies into the world and never lost a father
+yet. Ye editor extends heartiest congrats. Dal, it looks like the
+cigars were on you!</p></blockquote>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p><p>The next chapter in the sequence of chapters leading to our climax is
+short but essential. Returning home Sunday evening, Judge Priest is
+informed that twice that day a strange young white lady has stopped at
+the house urgently requesting that immediately upon his arrival he be so
+good as to call on Mrs. Dallam Wybrant on a matter of pressing moment.
+Bidden to describe the messenger, Jeff Poindexter can only say that she
+'uz a powerful masterful-lookin' Yankee-talkin' lady, all dressed up lak
+she mout belong to some kind of a new secret s'ciety lodge, which is
+Jeff's way of summing up his impressions of the first professional
+trained nurse ever imported, capped, caped and white shod, to our town.</p>
+
+<p>It was this same professional, a cool and starchy vision, who led the
+way up the wide stairs of the Chickasaw Drive house, the old judge, much
+mystified, following close behind her. She ushered him into a bedroom,
+bigger and more gorgeous than any bedroom he had ever seen, and leaving
+him standing, hat in hand, at the bedside of her chief charge, she went
+out and closed the door behind her.</p>
+
+<p>From the pillows there looked up at him a face that was paler than when
+he had last seen it, a face still drawn from pangs of agony recently
+endured, but a face transfigured and radiant. The Madonna look was in it
+now. Outside, the dusk of an August evening was thickening; and inside,
+the curtains were half drawn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> and the electrics not yet turned on, but
+even so, in that half light, the judge could mark the change here
+revealed to him. He could sense, too, that the change was more spiritual
+than physical, and he could feel his animosity for this woman softening
+into something distantly akin to sympathy. At her left side, harbored in
+the crook of her elbow, lay a cuddling bundle; a tiny head, all red and
+bare, as though offering to Judge Priest's own bald, pinkish pate the
+sincere flattery of imitation, was exposed; and the tip of a very small
+ear, curled and crinkled like a sea shell. You take the combination of a
+young mother cradling her first-born within the hollow of her arm and
+you have the combination which has tautened the heartstrings of man
+since the first man child came from the womb. The old man made a silent
+obeisance of reverence; then waited for her to speak and expose the
+purpose behind this totally unexpected summons.</p>
+
+<p>"Judge Priest," she said, "I have been lying here all day hoping you
+would come before night. I have been wishing for you to come ever since
+I came out from under the ether. Thank you for coming."</p>
+
+<p>"Ma'am, I started fur here ez soon ez I got your word," he said. "In
+whut way kin I be of service to you? I'm at your command."</p>
+
+<p>She slid her free hand beneath the pillow on which her head rested and
+brought forth a crinkled sheet of paper and held it out to him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p><p>"Didn't you write this?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He took it and looked at it, and a great astonishment and a great
+chagrin screwed his eyes and slackened his lower jaw.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, ma'am," he admitted, "I wrote it. But it wuzn't meant fur you to
+see. It wuzn't meant fur anybody a-tall to see&mdash;ever. And I'm wonderin',
+ma'am, and waitin' fur you to tell me how come it to reach you."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you," she answered. "But first, before we get to that, would
+you mind telling me how you came to write it, and when, and all? I think
+I can guess. I think I have already pieced the thing together for
+myself. Women can't reason much, you know; but they have intuition." She
+smiled a little at this conceit. "And I want to know if my deductions
+and my conclusions are correct."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, ma'am," he said, "ez I wuz sayin', no human eye wuz to have read
+this here. But since you have read it, I feel it's my bounden duty, in
+common justice to another, to tell you the straight of it, even though
+in doin' so I'm breakin' a solemn pledge."</p>
+
+<p>So he told her&mdash;the how and the why and the where and the when of it;
+details of which the reader is aware.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought I wasn't very far wrong, and I wasn't," she said when he had
+finished his confession. She was quiet for a minute, her eyes fixed on
+the farther wall. Then: "Judge Priest, unwittingly, it seems, you have
+been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> the god of the machine. I wonder if you'd be willing to continue
+to serve?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ef it lies within my powers to do so&mdash;yessum, and gladly."</p>
+
+<p>"It does lie within your power. I want you to have the necessary papers
+drawn up which will signalize my giving over to my mother my share of
+that money which the railway paid two weeks ago, and then if you will
+send them to me I will sign them. I want this done at once, please&mdash;as
+soon as possible."</p>
+
+<p>"Ma'am," he said, "it shall be as you desire; but ef it's all the same
+to you I'd like to write out that there paper with my own hand. I kin
+think of no act of mine, official or private, in my whole lifetime which
+would give me more honest pleasure. I'll do so before I leave this
+house." He did not tell her that by the letter of the law she would be
+giving away what by law was not hers to give. He would do nothing to
+spoil for her the sweet savor of her surrender. Instead he put a
+question: "It would appear that you have changed your mind about this
+here matter since I seen you last?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was changed for me," she said. "This paper helped to change it for
+me; and you, too, helped without your knowledge; and one other, and most
+of all my baby here, helped to change it for me. Judge Priest, since my
+baby came to me my whole view of life seems somehow to have been
+altered. I've been lying here<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> to-day with her beside me, thinking
+things out. Suppose I should be taken from her, and suppose her father
+should be taken, too, and she should be left, as I was, to the mercy of
+the world and the charity of strangers. Suppose she should grow up, as I
+did&mdash;although until I read that paper I didn't know it&mdash;beholden to the
+goodness and the devotion and the love of one who was not her real
+mother. Wouldn't she owe to that other woman more than she could have
+owed to me, her own mother, had I been spared to rear her? I think
+so&mdash;no, I know it is so. Every instinct of motherhood in me tells me it
+is so."</p>
+
+<p>"Lady," he answered, "to a mere man woman always will be an everlastin'
+puzzle and a riddle; but even a man kin appreciate, in a poor, faint
+way, the depths of mother love. It's ez though he looked through a break
+in the clouds and ketched a vision of the glories of heaven. But you
+ain't told me yit how you come to be in possession of this here sheet of
+note paper."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's right! I had forgotten," she answered. "Try to think now,
+judge&mdash;when my mother refused to let you go farther with your plan that
+night at her house, what did you do with the paper?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shoved it out of sight quick ez ever I could. I recall that much
+anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you by any chance put it in your pocket?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p><p>"Well, by Nathan Bedford Forrest!" he exclaimed. "I believe that's
+purzackly the very identical thing I did do. And bein' a careless old
+fool, I left it there instid of tearin' it up or burnin' it, and then I
+went on home and plum' furgot it wuz still there&mdash;not that I now regret
+havin' done so, seein' whut to-night's outcome is."</p>
+
+<p>"And did your servant, after you were gone, send the suit you had worn
+that night downtown to be cleaned or repaired? Or do you know about
+that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suspicion that he done that very thing," he said, a light beginning
+to break in upon him. "Jeff is purty particular about keepin' my clothes
+in fust-rate order. He aims fur them to be in good condition when he
+decides it's time to confiscate 'em away frum me and start in wearin'
+'em himself. Yessum, my Jeff's mighty funny that way. And now, come to
+think of it, I do seem to reckerlect that I spilt a lot of ink on 'em
+that same night."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, the mystery is no mystery at all," she said. "On that very
+same day&mdash;the day your darky sent your clothes to the cleaner's&mdash;I had
+two of Dallam's suits sent down to be pressed. That little man at the
+tailor shop&mdash;Pedaloski&mdash;found this paper crumpled up in your pocket and
+took it out and then later forgot where he had found it. So, as I
+understand, he tried to read it, seeking for a clue to its ownership. He
+can't read much English,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> you know, so probably he has had no idea then
+or thereafter of the meaning of it; but he did know enough English to
+make out the name of Wybrant. Look at it and you'll see my name occurs
+twice in it, but your name does not occur at all. So don't you see what
+happened&mdash;what he did? Thinking the paper must have come from one of my
+husband's pockets, he smoothed it out as well as he could and folded it
+up and pinned it to the sleeve of Dallam's blue serge and sent it here.
+My maid found it when she was undoing the bundle before hanging up the
+clothes in Dallam's closet, and she brought it to me, thinking, I
+suppose, it was a bill from the cleaner's shop, and I read it. Simple
+enough explanation, isn't it, when you know the facts?"</p>
+
+<p>"Simple," he agreed, "and yit at the same time sort of wonderful too.
+And whut did you do when you read it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was stunned at first. I tried at first not to believe it. But I
+couldn't deceive myself. Something inside of me told me that it was
+true&mdash;every word of it. I suppose it was the woman in me that told me.
+And somehow I knew that you had written it, although really that part
+was not so very hard a thing to figure out, considering everything. And
+somehow&mdash;I can't tell you why though&mdash;I was morally sure that after you
+had written it some other person had forbidden your making use of it in
+any way, and instinctively&mdash;anyhow, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> suppose you might say it was by
+instinct&mdash;I knew that it had reached me, of all persons, by accident and
+not by design.</p>
+
+<p>"I tried to reach you&mdash;you were gone away. But I did reach that funny
+little man Pedaloski by telephone, and found out from him why he had
+pinned the paper on Dallam's coat. I did not tell my husband about it.
+He doesn't know yet. I don't think I shall ever tell him. For two days,
+judge, I wrestled with the problem of whether I should send for my
+mother and tell her that now I knew the thing which all her life she had
+guarded from me. Finally I decided to wait and see you first, and try to
+find out from you the exact circumstances under which the paper was
+written, and the reason why, after writing it, you crumpled it up and
+hid it away.</p>
+
+<p>"And then&mdash;and then my baby came, and since she came my scheme of life
+seems all made over. And oh, Judge Priest"&mdash;she reached forth a white,
+weak hand and caught at his&mdash;"I have you and my baby and&mdash;yes, that
+little man to thank that my eyes have been opened and that my heart has
+melted in me and that my soul has been purged from a terrible selfish
+deed of cruelty and ingratitude. And one thing more I want you to know:
+I'm not really sorry that I was born as I was. I'm glad, because&mdash;well,
+I'm just glad, that's all. And I suppose that, too, is the woman in me."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p><p>One given to sonorous and orotund phrases would doubtless have coined a
+most splendid speech here. But all the old judge, gently patting her
+hand, said was:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now, ma'am, that's powerful fine&mdash;the way it's all turned out.
+And I'm glad I had a blunderin' hand in it to help bring it about. I
+shorely am, ma'am. I'd like to keep on havin' a hand in it. I wonder now
+ef you wouldn't like fur me to be the one to go right now and fetch your
+mother here to you?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, judge, that's not necessary. She's here now. She was here
+when the baby came. I sent for her. She's in her room right down the
+hall; it'll be her room always from now on. I expect she's sewing on
+things for the baby; we can't make her stop it. She's terribly jealous
+of Miss McAlpin&mdash;that's the trained nurse Dallam brought back with him
+from St. Louis&mdash;but Miss McAlpin will be going soon, and then she'll be
+in sole charge. She doesn't know, Judge Priest, that what she told to
+you I now know. She never shall know if I can prevent it, and I know
+you'll help me guard our secret from her."</p>
+
+<p>"I reckin you may safely count on me there, ma'am," he promised. "I've
+frequently been told by disinterested parties that I snore purty loud
+sometimes, but I don't believe anybody yit caught me talkin' in my
+sleep. And now I expect you're sort of tired out. So ef you'll<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> excuse
+me I'll jest slip downstairs, and before I go do that there little piece
+of writin' we spoke about a while ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't you like to see my baby before you go?" she asked. Her left
+hand felt for the white folds which half swaddled the tiny sleeper.
+"Judge Priest, let me introduce you to little Miss Martha Millsap
+Wybrant, named for her grandmammy."</p>
+
+<p>"Pleased to meet you, young lady," said he, bowing low and elaborately.
+"At your early age, honey, it's easier fur a man, to understand you than
+ever it will be agin after you start growin' up. Pleased indeed to meet
+you."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>If memory serves him aright, this chronicler of sundry small happenings
+in the life and times of the Honorable William Pitman Priest has more
+than once heretofore commented upon the fact that among our circuit
+judge's idiosyncrasies was his trick, when deeply moved, of talking to
+himself. This night as he went slowly homeward through the soft and
+velvety cool of the summer darkness he freely indulged himself in this
+habit. Oddly enough, he punctuated his periods, as it were, with
+lamp-posts. When he reached a street light he would speak musingly to
+himself, then fall silent until he had trudged along to the next light.
+Something after this fashion:</p>
+
+<p>Corner of Chickasaw Drive and Exall Boulevard:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p><p>"Well, sir, the older I git the more convinced I am that jest about the
+time a man decides he knows a little something about human nature it's a
+shore sign he don't know nothin' a-tall about it, 'specially human
+nature ez it applies to the female of the species. Now, f'rinstance, you
+take this here present instance: A woman turns aginst the woman she
+thinks is her own mother. Then she finds out the other woman ain't her
+own mother a-tall, and she swings right back round agin and&mdash;well, it's
+got me stumped. Now ef in her place it had 'a' been a man. But a
+woman&mdash;oh, shuckin's, whut's the use?"</p>
+
+<p>Corner of Chickasaw Drive and Sycamore Avenue:</p>
+
+<p>"Still, of course we've got to figger the baby as a prime factor
+enterin' into the case and helpin' to straighten things out. Spry little
+trick fur three days old, goin' on four, wuzn't she? Ought to be purty,
+too, when she gits herself some hair and a few teeth and plumps out so's
+she taken up the slack of them million wrinkles, more or less, that
+she's got now. Babies, now&mdash;great institutions anyway you take 'em."</p>
+
+<p>Corner of Sycamore Avenue, turning into Clay Street:</p>
+
+<p>"And still, dog-gone it, you'll find folks in this world so blind that
+they'll tell you destiny or fate, or whutever you want to call it, jest
+goes along doin' things by haphazard without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> no workin' plans and no
+fixed designs. But me, I'm different&mdash;me. I regard the scheme of
+creation ez a hell of a success. Look at this affair fur a minute. I go
+meddlin' along like an officious, absent-minded idiot, which I am, and
+jest when it looks like nothin' is goin' to result frum my interference
+but fresh heartaches fur one of the noblest souls that ever lived on
+this here footstool, why the firm of Providence, Pedaloski and
+Poindexter steps in, and bang, there you are! It wouldn't happen agin
+probably in a thousand years, but it shore happened this oncet, I'll
+tell the world. Let's see, now, how does that there line in the hymn
+book run?&mdash;'moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.' Ain't it
+the truth?"</p>
+
+<p>Last street lamp on Clay Street before you come to Judge Priest's house:</p>
+
+<p>"And they call 'em the opposite sex! I claim the feller that fust coined
+that there line wuz a powerful conservative pusson. Opposite? Huh!
+Listen here to me: They're so dad-gum opposite they're plum'
+cater-cornered!"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>A SHORT NATURAL HISTORY</h3>
+
+<p>If ever a person might be said to have dedicated his being to the
+pursuit of leisure, that selfsame was Red Hoss Shackleford, of color,
+and highly so. He was one who specialized in the deft and fine high art
+of doing nothing at all. With him leisure was at once a calling to be
+followed regularly and an ideal to be fostered. But also he loved to
+eat, and he had a fancy for wearing gladsome gearings, and these
+cravings occasionally interfered with the practice of his favorite
+vocation. In order that he might enjoy long periods of manual inactivity
+it devolved upon him at intervals to devote his reluctant energies to
+gainful labor. When driven to it by necessity, which is said to be the
+mother of invention and which certainly is the full sister to appetite,
+Red Hoss worked. He just naturally had to&mdash;sometimes.</p>
+
+<p>You see, in the matter of being maintained vicariously he was less
+fortunately circumstanced than so many of his fellows in our town<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> were,
+and still are. He had no ministering parent doing cookery for the white
+folks, and by night, in accordance with a time-hallowed custom with
+which no sane housekeeper dared meddle, bringing home under a dolman
+cape loaded tin buckets and filled wicker baskets. Ginger Dismukes,
+now&mdash;to cite a conspicuous example&mdash;was one thus favored by the
+indulgent fates.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Ca'line Dismukes, mother of the above, was as honest as the day was
+long; but when the evening of that day came, such trifles, say, as part
+of a ham or a few left-over slices of cake fell to her as a legitimate
+if unadvertised salvage. Every time the quality in the big house had
+white meat for their dinner, Ginger, down the alley, enjoyed drumsticks
+and warmed-up stuffing for his late supper. He might be like the
+tapeworm in that he rarely knew in advance what he would have to eat,
+but still, like the tapeworm, he gratefully absorbed what was put before
+him and asked no questions of the benefactor. Without prior effort on
+his part he was fed even as the Prophet Elijah was fed by the ravens of
+old. This simile would acquire added strength if you'd ever seen Aunt
+Ca'line, her complexion being a crow's-wing sable.</p>
+
+<p>Red Hoss had no dependable helpmate, such as Luther Maydew had, with a
+neatly lettered sign in her front window: <span class="smcap">Going-Out Washing Taken in
+Here</span>. Luther's wife was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>Luther's only visible means of support, yet
+Luther waxed fat and shiny and larded the earth when he walked abroad.
+Neither had Red Hoss an indulgent and generous patron such as Judge
+Priest's Jeff&mdash;Jeff Poindexter&mdash;boasted in the person of his master.
+Neither was he gifted in the manipulation of the freckled bones as the
+late Smooth Crumbaugh had been; nor yet possessed he the skill of shadow
+boxing as that semiprofessional pugilist, Con Lake, possessed it. Con
+could lick any shadow that ever lived, and the punching bag that could
+stand up before his onslaughts was not manufactured yet; wherefore he
+figured in exhibition bouts and boxing benefits, and between these lived
+soft and easy. He enjoyed no such sinecure as fell to the lot of Uncle
+Zack Matthews, who waited on the white gentlemen's poker game at the
+Richland House, thereby harvesting many tips and whose otherwise nimble
+mind became a perfect blank twice a year when he was summoned before the
+grand jury.</p>
+
+<p>Red Hoss did, indeed, have a sister, but the relations between them were
+strained since the day when Red Hoss' funeral obsequies had been
+inopportunely interrupted by the sudden advent among the mourners of the
+supposedly deceased, returning drippingly from the river which
+presumably had engulfed him. His unexpected and embarrassing
+reappearance had practically spoiled the service for his chief relative.
+She never had forgiven Red Hoss for his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> failure to stay dead, and he
+long since had ceased to look for free pone bread and poke chops in that
+quarter.</p>
+
+<p>So when he had need to eat, or when his wardrobe required replenishing,
+he worked at odd jobs; but not oftener. Ordinarily speaking, his heart
+was not in it at all. But at the time when this narrative begins his
+heart was in it. One speaks figuratively here in order likewise to speak
+literally. A romantic enterprise carried on by Red Hoss Shackleford
+through a period of months promised now a delectable climax. As between
+him and one Melissa Grider an engagement to join themselves together in
+the bonds of matrimony had been arranged.</p>
+
+<p>Before he fell under Melissa's spell Red Hoss had been regarded as one
+of the confirmed bachelors of the Plunkett's Hill younger set. He had
+never noticeably favored marriage and giving in marriage&mdash;especially
+giving himself in marriage. It may have been&mdash;indeed the forked tongue
+of gossip so had it&mdash;that the fervor of Red Hoss' courting, when once he
+did turn suitor, had been influenced by the fortuitous fact that Melissa
+ran as chambermaid on the steamboat <i>Jessie B.</i> The fact outstanding,
+though, was that Red Hoss, having ardently wooed, seemed now about to
+win.</p>
+
+<p>But Melissa, that comely and comfortable person, remained practical even
+when most loving. The grandeur of Red Hoss' dress-up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> clothes may have
+entranced her, and certainly his conversational brilliancy was
+altogether in his favor, but beyond the glamour of the present, Melissa
+had the vision to appraise the possibilities of the future. Before
+finally committing herself to the hymeneal venture she required it of
+her swain that he produce and place in her capable hands for
+safe-keeping, first, the money required to purchase the license; second,
+the amount of the fee for the officiating clergyman; and third, cash
+sufficient to pay the expenses of a joint wedding journey to St. Louis
+and return. It was specified that the traveling must be conducted on a
+mutual basis, which would require round-trip tickets for both of them.
+Melissa, before now, had heard of these one-sided bridal tours. If Red
+Hoss went anywhere to celebrate being married she meant to go along with
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Altogether, under these headings, a computed aggregate of at least
+eighty dollars was needed. With his eyes set then on this financial
+goal, Red Hoss sought service in the marts of trade. Perhaps the
+unwonted eagerness he displayed in this regard may have been quickened
+by the prospect that the irksomeness of employment before marriage would
+be made up to him after the event in a vacation more prolonged than any
+his free spirit had ever known. Still, that part of it is none of our
+affair. For our purposes it is sufficient to record that the campaign
+for funds had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>progressed to a point where practically fifty per cent of
+the total specified by his prudent inamorata already had been earned,
+collected and, in accordance with the compact, intrusted to the
+custodianship of one who was at once fianc&eacute;e and trustee.</p>
+
+<p>On a fine autumnal day Red Hoss made a beginning at the task of amassing
+the remaining half of the prenuptial sinking fund by accepting an
+assignment to deliver a milch cow, newly purchased by Mr. Dick Bell, to
+Mr. Bell's dairy farm three miles from town on the Blandsville Road.
+This was a form of toil all the more agreeable to Red Hoss&mdash;that is to
+say, if any form of toil whatsoever could be deemed agreeable to
+him&mdash;since cows when traveling from place to place are accustomed to
+move languidly. By reason of this common sharing of an antipathy against
+undue haste, it was late afternoon before the herder and the herded
+reached the latter's future place of residence; and it was almost dusk
+when Red Hoss, returning alone, came along past Lone Oak Cemetery. Just
+ahead of him, from out of the weed tangle hedging a gap in the cemetery
+fence, a half-grown rabbit hopped abroad. The cottontail rambled a few
+yards down the road, then erected itself on its rear quarters and with
+adolescent foolhardiness contemplated the scenery. In his hand Red Hoss
+still carried the long hickory stick with which he had guided the steps
+of Mr. Bell's new cow. He flung his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> staff at the inviting mark now
+presented to him. Whirling in its flight, it caught its target squarely
+across the neck, and the rabbit died so quickly it did not have time to
+squeak, and barely time to kick.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is known of all men that luck of two widely different kinds
+resides in the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit. There is bad luck
+in it for the rabbit itself, seeing that the circumstance of its having
+a left hind foot, to begin with, renders life for that rabbit more
+perilous even than is the life of a commonplace rabbit. But there is
+abiding good luck in it for the human who falls heir to the foot after
+the original possessor has passed away. To insure the maximum of fair
+fortune for the legatee, the rabbit while in the act of jumping over a
+sunken grave in the dark of the moon should be killed with a crooked
+stick which a dead man has carried; but since there is no known record
+of a colored person hanging round sunken graves in the dark of the moon,
+the left hind foot of an authentic graveyard rabbit slain under any
+circumstances is a charm of rare preciousness.</p>
+
+<p>With murky twilight impending, it was not for Red Hoss Shackleford to
+linger for long in the vicinity of a burying ground. Already, in the
+gloaming, the white fence palings gleamed spectrally and the shadows
+were thickening in the honeysuckle jungles beyond them. Nor was it for
+him to think of eating the flesh of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> graveyard rabbit, even though it
+be plump and youthful, as this one was.</p>
+
+<p>Graveyard rabbits, when indubitably known to be such, decorate no
+Afro-American skillet. Destiny has called them higher than frying pans.</p>
+
+<p>Almost before the victim of his aim had twitched its valedictory twitch
+he was upon it. In his hand, ready for use, was his razor; not his
+shaving razor, but the razor he carried for social purposes. He bent
+down, and with the blade made swift slashes right and left at a limber
+ankle joint, then rose again and was briskly upon his homeward way,
+leaving behind him the maimed carcass, a rumpled little heap, lying in
+the dust. A dozen times before he reached his boarding house he fingered
+the furry talisman where it rested in the bottom of his hip pocket, and
+each touching of it conveyed to him added confidences in propitious
+auguries.</p>
+
+<p>Surely enough, on the very next day but one, events seemed organizing
+themselves with a view to justifying his anticipations. As a consequence
+of the illness of Tom Montjoy he was offered and accepted what promised
+to be for the time being a lucrative position as Tom Montjoy's
+substitute on the back end of one of Fowler &amp; Givens' ice wagons. The
+Eighteenth Amendment was not as yet an accomplished fact, though the
+dread menace of it hung over that commonwealth which had within its
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>confines the largest total number of distilleries and bonded warehouses
+to be found in any state of this union. Observing no hope of legislative
+relief, sundry local saloon keepers had failed to renew their licenses
+as these expired. But for every saloon which closed its doors it seemed
+there was a soda fountain set up to fizz and to spout; and the books of
+Fowler &amp; Givens showed the name of a new customer to replace each
+vanished old one. So trade ran its even course, and Red Hoss was
+retained temporarily to understudy, as it were, the invalid Montjoy.</p>
+
+<p>In an afternoon lull following the earlier rush of deliveries Mr. Ham
+Givens came out to where Tallow Dick Evans, Bill Tilghman and Red Hoss
+reclined at ease in the lee of the ice factory's blank north wall and
+bade Red Hoss hook up one of the mules to the light single wagon and
+carry three of the hundred-pound blocks out to Biederman's ex-corner
+saloon, now Biederman's soft-drink and ice-cream emporium, at Ninth and
+Washington.</p>
+
+<p>"Better let him take Blue Wing," said Mr. Givens, addressing Bill
+Tilghman, who by virtue of priority of service and a natural affinity
+for draft stock was stable boss for the firm.</p>
+
+<p>It was Bill Tilghman who once had delivered himself of the sage remark
+that "A mule an' a nigger is 'zackly alike&mdash;'specially de mule."</p>
+
+<p>"Can't tek Blue Wing, Mist' Givens," answered Bill. "She done went up to
+Mist' <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>Gallowayses' blacksmith shop to git herse'f some new shoes."</p>
+
+<p>This pluralization of a familiar name was evidence on Bill Tilghman's
+part of the estimation in which he held our leading farrier, Mr. P. J.
+Galloway.</p>
+
+<p>"All right, take one of the other mules then. But get a hustle on,"
+ordered Mr. Givens as he re&euml;ntered his office.</p>
+
+<p>"Dat bein' de case, I reckin I'll tek dat white Frank mule," said Red
+Hoss. "'Tain't no use of him standin' in de stall eatin' his ole fool
+haid off jes' 'cause Tom Montjoy is laid up."</p>
+
+<p>"Boy," said Bill Tilghman, "lissen! You 'cept a word of frien'ship an'
+warnin' f'um somebody dat's been kicked by more mules 'en whut you ever
+seen in yore whole life, an' you let dat Frank mule stay right whar he
+is. You kin have yore choice of de Maud mule or de Maggie mule or Friday
+or January Thaw; but my edvice to you is, jes' leave dat Frank mule be
+an' don't pester him none."</p>
+
+<p>"How come?" demanded Red Hoss. "I reckin I got de strength to drive ary
+mule dey is."</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't sayin' you ain't," stated Bill Tilghman. "A born ijiot could
+drive dat mule, so I jedge you mout mek out to qualify. 'Tain't de
+drivin' of him&mdash;hit's de hitchin' up of him which I speaks of."</p>
+
+<p>Tallow Dick put in, "Hit's dis way wid dat Frank: In his early chilehood
+somebody <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>muster done somethin' painful to dat mule's haid, an' it seem
+lak it lef' one ondurin' scar in his mind. Anyway, f'um dat day
+hencefor'ard he ain't let nobody a-tall, let alone hit's a plum'
+stranger to him lak you is, go prankin' round his haid. Ef you think a
+mule's back end is his dangersome end you jes' try to walk up to ole
+Frank face to face, ez nigger to mule, an' try to hang de mule jewelry
+over his years. Da's all, jes' try it! Tom Montjoy is de onliest one
+which kin slip de bit in dat mule's mouf, an' de way he do it is to go
+into de nex' stall an' keep speakin' soothin' words to him, an' put de
+bridle on him f'um behinehand of his shoulder lak. But when Tom Montjoy
+ain't wukkin', de Frank mule he ain't wukkin' neither any. Yessuh, Tom
+Montjoy is de sole one which dat Frank mule gives his confidences to,
+sech as dey is."</p>
+
+<p>Red Hoss snorted his contempt for his warning.</p>
+
+<p>"Huh, de trouble wid dat mule is he's pampered! You niggers done pamper
+him twell he think he owns dese whole ice-factory premises. Whut he need
+fur whut ails him is somebody which ain't skeered of him. Me, I aims to
+go 'crost to dat stable barn over yonder 'crost de street an' walk right
+in de same stall wid dat Frank same ez whut I would wid ary other mule,
+an' ef he mek jes' one pass at me I'm gwine up wid my fistes an' give
+him somethin' to brood over."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p><p>Bill Tilghman looked at Tallow Dick, looking at him sorrowfully, as
+though haunted by forebodings of an impending tragedy, and shook his
+head slowly from side to side. Tallow Dick returned the glance in kind,
+and then both of them gazed steadfastly at the vainglorious new hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Son, boy," inquired old Bill softly, "whut is de name of yore mos'
+favorite hymn?"</p>
+
+<p>"Whut my favorite hymn got to do wid it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, nothin', only I wuz jes' studyin'. Settin' yere, I got to thinkin'
+dat mebbe dey wuz some purticular tune you might lak sung at de grave."</p>
+
+<p>"An' whilst you's tellin' Unc' Bill dat much, you mout also tell us whar
+'bouts in dis town you lives at?" added Tallow Dick.</p>
+
+<p>"You knows good an' well whar I lives at," snapped Red Hoss.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought mebbe you mout 'a' moved," said Tallow Dick mildly.
+"'Twouldn't never do fur me an' Bill yere to be totin' de remains to de
+wrong address. Been my experience dat nothin' ain't mo' onwelcome at a
+strange house 'en a daid nigger, especially one dat's about six feet two
+inches long an' all mussed up wid fresh mule tracks."</p>
+
+<p>"Huh! You two ole fools is jes' talkin' to hear yo'se'fs talk," quoth
+Red Hoss. "All I axes you to do is jes' set quiet yere, an' in 'bout six
+minutes f'um now you'll see me <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>leadin' a tamed-down white mule wid de
+britchin' all on him outen through dem stable barn do's."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, honey, have it yo' own way. Ef you won't hearken an' you
+won't heed, go ahaid!" stated Uncle Bill, with a wave of his hand. "You
+ain't too young to die, even ef you is too ole to learn. Only I trust
+an' prays dat you won't be blamin' nobody but yo'se'f 'bout this time
+day after to-mor' evenin' w'en de sexton of Mount Zion Cullud Cemetery
+starts pattin' you in de face wid a spade."</p>
+
+<p>"Unc' Bill, you said a moufful den," added Tallow Dick. "De way I looks
+at it, dey ain't no use handin' out sense to a nigger ef he ain't got no
+place to put it. 'Sides, dese things offen-times turns out fur de best;
+orphants leaves de fewest mourners. Good-by, Red Hoss, an' kindly give
+my reguards to any frien's of mine dat you meets up wid on 'yother side
+of Jordan."</p>
+
+<p>With another derisive grunt, Red Hoss rose from where he had been
+resting, angled to the opposite side of the street and disappeared
+within the stable. For perhaps ninety seconds after he was gone the
+remaining two sat in an attitude of silent waiting. Their air was that
+of a pair of black seers who likewise happen to be fatalists, and who
+having conscientiously discharged a duty of prophecy now await with
+calmness the fulfillment of what had been foretold. Then they heard,
+over there where Red<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> Hoss had vanished, a curious muffled outcry. As
+they subsequently described it, this sound was neither shriek nor moan,
+neither oath nor prayer. They united in the declaration that it was more
+in the nature of a strangled squeak, as though a very large rat had
+suddenly been trodden beneath an even larger foot. However, for all its
+strangeness, they rightfully interpreted it to be an appeal for succor.
+Together they rose and ran across Water Street and into the stable.</p>
+
+<p>The Frank mule had snapped his tether and, freed, was backing himself
+out into the open. If a mule might be said to pick his teeth, here was a
+mule doing that very thing. Crumpled under the manger of the stall he
+just had quitted was a huddled shape. The rescuers drew it forth, and in
+the clear upon the earthen stable floor they stretched it. It was
+recognizable as the form of Red Hoss Shackleford.</p>
+
+<p>Red Hoss seemed numbed rather than unconscious. Afterward Bill Tilghman
+in recounting the affair claimed that Red Hoss, when discovered, was
+practically nude clear down to his shoes, which being of the variety
+known as congress gaiters had elastic uppers to hug the ankles. This
+snugness of fit, he thought, undoubtedly explained why they had stayed
+on when all the rest of the victim's costume came off. In his version,
+Tallow Dick averred he took advantage of the circumstance of Red Hoss'
+being almost totally undressed to tally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> up bruise marks as
+counter-distinguished from tooth marks, and found one of the former for
+every two sets of the latter. From this disparity in the count, and
+lacking other evidence, he was bound to conclude that considerable
+butting had been done before the biting started.</p>
+
+<p>However, these conclusions were to be arrived at later. For the moment
+the older men busied themselves with fanning Red Hoss and with sluicing
+a bucket of water over him. His first intelligible words upon partially
+reviving seemed at the moment of their utterance to have no direct
+bearing upon that which had just occurred. It was what he said next
+which, in the minds of the hearers, established the proper connection.</p>
+
+<p>"White folks suttinly is curious." Such was his opening remark,
+following the water application. "An' also, dey suttinly do git up some
+mouty curious laws." He paused a moment as though in a still slightly
+dazed contemplation of the statutory idiosyncrasies of the Caucasian,
+and then added the key words: "F'rinstance, now, dey got a law dat you
+got to keep lions an' tigers in a cage. Yassuh, da's de law. Can't no
+circus go 'bout de country widout de lions an' de tigers an' de
+highyenas is lock' up hard an' fas' in a cage." Querulously his voice
+rose in a tone of wondering complaintfulness: "An' yit dey delibert'ly
+lets a man-eatin' mule go ramblin' round loose, wid nothin' on him but a
+rope halter."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p><p>Across the prostrate form of the speaker Bill Tilghman eyed Tallow Dick
+in the reminiscent manner of one striving to recall the exact words of a
+certain quotation and murmured, "De trouble wid dat Frank mule is dat
+he's pampered."</p>
+
+<p>"Br'er Tilghman," answered back Tallow Dick solemnly, "you done said
+it&mdash;de mule is been pampered!"</p>
+
+<p>The sufferer stirred and blinked and sat up dizzily.</p>
+
+<p>"Uh-huh," he assented. "An' jes' ez soon ez I gits some of my strength
+back ag'in, an' some mo' clothes on, I'm gwine tek de longes', sharpes'
+pitchfork dey is in dis yere stable an' I'm gwine pamper dat devilish
+mule wid it fur 'bout three-quarters of an hour stiddy."</p>
+
+<p>But he didn't. If he really cherished any such disciplinary designs he
+abandoned them next morning at sunup, when, limping slightly, he propped
+open the stable doors preparatory to invading its interior. The white
+demon, which appeared to have the facility of snapping his bonds
+whenever so inclined, came sliding out of the darkness toward him, a
+malignant and menacing apparition, with a glow of animosity in two
+deep-set eyes and with a pair of prehensile lips curled back to display
+more teeth than by rights an alligator should have. It was immediately
+evident to Red Hoss that in the Frank mule's mind a deep-seated aversion
+for him had been engendered. He had the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> feeling that potential ill
+health lurked in that neighborhood; that death and destruction, riding
+on a pale mule, might canter up at any moment. Personally, he decided to
+let bygones be bygones. He dropped the grudge as he tumbled backward
+through the stable doors and slammed them behind him. That same day he
+went to Mr. Ham Givens and announced his intention of immediately
+breaking off his present associations with the firm.</p>
+
+<p>"Me, I is done quit foolin' wid ole ice waggins," he announced airily
+after Mr. Givens had given him his time. "Hit seems lak my gift is fur
+machinery."</p>
+
+<p>"A pusson which wuz keerful wouldn't trust you wid a shoe
+buttoner&mdash;dat's how high I reguards yore gift fur machinery," commented
+Bill Tilghman acidly. Red Hoss chose to ignore the slur. Anyhow, at the
+moment he could put his tongue to no appropriate sentence of counter
+repartee. He continued as though there had been no interruption:</p>
+
+<p>"Yassuh, de nex' time you two pore ole foot-an'-mouth teamsters sees me
+I'll come tearin' by yere settin' up on de boiler deck of a taxiscab.
+You better step lively to git out of de way fur me den."</p>
+
+<p>"I 'lows to do so," assented Bill. "I ain't aimin' to git shot wid no
+stray bullets."</p>
+
+<p>"How come stray bullets?"</p>
+
+<p>"Anytime I sees you runnin' a taxiscab I'll know by dat sign alone dat
+de sheriff an' de<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> man which owns de taxiscab will be right behine
+you&mdash;da's whut I means."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't pay no 'tention to Unc' Bill," put in Tallow Dick. "Whar you aim
+to git dis yere taxiscab, Red Hoss?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mist' Lee Farrell he's done start up a regular taxiscab line,"
+expounded Red Hoss. "He's lookin' fur some smart, spry cullid men ez
+drivers. Dat natchelly bars you two out, but it lets me in. Mist' Lee
+Farrell he teach you de trade fust, an' den he gives you three dollars a
+day, an' you keeps all de tips you teks in. So it's so long and fare you
+well to you mule lovers, 'ca'se Ise on my way to pick myse' out my
+taxiscab."</p>
+
+<p>"Be sure to pick yo'se'f out one which ain't been pampered," was Bill
+Tilghman's parting shot.</p>
+
+<p>"Nummine dat part," retorted Red Hoss. "You jes' remember dis after I'm
+gone: Mules' niggers an' niggers' mules is 'bout to go out of style in
+dis man's town."</p>
+
+<p>In a way of speaking, Red Hoss in his final taunt had the rights of it.
+Lumbering drays no longer runneled with their broad iron tires the
+red-graveled flanks of the levee leading down to the wharf boats. They
+had given way almost altogether to bulksome motor trucks. Closed hacks
+still found places in funeral processions, but black chaser craft,
+gasoline driven and snorting furiously, met all incoming trains and sped
+to all outgoing ones. Betimes, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>beholding as it were the handwriting on
+the wall, that enterprising liveryman, Mr. Lee Farrell, had set up a
+garage and a service station on the site of his demolished stable, and
+now was the fleet commander of a whole squadron of these tin-armored
+destroyers.</p>
+
+<p>Under his tutelage Red Hoss proved a reasonably apt pupil. At the end of
+an apprenticeship covering a fortnight he matriculated into a regular
+driver, with a badge and a cap to prove it and a place on the night
+shift. Red Hoss felt impressive, and bore himself accordingly. He began
+taking sharp turns on two wheels. He took one such turn too many. On
+Friday night of his first week as a graduate chauffeur he steered his
+car headlong into a smash-up from which she emerged with a dished front
+wheel and a permanent marcel wave in one fender. As he nursed the
+cripple back to the garage Red Hoss exercised an imagination which never
+yet had failed him, and fabricated an explanation so plausibly shaped
+and phrased as to absolve him of all blameful responsibility for the
+mishap.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Farrell listened to and accepted this account of the accident with
+no more than a passing exhibition of natural irritation; but next
+morning when Attorney Sublette called, accompanied by an irate client
+with a claim for damages sustained to a market wagon, and bringing with
+him also the testimony of at least two disinterested eye-witnesses to
+prove<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> upon whose shoulders the fault must rest, Mr. Farrell somewhat
+lost his customary air of sustained calm. Cursing softly under his
+breath, he settled on the spot with a cash compromise; and then calling
+the offender to his presence, he used strong and bitter words.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, boy," he proclaimed, "I've let you off this time with a
+cussing, but next time anything happens to a car that you are driving
+you've got to come clean with me. It ain't to be expected that a lot of
+crazy darkies can go sky-hooting round this town driving pot-metal
+omnibuses for me without one of them getting in a smash-up about every
+so often, and I'm carrying accident insurance and liability insurance to
+cover my risks; but next time you get into a jam I want you to come
+through with the absolute facts in the case, so's I'll know where I
+stand and how to protect myself in court or out of it. I don't care two
+bits whose fault it is&mdash;your fault or some other lunatic's fault. The
+truth is what I want&mdash;the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
+truth, so help you God. And He'll need to help you if I catch you lying
+again! Get me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Boss," said Red Hoss fervently, "I gits you."</p>
+
+<p>Two nights later the greater disaster befell. It was a thick, drizzly,
+muggy night, when the foreground of one's perspective was blurred by the
+murk and when there just naturally was not any background at all. Down
+by the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>Richland House a strange white man wearing a hand-colored
+mustache and a tiger-claw watch charm hailed Red Hoss. This person
+desired to be carried entirely out of town, to the south yards of the P.
+T. &amp; A. Railroad, where Powers Brothers' Carnival Company was detraining
+from its cars with intent to pitch camp in the suburb of Mechanicsville
+hard by and furnish the chief attractions for a three days' street fair
+to be given under the auspices of the Mechanicsville lodge of Knights of
+Damon.</p>
+
+<p>After they had quit the paved streets, Red Hoss drove a bumpy course
+diagonally across many switch spurs, and obeying instructions from his
+fare brought safely up alongside a red-painted sleeping car which formed
+the head end of the show train where it stood on a siding. But starting
+back he decided to skirt alongside the track, where he hoped the going
+might be easier. As he backed round and started off, directly in front
+of him he made out through the encompassing mists the dim flare of a
+gasoline torch, and he heard a voice uplifted in pleading:</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, Lena! Come on, Baby Doll! Come on out of that, you Queenie!"</p>
+
+<p>Seemingly an unseen white man was urging certain of his lady friends to
+quit some mysterious inner retreat and join him where he stood; all of
+which, as Red Hoss figured it, was none of his affair. Had he known more
+he might have moved more slowly; indeed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> might have stopped moving
+altogether. But&mdash;I ask you&mdash;how was Red Hoss to know that the chief bull
+handler for Powers Brothers was engaged in superintending the unloading
+of his large living charges from their traveling accommodations in the
+bull car?</p>
+
+<p>There were three of these bulls, all of them being of the gentler sex.
+Perhaps it might be well to explain here that the word "bull," in the
+language of the white tops, means elephant. To a showman all cow
+elephants are bulls just as in a mid-Victorian day, more refined than
+this one, all authentic bulls were, to cultured people, cows.</p>
+
+<p>Obeying the insistent request of their master, forth now and down a
+wooden runway filed the members of Powers Brothers' World Famous Troupe
+of Ponderous Pachydermic Performers. First came Lena, then Baby Doll and
+last of all the mighty Queenie; and in this order they lumberingly
+proceeded, upon huge but silent feet, to follow him alongside the
+cindered right of way, feeling their way through the fog.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is a fact well established in natural history&mdash;and in this
+instance was to prove a lamentable one&mdash;that elephants, unlike lightning
+bugs, carry no tail lamps. Of a sudden Red Hoss was aware of a vast,
+indefinite, mouse-colored bulk looming directly in the path before him.
+He braked hard and tried to swing out, but he was too close upon the
+obstacle to avoid a collision.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p><p>With a loud metallic smack the bow of the swerving taxicab, coming up
+from the rear, treacherously smote the mastodonic Queenie right where
+her wrinkles were thickest. Her knees bent forward, and involuntarily
+she squatted. She squatted, as one might say, on all points south.
+Simultaneously there was an agonized squeal from Queenie and a crunching
+sound from behind and somewhat under her, and the tragic deed was done.
+The radiator of Red Hoss' car looked something like a concertina which
+had seen hard usage and something like a folded-in crush hat, but very
+little, if any, like a radiator.</p>
+
+<p>At seven o'clock next morning, when Mr. Farrell arrived at his
+establishment, his stricken gaze fastened upon a new car of his which
+had become to all intents and purposes practically two-thirds of a car.
+The remnant stood at the curbing, where his service car, having towed it
+in, had left it as though the night foreman had been unwilling to give
+so complete a ruin storage space within the garage. Alongside the
+wreckage was Red Hoss, endeavoring more or less unsuccessfully to make
+himself small and inconspicuous. Upon him menacingly advanced his
+employer.</p>
+
+<p>"The second time in forty-eight hours for you, eh?" said Mr. Farrell.
+"Well, boy, you do work fast! Come on now, and give me the cold facts.
+How did the whole front end of this car come to get mashed off?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p><p>Tone and mien alike were threatening. Red Hoss realized there was no
+time for extended preliminary remarks. From him the truth came
+trippingly on the tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"Boss, man, I ain't aimin' to tell you no lies dis time. I comes clean."</p>
+
+<p>"Come clean and come fast."</p>
+
+<p>"A elephint set down on it."</p>
+
+<p>"What!"</p>
+
+<p>"I sez, suh, a elephint set down on it."</p>
+
+<p>In moments of stress, when tempted beyond his powers of self-control,
+Mr. Farrell was accustomed to punctuate physically, as it were, the
+spoken word. What he said&mdash;all he said&mdash;before emotion choked him was:
+"Why&mdash;you&mdash;you&mdash;" What he did was this: His right arm crooked upward
+like a question mark; it straightened downward like an exclamation
+point; his fist made a period, or, as the term goes, a full stop on the
+point of Red Hoss Shackleford's jaw. What Red Hoss saw resembled this:</p>
+
+<p class="center">*&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*
+&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*</p>
+
+<p>Only they were all printed flashingly in bright primary colors, reds and
+greens predominating.</p>
+
+<p>As the last gay asterisk faded from before his blinking eyes Red Hoss
+found himself sitting down on a hard concrete sidewalk. Coincidentally
+other discoveries made themselves manifest to his understanding. One was
+that the truth which often is stranger than fiction may also on occasion
+be a more dangerous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> commodity to handle. Another was that abruptly he
+had severed all business connections with Mr. Lee Farrell's industry.
+His resignation had been accepted on the spot, and the spot was the
+bulge of his left jaw.</p>
+
+<p>Somewhat dazed, filled with an inarticulate but none the less sincere
+conviction that there was neither right nor justice left in a misshapen
+world, Red Hoss got up and went away from there. He deemed it the part
+of prudence to go utterly and swiftly away from there. It seemed
+probable that at any moment Mr. Farrell might emerge from his inner
+office, whither, as might be noted through an open window, he had
+retired to pour cold water on his bruised knuckles, and get violent
+again. The language he was using so indicated.</p>
+
+<p>Presently Red Hoss, with one side of his face slightly swollen and a
+curious taste in his mouth, might have been seen boarding a Locust
+Street car southbound. He was on his way to Mechanicsville. In the back
+part of his brain lurked vaguely a project to seek out the man who owned
+those elephants and plead for some fashion of redress for painful
+injuries innocently sustained. Perhaps the show gentleman might incline
+a charitable ear upon hearing Red Hoss' story. Just how the sufferer
+would go about the formality of presenting himself to the consideration
+of the visiting dignitary he did not yet know. It was all nebulous and
+cloudy; a contingency to be shaped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> by circumstances as they might
+develop. Really sympathy was the balm Red Hoss craved most.</p>
+
+<p>He quit the car when the car quit him&mdash;at the end of the line where the
+iron bridge across Island Creek marked the boundary between the
+municipality and its principal suburb. Even at this hour
+Mechanicsville's broadest highway abounded in fascinating sights and
+alluring zo&ouml;logical aromas. The carnival formally would not open till
+the afternoon, but by Powers Brothers' crews things already had been
+prepared against the coming of that time. In all available open spaces,
+such as vacant lots abutting upon the sidewalks and the junctions of
+cross streets, booths and tents and canvas-walled arenas had been set
+up. Boys of assorted sizes and colors hung in expectant clumps about
+marquees and show fronts. Also a numerous assemblage of adults of the
+resident leisure class, a majority of these being members of Red Hoss'
+own race, moved back and forth through the line of fairings, inspired by
+the prospect of seeing something interesting without having to pay for
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Red Hoss forgot temporarily the more-or-less indefinite purpose which
+had brought him hither. He joined a cluster of watchful persons who
+hopefully had collected before the scrolled and ornamented wooden
+entrance of a tarpaulin structure larger than any of the rest. From
+beneath the red-and-gold portico of this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> edifice there issued a blocky
+man in a checkered suit, with a hard hat draped precariously over one
+ear and with a magnificent jewel gleaming out of the bosom of a
+collarless shirt. All things about this man stamped him as one having
+authority over the housed mysteries roundabout. Visibly he rayed that
+aura of proprietorship common to some monarchs and to practically all
+owners of traveling caravansaries. Seeing him, Red Hoss promptly
+detached himself from the group he had just joined, and advanced, having
+it in mind to seek speech with this superior-appearing personage. The
+white man beat him to it.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, boy, that's right, keep a-coming," he called. His experienced eye
+appraised Red Hoss' muscular proportions. "Do you want a job?"</p>
+
+<p>"Whut kinder job, boss?"</p>
+
+<p>"Best job you ever had in your life," declared the white man. "You get
+fourteen a week and cakes. Get me? Fourteen dollars just as regular as
+Saturday night comes, and your scoffing free&mdash;all the chow you can eat
+thrown in. Then you hear the band play absolutely free of charge, and
+you see the big show six times a day without having to pay for it, and
+you travel round and see the country. Don't that sound good to you? Oh,
+yes, there's one thing else!" He dangled a yet more alluring temptation.
+"And you wear a red coat with brass buttons on it and a cap with a plume
+in it."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p><p>"Sho' does sound good," said Red Hoss, warming. "Whut else I got to do,
+cunnel?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, just odd jobs round this pitch here&mdash;this animal show."</p>
+
+<p>"Hole on, please, boss! I don't have no truck wid elephints, does I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nope. The elephants are down the line in a separate outfit of their
+own. You work with this show&mdash;clean out the cages and little things like
+that. Don't get worried," he added quickly, interpreting aright a look
+of sudden concern upon Red Hoss' face. "You don't have to go inside the
+cages to clean 'em out. You stay outside and do it with a long-handled
+tool. I had a good man on this job, but he quit on me unexpectedly night
+before last."</p>
+
+<p>The speaker failed to explain that the recent incumbent had quit thus
+abruptly as a result of having a forearm clawed by a lady leopard named
+Violet.</p>
+
+<p>"'Bout how long is dis yere job liable to last?" inquired Red Hoss. "You
+see, cunnel, Ise 'spectin' to have some right important private business
+in dis town 'fore so very long."</p>
+
+<p>"Then this is the very job you want. After we leave here to-morrow night
+we strike down across the state line and play three more stands, and
+then we wind up with a week in Memphis. We close up the season there and
+go into winter quarters, and you come on back home. What's your name?"</p>
+
+<p>"My full entitled name is Roscoe Conklin'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> Shackleford, but 'count of my
+havin' a kinder brightish complexion dey mos' gin'rally calls me Red
+Hoss. I reckin mebbe dey's Injun blood flowin' in me."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, Red Hoss, let it flow. You just come on with me and I'll
+show you what you'll have to do. My name is Powers&mdash;Captain Powers."</p>
+
+<p>Proudly sensing that already he was an envied figure in the eyes of the
+group behind him, Red Hoss followed the commanding Powers back through a
+canvas-sided marquee into a circular two-poled tent. There were no
+seats. The middle spaces were empty. Against the side walls were ranged
+four cages. One housed a pair of black bears of a rather weather-beaten
+and travel-worn aspect. Next to the bears, the lady leopard, Violet,
+through the bars contemplated space, meanwhile wearing that air of
+intense boredom peculiar to most caged animals. A painted inscription
+above the front of the third cage identified its occupant as none other
+than The Educated Ostrich; the Bird That Thinks.</p>
+
+<p>Red Hoss' conductor indicated these possessions with a lordly wave of
+his arm, then led the way to the fourth cage. It was the largest cage of
+all; it was painted a bright and passionate red. It had gilded
+scrollings on it. Upon the ornamented fa&ccedil;ade which crossed its front
+from side to side a lettered legend ran. Red Hoss spelled out the
+pronouncement:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p><p>Chieftain, King of Feline Acrobats! The Largest Black-maned Nubian Lion
+in Captivity! Danger!</p>
+
+<p>The face of the cage was boarded halfway up, but above the top line of
+the planked cross panel Red Hoss could make out in the foreground of the
+dimmed interior a great tawny shape, and at the back, in one corner, an
+orderly clutter of objects painted a uniform circus blue. There was a
+barrel or two, an enormous wooden ball, a collapsible fold-up seesaw and
+other impedimenta of a trained-animal act. Red Hoss had heard that the
+lion was a noble brute&mdash;in short, was the king of beasts. He now was
+prepared to swear it had a noble smell. Beneath the cage a white man in
+overalls slumbered audibly upon a tarpaulin folded into a pallet.</p>
+
+<p>"There's the man you take your orders from if you join us," explained
+Powers, flirting a thumb toward the sleeper. "Name of Riley, he is. But
+you draw your pay from me." With his arm he described a circle. "And
+here's the stock you help take care of. The only one you need to be
+careful about is that leopard over yonder. She gets a little peevish
+once in a while. Well, I would sort of keep an eye on the ostrich here
+alongside you too. The old bird's liable to cut loose when you ain't
+looking and kick the taste out of your mouth. You give them both their
+distances. But those bears behind you is just the same as a pair of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+puppies, and old Chieftain here&mdash;well, he looks pretty fierce and he
+acts sort of fierce too when he's called on for it, but it's just acting
+with him; he's trained to it. Off watch, he's just as gentle as an
+overgrown kitten. Riley handles him and works him, and all you've got to
+do when Riley is putting him through his stunts is to stand outside here
+and hand him things he wants in through the bars. Well, is it a go?
+Going to take the job?"</p>
+
+<p>"Boss," said Red Hoss, "you speaks late&mdash;I done already tooken it."</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" said Powers. "That's the way I love to do business&mdash;short and
+sweet. You hang round for an hour or two and sort of get acquainted with
+things until Riley has his nap out. When he wakes up, if I ain't back by
+that time, you tell him you're the new helper, and he'll wise you up."</p>
+
+<p>"Yas suh," said Red Hoss. "But say, boss, 'scuse me, but did I
+understand you to mention dat eatin' was in de contract?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure! Hungry already?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, suh, you see I mos' gin'rally starts de day off wid breakfust,
+an' to tell you de truth I ain't had nary grain of breakfust yit!"</p>
+
+<p>"Got the breakfast habit, eh? Well, come on with me to the cook house
+and I'll see if there ain't something left over."</p>
+
+<p>Despite the nature of his calling as a tamer of ferocious denizens of
+the tropic jungle, Mr. Riley, upon wakening, proved to be a person<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> of a
+fairly amiable disposition. He made it snappy but not unduly burdensome
+as he initiated Red Hoss into the rudimentary phases of the new
+employment. As the forenoon wore on the conviction became fixed in Red
+Hoss' mind that for an overlord he had a white man who would be apt to
+listen to reason touching on any proposition promising personal profits
+with no personal risks.</p>
+
+<p>Sharp upon this diagnosis of his new master's character, a magnificent
+idea, descending without warning like a bolt from the blue, struck Red
+Hoss on top of his head and bored in through his skull and took prompt
+root in his entranced and dazzled brain. It was a gorgeous conception;
+one which promised opulent returns for comparatively minor exertions. To
+carry it out, though, required co&ouml;peration, and in Riley he saw with a
+divining glance&mdash;or thought he saw&mdash;the hope of that co&ouml;peration.</p>
+
+<p>In paving the way for confidential relations he put to Riley certain
+leading questions artfully disguised, and at the beginning seemingly
+artlessly presented. By the very nature of Riley's answers he was
+further assured of the safety of the ground on which he trod, whereupon
+Red Hoss cautiously broached the project, going on to amplify it in
+glowing colors the while Riley hearkened attentively.</p>
+
+<p>It was a sheer pleasure to outline a proposition to a white gentleman
+who received it so agreeably. Fifteen minutes after the first <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>tentative
+overtures had been thrown out feeler-wise, Red Hoss found that he and
+Riley were in complete accord on all salient points. Indeed they already
+were as partners jointly committed to a joint undertaking.</p>
+
+<p>After the third and last afternoon performance, in which Red Hoss,
+wearing a proud mien and a somewhat spotty uniform coat, had acquitted
+himself in all regards creditably, Riley gave him a leave of absence of
+two hours, ostensibly for the purpose of quitting his boarding house and
+collecting his traveling wardrobe. As a matter of fact, these details
+really required but a few minutes, and it had been privily agreed
+between them that the rest of the time should be devoted by Red Hoss to
+setting in motion the actual preliminaries of their scheme.</p>
+
+<p>This involved a personal call upon Mr. Moe Rosen, who conducted a hide,
+pelt, rag, junk, empty-bottle and old-iron emporium on lower Court
+Street, just off the Market Square. September's hurried twilight had
+descended upon the town when the scouting conspirator tapped for
+admission at the alley entrance to the back room of Mr. Rosen's
+establishment, where the owner sat amid a variegated assortment of
+choicer specimens culled from his collected wares. Mr. Rosen needed no
+sign above his door to inform the passing public of the nature of his
+business. When the wind was right you could stand two blocks away and
+know it without being told. Here at Mr. Rosen's side door<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> Red Hoss
+smacked his nostrils appreciatively. Even to one newly come from a
+wild-animal show, and even when smelled through a brick wall, Mr.
+Rosen's place had a graphic and striking atmosphere which was all its
+own.</p>
+
+<p>As one well acquainted with the undercurrents of community life, Red
+Hoss shared, with many others, the knowledge that Mr. Rosen, while
+ostensibly engaged in one industry, carried on another as a sort of
+clandestine by-product. Now this side line, though surreptitiously
+conducted and perilous in certain of its aspects, was believed by the
+initiated to be really more lucrative than his legitimatized and avowed
+calling. Mr. Rosen was by way of being&mdash;by a roundabout way of
+being&mdash;what technically is known as a bootlegger. He bootlegged upon a
+larger scale than do most of those pursuing this precarious avocation.</p>
+
+<p>It was stated in an earlier paragraph that national prohibition had not
+yet come to pass. But already local option held the adjoining
+commonwealth of Tennessee in a firm and arid grasp; wherefore Mr.
+Rosen's private dealings largely had to do with discreet clients
+thirstily residing below the state line. It was common rumor in certain
+quarters that lately this traffic had suffered a most disastrous
+interruption. Tennessee revenue agents suddenly had evinced an
+unfriendly curiosity touching on vehicular movements from the Kentucky
+side.</p>
+
+<p>A considerable chunk of Mr. Rosen's profits<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> for the current year had
+been irretrievably swallowed up when a squad of these suspicious
+excisemen laid their detaining hands upon a sizable order of case stuff
+which&mdash;disguised and broadly labeled as crated household goods&mdash;was
+traveling southward by nightfall in a truck, heading toward a
+destination in a district which that truck was destined never to reach.</p>
+
+<p>Bottle by bottle the aromatic contents of the packages had been poured
+into the wayside ditch to be sucked up by an unappreciative if porous
+soil. The truck itself had been confiscated. Its driver barely had
+escaped, to return homeward afoot across country bearing dire tidings to
+his employer, who was reported, upon hearing the lamentable news,
+literally to have scrambled the air with disconsolate flappings of his
+hands, meanwhile uttering shrill cries of grief.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, as though to top this stroke of ill luck, further activities
+in the direction of his most profitable market practically had been
+brought to a standstill by reason of enhanced vigilance on the part of
+the Tennessee authorities along the main highroads running north and
+south. Between supply and demand, or perhaps one should say between
+purveyor and consumer, the boundary mark dividing the sister
+commonwealths stretched its dead line like a narrow river of despair. It
+was not to be wondered at, therefore, that the sorely pestered Mr. Rosen
+should be at this time a prey to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> care so carking as to border on
+forthright melancholia. Never a particularly cheerful person, at Red
+Hoss' soft knock upon his outer door he raised a countenance completely
+clothed in moroseness where not clothed in whiskers and grunted
+briefly&mdash;a sound which might or might not be taken as an invitation to
+enter. Nor was his greeting, following upon the caller's soft-footed
+entrance, calculated to promote cordial intercourse.</p>
+
+<p>"What you want, nigger?" he demanded, breaking in on Red Hoss' politely
+phrased greeting. Then without waiting for a reply, "Well, whatever it
+is, you don't get it. Get out!"</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, Red Hoss came right on in. Carefully he closed the door
+behind him, shutting himself in with Mr. Rosen and privacy and a
+symposium of strong, rich smells.</p>
+
+<p>"'Scuse me, Mist' Rosen," he said, "fur bre'kin' in on you lak dis, but
+I got a little sumpin' to say to you in mos' strictes' confidence. Seems
+lak to me I heard tell lately dat you'd had a little trouble wid some
+white folkses down de line. Co'se dat ain't none o' my business. I jes'
+mentioned it so's you'd understan' whut it is I wants to talk wid you
+about."</p>
+
+<p>He drew up an elbow length away from Mr. Rosen and sank his voice to an
+intimate half whisper.</p>
+
+<p>"Mist' Rosen, le's you an' me do a little s'posin'. Le's s'posen' you
+has a bar'l of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>vinegar or molasses or sumpin' which you wants delivered
+to a frien' in Memphis, Tennessee. Seems lak I has heared somewhars dat
+you already is got a frien' or two in Memphis, Tennessee? All right den!
+S'posin', den, dat you wrote to your frien' dat dis yere bar'l would be
+comin' along to him inside of a week or ten days f'um now wid me in de
+full charge of it. S'posin', den, on top o' dat I could guarantee you to
+deliver dat bar'l to your frien' widout nobody botherin' dat bar'l on de
+way, and widout nobody 'spectin' whut wuz in dat bar'l, an' widout
+nobody axin' no hard questions about dat bar'l. S'posin' all dem things,
+ef you please, suh, an' den I axes you dis question: How much would dat
+favor be wuth to you in cash money?"</p>
+
+<p>As a careful business man, Mr. Rosen very properly pressed for further
+particulars before in any way committing himself in the matter of the
+amount of remuneration to be paid for the accommodation proposed. At
+this evidence of interest on the other's part Red Hoss grinned in happy
+optimism.</p>
+
+<p>"Mist' Rosen, 'twon't hardly be no trouble a-tall," he stated. "In de
+fust place, you teks a pot o' blue paint an' you paints dat bar'l blue
+f'um head to foot. De bluer dat bar'l is de more safer she'll be. An' to
+mek sure dat de color will be right yere's a sample fur you to go by."</p>
+
+<p>With that, Red Hoss produced from a hip<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> pocket a sliver of plank
+painted on both sides in the cerulean hue universally favored by circus
+folk for covering seat boards, tent poles and such paraphernalia of a
+portable caravansary as is subject to rough treatment and frequent
+handling. At this the shock of surprise was such as almost to lift Mr.
+Rosen up on top of the cluttered desk which separated him from his
+visitor. It did lift him halfway out of his chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Nigger," he declared incredulously, "you talk foolishness! A mile away
+those dam Tennessee constables would be able to see a plain barrel which
+ain't got no paint on it at all, and now you tell me I should paint a
+barrel so blue as the sky, and yet it should get through from here to
+Memphis. Are you crazy in the head or something, or do you maybe think I
+am?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nummine dat," went on Red Hoss. "You do lak I tells you, an' you paints
+de bar'l right away so de paint'll git good an' dry twixt now an'
+We'n'sday night. Come We'n'sday night, you loads dat blue bar'l in a
+waggin an' covers it up an' you fetches it to me at de back do' of de
+main wild animal tent of dat carnival show which is now gwine on up yere
+in Mechanicsville. Don't go to de tent whar de elephints is. Go to de
+tent whar de educated ostrich is. Dar you'll fin' me. I done tuk a job
+as de fust chief 'sistant wild-animal trainer, an' right dar I'll be
+waitin'. So den you turns de bar'l over to me an' you goes on back home
+an' you furgits<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> all 'bout it. Den in 'bout two weeks mo' when I gits
+back yere I brings you a piece o' writin' f'um de gen'elman in Memphis
+sayin' dat de bar'l has been delivered to him in good awder, an' den you
+pays me de rest o' de money dat's comin' to me." He had a canny second
+thought. "Mebbe," he added, "mebbe it would be better for all concern'
+ef you wrote to yore frien' in Memphis to hand me over de rest of de
+money when I delivers de bar'l. Yassuh, I reckins dat would be de best."</p>
+
+<p>"The rest of what money?" demanded Mr. Rosen sharply. "I ain't said
+nothing about giving no money to nobody. What do you mean&mdash;money?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean de rest of de money which'll be comin' to me ez my share,"
+explained Red Hoss patiently. "De white man dat's goin' to he'p me wid
+dis yere job, he 'sists p'intedly dat he must have his share paid down
+cash in advance 'count of him not bein' able to come back yere an'
+collek it fur hisse'f, an' likewise 'count of him not keerin' to have no
+truck wid de gen'elman at de other end of de line. De way he put it, he
+wants all of his'n 'fore he starts. But me, Ise willin' to wait fur de
+bes' part of mine anyhow. So dat's how it stands, Mist' Rosen, an'
+'scusin' you an' me an' dis yere white man an' your frien' in Memphis,
+dey ain't nary pusson gwine know nothin' 'bout it a-tall, 'ceptin' mebbe
+hit's de lion. An' ez fur dat, w'y de lion don't count noways, 'count<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+of him not talkin' no language 'ceptin' 'tis his own language."</p>
+
+<p>"The lion?" echoed Mr. Rosen blankly. "What lion? First you tell me blue
+barrel and then you tell me lion."</p>
+
+<p>"I means Chieftain&mdash;de larges' black-mangy Nubbin lion in captivation,"
+stated Red Hoss grandly, quoting from memory his own recollection of an
+inscription he but lately had read for the first time. "Mist' Rosen,
+twixt you an' me, I reckins dey ain't no revenue officer in de whole
+state of Tennessee which is gwine go projeckin' round a lion cage
+lookin' fur evidence."</p>
+
+<p>Disclosing the crux of his plot, his voice took on a jubilant tone.
+"Mist' Rosen, please, suh, lissen to me whut Ise revealin' to you. Dat
+blue bar'l of yourn is gwine ride f'um yere plum' to Memphis, Tennessee,
+in a cage wid a lion ez big ez ary two lions got ary right to be! An'
+now den, Mist' Rosen, le's you an' me talk 'bout de money part of it;
+'cause when all is said an' done, dat's de principalest part, ain't it?"</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The town of Wyattsville was, as the saying goes, all agog. Indeed, as
+the editor of the Wyattsville Tri-Weekly Statesman most aptly phrased it
+in the introductory sentence of a first-page, full-column article in his
+latest issue: "This week all roads run to Wyattsville."</p>
+
+<p>The occasion for all this pleasurable excitement wast the annual fair
+and races of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> Forked Deer County Jockey Club, and superimposed upon
+that the street carnival conducted under the patronage and for the
+benefit of Wyattsville Herd Number 1002 of the Beneficent and Patriotic
+Order of American Bison. Each day would be a gala day replete with
+thrills and abounding in incident; in the forenoons grand free
+exhibitions upon the streets, also judgings and awards of prizes in
+various classes, such as farm products, livestock, poultry, needlework,
+pickles, preserves and art objects; in the afternoons, on the half-mile
+track out at the fair grounds, trotting, pacing and running events; in
+the evenings the carnival spirit running high and free, with
+opportunities for innocent mirth, merriment and entertainment afforded
+upon every hand.</p>
+
+<p>This was Monday night, the opening night. The initial performance of the
+three on the nightly schedule of Powers Brothers' Trained Wild Animal
+Arena approached now its climax, the hour approximately being
+eight-forty-five. The ballyhoo upon the elevated platform without had
+been completed. Hard upon this an audience of townspeople and visitors
+which taxed the standing capacity of the tented enterprise had flowed
+in, after first complying with the necessary financial details at the
+ticket booth. The Educated Ostrich, the Bird That Thinks, had performed
+to the apparent satisfaction of all, though it might as well be
+confessed that if one might judge by the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>intelligent creature's
+expression, the things it thought while going through its paces scarcely
+would be printable. Violet, the lady leopard, had obliged by yowling in
+a spirited and spitty manner when stirred up with a broom handle. The
+two bears had given a complete if somewhat lackadaisical rendition of
+their act. And now the gentlemanly orator in charge, who, after his
+ballyhoos, doubled as master of ceremonies and announcer of events,
+directed the attention of the patrons to the largest cage of the four.</p>
+
+<p>As was customary, the culminating feature of the program had been
+invested with several touches of skillful stage management, the purpose
+being to enhance the thrills provided and send the audience forth
+pleased and enthusiastic. In high boots and a tiger-skin tunic, Mr.
+Riley, armed with an iron bar held in one hand and a revolver loaded
+with blank cartridges in the other, stood poised and prepared to leap
+into the den at the ostensible peril of his life and put his ferocious
+charge through a repertoire of startling feats. His eye was set, his
+face determined; his lower jaw moved slowly. This steel-hearted man was
+chewing tobacco to hide any concern he might feel.</p>
+
+<p>Red Hoss Shackleford, resplendent in his official trappings, made an
+elaborate ceremonial of undoing the pins and bolts which upheld the
+wooden panels across the front elevation of the cage. The announcer took
+advantage of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> pause thus artfully contrived to urge upon the
+spectators the advisability of standing well back from the guard ropes.
+Every precaution had been taken, he informed them, every possible
+safeguard provided, but for their own sakes it were well to be on the
+prudent side in case the dauntless trainer should lose control over his
+dangerous pupil. This warning had its usual effect. With a forward rush
+everyone instantly pressed as closely as possible into the zone of
+supposed menace.</p>
+
+<p>Here a curious psychological fact obtrudes. In each gathering of this
+character is at least one parent, generally a father, who habitually
+conveys his offsprings of tender years to places where they will be
+acutely uncomfortable, and by preference more especially to spots where
+there is a strong likelihood that they may meet with a sudden and
+violent end. Wyattsville numbered at least one such citizen within her
+enrolled midst. He was here now, jammed up against the creaking rope,
+holding fast with either clutch to a small and a sorely frightened child
+who wept.</p>
+
+<p>Red Hoss finished with the iron catches. Behind the shielding falsework
+he heard and felt the rustle and the heave of a great sinewy body
+threshing about in a confined space. He turned his head toward the
+announcer, awaiting the ordained signal.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you all ready?" clarioned that person. "Then go!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p><p>With a clatter and crash down came the wooden frontage. It was a part
+of the mechanics intrusted to the docile and intelligent Chieftain that
+so soon as the woodwork had dropped he, counterfeiting an unappeasable
+bloodthirstiness, should fling himself headlong against the straining
+bars, uttering hair-raising roars. This also was the cue for Riley to
+wriggle nimbly through a door set in the end of the cage and slam the
+door behind him; then to outface the great beast and by threats, with
+bar and pistol both extended, to force him backward step by step, still
+snarling but seemingly daunted, round and round the cage. Finally, when
+through the demonstrated power of the human eye Chieftain had been
+sufficiently cowed, Riley would begin the stirring entertainment for
+which all this had been a spectacular overture. Such was the preliminary
+formula, but for once in his hitherto blameless life Chieftain failed to
+sustain his r&ocirc;le.</p>
+
+<p>He did not dash at his prison bars as though to rend them from their
+sockets; he did not growl in an amazingly deep bass, as per inculcated
+schooling; he did not bare the yellow fang nor yet unsheathe the cruel
+claw. With apparent difficulty, rising on his all fours from where he
+was crouched in the rear left-hand corner of his den, Chieftain advanced
+down stage with what might properly be called a rolling gait. Against
+the iron uprights he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> lurched, literally; then, as though grateful for
+their support, remained fixed there at a slanted angle for a brief
+space.</p>
+
+<p>A faunal naturalist, versed in the ways of lions, would promptly have
+taken cognizance of the fact that Chieftain, upon his face, wore an
+expression unnatural for lions to wear. It was an expression which might
+be classified as dreamily good-natured. His eyes drooped heavily, his
+lips were wreathed in a jovial feline smile. Transfixed as he was by a
+shock of astonishment and chagrin, Riley under his breath snapped a word
+of command.</p>
+
+<p>In subconscious obedience to his master's voice, Chieftain slowly
+straightened himself, came to an about face, and with his massive head
+canted far to one side and all adroop as though its weight had become to
+him suddenly burdensome, and his legs spraddled widely apart to hold him
+upright, he benignantly contemplated the sea of expectant and eager
+faces that stretched before him. Slowly he lifted a broad forefoot and
+with its padded undersurface made a fumbling gesture which might have
+been interpreted as an attempt on his part to wipe his nose.</p>
+
+<p>The effort proved too much for him. Lacking one important prop, he lost
+his balance, toppled over and fell heavily upon his side. The fall
+jolted his mouth widely ajar, and from the depths of his great throat
+was emitted an immense but unmistakable hiccup&mdash;a hiccup<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> deep, sincere
+and sustained, having a high muzzle velocity and humidly freighted with
+an aroma as of a hundred hot mince pies.</p>
+
+<p>From the spellbound crowd rose a concerted gasp of surprise. Chieftain
+heeded it not. With the indubitable air of just recalling a pleasant but
+novel experience, and filled with a newborn desire to renew the
+sensation, he groggily regained his feet and reeled back to the corner
+from whence he had come. Here, with the other properties of his act, a
+slickly painted blue barrel stood upended. Applying his nose to a spot
+at the base of it, he lapped greedily at a darkish aromatic liquid
+which, as the entranced watchers now were aware, oozed forth in a stream
+upon the cage floor through a cranny treacherously opened between two
+sprung staves. And all the while he tongued up the escaping runlet of
+fluid he purred and rumbled joyously and his tawny sides heaved and
+little tremors of pure ecstasy ran lengthwise through him to expire
+diminishingly in lesser wriggles at the tufted tip of his gently
+flapping tail.</p>
+
+<p>Then all at once understanding descended upon the audience, and from
+them together rose a tremendous whoop. A joyous whoop it was, yet tinged
+with a feather edging of jealous regret on the part of certain adult
+whoopers there. They had paid their quarters, these worthy folk, to see
+a lion perform certain tricks and antics; and lo, they had been
+vouchsafed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> the infinitely more unique spectacle of a lion with a jag
+on! It was a boon such as comes but once in many lifetimes, this
+opportunity to behold majestic Leo, converted into a confirmed inebriate
+by his first indulgence in strong and forbidden waters, returning to his
+tippling.</p>
+
+<p>To some perhaps in this land of ours the scene would have served to
+point a moral and provide a text&mdash;a lamentable picture of the evils of
+intemperance as exemplified in its effects upon a mere unreasoning dumb
+brute. But in this assemblage were few or none holding the higher view.
+Unthoughtedly they yelled their appreciation, yelling all the louder
+when Chieftain, having copiously refreshed himself, upreared upon his
+hind legs, with both his forepaws winnowing the perfumed air, and after
+executing several steps of a patently impromptu dance movement, tumbled
+with a happy, intoxicated gurgle flat upon his back and lapsed into a
+coma of total insensibility.</p>
+
+<p>But there was one among them who did not cheer. This one was a
+square-jawed person who, shoving and scrooging, cleft a passage through
+the applauding multitude, and slipped deftly under the ropes and laid a
+detaining grasp upon the peltry-clad shoulder of the astonished Riley.
+With his free hand he flipped back the lapel of his coat to display a
+badge of authority pinned on the breast of his waistcoat.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p><p>"What's the main idea?" His tone was rough. "Who's the chief booze
+smuggler of this outfit? How'd that barrel yonder come to be traveling
+across country with a soused lion?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can search me!" lied Riley glibly. "So help me, Mike, all I know is
+that that barrel was slipped over on me by a big nigger that joined out
+with us up here in Kentucky a week ago! I told him to get me a barrel,
+meaning to teach the lion a new trick, and he stuck that one in there.
+But I hadn't never got round to using it yet, and I didn't know it was
+loaded&mdash;I'll swear to that!"</p>
+
+<p>Cast in another environment, Mr. Riley might have made a good actor.
+Even here, in an embarrassing situation calling for lines spoken ad lib.
+and without prior rehearsals, he had what the critics term sincerity.
+His fine dissembling deceived the revenue man.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that being the case, where is this here nigger, then?" demanded
+the officer.</p>
+
+<p>Riley looked about him.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see him," he said. "He was right alongside just a moment ago
+too. I guess he's gone."</p>
+
+<p>This, in a sense, was the truth, and in still another sense an
+exaggeration. Red Hoss was not exactly gone, but he certainly was going.
+A man on horseback might have overtaken him, but with the handicap of
+Red Hoss' flying start against the pursuing forces no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> number of men
+afoot possibly could hope to do so.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the second mile, and still going strong, the fugitive
+bethought him to part with his red coat. He already had run out from
+under his uniform cap, but a red coat with a double row of brass buttons
+and brass-topped epaulettes on it flashing next morning across a bland
+autumnal landscape would be calculated to attract undesired attention.
+So without slackening speed he took it off and cast it behind him into
+the darkness. Figuratively speaking, he breathed easier when he crossed
+the state line at or about five <span class="smaller">A.M.</span> As a matter of fact, though, he was
+breathing harder. Some hours elapsed before he caught up with his
+panting.</p>
+
+<p>Traveling in his shirt sleeves, he reached home too late for the
+wedding. Still, considering everything, he hardly would have cared to
+attend anyhow. Either he would have felt embarrassed to be present or
+else the couple would, or perhaps all three. On such occasions nothing
+is more superfluous than an extra bridegroom. The wedding in question
+was the one uniting Melissa Grider and Homer Holmes. It was generally
+unexpected&mdash;in fact, sudden.</p>
+
+<p>The marriage took place on a Wednesday at high noon in the office of
+Justice of the Peace Dycus. Red Hoss arrived the same afternoon, shortly
+after the departure of the happy pair for Cairo, Illinois, on a
+honeymoon tour. All<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> along, Melissa had had her heart set on going to
+St. Louis; but after the license had been paid for and the magistrate
+had been remunerated there remained but thirty-four dollars of the fund
+she had been safeguarding, dollar by dollar, as her other, or regular,
+fianc&eacute; earned it. So she and Homer compromised on Cairo, and by their
+forethought in taking advantage of a popular excursion rate they had, on
+their return, enough cash left over to buy a hanging lamp with which to
+start up housekeeping.</p>
+
+<p>Late that evening, while Red Hoss still wrestled mentally with the
+confusing problem of being engaged to a girl who just had been married
+to another, a disquieting thought came abruptly to him, jolting him like
+a blow. Looking back on events, he was reminded that the sequence of
+painful misadventures which had befallen him recently dated, all and
+sundry, from that time when he was coming back down the Blandsville Road
+after delivering Mr. Dick Bell's new cow and acquired a fresh hind foot
+of a graveyard rabbit. He had been religiously toting that presumably
+infallible charm against disaster ever since&mdash;and yet just see what had
+happened to him! Surely here was a situation calling for interpretive
+treatment by one having the higher authority. In the person of the
+venerable Daddy Hannah&mdash;root, herb and conjure doctor&mdash;he found such a
+one.</p>
+
+<p>Before going into consultation the patriarch forethoughtedly collected a
+fee of seventy-five<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> cents from Red Hoss. At the outset he demanded two
+dollars, but accepted the six bits, because that happened to be all the
+money the client had. This formality concluded, he required it of Red
+Hoss that he recount in their proper chronological order those various
+strokes of ill fortune which lately had plagued him; after which Daddy
+Hannah asked to see the talisman which coincidentally had been in the
+victim's ownership from beginning to culmination of the enumerated
+catastrophes. He took it in his wrinkled hand and studied it, sides, top
+and bottom, the while Red Hoss detailed the exact circumstances
+attending the death of the bunny. Then slowly the ancient delivered his
+findings.</p>
+
+<p>"In de fust an' fo'mos' place," stated Daddy Hannah, "dis yere warn't no
+reg'lar graveyard rabbit to start off wid. See dis li'l' teeny black
+spot on de und'neath part? Well, dat's a sho' sign of a witch rabbit. A
+witch rabbit he hang round a buryin' ground, but he don't go inside of
+one&mdash;naw, suh, not never nur nary. He ain't dare to. He stay outside an'
+frolic wid de ha'nts w'en dey comes fo'th, but da's all. De onliest
+thing which dey is to do when you kills a witch rabbit is to cut off de
+haid f'um de body an' bury de haid on de north side of a log, an' den
+bury de body on de south side so's dey can't jine together ag'in an'
+resume witchin'. So you havin' failed to do so, 'tain't no wonder you
+been havin' sech a powerful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> sorry time." He started to return the foot
+to its owner, but snatched it back.</p>
+
+<p>"Hole on yere a minute, boy! Lemme tek' nuther look at dat thing." He
+took it, then burst forth with a volley of derisive chuckling. "Huh,
+huh, well ef dat ain't de beatenes' part of it all!" wheezed Daddy
+Hannah. "Red Hoss, you sho' muster been in one big hurry to git away
+f'um dat spot whar you kilt your rabbit and ketched your charm. Looky
+yere at dis yere shank j'int! Don't you see nothin' curious about de
+side of de leg whar de hock sticks out? Well den, cullid boy, ef you
+don't, all I got to say is you mus' be total blind ez well ez monst'ous
+ignunt. Dis ain't no lef' hind foot of no rabbit."</p>
+
+<p>"Whut is it den?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's de right hind foot, dat's whut 'tis!" He tossed it away
+contemptuously.</p>
+
+<p>After a long minute Red Hoss, standing at Daddy Hannah's doorstep with
+his hands rammed deep in pockets, which were both empty, spoke in tones
+of profound bitterness. He addressed his remarks to space, but Daddy
+Hannah couldn't help overhearing.</p>
+
+<p>"Fust off, I gits fooled by de right laig of de wrong rabbit. Den a
+man-eatin' mule come a-browsin' on me an' gnaw a suit of close right
+offen my back. Den I runs into a elephint in a fog an' busts one of
+Mist' Lee Farrell's taxiscabs fur him an' he busts my jaw fur me. Den I
+gits tuk advantage of by a fool lion dat can't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> chamber his licker lak a
+gen'l'man, in consequence of which I loses me a fancy job an' a chunk of
+money. Den Melissa, she up an'&mdash;well, suh, I merely wishes to say dat
+f'um now on, so fur ez I is concerned, natchel history is a utter
+failure."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>IT COULD HAPPEN AGAIN TO-MORROW</h3>
+
+<p>"Sorry, ma'am," said the Pullman conductor, "but there's not a bit of
+space left in the chair car, nor the sleeper neither."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry too," said the young woman in the tan-colored tailor-mades.
+She was smartly hatted and smartly spatted; smart all over from
+toque-tip to toe-tip. "I didn't know until almost the last minute that
+I'd have to catch this train, and trusted to chance for a seat."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes'm, I see," commiserated the man in blue. "But you know what the
+rush is this time of year, and right now on top of all that so many of
+the soldiers getting home from the other side and their folks coming
+East to meet 'em and everything. I guess though, miss, you won't have
+much trouble getting accommodated in one of the day coaches."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll try it," she said, "and thank you all the same."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p><p>She picked up her hand bag.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait a minute," he suggested. "I'll have my porter carry your valise on
+up to the other cars."</p>
+
+<p>Men of all stations in life were rather given to offering help to Miss
+Mildred Smith, the distinguished interior decorator and&mdash;on the
+side&mdash;amateur investigator for Uncle Sam with a wartime record for
+services rendered which many a professional might have envied. Perhaps
+they were the more ready to offer it since the young woman seemed so
+rarely to need it.</p>
+
+<p>This man's reward was a brisk little nod.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't bother," she said. "This bag isn't at all heavy, and I'm
+used to traveling alone and looking out for myself." She footed it
+briskly along the platform of the Dobb's Ferry station. At the door of
+the third coach back from the baggage car a flagman stopped her.</p>
+
+<p>"All full up in here, lady," he told her, "but I think maybe you might
+find some place to sit in the next car beyond. If you'll just leave your
+grip here I'll bring it along to you after we pull out."</p>
+
+<p>As she reached the door of the coach ahead the train began to move. This
+coach was comfortably filled&mdash;and more than comfortably filled. Into the
+aisles projected elbows and feet and at either side doubled rows of
+backs of heads showed above the red plush seats. She shrugged her
+shoulders; it meant standing for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> a while at least; probably someone
+would be getting off soon&mdash;this train was a local, making frequent
+stops. It was not the train she would have chosen had the choosing been
+left altogether to her, but Mullinix of the Secret Service, her
+unofficial chief, had called her away from a furnishing and finishing
+contract at a millionaire's mansion in the country back of Dobb's Ferry
+to run up state to Troy, where there had arisen a situation which in the
+opinion of the espionage squad a woman was best fitted to handle,
+provided only that woman be Miss Mildred Smith. And so on an hour's
+notice she had dropped her own work and started.</p>
+
+<p>Now, though, near the more distant end of the car she saw a break in one
+line of heads. Perhaps the gap might mean there would be room for her.
+She made her way toward the spot, her trim small figure swaying to the
+motion as the locomotive picked up speed. Drawing nearer, she saw the
+back of one seat had been turned so that its occupants faced rearward
+toward her. In this seat, the one farther from her as she went up the
+aisle, were a man and a woman; in the nearer seat, facing this pair and
+sitting next the window, was a second woman&mdash;a girl rather&mdash;all three of
+them, she deduced from the seating arrangement, being members of the
+same party. A suitcase rested upon the cushions alongside the younger
+woman.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p><p>"I beg your pardon," said the lone passenger, halting here, "but is
+this place taken?"</p>
+
+<p>The man's face twisted as though in annoyance. He made an undecided
+gesture which might be interpreted either as an affirmative or the other
+thing. "I'm sorry if I am disturbing you," added Miss Smith, "but the
+car is crowded&mdash;every inch of it except this seems to be occupied."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I guess it's all right," he said, though in his begrudged consent
+was a sort of indirect intimation that it was not altogether all right.
+He half rose and swung the suitcase up into the luggage rack overhead,
+then tucked in his knees so she might slip into the place opposite him
+next the aisle.</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me," he said a moment later, "but I could change seats with you
+if you don't mind."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyebrows went up a trifle.</p>
+
+<p>In her experiences it had not often happened that seemingly without
+reason a male fellow traveler had suggested that she give him a place
+commonly regarded as preferable to his own.</p>
+
+<p>"I do mind, rather," she answered. "Riding backward makes me carsick
+sometimes. Still I will change with you if you insist on it. I'm the
+intruder, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, never mind!" he hastened to say. "I guess it don't make any
+difference. And there's no intrusion, miss&mdash;honest now, there ain't."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p><p>Miss Smith opened the book she had brought along and began to read. She
+felt that obliquely her enforced companions were studying her&mdash;at least
+two of them were. The one with whom she shared a seat had not looked her
+way; except to draw in her body a trifle as Miss Smith sat down she had
+made no movement of any sort. Certainly she had manifested no interest
+in the new arrival. In moments when her glance did not cross theirs,
+Miss Smith, turning the pages of her book, considered the two who faced
+her, subconsciously trying&mdash;as was her way&mdash;to appraise them for what
+outwardly they presumably were. Offhand she decided the man might be the
+superintendent of an estate; or then again he might be somebody's head
+gardener. He was heavily built and heavily mustached with a reddish cast
+to his skin and fat broad hands. The woman alongside him had the look
+about her of being a high-class domestic employee, possibly a
+housekeeper or perhaps a seamstress. Miss Smith decided that if not
+exactly a servant she was accustomed to dealing with servants and in her
+own sphere undoubtedly would figure as a competent and authoritative
+person.</p>
+
+<p>Of her own seat mate she could make out little except that she was
+young&mdash;young enough to be the daughter of the woman across from her, and
+yet plainly enough not the woman's daughter. Indeed if first impressions
+counted for anything she was of a different type and a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> different fiber
+from the pair who rode in her company. One somehow felt that she was
+with them but not of them; that she formed the alien apex of a triangle
+otherwise harmonious in its social composition. She was muffled cheek to
+knees in a loose cape of blue military cloth which quite hid the
+outlines of her figure, yet nevertheless revealed that she was slimly
+formed and of fair height. The flaring collar of the garment was
+upturned, shielding her face almost to the line of her brows. But out of
+the tail of her eye Miss Smith caught a suggestion of a youthful regular
+profile and admiringly observed the texture of a mass of thick, fine,
+auburn hair. Miss Smith was partial to auburn hair; she wondered if this
+girl had a coloring to match the rich reddish tones that glinted in the
+smooth coils about her head.</p>
+
+<p>Presently the man fumbled in a breast pocket of his waistcoat and found
+a long malignant-looking cigar. He bit the end of it and inserted the
+bitten end in his mouth, rolling it back and forth between his lips.
+Before long this poor substitute of the confirmed nicotinist for a smoke
+failed to satisfy his cravings. He whispered a word to his middle-aged
+companion, who nodded, and then with a mutter of apology to Miss Smith
+for troubling her he scrouged out into the aisle and disappeared in the
+direction of the smoker.</p>
+
+<p>Left alone, the woman very soon began to yawn. It was to be judged that
+the stuffy air<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> of the car made her dozy. She kept her eyes open with an
+effort, her head lolling in spite of her drowsy efforts to hold it
+straight, yet all the while bearing herself after the fashion of one
+determined not to fall asleep.</p>
+
+<p>A voice spoke in Miss Smith's ear&mdash;a low and well-bred and musical
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon," it said hesitatingly, then stopped.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Smith turned her head toward the speaker and now for the first time
+had a fair chance to look into the face of the voice's owner. She looked
+and saw the oval of a most comely face, white and drawn as though by
+exhaustion or by deep sorrow, or perhaps by both. For all their pallor
+the cheeks were full and smooth; the brow was broad and low; the mouth
+firm and sweet. From between the tall collars of the cape the throat,
+partly revealed, rose as a smooth fair column. What made the girl almost
+beautiful were her eyes&mdash;eyes big and brown with a fire in them to
+suggest the fine high mettle of a resolute character, but out of them
+there looked&mdash;or else the other was woefully wrong&mdash;a great grief, a
+great distress bravely borne. To herself&mdash;all in that instant of
+looking&mdash;she said mentally that these were the saddest, most courageous
+eyes she ever had seen set in a face so young and seemingly bespeaking
+so healthful a body. For a moment Miss Smith was so held by what she saw
+that she forgot to speak.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span></p><p>"I beg your pardon," repeated the girl. "I wonder if you would be good
+enough to bring me a drink of water&mdash;if it isn't too much trouble. I'm
+so thirsty. I can't very well go myself&mdash;there are reasons why I can't.
+And I don't think she"&mdash;with a sidelong glance toward the nodding figure
+opposite&mdash;"I don't think she would feel that she could go and leave me.'</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly I will," said Miss Smith. "It's not a bit of bother."</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" The woman had been roused to full wakefulness by the
+movement of the stranger in rising.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't move," said Miss Smith. "Your young lady is thirsty and
+I'm going to bring her a drink of water&mdash;that's all."</p>
+
+<p>"It's very good of you, miss," said the elder woman. She reached for her
+hand bag. "I think I've got a penny here for the cup."</p>
+
+<p>"I've plenty of pennies," said Miss Smith.</p>
+
+<p>At the cooler behind the forward door she filled a paper cup and brought
+it back to where the two were. To her surprise the elder woman reached
+for the cup and took it from her and held it to the girl's lips while
+she drank. With a profound shock of sympathy the realization went
+through Miss Smith that the girl had not the use of her hands.</p>
+
+<p>Having drunk, the girl settled back in her former posture, her face half
+turned toward the window and her head drooping as if from weariness. The
+woman laid the emptied cup aside<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> and at once was dozing off again. The
+third member of the group sat in pitying wonder. She wondered what
+affliction had made a cripple of this wholesome-looking bonny creature.
+She thought of ghastly things she had read concerning the dreadful after
+effects of infantile paralysis, but rejected the suggestion, because no
+matter what else of dread and woe the girl's eyes had betrayed the face
+was too plump and the body, which she could feel touching hers, too firm
+and well nourished to betoken a present and wasting infirmity. So then
+it must have been some accident&mdash;some maiming mishap which probably had
+not been of recent occurrence, since nothing else about the girl
+suggested physical impairment. If this deduction were correct, the
+wearing of the shrouding blue cape in an atmosphere almost stiflingly
+close stood explained. It was so worn to hide the injured limbs from
+view. That, of course, would be the plausible explanation. Yet at the
+same time an inner consciousness gave Miss Smith a certain and absolute
+conviction that the specter of tearfulness lurking at the back of those
+big brown eyes meant more than the ever-present realization of some
+bodily disfigurement.</p>
+
+<p>Fascinated, she found her eyes searching the shape beside her for a clew
+to the answer of this lamentable mystery. In her covert scrutiny there
+was no morbid desire to spy upon another's hidden miseries&mdash;our Miss
+Smith was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> too well-bred for that&mdash;only was there a sudden quickened
+pity and with that pity a yearning to offer, if opportunity served, any
+small comfort of act or word which might fitly come her way. As her
+glance&mdash;behind the cover of her reopened book&mdash;traveled over the cloaked
+shape searching for a clew to the secret she saw how that chance
+promised to serve her ends. The girl was half turned from her, a
+shoulder pressing against the window ledge; the twist of her body had
+drawn one front breadth of the cape awry so that no longer did it
+completely overlap its fellow. In the slight opening thus unwittingly
+contrived Miss Smith could make out at the wearer's belt line a partly
+obscured inch or two of what seemed to be a heavy leathern gear, or
+truss, which so far as the small limits of the exposed area gave hint as
+to its purpose appeared to engage the forearms like a surgical device,
+supporting their weight below the bend of the elbows. With quickening
+and enhanced sympathy the little woman winced.</p>
+
+<p>Then she started, her gaze lifting quickly. Of a sudden she became aware
+that the girl was regarding her straightforwardly with those haggard
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you tell what the&mdash;the trouble is with me?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>She spoke under her breath, the wraith of a weary little smile about her
+mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm so sorry," answered Miss Smith<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> contritely. "But please believe
+me&mdash;it was not mere cheap inquisitiveness that made me look."</p>
+
+<p>"I think I know," said the girl softly. "You were sorry. And it doesn't
+matter much&mdash;your seeing. Somehow I don't mind your seeing."</p>
+
+<p>"But I haven't really seen&mdash;I only caught a glimpse. And I'm afraid now
+that I've been pressing too closely against your side; perhaps giving
+you pain by touching your arms."</p>
+
+<p>"My arms are not hurting me," said the girl, still with that queer ghost
+of a smile at her lips. "I've not been hurt or injured in any way."</p>
+
+<p>"Not hurt? Then why&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She choked the involuntary question even as she was framing it.</p>
+
+<p>"This&mdash;this has been done, I suppose, to keep me from hurting anyone
+else."</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;but I don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you&mdash;yet? Then lift a fold of my wrap&mdash;carefully, so no one else
+can see while you are looking. I'd rather you did," she continued,
+seeing how Miss Smith hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"But I am a stranger to you. I don't wish to pry. I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Please do! Then perhaps you won't be worrying later on about&mdash;about me
+if you know the truth now."</p>
+
+<p>With one hand Miss Smith turned back the edge of the cape, enlarging
+slightly the opening, and what she saw shocked her more deeply than
+though she had beheld some hideous <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>mutilation. She saw that about both
+of the girl's wrists were snugly strapped broad leather bands, designed
+something after the fashion of the armlets sometimes worn by athletes
+and artisans, excepting that here the buckle fastenings were set upon
+the tops of the wrists instead of upon the inner sides; saw, too, that
+these cuffs were made fast to a wide leather belt, which in an unbroken
+band encircled the girl's trunk, so that her prisoned forearms were
+pressed in and confined closely against her body at the line of her
+waist. Her elbows she might move slightly and her fingers freely; but
+the hands were held well apart and the fingers in play might touch only
+the face of the broad girthing, which presumably was made fast by
+buckles or lacings at her back. As if the better to indicate how firmly
+she was secured, the wearer of these strange bonds flexed her arm
+muscles slightly; the result was a little creaking sound as the harness
+answered the strain. Then the girl relaxed and the sound ended.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you poor child!" The gasped exclamation came involuntarily,
+carrying all the deeper burden of compassion because it was uttered in a
+half whisper. Quickly she snugged the cloak in to cover the ugly thing
+she had looked upon. "What have you done that you should be treated so?"</p>
+
+<p>Indignation was in the asking&mdash;that and an incredulous disbelief that
+here had been any wrongdoing.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p><p>"It isn't what I've done&mdash;exactly. I imagine it is their fear of what
+they think I might do if my hands were free."</p>
+
+<p>"But where are you going? Where are these people taking you? You're no
+criminal. I know you're not. You couldn't be!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am being taken to a place up the road to be confined as a dangerous
+lunatic."</p>
+
+<p>In the accenting of the words was no trace of rebellion or even of
+self-pity, but merely there was the dead weight and numbness of a
+hopeless resignation to make the words sound flat and listless.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe one word of it!" exclaimed Miss Smith, then broke off
+short, realizing that the shock of the girl's piteous admission had sent
+her own voice lifting and that now she had a second listener. The woman
+diagonally across from her was sitting bolt upright and a pair of small
+eyes were narrowing upon her in a squint of watchful and hostile
+suspicion. Instantly she stood up&mdash;a small, competent, determined body.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be back," she stated, disregarding the elder woman and speaking to
+the younger. "And I'm going to find out more about you, too, before I'm
+done."</p>
+
+<p>Her step, departing, was brisk and resolute.</p>
+
+<p>In the aisle near the forward door she encountered the flagman.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a man in the smoker I must see at once," she said. "Will you
+please go in there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> and find him and tell him I wish&mdash;no, never mind. I
+see him coming now."</p>
+
+<p>She went a step or two on to meet the person she sought, halting him in
+the untenanted space at the end of the coach.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to speak with you, please," she began.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you'll have to hurry," he told her, "because I'm getting off with
+my party in less'n five minutes from now. What was it you wanted to say
+to me?"</p>
+
+<p>"That young girl yonder&mdash;I became interested in her. I thought perhaps
+she had been injured. Then more or less by chance I found out the true
+facts. I spoke to her; she told me a little about her plight."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you've been talking to her what's the big idea in talking to
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>His tone was churlish.</p>
+
+<p>"This isn't mere vulgar curiosity on my part. I have a perfectly proper
+motive, I think, in inquiring into her case. What is her name."</p>
+
+<p>"Margaret Vinsolving."</p>
+
+<p>"Spell it for me, please&mdash;the last name?"</p>
+
+<p>He spelled it out, and she after him to fix it in her mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Where does she live&mdash;I mean where is her home?"</p>
+
+<p>"Village of Pleasantdale, this state," shortly.</p>
+
+<p>"Who are her people?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's got a mother and that's all, far as I know."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p><p>"What asylum are you taking her to?"</p>
+
+<p>"No asylum. We're taking her to Doctor Shorter's Sanitarium back of
+Peekskill two miles&mdash;Dr. Clement Shorter, specialist in nervous
+disorders&mdash;he's the head."</p>
+
+<p>"It is a private place then and not a state asylum?"</p>
+
+<p>"You said it."</p>
+
+<p>"You are connected with this Doctor Shorter's place, I assume?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yep."</p>
+
+<p>"In what capacity?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, sort of an outside man&mdash;look after the grounds and help out
+generally with the patients and all. And now, say, lady, if that'll
+satisfy you I guess I better be stepping along. I got to see about
+getting this here patient and the matron off the train; that's the
+matron that's setting with her."</p>
+
+<p>"Just a moment more, please."</p>
+
+<p>She felt in a fob set under the cuff of her left sleeve and brought
+forth a small gold badge and held it cupped in her gloved hand for him
+to see. As he bent his head and made out the meaning of the badge the
+gruff air dropped from him magically.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I see!" he said. "Secret Service, eh? All right, ma'am, what more
+did you want to know? Only I'd ask you speak brisk because there ain't
+so much time."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me briefly what you know of that child."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p><p>"Not such a lot, excepting she's a dangerous lunatic, having been
+legally adjudged so yestiddy. And her mother's paying for her keep at a
+high-class place where she can have special treatment and special care
+instead of letting her be put away in one of the state asylums. And so
+I'm taking her there&mdash;me and the matron yonder. That's about all, I
+guess."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe it."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't believe what?"</p>
+
+<p>He was beginning to bristle anew.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't believe she is insane at all, much less dangerously so. Why, I've
+just been talking with her. We exchanged only a few words, but in all
+that she said she was so perfectly rational, so perfectly sensible.
+Besides, one has only to look at her to feel sure some terrible mistake
+or some terrible injustice is being done. Surely there is nothing
+eccentric, nothing erratic about her; now is there? You must have been
+studying her. Don't you yourself feel that there might have been
+something wrong about her commitment?"</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a chancet. Everything's been positively regular and aboveboard. You
+can't railroad folks into Doctor Shorter's place; he's got too high a
+standing. Shorter takes no chances with anybody."</p>
+
+<p>"But she seemed so absolutely normal in speech, manner&mdash;everything. I've
+seen insane persons before now and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p><p>"Excuse me, but about how many have you seen?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not many, I admit, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, excuse me again, lady, but I thought as much. Well, I
+have&mdash;plenty of 'em I've seen in my time. See 'em every day for the
+matter of that. Listen to me! For instance, now, we've got a case up
+there with us now. He's been there going on fifteen years; used to be a
+preacher, highly educated and all that. Look at him and you wouldn't see
+a thing out of the way with him except that he'd be wearing a
+strait-jacket. Talk to him for maybe a week and you wouldn't notice a
+single thing wrong about him. He'd just strike you all along as being
+one of the nicest, mildest, old Christian gents you ever met up with in
+your whole life. But get him on a certain subject; just mention a
+certain word to him and he'd tear your throat out with his bare hands if
+he could get at you."</p>
+
+<p>"But this poor girl, surely her case is different? Was it really
+necessary to bind her hands as you've done?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lady, about these here violent ones you can't never tell. Me, I never
+saw her in my life before I went down after her this morning, and up to
+now she hasn't made me a mite of trouble. But I had my warning from them
+that turned her over to me. Anyhow, all I needed was the story of her
+own mother, as fine a lady as you'd care to see and just about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+broken-hearted over all this. You'd think from the way she carried on
+she was the one that was being put away and not the daughter. And yet,
+what did the mother swear to on her sacred oath? She swore to the
+daughter's having tried, not once but half a dozen separate times to
+kill her, till she was afraid for her own life&mdash;positively!</p>
+
+<p>"Besides, lady, it's been my experience, and I've had a heap of it, that
+it's the quiet-acting ones that are apt to strike the quickest and do
+the most damage when the fit comes on 'em. So taking everything into
+consideration, I felt like as if I oughter be purty careful handling her
+on this trip. But she's all right. Probably nobody on this train,
+outside of you, knows there's anything wrong with her and it was
+accidental-like, so you tell me, the way you come to find out&mdash;you
+taking that seat alongside her and getting into talk with her whilst I
+was in yonder smoking. It's better she should be under control thataway
+than that she should maybe get a spell on her right here in this car or
+somewheres and me be forced to hold her down by main strength and
+possibly have to handle her pretty rough. I put it to you now, ain't it?
+The way she's fixed she can't harm herself nor no one else. You take it
+from me, lady, that while I've been in this business for so long I don't
+always get my private feelings harrowed up over the case of a
+nice-looking young girl like this one is, like an outsider<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> might, still
+at that I ain't hard-hearted and I ain't aiming to be severe just
+because I can. But what else is there for me to do except what I'm
+doing? I ask you. Say, it's funny she talked to you. She ain't said
+hardly a word to us since she started. Didn't even say nothing when I
+put the hobbles on her."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not questioning your judgment," said Miss Smith, "but she is so
+pitiable! She seemed to me like some dumb, frightened, wild creature
+caught in a trap. And despite what you say I'm sure she can't be mad.
+Please, may I speak with her again&mdash;if she herself doesn't mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afeared it's too late," he said not unkindly. "We're slowing down
+for Peekskill now. I'll have to step lively as it is to get 'em off
+shipshape. But if you've still got any doubts left in your mind you can
+look up the court records at White Plains. You'll find everything's been
+done positively legal and regular. And if you should want to reach me
+any time to find out how she's getting along or anything like that, why
+my name is Abram Foley, care of Doctor Shorter."</p>
+
+<p>He cast this farewell information back over his shoulder as he hurried
+from her.</p>
+
+<p>Half convinced yet doubting still, and filled wholly with an
+overmastering pity, Miss Smith stood where she was while the train
+jerkily came to a standstill. There she stayed, watching, as the trio
+quitted the car. Past her where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> she stood the man Foley led the way,
+burdened with the heavy suitcase. Next came his charge, walking steadily
+erect, mercifully cloaked to her knees in the blue garment; and the
+matron, in turn behind her, bearing a hand bag and an odd parcel or two.
+About the departing group a casual onlooker would have sensed nothing
+unusual. But our Miss Smith, knowing what she did know, held a clenched
+hand to the lump that had formed in her throat. She was minded to speak
+in farewell to the prisoner, and yet a second impulse held her mute.</p>
+
+<p>She fell in behind the three of them though, following as far as the
+platform, being minded to witness the last visible act of the tragedy
+upon which she had stumbled. Her eyes and her heart went with them as
+they crossed through the open shed of the station, the man still
+leading, the matron with one hand guiding their unresisting ward toward
+where a closed automobile, a sort of hybrid between a town car and an
+ambulance, was drawn up on the driveway just beyond the eaves of the
+building. A driver in a gray livery opened the door of the car for its
+occupants.</p>
+
+<p>Alongside the automobile the girl swung herself round, her head thrown
+back, as a felon might face about at the gateway of his prison&mdash;for a
+last view of the free world he was leaving behind. Seemingly the
+vigilant woman misinterpreted this movement as the first <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>indication of
+a spirit of kindling obstinacy. Alarmed, she caught at the girl to
+restrain her. Her grasp closed upon the shoulder of the cape and as the
+wrenched garment came away in her hand the prisoner stood revealed in
+her bonds&mdash;a slim graceful figure, for all the disfigurement of the
+clumsy harness work which fettered her.</p>
+
+<p>An instant later the cape had been replaced upon her shoulders, hiding
+her state from curious eyes, but in that same brief space of time she
+must have seen leaning from the train, which now again was in motion,
+the shape of her unknown champion, for she nodded her head as though in
+gratitude and good-by and her white face suddenly was lighted with what
+the passenger upon the car platform, seeing this through a sudden mist
+of tears, thought to be the bravest, most pitiable smile that ever she
+had seen.</p>
+
+<p>The train doubled round an abrupt curve, in the sharpness of its swing
+almost throwing her off her feet, and when she had regained her balance
+and looked again the station was furlongs behind her, hidden from sight
+by intervening buildings.</p>
+
+<p>It was that smile of farewell which acted as a flux to carry into the
+recipient's mind a resolution already forming. Into things her emotions
+were likely to lead her headlong and impetuously, but for a way out of
+them this somewhat unusual young woman named Smith<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> generally had for
+her guide a certain clear quality of reasoning, backed by an intuition
+which helped her frequently to achieve satisfactory results. So it was
+with her in this instance.</p>
+
+<p>Her share of the business in Troy completed, as speedily it was, she
+stayed in Albany for half a day on her way back and called upon the
+governor. At first sight he liked her, for her good looks, for her
+trigness, her directness and more than any of these for the excellent
+mental poise which so patently was a part of her. The outcome of her
+visit to him and his enthusiastic admiration for her was that the
+district attorney of Westchester County shortly thereafter instituted an
+investigation, the chief fruitage of that investigation being embodied
+in a somewhat longish letter from him, which Miss Smith read in her
+studio apartment one afternoon perhaps three weeks after the date of her
+meeting on trainboard with that adjudged maniac, the girl Margaret
+Vinsolving.</p>
+
+<p>To the letter was a polite preamble. She skipped it. We may do well to
+follow her lead and come to the body of it, which ran like this:</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Janet Vinsolving is the widow of a colonel in our Regular Army. My
+information is that she is a woman of culture and refinement. Since the
+death of her husband some eight years ago she has been residing in a
+small home which she owns in the outskirts of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>Pleasantdale village in
+this county. From the fact that she keeps no servants and from other
+facts brought to me I gather that she is in very modest circumstances.
+She has been living quite alone except for the daughter, Margaret, who
+is her only child. The daughter was educated in the public schools of
+the county. Lately she has been studying applied designing with a view
+to becoming an interior decorator."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, now I know another reason why I was drawn to her!" interpolated the
+reader, speaking to herself. With heightened interest she read on:</p>
+
+<p>"On inquiry it appears that among her former schoolmates and teachers
+she was popular, though not inclined to make intimates. She is reputed
+to have been rather high-tempered, but seemingly throughout her
+childhood and young girlhood there was nothing about her conduct or
+appearance to indicate a disordered mind. Indeed there was no suggestion
+of mental aberration on her part from any source until within the past
+month. However, I should add that it is rather hard to arrive at any
+accurate estimate of her general behavior by reason of the fact that
+mother and daughter led so secluded a life. They had acquaintances in
+the community, but apparently no close friends there or elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>"About four weeks ago, on the twenty-eighth of last month to be exact,
+the mother, described to me as being in a state of great <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>distress,
+visited Justice Cannavan, then sitting in chambers at White Plains, and
+asking for a private interview with him, requested an inquiry into the
+sanity of the girl Margaret, with a view, as she explained, of
+protecting her own life. Her daughter, she alleged, had without warning
+developed a homicidal tendency aimed at the applicant.</p>
+
+<p>"According to Mrs. Vinsolving, the girl, who always theretofore had been
+a devoted and affectionate child, had made at least five separate and
+distinct attempts to kill her, first by putting poison into her food and
+later by attempting to strangle her at night in her bed. Next only to a
+natural desire to have her own physical safety insured, the mother was
+apparently inspired by a wish to surround the truth regarding her
+beloved child's aberration with as much secrecy as possible. At the same
+time she realized that a certain amount of publicity was inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>"Acting under the statutes, the justice appointed two reputable
+practicing physicians of the county, namely Dr. Ernest Malt, of
+Wincorah, and Dr. James P. McGlore, of Pleasantdale, to sit as a
+commission for the purpose of inquiring into Miss Vinsolving's mental
+state. The mother, still exhibiting every evidence of maternal grief,
+appeared before these gentlemen and repeated in detail the account of
+the attacks made upon her, as previously described to His Honor.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p><p>"The girl was then brought before the commission. It was explained to
+her that under the law she had the right to demand a hearing in open
+court before a jury chosen to pass upon her sanity. This she waived, but
+from this point on throughout the inquiry she steadfastly declined to
+make answers to the questions propounded to her by the members of the
+commission in an effort to ascertain her mental status, but on the
+contrary persistently maintained a silence which they interpreted as a
+phase of insane cunning characteristic of a type of abnormality not
+often encountered, but in their opinion the more sinister and
+significant because of its rarity.</p>
+
+<p>"They accordingly drew up a finding setting forth that in their opinion
+and deliberate judgment the unfortunate young woman was suffering from a
+progressive and therefore probably incurable form of dementia. The
+justice immediately signed the necessary orders for her detention and
+commitment. To save the daughter from being sent to a state institution
+the mother provided funds sufficient for her care at Doctor Shorter's
+sanitarium, an establishment of unimpeachable reputation, and she
+accordingly was taken there in proper custody, as you yourself are
+aware.</p>
+
+<p>"My information from the sanitarium, which I procured in response to
+your request, and the governor's instructions to me for a full inquiry
+into all the circumstances is that since her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>confinement Miss
+Vinsolving has been under constant observation. She has been orderly and
+obedient and except for slightly melancholic tendencies, which might
+easily be provoked by the nature of her environment, is quite natural in
+her behavior. I draw the inference, however, that this docility may be
+merely the forerunner of an outburst at any time.</p>
+
+<p>"Altogether my investigation convinces me that no miscarriage of the law
+could possibly have occurred in this instance. There is certainly no
+ground for suspecting that the mother had any ulterior or improper
+motive in seeking to have her daughter and sole companion deprived of
+liberty. Neither the mother nor any other person alive can hope to
+profit in a financial sense by reason of the girl's temporary or
+permanent detention.</p>
+
+<p>"The girl herself is without means of her own. The mother for her
+maintenance is largely dependent upon the pension she receives from the
+United States Government. The girl had no income or estate of her own
+and no expectancy of any inheritance from any imaginable source other
+than the small estate she will legally inherit at the death of her
+mother. Finally I may add that nowhere in the case has there developed
+any suggestion of a scandal in the life of mother or daughter or of any
+clandestine love affair on the part of either.</p>
+
+<p>"These briefly are the available facts as compiled by a trustworthy
+member of my staff,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> Assistant District Attorney Horace Wilkes, to whom
+I detailed the duty of making a painstaking inquiry. If I may hereafter
+be of service to you in this matter or any other matter, kindly command
+me. I have the honor to be,</p>
+
+<p class="center">"Yours etc., etc."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>With a little gesture of despairful resignation Miss Smith laid the
+letter down. Well, there was nothing more she could do; nothing more to
+be done. She had come to a blind end. The proof was conclusive of the
+worst. But in her thoughts, waking and sleeping, persisted the image of
+that gallant, pathetic little figure which she had seen last at the
+Peekskill station, bound, helpless, alone and all so courageously facing
+what to most of us would be worse than death itself. Awake or in sleep
+she could not get it out of her mind.</p>
+
+<p>At length one night following on a day which for the greater part she
+had spent in a study of the somewhat curious laws that in New York
+State&mdash;as well as in divers other states of the Union&mdash;govern the
+procedure touching certain classes coming within purview of the code,
+she awoke in the little hours preceding the dawn to find herself saying
+aloud: "There's something wrong&mdash;there must be&mdash;there has to be!"</p>
+
+<p>Until daylight and after she lay there planning a course of action until
+finally she had it completed. True, it was a grasping at feeble<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> straws,
+but even so she meant to follow along the only course which seemed open
+to her.</p>
+
+<p>First she did some long-distance telephoning. Then immediately after
+breakfast she sent to the garage round the corner for her runabout and
+in it she rode up through the city and on into Westchester, now
+beginning to flaunt the circus colors of a gorgeous Indian summer. An
+hour and a half of steady driving brought her to the village of
+Pleasantdale. She found it a place well named, seeing that it was tucked
+down in a cove among the hills between the Hudson on the one side and
+the Sound on the other.</p>
+
+<p>Following the directions given her by a lone policeman on duty in the
+tiny public square, she ran two blocks along the main street and drew up
+where a window sign giving name and hours advertised that James P.
+McGlore, M.D., here professionally received patients in his office on
+the lower floor of his place of residence. A maidservant answered the
+caller's knock, and showing her into a chamber furnished like a parlor
+which had started out to be a reception room and then had tried&mdash;too
+late&mdash;to change back again into a parlor, bade her wait. She did not
+have long to wait. Almost immediately an inner door opened and in the
+opening appeared the short and blocky figure of a somewhat elderly,
+old-fashioned-looking man with a square homely face&mdash;a face which
+instantly she classified as belonging to a rather<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> stupid, very dogmatic
+and utterly honest man. He had outjutting, belligerent eyebrows and a
+stubborn underjaw that was badly undershot. He spoke as he entered and
+his tone was noticeably not cordial.</p>
+
+<p>"The girl tells me your name is Smith. I suppose from that you're the
+young person that the district attorney telephoned me about an hour or
+so ago. Well, how can I serve you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps, doctor, the district attorney told you I had interested myself
+in the case of the Vinsolving girl&mdash;Margaret Vinsolving," she began. "I
+had intended to call also upon your associate, Doctor Malt, over at
+Wincorah, but I learn he is away."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes," he said with a sort of hurried petulance. "Know all about
+that. Malt's like a lot of these young new physicians&mdash;always running
+off on vacations. Mustn't hold me responsible for his absences. Got no
+time to think about the other fellow. Own affairs are enough&mdash;keep me
+busy. Well, go on, why don't you? You were speaking of the Vinsolving
+girl. Well, what of her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was saying that I had interested myself in her case and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He snapped in: "One moment. Let's get this all straightened out before
+we start. May I inquire if you are closely related to the young person
+in question?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am not. I never saw her but once."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p><p>"Are you by any chance a close friend of the young woman?"</p>
+
+<p>He towered over her, for she was seated and he had not offered to sit
+down. Indeed throughout the interview he remained standing.</p>
+
+<p>Looking up at him, where he glowered above her, she answered back
+promptly:</p>
+
+<p>"As I was saying, I never saw her but once&mdash;that was on the day she was
+carried away to be placed in confinement. So I cannot call myself her
+friend exactly, though I would like to be her friend. It was because of
+the sympathy which her position&mdash;and I might add, her
+personality&mdash;roused in me that I have taken the liberty of coming here
+to see you about her."</p>
+
+<p>Under his breath he growled and grunted and puffed certain sounds. She
+caught the purport of at least two of the words.</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me, doctor," she said briskly, "but I am not an amateur
+philanthropist. I trust I'm not an amateur anything. I am a business
+woman earning my own living by my own labors and I pay taxes and for the
+past year or so I have been a citizen and a voter. Please do not regard
+me merely as an officious meddler&mdash;a busybody with nothing to do except
+to mind other people's affairs. It was quite by chance that I came upon
+this poor child and learned something of her unhappy state."</p>
+
+<p>The choleric brows went up like twin stress marks accenting unspoken
+skepticism.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p><p>"A child&mdash;of twenty-four?" he commented ironically.</p>
+
+<p>"A child, measured by my age or yours. As I told you, I met her quite
+accidentally. She appealed to me so&mdash;such a plucky, helpless, friendless
+little thing she seemed with those hideous leather straps binding her."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to imply that she was being mistreated by those who had her
+in charge?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, her escorts&mdash;or attendants or warders or guards or whatever one
+might call them&mdash;seemed kindly enough, according to their lights. But
+she was so quiet, so passive that I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, would you expect anyone who felt a proper sense of responsibility
+to suffer dangerous maniacs to run at large without restraint or control
+of any sort upon their limbs and their actions?"</p>
+
+<p>"But, doctor, that is just the point&mdash;are you so entirely sure that she
+is a dangerous maniac? That is what I want to ask you&mdash;whether there
+isn't a possibility, however remote, that a mistake may conceivably have
+been made? Please don't misunderstand me," she interjected quickly,
+seeing how he&mdash;already stiff and bristly&mdash;had at her words stiffened and
+bristled still more. "I do not mean to intimate that anything unethical
+has been done. In fact I am quite sure that everything has been quite
+ethical. And I am not questioning your professional standing or decrying
+your abilities.</p>
+
+<p>"But as I understand it, neither you nor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> Doctor Malt is avowedly an
+alienist. I assume that neither of you has ever specialized in nervous
+or mental disorders. Such being the case, don't you agree with me&mdash;this
+idea has just occurred to me&mdash;that if an alienist, a man especially
+versed in these things rather than a general practitioner, however
+experienced and competent, were called in even now&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And you just said you were not reflecting upon my professional
+abilities!"</p>
+
+<p>His tone was heavily sarcastic.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I am not! I beg your pardon if my poor choice of language has
+conveyed any such impression. What I am trying to get at, doctor, in my
+inexpert way, is that I talked with this girl, and while I exchanged
+only a few words with her, nevertheless what she said&mdash;yes, and her
+bearing as well, her look, everything about her&mdash;impressed me as being
+entirely rational."</p>
+
+<p>He fixed her with a hostile glare and at her he aimed a blunt gimlet of
+a forefinger.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you quite sure you are entirely sane yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"I trust I am fairly normal."</p>
+
+<p>"Got any little funny quirks in your brain? Any little temperamental
+crotchets in which you differ from the run of people round you? Think
+now!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she confessed, "I don't like cats&mdash;I hate cats. And I don't like
+figured wall paper. And I don't like&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p><p>"That will be sufficient. Take the first point: You hate cats. On that
+count alone any confirmed cat lover would regard you as being as crazy
+as a March hare. But until you start going round trying to kill other
+people's cats or trying to kill other people who own cats there's
+probably no danger that anyone will prefer charges of lunacy against you
+and have you locked up."</p>
+
+<p>She smiled a little in spite of her earnestness.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps it is symptomatic of a lesion in my brain that I should be
+concerning myself in the case of a strange girl whom I have seen but
+once&mdash;is that also in your thoughts, Doctor McGlore?"</p>
+
+<p>"We'll waive that," he said. "For the sake of argument we'll concede
+that your indicative peculiarities assume a harmless phase at present.
+But this Vinsolving girl's case is different&mdash;hers were not harmless.
+Her acts were amply conclusive to establish proof of her mental
+condition."</p>
+
+<p>"From the district attorney's statement to me I rather got the
+impression that she did not indulge in any abnormal conduct while before
+you for examination."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he tell you of her blank refusal to answer the simplest of the
+questions my associate and I put to her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor," she countered, seeking to woo him into a better humor, "would
+you construe silence on a woman's part as necessarily a mark<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> of
+insanity? It is a rare thing, I concede. But might it not sometimes be
+an admirable thing as well?"</p>
+
+<p>But this gruff old man was not to be cajoled into pleasanter channels
+than the course his mood steered for him.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll waive that too. Anyhow, the mother's evidence was enough."</p>
+
+<p>"But was there anything else other than the mother's unsupported story
+for you to go on and be guided by?"</p>
+
+<p>"What else was needed?" he retorted angrily. "What motive could the
+mother have except the motives that were prompted by mother love? That
+was a devoted, desolated woman if ever I saw one. Look here! A daughter
+without cause suddenly turns upon her mother and tries to kill her.
+Well, then, either she's turned criminal or she has gone crazy!</p>
+
+<p>"But why should I go on debating with you a matter which you don't know
+anything about in the first place and in which you have no call to
+interfere in the second place?</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to be sharp with you, young woman, but that's the plain
+fact. The duty which I undertook under the law and as a reputable
+physician was not a pleasant one, and it becomes all the less pleasant
+when an unqualified layman&mdash;laywoman if you prefer to phrase it that
+way&mdash;cross-examines me on my judgment."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p><p>"Doctor, let me repeat again I have not sought to cross-question you or
+belittle your knowledge. But you speak of the law. Do you not think it a
+monstrous thing that two men even though they be of high standing in
+their profession as general practitioners, but without special
+acquaintance with mental derangements&mdash;I am not speaking of this
+particular case now but of hundreds of other cases&mdash;do you not think it
+a wrong thing that two such persons may pass upon a third person's
+sanity and upon the uncorroborated testimony of some fourth person
+recommend the confinement of the accused third person in an asylum for
+the insane?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you know a person so complained of&mdash;or accused, as you put
+it&mdash;has the right to a jury trial in open court. This girl that you're
+so worked up about had that right. She waived it."</p>
+
+<p>"But is a presumably demented person a fit judge of his or her own best
+course of conduct? In your opinion shouldn't there be other safeguards
+in their interests to insure against what conceivably might be a
+terrible error or a terrible injustice?"</p>
+
+<p>He didn't exactly sneer, but he indulged himself in the first cousin of
+a sneer.</p>
+
+<p>"You've evidently been fortifying yourself to give me a battle&mdash;reading
+up on the subject, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've been reading up on the subject&mdash;not, though, for the purpose of
+entering into a joint<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> debate on the subject with anyone. But, doctor, I
+have read enough to startle me. I never knew before there were such laws
+on the statute books. And I have learned about another case, the case of
+that rich man&mdash;a multimillionaire the papers called him, which means I
+suppose that at least he was well-to-do. You remember about him, I am
+sure? A commission declared him of unsound mind. He got away to another
+state where the legal processes of this state could not reach him. The
+courts of that other state declared him mentally competent and capable
+of managing his own affairs&mdash;and for a period of years he did manage
+them. Here the other month, under a pledge of safe conduct, he returned
+to New York on legal business and while he was here he carried his cause
+to a higher court and that court ruled him to be sane and entitled to
+his complete freedom of body and action. But for years he had been a
+pseudofugitive in enforced exile and for years he had carried the stigma
+of having been adjudged insane. This thing happened, incredible as it
+sounds. It might happen again to-day or to-morrow. It&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me for interrupting your flow of eloquence," he said with a
+labored politeness, "but I thought you came here to discuss the case of
+a girl named Vinsolving, not the case of a man I never heard of before.
+Now, at least I'm not going to discuss generalities with you and I'm not
+going to sit here and join with you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> in questioning the workings of the
+law either. The laws are good enough for me as they stand. I'm a
+law-abiding citizen, not one of these red-eyed socialistic Bolsheviks
+that are forever trying to tear down things. I believe in taking the
+laws as I find them. Let well enough alone&mdash;that's my motto, young
+woman. And there are a whole lot more like me in this country."</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me for breaking in on you, sir," she said, fighting hard to keep
+her temper, "but neither am I a socialist or a Bolshevik."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I reckon probably you're one of these rampant suffragists. Anyhow,
+what's the use of discussing abstracts? If you don't like the law why
+don't you have it changed?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's one of the very things I hope before long to try to do," she
+replied.</p>
+
+<p>"It'll keep you pretty busy," he responded with a sniff of profound
+disapproval. "But then you seem to have a lot of spare time on your
+hands to spend in crusading round. Well, I haven't. I've got my patients
+to see to. One of 'em is waiting for me now&mdash;if you'll kindly excuse
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>She rose.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry," she said sincerely, "if either my mission or my language
+has irritated you. I seem somehow to have defeated the purpose that
+brought me&mdash;I mean a faint hope that perhaps somehow I might help that
+girl. Something tells me&mdash;call it intuition or sentimentality or what
+you will&mdash;but something tells me I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> must keep on trying to help her. I
+only wish I could make you share my point of view."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you can't. Say, see here, why don't you go to see the mother? I
+judge she might convince you that you are on the wrong tack, even if I
+can't."</p>
+
+<p>"That's exactly what I mean to do," she declared.</p>
+
+<p>Something inside her brain gave a little jump. It was curious that she
+had not thought of it before; even more curious that his labored
+sarcasms had been required to set her on this new trail.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, at that, you'd better think twice before you go," he retorted.
+"She was a mighty badly broken-up woman the last time I saw her, but
+even so I judge she's still got spunk enough left in her to resent
+having an unauthorized and uninvited stranger coming about, seeking to
+pry into her own private sorrow. But it's your affair, not mine.
+Besides, judging by everything, you probably don't think my advice is
+worth much anyhow."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, but I do&mdash;I do indeed! And I thank you for it."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't mention it! And good day!"</p>
+
+<p>The slamming of the inner door behind him made an appropriate
+exclamation point to punctuate the brevity of his offended and indignant
+departure. For a moment she felt like laughing outright. Then she felt
+like crying. Then she did neither. She left.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor, old opinionated, stupid old, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>conscientious old thing!" she was
+saying to herself as she let herself, unattended, out of the front door.
+"And yet I'll wager he would sit up all night and work his fingers to
+the bone trying to save a life. And when it comes to serving poor people
+without expecting payment or even asking for it, I know he is a perfect
+dear. Besides, I should be grateful to him&mdash;he gave me an idea. I don't
+know where he got it from either&mdash;I don't believe he ever had so very
+many of his own."</p>
+
+<p>Again the handy cop in the communal center set her upon her way. But
+when she came to the destination she sought&mdash;a small, rather shabby
+cottage standing a mile or so westward from the middle of things
+communal, out in the fringes of the village where outlying homesteads
+tailed away into avowed farmsteads&mdash;the house itself was closed up fast
+and tight. The shutters all were closely drawn and against the gatepost
+was fastened a newly painted sign reading: "For Sale or Rent. Apply to
+Searle, the Up-to-Date Real Estate Man, Next Door to Pythian Hall."</p>
+
+<p>Not quite sure she had stopped at the right place, Miss Smith hailed a
+man pottering in a chrysanthemum bed in the yard of the adjoining
+cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Vinsolving?" he said, lifting a tousled head above his palings.
+"Yessum, she lives there&mdash;leastwise she did. She moved away only the day
+before yesterday. Sort of sudden, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> think it must have been. I didn't
+know she was going till she was gone." He grinned in extenuation of the
+unaccountable failure of a small-town man to acquaint himself with all
+available facts regarding a neighbor's private affairs. "But then she
+never wasn't much of a hand, Mrs. Vinsolving wasn't, for mixing with
+folks. I'll say she wasn't!"</p>
+
+<p>Back she turned to seek out Searle, he of up-to-date real estate. In a
+dingy office upstairs over the local harness store a lean and rangy
+gentleman raised a brindled beard above a roll-top desk and in answer to
+her first question crisply remarked, "Can't tell."</p>
+
+<p>"But surely if she put her property in your hands for disposal she must
+have given you some address where you might communicate with her?"
+pressed Miss Smith.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, she done that all right, but that ain't the question you ast
+me first. You ast me if I could tell you where she was&mdash;and that I can't
+do."</p>
+
+<p>"I see. Then I presume she left instructions with you not to give her
+present whereabouts to anyone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you might figger it out that way and mebbe not so far wrong,"
+said the cryptic Mr. Searle. "But if you think you'd like to buy or rent
+her place I'm fully empowered to act. Got the keys right here and a car
+standing outside&mdash;take you right on out there in a jiffy if you say the
+word."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p><p>He rose up and followed her halfway down the steps, plainly torn
+between a desire to make a commission and a regret that under orders
+from his client he could furnish no details regarding her late
+movements.</p>
+
+<p>"If you're interested in any other piece of property in this vicinity&mdash;"
+were the last words she heard floating down the stair well as she passed
+out upon the uneven sidewalk.</p>
+
+<p>She knew exactly what she meant to do next. At sight of her badge, as
+shown to him through his wicketed window marked "General Delivery," the
+village postmaster gave her a number on a side street well up-town in
+New York, adding: "Going away, Mrs. Vinsolving particularly asked me not
+to tell anybody where her mail was to be sent on to. Kind of a secretive
+woman anyhow, she was, and besides she's had some very pressing trouble
+come on her lately. I presume you've heard something about that matter?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose now," went on the postmaster, his features sharpening with
+curiosity, "that the Federal authorities ain't looking into that
+particular matter? Not that I care to know myself, but I just thought it
+wouldn't be any harm to ask."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Miss Smith, "I merely wanted to see her on a personal matter
+and I only let you see my credential in order to learn her forwarding
+address."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p><p>Provided with the requisite information, she figured that before night
+she would interview the widow or know good reasons why. That the other
+woman had quitted her home seemingly in a hurry and with efforts at
+secrecy gave zest to the quest and added a trace of bepuzzlement to it
+too. Even so, she did not herself know what she meant to say to the
+woman when she had found her in her present abiding place or what
+questions she would ask. Only she knew that an inner prompting stronger
+than any reasoned-out process drove her forward upon her vague and
+blinded mission. Fool's errand it might be&mdash;probably was&mdash;yet she meant
+to see it through.</p>
+
+<p>But she had not reckoned upon the contingency that on this fine October
+forenoon, for the first time since buying his new touring car, Mr. Jake
+Goebel, shirt-waist manufacturer in a small way in Broome Street and
+head of a family in a large way in West One Hundred and Ninety-ninth
+Street, would be undertaking to drive the said car unaided and untutored
+by a more experienced charioteer on a trial spin up the Albany Post
+Road, accompanied&mdash;it being merely a five-passenger car&mdash;only by Mrs.
+Rosa Goebel, wife of the above, six little Goebels of assorted sizes and
+ages and Mrs. Goebel's unmated sister, Miss Freda Hirschfeld of
+Rivington Street. In Getty Square, Yonkers, about noontime occurred a
+head-on collision, the subsequent upshots of which were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> variously that
+divers of those figuring in the accident went in the following
+directions:</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Smith to a doctor's office near by to have a sprained wrist
+bandaged; and thence home in a hired automobile.</p>
+
+<p>Her runabout to a Yonkers repair shop and garage.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Goebel, with lamentations, to the office of an attorney making a
+specialty of handling damage suits, thence home by train with the seven
+members of his family party, all uninjured as to their limbs and members
+but in a highly distracted state nervously.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Goebel's car to another repair shop and garage.</p>
+
+<p>The traffic policeman on duty in Getty Square to the station house to
+make a report of the fifth smash-up personally officered by him within
+eight hours&mdash;on a Sunday his casualty list would have been longer, but
+this was a week day, when pleasure travel was less fraught with highway
+perilousness.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It so happened that Mullinix came to town from Washington next morning
+and, following his custom, rang up his unpaid but none the less valued
+aid to inquire whether he might come a-calling. No, he might not, Miss
+Smith being confined to her room with cold compresses on her injured
+wrist, but he might render a service for her if so minded&mdash;and he was.
+To<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> him, then, over the wire Miss Smith stated her requirements.</p>
+
+<p>"I want you please to go to this address"&mdash;giving it&mdash;"and see whether
+you find there a Mrs. Janet Vinsolving, a widow. I rather imagine the
+place may be a boarding house, though I won't be sure as to that. It
+will not be necessary for you to see her in person; in fact I'd rather
+you did not. What I want you to do is to learn whether she is still
+there, and if so how long she expects to stay there, and generally
+anything you can about her movements. She went there only three days ago
+and inasmuch as she has a reputation in her former home for keeping very
+much to herself this may be a more difficult job than it sounds. But do
+the best you can, won't you, and then notify me of the results by
+telephone? No, it is a personal affair&mdash;nothing to do with any of our
+official undertakings. I'll tell you more about it when I see you. I
+expect I shall be able to receive visitors in a day or two; just now I
+feel a bit shaken up and unstrung. That's all, and thank you ever so
+much."</p>
+
+<p>Within an hour he had her on the telephone again.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello!" she said. "Yes, this is Miss Smith. Oh, it's you, is it? Well,
+what luck?... Oh, so it was a boarding house, after all.... And you
+found her there?... No? Then where is she?... What? Where did you say?
+Bellevue!... I knew it, I knew it, something<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> told me!... No, no, never
+mind my ravings! Go on, please, go on!... Yes, all right. Now then,
+listen please: You jump in a taxi and get here to my apartments as soon
+as you can. I'll be dressed and ready when you arrive to go over there
+with you.... What?... Oh, bother the doctor's instructions. It's only a
+sprain anyhow and I feel perfectly fit by now, honestly I do ... tell
+you I'd get up out of my dying bed to go.... Yes, indeed, it is
+important&mdash;much more important than you think! Come on for me, I'll be
+waiting."</p>
+
+<p>When fifteen minutes later the perplexed Mullinix halted a taxi at the
+Deansworth Studio Building she was at the curbing, her left arm in a
+sling and her eyes ablaze with barely controlled emotions. Before he
+could move to get out and help her in she was already in.</p>
+
+<p>"Bellevue Hospital, psychopathic ward," he told the driver as she
+climbed nimbly inside.</p>
+
+<p>As the taxi started she turned to Mullinix, demanding: "Now tell it to
+me all over again. When you are through, then I'll explain to you why I
+am so interested."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "there isn't so very much to tell. The address you gave
+me turned out to be a boarding house just as you suspected it might&mdash;a
+second-rate place but apparently highly respectable, kept by a Mrs.
+Sheehan. It's been under the same management at the same place for a
+good many years. It wasn't very much trouble for me to find out what
+you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> wanted to know, because the whole place was in turmoil after what
+had happened just an hour or so before I got there. And when it
+developed that I had come to inquire about the cause of all the
+excitement every old-lady boarder in the house wanted to tell me about
+it all at the same time.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems that three days ago this Mrs. Vinsolving applied at the place
+for room and board. Mrs. Sheehan vaguely remembered her as having been
+her guest for a short time ten or twelve years ago. At that time she was
+with her husband, Colonel Vinsolving, who it appears has since died, and
+a daughter about ten years or twelve years of age&mdash;a little girl with
+red hair, as Mrs. Sheehan recalls. This time, though, she came alone,
+carrying only hand baggage. Except that she seemed to be nervous and
+rather harassed and unhappy looking, there was nothing noticeably
+unusual about her. Mrs. Sheehan took her in willingly enough.</p>
+
+<p>"She went straight to her room on the third floor and stayed there,
+having her meals brought up to her. But this morning early she went to
+the landlady and begged for protection, saying she was in fear of her
+life. Mrs. Sheehan very naturally inquired to know what was up&mdash;and then
+Mrs. Vinsolving told her this story:</p>
+
+<p>"She said she had discovered a conspiracy to murder her, headed
+by&mdash;guess who? The late Kaiser, no less! She said that the Kaiser in
+disguise had escaped from Holland, leaving<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> behind him in his recent
+place of exile over there a double made up to look like him, and was now
+in hiding in this country for the sole purpose of having Mrs. Vinsolving
+assassinated in revenge, because her late husband, while an officer in
+the Army, had perfected a poison gas deadlier than any other known,
+which, being kept a secret by this Government and used against the
+German army in the war, had brought about the victory for our side and
+led to the overthrow of the Kaiser's outfit.</p>
+
+<p>"She went on to say she had run away from some suburban town or other to
+hide in New York and that was why she had taken refuge at Mrs.
+Sheehan's, thinking she would be in safety. But now she knew the
+plotters had tracked her, because she had just detected that the maid
+who had been bringing up her meals to her was really a German agent, and
+acting under orders from the Kaiser had put poison into her food. All of
+which naturally surprised Mrs. Sheehan considerably, especially as the
+accused servant happened to be a perfectly reliable Finnish girl who has
+been working for Mrs. Sheehan for five years and who had two brothers in
+the Seventy-seventh Division overseas.</p>
+
+<p>"It didn't take Mrs. Sheehan two minutes&mdash;she being a pretty
+level-headed person evidently&mdash;to see what ailed her new boarder. She
+managed to get Mrs. Vinsolving quieted down and get her back again into
+her room, and then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> she called in the policeman on the post and inside
+of an hour the woman had been smuggled out of the house and was on her
+way to Bellevue in an ambulance with a doctor and a policeman guarding
+her. But by that time, of course, the news had leaked out among the
+other boarders and the whole place was beginning to stew with
+excitement. It was still stewing when I got there.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, as soon as you told me over the telephone that you were bent and
+determined on going to Bellevue, though I do not see why you should be
+in such a hurry about it and taking chances on setting up an
+inflammation in your injured arm, because even though you do know the
+poor crazed creature you can't be of any help&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know her. I never saw her in my life."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That part can wait. I'll explain later. You were saying that as soon as
+you talked with me over the telephone you did something. What was it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, I called up Doctor Steele, chief surgeon in the psychopathic
+ward, who happens to be a friend of mine and one of us besides"&mdash;he
+tapped the badge he wore under his coat lapel&mdash;"and told him I was
+bringing you down to see this woman, and he volunteered some information
+of the case in advance of your coming. I've forgotten just what he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
+called the form of insanity which has seized her&mdash;it's a jaw-breaking
+Latin name&mdash;but anyhow, he said his preliminary diagnosis convinced him
+that it must have been coming on her for some time; that it was marked
+by delusions of persecution and by an exaggerated ego, causing its
+victims to imagine themselves the objects of plots engineered by the
+most distinguished personages, such as rulers and high dignitaries; and
+that while in this state a man or a woman suffering from this particular
+brand of lunacy was apt to shift his or her suspicion from one person to
+another&mdash;first perhaps accusing some perfectly harmless and well-meaning
+individual, who might be a relative or a near friend, and then nearly
+always progressing to the point in his or her madness where the charge
+was directed against some famous character."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you hear anywhere any mention made of a daughter&mdash;the red-haired
+child of twelve years ago?" inquired Miss Smith.</p>
+
+<p>"To be sure I did, but I'd forgotten about her," said Mullinix. "Mrs.
+Sheehan told me that somewhere in her excited narrative Mrs. Vinsolving
+did say something about the daughter. As nearly as I can recall, she
+told Mrs. Sheehan that five or six weeks ago, or some such matter, her
+daughter had tried to kill her and that she thought then the daughter
+had gone mad, but that now she knew the girl had joined the Kaiser's
+gang for pay. I made a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> mental note of this part of the rigmarole at the
+time Mrs. Sheehan was repeating it to me, and then it slipped my mind.
+But now putting that yarn alongside of what Doctor Steele tells me about
+the symptoms of the disease, I see the connection&mdash;first the daughter,
+then the strange servant girl and finally the Kaiser. But say, I wonder
+why the daughter hasn't been keeping some sort of a guard over the poor
+demented creature? What can she have been thinking about herself to let
+her mother go running foot-loose round the country, nursing these
+changing delusions?"</p>
+
+<p>"She couldn't very well help herself," put in Miss Smith. "The daughter
+is in an asylum&mdash;put there five weeks ago on the mother's complaint."</p>
+
+<p>"But heavens alive, how could that have happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"Very easily&mdash;under the laws of this state," she answered grimly. Then
+speaking more quickly: "I've changed my mind about going to Bellevue
+with you. Please tell the driver to take me to the Grand Central
+Station. I don't know what train I'm going to catch, except that it's
+the next one leaving on the Hudson River Division for up state. You go
+on then, please, to the hospital and find out all you can about this
+case and call me on the long-distance to-night&mdash;no, that won't do
+either. I don't know where I'll be. I may be in Peekskill or in
+Albany&mdash;I can't say which. I tell<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> you&mdash;I'll call you at eight o'clock;
+that will be better.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" she went on impetuously, reading on his face the protest he
+meant to utter. "My wrist is well bandaged and giving me no pain. I'm
+thinking now of what a poor brave girl had on both her wrists when last
+I saw her and of what she must have been enduring since then. I'll
+explain the biggest chapter of the story to you on the way over before
+you drop me at the station."</p>
+
+<p>At the Grand Central she left behind a thoroughly astonished gentleman.
+He was clear on some points which had been puzzling him from time to
+time during this exceedingly busy morning, but still much mystified to
+make out the meaning of Miss Smith's farewell remark as he put her
+aboard her train.</p>
+
+<p>"I only wish one thing," she had said. "I only wish I might take the
+time to stop at the village of Pleasantdale and break the news to a
+certain Doctor McGlore who lives there. I trust I am not unduly cattish,
+but I dearly would love to watch the expression on his face when he
+heard it. I think I'd do it, too, if I were not starting on the most
+imperative errand that ever called me in my life."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A week later, to the day, two expected visitors were ushered into the
+private chamber of the governor at Albany&mdash;one of them a small,
+exceedingly well-groomed and good-looking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> woman in her thirties, and
+one a slender pretty girl with big brown eyes and wonderful auburn hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Governor," said Miss Smith, "I want the pleasure of introducing to you
+the gamest girl in the whole world&mdash;Margaret Vinsolving."</p>
+
+<p>He took the firm young hand she offered him. "Miss Vinsolving," he said,
+"in the name of the State of New York and on behalf of it I ask your
+forgiveness for the great and cruel wrong which unintentionally was done
+to you."</p>
+
+<p>"And I want to thank you for what you have done for me, sir," she
+answered him simply.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't thank me," he said. "You know the one to thank. If I had not set
+the machinery of my office in motion on your behalf within five minutes
+after your benefactress here reached me the other day I should have
+deserved impeachment. But I should never have lived to face impeachment.
+I'm sure the slightest sign of hesitation on my part would have been the
+signal for your advocate to brain me with my own inkstand." His face
+sobered. "But, my child, for my own information there are some things I
+want cleared up. Why in the face of the monstrous charges laid against
+you did you keep silent&mdash;that is one of the things I want to know?"</p>
+
+<p>Before answering, the girl glanced inquiringly at her companion.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span></p><p>"Tell him," counseled Miss Smith.</p>
+
+<p>Steadily the girl made answer.</p>
+
+<p>"When my poor mother accused me of trying to kill her I realized for the
+first time that her mind had become affected. No one else, though,
+appeared to suspect the real truth. Perhaps this was because she seemed
+so normal on every other subject. So I decided to keep silent. I thought
+that if I were taken away from her for a while possibly the separation
+and with it the lifting of the imaginary fear of injury at my hands,
+which had upset her, might help her to regain her reason and no outsider
+be ever the wiser for it. I am young and strong; I believed I could bear
+the imprisonment without serious injury to me. I believe yet&mdash;for her
+sake&mdash;I could have borne it. And I knew&mdash;I realized what would happen to
+her if she were placed in such surroundings as I have been in and made
+to pass through such experiences as those through which I have passed. I
+felt that all hope of a cure for her would then be gone forever. And I
+love my mother." She faltered, her voice trembling a bit, then added:
+"That is why I kept silent, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dear child," he said, "what a wrong thing for you to have done.
+It was a splendid, chivalrous, gallant sacrifice, but it was wrong. And
+if you don't mind I'd like to shake hands with you again."</p>
+
+<p>"You see, sir, there was no one with whom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> I might advise in the
+emergency that came upon me without warning," she explained. "I had no
+confidante except my mother, and she&mdash;through madness&mdash;had turned
+against me. I had no friend then&mdash;I have one now, though."</p>
+
+<p>And she went to Miss Smith and put her head on the elder woman's
+shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>With her arms about the girl, Miss Smith addressed the governor.</p>
+
+<p>"We are going away a while together for a rest," she told him. "We both
+need it. And when we come back she is going to join me in my work. Some
+day Margaret will be a better interior decorator than her teacher can
+ever hope to be."</p>
+
+<p>"Then from now on, so far as you two are concerned, this ghastly thing
+should be only an unhappy dream which you'll strive to forget, I'm
+sure," he said. "It's all over and done with, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Over and done with for her&mdash;yes," said Miss Smith. "But how about your
+duty as governor? How about my duty as a citizen? Shouldn't we each of
+us, you in your big way and I in my small way, work to bring about a
+reform in the statutes under which such errors are possible? Think,
+governor, of what happened to this child! It may happen again to-day or
+to-morrow to some other equally innocent sufferer. It might happen to
+any one of us&mdash;to me or to someone dear to you."</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Smith," he stated, "if ever it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>happens to you I shall take the
+witness stand on your account and testify to two things: First, that you
+are the sanest human being in this state; and second, that you certainly
+do know how to play a hunch when you get one. If I had your intuition,
+plus my ambition, I wouldn't be governor&mdash;I'd be running for president.
+And I'd win out too!"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>THE RAVELIN' WOLF</h3>
+
+<p>When the draft came to our town as it came to all towns it enmeshed Jeff
+Poindexter, who to look at him might be any age between twenty-one and
+forty-one. Jeff had a complexion admirably adapted for hiding the wear
+and tear of carking years and as for those telltale wrinkles which
+betray care he had none, seeing that care rarely abode with him for
+longer than twenty-four hours on a stretch. Did worry knock at the front
+door Jeff had a way of excusing himself out of the back window. But this
+dread thing they called a draft was a worry which just opened the door
+and walked right in&mdash;and outside the window stood a jealous Government,
+all organized to start a rookus if anybody so much as stepped sideways.</p>
+
+<p>Jeff had no ambition to engage in the jar and crash of actual combat;
+neither did the idea of serving in a labor battalion overseas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> appeal to
+one of his habits. The uniform had its lure, to be sure, but the
+responsibilities presaged by the putting on of the uniform beguiled him
+not a whipstitch. Anyhow, his ways were the ways of peace. As a diplomat
+he had indubitable gifts; as a warrior he felt that he would be out of
+his proper element. So when answering a summons which was not to be
+disregarded Jeff appeared before the draft board he was not noticeably
+happy.</p>
+
+<p>"Unmarried, eh?" inquired his chief inquisitor.</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, suh&mdash;I means, naw, suh," stated Jeff. "I ain't never been much of
+a hand fur marryin' round."</p>
+
+<p>He forced an ingratiating smile. The smile fell as seed on barren
+soil&mdash;fell and died there.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother and father? Either one or both of them living?"</p>
+
+<p>Never had Jeff looked more the orphan than as he stood there confessing
+himself one. He fumbled his hat in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"No dependents at all then, I take it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, suh, dey shorely is," answered Jeff smartly, hope rekindling
+within him.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, who is it that you help support&mdash;if it's anybody?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hit's Jedge Priest&mdash;tha's who. Jedge, he jes' natchelly couldn't git
+'long noways 'thout me lookin' after him, suh. The older he git the more
+it seem lak he leans heavy on me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Judge Priest may have to lean on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> himself for a while. Uncle Sam
+needs every able-bodied man he can get these times and you look to be as
+strong as a mule. Here, take this card and go on through that door
+yonder to the second room down the hall and let Doctor Dismukes look you
+over."</p>
+
+<p>Jeff cheered up slightly. He knew Doctor Dismukes&mdash;knew him mighty well.
+In Doctor Dismukes' hands he would be in the hands of a friend. Beyond
+question the doctor would understand the situation as this strange and
+most unsympathetic white man undoubtedly did not.</p>
+
+<p>But Doctor Dismukes, all snap and smartness, went over him as though he
+had never seen him before in all his life. If Jeff had been a horse for
+sale and the doctor a professional horse coper, scarcely could the
+examination have been carried forward with a more businesslike dispatch.</p>
+
+<p>"Jeff," said the doctor when he had finished and the other was
+rearranging his wardrobe, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself for being
+so healthy. Take your teeth now&mdash;your teeth are splendid. I only wish I
+had a set like 'em."</p>
+
+<p>"Is dey?" said Jeff despondently, for the first time in his life
+regretting his unblemished ivory.</p>
+
+<p>"They certainly are. You wouldn't need a gun, not with those teeth you
+wouldn't&mdash;you could just naturally bite a German in two."</p>
+
+<p>Jeff shivered. The very suggestion was abhorrent to his nature.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p><p>"Please suh, don't&mdash;don't talk lak that," he entreated. "I ain't
+cravin' to bite nobody a-tall, 'specially 'tis Germans. Live an' let
+live&mdash;tha's my sayin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Yep," went on the doctor, prolonging the agony for the victim, "your
+teeth are perfect and your lungs are sound, your heart action is
+splendid and I know something about your appetite myself, having seen
+you eat. Black boy, listen to me! In every respect you are absolutely
+qualified physically to make a regular man-eating bearcat of a
+soldier"&mdash;he paused&mdash;"in every respect excepting one&mdash;no, two."</p>
+
+<p>If a drowning man clutching for a straw might be imagined as
+coincidentally asking a question, it is highly probable he would ask it
+in the tone now used by Jeff.</p>
+
+<p>"Meanin'&mdash;meanin' w'ich, suh?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean your feet. You've got flat feet, Jeff&mdash;you've got the flattest
+feet I ever saw. I don't understand it either. So far as I've been able
+to observe you've spent the greater part of your life sitting down.
+Somebody must have hit you on the head with an ax when you were standing
+on a plowshare and broke your arches down."</p>
+
+<p>It was an old joke, but it fitted the present case, and Jeff, not to be
+outdone in politeness, laughed louder at it than its maker did. Indeed
+Jeff felt he had reason to laugh; a great load was lifting from his
+soul.</p>
+
+<p>"Jeff," went on the doctor, "deeply though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> it may grieve both of us, it
+nevertheless is my painful duty to inform you that you have two
+perfectly good exemptions from military service&mdash;a right one and a left
+one. Now grab your hat and get out of here."</p>
+
+<p>"Boss," cried Jeff, "Ise gone. Exemptions, tek me away frum yere!"</p>
+
+<p>So while many others went away to fight or to learn how to fight, as the
+case might be, Jeff stayed behind and did his bit by remaining
+steadfastly cheerful. Never before, sartorially speaking, had he cut so
+splendid a figure as now when such numbers of young white gentlemen of
+his acquaintance were putting aside civilian garb to put on khaki. Jeff
+had one of those adaptable figures. The garments to which he fell heir
+might never have fitted their original owner, but always they would fit
+Jeff. Gorgeous in slightly worn but carefully refurbished raiment, he
+figured in the wartime activities of the colored population and in
+ostensibly helpful capacities figured in some of the activities of the
+white folks too.</p>
+
+<p>Going among his own set his frequent companion was that straw-colored
+light of his social hours, Ophelia Stubblefield. It helped to reconcile
+Jeff to the rigors of the period of enforced rationing as he reflected
+that the same issues and causes which made lump sugar a rarity and fat
+meat a scarcity had rid him of his more dangerous competition in the
+quarter where his affections centered. Particularly on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> one account did
+he feel reconciled. A spirit of the most soothful resignation filled him
+when he gave thought to the moral certainty that the most formidable and
+fearsome of his rivals, that bloody-minded bravo, Smooth Crumbaugh,
+would daunt him never again with threats of articular dismemberment with
+a new-honed razor. For Smooth Crumbaugh was gone and gone for good.
+First the draft had carried him away and then the pneumonia had carried
+him off. War had its compensations after all.</p>
+
+<p>Wearing Ophelia upon one arm and wearing in the crook of the other a
+high hat which once had been the property of a young man now bossing an
+infantry battalion in the muddiest part of France, Jeff appeared
+prominently in the Armistice celebration at the First Ward Colored
+Baptist Church. Still so accoutered&mdash;Ophelia on his one hand and the
+high hat held in proper salute against his breast&mdash;he served upon the
+official reception committee headed by the Rev. Potiphar Grasty and by
+Prof. Rutherford B. H. Champers, principal of the Colored High School,
+which greeted the first returning squad of service men of color.</p>
+
+<p>Home-comers who had been clear across the ocean brought back with them
+almost unbelievable but none the less fascinating accounts of life and
+customs in foreign parts. The tales these traveled ones had to tell were
+eagerly listened to and as eagerly passed along, dowered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> at each time
+of retelling with prodigal enlargements and amplifications the most
+generous.</p>
+
+<p>A ferment of discontent began to stir under the surface of things; a
+sort of inarticulate rebellion against existing conditions, which
+presently manifested itself in small irritations at various points of
+contact with the white race. It was nothing tangible as yet, nothing
+upon which one might put a hand or cap with a word of comprehensive
+description. Indeed it had been working for weeks like a yeast in the
+minds of sundry black folk before their Caucasian neighbors began to
+sense it at all, and for this there was a reason easily understandable
+by anyone born and reared in any sizable town in any one of the older
+states lying below Mason and Dixon's Line. For in each such community
+there are two separate and distinct worlds&mdash;a black one and a white
+one&mdash;interrelated by necessities of civic co&ouml;rdination and in an
+economic sense measurably dependent one upon the other, and yet in many
+other aspects as far apart as the North Pole is from the South.</p>
+
+<p>Regarding what the white world is feeling and thinking and saying, the
+lesser black world that is set down within it is nearly always better
+informed than is the other and larger group touching on new movements
+and growing sentiments amongst the darker-skinned factors. Into the
+white man's house, serving in this or that domestic capacity, goes the
+negro as an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> observant witness to the moods and emotions of his or her
+employer and bringing away an understanding of the family complexities
+and the current trend of opinion as it shapes itself beneath that roof.</p>
+
+<p>But the white man, generally speaking, views the negro's private life
+only from the outside, and if he be a Southern-born white man, wise in
+his generation, seeks to look no further, for surface garrulity and
+surface exuberance do not deceive him, but serve only to make him
+realize all the more clearly that he is dealing with members of what at
+heart is one of the most secretive and sensitive of all the breeds of
+men. But since this started out to be the chronicle of an episode
+largely relating to Jeff Poindexter and one other and not a
+psychological study of actions and reactions as between the two most
+numerous races in this republic, it is perhaps as well that we should
+get on with our narrative.</p>
+
+<p>If the leaven of unrest, vague and formless as it was at the outset,
+properly might be said to date from the time of the return of divers
+black veterans, it took on shape and substance after the advent of one
+Dr. J. Talbott Duvall, an individual engaging in manner, and in
+language, dress and deportment fascinating beyond degree; likewise an
+organizer by profession and a charmer of the opposite sex by reason of
+qualifications both natural and acquired.</p>
+
+<p>A doctor he was, as witness the handle to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> his name, and yet a doctor of
+any known variety he was not. Confessedly he was no doctor of medicine,
+though his speech dripped gorgeous ear-filling Latin words which sounded
+as though they might be the names of difficult and sinister diseases;
+nor was he doctor of divinity, though speedily he proved himself to be
+at home in pulpits. He was not a horse doctor or a corn doctor or a
+conjure doctor or a root-and-herb doctor or a healer by faith or the
+laying on of hands. His title, it seemed, was his by virtue of a degree
+conferred upon him by a college&mdash;a white man's college&mdash;somewhere in the
+North. His accent was that of a traveled cosmopolite superimposed upon
+the speech of a place away off somewhere called the West Indies. He had
+money and he spent it; he had a wardrobe of distinction and he wore it;
+he had a gift for argumentation and he exercised it; he had a way with
+the ladies and he used it. His coming had created a social furor; his
+subsequent ministrations amounted to what for lack of a better word is
+commonly called a sensation.</p>
+
+<p>If there were those who from motives, let us say, of envy looked with
+the jaundiced eye of disfavor upon his mounting popularity and his
+constantly widening scope of influence they mainly kept their own
+counsel or at least refrained from voicing their private prejudices in
+public places. One gets fewer bumps traveling with the crowd than
+against it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p><p>Even so bold a spirit and customarily so outspoken a speaker as Aunt
+Dilsey Turner, Judge Priest's black cook of many years' incumbency, saw
+fit somewhat to dissemble on the occasion of a call paid by Sister
+Eldora Menifee, who came dressed to kill and inspired by the zeal of the
+new convert to win yet other converts. Entering by way of the alley gate
+one fine forenoon, Sister Eldora found Aunt Dilsey sitting in the
+kitchen doorway hulling out a mess of late green peas newly picked from
+the house garden.</p>
+
+<p>"Sist' Turner," began the visitor, "I hopes I ain't disturbin' you by
+runnin' in on you this mawnin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Honey," said Aunt Dilsey, "you're jes' ez welcome ez day is frum night.
+Lemme fetch you a cheer out yere on the gallery." And she made as if to
+heave her vast comfortable bulk upright.</p>
+
+<p>"No'm, set right where you is," begged Sister Menifee. "I ain't got only
+jes' a few minutes to stay. Things is mighty pressin' with me. I got
+quite a number of my lady frien's to see to-day an' you happens to be
+the fust one on de list."</p>
+
+<p>"Is tha' so?" inquired Aunt Dilsey. Her tone was cordiality itself, but
+one less carried away by the enthusiasm of the mission which had brought
+her than Sister Eldora Menifee was might have caught a latent gleam of
+hostility in the elder woman's eye. "Well, go on, Ise lis'enin'."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span></p><p>"Well, Sist' Turner, ef you's heared 'bout de work I been doin' lately
+I reckin mebbe you kin guess whut brung me to yore do'. I is solicitin'
+you fur yore fellership ez a reg'lar member of de ladies' auxiliary of
+de new s'ciety w'ich Doct' J. Talbott Duvall is got up."</p>
+
+<p>"Meanin' perzactly w'ich s'ciety? Dis yere Doct' Duvall 'pears to be so
+busy gittin' up fust one thing an' then 'nother seems lak I ain't been
+able to keep track of his doin's, 'count of my bein' so slow gittin'
+round on my feet by reason of de rheumatism."</p>
+
+<p>"Meanin' de Shinin' Star Cullid Uplift and Progress League&mdash;dat's de
+principalest activity in w'ich he's now engaged. De dues is one dollar
+down on 'nitiation an' twenty cents a week an'&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Wait jes' one minute, Sist' Menifee, ef you please. 'Fore we gits any
+furder 'long answer me dis one question Ise fixin' to ast you&mdash;do dis
+yere new lodge perpose to fune'lize de daid?"</p>
+
+<p>"We ain't tuck up dat point yit; doubtless we'll come to de plans fur
+dat part later. Fur de time bein' de work is jes' to form de ladies'
+auxiliary an' git de main objec's set fo'th."</p>
+
+<p>"Lis'en, chile. Me, I don't aim never so long as I lives an' keeps my
+reason to jine no lodge w'ich don't start out fust thing by fune'lizin'
+de daid. Ise thinkin' now of de case of dat pore shif'less Sist'
+Clarabelle Hardin dat used to live out yere on Plunkett's Hill. She up
+an'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> jined one of dese newfandangle' lodges w'ich didn't have nothin' to
+it but a fancy name an' a fancy strange nigger man runnin' it, an' right
+on top of dat she up an' died 'thout a cent to her back. An' you know
+whut happen den? Well, I'm gwine tell you. Dat pore chile laid round de
+house daid fur gwine on three days an' den she jes' natchelly had to git
+out to de cemetery de bes' way she could. Not fur me, honey, not fur me.
+Dey got to have de money in de bank waitin' an' ready to bury de fus'
+member dat passes frum dis life before dey gits a cent of mine."</p>
+
+<p>"But dis yere lodge is gwine have a more 'portant puppose 'en jes' to
+fune'lize de daid," protested Sister Eldora. "We aims to do somethin'
+fur de livin' whilst yet dey's still alive. Curious you ain't tuck
+notice of de signs of de times ez dey's been expounded 'mongst de people
+by Doct' Duvall. He sho' kin 'splain things in a way to mek you a true
+believer." The advocate of the new order of things sank her voice to a
+discreet half whisper. "Sist' Turner, we aims at gittin' mo' of de
+rights dat's due us. We aims to see dat de pore an' de lowly an' de
+downtrodden-on is purtected in dey rights. We aims&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Num'mine whut you aims at&mdash;de question is, is you gwine be able hit
+whar you aims? An' lemme tell you somethin' more, Sist' Eldora Menifee.
+I ain't needin' no ladies' auxiliary to tell me whut my rights is.
+Neither I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> ain't needin' to pay out no twenty cents a week to find out
+neither. W'en it comes to dat, all de ladies' auxiliary w'ich I needs is
+jes' me, myse'f. I knows good an' well whut my rights is already an' Ise
+gwine have 'em, too, or somebody'll sho' git busted plum wide open. Mind
+you, I ain't sayin' nothin' 'ginst dis new man nur 'ginst dem w'ich
+chooses to follow 'long after his teachin's. Ise jes' sayin' dat so fur
+ez my jinin' in wid dis yere lodge is concern' you's wastin' yore
+breath. Better pass along, honey, to de nex' one on dat list of your'n,
+'thout you's a mind to stay yere an' watch me dish up Jedge Priest's
+vittles fur 'im."</p>
+
+<p>"Mebbe if Doct' Duvall wuz to come hisse'f an' mek manifest to you de
+high pupposes&mdash;" began Sister Eldora. But Aunt Dilsey cut her off short.</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't mek no diffe'nce ef he come eighty times a day an' twice ez
+offen on Sunday. Anyway, I reckins my day fur jinin' things is done
+over."</p>
+
+<p>There was a dead weight of finality in her words. She rose heavily. As
+Sister Menifee departed Aunt Dilsey became aware of the presence of Jeff
+Poindexter. He was emerging from behind the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Been hidin' inside dat kitchen lis'enin', I s'pose?" demanded Aunt
+Dilsey.</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't help frum hearin'," admitted Jeff. It was evident that he was
+not deeply grieved<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> over the failure of Sister Menifee to make headway
+against Aunt Dilsey's opposition. "At the last you suttinly give dat
+woman her marchin' orders, didn't you, Aunt Dilsey?"</p>
+
+<p>"An' sech wuz my intention frum de start off," she confided. "Minute she
+come th'ough dat back gate yonder I knowed whut she wuz comin' fur an' I
+wuz set an' ready wid de words waitin' on de tip of my tongue."</p>
+
+<p>"Me, I don't fancy dat Duvall neither," stated Jeff. "I ain't been
+sayin' much 'bout him one way or 'nother but I been doin' a heap o'
+steddyin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, I knows all 'bout dat too," snapped Aunt Dilsey. "I got eyes in my
+haid. You los' yore taste fur dis yere big-talkin', fine-lookin' man jes
+ez soon ez he started sparkin' round dat tore-down limb of a 'Phelia
+Stubblefield. Whut ails you is you is jealous; hadn't been fur dat I lay
+you'd be runnin' round wid yore tongue hangin' out suckin' in ever'thing
+he sez ez de gospil truth same ez a lot of dese other weak-minded ones
+is doin'. Oh, I know you, boy, frum ze ground up! An' furthermo' I knows
+dis Doct' Duvall likewise also, even ef I ain't never seen him but oncet
+or twicet sence fust he come yere to dis town all dress' up lak a
+persidin' elder. I don't lak his looks an' I don't lak his ways, jedgin'
+by whut I hears of 'em frum dis one an' dat one, an' most in special I
+don't lak his color. He ain't clear brown lak whut I is, an' he ain't
+muddy black lak whut<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> you is, neither he ain't high yaller lak some is.
+To me he looks most of all lak de ground side of a nickel wahtermelon.
+An' in all de goin' on sixty-two yeahs of my life I ain't never seen no
+pusson callin' theyselves Affikins dat had dat kind of a sickly
+greenish-yaller-whitish complexion but whut trouble come pourin' frum
+'em sooner or later, an' most gin'rally sooner, lak manna pourin' from
+de gourd of de Prophet Jonah. Dat man is a ravelin' wolf, ef ever I seen
+one."</p>
+
+<p>"Whut kind of a wolf did you say, Aunt Dilsey?" asked Jeff.</p>
+
+<p>"Consult de Scriptures an' you won't be so ignunt," she answered
+crushingly. "Consult de Scriptures an' you'll read whar de ravelin' wolf
+come down on de fold, an' whut he done to de fold after he'd done come
+down on it wuz more'n aplenty. An' now, boy, you git on out of my
+kitchen an' go on 'bout yore business&mdash;ef you's got any business, w'ich
+I doubts. I ain't got no mo' time to waste on you den whut I is on dat
+flighty-haided Eldora Menifee, a-traipsin' round frum one back do' to
+'nother with her talk 'bout ladies' auxiliaries an' gittin' yo rights
+fur a dollah down an' twenty cents a week."</p>
+
+<p>Jeff faded away. It was comforting in a way to find Aunt Dilsey on his
+side, even though her manner rather indicated she resented the fact that
+he was on hers. A few evenings later he found out something else. He was
+made to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> know that in another and entirely unsuspected quarter the
+endeavors of the diligently crusading and organizing Duvall person had
+roused more than a passing curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>One evening, supper being over, Judge Priest lingered on in his
+low-ceiled dining room smoking his corncob pipe while Jeff cleared away
+the supper dishes. It was the same high-voiced deliberately
+ungrammatical Judge Priest that the kindly reader may recall&mdash;somewhat
+older than at last accounts, somewhat slower in his step&mdash;but then he
+never had been given to fast movements&mdash;and perhaps just a trifle
+balder.</p>
+
+<p>"Wuz dey anythin' else you wanted, jedge, 'fore I locks up the back of
+the house an' lights out?" Jeff inquired when the table had been reset
+for breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I think mebbe there wuz," drawled the old man. He hesitated a
+moment almost as though at a loss for a proper phrasing of the thing he
+meant to say next. Then: "Jeff, what's come over your race in this town
+here lately?"</p>
+
+<p>"Meanin' w'ich, suh?" countered Jeff. "Me, I ain't notice nothin' out of
+the way&mdash;nothin' particular."</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't you? Well, I think I have. Jeff, I don't want to be put in the
+position of pryin' into the private and the personal affairs of other
+folks, reguardless of color. I have to do enough of that sort of thing
+in my official capacity when I'm settin' in judgment up at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> big cote
+house. But unless I can get some confidential information frum you I
+don't know where else I'm likely to git it, and at the same time I sort
+of feel as ef I should try to get hold of it somewheres or other ef it's
+humanly possible."</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, suh."</p>
+
+<p>"Now heretofore in this community the two races&mdash;white and black&mdash;have
+got along purty tolerably well together. We managed to put up with your
+shortcomings and you managed to put up with ours, which at times may
+have been considerable of a strain on both sides. Still we've done it.
+But it seems to me here of late there's been a kind of an undercurrent
+of discontent stirrin' amongst your people&mdash;and no logical reason fur it
+either, so fur as I kin see. Yet there it is.</p>
+
+<p>"There wuz that rumpus two-three weeks ago down in Market Square. A
+little more and that affair could have growed into a first-class race
+riot. And here last Saturday night followed that mix-up out by the Union
+Depot when Policeman Gip Futtrell got all carved up and two darkies got
+purty extensively shot. And night before last the trouble that occurred
+on that Belt Line car out in Hollandville; that looked mighty
+threatenin', too, fur a while. And in between all these more serious
+things a lot of little unpleasantnesses keep croppin' up&mdash;always takin'
+the form of friction between whites and blacks.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span></p><p>"One of these here occurrences might be what you'd call an accident and
+two of them in rapid succession a coincidence, but it looks to me like
+now it's gittin' to be a habit. It's leadin' to bad blood and what's
+worse it's leadin' to a lot of spilt blood and our city gittin' a bad
+name and all that.</p>
+
+<p>"And I know the respectable black folks in this town don't want that to
+happen any more than the respectable white people do.</p>
+
+<p>"Now then, Jeff, whut's at the bottom of all this&mdash;I mean on your side
+of the color line? Who's stirrin' up old grudges and kindlin' new ones?
+I've sort of got my own private suspicions, but I'd like to see ef your
+ideas run along with mine. Got any suggestions as to the underlying
+causes of this ill feelin' that's sprung up so lately and without any
+good reason for it either so fur ez I kin see?"</p>
+
+<p>Now ordinarily Jeff would have held firmly to the doctrine that white
+folks should tend to their business and let black folks tend to theirs.
+For all his loyalty to his master, a certain race consciousness in him
+would have bade him keep hands off and tongue locked. But here a strong
+personal prejudice operated to steer Jeff away from what otherwise would
+have been his customary course.</p>
+
+<p>"Jedge," he said, drawing a pace or two nearer his employer, "did you
+ever hear tell of a pale-yaller party w'ich calls hisse'f Doct' J.
+Talbott Duvall dat come yere a few weeks ago?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span></p><p>"Ah, hah!" said the judge as though satisfied of the correctness of a
+prior conclusion. "I thought possibly my mind might be on the right
+track. Yes, I've heard of him and I've seen him. Whut of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Jedge, I trusts you won't tell nobody else whut I'm tellin' you, but
+dat's sho' de one dat's at the bottom of the whole mess. He's the one
+dat's plantin' the pizen. Me, I ain't had no truck wid him myse'f, but
+dat ain't sayin' I don't know whut he's doin', case I do. He calls
+hisse'f a organizer."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, hah! And whut is he organizin'?"</p>
+
+<p>"Trouble, jedge. Dat's whut&mdash;trouble fur a lot of folks. Jedge, fo' we
+goes any further lemme ast you a coupler questions, please, suh. Is it
+true dat over dere in some of dem Youropean countries black folks is
+jes' the same ez white folks, ef not more so?"</p>
+
+<p>Choosing his words, the old man elucidated his understanding of the
+social order as it prevailed in certain geographical divisions and
+subdivisions of the continent of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, suh, thanky, suh," said Jeff when the judge had finished. "I
+reckin mebbe one main trouble over dere is, jedge, dat dem folks ain't
+been raised de way you an' me is."</p>
+
+<p>"Jeff," said the judge, "I'm inclined to think probably you're right."</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, suh. Now den, jedge, here's one mo' thing. Is it true dat in all
+dem furrin countries&mdash;Russia an' Germany an' Bombay an' all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>&mdash;dat the
+po' people, w'ite or black or whutever dey color is, is fixin' to rise
+up in they might an' tek the money an' de gover'mint an' de fine houses
+an' the cream of ever'thing away frum dem dat's had it all 'long?"</p>
+
+<p>Again the judge expounded at length, touching both upon upheavals abroad
+and on discords nearer home. Next it was Jeff's turn to make disclosures
+having a purely local application and he made them. Listening intently,
+Judge Priest puckered his bald brow into furrows of perplexity.</p>
+
+<p>"Jeff," he said finally, "I'm much obliged to you fur tellin' me all
+this. It backs up what I'd sort of figgered out all by myself. The whole
+world appears to be engaged in standin' on its esteemed head at this
+writin'. I reckin when old Mister Kaiser turned loose the war he didn't
+stop to think that mebbe the war was only one of a whole crop of evils
+he wuz lettin' out of his box of tricks. Or mebbe he didn't care&mdash;bein'
+the kind of a person he wuz. And I'm prone to believe also that when the
+Germans stopped fightin' us with guns they begun fightin' us with other
+weapons almost as dangersome to our peace of mind and future well-bein'.
+Different parts of this country are in quite a swivet&mdash;agitators
+preachin' bad doctrine&mdash;some of 'em drawin' pay from secret enemies
+across the sea fur preachin' it, too, I figger&mdash;and a lot of highly
+disagreeable disturbances croppin' up here and there. But I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> was hopin'
+that mebbe our little corner of the world wouldn't be pestered. But now
+it looks ez ef we weren't goin' to escape our share of the trouble."</p>
+
+<p>"Jedge," asked Jeff, "ain't they some way dis Duvall pusson could be
+fetched up in cote? I suttinly would admire to see dat yaller man
+wearin' a striped suit of clothes."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Jeff," said the judge, "I doubt either the legality or the
+propriety of such a step, ef you get what I mean. From whut you tell me
+I don't see where he's really broken any laws. He's got a right to come
+here and organize his societies and lodges and things so long as he
+don't actually come out in the open and preach violence. He's got a
+perfect right under the law to organize this here new drill company you
+speak about. I sometimes think that ef all the young men in this country
+had been required to do a little more drillin' in years gone by we'd be
+feelin' somewhat safer to-day. Anyway, it's a mighty great mistake
+sometimes to make a martyr out of a rascal. Puttin' him in jail, unless
+you're absolutely certain that a jail is where he properly belongs,
+gives him a chance to raise the cry of persecution and gives his
+followers an excuse to cut loose and smash up things. You git my drift,
+don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, suh, think I do. Well den, suh, ef I wuz runnin' dis town seems to
+me I'd git a crowd of strong-minded gen'elmen together some evenin' in
+the dark of the moon an' let 'em<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> call on dis yere slick-haided
+half-strainer an' invite him to tek his foot in his hand an' marvil
+further. Ef one of 'em wuz totin' a rope in his hand sorter keerless lak
+it might help. Ropes is powerful influential. An' the sight of tar an'
+feathers meks a mighty strong argument, too, Ise heared tell."</p>
+
+<p>"Jeff," said the judge, "I'm astonished that you'd even suggest sech a
+thing! Mob law is worse even than no law at all. Besides," he added&mdash;and
+now there was a small twinkle in his eye to offset to a degree the
+severity in his tones&mdash;"besides, the feller that was bein' called on by
+the committee might decline to take the hint and then purty soon you
+might have another self-made martyr on your hands. But ef he ran away on
+his own hook now&mdash;ef something came up that made him go of his own
+accord and go fast and cut a sort of a cheap figure in the eyes of his
+deluded followers whilst he was goin'&mdash;that'd be a different thing
+altogether. Start a crowd of folks, white or black or brown, to laughin'
+at a feller and they'll quit believin' in him. Worshipin' a false god
+and laughin' at him at the same time never has been successfully done
+yit."</p>
+
+<p>He sucked his pipe. "Jeff," he resumed, "what do you know, ef anything,
+about the past career and movements of this here J. Talbott Et Cetery?"</p>
+
+<p>Jeff knew a good deal&mdash;at second hand. Didn't the object of his deepest
+aversions <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>persist in almost nightly calls upon the object of his
+deepest affections? Paying such calls, didn't the enemy spend
+hours&mdash;hours upon hours doubtless&mdash;pouring into Ophelia's ear accounts
+of his recent triumphs as an uplifter in other towns and other states?
+Didn't the fascinated and flattered Ophelia in turn recount these tales
+to one whose opportunities for traveling and seeing the great world had
+been more circumscribed? Had not Jeff writhed in jealous misery the
+while he heard the annals of a rival's successes? So Jeff made prompt
+answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, suh, I suttinly does. Ise heared a right smart 'bout dis yere
+Duvall's past life frum&mdash;frum somebody. 'Cordin' to the way he norrates
+it, he wuz in Nashville, Tennessee 'fore he come yere; an' 'fore dat in
+Mobile, Alabama; an' 'fore dat in Little Rock, Arkansaw. Seem lak w'en
+he ain't organizin' or speechifyin' he ain't got nothin' better to do
+den run round amongst young cullid gals braggin' 'bout the places he's
+been an' the things he done whilst in 'em."</p>
+
+<p>Jeff spoke with an enhanced bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>"I see. Then I take it ef he spends so much time in seekin' out female
+society that he's not a married man?"</p>
+
+<p>"So he say&mdash;so he say! But, Jedge Priest, ef ever I looked on the
+spittin'-image of a natchel-born marryin' nigger, dat ver' same Duvall
+is de one."</p>
+
+<p>Judge Priest seemed not to have heard this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> last. He sat for a bit
+apparently studying the tips of his square-toed, low-quarter shoes.</p>
+
+<p>"Jeff," he said when he had given his feet a long half minute of seeming
+consideration, "I would like to know some facts about the previous life
+and general history of the individual we've been discussin'&mdash;I really
+would. In fact my curiosity is sech that I might even be willin' to
+spend a little money out of my own pocket, ef needs be, in order to find
+out. So I was jest wonderin' whether you wouldn't like to take a little
+trip, with all expenses paid, and tour round through some of our sister
+states and make a few private inquiries. It occurs to me that everything
+considered you might make a better job of it as an amateur investigator
+than a regular professional detective of a different color might. Do you
+know where by any chance you could git hold of a good photograph of this
+here individual&mdash;I mean without lettin' him know anything about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, suh, dat I does," stated Jeff briskly.</p>
+
+<p>The conference between master and man lasted perhaps fifteen minutes
+longer before Jeff was dismissed for the night. Mainly it dealt with
+ways, means and purposes. Upon the heels of it, within forty-eight hours
+two events&mdash;seemingly nowise related or bearing one upon the
+other&mdash;occurred. An ornately framed photograph lately bestowed as a gift
+and treasured as a trophy of sentimental value mysteriously vanished
+from the mantelpiece of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> the front room of Ophelia Stubblefield's pa's
+house; and Jefferson Poindexter, carrying a new and very shiny suitcase,
+unostentatiously left town late at night on a southbound train.</p>
+
+<p>Darktown in Nashville knew him for a brief space as a visiting nobleman
+with money in all his pockets and apparently nothing of importance to do
+except to spend it in divertisements suitable to the social instincts of
+a capitalist of leisure. In Mobile at the Elite Colored Beauty Parlors
+for the first time in his life he tendered his finger nails for
+ministrations at the hands of a dashing chocolate-ice-cream-colored
+manicurist and spent the remainder of that same afternoon in a sunny
+spot, glistening pleasantly.</p>
+
+<p>If in both these cities and likewise in Little Rock, which next he
+favored with his presence, he made himself known to brothers of his
+particular lodge&mdash;the Afro-American Order of Supreme Kings of the
+Universe has a large and a widely distributed membership&mdash;and if under
+the sacred pledge of secrecy which only may be broken on pain of
+mutilation and death by torture he&mdash;with the aid of these fraternal
+allies of his&mdash;conducted certain discreet inquiries, why, that was his
+own private business. Assuredly, so far as surface indications counted,
+he appeared to have no business other than pleasurable pursuits. From
+Little Rock he turned his face southeastward, landing at Macon, Georgia,
+where he lingered on for upward of a week, breaking his visit only by a
+day's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> side trip to a smaller town south of Macon. Altogether Jeff was
+an absentee from his favorite haunts back home for the greater part of a
+month.</p>
+
+<p>He reached town on a Monday. Betimes Tuesday morning, inspired outwardly
+by the zeal of one just won over from skepticism to the immediate
+advisability of following a sapient course, he sought opportunity to
+become a member in good standing of the Shining Star Colored Uplift and
+Progress League, a simple ceremony and a brief, since it involved merely
+the signing of one's name on Dotted Line A of a printed form card and
+the paying of a dollar into the hand of Dr. J. Talbott Duvall. On
+Tuesday evening the league met in stated session at Hillman's Hall on
+Yazoo Street and Jeff was early on hand, visibly enthusiastic and
+professedly ready to do all within his power to further the aims and
+intents of the organization. As a brand snatched from the burning he was
+elevated before the eyes of the assemblage so that all might see him and
+mark his mien of newborn fervor, for Doctor Duvall, following his
+custom, called to places upon the platform the proselytes enrolled since
+the previous meeting, to the end that older members might observe the
+physical proof of a steady and a healthful growth.</p>
+
+<p>So there sat Jefferson in the very front row of wooden chairs, where all
+might behold him and he might behold all and sundry. About<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> him were his
+recent fellow converts. Almost directly behind him was a door giving
+upon a side entrance; there was another door serving similar purposes
+upon the opposite side of the stage. Beyond him to the left in the
+center of the stage were grouped the honorary officers of the league,
+flanking and supporting their chief.</p>
+
+<p>Being an honorary officer carried with it, as the title might imply,
+honor and prominence second only to that enjoyed by the
+president-organizer, but it entailed no great weight of responsibility,
+since practically all the actual work of the league had from the very
+outset been generously assumed by Doctor Duvall. It was he who cared for
+the funds, he who handled disbursements, he who conducted the
+proceedings, he who made the principal addresses on meeting nights, he
+who between meetings labored without cessation to spread educational
+propaganda. That he found time for all these purposeful endeavors and
+yet crowded in such frequent opportunity for mingling socially among the
+lambs of his flock&mdash;notably the ewe lambs&mdash;was but evidence,
+accumulating daily, of his genius for leadership and direction.</p>
+
+<p>This night the session opened with a prayer&mdash;by Doctor Duvall; an
+eloquent and a moving prayer indeed, its sonorous periods set off and
+adorned with noble big words and quotations in foreign tongues. The
+prayer would be followed, it had been announced, by the reading of the
+minutes of the previous session, after<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> which Doctor Duvall would speak
+at length with particular reference to things lately accomplished and
+the even more important things in contemplation for the near future.</p>
+
+<p>Standing for the prayer, Jeff could look out over what a master of words
+before now has fitly described as a sea of upturned faces&mdash;faces black,
+brown and yellow. Had he been minded to give thought to details he might
+have noted how at every polysyllabic outburst from the inspired
+invocationist old Uncle Ike Fauntleroy, himself accounted a powerful
+hand at wrestling with sinners in prayer, was visibly jolted by
+admiration; might, if he had had a head for figures, have kept count of
+the hearty amens with which Sister Eldora Menifee punctuated each pause
+when Doctor Duvall was taking a fresh breath; might have cast a side
+glance upon Ophelia Stubblefield in a new and most becoming hat with
+ostrich plumage grandly surmounting it. But under the hand which he held
+reverently cupped over his brow Jeff's eyes were fixed upon a certain
+focal point,&mdash;to wit, the door of the main entrance at the length of the
+hall from him. It was as though Jeff waited for something or somebody he
+was expecting.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did he have so very long to wait. The prayer was done and well done.
+In its wake, so to speak, there spouted up from every side veritable
+geysers of hallelujahs and amens. The honorary secretary, Brother Lemuel
+Diuguid,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> smelling grandly of expensive hair ointments&mdash;Brother Diuguid
+being by calling a head barber&mdash;stood up to read the minutes of the
+preceding regular session, and having read them sat down again. A
+friendly and flattering bustle of anticipation filled the body of the
+hall as Doctor Duvall rose and moved one pace forward and&mdash;raising a
+hand for silence&mdash;began to speak. But he had no more than begun, had
+progressed no farther than part way of his first smoothly launched
+sentence, when he was made to break off by an unseemly interruption at
+the rear. The honorary grand inner guard on duty at the far street door,
+after a brief and unsuccessful struggle with unseen forces, was observed
+to be shoved violently aside from his post. Bursting in together there
+entered two strangers&mdash;a tall yellow woman and a short black man, and
+both of them of a most grim and determined aspect. He moved fast, this
+man, but even so his companion moved faster still. She was three paces
+ahead of him when, bulging impetuously past those who sprang into the
+center aisle as though to halt her onward rush&mdash;all others present being
+likewise up on their feet&mdash;she came to a halt near the middle of the
+hall and, glaring about her defiantly, just double-dog-dared any present
+to lay so much as the weight of one detaining finger upon her. There was
+something about her calculated to daunt the most willing of volunteer
+opponents, and so while those at a safe <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>distance demanded the ejection
+of the intruders, those nearer her hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"Th'ow me out?" she whooped, echoing the words of outraged and startled
+members of the Shining Star. "I'd lak to see de one dat's gwine try it!
+An' 'fo' anybody talk 'bout th'owin' out lettum heah me whilst I sez my
+say!"</p>
+
+<p>Towering until she seemed to increase in stature by inches, she aimed a
+long and bony finger dead ahead.</p>
+
+<p>"Ax dat slinky yaller man up yonder on dat flatfo'm ef he gwine give de
+order to th'ow me out!" she clarioned in a voice which rose to a
+compelling shriek. "But fust off ax him whut he meant&mdash;marryin' me in
+Mobile, Alabama, an' den runnin' 'way frum his lawful wedded wife under
+cover of de night! Ax him&mdash;dat's all, ax him!"</p>
+
+<p>"An' ax him one thing mo'!" It was the voice of her short companion
+rising above the tumult. "Ax him whut he done wid de funds of de s'ciety
+he 'stablished at Little Rock, Arkansaw, all of w'ich he absconded wid
+dis last spring!"</p>
+
+<p>As though the same set of muscles controlled every neck the heads of all
+swung about, their eyes following where the accusers pointed, their ears
+twitching for the expected blast of denial and denunciation which would
+wither these mad and scandalous detractors in their tracks.</p>
+
+<p>Alas and alackaday! With his splendid figure suddenly all diminished and
+shrunken, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> distress writ large and plain upon his features, the
+popular idol was step by step flinching backward from the edge of the
+platform&mdash;was step by step inching, edging toward the side door in the
+right-hand wall.</p>
+
+<p>And in this same instant the stunned assemblage realized that Jeff
+Poindexter, by nimble maneuvering, had thrust himself between the
+retreating figure and the exit, and Jeff was crying out: "Not dis way
+out, Doct' Duvall. Not dis way! The one you married down below Macon is
+waitin' fur you behin' dis do'!"</p>
+
+<p>The doctor stopped in midflight and swung about and his eye fell upon
+the right-hand door and he moved a yard or two in that direction; but no
+more than a yard or two, for again Jeff spoke in warning, halting him
+short:</p>
+
+<p>"Not dat way neither! The one frum dat other town whar you uster live is
+waitin' outside dat do'&mdash;wid a pistil! Seems lak you's entirely
+s'rounded by wives dis evenin'!"</p>
+
+<p>To the verge of the footlights the beset man darted, and like a
+desperate swimmer plunging from a foundering bark into a stormy sea he
+leaped far out and projected himself, a living catapult, along the
+middle aisle. He struck the tall yellow woman as the irresistible force
+strikes the supposedly immovable object of the scientists' age-old
+riddle, but on his side was impetus and on hers surprise. She was bowled
+over flat and her hands, clutching as she went down, closed, but on
+empty and unresisting air.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> Literally he hurdled over the stocky form of
+the little black man behind her, but as the other flitted by him the
+fists of the stranger knotted firmly into the skirts of its wearer's
+long black frock coat and held on. There was a rending, tearing sound
+and as the back breadth of the garment ripped bodily away from the
+waistband there flew forth from the capsized tail pockets a veritable
+cloudburst of currency&mdash;floating, fluttering green and yellow bills and
+with them pattering showers of dollars and halves and dimes and quarters
+and nickels.</p>
+
+<p>That canny instinct which had led the fugitive apostle of the uplift to
+hide the collected funds of the league upon his person rather than trust
+to banks and strong boxes was to prove his ruination financially but his
+salvation physically. While those who had believed in him, now
+forgetting all else, scrambled for the scattered money&mdash;their money&mdash;he
+fled out of the unguarded door and was instantly gone into the shielding
+night&mdash;a sorry shape in a bob-tailed garment.</p>
+
+<p>At a somewhat later hour Judge Priest in his living room was receiving
+from Jefferson Poindexter a much lengthier and more elaborated account
+of the main occurrences of the evening at Hillman's Hall than has here
+been presented. Speaking as he did in the dual r&ocirc;le of spectator and of
+an actuating force in the events of that crowded and exciting night,
+Jeff spared no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>details. He had come to the big scene of his narrative
+when his master interrupted him:</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on a minute, Jeff! I don't know ez I get the straight of it all
+yit. I rather gathered frum whut you told me yesterday when you landed
+back home and made your report that you'd only been able to dig up one
+certain-sure wife of this feller's&mdash;the one that came along with you and
+that little Arkansaw darky. You didn't say anything then about bein'
+able to prove he wuz a bigamist."</p>
+
+<p>"Huh, jedge, I didn't have to prove it! Dat man wuz more'n jes' a plain
+bigamist. He sho' wuz a trigamist, an' ef the full truth wuz knowed I
+'spects he wuz a quadrupler at the very least. He proved it hisself&mdash;way
+he act' w'en the big 'splosion come."</p>
+
+<p>"But the two women you told him were waitin' behind those side doors for
+him&mdash;how about them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Law, jedge, dey wuzn't dere&mdash;neither one of 'em wuzn't. Jes' lak I told
+you yistiddy, I couldn't find only jest one woman dat nigger'd married
+an' run off frum, an' her I fetched 'long wid me. But lak I also told
+you, I got kind of traces of one dat uster live below Macon but w'ich is
+now vanished, an' ever'whar else I went whar he'd lived befo' he come
+yere de signs wuz manifold dat he wuz a natchel-born marryin' fool, jes'
+lak I 'spicioned fust time ever I see him. So w'en he started fur dat
+fust do' I taken a chancet on him an' w'en I seen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> how he cringed an'
+ducked back I taken another chancet on him, an' the subsequent evidences
+offers testimony dat both times I reckined right. Jedge, the late Doct'
+Duvall muster married some powerful rough-actin' gals in his time ef he
+thought the Mobile one wuz the gentlest out of three. Well, anyway, suh,
+the ravelin' wolf is gone frum us, an' fur one I ain't 'spectin' him
+back never no mo'. An' I reckin dat's the main pint wid you an' me
+both."</p>
+
+<p>"The ravelin' whut?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dat's whut Aunt Dilsey called him oncet, speechifyin' to me 'bout
+him&mdash;the ravelin' wolf. Only he suttinly did look he wuz comin'
+unraveled mighty fast the last I seen of him."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>"WORTH 10,000"</h3>
+
+<p>You might have called Vincent C. Marr a self-made man and be making no
+mistake about it. For he was self-made; not merely self-assembled, as so
+many men are who attain distinction in this profession or that calling.
+Entirely through his own efforts, with only his native wit to light the
+way for him, he had pulled himself up, step by step, from the very
+bottom of his trade to the very top of it. His trade was the applied
+trade of crookedness; his pursuit the pursuit of other folks' cash
+resources. He had the envy and admiration of his friends in allied
+branches of the same general industry; he had the begrudged respect of
+his official enemies, the police; while his accomplishments&mdash;the tricks
+he pulled, the coups he scored, the purses he garnered&mdash;were discussed
+and praised by the human nits and lice of the Seamy Side, just as the
+achievements in a legitimate field of a Hill or a Schwab or a
+Rockefeller might be talked of among petty shopkeepers and little
+business men. He had, as the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> phrase goes, everything&mdash;imagination,
+resource, ingenuity, audacity, utter ruthlessness.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it would seem hard to conceive a more humble beginning than his had
+been. His father was a cobbler in a little West Virginia coal town. At
+sixteen he ran away from home to go with a small circus. This circus was
+a traveling shield for all manner of rough extortioners. Card sharps,
+shell workers, petermen, sneak thieves, pickpockets, even burglars rode
+its train. They had a saying that the owner of this show sold the
+safe-blowing privileges outright but retained a one-third interest in
+the hold-up concession. That was a whimsical exaggeration of what
+perhaps had a kern of truth in it. Certainly it was the fact of the case
+that the owner depended more upon his lion's cut of the swag which the
+trailing jackals amassed than upon the intake at the ticket windows. Bad
+weather might kill his business for a week; a crop failure might lame it
+for a month; but the graft was as sure as anything graftified can be.
+When the runaway youth, Vince Marr, inserted himself beneath the
+protecting wing of this patron he knew exactly whither his ultimate
+ambitions tended. He had no vague boyish design to serve a 'prenticeship
+as stake driver or roustabout in the hope some day of graduating into a
+rider or a tumbler, a ringmaster or a clown. He joined out in order that
+among these congenial influences he might the quicker become an
+accomplished thief.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span></p><p>Starting as a novice he had to carve out his own little niche in
+company where the competition already was fierce. His rise, though, was
+rapid. So far as the records show he was the first of the Monday guys.
+He developed the line himself and gave to it its name. A Monday guy was
+a plunderer of clotheslines. He followed the route of the daily street
+parade; rather he followed a route running roughly parallel to it. He
+set out coincidentally with it and he aimed to have his pilfering stint
+finished when the parade was over. He prowled in alleys and skinned over
+back fences, progressing from house yard to house yard while the parade
+passed through the streets upon which the houses faced. From kitchen
+boilers and laundry heaps, from wash baskets and drying ropes, he
+skimmed the pick of what was offered&mdash;silk shirts, fancy hose, women's
+embroidered blouses, women's belaced under-things. His work was made
+comparatively easy for him, since the dwellers of the houses would be
+watching the parade.</p>
+
+<p>His strippings he carried to the show lot and there he hid them away.
+That night in the privilege car the collections of the day would be
+disposed of by sale or trade to members of the troupe and the affiliated
+rogues. Especially desirable pieces might be reserved to be shipped on
+to a professional receiver of stolen goods in a certain city. Naturally,
+pickings were at their best on a Monday, for since Mother Eve on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+first Monday hanged her fig leaf out to dry, Monday has been wash day
+the world over. Hence the name for the practitioner of the business.</p>
+
+<p>Vince Marr did not very long remain a Monday guy. The risks were not
+very great, everything considered. Suppose detection did come; suppose
+the cry of "Stop thief!" was raised. Who would quit watching a circus
+parade to join in a hunt for a marauder already vanished in a maze of
+outbuildings and alleyways? Still there were risks to be taken, and the
+rewards on the whole were small and uncertain. Before he reached his
+nineteenth year young Marr was the manager of a weighing pitch.
+Apparently he had but one associate in the enterprise; as a matter of
+fact he had four. In the place where holidaying crowds gathered&mdash;on a
+circus lot, at a street carnival, outside the gates of a county fair&mdash;he
+and his visible partner would set up his weighing device, and then
+stationing himself near it he would beseech you to let him guess your
+correct weight. If he guessed within three pounds of it, as recorded by
+the machine, you owed him a nickel; if he failed to guess within three
+pounds of it you owed him nothing. "Take a chance, brother!" he would
+entreat you with friendly jovial banter. "Be a sport&mdash;take a chance!"
+Let us say you accepted his proposition. Swiftly he would flip with his
+hands along your sides, would slap your flanks, would pinch you gently
+as though testing your flesh for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>solidity, then would call out loudly
+so that all within earshot might hear: "I figure that the gentleman
+weighs&mdash;let me see&mdash;exactly one hundred and forty-seven pounds." Or
+perhaps he would predict: "This big fellow will pull her down at two
+hundred and eight pounds, no more and no less." Then you placed yourself
+in the swinging seat of the machine with your feet clear of the earth,
+and his partner duly weighed you. Sometimes Marr guessed your weight;
+quite as often, though, he failed to come within three pounds of it and
+you paid him nothing for his pains. It was difficult to figure how so
+precarious a means of income could be made to yield a proper return
+unless the scales were dishonest.</p>
+
+<p>The scales were honest enough. The real profits were derived from quite
+a different source. Three master dips&mdash;pickpockets&mdash;were waiting for you
+as you moved off; they attended to your case with neatness and dispatch.
+Their work was expedited for them by reason that already they knew where
+you carried your valuables. Once Marr ran his swift and practiced
+fingers over your body he knew where your watch was, your wallet, your
+purse for small change, your roll of bills.</p>
+
+<p>A code word in his patter advertised to his confederates exactly
+whereabouts upon your person the treasure was carried. Really the
+business gave splendid returns. It was Marr, though, who had seized upon
+it when it merely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> was a catchpenny carnival device and made of it a
+real money earner. Moreover, the pickpockets took the real peril. Even
+in the infrequent event of the detection of them there was no evidence
+to justify the suspicion that the proprietors of the weighing machine
+were accessories to the pocket looting. Vince Marr was like that&mdash;always
+playing safe for himself, always thinking a jump ahead of his crowd and
+a jump and a half ahead of the police.</p>
+
+<p>He was never the one to get into a rut and stay there. Long before the
+old-time grafting circuses grew scarce and scarcer, and before the
+street-fairing concessions progressed out of their primitive beginnings
+into orderly and recognized organizations, he had quitted both fields
+for higher and more lucrative ramifications of his craft. Ask any
+old-time con man who ostensibly has reformed. If he tells you the
+truth&mdash;which is doubtful&mdash;he will tell you it was Chappy Marr who really
+evolved the fake foot-racing game, who patched up the leaks in the
+wireless wire-tapping game, who standardized at least two popular forms
+of the send game, who improved marvelously upon three differing versions
+of the pay-off game.</p>
+
+<p>All the time he was perfecting himself in his profession, fitting
+himself for the practice of it in its highermost departments. He learned
+to tone down his wardrobe. He polished his manners until they had a
+gloss on them. He labored assiduously to correct his grammar, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> so
+well succeeded at the task that except when he was among associates and
+relapsed into the argot of the breed, he used language fit for a college
+professor&mdash;fit for some college professors anyway. At thirty he was a
+glib, spry person with a fancy for gay housings. At forty-five, when he
+reached the top of his swing, he had the looks, the vocabulary and the
+presence of an educated and a traveled person.</p>
+
+<p>He had one technical defect, if defect it might be called. In the larger
+affairs of his unhallowed business he displayed a mental adaptability, a
+talent to think quickly and shift his tactics to meet the suddenly
+arisen emergency, which was the envy of lesser underworld notables; but
+in smaller details of life he was prone to follow the line of least
+resistance, which is true of the most of us, honest and dishonest men
+the same. For instance, though he had half a dozen or more common
+aliases&mdash;names which he changed as he changed his collars&mdash;he pursued a
+certain fixed rule in choosing them, just as a man in picking out
+neckties might favor mixed weaves and varied patterns but stick always
+to the same general color scheme. He might be Vincent C. Marr, which was
+his proper name, or among intimates Chappy Marr. Then again he might be
+Col. Van Camp Morgan, of Louisiana; or Mr. Vance C. Michaels, a Western
+mine owner; or Victor C. Morehead; he might be a Markham or a Murrill or
+a Marsh or a Murphy as the occasion and the r&ocirc;le and his humor suited.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>Always, though, the initials were the same. Partly this was for
+convenience&mdash;the name was so much easier to remember then&mdash;but partly it
+was due to that instinct for ordered routine which in a reputable sphere
+of endeavor would have made this man rather conventional and methodical
+in his personal habits, however audacious and resourceful he might have
+been on his public side and his professional. He especially was lucky in
+that he never acquired any of those mouth-filling nicknames such as
+Paper Collar Joe wore, and Grand Central Pete and Appetite Willie and
+the Mitt-and-a-Half Kid and the late Soapy Smith&mdash;picturesque enough,
+all of them, but giving to the wearers thereof an undesirable prominence
+in newspapers and to that added extent curtailing their usefulness in
+their own special areas of operation.</p>
+
+<p>Nor had he ever smelled the chloride-of-lime-and-circus-cage smell of
+the inside of a state's prison; no Bertillon sharp had on file his
+measurements and thumb prints, nor did any central office or detective
+bureau contain his rogues-gallery photograph. Times almost past counting
+he had been taken up on suspicion; more than once had been arrested on
+direct charges, and at least twice had been indicted. But because of
+connections with crooked lawyers and approachable politicians and venal
+police officials and because also of his own individual canniness, he
+always had escaped conviction and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>imprisonment. There was no stink of
+the stone hoosgow on his correctly tailored garments, and no barber
+other than one of his own choosing had ever shingled Chappy Marr's hair.
+Within reason, therefore, he was free to come and go, to bide and to
+tarry; and come and go at will he did until that unfortuitous hour when
+the affair of the wealthy Mrs. Propbridge and her husband came to pass.</p>
+
+<p>When the period of post-wartime inflation came upon this country
+specialized thievery marched abreast with legitimate enterprise; with it
+as with the other, rewards became tremendously larger; small turnovers
+were regarded as puny and contemptible, and operators thought in terms
+of pyramiding thousands of dollars where before they had been glad to
+strive for speculative returns of hundreds. By now Chappy Marr had won
+his way to the forefront of his kind. The same intelligence invoked, the
+same energies exercised, and in almost any proper field he would before
+this have been a rich man and an honored one. By his twisted code of
+ethics and unmorals, though, the dubious pre&euml;minence he enjoyed was
+ample reward. He stood forth from the ruck and run, a creator and a
+leader who could afford to pass by the lesser, more precarious games,
+with their prospect of uncertain takings, for the really big and
+important things. He was like a specialist who having won a prominent
+position may now say that he will accept only such patients as he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>
+pleases and treat only such cases as appeal to him.</p>
+
+<p>This being so, there were open to him two especially favored lines: he
+might be a deep-sea fisherman, meaning by that a crooked card player
+traveling on ocean steamers; or he might be the head of a swell mob of
+blackmailers preying upon more or less polite society. For the first he
+had not the digital facility which was necessary; his fingers lacked the
+requisite deftness, however agile and flexible the brain which directed
+the fingers might be. So Chappy Marr turned his talents to blackmailing.
+Blackmailing plants had acquired a sudden vogue; nearly all the
+wise-cracking kings and queens of Marr's world had gone or were going
+into them. Moreover, blackmailing offered an opportunity for variety of
+scope and ingenuity in the mechanics of its workings which appealed
+mightily to a born originator. Finally there was a paramount
+consideration. Of all the tricks and devices at the command of the
+top-hole rogue it was the very safest to play. Ninety-nine times out of
+a hundred the victim had his social position or his business reputation
+to think of, else in the first place he would never have been picked on
+as a fit subject for victimizing. Therefore he was all the more disposed
+to pay and keep still, and pay again.</p>
+
+<p>The bait in the trap of the average blackmailing plant is a woman&mdash;a
+young woman, good-looking, well groomed and smart. It is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> with her that
+the quarry is compromisingly entangled. But against women confederates
+Chappy Marr had a strong prejudice. They were such uncertain quantities;
+you never could depend upon them. They were emotional, temperamental;
+they let their sentimental attachments run away with their judgment;
+they fell in love, which was bad; they talked too much, which was worse;
+they were fickle-minded and jealous; they were given to falling out with
+male pals, and they had been known to carry a jealous grudge to the
+point of turning informer. So he set his inventions to the task of
+evolving a blackmailing snare which might be set and sprung, and
+afterwards dismantled and hidden away without the intervention of the
+female knave of the species in any of its stages. Trust him&mdash;smooth as
+lubricating oil, a veritable human graphite&mdash;to turn the trick. He
+turned it.</p>
+
+<p>The upshot was a lovely thing, almost foolproof and practically
+cop-proof. To be sure, a woman figured in it, but her part was that of
+the chosen prey, not the part of an accessory and accomplice. The
+greater simplicity of the device was attested by the fact that for its
+mounting, from beginning to end, only three active performers were
+needed. The chief r&ocirc;le he would play. For his main supporting cast he
+needed two men, and knew moreover exactly where to find them. Of these
+two only one would show ever upon the stage. The other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> would bide out
+of sight behind the scenes, doing his share of the work, unsuspected,
+from under cover.</p>
+
+<p>For the part which he intended her to take in his production&mdash;the part
+of dupe&mdash;Mrs. Justus Propbridge was, as one might say, made to order.
+Consider her qualifications: young, pretty, impressionable, vain and
+inexperienced; the second wife of a man who even in these times of
+suddenly inflated fortunes was reckoned to be rich; newly come out of
+the boundless West, bringing a bounding social ambition with her;
+spending money freely and having plenty more at command to spend when
+the present supply was gone; her name appearing frequently in those
+newspapers and those weekly and monthly magazines catering particularly
+to the so-called smart set, which is so called, one gathers, because it
+is not a set and is not particularly smart.</p>
+
+<p>Young Mrs. Propbridge figured that her name was becoming tolerably well
+known along the Gold Coast of the North Atlantic Seaboard. It was too.
+For example, there was at least one person entirely unknown to her who
+kept a close tally of her comings and her goings, of her social
+activities, of her mode of daily life. This person was Vincent Marr.
+Thanks to the freedom with which a certain type of journal discusses the
+private and the public affairs of those men and women most commonly
+mentioned in its columns, he presently had in his mind a very clear
+picture of this lady, and he followed her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>movements, as reflected in
+print, with care and fidelity; it was as though he had a deep personal
+interest in her. For a matter of fact, he did; he had a very personal
+interest in her. He had been doing this for months; in his trade, as in
+many others, patience was not only a virtue but a necessity. For
+example, he knew that her determined and persistent but somewhat crudely
+engineered campaigning to establish herself in what New York calls&mdash;with
+a big S&mdash;Society was the subject in some quarters of a somewhat thinly
+veiled derision; he knew that her husband was rather an elemental, not
+to say a primitive creature, but genuine and aboveboard and generous, as
+elemental beings are likely to be. Marr figured him to be of the jealous
+type. He hoped he was; it might simplify matters tremendously.</p>
+
+<p>On a certain summer morning a paragraph appeared in at least three daily
+papers to the effect that Mr. and Mrs. Justus Propbridge had gone down
+to Gulf Stream City, on the Maryland coast; they would be at the
+Churchill-Fontenay there for a week or ten days. It was at his breakfast
+that Marr read this information. At noon, having in the meantime done a
+considerable amount of telephoning, he was on his way to the seaside
+too. Mentally he was shaking hands with himself in a warmly
+congratulatory way. Gulf Stream City was a place seemingly designed,
+both by Nature and by man, for the serving of his purposes.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span></p><p>Residing there were persons of his own kidney and persuasion, on whom
+he might count for at least one detail of invaluable co&ouml;peration. For a
+certain act of his piece, a short but highly important one, he also must
+have a borrowed stage setting and a supernumerary actor or so.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately upon his arrival he sought out certain dependable
+individuals and put them through a rough rehearsal. This he did before
+he claimed the room he had engaged by wire at the Hotel Crofter. The
+Hotel Crofter snuggled its lesser bulk under an imposing flank of the
+supposedly exclusive and admittedly expensive Churchill-Fontenay. From
+its verandas one might command a view of the main entrance of the
+greater hotel.</p>
+
+<p>It was on a Tuesday that the Propbridges reached Gulf Stream City. It
+was on Wednesday afternoon that the husband received a telegram, signed
+with the name of a business associate, calling him to Toledo for a
+conference&mdash;so the wire stated&mdash;upon an urgent complication newly
+arisen. Mr. Propbridge, as all the world knew, was one of the heaviest
+stockholders and a member of the board of the Sonnesbein-Propbridge Tire
+Company, which, as the world likewise knew, had had tremendous dealings
+in contracts with the Government and now was having trouble closing up
+the loose ends of its wartime activities.</p>
+
+<p>He packed a bag and caught a night train West. On the following morning,
+which would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> be Thursday, Mrs. Propbridge took a stroll on Gulf Stream
+City's famous boardwalk. It was rather a lonely stroll. She had no
+particular objective. It was too early in the day for a full display of
+vivid costumes among the bathers on the beach. She encountered no one
+she knew.</p>
+
+<p>Really, for a resort so extensively advertised, Gulf Stream City was not
+a particularly exciting place. For lack of anything better to do she had
+halted to view the contents of a shop window when an exclamation of
+happy surprise from someone immediately behind her caused Mrs.
+Propbridge to turn around.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately it was her turn to register astonishment. A tall,
+well-dressed, gray-haired man, a stranger to her, was taking possession
+of her right hand and shaking it warmly.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, my dear Mrs. Watrous," he was saying, "how do you do? Well, this
+is an unexpected pleasure! When did you come down from Wilmington? And
+who is with you? And how long are you going to stay? General Dunlap and
+his daughter Claire&mdash;you know, the second daughter&mdash;and Mrs.
+Gordon-Tracy and Freddy Urb will be here in a little while. They'll be
+delighted to see you! Why, we'll have a reunion! Well, well, well!"</p>
+
+<p>He had said all this with scarcely a pause for breath and without giving
+her an opportunity to speak, as though surprise made him disregardful of
+labial punctuation of his sentences. Indeed, Mrs. Propbridge did not
+succeed in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>getting her hand free from his grasp until he had uttered
+the final "well."</p>
+
+<p>"You have the advantage of me," she said. "I do not know you. I am sure
+I never saw you before."</p>
+
+<p>At this his sudden shift from cordiality to a look half incredulous,
+half embarrassed was almost comic.</p>
+
+<p>"What?" he demanded, falling back a pace. "Surely this is Mrs. Beeman
+Watrous of Wilmington? I can't be mistaken!"</p>
+
+<p>"But you are mistaken," she insisted; "very much mistaken. My name is
+not Watrous; my name is Propbridge."</p>
+
+<p>"Madam," he cried, "I beg ten thousand pardons! Really, though, this is
+one of the most remarkable things I ever saw in my life&mdash;one of the most
+remarkable cases of resemblance, I mean. I am sure anyone would be
+deceived by it; that is my apology. In my own behalf, madam, I must tell
+you that you are an exact counterpart of someone I know&mdash;of Mrs. Beeman
+Watrous, a very good friend of mine. Pardon me once more, but may I ask
+if you are related to Mrs. Beeman Watrous? Her cousin perhaps? It isn't
+humanly possible that two persons should look so much alike and not be
+related?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I ever heard of the lady," stated Mrs. Propbridge
+somewhat coldly.</p>
+
+<p>"Again, madam, please excuse me," he said. "I am very, very sorry to
+have annoyed you."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> He bowed his bared head and turned away. Then
+quickly he swung on his heel and returned to her, his hat again in his
+left hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Madam," he said, "I am fearful that you are suspecting me of being one
+of the objectionable breed of he-flirts who infest this place. At the
+risk of being tiresome I must repeat once more that your wonderful
+resemblance to another person led me into this awkward error. My name,
+madam, is Murrill&mdash;Valentine C. Murrill&mdash;and I am sure that if you only
+had the time and the patience to bear with me I could find someone
+here&mdash;some acquaintance of yours perhaps&mdash;who would vouch for me and
+make it plain to you that I am not addicted to the habit of forcing
+myself upon strangers on the pretext that I have met them somewhere."</p>
+
+<p>His manner was disarming. It was more than that; it was outright
+engaging. He was carefully groomed, smartly turned out; he had the
+manner and voice of a well-bred person. To Mrs. Propbridge he seemed a
+candid, courteous soul unduly distressed over a small matter.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't concern yourself about it," she said. "I didn't suspect
+you of being a professional masher; I was only rather startled, that's
+all."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you for telling me so," he said. "You take a load off my mind, I
+assure you. Pardon me again, please&mdash;but did I understand you to say a
+moment ago that your name was Propbridge?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p><p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't a very common name. Surely you are not the Mrs. Propbridge?"</p>
+
+<p>Without being in the least presuming he somehow had managed to convey a
+subtle tribute.</p>
+
+<p>"I am Mrs. Justus Propbridge, if that is what you mean," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then," he said in tones of relief, "that simplifies matters. Is
+your husband about, madam? If he is I will do myself the honor of
+introducing myself to him and repeating to him the explanation I have
+just made to you. You see, I am by way of being one of the small fish
+who circulate on the outer edge of the big sea where the large financial
+whales swim, and it is possible that he may have heard my name and may
+know who I am."</p>
+
+<p>"My husband isn't here," she explained. "He was called away last night
+on business."</p>
+
+<p>"Again my misfortune," he said.</p>
+
+<p>They were in motion now; he had fallen into step alongside her as she
+moved on back up the boardwalk. Plainly her amazing resemblance to
+someone else was once more the uppermost subject in his mind. He went
+back to it.</p>
+
+<p>"I've heard before now of dual personalities," he said, "but this is my
+first actual experience with a case of it. When I first saw you standing
+there with your back to me and even when you turned round facing me
+after I spoke to you, I was ready to swear that you were Mrs. Beeman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+Watrous. Look, manner, size, voice, hair, eyes&mdash;all identical. I know
+her very well too. I've been a guest at one or two of her house parties.
+It's curious that you never heard of her, Mrs. Propbridge; she's the
+widow of one of the Wilmington Watrouses&mdash;the firearms people, you
+know&mdash;guns, rifles, all that sort of thing&mdash;and he left her more
+millions than she knows what to do with."</p>
+
+<p>Now Mrs. Propbridge had never heard of any Wilmington Watrouses, but
+plainly, here in the East they were persons of consequence&mdash;persons who
+would be worth knowing.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded as though to indicate that now she did faintly recall who it
+was this kindly stranger had meant.</p>
+
+<p>He went on. It was evident that he was inclined to be talkative. The
+impression was conveyed to her that here was a well-meaning but rather
+shallow-minded gentleman who was reasonably fond of the sound of his own
+voice. Yet about him was nothing to suggest over-effusiveness or
+familiarity.</p>
+
+<p>"I've a sort of favor to ask of you," he said. "I've some friends who're
+motoring over to-day from Philadelphia. I had to run on down ahead of
+them to see a man on business. They're to join me in about an hour from
+now"&mdash;he consulted his watch&mdash;"and we're all driving back together
+to-night. General Dunlap and Mrs. Claire Denton, his daughter&mdash;she's the
+amateur tennis champion, you know&mdash;and Mrs.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> Gordon-Tracy, of Newport,
+and Freddy Urb, the writer&mdash;they're all in the party. And the favor I'm
+asking is that I may have the pleasure of presenting them to you&mdash;that
+is, of course, unless you already know them&mdash;so that I may enjoy the
+looks on their faces when they find out that you are not Mrs. Beeman
+Watrous. I know they'll behave as I did. They won't believe it at first.
+May I?"</p>
+
+<p>What could Mrs. Propbridge do except consent? Indeed, inwardly she
+rejoiced at the prospect. She did not know personally the four named by
+this Mr. Murrill, but she knew mighty well who they were. What person
+familiar with the Social Register could fail to know who they were?
+Another thing had impressed her: The stranger had mentioned these
+notables with no especial emphasis on the names; but instead, quite
+casually and in a manner which carried with it the impression that such
+noted folk as Mrs. Denton and her distinguished father, and Freddy Urb
+the court jester of the innermost holies of holies of Newport and Bar
+Harbor and Palm Beach, and Mrs. Gordon-Tracy, the famous beauty, were of
+the sort with whom customarily he associated. Plainly here was a
+gentleman who not only belonged to the who's-who but had a very clear
+perception of the what-was-what. So fluttered little Mrs. Propbridge
+promptly said yes&mdash;said it with a gratified sensation in her heart.</p>
+
+<p>"That's fine of you!" said Murrill, visibly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> elated. It would appear
+that small favors were to him great pleasures. "That's splendid! Up
+until now the joke of this thing has been on me. I want to transfer it
+to them. I'm to meet them up here in the lounge of the
+Churchill-Fontenay."</p>
+
+<p>"That's where I am stopping," said Mrs. Propbridge.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it? Better and better! We might stroll along that way if you don't
+mind. By Jove, I've an idea! Suppose when they arrive they found us
+chatting together like old friends&mdash;suppose as they came up they were to
+overhear me calling you Mrs. Beeman Watrous. That would make the shock
+all the greater for them when they found out you really weren't Mrs.
+Watrous at all, but somebody they'd never seen before! Are you game for
+it?... Capital! Only, if we mean to do that we'll have to kill the time,
+some way, for forty or fifty minutes or so. Do you mind letting me bore
+you for a little while? I know it's unconventional&mdash;but I like to do the
+unconventional things when they don't make one conspicuous."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Propbridge did not in the least mind. So they killed the time and
+it died a very agreeable death, barring one small incident. On Mr.
+Murrill's invitation they took a short turn in a double-seated roller
+chair, Mr. Murrill chatting briskly all the while and savoring his
+conversation with offhand reference to this well-known personage and
+that. At his suggestion they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> quit the wheel chair at a point well down
+the boardwalk to drink orangeades in a small glass-fronted caf&eacute; which
+faced the sea. He had heard somewhere, he said, that they made famous
+orangeades in this shop. They might try for themselves and find out.</p>
+
+<p>The experiment was not entirely a success. To begin with, a waiter
+person&mdash;Mr. Murrill referred to him as a waiter person&mdash;sat them down
+near the front at a small, round table whose enamel top was decorated
+with two slopped glasses and a bottle one-third filled with wine gone
+stale. At least the stuff looked and smelled like wine&mdash;like a poor
+quality of champagne.</p>
+
+<p>"Ugh!" said Mr. Murrill, tasting the air. "Somebody evidently couldn't
+wait until lunch time before he started his tippling. And I didn't
+suspect either that this place might be a bootlegging place in disguise.
+Well, since prohibition came in it's hard to find a resort shop anywhere
+where you can't buy bad liquor&mdash;if only you go about it the right way."</p>
+
+<p>When the waiter person brought their order he bade him remove the bottle
+and the slopped glasses, and the waiter person obliged, but so sulkily
+and with such slowness of movement that Mr. Murrill was moved to speak
+to him rather sharply. Even so, the sullen functionary took his time
+about the thing. Nor did the orangeade prove particularly appetizing.
+Mr. Murrill barely tasted his.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p><p>"Shall we clear out?" he asked, making a fastidious little grimace.</p>
+
+<p>At the door, on the way out, he made excuses.</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry I suggested coming into this place," he said, sinking his voice.
+"Either it is a shop which has gone off badly or its merits have been
+overadvertised by its loving friends. To me the whole atmosphere of the
+establishment seemed rather dubious, eh, what? Well, what shall we do
+next? I see a few bathers down below. Shall we go down on the beach and
+find a place to sit and watch them for a bit?"</p>
+
+<p>They went; and he found a bench in a quiet place under the shorings of
+the boardwalk close up alongside one of the lesser bathing pavilions,
+and they sat there, and he talked and she listened. The man had an
+endless fund of gossip about amusing and noted people; most of them, it
+would seem, were his intimates. Telling one or two incidents in which
+these distinguished friends had figured, he felt it expedient to sink
+his voice to a discreet undertone. There was plainly apparent a delicacy
+of feeling in this; one did not shout out the names of such persons for
+any curious passer-by to hear. It developed that there was one specially
+close bond between him and the members of General Dunlap's family, an
+attachment partly based upon old acquaintance and partly upon the fact
+that the Dunlaps thought he once upon a time had saved the life of the
+general's youngest daughter, Millicent.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p><p>"Really, though, it was nothing," he said deprecatingly, as befitted a
+modest and a mannerly man. "The thing came about like this: It was once
+when we were all out West together. We were spending a week at the Grand
+Ca&ntilde;on. One morning we took the Rim Drive over to Mohave Point. No doubt
+you know the spot? I was standing with Millicent on the outer edge of
+the cliff and we were looking down together into that tremendous void
+when all of a sudden she fainted dead away. Her heart isn't very
+strong&mdash;she isn't athletic as Claire, her older sister, and the other
+Dunlap girls are&mdash;and I suppose the altitude got her. Luckily I was as
+close to her as I am to you now, and I saw her totter and I threw out my
+arms&mdash;pardon me&mdash;like this." He illustrated with movements of his arms.
+"And luckily I managed to catch her about the waist as she fell forward.
+I held on and dragged her back out of danger. Otherwise she would have
+dropped for no telling how many hundreds of feet. Of course it was only
+a chance that I happened to be touching elbows with the child, and
+naturally I only did what anyone would have done in the same
+circumstances, but the whole family were tremendously grateful and made
+a great pother over it. By the way, speaking of rescues, have you heard
+about the thing that happened to the two Van Norden girls at Bailey's
+Beach last week? I must tell you about that."</p>
+
+<p>Presently they both were surprised to find<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> that forty-five minutes had
+passed. Mr. Murrill said they had better be getting along; he made so
+bold as to venture the suggestion that possibly Mrs. Propbridge might
+want to go to her rooms before the automobile party arrived, to change
+her frock or something. Not that he personally thought she should change
+it. If he might be pardoned for saying so, he thought it a most becoming
+frock; but women were curious about such things, now honestly weren't
+they? And Mrs. Propbridge was constrained to confess that about such
+things women were curious. She had a conviction that if all things moved
+smoothly she presently would be urged to waive formality and join the
+party at luncheon. Mr. Murrill had not exactly put the idea into words
+yet, but she sensed that the thought of offering the invitation was in
+his mind. In any event the impending meeting called for efforts on her
+part to appear at her best.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe I will run up to our rooms for a few minutes before your
+friends arrive," she said as they arose from the bench. "I want to
+freshen up a bit."</p>
+
+<p>"Quite so," he assented.</p>
+
+<p>He left her at the doors of the Churchill-Fontenay, saying he would idle
+about and watch for the others in case they should arrive ahead of time.</p>
+
+<p>Ten minutes later, while she was still trying to make a choice between
+three frocks, her telephone rang. She answered the ring; it was Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+Murrill, who was at the other end of the line. He was distressed to have
+to tell her that word had just reached him that on the way down from
+Philadelphia General Dunlap had been taken suddenly ill&mdash;an attack of
+acute indigestion, perhaps, or possibly a touch of the sun&mdash;and the
+motor trip had been halted at a small town on the mainland fifteen miles
+back of Gulf Stream City. He was starting immediately for the town in a
+car with a physician. He trusted the general's indisposition was not
+really serious but of course the party would be called off; and the
+invalid would return to Philadelphia as soon as he felt well enough to
+move. He was awfully sorry&mdash;Mr. Murrill was&mdash;terribly put out, and all
+that sort of thing; hoped that another opportunity might be vouchsafed
+him of meeting Mrs. Propbridge; he had enjoyed tremendously meeting her
+under these unconventional circumstances; and now he must go.</p>
+
+<p>It was not to be denied that young Mrs. Propbridge felt distinctly
+disappointed. The start of the little adventure had had promise in it.
+She had forecast all manner of agreeable contingencies as the probable
+outcome.</p>
+
+<p>For some reason, though, or perhaps for no definite reason at all, she
+said nothing to her husband, on his return from Toledo, of her encounter
+with the agreeable Mr. Murrill. Anyway, he arrived in no very affable
+state of mind. As a matter of fact he was most terrifically out of
+temper. Somebody or other&mdash;presumably<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> some ass of a practical joker, he
+figured, or possibly a person with a grudge against him who had curious
+methods of taking vengeance&mdash;had lured him into taking a hot, dusty,
+tiresome and entirely useless trip. There was no business conference on
+out at Toledo; no need for his presence there. If he could lay hands on
+the idiot who had sent him that forged telegram&mdash;well, the angered Mr.
+Propbridge indicated with a gesture of a large and knobby fist what he
+would do to the aforesaid idiot.</p>
+
+<p>The next time Mr. Propbridge was haled to the broiling Corn Belt he made
+very sure that the warrant was genuine. One of these wild-goose chases a
+summer was quite enough for a man with a size-nineteen collar and a
+forty-six-inch waistband.</p>
+
+<p>The next time befell some ten days after the Propbridges returned from
+the shore to their thirty-thousand-dollars-a-year apartment on Upper
+Park Avenue. The very fact that they did live in an apartment and that
+they did spend a good part of their time there would stamp them for what
+they were&mdash;persons not yet to be included among the really fashionable
+group. The really fashionable maintained large homes which they occupied
+when they came to town to have dental work done or to launch a d&eacute;butante
+daughter into society; the rest of the year they usually were elsewhere.
+It was the thing.</p>
+
+<p>Business of importance sent Mr. Propbridge to Detroit, and then on to
+Chicago and Des<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> Moines. On a certain afternoon he caught the Wolverine
+Limited. Almost before his train had passed One Hundred and Twenty-fifth
+Street Mrs. Propbridge had a caller. She was informed that a member of
+the staff of that live paper, People You Know, desired to see her for a
+few minutes. Persons of social consequence or persons who craved to be
+of social consequence did not often deny themselves to representatives
+of People You Know. Mrs. Propbridge told the switchboard girl downstairs
+to tell the hallman to invite the gentleman to come up.</p>
+
+<p>He proved to be a somewhat older man than she had expected to see. He
+was well dressed enough, but about him was something hard and
+forbidding, almost formidable in fact. Yet there was a soothing,
+conciliatory tone in his voice when he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Propbridge," he began, "my name is Townsend. I am one of the
+editors of People You Know. I might have sent one of our reporters to
+see you, but in a matter so important&mdash;and so delicate as this one is&mdash;I
+felt it would be better if I came personally to have a little talk with
+you and get your side of the affair for publication."</p>
+
+<p>"My side of what affair?" she asked, puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>He lifted one lip in a cornerwise smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me give you a little advice, Mrs. Propbridge," he said. "I've had a
+lot of experience in such matters as these. The interested parties will
+be better off if they're perfectly frank in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> talking to the press. Then
+all misunderstandings are avoided and everybody gets a fair deal in
+print. Don't you agree with me that I am right?"</p>
+
+<p>"You may be right," she said, "but I haven't the least idea what you are
+talking about."</p>
+
+<p>"I mean your trouble with your husband&mdash;if you force me to speak
+plainly; I'd like to have your statement, that's all."</p>
+
+<p>"But I haven't had any trouble with my husband!" she said. Her amazement
+made her voice shrill. "My husband and I are living together in perfect
+happiness. You've made a mistake."</p>
+
+<p>"No chance," he said, and suddenly his manner changed from the
+sympathetic to the accusing. "Mrs. Propbridge, we have exclusive advance
+information from reliable sources&mdash;a straight tip&mdash;that the proof
+against you is about to be turned over to your husband and we've every
+reason to believe that when he gets it in his hands he's going to sue
+you for divorce, naming as corespondent a certain middle-aged man. Do
+you mean to tell me you don't know anything about that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I mean to! Why, you're crazy! You're&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Wait just one minute please," he interrupted the distressed lady. "Wait
+until I get through telling you how much I know already; then you'll see
+that denials won't help you any. As a matter of fact we're ready now to
+go ahead and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> spring the story in next week's issue, but I thought it
+was only fair to come to you and give you a chance to make your defense
+in print&mdash;if you care to make one."</p>
+
+<p>"I still tell you that you've made a terrible mistake," she declared.
+Her anger began to stir within her, as indignation succeeded to
+astonishment. "How dare you come here accusing me of doing anything
+wrong!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm accusing you of nothing. I'm only going by the plain evidence. I
+might be lying to you. Other people might lie to you. But, madam,
+photographs don't lie. That's why they're the best possible evidence in
+a divorce court. And I've seen the evidence. I've got it in my pocket
+right now."</p>
+
+<p>"Evidence against me? Photographs of me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure. Photographs of you and the gray-haired party." He reached in a
+breast pocket and brought out a thin sheaf of unmounted photographs and
+handed them to her. "Mrs. Propbridge, just take a look at these and then
+tell me if you blame me for assuming that there's bound to be trouble
+when your husband sees them?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked, and her twirling brain told her it was all a nightmare, but
+her eyes told her it was not. Here were five photographs, enlarged
+snapshots apparently: One, a profile view, showing her standing on a
+boardwalk, her hand held in the hand of the man she had known as
+Valentine C. Murrill; one, a quartering view, revealing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> them riding
+together in a wheel chair, their heads close together, she smiling and
+he apparently whispering something of a pleasing and confidential nature
+to her, the posture of both almost intimate; one, a side view, showing
+the pair of them emerging from an open-fronted caf&eacute;&mdash;she recognized the
+fa&ccedil;ade of the place where they had found the orangeades so
+disappointing&mdash;and in this picture Mr. Murrill had been caught by the
+camera as he was saying something of seeming mutual interest, for she
+was glancing up sidewise at him and he had lowered his head until his
+lips almost touched her ear; one, showing them sitting at a small round
+table with a wine bottle and glasses in front of them and behind them a
+background suggesting the interior of a rather shabby drinking place, a
+distinct impression of sordidness somehow conveyed; and one, a rear
+view, showing them upon a bench alongside a seemingly deserted wooden
+structure of some sort, and in this one the man had been snapped in the
+very act of putting his arms about her and drawing her toward him.</p>
+
+<p>That was all&mdash;merely five oblong slips of chemically printed paper, and
+yet on the face of them they told a damning and a condemning story.</p>
+
+<p>She stared at them, she who was absolutely innocent of thought or intent
+of wrong-doing, and could feel the fabric of her domestic life trembling
+before it came crashing down.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p><p>"Oh, but this is too horrible for words!" the distressed lady cried
+out. "How could anybody have been so cruel, so malicious, as to follow
+us and waylay us and catch us in these positions? It's monstrous!"</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody did catch you, then, in compromising attitudes&mdash;you admit
+that?"</p>
+
+<p>"You twist my words to give them a false meaning!" she exclaimed. "You
+are trying to trap me into saying something that would put me in a wrong
+light. I can explain&mdash;why, the whole thing is so simple when you
+understand."</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose you do explain, then. Get me right, Mrs. Propbridge&mdash;I'm all
+for you in this affair. I want to give you the best of it from every
+standpoint."</p>
+
+<p>So she explained, her words pouring forth in a torrent. She told him in
+such details as she recalled the entire history of her meeting with the
+vanished Mr. Murrill&mdash;how a doctored telegram sent her husband away and
+left her alone, how Murrill had accosted her, and why and what
+followed&mdash;all of it she told him, withholding nothing.</p>
+
+<p>He waited until she was through. Then he sped a bolt, watching her
+closely, for upon the way she took it much, from his viewpoint,
+depended.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "if that's the way this thing happened and if you've
+told your husband about it"&mdash;he dragged his words just a trifle&mdash;"why<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+should you be so worried, even if these pictures should reach him?"</p>
+
+<p>Her look told him the shot had struck home. Inwardly he rejoiced,
+knowing, before she answered, what her answer would be.</p>
+
+<p>"But I didn't tell him," she confessed, stricken with a new cause for
+concern. "I&mdash;I forgot to tell him."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you forgot to tell him?" he repeated. Now suddenly he became a
+cross-examiner, snapping his questions at her, catching her up sharply
+in her replies. "And you say you never saw this Mr. Murrill&mdash;as you call
+him&mdash;before in all your life?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"And you've never seen the mysterious stranger since?"</p>
+
+<p>"There was nothing mysterious about him, I tell you. He was merely
+interesting."</p>
+
+<p>"Anyhow, you've never seen him since?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Nor had any word from him other than that telephone talk you say you
+had with him?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ever make any inquiries with a view to finding out whether
+there was such a person as this Mrs. Beeman Watrous?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; why should I?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's a question for you to decide. Did you think to look in the
+papers to see whether General Dunlap had really been taken ill on a
+motor trip?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span></p><p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet he's a well-known person. Surely you expected the papers would
+mention his illness?"</p>
+
+<p>"It never occurred to me to look. I tell you there was nothing wrong
+about it. Why do you try to trip me up so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me, I'm only trying to help you out of what looks like a pretty
+bad mess. But I've got to get the straight of it. Let me run over the
+points in your story: No sooner do you land in Gulf Stream City than
+your husband gets a faked-up telegram and goes away? And you are left
+all alone? And you go for a walk all by yourself? And a man you never
+laid eyes on before comes up to you and tells you that you look a lot
+like a friend of his, a certain very rich widow, Mrs. Watrous&mdash;somebody,
+though, that I for one never heard of, and I know the Social Register
+from cover to cover, and know something about Wilmington too. And on the
+strength of your imaginary resemblance to an imaginary somebody he
+introduced himself to you? And then you let him walk with you? And you
+let him whisper pleasant things in your ear? Two of those pictures that
+you've got in your hand prove that. And you let him take you into one of
+the most notorious blind tigers on the beach? And you sit there with him
+in this dump&mdash;this place with a shady reputation&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I've explained to you how that happened. We didn't stay there. We came
+right out."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span></p><p>"Let me go on, please. And you let him buy you wine there?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've told you about that part, too&mdash;how the bottles and the glasses
+were already on the table when we sat down."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm merely going by what the photographs tell, Mrs. Propbridge. I'm
+merely saying to you what a smart divorce lawyer would say to you if
+ever he got you on the witness stand; only he'd be trying to convict you
+by your own words and I'm trying to give you every chance to clear
+yourself. And then after that you go and sit with him&mdash;this perfect
+stranger&mdash;in a lonely place alongside a deserted bath house and nobody
+else in sight?"</p>
+
+<p>"There were people bathing right in front of us all the time."</p>
+
+<p>"Were there? Well, take a look at Photograph Number Five and see if it
+shows any bathers in sight. And he slips his arm around you and draws
+you to him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I explained to you how that happened," protested the badgered,
+desperate woman. "No matter what the circumstances seem to be, I did
+nothing wrong, I tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, just as you say. Remember, I'm taking your side of it; I'm
+trying to be your friend. But here's the important thing for you to
+consider: With those pictures laid before them would any jury on earth
+believe your side of it? Would they believe you had no hand in sending
+your husband that faked-up telegram?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> Would they believe it wasn't a
+trick to get him away so you could keep an appointment with this man?
+Would any judge believe you? Would your friends believe you? Or would
+they all say that they never heard such a transparent cock-and-bull
+story in their lives?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, oh!" she cried chokingly, and put her face in her hands. Then she
+threw up her head and stared at him out of her miserable eyes. "Where
+did those pictures come from? You say you believe in me, that you are
+willing to help me. Then tell me where they came from and who took them?
+And how did you manage to get hold of them?"</p>
+
+<p>His baitings had carried her exactly to the desired place&mdash;the turning
+point, they call it in the vernacular of the confidence sharp. The rest
+should be easy.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Propbridge," he said, "you've been pretty frank with me. I'll be
+equally frank with you. Those pictures were brought to our office by the
+man who took them. I have his name and address, but am not at liberty to
+tell them to anyone. I don't know what his motives were in taking them;
+we did not ask him that either. We can't afford to question the motives
+of people who bring us these exclusive tips. We pay a fancy price for
+them and that lets us out. Besides, these photographs seemed to speak
+for themselves. So we paid him the price he asked for the use of them.
+Destroying these copies wouldn't help you any. That man still has the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>
+plates; he could print them over again. The only hope you've got is to
+get hold of those plates. And I'm afraid he'll ask a big price for
+them."</p>
+
+<p>"How big a price?"</p>
+
+<p>"That I couldn't say without seeing him. Knowing the sort of person he
+is, my guess is that he'd expect you to hand him over a good-sized chunk
+of money to begin with&mdash;as a proof of your intentions to do business
+with him. You'd have to pay him in cash; he'd be too wise to take a
+check. And then he might want so much apiece for each plate or he might
+insist on your paying him a lump sum for the whole lot. You see, what he
+evidently expects to do is to sell them to your husband, and he'd expect
+you at least to meet the price your husband would have to pay. Any way
+you look at it he's got you at his mercy&mdash;and, as I see it, you'll
+probably have to come to his terms if you want to keep this thing a
+secret."</p>
+
+<p>"Where is this man? You keep saying you want to serve me&mdash;can't you
+bring him to me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid he wouldn't come. If he's engaged in a shady business&mdash;if
+he's cooked up a deliberate scheme to trap you&mdash;he won't come near you.
+That's my guess. But if you are willing to trust me to act as your
+representative maybe the whole thing might be arranged and no one except
+us ever be the wiser for it."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Propbridge being an average woman did what the average woman, thus
+cruelly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>circumstanced and sorely frightened and half frantic and
+lacking advice from honest folk, would do. She paid and she paid and she
+kept on paying. First off, it appeared the paper had to be recompensed
+for its initial outlay and for various vaguely explained incidental
+expenses which it had incurred in connection with the affair. Then,
+through Townsend, the unknown principal demanded that a larger sum
+should be handed over as an evidence of good faith on her part before he
+would consider further negotiations. This, though, turned out to be only
+the beginning of the extortion processes.</p>
+
+<p>When, on this pretext and that, she had been mulcted of nearly fourteen
+thousand dollars, when her personal bank account had been exhausted,
+when most of her jewelry was secretly in pawn, when still she had not
+yet been given the telltale plates, but daily was being tortured by
+threats of exposure unless she surrendered yet more money, poor badgered
+beleaguered little Mrs. Propbridge, being an honest and a
+straightforward woman, took the course she should have taken at the
+outset. She went to her husband and she told him the truth. And he
+believed her.</p>
+
+<p>He did not stop with believing her; he bestirred himself. He had money;
+he had the strength and the authority which money gives. He had
+something else&mdash;he had that powerful, intangible thing which among
+police officials and in the inner politics of city governments is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+variously known as a pull and a drag. Straightway he invoked it.</p>
+
+<p>Of a sudden Chappy Marr was aware that he had made a grievous mistake.
+He had calculated to garner for himself a fat roll of the Propbridge
+currency; had counted upon enjoying a continuing source of income for so
+long as the wife continued to hand over hush money. Deduct the cuts
+which went to Zach Traynor, alias Townsend, for playing the part of the
+magazine editor, and to Cheesy Mike Zaugbaum, that camera wizard of
+newspaper staff work turned crook's helper&mdash;Zaugbaum it was who had
+worked the trick of the photographs&mdash;and still the major share of the
+spoils due him ought, first and last, to run into five gratifying
+figures. On this he confidently had figured. He had not reckoned into
+the equation the possibility of invoking against him the Propbridge pull
+backed by the full force of this double-fisted, vengeful millionaire's
+rage. Indeed he never supposed that there might be any such pull. And
+here, practically without warning, he found his influence arrayed
+against an infinitely stronger influence, so that his counted for
+considerably less than nothing at all.</p>
+
+<p>Still, there was a warning. He got away to Toronto. Traynor made Chicago
+and went into temporary seclusion there. Cheesy Zaugbaum lacked the luck
+of these two. As soon as Mrs. Propbridge had described the ingratiating
+Mr. Murrill and the obliging Mr. Townsend to M. J.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> Brock, head of the
+Brock private-detective agency, that astute but commonplace-appearing
+gentleman knew whom she meant. Knowing so much, it was not hard for him
+to add one to one and get three. He deduced who the third member of the
+triumvirate must be. Mr. Brock owed his pre&euml;minence in his trade to one
+outstanding faculty&mdash;he was an honest man who could think like a thief.
+Three hours after he concluded his first interview with the lady one of
+his operatives walked up behind Cheesy and tapped him on the shoulder
+and inquired of him whether he would go along nice and quiet for a talk
+with the boss or was inclined to make a fuss about it. In either event,
+so Cheesy was assured, he, could have his wish gratified. And Cheesy,
+who had the heart of a rabbit&mdash;a rabbit feeding on other folks' cabbage,
+but a timorous, nibbling bunny for all that&mdash;Cheesy, he went.</p>
+
+<p>In Toronto Marr peaked and pined. He probably was safe enough for so
+long as he bided there; there had been no newspaper publicity, and he
+felt reasonably sure that openly, at least, the aid of regular police
+departments would not be set in motion against him; so he put the
+thoughts of arrest and extradition and such like unpleasant
+contingencies out of his mind. But li'l' old N'York was his proper
+abiding place. The smell of its streets had a lure for him which no
+other city's streets had. His crowd was there&mdash;the folk who spoke his
+tongue and played his game. And there the gudgeons on which his sort<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>
+fed schooled the thickest and carried the most savory fat on their bones
+as they skittered over the asphaltum shoals of the Main Stem.</p>
+
+<p>For a month, emulating Uncle Remus' Brer Fox, he lay low, resisting the
+gnawing discontent that kept screening delectable visions of Broadway
+and the Upper Forties and Seventh Avenue before his homesick eyes. It
+was a real nostalgia from which he suffered. He endured it, though, with
+what patience he might lest a worse thing befall. And at the end of that
+month he went back to the big town; an overpowering temptation was the
+reason for his going. There had arisen a chance for a large turnover and
+a quick get-away again, with an attractively large sum to stay him and
+comfort him after he resumed his enforced exile. An emissary from the
+Gulwing mob ran up to Toronto and dangled the lure before his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Harbored in New York at the present moment was a beautiful prospect&mdash;a
+supremely credulous cattleman from the Far West, who had been playing
+the curb market. A crooks' tipster who was a clerk in a bucket shop
+downtown had for a price passed the word to the Gulwings, and the
+Gulwings&mdash;Sig and Alf&mdash;were intentful to strip the speculative Westerner
+before the curb took from him the delectable core of his bank roll. But
+the Gulwing organization, complete as it is in most essential details,
+lacked in its personnel for the moment a person of address to undertake
+the steering and the convincing&mdash;to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> worm a way into the good graces of
+the prospective quarry; to find out approximately about how much in
+dollars and cents he might reasonably be expected to yield, and then to
+stand by in the pose of a pretended fellow investor and fellow loser,
+while the cleaning up of the plunger was done by the competent but
+crude-mannered Messrs. Sigmund and Alfred Gulwing and their associates.
+For the important r&ocirc;le of the convincer Marr was suited above all
+others. It was represented to him that he could slip back to town and,
+all the while keeping well under cover, rib up the customer to go, as
+the trade term has it, and then withdraw again to the Dominion. A price
+was fixed, based on a sliding scale, and Marr returned to New York.</p>
+
+<p>Three days from the day he reached town the Westerner, whose name was
+Hartridge, lunched with him as his guest at the Roychester, a small,
+discreetly run hotel in Forty-sixth Street. After luncheon they sat down
+in the lobby for a smoke. For good and sufficient reasons Marr preferred
+as quiet a spot and as secluded a one as the lobby of the hotel might
+offer. He found it where a small red-leather sofa built for two stood in
+a sort of recess formed on one side by a jog in the wall and on the
+other side by the switchboard and the two booths which constituted the
+Roychester's public telephone equipment. To call the guest rooms one
+made use of an instrument on the clerk's desk, farther over to the left.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span></p><p>To this retreat Marr guided the big Oregonian. From it he had a fairly
+complete view of the lobby. This was essential since presently, if
+things went well or if they did not go well, he must privily give a
+designated signal for the benefit of a Gulwing underling, a lesser
+member of the mob, who was already on hand, standing off and on in the
+offing. Sitting there Marr was well protected from the view of persons
+passing through, bound to or from the grill room, the desk or the
+elevators. This also was as it should be. Better still, he was
+practically out of sight of those who might approach the telephone
+operator to enlist her services in securing outside calls. The
+outjutting furniture of her desk and the flanks of the nearermost pay
+booth hid him from them; only the top of the young woman's head was
+visible as she sat ten feet away, facing her perforated board.</p>
+
+<p>The voices of her patrons came to him, and her voice as she repeated the
+numbers after them: "Greenwich 978, please."</p>
+
+<p>"Larchmont 54 party J."</p>
+
+<p>"Worth 9009, please, miss."</p>
+
+<p>"Vanderbilt 100."</p>
+
+<p>And so on and so forth, in a steady patter, like raindrops falling; but
+though he could hear he could not be seen. Altogether, the spot was, for
+his own purposes, admirably arranged.</p>
+
+<p>So they sat and smoked, and pretty soon, the occasion and the conditions
+and the time being ripe, Marr outlined to his new friend Hartridge,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> on
+pledge of secrecy, a wonderfully safe and wonderfully simple plan for
+taking its ill-gotten money away from a Tenderloin pool room. Swiftly he
+sketched in the details; the opportunity, he divulged in strict
+confidence, had just come to him. He confessed to having taken a great
+liking to Hartridge during their short acquaintance; Hartridge had
+impressed him as one who might be counted upon to know a good thing when
+he saw it, and so, inspired by these convictions, he was going to give
+Hartridge a chance to join him in the plunge and share with him the
+juicy proceeds. Besides, the more money risked the greater the killing.
+He himself had certain funds in hand, but more funds were needed if a
+real fortune was to be realized.</p>
+
+<p>There was need, though, for prompt decision on the part of all
+concerned, because that very afternoon&mdash;in fact, within that same
+hour&mdash;there in the Roychester he was to meet, by appointment, the
+conniving manager of an uptown branch office of the telegraph company,
+who would co&ouml;perate in the undertaking and upon whose good offices in
+withholding flashed race results at Belmont Park until his fellow
+conspirators, acting on the information, could get their bets down upon
+the winners, depended the success of the venture. Only, strictly
+speaking, it would not be a venture at all, but a moral certainty, a
+cinch, the surest of all sure things. Guaranties against mischance
+entailing loss<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> would be provided; he could promise his friend Hartridge
+that; and the telegraph manager, when he came shortly, would add further
+proof.</p>
+
+<p>The question then was: Would Hartridge join him as a partner? And if so,
+about how much, in round figures, would Hartridge be willing to put up?
+He must know this in advance because he was prepared to match
+Hartridge's investment dollar for dollar.</p>
+
+<p>And at that Hartridge, to Marr's most sincere discomfiture, shook his
+head.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you how it is with me," said Hartridge. "These broker fellows
+downtown have been touchin' me up purty hard. I guess this here New York
+game ain't exactly my game. I'm aimin' to close up what little deals
+I've still got on here and beat it back to God's country while I've
+still got a shirt on my back. I'm much obliged to you, Markham, for
+wantin' to take me into your scheme. It sounds good the way you tell it,
+but it seems like ever'thing round this burg sounds good till you test
+it out&mdash;and so I guess you better count me out and find yourself a
+partner somewheres else."</p>
+
+<p>There was definiteness in his refusal; the shake of his head emphasized
+it too. Marr's r&ocirc;le should have been the persuasive, the insistent, the
+argumentative, the cajoling; but Marr was distinctly out of temper.</p>
+
+<p>Here he had ventured into danger to play for a fat purse and all he
+would get for his trouble and his pains and the risk he had run would
+be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> just those things&mdash;pains and trouble and risk&mdash;these, and nothing
+more nourishing.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, very well then, Hartridge," he said angrily, "if you haven't any
+confidence in me&mdash;if you can't see that this is a play that naturally
+can't go wrong&mdash;why, we'll let it drop."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I've got confidence in you&mdash;" began Hartridge, but Marr, no
+patience left in him, cut him short.</p>
+
+<p>"Looks like it, doesn't it?" he snapped. "Forget it! Let's talk about
+the weather."</p>
+
+<p>He lifted his straw hat as though to ease its pressure upon his head and
+then settled it well down over his eyes. This was the sign to the
+Gulwings' messenger, watching him covertly from behind a newspaper over
+on the far side of the lobby, that the plan had failed. The signal he
+had so confidently expected to give&mdash;a trick of relighting his cigar and
+flipping the match into the air&mdash;would have conveyed to the watcher the
+information that all augured well. The latter's job then would have been
+to get up from his chair and step outside and bear the word to Sig
+Gulwing, who, letter-perfect in the part of the conspiring telegraph
+manager, would promptly enter and present himself to Marr, and by Marr
+be introduced to the Westerner. The hat-shifting device had been devised
+in the remote contingency of failure on Marr's part to win over the
+chosen victim. Plainly the collapse of the plot had been totally
+unexpected by the messenger. Over his paper he stared at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> Marr until
+Marr repeated the gesture. Then, fully convinced now that there had been
+no mistake, the messenger arose and headed for the door, the whole
+thing&mdash;signaling, duplicated signaling and all&mdash;having taken very much
+less time for its action than has here been required to describe it.</p>
+
+<p>The signal bearer had taken perhaps five steps when Hartridge spoke
+words which instantly filled Marr with regret that he had been so
+impetuously prompt to take a no for a no.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, hold your hosses, Markham," said Hartridge contritely. "Don't be
+in such a hurry! Come to think about it, I might go so far as to risk
+altogether as much, say, as eight or ten thousand dollars in this scheme
+of yours&mdash;I don't want to be a piker."</p>
+
+<p>In the hundredth part of a second Marr's mind reacted; his brain was
+galvanized into speedy action. Ten thousand wasn't very much&mdash;not nearly
+so much as he had counted on&mdash;still, ten thousand dollars was ten
+thousand dollars; besides, if the Gulwings did their work cannily the
+ten thousand ought to be merely a starter, an initiation fee, really,
+for the victim. Once he was enmeshed, trust Sig and Alf to trim him to
+his underwear; the machinery of the wire-tapping game was geared for
+just that.</p>
+
+<p>He must stop the departing messenger then, must make him understand that
+the wrong sign had been given and that the fish was nibbling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> the bait.
+Yet the messenger's back was to them; ten steps, fifteen steps more, and
+he would be out of the door.</p>
+
+<p>For Marr suddenly to hail a man he was supposed not to know might be
+fatal; almost surely at this critical moment it would stir up suspicion
+in Hartridge's mind. Yet some way, somehow, at once, he must stop the
+word bearer. But how? That was it&mdash;how?</p>
+
+<p>Ah, he had it! In the fraction of a moment he had it. It came to him
+now, fully formed, the shape of it conjured up out of that jumble of
+words which had been flowing to him from the telephone desk all the
+while he had been sitting there and which had registered subconsciously
+in his quick brain. The pause, naturally spaced, which fell between
+Hartridge's 'bout-faced concession and Marr's reply, was not unduly
+lengthened, yet in that flash of time Marr had analyzed the puzzle of
+the situation and had found the answer to it.</p>
+
+<p>"Bully, Hartridge!" he exclaimed. "You'll never regret it. Our man ought
+to be here any minute now.... By Jove! That reminds me&mdash;I meant to
+telephone for some tickets for to-night's Follies&mdash;you're going with me
+as my guest. Just a moment!"</p>
+
+<p>He got on his feet and as he came out of the corner and still was eight
+feet distant from the telephone girl, he called out loudly, as a man
+might call whose hurried anxiety to get an important number made him
+careless of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> pitch of his voice: "Worth 10,000! Worth 10,000!"</p>
+
+<p>He feared to look toward the door&mdash;yet. For the moment he must seem
+concerned only with the hasty business of telephoning.</p>
+
+<p>Annoyed by his shouting, the girl raised her head and stared at him as
+he came toward her.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the excitement?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>With enhanced vehemence he answered, putting on the key words all the
+emphasis he dared employ:</p>
+
+<p>"I should think anybody in hearing could understand what I said and what
+I meant&mdash;<i>Worth 10,000</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>He was alongside her now; he could risk a glance toward the door. He
+looked, and his heart rejoiced inside of him, for the messenger had
+swung about, as had half a dozen others, all arrested by the harshness
+of his words&mdash;and the messenger was staring at him. Marr gave the
+correct signal&mdash;with quick well-simulated nervousness drew a loose match
+from his waistcoat pocket, struck it, applied it to his cigar, then
+flipped the still burning match halfway across the floor. No need for
+him again to look&mdash;he knew the artifice had succeeded.</p>
+
+<p>"Here's your number," said the affronted young woman. With a vicious
+little slam she stuck a metal plug into its proper hole.</p>
+
+<p>Marr had not the least idea what concern or what individual owned Worth
+10,000 for a telephone number. Nor did it concern him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> now. Even so, he
+must of course carry out the pretense which so well had served him in
+the emergency. He entered the booth, leaving the door open for
+Hartridge's benefit.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, hello!" he called into the transmitter. "This is V. C. Markham
+speaking. I want to speak to"&mdash;he uttered the first name which popped
+into his mind&mdash;"to George Spillane. Want to order some tickets for a
+show to-night." He paused a moment for the sake of the verities; then,
+paying no heed to the confused rejoinder coming to him from the other
+end of the wire, and improvising to round out his play, went on: "What's
+that?... Not there? Oh, very well! I'll call him later.... No, never
+mind, Spillane's the man I want. I'll call again."</p>
+
+<p>He hung up the receiver. Out of the tail of his eye as he hung it up he
+saw Sig Gulwing just entering the hotel, in proper disguise for the
+character of the district telegraph manager with a grudge against pool
+rooms and a plan for making enough at one coup to enable him to quit his
+present job; the job was mythical, and the grudge, too&mdash;bits merely of
+the fraudulent drama now about to be played&mdash;but surely Gulwing was most
+solid and dependable and plausible looking. His make-up was perfect. To
+get here so soon after receiving the cue he must have been awaiting the
+word just outside the entrance. Gulwing was smart but he was not so
+smart as Marr&mdash;Marr exulted to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>himself. In high good humor, he dropped
+a dollar bill at the girl's elbow.</p>
+
+<p>"Pay for the call out of that, miss, and keep the change," he said
+genially. "Sorry I was so boisterous just now."</p>
+
+<p>Thirty minutes later, still radiating gratification, Marr stood at the
+cigar stand making a discriminating choice of the best in the humidor of
+imported goods. Gulwing and Hartridge were over there on the sofa, cheek
+by jowl, and all was going well.</p>
+
+<p>Half aloud, to himself, he said, smiling in prime content: "Well, I
+guess I'm bad!"</p>
+
+<p>"I guess you are!" said a voice right in his ear; "and you're due to be
+worse, Chappy, old boy&mdash;much worse!"</p>
+
+<p>The smile slipped. He turned his head and looked into the complacent,
+chubby face and the pleased eyes of M. J. Brock, head of Brock's
+Detective Agency&mdash;the man of all men in this world he wished least to
+see. For once, anyhow, in his life Marr was shaken, and showed it.</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right, Chappy," said Brock soothingly, rocking his short
+plump figure on his heels; "there won't be any rough stuff. I've got a
+cop off the corner who's waiting outside if I should need him&mdash;in case
+of a jam&mdash;but I guess we won't need him, will we? You'll go along with
+me nice and friendly in a taxicab, won't you?" He flirted his thumb over
+his shoulder. "And you needn't bother about Gulwing either. I've seen
+him&mdash;saw him as soon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> as I came in. I guess he'll be seeing me in a
+minute, too, and then he'll suddenly remember where it was he left his
+umbrella and take it on the hop."</p>
+
+<p>Marr said not a word. Brock rattled on in high spirits, still
+maintaining that cat-with-a-mouse attitude which was characteristic of
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind worrying about old pal Gulwing&mdash;I don't want him now. You're
+the one you'd better be worrying about; because that's going to be a
+mighty long taxi ride that you're going to take with me, Chappy&mdash;fifteen
+minutes to get there, say, and anywhere from five to ten years to get
+back&mdash;or I miss my guess.... Yes, Chappy, you're nailed with the goods
+this time. Propbridge is going through; his wife too. They'll go to
+court; they'll shove the case. And Cheesy Zaugbaum has come clean. Oh, I
+guess it's curtains for you all right, all right."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't exactly hate yourself, do you?" gibed Marr. "Sort of pleased
+with yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not so much pleased with myself as disappointed in you, Chappy,"
+countered the exultant Brock. "I figured you were different from the
+rest of your crowd, maybe; but it turns out you're like all the
+others&mdash;you will do your thinking in a groove." He shook his head in
+mock sorrow. "Chappy, tell me&mdash;not that it makes any difference
+particularly, but just to satisfy my curiosity&mdash;curiosity being my
+business, as you might say&mdash;what number<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> was it you called up from here
+about thirty minutes back? Come on. The young lady over yonder will tell
+me if you don't. Was it Worth 10,000?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Marr, "it was."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought so," said Brock. "I guessed as much. But say Chappy, that's
+the trunk number of the Herald. Before this you never were the one to
+try to break into the newspapers on your own hook. What did you want
+with that number?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's my business," said Marr.</p>
+
+<p>"Have it your way," assented Brock with ironic mildness. "Now, Chappy,
+follow me a minute and you'll see how you dished your own beans: You
+call up Worth 10,000&mdash;that's a private matter, as you say. But Central
+gets the call twisted and gives you another number&mdash;that's a mistake.
+And the number she happens to give you is the number of my new branch
+office down in the financial district&mdash;that's an accident. And the
+fellow who answers the call at my shop happens to be Costigan, my chief
+assistant, who's been working on the Propbridge case for five weeks
+now&mdash;and that's a coincidence. He doesn't recognize your voice over the
+wire&mdash;that would be luck. But when, like a saphead, you pull your new
+moniker, but with the same old initials hitched to it, and when on top
+of that you ask for George Spillane, which is Cheesy by his most popular
+alias&mdash;when you do these things, why Chappy, it's your own fault.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p><p>"Because Costigan is on then, bigger than a house. You've tipped him
+your hand, see? And with our connections it's easy&mdash;and quick&mdash;for
+Costigan to trace the call to this hotel. And inside of two minutes
+after that he has me on the wire at my uptown office over here in West
+Fortieth. And here I am; as a matter of fact, I've been here all of
+fifteen minutes.</p>
+
+<p>"It all proves one thing to me, Chappy. You're wiser than the run of
+'em, but you've got your weak spot, and now I know what it is: You think
+in a groove, Chappy, and this time, by looking at the far end of the
+groove, you can see little old Warble-Twice-on-the-Hudson looming up.
+And you won't have to look very hard to see it, either.... Well, I see
+Gulwing has taken a tumble to himself and has gone on a run to look for
+his umbrella. Suppose we start on our little taxi ride, old groove
+thinker?"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>MR. LOBEL'S APOPLEXY</h3>
+
+<p>The real purpose of this is to tell about Mr. Lobel's attack of
+apoplexy. What comes before must necessarily be in its nature
+preliminary and preparatory, leading up to the climactic stroke which
+leaves the distinguished victim stretched upon the bed of affliction.</p>
+
+<p>First let us introduce our principal. Reader, meet Mr. Max Lobel,
+president of Lobel Masterfilms, Inc., also its founder, its chief
+stockholder and its general manager. He is a short, broad, thick,
+globular man and a bald one, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, carrying a
+gold-headed cane and using a private gold-mounted toothpick after meals.
+His collars are of that old-fashioned open-faced kind such as our
+fathers and Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., used to wear; collars rearing
+at the back but shorn widely away in front to show two things&mdash;namely,
+the Adam's apple and that Mr. Lobel is conservative. But for his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>neckwear he patronizes those shops where ties are exclusively referred
+to as <i>scarves</i> and cost from five dollars apiece up, which proves also
+he is progressive and keeps abreast of the times. When he walks he
+favors his feet. Mostly, though, he rides in as good a car as domestic
+currency can buy in foreign marts.</p>
+
+<p>Aside from his consuming desire to turn out those surpassing
+achievements of the cellular-cinema art known as Lobel's Masterfilms, he
+has in life two great passions, one personal in its character, the other
+national in its scope&mdash;the first a craving for fancy waistcoats, the
+second a yearning to see the name of Max Lobel in print as often as
+possible and in as large letters as likewise is possible; and for either
+of these is a plausible explanation. Mr. Lobel has a figure excellently
+shaped for presenting the patternings of a fanciful stomacher to the
+world and up until a few years ago there were few occasions when he
+might hope to see the name Lobel in print. For, know you, Mr. Lobel has
+not always been in the moving-picture business. Nobody in the
+moving-picture business has always been in the moving-picture
+business&mdash;excepting some of the child wonders under ten years of age.
+And ten years ago our hero was the M. Lobel Company, cloak and suit
+jobbers in rather an inconspicuous Eastern town.</p>
+
+<p>What was true of him as regards his comparatively recent advent into the
+producing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> and distributing fields was true of his major associates.
+Back in 1911 the vice president and second in command, Mr. F. X.
+Quinlan, moved upward into a struggling infantile industry via the
+stepping-stone of what in the vernacular of his former calling is known
+as a mitt joint&mdash;summers at Coney, winters in store pitches&mdash;where he
+guided the professional destinies of Madame Zaharat, the Egyptian
+seeress, in private, then as now, Mrs. F. X. Quinlan n&eacute;e Clardy.</p>
+
+<p>The treasurer and secretary, Mr. Simeon Geltfin, had once upon a time
+been proprietor of the Ne Plus Ultra Misfit Clothing Parlors at Utica,
+New York, a place where secondhand habiliments, scoured and ironed,
+dangled luringly in show windows bearing such enticing labels as
+"Tailor's Sample&mdash;Nobby&mdash;$9.80," "Bargain&mdash;Take Me Home For $5.60," and
+"These Trousers Were Uncalled For&mdash;$2.75."</p>
+
+<p>The premier director, Mr. Bertram Colfax, numbered not one but two
+chrysalis changes in his career. In the grub stage, as it were, he had
+begun life as Lemuel Sims, a very grubby grub indeed, becoming Colfax at
+the same time he became property man for a repertoire troupe playing
+county-fair weeks in the Middle West.</p>
+
+<p>As for the scenario editor and continuity writer, he in a prior
+condition of life had solicited advertisements for a trade journal. So
+it went right down the line.</p>
+
+<p>At the time of the beginning of this narrative<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> Lobel Masterfilms, Inc.,
+had attained an eminence of what might be called fair-to-medium
+prominence in the moving-picture field. In other words, it now was able
+to pay its stars salaries running up into the multiples of tens of
+thousands of dollars a year and the bank which carried its paper had not
+yet felt justified in installing a chartered accountant in the home
+offices to check the finances and collect the interest on the loans
+outstanding. Before reaching this position the concern had passed
+through nearly all the customary intervening stages. Nearly a decade
+rearward, back in the dark ages of the filmic cosmos, the Jurassic
+Period of pictures, so to speak, this little group of pathfinders
+tracking under the chieftainship of Mr. Lobel into almost uncharted
+wilds of artistic endeavor had dabbled in slap-stick one reelers
+featuring the plastic pie and the treacherous seltzer siphon, also the
+trick staircase, the educated mustache and the performing doormat.</p>
+
+<p>Next&mdash;following along the line of least resistance&mdash;the adventurers went
+in more or less extensively for wild-western dramas replete with
+stagecoach robberies and abounding in hair pants. If the head bad
+man&mdash;not the secondary bad man who stayed bad all through, or the
+tertiary bad man who was fatally extinguished with gun-fire in Reel Two,
+but the chief, or primary, bad man who reformed and married Little Nell,
+the unspoiled child of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> Death Valley&mdash;wore the smartest frontier get-up
+of current year's vintage that the Chicago mail-order houses could turn
+out; if Little Nell's father, appearing contemporaneously, dressed
+according to the mode laid down for Forty-niners by such indubitable
+authorities as Bret Harte; if the sheriff stalked in and out of lens
+range attired as a Mississippi River gambler was popularly supposed to
+have been attired in the period 1860 to 1875; and if finally the cavalry
+troopers from the near-by army post sported the wide hats and khaki
+shirts which came into governmental vogue about the time of the Spanish
+War, all very well and good. The action was everything; the sartorial
+accessories were as they might be and were and frequently still are.</p>
+
+<p>Along here there intruded a season when the Lobel shop tentatively
+experimented with costume dramas&mdash;the Prisoner of Chillon wearing the
+conventional black and white in alternating stripes of a Georgia chain
+gang and doing the old Sing Sing lock step and retiring for the night to
+his donjon cell with a set of shiny and rather modern-looking leg irons
+on his ankles; Mary Queen of Scots and Catharine de' Medici in costumes
+strikingly similar; Oliver Goldsmith in Sir Walter Raleigh's neck ruff
+and Captain Kidd's jack boots.</p>
+
+<p>But this season endured not for long. Costume stuff was nix. It was not
+what the public wanted. It was over their heads. Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> Lobel himself said
+so. Wake him up in the middle of the night and he could tell you exactly
+what the public did and did not want. Divining the popular will amounted
+with him to a gift; it approximated an exact art; really it formed the
+corner stone of his success. Likewise he knew&mdash;but this knowledge
+perhaps had come to him partly by experience rather than altogether by
+intuition&mdash;that historical ten reelers dealing with epochal events in
+the life of our own people were entirely unsuited for general
+consumption.</p>
+
+<p>When this particular topic untactfully was broached in his presence Mr.
+Lobel, recalling the fate of the elaborate feature entitled Let Freedom
+Ring, had been known to sputter violently and vehemently. Upon this
+production&mdash;now abiding as a memory only, yet a memory bitter as
+aloes&mdash;he had spared neither expense nor pains, even going so far as
+personally to direct the filming of all the principal scenes. And to
+what ends? Captious critics, including those who wrote for the daily
+press and those who merely sent in offensive letters&mdash;college professors
+and such like cheap high-brows&mdash;had raised yawping voices to point out
+that Paul Revere galloping along the pre-Revolutionary turnpike to
+spread the alarm passed en route two garages and one electric power
+house; that Washington crossing the Delaware stood in the bow of his
+skiff half shrouded in an American flag bearing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>forty-eight stars upon
+its field of blue; that Andrew Jackson's riflemen filing out from New
+Orleans to take station behind their cotton-bale breastworks marched for
+some distance beneath a network of trolley wires; that Abraham Lincoln
+signing the Emancipation Proclamation did so while seated at a desk in a
+room which contained in addition to Lincoln and the desk and the
+Proclamation a typewriter and a Persian rug; that at Manila Bay Admiral
+Dewey wore spats and a wrist watch.</p>
+
+<p>But these primitive adventurings, these earlier pioneering quests into
+the realm of the speculative were all in limbo behind them, all wiped
+off the slate, in part forgiven, in a measure forgotten. Since that
+primitive beginning and those formulative middle periods Lobel
+Masterfilms had found their field, and having found it, now plowed and
+tilled it. To those familiar with the rise and the ever-forward movement
+of this, now the fourth largest industry in the civilized globe&mdash;or is
+it the third?&mdash;it sufficiently will fix the stage of evolutionary
+development attained by this component unit of that industry when I
+state that Lobel Masterfilms now dealt preponderantly with vampires. To
+be sure, it continued to handle such side lines as taffy-haired ing&eacute;nues
+from the country, set adrift among the wiles and pitfalls of a cruel
+city; such incidentals as soft-pie comickers and chin-whiskered
+by-Hectors; such necessary by-products as rarely beautiful he-juveniles
+with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> plush eyelashes and the hair combed slickly back off the forehead
+in the approved Hudson seal effect&mdash;splendid, manly youths these, who
+might have dodged a draft or two but never yet had flinched from before
+the camera's aiming muzzle. But even though it had to be conceded that
+Goldilockses and Prince Charmings endure and that while drolls and
+jesters may come and go, pies are permanent and stale not, neither do
+they wither; still, and with all that, such like as these were, in the
+Lobel scheme of things, merely so many side lines and incidentals and
+by-products devised and designed to fatten out a program.</p>
+
+<p>Where Mr. Lobel excelled was in the vamp stuff. Even his competitors
+admitted it the while they vainly strove to rival him. In this, his own
+chosen realm of exploration and conquest he stood supremely alone; a
+monarch anointed with the holy oils of superiority, coroneted with
+success's glittering diadem. Look at his Woman of a Million Sins! Look
+at his Satan's Stepchild, or How Human Souls are Dragged Down to Hell,
+in six reels! Look at A Daughter of Darkness! Look at The Wrecker of
+Lives! Look at The Spider Lady, or The Net Where Men Were the Flies!
+Look at Fair of Face Yet Black of Heart! All of them his, all box-office
+best bets and all still going strong!</p>
+
+<p>Moreover by now Lobel Masterfilms had progressed to that milestone on
+the path of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>progress and enterprise where genuine live authors&mdash;guys
+that wrote regular books&mdash;frequently furnished vehicles for stardom's
+regal usages. By purchase, upon the basis of so much cash or&mdash;as the
+case might be&mdash;so little cash down on the signing of the contract and
+the promise of so much more&mdash;often very very much more&mdash;to be paid in
+royalties out of accrued net profits, the rights to a published work
+would be acquired. Its name, say, was A Commonplace Person, which
+promptly would be changed in executive conclave to The Cataract of
+Destiny, or perhaps Fate's Plaything, or in any event some good catchy
+title which would look well in electrics and on three sheets.</p>
+
+<p>This important point having been decided on, Mr. Ab Connors, the
+scenario editor, would take the script in hand to labor and bring forth
+the screen adaptation. If the principal character in the work, as
+originally evolved by her creator, was the daughter of a storekeeper in
+a small town in Indiana who ran away from home and went to Chicago to
+learn the millinery business, he, wielding a ruthless but gifted blue
+pencil, would speedily transform her into the ebon-hearted heiress of a
+Klondyke millionaire, an angel without but a harpy within, and after
+opening up Reel One with scenes in a Yukon dance hall speedily would
+move all the important characters to New York, where the plot thickened
+so fast that only a succession of fade-outs and fade-ins, close-ups and
+cut-backs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> saved it from clabbering right on Mr. Connors' hands.</p>
+
+<p>The rest would be largely a matter of continuity and after that there
+was nothing to worry about except picking out the cast and the locations
+and building the sets and starting to shoot and mayhap detailing a head
+office boy to stall off the author in case that poor boob came butting
+in kicking about changes in his story or squawking about overdue royalty
+statements or something. Anyhow, what did he know&mdash;what could he be
+expected to know&mdash;about continuity or what the public wanted or what the
+limitations and the possibilities of the screen were? He merely was the
+poor fish who'd wrote the book and he should ought to be grateful that a
+fellow with a real noodle had took his stuff and cut all that dull
+descriptive junk out of it and stuck some pep and action and punch and
+zip into the thing and wrote some live snappy subtitles, instead of
+coming round every little while, like he was, horning in and beefing all
+over the place.</p>
+
+<p>And besides, wasn't he going to have his name printed in all the
+advertising matter and flashed on the screen, too, in letters nearly a
+fifth as tall as the letters of Mr. Lobel's name and nearly one-third as
+tall as the name of the star and nearly one-half as tall as the name of
+the director and nearly&mdash;if not quite&mdash;as tall as the name of the camera
+man, and so get a lot of absolutely free advertising that would be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+worth thousands of dollars to him and start people all over the country
+to hearing about him? Certainly he was! And yet, with all that, was
+there any satisfying some of these cheap ginks? The answer was that
+there was not.</p>
+
+<p>There was never any trouble, though, about casting the principal r&ocirc;le.
+That was easy&mdash;a matter of natural selection. If it could be played
+vampishly from the ground up, and it usually could&mdash;trust Mr. Connors
+for that&mdash;it went without question to Vida Monte, greatest of all the
+luminaries in the Lobel constellation and by universal acknowledgment
+the best vampire in the business. In vampiring Vida Monte it was who
+led; others imitatively followed. Compared with her these envying lady
+copy cats were as pale paprikas are to the real tabasco. Five pictures
+she had done for Lobel Masterfilms since placing herself under Lobel's
+management and a Lobel contract, all of them overpowering knock-outs,
+sensations, sure-fire hits. On the sixth she now was at work and her
+proud employer in conversation and in announcements to the trade stood
+sponsor for the pledge that in its filming Monte literally would
+out-Monte Monte.</p>
+
+<p>Making his word good, he took over volunteer supervision of the main
+scenes. His high-domed forehead glistening with sweat, his spectacles
+aflame like twin burning glasses, his coat off, his collar off, his
+waistcoat off, he snorted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> and churned, a ninety-horse dynamo of a
+little fat man, through the hot glary studio, demanding this
+improvement, detecting that defect, calling for this, that or the other
+perfect thing in a voice which would have detained the admiring ear of
+an experienced bull whacker. Before him Josephson, the little camera
+man, quailed. From his path extra people departed, fleeing headlong; and
+in his presence property men were as though they were not and never had
+been. Out of the hands of Bertram Colfax, born Sims, he wrenched a
+megaphone and through it he bellowed:</p>
+
+<p>"Put more punch in it, Monte&mdash;that's what I'm asking you for&mdash;the punch!
+Choke her, Harcourt! Choke him right back, Monte! Now-w-w then, clinch!
+Clinch and hang on! Good! And now the kiss! You know, Monte, the long
+kiss&mdash;the genuwine Monte kiss! Oh, if you love me, Monte, give me
+footage on that kiss! That's it&mdash;hold it! Hold it! Keep on holding it!"</p>
+
+<p>"But, Mr. Lobel, now," protested Colfax, born a Sims but living it down
+and feeling that never more than at this minute, when rudely the
+steersman's helm had been snatched from his grasp, was there greater
+need that he should be a Colfax through and through&mdash;&mdash;"but, Mr. Lobel,
+it was my idea that up to this point anyway the action should be played
+with restraint to sort of prepare the way for&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean restraint?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span></p><p>"Well, I thought to emphasize what comes later&mdash;for a sort of
+comparative value&mdash;that if we were just a little subtle at the
+beginning&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Sufficient, Colfax! Listen! Don't come talking to me about no subtles!
+When you're working the supporting members of the cast you maybe could
+stick in some subtles once in a while to salve them censors, but so far
+as Monte is concerned you leave 'em out!"</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't but me any buts! Listen! Ain't I taken my paralyzed oath that
+this here picture should make all the other vamp pictures which ever
+were taken look like pikers? I have! Listen! For Monte, the way I feel,
+I shouldn't care if she don't do a single subtle in the whole damn
+picture."</p>
+
+<p>He had taken his paralyzed oath and he kept it. It was a wonderful
+story. The queen of the apaches, ruling the Parisian underworld by her
+fire, her beauty, her courage, accepts German gold to betray her
+country, and attempts by siren wiles to seduce from the path of duty
+Capt. Stuyvesant Schuyler of the U. S. A. general staff; almost succeeds
+too because of his blind passion for this glorious, sinful creature. At
+the crucial moment, when about to surrender to his Delilah secrets which
+would destroy the entire Allied cause and open the gates of Paris to the
+conquering foe, he is saved by a vision of his sainted,
+fade-in-and-fade-out mother's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> face. Overcome with remorse, he resigns
+his commission, and fleeing from temptation returns to America, a
+broken-hearted man; proves heart is broken by constantly pressing
+clenched hand to left breast as though to prevent pieces from slipping
+down into the abdominal cavity. Distress of the apache queen on finding
+her intended victim gone. Suddenly a real love, not the love of the
+wanton, but a purer, deeper emotion wakens in her breast. Close-up
+showing muscular reflexes produced upon the human face by wakening
+processes in the heart.</p>
+
+<p>Quitting the gay life, she follows him to Land of Free. Finds him about
+to marry his sweetheart of childhood, a New York society girl worth
+uncounted millions but just middling looking. Prompt bust-up of
+childhood sweetheart's romance. Abandonment of social position, wealth,
+everything by Schuyler, who declares he will make the stranger his
+bride&mdash;accompanying subtitle, "What should we care what the world may
+say? For after all, love is all!" Discovery on day before marriage of
+papers proving that Lolita&mdash;that's the lady apache's name&mdash;is really
+Schuyler's half sister, due to carryings-on of Schuyler's late father as
+a young art student in Paris with Lolita's mother, a famous gypsy model.
+Renunciation by Lolita of Schuyler. Her suicide by imbibing poison from
+secret receptacle in ring. Schuyler, after registering copious grief,
+re&euml;nters <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>American Army under assumed name as a private in the ranks.
+Returns to battlefield in time to take part in decisive action of the
+war. All the officers in his brigade above the rank of corporal having
+apparently been killed by one devastating blast of high explosive, he
+assumes command and leads dauntless charge of the heavy artillery
+through the Hindenburg Line. Is made a colonel on the spot. Rides up
+Fifth Avenue alongside of Pershing in grand triumphant parade of
+home-coming First Division, carrying a large flag and occasionally
+chatting pleasantly with Pershing. On eve of marriage to childhood's
+sweetheart, who remains faithful, he goes to lonely spot where Lolita
+lies buried and places upon the silent mound her favorite flower, a
+single long-stemmed tiger lily. Fade out&mdash;finish!</p>
+
+<p>Artistically, picturesquely, from the standpoint of timeliness, from the
+standpoint of vampirishness, from any standpoint at all, it satisfied
+fully every demand. It was one succession of thrilling, gripping,
+heart-lifting scenes set amid vividly contrasting surroundings&mdash;the
+lowest dive in all Paris; the citadel at Verdun; grand ballroom of the
+Schuyler mansion at Newport; the Place Vend&ocirc;me on a day when it was
+entirely unoccupied except by moving-picture actors; Fifth Avenue on its
+most gala occasion&mdash;these were but a few samples. The subtitles fairly
+hissed to the sibilant swishing of such words as traitress, temptress,
+tigress<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> and sorceress. And the name of it&mdash;you'd never guess&mdash;the name
+of it was The She-Demon's Doom! When Mr. Lobel spoke those words
+inspired he literally took them up in his arms and fondled them and
+kissed them on the temples. And why not? They were his own brain
+children.</p>
+
+<p>He had kept his paralyzed word and he could prove it. For because this
+Vida Monte was one of those mimetic pieces of flesh which, without any
+special mental co&ouml;peration, may alter the body, the face, the muscles,
+the expression, the very look out of the eyes, to suit the demands of
+prompters and teachers; because of the plan of direction so powerfully
+engineered by the master mind of Lobel and, under Lobel, the lesser mind
+of Colfax, born Sims; because of the very nature of the r&ocirc;le of Lolita
+the abandoned, this picture was more daring, more sensual, more filled
+up with voluptuous suggestion, with coiling, clinging, writhing
+snakiness, with rampant, naked sexuality&mdash;in short and in fine was more
+vampirishly vampiratious than this, the greatest of all modern mediums
+for the education, the moral uplift and the entertainment of the masses,
+had ever known.</p>
+
+<p>And then one week to the day after Mr. Lobel shot the last scene she up
+and died on him.</p>
+
+<p>That is to say, a woman named Glassman, a Hungarian by birth, in age
+thirty-two years, widowed and without children or known next<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> of kin,
+died in a small bungalow in a small town up in the coast range north of
+Los Angeles. When the picture was done and Vida Monte took off the
+barbaric trappings and the heavy paste jewels and the clinging reptilian
+half gowns of the r&ocirc;le she played, with them she took off and laid aside
+the animal emotionalism, the theatricalistic fever and fervor, the
+passion and the lure that professionally made up Vida Monte, movie star.
+She took off even the very aspect of herself as the show shop and as
+patrons of the cinemas knew her; and she put on a simple traveling gown
+and she tucked her black hair up in coils beneath a severely plain hat
+and she became what really she was and always had been&mdash;a quiet,
+self-contained, frugal and&mdash;except for her splendid eyes, her fine
+figure and her full mobile mouth&mdash;a not particularly striking-looking
+woman, by name Sarah Glassman, which was, in fact, her name; and quite
+alone she got on a train and she went up into the foothills to a tiny
+bungalow which she had rented there for a month or so to live alone, to
+do her own simple housekeeping, to sew and to read and to rest.</p>
+
+<p>It was the day after the taking of the last segment of the picture that
+she went away. It was four days later that she sickened of the Spanish
+influenza, so called. It was not Spanish and not influenza, though by
+any other name it would have been as deadly in its devastating sweep
+across this country. And it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> within forty-eight hours after that, on
+a November afternoon, that word came to the Lobel plant that she was
+dead. Down there they had not known even that she was sick.</p>
+
+<p>"The doctor in that there little jay town up there by the name
+Hamletsburg is the one which just gets me on the long-distance telephone
+and tells me that she died maybe half an hour ago."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lobel in his private office was telling it to Vice President Quinlan
+and Secretary-Treasurer Geltfin, the only two among his associates that
+his messenger had been able to find about the executive department at
+the moment. He continued:</p>
+
+<p>"Coming like a complete shock, you could 'a' knocked me down with a
+feather, I assure you. For a minute I couldn't believe it. This doctor
+he has to say it to me twice before I get it into my head.
+Shocking&mdash;huh? Sudden&mdash;huh? Awful&mdash;what? You bet you! That poor girl,
+for her my heart is bleeding. Dead and gone like that, with absolutely
+practically no warning! It don't seem possible! Taken down day before
+yesterday, the doctor says, and commenced getting from bad to worse
+right away. And this morning she goes out of her head and at
+two-forty-five this afternoon all of a sudden her heart gives out on her
+and she is dead before anybody knows it. Awful, awful!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lobel wagged a mournful poll.</p>
+
+<p>"More than awful&mdash;actually it is horrifying!" quoth Mr. Geltfin. Visibly
+at least his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> distress seemed greater than the distress of either of the
+others. "All off alone up there by herself in some little rube town it
+must come to her! Maybe if she had been down here with specialists and
+surgeons and nurses and all she would 'a' been saved. Too bad, too bad!
+People got no business going away from a big town! Me, I get nervous
+even on a motor trip in the country and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Everything possible which could be done was done," resumed Mr. Lobel.
+"So you don't need you should worry there, Geltfin. The doctor tells me
+he can't get no regular trained nurse on account there is so much
+sickness from this flu and no regular nurses there anyway, but he tells
+me he brings in his wife which she understands nursing and he says the
+wife sticks right there day and night and gives every attention. There
+ain't nothing we should reproach ourselves about, and besides we didn't
+know even she was sick&mdash;nobody knew.</p>
+
+<p>"Dead and gone, poor girl, and not one week ago&mdash;six days, if I got to
+be exact&mdash;she is sitting right there in that same seat where you're
+sitting now, Geltfin, looking just as natural and healthy as what you
+look, Geltfin; looking just as if nothing is ever going to happen to
+her."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Geltfin had hastily risen and moved nearer the outer door.</p>
+
+<p>"An awful thing&mdash;that flu!" he declared. "Lobel, do you think maybe she
+could 'a' had the germs of it on her then?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p><p>"Don't be a coward, Geltfin!" rebuked his senior severely. "Look at me
+how I am not frightened, and yet it was me she seen last, not you!
+Besides, only to-day I am reading where that big doctor in Cincinnati,
+Ohio&mdash;Silverwater&mdash;says it is not a disease which you could catch from
+somebody else until after they have actually got down sick with it. Yes,
+sir, she sits right there telling me good-by. 'Mr. Lobel,' she says to
+me&mdash;I had just handed her her check&mdash;'Mr. Lobel,' she says, 'always to
+you,' she says, 'I should be grateful. Always to you,' she says, 'I
+should give thanks that two years ago when I am practically
+comparatively unknown you should 'a' given me my big chance.' In them
+very words she says it, and me setting here at this desk listening at
+her while she said so!</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I ain't lost no time, boys. Before even I sent to find you I
+already got busy. I've got Appel starting for up there in half an hour
+in my car to take charge of everything and with orders to spare no
+expense. The funeral what I am going to give that girl! Well, she
+deserves it. Always a hard worker, always on the job, always she minds
+her own business, always she saves her money, always a perfect lady,
+never throwing any of these here temperamentals, never going off in any
+of these here highsterics, never making a kick if something goes wrong
+because it happens I ain't on the lot to run things, never&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p><p>It threatened to become a soliloquy. This time it was Quinlan who
+interrupted:</p>
+
+<p>"You said it all, Lobel, and it's no need that you should go on saying
+it any more. The main points, I take it, are that we're all sorry and
+that we've lost one swell big asset by her dying&mdash;only it's lucky for us
+she didn't take ill before we got through shooting The She-Demon."</p>
+
+<p>"Lucky? Huh! Actually, lucky ain't the right word for it!" said the
+president. "When I think of the fix we should 'a' been in if she hadn't
+finished up the picture first, I assure you, boys, it gives me the
+shivers. Right here and now in the middle of being sorry it gives me the
+shivers!"</p>
+
+<p>"It does, does it?" There was something so ominous in Mr. Geltfin's
+sadly ironic remark&mdash;something in tone and accent so lugubriously
+foreboding that his hearers swung about to stare at him. "It does, does
+it? Well, all what I've got to say is, Lobel, you've got some shivers
+coming to you! We've all got some shivers coming to us! Having this girl
+die on us is bad business!"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure it is," agreed the head, "but it might be worse. There's one awful
+big salary cut off the pay roll and if we can't have her with us no
+longer there's nobody else can have her. And the profits from that last
+picture should ought to be something positively
+enormous&mdash;stupendous&mdash;sensational. Listen! I bet you that from the hour
+we release&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p><p>"You ain't going to release!" broke in Geltfin, his wizen features
+sharpening into a peaky mask of grief.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't talk foolishness!" snapped Mr. Lobel. "For why shouldn't we be
+going to release?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's it&mdash;why?" Mr. Quinlan seconded the demand.</p>
+
+<p>"Because you wouldn't dare do it!" In his desire to make clear his point
+Mr. Geltfin fairly shoveled the words out of himself, bringing them
+forth overlapping one another like shingles on a roof. "Because the
+public wouldn't stand for it! Always you brag, Lobel, that you know what
+the public want! Well then, would the public stand for a picture where a
+good, decent, straight girl that's dead and will soon be in her grave is
+for six reels doing all them suggestive vampire stunts like what you
+yourself, Lobel, made her do? Would the public stand for calling a dead
+woman names like she-demon? They would not&mdash;not in a thousand years&mdash;and
+you should both know it without I should have to tell you! With some
+pretty rough things we could get by, but with that thing we could never
+get by! The public, I tell you, would not stand for it. No, sir; when
+that girl died the picture died with her. You just think it over once!"</p>
+
+<p>Out of popped eyes he glared at them. They glared at him, then they
+looked at each other. Slowly Mr. Lobel's head drooped forward as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> though
+an unseen hand pressed against the back of his neck. Quinlan casting his
+eyes downward traced with one toe the pattern of the rug under his feet.</p>
+
+<p>On top of one sudden blow, heavy and hard to bear, another now had
+followed. Since Lobel had become one of the topnotchers with a
+reputation to maintain, expenses had been climbing by high jumps, but
+receipts had not kept pace with expenses. There were the vast salaries
+which even the lesser drawing cards among the stars now demanded&mdash;and
+got. There were war taxes, excess profit taxes, amusement taxes. There
+was to be included in the reckoning the untimely fate of Let Freedom
+Ring, a vastly costly thing and quickly laughed to death, yet a smarting
+memory still. Its failure had put a crimp in the edge of the exchequer.
+This stroke would run a wide fluting of deficit right through the middle
+of it.</p>
+
+<p>The pall of silence lasted no longer than it has here taken to describe
+how it fell and enveloped them. Mr. Geltfin broke the silence without
+lifting the prevalent gloom. Indeed his words but depressingly served to
+darken it to a very hue of midnight.</p>
+
+<p>"Besides," he added, "there is anyhow another reason. We know what a
+nice clean girl she was in private life. We know that all them wild
+romance stories about her was cooked up in the press department to make
+the suckers believe that both on and off the screen she was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> the same.
+But she wasn't, and so I for one should be afraid that if we put that
+fillum out she'd come back from the dead to stop it!"</p>
+
+<p>He sank his voice, glancing apprehensively over his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Lobel, you wouldn't dare do it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Lobel," said Quinlan, "he's right! We wouldn't dare do it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Quinlan," admitted Lobel, "it's right&mdash;I wouldn't dare do it."</p>
+
+<p>In that same instant of his confession, though, Mr. Lobel bounded out of
+his chair, magically changing from a dumpy static figure of woe into the
+dynamo of energy and resourcefulness the glassed-in studios and the
+out-of-door locations knew.</p>
+
+<p>"I got it!" he whooped. "I got it!" He threw himself at an inner door of
+the executive suite and jerked it open. "Appel," he shouted, "don't
+start yet! I got more instructions still for you. And say, Appel, you
+ain't seen nobody but only Quinlan and Geltfin&mdash;eh? You ain't told
+nobody only just them? Good! Well, don't! Don't telephone nobody! Don't
+speak a word to nobody! Don't move from where you are!"</p>
+
+<p>He closed the door and stood against it as though to hold his private
+secretary a close prisoner within, and faced his amazed partners.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a cinch!" he proclaimed to them. "I just this minute thought it up
+myself. If I must say it myself, always in a big emergency<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> I can think
+fast. Listen! Nobody ain't going to know Monte is dead; not for a year,
+not maybe for two years; not until this last big picture is old and worn
+out; not until we get good and ready they should know. Vida Monte, she
+goes right on living till we say the word."</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Wait, wait, can't you? If I must do all the quick thinking for this
+shop shouldn't I sometimes get a word in sideways? What I'm telling you,
+if you'll please let me, is this: The girl is dead all right! But nobody
+knows it only me and you, Quinlan, and you, Geltfin, and Appel in this
+next room here. Even the doctor up there at Hamletsburg he don't know it
+and his wife she don't know it and nobody in all that town knows it. And
+why don't they know? Because they think only it is a woman named Sarah
+Glassman that is dead. Actually that sickness no doubt changed her so
+that even if them rubes ever go to see high-class feature fillums there
+didn't nobody recognize her. If they didn't suspect nothing when she was
+alive, for why should they suspect something now she is dead? They
+shouldn't and they won't and they can't!</p>
+
+<p>"What give me the idea was, I just remembered that when the doctor
+called me up he spoke only the name Glassman, not the name Monte. He
+tells me he calls up here because he finds in her room where she died a
+card with the name Lobel Masterfilms on it. And <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>likewise also I just
+remembered that in the excitement of getting such a sad news over the
+telephone I don't tell him who really she is neither."</p>
+
+<p>"Holy St. Patrick!" blurted Quinlan, up now on his feet. "You mean,
+Lobel&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Wait, wait, I ain't done&mdash;I ain't hardly started!" With flapperlike
+motions of his hands Mr. Lobel waved him down. "It's easy&mdash;a pipe.
+Listen! To date her salary is paid. The day she went away I gave her a
+check in full, and if she done what always before she does, it's in the
+bank drawing interest. Let it go on staying in the bank drawing
+interest. So far as we know, she ain't got no people in this country at
+all. In the old country, in Hungary? Maybe, yes. But Hungary is yet all
+torn up by this war&mdash;no regular government there, no regular mails, no
+American consuls there, no nothing. Time for them foreigners that they
+should get their hands on her property one year from now or two years or
+three. They couldn't come to claim it even if we should notify them,
+which we can't. They don't lose nothing by waiting. Instead they
+gain&mdash;the interest it piles up.</p>
+
+<p>"Should people ask questions, why then through the papers we give it out
+that Miss Vida Monte is gone far off away somewhere for a long rest;
+that maybe she don't take no more pictures for a long time. That should
+make The She-Demon go all the better. And to-morrow up there in that
+little rube town<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> very quietly we bury Sarah Glassman, deceased, with
+the burial certificate made out in her own name." He paused a moment to
+enjoy his triumph. "Boys, when I myself think out something, am I right
+or am I wrong?"</p>
+
+<p>He answered his own question.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm right!"</p>
+
+<p>By the look on Quinlan's face he read conviction, consent, full and
+hearty approval. But Geltfin wavered. Inside Geltfin superstition
+wrestled with opposing thoughts. Upon him then Lobel, the master mind,
+advanced, dominating the scene and the situation and determined also to
+dominate the lesser personality.</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;but say&mdash;but look here now, Lobel," stammered Geltfin, hesitating
+on the verge of a decision, "she might come back."</p>
+
+<p>"Geltfin," commanded Lobel, "you should please shut up. Do you want that
+we should make a lot of money or do you want that we should lose a lot
+of money? I ask you. Listen! The dead they don't come back. When just
+now you made your spiel, that part of it which you said about the dead
+coming back didn't worry me. It was the part which you said about the
+public not standing for it that got me, because for once, anyhow, in
+your life you were right and I give you right. But what the public don't
+know don't hurt 'em. And the public won't know. You leave it to me!"</p>
+
+<p>It was as though this argument had been a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> mighty arm outstretched to
+shove him over the edge. Geltfin ceased to teeter on the brim&mdash;he fell
+in. He nodded in surrender and Lobel quit patting him on the back to
+wave the vice president into activity.</p>
+
+<p>"Quinlan," he ordered as he might order an office boy, "get busy! Tell
+'em to rush The She-Demon! Tell 'em to rush the subtitles and all! Tell
+'em to rush out an announcement that the big fillum is going to be
+released two months before expected&mdash;on account the demand of the public
+is so strong to see sooner the greatest vampire feature ever fillumed."</p>
+
+<p>Quinlan was no office boy, but he obeyed as smartly as might any newly
+hired office boy.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>If it was Mr. Lobel's genius which guided the course of action,
+energizing and speeding it, neither could it be denied that circumstance
+and yet again circumstance and on top of that more circumstance matched
+in with hue and shade to give protective coloration to his plan.
+Continued success for it as time should pass seemed assured and
+guaranteed, seeing that Vida Monte, beyond the studios and off the
+locations, had all her life walked a way so secluded, so inconspicuous
+and so utterly commonplace that no human being, whether an attach&eacute; of
+the company or an outsider, would be likely to miss her, or missing her,
+to pry deeply into the causes for her absence. So much for the
+contingencies of the future as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> those in the secret foresaw it. As for
+the present, that was simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>As quietly as she had moved in those earlier professional days of hers,
+when she played small r&ocirc;les in provincial stock companies; as quietly as
+she had gone on living after film fame and film money came her way; as
+quietly as she had laid her down and died, so&mdash;very quietly&mdash;was her
+body put away in the little cemetery at Hamletsburg. To the physician
+who had ministered to her, to his good-hearted wife, to the official who
+issued the burial certificate, to the imported clergyman who held the
+service, to the few villagers who gathered for the funeral, drawn by the
+morbid lure which in isolated communities brings folk to any funeral&mdash;to
+all of these the dead woman merely was a stranger with a strange name
+who, temporarily abiding here, had fallen victim to the plague which
+filled the land.</p>
+
+<p>Of those who had a hand in the last mortal r&ocirc;le she would ever play only
+Lobel's private secretary, young Appel, who came to pay the bills and
+take over the private effects of this Sarah Glassman and after some
+fashion to play the r&ocirc;les of next friend and chief mourner, kenned the
+truth. The clergyman having done his duty by a deceased coreligionist,
+to him unknown, went back to the city where he belonged. The physician
+hurried away from the cemetery to minister to more patients than he
+properly could care for. The townspeople <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>scattered, intent upon their
+own affairs. Appel returned to headquarters, reporting all well.</p>
+
+<p>At headquarters all likewise went well&mdash;so briskly well in fact that
+under the urge for haste things essential were accomplished in less time
+by fewer craftsmen than had been the case since those primitive
+beginnings when Lobel's, then a struggling short-handed concern,
+frequently had doubled up its studio staffs for operative service in the
+makeshift laboratory. Reporting progress to the president, Mr. Quinlan
+expanded with self-satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm fixing to show you something in the way of a speed record," he
+proudly proclaimed. "The way I looked at it, the fewer people I had
+rushing this thing through the factory the less chance there was for
+loose talk round the plant and the less loose talk there was going on
+round the plant the less chance there was for maybe more loose talk
+outside. Yes, I know we'd figured we'd got everything caulked up
+air-tight, but I says to myself, 'What's the use in taking a chance on a
+leak if you don't have to?'</p>
+
+<p>"So I practically turned the big part of the job&mdash;developing and all the
+rest of it&mdash;over to Josephson, same as we used to do back yonder when we
+was starting out in this game and didn't have a regular film cutter and
+the camera man had to jump in and develop and cut and assemble and print
+and everything. Josephson shot all the scenes for The She-Demon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>&mdash;he
+knows the run of it better even than the director does. Besides,
+Josephson is naturally close-mouthed. He minds his own business and
+never butts in anywhere. To look at him you can't never tell what he's
+thinking about. But even if he suspected anything&mdash;and, of course, he
+don't&mdash;he's the kind that'd know enough to keep his trap shut. So I've
+had him working like a nailer and he's pretty near done.</p>
+
+<p>"Soon as he had the negative ready, which was late yesterday afternoon
+after you'd went home, I had it run off with nobody there but me and
+Josephson, and I took a flash at it&mdash;and, Lobel, it's a bear! No need
+for you to worry about the negative&mdash;it was a heap too long, of course,
+in the shape it was yesterday, but it had everything in it we hoped
+would be in it&mdash;and more besides.</p>
+
+<p>"So then without losing a minute I stuck Josephson on the printing
+machine himself. I'd already gave the girl on the machine a couple of
+days off to get her out of the way. Josephson stayed on the job alone
+pretty near all last night, I guess. He had things to himself without
+anybody to bother him and I tell you he shoved it along.</p>
+
+<p>"Connors ain't lost no time neither. He's got the subtitles pretty near
+done, and believe it or not, as you're a mind to, but, Lobel, I'm
+telling you that this time to-morrow morning and not a minute later I'll
+have the first <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>sample print all cut and assembled and ready for you to
+give it a look! Then it'll just be a job of matching up the negative and
+sticking in the subtitles and starting to turn out the positives faster
+than the shipping-room gang can handle 'em. I guess that ain't moving,
+heh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quinlan," said Mr. Lobel, "I give you right."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>By making his word good to the minute the gratified Mr. Quinlan derived
+additional gratification. At the time appointed they sat in darkness in
+the body of the projection room&mdash;Lobel, Quinlan, Geltfin and Appel,
+these four and none other&mdash;behind a door locked and barred. Promptly on
+Quinlan's order the operator in the box behind them started his machine
+and the accomplished rough draft of the great masterpiece leaped into
+being and actuality upon the lit square toward which they faced.</p>
+
+<p>The beginning was merely a beginning&mdash;graphic enough and offering
+abundant proof that in this epochal undertaking the Lobel shop had
+spared no expense to make the production sumptuous, but after all only
+preliminary stuff to sauce the palate of the patron for a greater feast
+to come and suitably to lead up to the introduction of the star. Soon
+the star was projected upon the screen, a purring, graceful panther of a
+woman, to change at once into a sinuous python of a woman and then to
+merge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> the feline and the ophidian into a sinister, splendid, menacing
+composite bespeaking the dramatic conception and the dramatic
+presentment of all feminine evil, typifying in every move of the lithe,
+half-clad body, in every shift of the big eyes, wickedness unleashed and
+unashamed.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lobel sitting unseen in the velvet blackness uttered grunts of
+approbation. The greatest of all film vampires certainly had delivered
+the goods in this her valedictory. Never before had she so well
+delivered them. The grunting became a happy rumble.</p>
+
+<p>But all this, too, was in a measure dedicatory&mdash;a foretaste of more
+vivid episodes to follow, when the glorious siren, displaying to the
+full her powers of fascination over the souls and the bodies of men,
+would rise to heights yet greater and the primitive passion she so well
+simulated would shine forth like a malignant jewel in a setting that was
+semibarbaric and semicivilized, too, and altogether prodigal and lavish.
+The first of these bigger scenes started&mdash;the scene where the queen of
+the apaches set herself to win the price of her hire from the Germans by
+seducing the young army officer into a betrayal of the Allied cause; the
+same scene wherein at the time of filming it Mr. Lobel himself had taken
+over direction from Colfax's hands.</p>
+
+<p>The scene was launched, acquired headway, then was halted as a bellow
+from Mr. Lobel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> warned the operator behind him to cut off the power.</p>
+
+<p>"What the hell!" sputtered the master. "There's a blur on the picture
+here, a sort of a kind of smokiness. Did you see it, Geltfin? Right
+almost directly in front of Monte it all of a sudden comes! Did you,
+Quinlan?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure I seen it," agreed Geltfin. "Like a spot&mdash;sort of."</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't on the negative when I seen it day before yesterday," stated
+Quinlan. "I can swear to that. A little defect from faulty printing, I
+guess."</p>
+
+<p>"All right then," said Mr. Lobel. "Only where you got efficiency like I
+got it in this plant such things should have no business occurring.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on, operator&mdash;let's see how goes it from now on."</p>
+
+<p>Out again two shadow figures&mdash;the vampire and the vampire's
+prey&mdash;flashed in motion. Yes, the cloudy spot was there, a bit of murky
+shadow drifting between the pair of figures and the audience. It
+thickened and broadened&mdash;and then from the suddenly constricted throats
+of the four watchers, almost as though all in the same moment an
+invisible hand had laid gripping hold on each of their several
+windpipes, came a chorused gasp.</p>
+
+<p>For they saw how out of the drifting patch of spumy wrack there emerged
+a shape vague and indistinct and ghostly, but taking on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>instantly the
+sharpened outlines of one they recognized. It was the shape, not of Vida
+Monte, the fabled wrecker of lives, but the shape of her other self,
+Sarah Glassman, and the face it wore was not the face of the stage
+vampire, aflame with the counterfeited evil which the actor woman had so
+well known how to simulate but the real face of the real woman, who lay
+dead and buried under a mound of fresh-cut sods seventy miles away&mdash;her
+own face, melancholy and sadly placid, as God had fashioned it for her.</p>
+
+<p>Out from the filmy umbra it advanced to the center, thus hiding its
+half-naked double writhing in the embrace of the deluded lover, and
+clearly revealed itself in long sweeping garments of pure white&mdash;fit
+grave clothes for one lately entombed&mdash;with great masses of loosened
+black hair falling like a pall about the passionless brooding face; and
+now lifting reproachful eyes, it looked out across the intervening void
+of blackness into their staring eyes, and from the folds of the cerement
+robes raised a bare arm high as though to forbid a lying sacrilege. And
+stood there then as a wraith newly freed from the burying mold, filling
+and dominating the picture so that one looking saw nothing else save the
+shrouded figure and the head and the face and those eyes and that upheld
+white arm.</p>
+
+<p>Cowering low in his seat with a sleeve across his eyes to shut out the
+accusing apparition,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> Mr. Geltfin whispered between chattering teeth: "I
+told him! I told him the dead could maybe come back!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Quinlan, a bolder nature but even so terribly shaken, was muttering
+to himself: "But it wasn't in the negative! I swear to God it wasn't in
+the negative!"</p>
+
+<p>It is probable that Mr. Lobel heard neither of them, or if he heard he
+gave no heed. He had a feeling that the darkness was smothering him.</p>
+
+<p>"Shut off the machine!" he roared as he wrenched his body free of the
+snug opera chair in which he sat. "And turn on the lights in this
+room&mdash;quick! And let me out of here&mdash;quick!"</p>
+
+<p>Lunging into the darkness he stumbled over Appel's legs and tumbled
+headlong out into the narrow aisle. On all fours as the lights flashed
+on, he gave in a choking bellow his commands.</p>
+
+<p>"Burn that print&mdash;you hear me, burn it now! And then burn the negative
+too! Quick you burn it, like I am telling you!"</p>
+
+<p>"But, Lobel, I'll swear to the negative!" protested Quinlan, jealous
+even in his fright for his own vindication. "If you'll look at the
+neg&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't touch it for a million dollars!" roared Lobel. "Burn it up,
+I tell you! And bury the ashes!"</p>
+
+<p>Still choking, still bellowing, he scrambled to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> his feet, an ungainly
+embodiment of mortal agitation, and ran for the door. But Mr. Geltfin
+beat him to it and through it, Quinlan and Appel following in the order
+named.</p>
+
+<p>Outside their chief fell up against a wall, panting and wheezing for
+breath, his face swollen and all congested with purple spots. They
+thought he was about to have a stroke or a seizure of some sort. But
+they were wrong. This merely was Nature's warning to a man with a size
+seventeen neckband and a forty-six-inch girth measurement. The stroke he
+was to have on the following day.</p>
+
+<p>Probably Quinlan and Geltfin as experienced business men should have
+known better than to come bursting together into the office of a stout
+middle-aged man who so lately had suffered a considerable nervous shock
+and still was unstrung; and having after such unseemly fashion burst in,
+then to blurt out their tidings in concert without first by soft and
+soothing words preparing their hearer's system to receive the tidings
+they bore. But themselves, they were upset by what they just had learned
+and so perhaps may be pardoned for a seeming unthoughtfulness. Both
+speaking at once, both made red of face and vehement by mingled emotions
+of rage and chagrin, each nourishing a perfectly natural and human
+desire to place the blame for a catastrophe on shoulders other than
+their own two pairs, they sought to impart the tale they brought. Ensued
+for an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> exciting moment a baffling confusion of tongues.</p>
+
+<p>"It was that Josephson done it&mdash;the mousy little sneak!"</p>
+
+<p>These words became intelligible as Quinlan, exerting his superior vocal
+powers, dinned out the sputtering inarticulate accents of Geltfin.</p>
+
+<p>"He fixed it so that you'd spill the beans, Lobel! He fixed The
+She-Demon&mdash;Josephson. And me trusting him!</p>
+
+<p>"How should I be knowing that all this time him and that girl was
+secretly engaged to be married? How should I be knowing that he would
+find out for himself the day after the funeral that she was dead and yet
+never say a word about it? How should I be knowing that he would have
+all tucked away somewhere a roll of film showing her dressed up like a
+madonna or a saint or a martyr or a ghost or something which he took
+privately one time when they was out together on location&mdash;slipping away
+with her and taking 'em without nobody knowing about it? How should I be
+knowing that without tipping his hand he would cook up the idea to work
+a slick fake on you, Lobel, and scare you into killing off the whole
+thing? How should I be knowing that while he was on the printing machine
+all by himself the other night that he would work the old double
+exposure stunt and throw such a scare into you in the projecting room
+yesterday?"</p>
+
+<p>By reason of his valvular resources Mr. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>Quinlan might shout louder than
+Geltfin. But he could not shout louder than Mr. Lobel. Nobody in that
+section of Southern California could. Mr. Lobel outblared him:</p>
+
+<p>"How should you be knowing? You come now and ask me that when all along
+it was you that had the swell idee to stick him into the laboratory all
+by himself where he could play some funny business? You!"</p>
+
+<p>"But it was you, Lobel, that wouldn't listen to me when I begged you to
+wait and not burn up the negative. I tried to tell you that the negative
+was O. K. when I'd seen it run off."</p>
+
+<p>"You told me? It's a lie!"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure I told you! Geltfin remembers my telling you, don't you, Geltfin?
+You're an old bird, Lobel&mdash;you ought to know by now about retouching and
+doctoring and all. You know how easy it is to slip over a double
+exposure. But it was only the sample print that was doctored. The
+negative was all right, but you wouldn't listen."</p>
+
+<p>"That's right too, Lobel!" shrilled Geltfin. "I heard him when he yelled
+out to you that you should wait!"</p>
+
+<p>Quinlan amplified the indictment.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure he heard me&mdash;and so did you! But no, you had to lose your nerve
+and lose your head just because you'd had a scare throwed into you."</p>
+
+<p>"I never lose my head! I never lose my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> nerve!" denied Mr. Lobel. He
+turned the counter tide of recriminations on Geltfin.</p>
+
+<p>"Anyhow,&mdash;it was you started it, Geltfin&mdash;you in the first place, right
+here in this room, with your craziness about the dead coming back. Only
+for your fool talk I would never have had the idee of a ghost at all.
+And now&mdash;now when the cow is all spilt milk you two come and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but Lobel," countered Geltfin, "remember you was the one that made
+'em burn up the negative without giving it a look at all!"</p>
+
+<p>"He said it, Lobel!" re&euml;nforced Quinlan. "You was the one that just
+would have the negative burned up whether or no. And now it's burned
+up!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lobel was not used to being bullied in his own office or elsewhere.
+If there was bullying to be done by anyone, he was his own candidate
+always. Surcharged with distracting regrets as he was, he had an
+inspiration. He would turn the flood of accusation away from himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is that Josephson?" he whooped. "He is the one actually to blame,
+not us. Let me get my hands on that Josephson once!"</p>
+
+<p>"You can't!" jeered Quinlan. "He's quit&mdash;he's gone&mdash;he's beat it! He
+wrote me a note, though, and mailed it back to me when he was beating it
+out of town, telling me to tell you how slick he'd worked it on you." He
+felt in his pockets. "I got that note here somewhere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>&mdash;here it is. I'll
+read it to you, Lobel&mdash;he calls you an old scoundrel in one place and an
+old sucker in another."</p>
+
+<p>"Look out&mdash;catch him, Quinlan!" cried Mr. Geltfin. "Look at his
+face&mdash;he's fixing to faint or something."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The prime intent of this recital, as set forth at the beginning, was to
+tell why Mr. Max Lobel had an attack of apoplexy. That original purpose
+having been now carried out, there remains nothing more to be added and
+the chapter ends.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>ALAS, THE POOR WHIFFLETIT!</h3>
+
+<p>Over Jefferson Poindexter's usually buoyant spirits a fabric of gloom,
+black, thick, and heavy, was spread like a burying-pall. His thoughts
+were the color of twelve o'clock at night at the bottom of a coal-mine
+and it the dark of the moon. Moroseness crowned his brow; sorrow berode
+his soul, and on his under lip the bull-bat, that eccentric bird which
+has to sit lengthwise of the limb, might have perched with room to
+spare. You couldn't see the ointment for the flies, and Gilead had gone
+out of the balm business. There was a reason. The reason was Ophelia
+Stubblefield.</p>
+
+<p>On an upturned watering-piggin alongside Mittie May's stall in the
+stable back of the house, Jeff sat and just naturally gloomed. To this
+retreat he had been harried against his will. Out of her domain, which
+was the kitchen, Aunt Dilsey had driven him with words barbed and
+bitter.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span></p><p>"Tek yo'se'f on 'way f'um yere, black boy!" Such had been her command.
+"Me, I's plum distracted an' wore out jes' f'um lookin' at you settin'
+'round sullin' lak a' ole possum. Ef Satan fine some labor still fur
+idle hands to do, same ez de Holy Word say he do, he suttinly must be
+stedyin' 'bout openin' up a branch employmint agency fur cullid only,
+'specially on yore account. You ain't de Grand President of de Order of
+de Folded Laigs, tho' you shorely does ack lak it. You's s'posed to be
+doin' somethin' fur yore keep an' wages. H'ist yo'se'f an' move."</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't doin' nothin'!" Jeff protested spiritlessly.</p>
+
+<p>"Dat you ain't!" agreed Aunt Dilsey. "An' whut you better do is better
+do somethin'&mdash;tha's my edvices to you. S'posin' ole boss-man came back
+yere to dis kitchen an' ketch you 'cumberin' de earth de way you is. You
+knows, well ez I does, w'ite folks suttinly does hate to see a strappin'
+nigger settin' 'round doin' nothin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Boss-man ain't yere," said Jeff. "He's up at the cote-house. Mos'
+doubtless jes' about right now he's sendin' some flippy cullid woman to
+the big jail fur six months fur talkin' too much 'bout whut don't
+concern her."</p>
+
+<p>"Is tha' so?" she countered. "Well, ef he should come back home he'll
+find one of de most fragrant cases of vagromcy he ever run acrost right
+yere 'pon his own household <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>premises. Boy, is you goin' move, lak I
+patiently is warned you, or ain't you? Git on out yander to de stable
+an' confide yo' sorrows to de Jedge's old mare. Mebbe she mout be able
+to endure you, but you p'intedly gives me de fidgits. Git&mdash;befo' I
+starts findin' out ef dat flat haid of yourn fits up smooth ag'inst de
+back side of a skillit."</p>
+
+<p>Nervously she fingered the handle of her largest frying-pan. Jeff knew
+the danger-signals. Too deeply sunken in melancholy to venture any
+further retorts, he withdrew himself, seeking sanctuary in the lee of
+Mittie May. He squatted upon the capsized keeler, automatically
+balancing himself as it wabbled under him on its one projecting handle,
+and, with his eyes fixed on nothing, gave himself over unreservedly to a
+consuming canker. For all that unhappiness calked his ears as with
+pledgets of cotton wool, there presently percolated to his aloof
+understanding the consciousness that somebody was speaking on the other
+side of the high board fence which marked the dividing line between
+Judge Priest's place and the Enders' place next door. Listlessly he
+identified the voice as the property of the young gentleman from up
+North who was staying with his kinsfolk, the Enders family. This was a
+gentleman already deeply admired by Jeff at long distance for the
+sprightliness of his wardrobe and for his gay and gallus ways. Against
+his will&mdash;for he craved to be quite alone with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> his griefs and no
+distracting influences creeping in&mdash;Jeff listened. Listening, he heard
+language of such splendor as literally to force him to rise up and
+approach the fence and apply his eye to a convenient cranny between two
+whitewashed boards.</p>
+
+<p>Under an Injun-cigar tree which grew in the Enders' back yard the
+fascinating visitor out of Northern parts was stretched in a hammock,
+between draws on a cigarette discoursing grandiloquently to a
+half-incredulous but wholly delighted audience of three. His three small
+nephews were hunkered on the earth beside him, their grinning faces
+upturned to his the while he dealt first with this and then with that
+variety of curious fauna which, he alleged, were to be encountered in
+the wilds of a strange place called the State of Rhode Island, where, it
+seemed, he had spent the greater part of an adventurous and crowded
+youth.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he was saying now, beginning, as it were, a new chapter, "if you
+think the sulfur-crested parabola is a funny bird you should hear about
+the great flannel-throated golosh, or arctic bird of the polar seas,
+which is a creature so rare that nobody ever saw one, although Dr. Cook,
+the imminent ex-explorer, made an exhaustive study of its habits and
+peculiarities and told the King of Denmark about them, afterward
+amplifying his remarks on the subject in the lecture which he delivered
+in this, his native land, under the auspices of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>International
+School of Poor Fish. By the way, I'm sure the Doctor must have visited
+this town on his tour. Only yesterday, I think it was, I saw an
+illuminated sign down on Franklin Street which surely was used
+originally to advertise his lecture. It was a sign which said, 'Cook
+With Gas!' But speaking of fish, I am reminded of the fur-bearing
+whiffletit; only some authorities say the whiffletit is not a fish at
+all, but a subspecies of the wampus family. Now, the wampus&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Say, tell us about the whiffletit next," begged one wriggling
+youngster, plainly allured by the sound of the name.</p>
+
+<p>"With pleasure," said the speaker. "The whiffletit is found only in
+streams running in a south-northerly direction. This is because the
+whiffletit, being a sensitive creature with poor vision, insists on
+having the light falling over its left shoulder at all times. A creek,
+river, inlet, or estuary which has a wide mouth and a narrow head, such
+as a professional after-dinner speaker has, is a favorite haunt for the
+whiffletit. To the naturalist it is a constant source of joy. It always
+swims backward upstream, to keep the water out of its eyes, and it has
+only one fin, which grows just under its chin, so that the whiffletit
+can fan itself in warm weather, thus keeping cool, calm, and collected.
+Most marvelous thing of all about this marvelous creature is its diet.
+For the whiffletit, my dear young friends, lives exclusively on imported
+Brie cheese.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span></p><p>"Did I say exclusively? Ah, there I fell into error. It has been known
+to nibble at a chiropodist's finger, but it prefers imported Brie
+cheese, aged in the wood. The mode employed in catching it is very
+interesting, and I shall now describe it to you. Selecting a body of
+water wherein the whiffletit resides, you enter a round-bottomed boat
+and row out to the middle of it. Then you take a square timber, and,
+driving it into the water, withdraw it very swiftly so as to leave a
+square hole in the water. Care should be taken to use a perfectly square
+timber because the whiffletit being, as I forgot to tell you, shaped
+like a brick, cannot move up and down a round hole without barking its
+shins, much to the discomfort of the pretty creature.</p>
+
+<p>"Pray follow me closely now, for at this juncture we come to the most
+important phase of the undertaking. You bait the edges of the hole with
+the cheese cut in small cubes and quietly await results. Nor do you have
+long to wait. Far down below in his watery retreat the whiffletit
+catches the alluring aroma of the cheese. He swims to the surface and
+devours it to the last crumb. But alas for the greedy whiffletit!
+Instantly the cheese swells him up so that he cannot change gears nor
+retreat back down the hole, and as he circles about, flapping
+helplessly, you lean over the side of the boat and laugh him to death!
+And such, my young friends, such is the fate of the whiffletit."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span></p><p>"'Scuse me, suh."</p>
+
+<p>The amateur aspirant for the robe of Munchausen paused from lighting a
+fresh cigarette and lifted his eyes, and was aware of an
+anthracite-colored face risen, like some new kind of crayoned full moon,
+above the white skyline of the side fence.</p>
+
+<p>"'Scuse me, suh, fur interruptin'," repeated the voice belonging to the
+apparition, "but I couldn't he'p frum overhearin' whut you wuz tellin'
+the boys yere. An' I got sort of interested myse'f."</p>
+
+<p>"It's Judge Priest's Jeff, Uncle Dwight," explained the oldest nephew.
+"Jeff makes us fluttermills out of corn-stalks, and he learned
+us&mdash;taught us, I mean&mdash;to call a brickbat an alley-apple, and he can
+make his ears wiggle just like a rabbit and everything. Don't you,
+Jeff?&mdash;I mean, can't you, Jeff?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I see," said the fabulist with a wink aside for Jeff's benefit. "I
+am indeed delighted to make the acquaintance of one thus gifted, even
+under the present informal circumstances. In what way, if any, may I be
+of service to you, Judge Priest's Jeff?"</p>
+
+<p>"That air thing you named the whiffletit&mdash;near ez I made out you said,
+boss, that fust you tolled him up to whar you wanted him wid cheese an'
+'en you jest natchelly laffed him to death?"</p>
+
+<p>"Such are the correct facts accurately repeated, Judge Priest's Jeff,"
+gravely assented this affable faunalist.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span></p><p>"Yas, suh," said Jeff. "D'ye s'pose now, boss, it would he'p any ef
+they wuz a whole passel of folks to do the laffin' 'stid of jes' one?"</p>
+
+<p>"Beyond the peradventure of a doubt. Concerted action on the part of
+many, guffawing merrily in chorus, assuredly would hasten the death of
+the ill-starred victim, if you get what I mean, Judge Priest's most
+estimable Jeff?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, suh," said Jeff. "Thanky, suh." He did not exactly smile his
+thanks, but the mask of his melancholy crinkled round the edges and
+raised slightly. One who knew Jeff, and more particularly one who had
+been cognizant of his depressed state during the past fortnight, would
+have said that a heartening thought suddenly had come to him, lightening
+and lifting in ever so small a degree the funereal mantlings. He made as
+though to withdraw from sight. A gesture from the visiting naturalist
+detained him.</p>
+
+<p>"One moment," said Uncle Dwight. "Might I, a comparative stranger, be
+pardoned for inquiring into the motives underlying the interest you have
+evinced in my perhaps poorly expressed but veracious narration?"</p>
+
+<p>The wraith of Jeff's grin took on flesh visibly. It was a pleasure&mdash;even
+to one beset by grievous perplexities&mdash;it was a pleasure to hear such
+noble big words fall thus trippingly from human lips. His answer, tho,
+was in a measure evasive, not to say cryptic.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span></p><p>"I wuz jes' stedyin', tha's all, suh," he fenced. He ducked from view,
+then bobbed his head up again.</p>
+
+<p>"'Scuse me, suh, but they is one mo' thing I craves to ast you."</p>
+
+<p>"Proceed, I pray you. Our aim is to please and instruct."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, suh, I jes' wanted to ast you ef you ever run acrost one of these
+yere whiffletits w'ich played on the jazzin'-valve?"</p>
+
+<p>"Prithee?"</p>
+
+<p>"Naw, suh, not the prith&mdash;prith&mdash;whut you jes' said. I mentioned the
+jazzin'-valve&mdash;whut some folks calls the saxophone. D'ye reckin they
+mout' 'a' been a whiffletit onct 'at played on one?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the saxophone! Well, as to that I could not with certainty speak.
+But, mark you, the whiffletit is a creature of infinite
+resources&mdash;versatile, abounding in quaint conceits and whimsies, and,
+having withal a wide repertoire. Sometimes its repertoire is twice as
+wide as it is, thus producing a peculiar effect when the whiffletit is
+viewed from behind. On second thought, I have no doubt that in the
+privacy of its subterranean fireside the whiffletit wiles away the
+tedium of the long winter evenings by playing on the saxophone."</p>
+
+<p>"Come on over, Jeff, and Uncle Dwight will tell us some more," urged the
+hospitable oldest nephew.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span></p><p>But Jeff had vanished. He wished to be alone for the working out of a
+project as yet vague and formless, but having a most definite object to
+be attained. Stimulated by hope new-born, he was now a sort of twelfth
+carbon-copy of the regular Jeff&mdash;faint, perhaps, and blurry, but
+recognizable. Through the clouds which encompassed him the faint promise
+of a rift was apparent.</p>
+
+<p>By rights one would have said that Jeff had no excuse for hiding in a
+shadowed hinterland at all. The world might have been excused for its
+failure to plumb the underlying causes which roiled the waters of his
+soul. Seemingly the currents of life ran for him in agreeable channels.
+He had an indulgent employer whose clothes fitted Jeff. Indeed,
+anybody's clothes fitted Jeff. He had one of those figures which seem to
+give and take. He was well nourished, gifted conversationally, of a
+nimble wit, resourceful, apt. Moreover, home-grown watermelons were
+ripe. The Eighth of August, celebrated in these parts by the race as
+Emancipation Day, impended. The big revival&mdash;the biggest and most
+tremendously successful revival in his people's local history&mdash;was in
+full swing at the Twelfth Ward tabernacle, affording thrill and
+entertainment every week-night and thrice on Sundays.</p>
+
+<p>There never had been such a revival; probably there never would be
+another such. Justifiably, the pastor of Emmanuel Chapel took credit to
+himself that he had planted the seed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> which at this present time so
+gloriously yielded harvest. Theretofore his chief claim to public
+attention had rested upon the sound of the name he wore. He had been
+born a Shine and christened a Rufus. But to him the name of Rufus Shine
+had seemed lacking in impressiveness and euphony for use by one about
+entering the ministry. Thanks to the ingenuity of a white friend who was
+addicted to puns and plays upon words, the defect had been cured. As the
+Rev. A. Risen Shine he bore a name which fitted its bearer and its
+bearer's calling&mdash;at once it was a slogan and a testimony, a trade-mark
+and a watch-cry.</p>
+
+<p>Proudly now he walked the earth, broadcasting the favor of his smile on
+every side. For it had been he who divined that the times were ripe for
+the importation of that greatest of all exhorting evangelists of his
+denomination, the famous Sin Killer Wickliffe, of Nashville, Tenn. His
+had been the zeal which inspired the congregation to form committees on
+ways and means, on place and time, on finance; his, mainly, the energy
+behind the campaign for subscriptions which filled the war-chest. As
+resident pastor, chief promotor, and general manager of the project, he
+had headed the delegation which personally waited upon the great man at
+his home and extended the invitation. Almost immediately, upon learning
+that the amount of his customary guaranty already had been raised and
+deposited in bank, the Rev.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> Wickliffe felt that he had a call to come
+and labor, and he obeyed it. He brought with him his entire
+organization&mdash;his private secretary, his treasurer, his musical
+director. For, mind you, the Sin Killer had borrowed a page from the
+book of certain distinguished revivalists of a paler skin-pigmentation
+than his. As the saying goes among the sinful, he saw his Caucasian
+brethren and went them one better. His musical director was not only an
+instrumentalist but a composer as well. He adapted, he wrote, he
+originated, he improvised, he interpolated, he orchestrated, he played.
+As one inspired, this genius played the saxophone.</p>
+
+<p>Now, in the world at large the saxophone has its friends and its foes.
+Its detractors agree that the late Emperor Nero was a maligned man;
+cruel, perhaps, in some of his aspects, but not so cruel as has been
+made out in the case against him. It was a fiddle he played while Rome
+burned&mdash;it might have been a saxophone. But to the melody-loving heart
+of the black race in our land the mooing tones of this long-waisted,
+dark-complected horn carry messages as of great joy. It had remained,
+though, for the resourceful Rev. Wickliffe to prove that it might be
+made to fill a nobler and a higher destiny than setting the feet of the
+young men to dancing and the daughters to treading the syncopated
+pathways of the ungodly. Discerning this by a sort of higher intuition,
+he had thrown himself into the undertaking of luring the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> expert
+saxophone performer of his acquaintance away from the flaunting tents of
+the transgressor and herding him into the fold of the safely regenerate.
+He succeeded. He saved Cephus Fringe, plucking him up as a brand from
+the burning, to remold him into a living torch fitted to light the way
+for others.</p>
+
+<p>Of Cephus it might be said, paraphrasing the lines about little dog
+Rover, that when he was saved he was saved all over. Being redeemed, he
+straightway disbanded his orchestra. He tore up his calling-card
+reading,</p>
+
+<div class="block"><p class="center">PROFESSOR CEPHUS FRINGE ESQUIRE<br />
+<span class="smcap">The Anglo-Saxophone King</span><br />
+Address: Care Champey's Barber-Shop<br />SOLE PROPRIETOR FRINGE'S ALL-STAR TROUPE</p></div>
+
+<p>He enlisted under the militant banners and on the personal staff of the
+Sin Killer. Amply then was the prior design of his new commander
+justified. For if it was the eloquence, the magnetism, the compelling
+force of the revivalist which brought the penitents shouting down the
+tan-bark trail to the mourner's bench, it was the harmonious croonings
+of Prof. Fringe as he conducted the introductory program&mdash;now rendering
+as a solo his celebrated original composition, "The Satan Blues," now
+leading the special choir&mdash;which psychologically paved the way for the
+greater scene to follow after. There was distress in the devil's
+glebe-lands when this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> pair struck their proper stride&mdash;first the
+Fringian outpourings harmoniously exalting the spirits of the assemblage
+and then the exhorters tying his hands to the Gospel plow and driving
+down into the populous valleys of sin, there to furrow and harrow, to
+sow and tend, to garner and glean.</p>
+
+<p>The team had struck its stride early at the protracted meeting so
+competently fostered by the resident pastor of Emmanuel Chapel, the Rev.
+A. Risen Shine. To himself, as already stated, the latter took prideful
+credit for results achieved and results promised. Well he might. Already
+hundreds of converts had come halleluiahing through; hundreds more
+teetered and swayed, back and forth, between doubt and conviction, ready
+at a touch to fall like the ripe and sickled grain in the lap of the
+husbandman. Wavering brethren had been fortified and were made stalwart
+again. Confirmed backsliders rubbed their wayward feet in the resin of
+faith and were boosted up the treacherous skids of their temptation and
+over the citadel walls to bask among the chosen in a Jericho City of
+repentance. Proselytes from other and hostile creeds trooped over with
+hosannas and loud outcries of rejoicing. Even the place where, each
+evening, the triumph of the preceding evening was repeated and amplified
+seemed appropriate for such scenes. For the Twelfth Ward tabernacle had
+not always been a tabernacle; it had been a tobacco-warehouse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span>&mdash;but it
+was converted. And its present chief ornament, next only to the Sin
+Killer himself&mdash;indeed, its chiefest ornament of all in the estimation
+of impressionable younger unmarried female members&mdash;was Prof. Cephus
+Fringe.</p>
+
+<p>At thought of him and of this, Jeff Poindexter, reperched on his wabbly
+piggin, wove his furrowed brow into a closer and more intricate pattern
+of cordial dislike. For if the main reason of his unhappiness was
+Ophelia Stubblefield, the secondary reason and principal contributory
+cause was this same Cephus Fringe. Ophelia's favorite letter may not
+have been F, but it should have been. She was fair, fickle, fawn-toned,
+flirty, flighty, and frequently false. Jeff cast back in his mind. He
+certainly had had his troubles since he became permanently engaged to
+Ophelia. For instance, there had been her affair with that ferocious
+razor-wielder Smooth Crumbaugh. In this matter the fortuitous return
+from the dead of Red Hoss Shackleford, as skilfully engineered by Jeff,
+had broken up Red Hoss's own memorial services, had also operated to
+scare Smooth Crumbaugh clean out of Colored Odd Fellows' Hall and leave
+the fainting Ophelia in the rescuing arms of Jeff. But there had been
+half a dozen other affairs, each of such intensity as temporarily to
+undermine Jeff's peace of mind. Between spells of infatuations for
+attractive strangers, she accepted Jeff's devotions. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> trouble was,
+though, that life, with Ophelia, seemed to be just one infatuation after
+another. And now, to cap all, she had suffered herself, nay, offered
+herself, to fall thrall to the dashing personality and the varied
+accomplishments of this Fringe person. It was this entanglement which
+for two weeks past had made Jeff, her official 'tween-times fianc&eacute;, a
+prey to carking cares and dark forebodings.</p>
+
+<p>Hourly and daily the situation, from Jeff's point of view, had grown
+more desperate as Ophelia's passion for the fascinating sojourner grew.
+He had even lost his relish for victuals which, with Jeff, was indeed a
+serious sign. In long periods of self-imposed solitude he had devised
+and discarded as hopeless various schemes for bringing discomfiture upon
+his latest and most dangerous rival. For a while he had thought somehow,
+somewhere, to rake up proofs of the interloper's former wild and
+reckless life. But of what avail to do that?</p>
+
+<p>By his own frank avowal the Professor had had a spangled past; had been
+an adventurer and a wanton, a wandering minstrel bard; had even been in
+jail. This background of admitted transgressions, now that he was so
+completely reformed and reclaimed, merely made him an all-the-more
+attractive figure in the eyes of those to whom he offered confession.
+Again, Jeff had trifled with a vague design of taunting Fringe into a
+quarrel and beating him up something scandalous. To this end he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span>
+tentatively had approached our leading exponent of the art of
+self-defense and our most dependable sporting authority, one Mr. Jerry
+Ditto.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ditto had grown out of a clerkship at Gus Neihiem's cigar-store into
+the realm of fistiana. As a shadow-boxer he excelled; as a bag-puncher
+also. But in an incautious hour for himself and his backer, Flash Purdy,
+owner of Purdy's Dixieland Bar, he had permitted himself to be entered
+for a match before an athletic club at Louisville against one Max
+Schorrer, a welter-weight appearing professionally under the <i>nom de
+puge</i> of Slugging Fogarty. It was to have been a match of twelve rounds,
+but early in the second round Mr. Ditto suddenly lost all conscious
+interest in the proceedings.</p>
+
+<p>He retired from the ring after this with a permanent lump on the point
+of his jaw and a profound conviction that the Lord had made a mistake
+and drowned the wrong crowd that time at the Red Sea. He fitted up a
+gymnasium in the old plow factory and gave instructions in sparring to
+the youth of the town. Naturally, his patronage was all-white, but he
+offered to take Jeff on for a few strictly private lessons at night
+provided Jeff would promise not to tell anybody about it. But at last
+the prospective client drew back. His ways were the ways of peace and
+diplomacy. Why depart from them? And, anyhow, this Cephus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> Fringe was so
+dog-goned sinewy-looking. Playing a saxophone ought to give a man wind
+and endurance. If not knocked cold in the first onslaught he might
+become seriously antagonized toward Jeff.</p>
+
+<p>But now, in the sportive fablings of the young white gentleman from up
+North who was visiting the Enders family, he had found a clue to what he
+sought. The difficult point, though, was to evolve the plan for the plot
+nebulously floating about in his brain; for while he envisaged the
+delectable outcome, the scheme of procedure was as yet entirely without
+form and substance. It was as though he looked through a tunnel under a
+hill. At the far end he beheld the sunlight, but all this side of it was
+utter darkness. Seeking to pluck inspiration out of the air, his roving
+eye fell upon the dappled rump of Mittie May as she stood in her stall
+placidly munching provender, and with that, <i>bang</i>! inspiration hit him
+spang between the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>To look on her, ruminative, ewe-like, fringed of fetlock and deliberate
+in her customary amblings, you would never have reckoned Mittie May to
+be a mare with a past. But such was the case. Her youth had been spent
+in travel over the continent with a tented caravan; in short, a circus.
+Her broad flat top-side, her dependable gait, her amiable disposition,
+her color&mdash;white with darkish half-moons on shoulder and flank&mdash;all
+these admirably had fitted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> her for the ring. When, long years before,
+Hooper's wagon-shows came to grief in our town Mittie May had been
+seized by Farrell Brothers to satisfy an unpaid hay-bill.</p>
+
+<p>Through her sobering maturer years she had passed from one set of hands
+to another, until finally, in her declining days, she found asylum in
+the affectionate ownership of Judge Priest, with Jeff to curry her fat
+sides and no more arduous labor to perform than occasionally to draw the
+Judge about from place to place in his ancient shovel-topped buggy.
+About her now there was naught to suggest the prancing rozin-back she
+once had been; the very look of her eye conjured up images of simple
+pastoral scenes&mdash;green meadows and purling brooks.</p>
+
+<p>But let a certain signal be sounded and on top of that let a certain air
+be played and Mittie May, instantly losing that air she had of a
+venerable and dignified sheep, became a Mittie May transformed; a Mittie
+May reverted to another and more feverish time; a Mittie May stirred by
+olden memories to nightmarish performances. By chance once Jeff had
+happened upon her secret, and now, all in one illuminating flash,
+recalling the conditions governing this discovery, he gave vent to a low
+anticipatory chuckle. It was the first chuckle he had uttered in a
+fortnight, and this one was edged with a sinister portent. He had his
+idea now. He had at hand the agency for bringing the scheme to fruition.
+But yet there remained much of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> preliminary detail to be worked out. His
+plan still was like a fine-toothed comb which has seen hard usage in a
+wiry thatch&mdash;there were wide gaps between its prongs.</p>
+
+<p>Jeff gave himself over to sustained thought. He made calculations
+calendar-wise. This was the first day of August; the eighth, therefore,
+was but seven short days removed. This plot of his seemed to resemble a
+number of things. It was like a piece of pottery, too. First the plastic
+clay must be assembled, then the vessel itself turned from it; finally
+the completed product must be given time to harden before it would be
+ready for use. He must move fast but warily.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with, now, he must create a setting of plausibility for the
+r&ocirc;le he meant, in certain quarters, to essay; must dress the character,
+as it were, in its correct housings and provide just the right touches
+of local color. Ready at hand was Aunt Dilsey; he would make her,
+unwittingly so far as she kenned, a supporting member of the cast. She
+would never know it, but she would play an accessory part, small but
+important, in his prologue.</p>
+
+<p>Five minutes later she lifted her eyebrows in surprise. As he reinserted
+himself halfway across the portals of the realm where she queened it his
+recent moroseness was quite gone from him. About him now was the
+suggestion, subtly conveyed, that here stood one who, after profound
+cogitation, had found out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> what ailed him and, by the finding out, was
+filled with a gentle, chastened satisfaction. He seated himself on the
+kitchen door-step, facing outward so that comparative safety might be
+attained with a single flying leap did her uncertain temper, flaring up
+suddenly, lead her to acts of hostility before he succeeded in winning
+her over. He uttered a long-drawn sigh, then sat a minute in silence. In
+silence, too&mdash;a suspicious, menacing silence&mdash;she glared at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Aunt Dilsey," he ventured, speaking over his shoulder, with his face
+averted from her, "mebbe you been noticin' yere lately I seemed kind of
+downcasted an' shiftless, lak ez ef I had a mood on me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Has I noticed it?" she repeated&mdash;"huh!" The punctuating grunt was
+non-committal. It might mean nothing; it might mean anything.</p>
+
+<p>He cleared his throat and went on,</p>
+
+<p>"An', mebbe&mdash;I ain't sayin' you actually is; I's sayin' it with a
+mebbe&mdash;mebbe you been marvelin' in yore mind whut it wuz w'ich pestered
+me an' made me ack so kind of no-'count?"</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't needin' to marvel," she stated coldly. "I knows. Laziness! Jes'
+pyure summer-time nigger laziness, wid a rich streak of meanness th'owed
+in."</p>
+
+<p>"Nome, you is wrong," he corrected her gently. "You is wrong there.
+'Ca'se likewise an' furthermo' I also is been off my feed&mdash;ain't that a
+sign to you?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span></p><p>"Sign of a tapeworm, I 'spects."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't say that, please, Ma'am," he humbly pleaded. "You speakin' in
+sich a way meks me 'most discouraged to confide in you whut I aims to
+confide in you. I'm tellin' it to you the fust one, too. 'Tain't nary
+'nother soul heared it. Aunt Dilsey, I's grateful to you in my heart,
+honest I is, fur runnin' me 'way frum yore presence yere jes' a little
+w'ile ago. You never knowed it at the time&mdash;I didn't s'picion it also
+neither&mdash;but you done me a favor. 'Ca'se settin' out yonder in the
+stable all alone and ponderin' deep, all of a sudden somethin' jes' come
+right over me an' I knowed whut's been the matter wid me lately. Aunt
+Dilsey, I's felt the quickenin' tech."</p>
+
+<p>"Better fur you ef somebody made you feel de quickenin' buggy-whup."</p>
+
+<p>He disregarded the brutal suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>"Yessum, I's felt the quickenin' tech. Ez you doubtless full well knows,
+I ain't been 'tendin' much 'pon the big revival. But even so&mdash;even an'
+evermo' so&mdash;the influence frum it done stretch fo'th its hand an' reach
+me. I ain't sayin' I's plum won over yit, but 'way down deep insides of
+me I's stirred&mdash;yessum, tha's the word&mdash;stirred. I ain't sayin' the
+spirit of grace is actually th'owed me, but I feel prone to say I thinks
+it's fixin' to rassle wid me. I ain't sayin' I stands convicted, but I
+aims to be a searcher fur the truth; I aims to stop, look, an' lissen. I
+ain't sayin'&mdash;" He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> broke off, the floods of his imagery dammed by the
+skeptical eye which swept him; then made a lame conclusion, "Tha's whut
+I sez, Ma'am, to you in strict confidences."</p>
+
+<p>"Den lemme say somethin' to you. You figgers it's salvation you needs,
+huh? I figgers it's vermifuge. Oh, I knows you, boy&mdash;I knows you f'um de
+grass-roots up. Still an' wid all dat, ef you should crave to mend yo'
+ways&mdash;an' de Heavens above knows dey kin stand a heap of mendin'!&mdash;I
+ain't gwine be de one to hender you."</p>
+
+<p>Against her better judgment her tone was softening. For she gave her
+allegiance unrestrainedly to the doctrine preached at Emmanuel Chapel.
+She was one of its stanch pillows. Indeed, it might be said of her that
+she was one of its plumpest bolsters; and Jeff, although admittedly of
+no religious persuasion, had grown up in the shadow of a differing
+creed. The winning over of the black ram of another fold would be a
+greater victory than the reclamation of any wandering sheep who had been
+reared as a true believer.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, boy," she went on, in this new mood, "let us hope an' pray dat in
+yore case dey's yit hope. De ways of de Almighty is pas' findin' out.
+Fur do not de Scriptures say dey's room fur both man an' beast?&mdash;de maid
+servant an' de man servant, de ox an' de ass, dey all may enter in? So
+dey mout be a skimsy, bare chanct fur sech even ez you is. One thing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span>
+shore&mdash;ef dey's ary grain of contritefulness in yore soul, trust de Sin
+Killer to fetch it fo'th to de light of day. He's de ole fambly doctor
+w'en it come to dat kind of sickness. You go to dat tabernickle to-night
+an' you keep on goin' an' le's see whut come to pass.... Jeffy, dey's a
+little mossil of cold peach cobbler lef over f'um dinner yistiddy
+settin' up yonder amongst de shelfs of my cu'board!"</p>
+
+<p>"Nome, thank you," said Jeff. "The emotions w'ich is in me seems lak
+they ain't left me no room fur nothin' else. Seems lak I can't git my
+mind on vittles yit. But I shore aims to be at the tabernickle to-night,
+Aunt Dilsey&mdash;I means, Sist' Dilsey. You jes' watch me. Tha's all I asts
+of you now&mdash;jes' watch me!"</p>
+
+<p>Head down and shoulders hunched, in the manner of one harkening to inner
+voices, Jeff betook himself around the corner of the back porch. Once
+out of her sight, though, he flung from him his mien of absorption. The
+overture had been rendered; there remained much to be done before the
+curtain rose. The languorous shade invited one to tarry and rest, but
+Jeff breasted the sunshine, going hither and yon upon his errands. Back
+of a cabin on Plunket's Hill he had private conference with one Gumbo
+Rollins, by profession a carnival concessionaire and purveyor of
+amusements in a small way. No cash actually changed hands, but on Jeff's
+part there was a promise of moneys<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> to be paid in the event of certain
+as-yet-problematical contingencies.</p>
+
+<p>Next he sought for and, at the Bleeding Heart restaurant, found a limber
+individual named Tecumseh Sherman Glass, called Cump for short. This
+Tecumseh Sherman Glass was a person of two trades and one outstanding
+trait. By day a short-order cook, by night he played in 'Gustus
+Hillman's Colored String Band. It is to be marked down in the reader's
+memory that the instrument he played was the saxophone; also that he was
+heavily impregnated with that form of professional jealousy which lurks
+in the souls of so many <i>artistes</i>; likewise that he was a member in
+fair standing of the Rev. A. Risen Shine's congregation, and, finally,
+that he was a born meddler in other folks' affairs. These facts all
+should be borne in mind; they have their value.</p>
+
+<p>With Tecumseh Sherman Glass, Jeff spent some time in a confidential
+exchange of words. Here, again, the matter of a subsequent financial
+reward, to be paid by the party of the first part, meaning Jeff, to the
+party of the second part, meaning Cump, following the satisfactory
+outcome of sundry developments, was arranged. Would there were space to
+tell how cunningly, how craftily Jeff, in the subtleties marking this
+interview, played upon three chords in the other's being&mdash;the chord of
+vengeful envy, the chord of malice, the chord of avarice. There is not
+space.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span></p><p>Four o'clock found the plotter entering the parlor of what once had
+been the establishment of T. Marshall, undertaker, now the Elite Colored
+Funeral Home, Marshall &amp; Kivil, proprietors. These transformations had
+dated from the time Percy C. Kivil (Tuskegee '18) entered the firm. Here
+was no plain undertaker. Here was an expert and a graduate mortician,
+with diploma to prove it; also one gifted of the pen. Two inscriptions
+done in flowing type hung on the wall. One of these inscriptions read:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Oh, Death, where is thy sting</div>
+<div class="i1">When we officiates?</div>
+<div>Embalming done attentively</div>
+<div class="i1">At standard pre-war rates.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And the other:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Blest be the tie that binds!</div>
+<div class="i1">Tho death thy form may shake.</div>
+<div>Call in a brother of thy race</div>
+<div class="i1">And let him undertake!</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>At a desk between these two decorative objects and half shadowed by the
+bright-green fronds of a large artificial palm, sat &AElig;sop Loving,
+son-in-law of the senior partner. From his parent-by-marriage &AElig;sop had
+borrowed desk-room for the carrying on of the multitudinous business
+relating to the general management of one of the celebrations projected
+in honor, and on account of, the Eighth of August. He might appear to be
+absorbed in important details, as he now did. But inside of him he was
+not happy and Jeff knew the reasons; the reasons<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> were common rumor.
+This year there was to be more than one celebration; there were to be
+two; and the opposition, organizing secretly and stealing a march on
+that usually wide-awake person, &AElig;sop, had rented Belt Line Park, thus
+forcing &AElig;sop's crowd to make a poor second choice of the old
+show-grounds, a treeless common away out near the end of Tennessee
+Street. On top of this and in an unexpected quarter, even more
+formidable competition was foreshadowed. A scant eighth of a mile
+distant from the show-lot and on the same thoroughfare stood the Twelfth
+Ward tabernacle, and here services would be held both afternoon and
+evening of the Eighth. The Rev. Wickliffe had so announced, and the Rev.
+Shine had backed him in the decision.</p>
+
+<p>It was inevitable, with this surpassing magnet of popular interest so
+near at hand, that for every truant convert who might halt to taste of
+the pleasures provided by &AElig;sop Loving and his associate promoters, half
+a dozen possible patrons would pass on by and beyond, drawn away by the
+compelling power of the Sin Killer's eloquence. Representations had been
+made to the revivalist that, with propriety, he might suspend his
+ministry for the great day. His answer was the declaration that on the
+Eighth he would preach not merely once, but twice.</p>
+
+<p>By him and his there would be no temporizing with the powers of evil,
+however insidiously<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> cloaked. Would not dancing be included in the
+entertainments planned by these self-seeking laymen who now approached
+him? Would not there be idle sports and vain pastimes calculated to
+entice the hearts of the populace away from consideration of the welfare
+of their own souls? Admittedly there would be drinking of soft drinks.
+And into the advertised softness some hardness assuredly would slip. You
+could not fool the Sin Killer. Having taken a firm stand, his rectitude
+presently moved him to further steps. On his behalf it was stated that
+he, personally, would lead the elect in triumphant procession out
+Tennessee Street to the tabernacle between the afternoon preaching and
+the evening. As an army with banners, the saved, the sober, and the
+seeking would march past, thus attesting their fealty to the cause which
+moved them. He defied all earthly forces to lure a single one from the
+ranks.</p>
+
+<p>And, after the preaching, under his auspices, there would be a mighty
+cutting of watermelons for those deemed to be qualified to participate
+therein. By the strict tenets of the Rev. Wickliffe's theology it seemed
+that watermelons were almost the only luscious things of this carnal
+world not held to be potentially or openly sinful. Small wonder then
+that Jeff, jauntily entering the Elite Funeral Home, read traces of an
+ill-concealed distress writ plain upon the face of &AElig;sop Loving.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Brother Lovin', you shore does look<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> lak you'd hung yore harp
+'pon the willer-tree an' wuz fixin' to tek in sorrow fur a livin'," he
+said in greeting. "Cheer yo'se'f up; 'tain't nothin' so worse but whut
+it mout be worser."</p>
+
+<p>"Easy fur you to say so, Brother Poindexter; harder fur me to do so,"
+stated &AElig;sop. "Gallivantin' 'round the way you is, you ain't got no idea
+of the aggervations w'ich keeps comin' up in connection wid an occasion
+sech ez this one, an' mo' 'specially the aggervations w'ich pussonally
+afflicts the director-general of the same, w'ich I is him."</p>
+
+<p>"I been hearin' somethings myse'f," said Jeff. "Word is come to me, fur
+one thing, that this yere smart-ellicky gang out at the Belt Line Park
+is aimin' to try to cut some of the groun' frum under yore feet. I
+regrets to hear it."</p>
+
+<p>"'Tain't them so much," said &AElig;sop. "We couldn't 'spect to go 'long
+havin' a nomopoly furever. Sooner or late they wuz bound to be
+opposition arisin' up. 'Tain't them so much, although I will say it wuz
+a low-flung trick to tek an' rent that park right out frum under our
+noses 'thout givin' us no warnin' so's we mout go an' rent it fu'st. No,
+hit's the action of that Emmanuel Chapel bunch w'ich gives me the mos'
+deepest concern. Seems lak ev'ry time that Rev'n' Sin Killer open his
+mouth I kin feel cold cash crawlin' right out of my pocket. Mind you,
+Brother Poindexter, I ain't got a word to say ag'in religion. I's strong
+fur it on Sundays, ez you well knows, but dog-gone <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span>religion w'en it
+come interferin' wid a pusson's chanct to pick up a little spare change
+fur hisse'f on a week-day!"</p>
+
+<p>"Spoke lak a true business man, Brother Lovin'," said Jeff. "Still, I
+reckin you's mebbe countin' the spoilt eggs 'fore they's all laid. The
+way I sees it, you'll do fairly well, nevertheless an' to the contrary
+notwithstandin'. Le's see. Ain't you goin' to have the dancin'-pavilion
+goin' all day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't you goin' to have money rollin' in frum all the snack-stands an'
+frum the fried-fish privilege an' frum the cane rackits an' frum the
+knock-the-babies-down an' all?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tubby shore, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't you due to pick up a right smart frum the kitty of the private
+crap game an' the chuck-a-luck layout?"</p>
+
+<p>"Natchelly. But&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Hole on; I ain't th'ough yit. Seems lak to me you ain't properly
+counted up yore blessin's a-tall. Ain't the near-beer&mdash;" he sank his
+voice discreetly, although there was no one to overhear "ain't the
+near-beer an' the <i>still nearer</i> beer goin' fetch you in a right peart
+lil' income? I'll say they is. An' ain't you goin' do mighty well on
+yore own account out of yore share of the commission frum Gumbo
+Rollinses' Flyin' Jinny?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hole on, hole on! How come Gumbo Rollins?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span></p><p>"W'y tha's all fixed," stated Jeff. "Gumbo he'll be out there 'fore
+sunup on the 'p'inted day wid his ole Flyin' Jinny an' his ole
+grind-organ an'&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Tain't nothin' fixed," demurred the astonished and indignant &AElig;sop.
+"'Tain't nothin' fixed 'thout I fixes it. Ain't I had pestermints 'nuff
+las' yeah settlin' up, or tryin' to, wid that Rollins? Ain't I told him
+then that never ag'in would I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, tha's settled," announced Jeff soothingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Who settled it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Me."</p>
+
+<p>"You?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, me&mdash;out of pyure frien'ship fur you. Lissen, Brother Lovin', an'
+give due heed. I comes to you d'rect frum Gumbo Rollins. He's done seen
+the error of the way he acked tow'ds you that time. He's cravin' that
+all the grudges of the bygone past shall be disremembered. Here's whut
+he's goin' to do: He's goin' give yore organization the reg'lar cut, an'
+'pon top of that he's goin' hand you, pussonally an' private, a special
+extra five pur cent, on all he teks in; that comes ez a free-will
+offerin' to you. He's goin' 'bandon his plan to run ez a independint
+attraction on the Eighth down back of the market-house. He's goin' be
+wid you heart an' soul an' Flyin' Jinny. All he asts, through me, is
+that he kin have the right to set her up on the purtic'lar spot w'ich
+he's got in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> mind out there on them show-ground lots. An' finally an'
+furthermo' he's done commission me to hand you ten dollars, unbeknownst
+to anybody, jes' to prove to you that his heart's in the right place an'
+that he's wishful fur to do the square thing." He felt in his pockets,
+producing a crumpled bill. "An' here 'tis!"</p>
+
+<p>&AElig;sop pouched the currency on the flank where he carried his personal
+funds before his commercial instinct inspired him to seek out the
+motives actuating the volunteer peacemaker. Experience had taught him to
+beware of Greeks bearing gifts&mdash;not of the gifts particularly, but of
+the Greeks.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "ef Gumbo Rollins aims to be honest an' open an'
+abovebode wid us, w'y that puts a diff'unt face on it. But so fur ez I
+heared tell, you an' Gumbo Rollins ain't been so thick ez all this up
+till now. I's wonderin' whut does you 'spect to git out of the little
+transaction fur yo'se'f? 'Ca'se I gives you warnin' right yere an' now
+that ef you's hopin' to git a split out of me you mout jes' ez well stop
+dreamin' ary sech a delusion an' become undelirious ag'in."</p>
+
+<p>"Stop, Brother Lovin'," broke in Jeff in the tone of one aggrieved at
+being unjustly accused. "Has I asted you fur anything? Then wait till I
+does so."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," agreed &AElig;sop. "I'll wait till you does so an' w'en you does
+so I'll say no, same ez I's already sayin' it to you in advance.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span> Say,
+boy, you must have yore reasons fur the int'rust you is displayin' in
+dis matter."</p>
+
+<p>"Whutever 'tis 'taint got nothin' to do wid lurin' no money out of yore
+possession," said Jeff. His voice changed to one of deep gravity.
+"Brother Lovin', look yere at me."</p>
+
+<p>He glanced about him, making doubly sure they were alone. He advanced
+one step and came to a halt; he made his figure rigid and gave first the
+grand hailing-sign of the Afro-American Society of Supreme Kings of the
+Universe, then the private signal of distress which invokes succor and
+support, and he wound up by uttering the cabalistic words which bind a
+fellow Supreme King in the vows of eternal secrecy on pain of having his
+heart cut out of his bosom and burned and the ashes scattered to the
+four winds. For his part, &AElig;sop Loving arose and, obeying the ritual,
+made the proper responses. In a solemn silence they exchanged the
+symbolic grip which is reserved only for occasions of emergency and
+stress and which unites brother to brother in bonds stronger than steel.
+A moment later &AElig;sop Loving was alone.</p>
+
+<p>It was not Jeff, the intriguer, who had colleagued with Gumbo Rollins
+and conspired with Cump Glass, who came in the evening to the Twelfth
+Ward tabernacle and sought a seat on a bench well up toward the front
+where he could be fairly conspicuous and yet not too conspicuous;
+neither was it the persuasive <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span>person who had dangled the bait of
+private profit before the beguiled eyes of &AElig;sop Loving. Rather was it
+the serious, self-searching, introspective Jeff, who earlier that day
+had besought counsel and comfort of Aunt Dilsey Turner. He came alone,
+walking with head bowed as walks one who is wrapped in his own thoughts.
+He arrived betimes; he remained silent and apart, inwardly communing,
+one would have said, while the audience rustled in.</p>
+
+<p>So engrossed was he that he seemed to have no eyes even for Ophelia, who
+perched high aloft, the brightest flower in the hanging garden of color
+that banked the tiers of the choir division terracing up behind the
+platform. She, in turn, had no eyes for any there save Prof. Cephus
+Fringe, who, it should be added, had one eye for Ophelia and the other
+for his own person. Even by those prejudiced in his favor it was not to
+be denied that the Professor was, as one might say, passionately
+addicted to himself. When, with Cephus Fringe accompanying and
+directing, the opening hymn was offered, Ophelia, lifting high her
+soprano voice, sang directly at, to, and for him. From the front this
+plainly was to be observed; in fact was the subject of whispered comment
+among some of Jeff's neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>As though he heard them not nor saw the byplay, he gave no sign which
+might be interpreted as denoting annoyance or chagrin. There was only a
+friendly and whole-souled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span> approval in his look when, following the
+song, Prof. Fringe rendered&mdash;I believe this is the customary
+phrase&mdash;rendered as a solo on his saxophone one of the compositions
+bearing his name as author. There was rapt attention and naught else in
+his pose and on his face the while the Rev. Wickliffe, swinging his
+scythe of righteousness, mowed for a solid hour in Satan's weedy back
+yard, so that the penitents fell in a broad swath.</p>
+
+<p>From her place hard by, Aunt Dilsey vigilantly watched Jeff and was, in
+spite of herself, convinced of his sincerity. She marked how, at the
+close of the meeting, he passed slowly, almost reluctantly out, stopping
+more than once and looking rearward as though half inclined to turn back
+and join the ranks of those who clustered still at the foot of the
+pulpit, completely and utterly won over. She was moved to direct the
+notice of certain of the sistren and brethren to his behavior as
+conspicuous proof of the compelling fervor of the Sin Killer. Swiftly
+the word spread that Jeff Poindexter magically had ceased to be a
+horrible example and was betraying evidences that he might yet become
+what insurance agents call a prospect.</p>
+
+<p>As though to justify this hope Jeff attended Tuesday night; his presence
+attesting him a well-wisher, his deportment an added testimony that he
+deeply had been stirred by the outpoured words of the revivalist. Before
+the service got under way he seized upon an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span>opportunity to be
+introduced to the Rev. Wickliffe. Many were spectators to the meeting
+between them, and speculation ran higher upon the possibility that
+before the week ended he would be enrolled among the avowedly convicted.
+Again on Wednesday night he was on hand, an attentive and earnest
+listener.</p>
+
+<p>Prior to the preliminary exercise of song on this night, the Rev.
+Wickliffe outlined the amplified plans for the great moral jubilation on
+the evening of the Eighth and invited suggestions from the assemblage to
+the end that naught be overlooked which might add to its splendors. At
+this invitation, almost as though he had been awaiting some such
+favorable opening, there stood up promptly Tecumseh Sherman Glass, and
+Tecumseh made a certain motion which on being put to the vote of the
+house carried unanimously amid sounds of a general approval. Some
+applauded, no doubt, because of the popularity of the idea embodied in
+the motion and some perhaps because the brother, in offering it, was
+deemed to have displayed a most generous, a most becoming, and a totally
+unexpected spirit of magnanimity toward a fellow professional occupying
+a place which Cump Glass or any other saxophonist might well envy him.</p>
+
+<p>If at this Jeff's heart gave a joyous jump inside of him, his face
+remained a mask to hide his real feelings. If, privily, by day he
+labored to gather up all the loose ends of his shaping<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> design, publicly
+by night he patronized the tabernacle. He was present on Thursday night
+and on Friday and on Saturday, and three times on Sunday he was present,
+maintaining still his outward bearing of interest and sympathy. He was
+like a tree which bends before the compelling blast yet refuses for a
+little while longer to topple headlong. This brings us up to Monday, the
+Glorious Eighth.</p>
+
+<p>With the morning of that day or with its nooning or with its
+afternooning we need have no concern, replete though they were in
+variety of entertainment and abounding in pleasurable incident. For us
+the interest chiefly centers in the early evening and especially in that
+part of the evening falling between seven o'clock and forty minutes past
+seven. At seven, prompt on the clock's stroke and as guaranteed in the
+announcements, the parade fathered by the Rev. Wickliffe, started from
+the corner of Tennessee and Front Streets, down by the river, and
+wended, as the saying goes, its way due westward into the sunset's
+painted afterglow.</p>
+
+<p>This was a parade! A great man had sired it; a tried organizer had
+fostered it; proved executives had worked out the problems of its
+divisions and its groupings. At its head, suitably mounted upon a white
+steed, rode a grand marshal who was more than a grand marshal. For in
+his one person this dignitary combined two parts: not only was he the
+grand marshal with a broad sash draped diagonally across his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> torso to
+prove it, but likewise he was the official trumpeter. At intervals he
+raised his horn to his lips and sounded forth inspiring notes. That his
+horn was neither a trumpet nor yet a bugle but a long, goose-necked
+thing might be regarded as merely a detail. Only one who was overly
+technical would have noted the circumstance at all. Behind him, sixteen
+abreast, appeared the special tabernacle choristers with large
+fluttering badges of royal purple. They came on magnificently, filling
+the street from curb-line to curb-line, and the sound of their singing
+was as a great wind gathering. The second one on the left, counting from
+the end, in the front row, was Ophelia Stubblefield, tawny and splendid
+as a lithesome tiger-lily. She wore white with long white kid gloves and
+a beflowered hat which represented the hoarded total of six weeks'
+wages. You would have said it was worth the money. Anybody would.</p>
+
+<p>In the second section rode the Rev. Wickliffe and the Rev. Shine; they
+were in a touring-car with its top flattened back. You might say they
+composed the second section. Carriages and automobiles rolling along
+immediately behind them bore the members of the official board of
+Emmanuel Chapel in sets of fours, and the chief financial contributors
+to the revival which this night would reach its climax. Flanking the
+carriages and following after them marched the living garnerings of the
+campaign&mdash;the converts to date, a veritable Gideon's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> Band of them, in
+number amounting to a host, and all afoot as befitting the palmer and
+the pilgrim. Established members of the congregation, in hired hacks, in
+jitneys, in rented and privately owned equipages, and also afoot came
+next.</p>
+
+<p>Voluntarily aligned representatives of the colored population at large
+formed the tail of the column. Of these last there surely were hundreds.
+Hundreds more, in holiday dress now somewhat rumpled after a day of
+pleasure-seeking and pleasure-finding, lined the sidewalks to see this
+spectacle. Nowhere along the straightaway of the line of march did the
+pavements lack for onlookers, but nearing the end of the route, and
+especially where the wide vacant spaces of the Tennessee Street common
+had been pre&euml;mpted by the festal enterprises of Director General &AElig;sop
+Loving and his confr&egrave;res, the press became thicker and ever thicker.
+Here the crowds overflowed upon the gravel roadway, narrowing the
+thoroughfare to a lane through which the paraders barely might pass.
+They did pass, though at a lessened pace, until their front ranks had
+reached the approximate middle breadth of the old show-grounds, with the
+tabernacle looming against the sunset's dying fires an eighth of a mile
+on beyond.</p>
+
+<p>It is necessary here and now that, taking our eyes from this scene, we
+hark back to the Wednesday evening preceding. It will be recalled that
+on this evening a certain motion was made<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> and by acclamation adopted.
+The maker of the motion, as we know, was Tecumseh Sherman Glass; its
+beneficiary, as the reader shrewdly may have divined, was Cephus Fringe.
+Beforehand perhaps the Professor had had vague misgivings as to the part
+he was to play in the pageantry on the Eighth; perhaps in his mind he
+had forecast the probability that he might suffer eclipse&mdash;a temporary
+eclipse&mdash;but to an <i>artiste</i> none the less distasteful&mdash;in the shadow of
+the Sin Killer, for since the Sin Killer had originally promulgated the
+idea of the procession it was only natural and only human that the Sin
+Killer should devise to himself the outstanding place of honor in it.</p>
+
+<p>Be these conjectures as they may be, it is not to be gainsaid that the
+suggestion embodied in Cump Glass's motion was to Prof. Fringe highly
+agreeable, insuring, as it did, a fair measure of prominence for him
+without infringing upon his chief's distinctions. He showed his
+approbation. I believe I already have intimated that Prof. Fringe was
+not exactly prejudiced against himself. Any lingering aversions he may
+have entertained in this quarter had long since been overcome.
+Nevertheless a fresh doubt, arising from fresh causes, assailed him as
+the first flush of satisfaction abated within him.</p>
+
+<p>This new-born uneasiness betrayed itself in his voice and his manner
+when, at the conclusion of the night's services, he encountered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> Cump
+Glass in the middle aisle. The meeting was not entirely by chance; if
+the truth is to be known, Cump had maneuvered to bring it about. The act
+was his; a greater mind than his, though, had sponsored the act. And
+Cump Glass, rightly interpreting the look upon Prof. Fringe's large,
+plump face, guilefully set himself to play upon the emotional nature of
+the other. With a gracious wave of his hand he checked the Professor's
+expression of thanks.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't mention it," he said generously, "don't mention it. It teks a
+purformer to understand another purformer's feelin's. So I therefo'
+teken it 'pon myse'f to nomernate you fur the gran' marshal and also ez
+the proper one to sound the buglin' blasts endurin' of the turnout.
+Seems lak somebody else would 'a' had the sense to do so, but w'en they
+wuzn't nobody w'ich did so, I steps in. But right soon afterwards I gits
+to stedyin' 'bout the hoss you'll be ridin', an' it's been worryin' me
+quite some little&mdash;the question of the hoss."</p>
+
+<p>"I been thinkin' concernin' of 'at very same thing," confessed Cephus
+Fringe.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that possible?" exclaimed Cump Glass with well-simulated surprise.
+"Well, suh, smart minds shorely runs in the same grooves, ez the sayin'
+goes. Yas, suh, settin' yonder after I made that motion, I sez to
+myse'f, I sez, 'Glass, you done started this thing an' you must see it
+th'ough. 'Twon't never do in this world fur the gran' marshal to be
+stuck up 'pon the top<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> side of a skittish, skeery liver'-stable hoss
+that'll mebbe start cuttin' up right in the smack middle of things and
+distrac' the gran' marshal's mind frum his business.' I seen that happen
+mo' times 'en onct, wid painful results. I s'pose, tho, you kin ride
+mighty nigh ary hoss they is, can't you, Purfessor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I could do so onct," stated Cephus in the manner of one who
+formerly had followed rough-riding for a calling, "but leadin' a public
+life fur so long, lak I has, I ain't had much time fur private
+pleasures. 'Sides w'ich, ef I'm goin' sound the notes I'll be needin'
+both hands free fur my instermint."</p>
+
+<p>"Puzzactly the same thought w'ich came to me, jes' lak I'm tellin' it to
+you," agreed Cump. "It teks a musician to think of things w'ich an
+ordinary pusson wouldn't never dream of. So, fur the las' hour or so I
+been castin' about in my mind an' jes' a minute ago the idee come to me.
+I feels shore I kin arrange wid a frien' of mine to he'p us out. I
+s'pose you is acquainted with this yere Jeffy Poindexter?"</p>
+
+<p>"I has met him," said Cephus with chill creeping into his tones. "An' I
+has observed him present yere the last two-three nights. But I ain't
+aimin' to ax no favors frum him."</p>
+
+<p>"You ain't needin' to," said Cump. "I'll 'tend to that myse'f. Besides,
+Purfessor, you is sizin' up Jeffy Poindexter wrong. He's went an'
+'sperienced a change of heart in his feelin's tow'ds whut's goin' on
+yere. Furthermo'"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span>&mdash;and here he favored his flattered listener with a
+confidential and a meaning wink&mdash;"he got sense 'nuff, Jeffy has, to know
+w'en he's crowded plum out of the runnin' by somebody w'ich is mo'
+swiftly gaited 'en whut he is, an' natchelly he crave to stand in well
+wid a winner. Naw, suh, that Jeffy, he'd be most highly overjoyed to
+haul off an' lend a helpin' hand, ef by so doin' he mout put you onder a
+favor to him."</p>
+
+<p>Cephus sniffed, half disarmed but wavering.</p>
+
+<p>"Wharin' could he he'p out? He ain't ownin' no private string of
+ridin'-hosses so fur ez I've took note of."</p>
+
+<p>"The w'ite man he wuks fur is got one an' Jeffy gits the borrowin' use
+of her&mdash;it's a mare&mdash;w'enever he want to, ez I knows frum whut he tells
+me an' frum whut I seen. Purfessor, that mare is jes' natchelly ordained
+an' cut out fur peradin'&mdash;broad ez a feather-tick, gentle ez the onborn
+lamb, an' mouty nigh pyure white&mdash;perzactly the right color fur a gran'
+marshal's hoss. Crowds ain't goin' pester that lady-mare none. Music
+ain't goin' disturb her none whutsoever, neither."</p>
+
+<p>"Whut's her reg'lar gait?"</p>
+
+<p>"Her reg'lar gait is standin' still. But w'en she's travelin' at her
+bestest speed she uses the cemetery walk. See that mare goin' pas' you
+w'en she's in a hurry an' you say to yo'se'f, you say, 'Yere you is,
+bound fur de buryin'-groun', but how come you got separated frum the
+hearse?' Purfessor, that mare's entitled <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span>Christian name is Mittie May.
+Did you ever hear of ary thing on fo' laigs, ur two, w'ich answered to
+the name of Mittie May that wuz tricky?"</p>
+
+<p>"Better be mouty sure," said the cautious Cephus, concerned for the
+safety and dignity of the creature which he held most dear of all on
+this earth. "'Member, I'll be needin' both hands free&mdash;'twon't be no
+time fur me to go jerkin' on the reins w'en my saxophone is requirin' to
+be played."</p>
+
+<p>"You's right there," agreed Cump. "Twouldn't never do, neither, fur you
+to slip off an' mebbe git yo'se'f crippled up. Whar would this yere
+pertracted meetin' be then? Lemme think. Ah, hah! I got it&mdash;the notion
+jes' come to me. Purfessor, listen yere." He placed his lips close to
+the other's ear and spoke perhaps fifty words in a confidential whisper.
+In token of approval and acquiescence the Professor warmly clasped the
+right hand of this forethoughted Glass.</p>
+
+<p>After such a manner was Cephus Fringe, all unwittingly, thrust into the
+pit which had been digged for him.</p>
+
+<p>At the point where the narrative was broken into for the interpolation
+of the episode now set forth, the head of the parade, as will be
+remembered, was just coming abreast of the old show-grounds. Now, the
+head of the parade was Cephus Fringe, and none other. One glance at him,
+upon a white steed, all glorious in high hat and frock coat and with
+that wide crimson<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span> sash dividing his torso in two parts, would have
+proved that to the most ignorant. As for his palfrey, she ambled along
+as though Eighth of August celebrations and a saxophone blaring between
+her drooping ears, and jubilating crowds and all that singing behind
+her, and all these carnival barkers shouting alongside her, had been her
+daily portion since first she was foaled into the world. The compound
+word lady-like would be the word fittest to describe her.</p>
+
+<p>Not twenty feet from her, close up to where the abutting common met the
+straggling brick pavement, stood the battered Flyin' Jinny of Gumbo
+Rollins. It was nearermost to the street-line of all the attractions
+provided by &AElig;sop Loving and his associates. Here, on the site which he
+had chosen, was Gumbo Rollins himself, competently in charge. At the
+precise moment when Mittie May and her proud rider had reached a point
+just opposite him, Gumbo Rollins elected to set his device in motion and
+with it the steam-organ which was part and parcel of the thing's
+organism. Really he might have waited a bit.</p>
+
+<p>Lured by the prospect of beholding something for nothing, most of his
+consistent patrons temporarily had deserted him to flock out into the
+roadway and witness the passing by of the Sin Killer's cohorts. Two
+infatuated lovers, country darkies, sat with arms entwined in a rickety
+wooden chariot. Here and there a piccaninny clung to the back of a
+spotted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> wooden pony or a striped wooden zebra. These, for the moment,
+were his only customers; nevertheless Gumbo Jones Rollins swung a lever
+and started the machinery. The merry-go-round moved with a shriek of
+steam; the wheezy organ began spouting forth the introductory bars of a
+rollicking <i>galop</i>, a tune so old that its very name had been forgotten,
+although the air of it lived anonymously.</p>
+
+<p>As though she had been bee-stung, Mittie May flung up her head. She
+arched her neck and pranced with all four of her feet. She spun about,
+scattering those of the pedestrian classes who hemmed her so closely in.
+Unmindful of a sudden anxious command from her rider, she swung her
+foreparts this way and that. She was looking for it. It must be directly
+hereabouts somewhere. In those ancient days of her youthful vagabondage
+it had always been close at hand when that tune&mdash;her own tune&mdash;was
+played.</p>
+
+<p>Then above the heads of the crowd she saw it&mdash;a scuffed circlet of earth
+measuring exactly fifty-two feet across and marking the location where
+the middle ring had been builded when Runyon &amp; Bulger's Mighty United
+Railroad Shows pitched their tents on the occasion of their annual
+Spring engagement. That had been in early May and this was summer's
+third month; the attrition of the weather had worn down the sharp edges
+of that low turfen parapet; by rights, too, there should have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> much
+sawdust and much smell of the same and a center pole rising like one
+lone blasted tree from the exact middle of a circular island of this
+sawdust; there should have been a ringmaster and at least two clowns and
+an orderly clutter of paraphernalia. Nevertheless there before her was
+the middle ring. And the music had started. And Mittie May answered the
+cue which had lived in her brain for fifteen long years and more, just
+as always she answered it, or sought to, when that tune smote her
+eardrums.</p>
+
+<p>The startled spectators gave backward and to either side in scrambling
+retreat as she lunged forward, cleaving a passage for herself to the
+proper spot of entrance. She whisked in. Around the ring she sped, her
+hoofs drumming against the flanks of the ring-back, her barrel slanting
+far over in obedience to the laws of centripetal force, her tail
+rippling out behind her like a homebound pennon in a fair breeze&mdash;around
+and around and yet again and then some more.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure there were irregularities in the procedure. Upon her back,
+springily erect, there should have been a jaunty equestrian swinging a
+gay pink leg in air and anon uttering the traditional <i>Hoop-la</i>. Instead
+there was a heavy bulk which embraced her neck with two strong arms,
+which wallowed about on her spinal column, which continually cried out
+entreaties, threats, commands, even profanities. Yet with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> Mittie May,
+as with most of us, habit was stronger than all else. She knew her duty
+as of old. She did it. Accommodating her gait to the quickening measures
+of the music, she stretched her legs, passing out of a rolling gallop
+into a hard run. Yet one more thing, or rather the lack of it, perplexed
+her. Attendants should be bringing forth knockdown fence-panels for her
+to leap over and hoops of paper for her rider to leap through. Never
+mind; out of her imagination she would supply these missing details when
+the proper moment came. She'd hurdle the hurdles which weren't there.
+Meanwhile she knew what to do&mdash;around and around and around, right
+willingly, right blithely went Mittie May.</p>
+
+<p>And, with her, around and around went also Prof. Cephus Fringe, but not
+willingly and by no means blithely. He shed his high hat and with it all
+lingering essences of his dignity. One of Mittie May's feet squashed
+down on the high hat and it folded up like a condensed time-card. He
+lost the last vestige of his vanishing authority when he lost his
+saxophone. The Professor did not understate the case when he had
+intimated that he was somewhat out of practice at equestrian exercises.
+Stark terror convulsed his frame; instinct of self-preservation made him
+careless of the language he used. Indeed, a good deal of the language he
+used was bounced right out of him.</p>
+
+<p>Haply perhaps for him&mdash;and surely nothing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> else that happened was for
+him haply circumstanced&mdash;most of the naughty words reached no ears save
+those of Mittie May. There were sounds which drowned them&mdash;sounds which
+began with a fluttered outcry of alarm, which progressed to a great gasp
+of astonishment, which swelled and rippled into a titter, which grew
+into a vast rocking roar of unrestrained joyousness. Children shrieked,
+old women cackled, old men wheezed, adults guffawed, strong men rolled
+upon the earth in uncontrollable outbursts of thunderous mirth. As
+though stricken in all his members, Gumbo Rollins fell alongside his
+whirling Flyin' Jinny, but failed not, even in that excess of his
+mounting hysteria, to see to it that the steam-driven organ continued to
+grind out the one tune of its repertoire. The members of the choir
+forgot that their mission was to sing. They were too busy laughing to
+sing. And high and clear above the chorus of their glad outcry rose the
+soprano gurglings of Ophelia Stubblefield as she leaned for support up
+against somebody.</p>
+
+<p>You ask, Why did not Prof. Cephus Fringe fall off of Mittie May? He
+tried to. At first he sought only to stay on; then after a bit he sought
+to get off; he couldn't. The cause for his staying on was revealed when
+Mittie May took the first of those mental hazards of hers. As she rose
+grandly into space to clear the imagined top-rail of the imagined panel
+and with hind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> heels drawn well in under her, descended and continued on
+her circling way, a keen-eyed spectator, all bent double though he was,
+alongside the ring, and beating himself in the short ribs, caught a
+flashing glimpse of a strong but narrow strap which bound the rider's
+ankles to the saddle-girth and which, through the ordered march of the
+parade, had been safely hidden from view behind the ornament housings of
+the broad Spanish stirrups. Cump Glass had done his fiendish work well;
+those straps strained, but they held.</p>
+
+<p>"Name of Glory!" shouted out the observer. "He done tie hisse'f on! He
+done tie hisse'f&mdash;" Overcome he choked.</p>
+
+<p>With a great sweeping, swooping heave Mittie May made the last leap. And
+then at the precise second when the music stopped, the leathern thongs
+parted, and as the burden on her tumbled off and lay struggling in the
+dust, Mittie May swerved from the ring and, magically and
+instantaneously becoming once more Judge Priest's staidly respectable
+old buggy-mare, stood waiting for Jeff Poindexter to come and lead her
+out of all this shrieking, whooping jam of folks back to her stable. And
+Jeff came. He had been there all the time. It was against his supporting
+frame that Ophelia had slanted limply the while she laughed.</p>
+
+<p>Here the curtain is lowered for two seconds to denote the passage of two
+days. At its rise Jeff Poindexter and Gumbo Rollins are discovered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span>
+sitting side by side on the back step of a cabin in the Plunket's Hill
+neighborhood.</p>
+
+<p>"An' so they ain't nobody seen him sence?" It is Jeff who is speaking.</p>
+
+<p>"So they tells me," answers Gumbo. "Ain't nary soul seen hair nur hide
+of him frum the moment he riz out 'en that ring an' tuk his foot in his
+hand an' marviled further. Yas, suh, the pertracted meetin' will have to
+worry 'long the best way it kin 'thout its champion purty man. Well,
+sometimes it seems lak these things turns out fur the bes'. It suttin'ly
+would damage his lacinated feelin's still mo' ef he wus yere an' heared
+folks all over town callin' him the Jazzed-up Circus Rider."</p>
+
+<p>"I got a better name fur him 'en that," says Jeff, "Whiffletit."</p>
+
+<p>"W'ich?" asks Gumbo.</p>
+
+<p>Seemingly Jeff has not heard his friend's question. In an undertone, and
+as though seeking to recall the words of a given formula, he communes
+with himself, "Fust you baits him wid the cheese. An' 'en w'en he nibble
+the cheese, he git all swelled up an' 'en whilst he's flappin' helpless
+you leans over the side of the boat an jes' natchelly laffs him to
+death."</p>
+
+<p>"Whut-all is you mumblin'?" demands Gumbo Rollins, puzzled by these
+seemingly unrelated and irrelevant mouthings. "Is you crazy?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yas," concurs Jeff, "crazy lak the king of the weazels."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>PLENTIFUL VALLEY</h3>
+
+<p>"So this here head brakeman, the same being a large, coarse, hairy,
+rectangular person with a square-toed jaw and a square-jawed toe, he up
+and boots the two of us right off this here freight train."</p>
+
+<p>My old and revered friend, Scandalous Doolan, is much addicted to
+opening a narrative smack down the middle, as though it were an oyster,
+and then, by degrees, working both ways&mdash;toward the start and the
+finish. So it did not greatly surprise me that without preface,
+dedication, index or chapter-heading, he should suddenly introduce a
+head brakeman and a freight train into a conversation which until that
+moment had dealt with topics not in the least akin to these. Indeed,
+knowing him as I did, it seemed to me all the better reason why I should
+promptly incline the greedy ear, for over and above his eccentricities
+in the matter of launching a subject, Mr. Doolan is the only member of
+his calling I ever saw who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span> talks in real life as all the members of his
+calling are fondly presumed to talk, in story-books and on the stage.</p>
+
+<p>I harkened, therefore, saying nothing, and sure enough, having dealt for
+a brief passage of time with the incident of a certain enforced
+departure from a certain as yet unnamed common carrier, he presently
+retraced his verbal footsteps and began at the beginning.</p>
+
+<p>I quote in full:</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir, that's what he does. Refusing to listen to reason, this here
+head brakeman, which anybody could tell just by looking at him that he
+didn't have no heart a-tall and no soul, so as you could notice it, he
+just red lights us off into the peaceful and sun-lit bosom of the rooral
+New York State landscape. But before reaching the landscape it becomes
+necessary for us to slide down a grade of a perpendicular character, and
+in passing I am much pleased to note that the right-of-way is
+self-trimmed to match the prevalent style of scenery, with maybe a few
+cinders interspersed for decorations. There is one class of travelers
+which prefers a road-bed rock-ballasted, and these is those which goes
+on trains from place to place. There's another kind which likes a
+road-bed done in the matched or natural materials, and them's the kind
+which goes off trains from time to time. And us two, being for the
+moment in this class, we are much gratified by the circumstance.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span></p><p>"And we sits up and dusts ourselves off in a nonchalant manner while
+the little old choo-choo continues upon her way to Utica, Syracuse, and
+all points west, leaving me and the Sweet Caps Kid with all the bright
+world before us, and nothing behind us but the police force.</p>
+
+<p>"For some months previous to this, me and the Sweet Caps Kid has been
+sojourning in that favored metropolis which is bounded on one side by a
+loud Sound and on the other by a steep Bluff, and is doing her constant
+best at all times to live up to the surroundings. Needless to say, I
+refer to little Noo Yawk, the original haunt of the come-on and the
+native habitat of the sure thing, where the jays bite freely and the
+woods are full of fish. We have been doing very well there&mdash;very, very
+well, considering. What with working the nuts on the side streets right
+off Broadway and playing a little three-card monte down round Coney in
+the cool of the evening and once in a while selling a sturdy husbandman
+from over Jersey way a couple of admission tickets to Central Park, we
+have found no cause to complain at the business depression. It sure
+looks to us like confidence has been restored and any time she seems a
+little backward we take steps to restore her some ourselves. But all of
+a sudden, something seems to tell me that we oughter be moving.</p>
+
+<p>"You know how them mysterious premonitions comes to a feller. A little
+bird whispers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> to you, or you have a dream, or else you walk into the
+mitt-joint and hand a he-note to a dark complected lady wearing a red
+kimono and a brown mustache, and she takes a flash at your palm and
+seems to see a dark man coming with a warrant, followed by a trip up a
+great river to a large stone building like a castle. Or else
+Headquarters issues a general alarm, giving names, dates, personal
+description, size of reward and place where last seen. This time it's a
+general alarm. From what I could gather, a downcasted Issy Wisenheimer
+has been up to the front parlor beefing about his vanishing bankroll and
+his disappearing breast-pin. You wouldn't think a self-respecting
+citizen of a great Republic like this'n would carry on so over
+thirty-eight dollars in currency and a diamond so yeller it woulda been
+a topaz if it had been any yellower. But such was indeed the case. I
+gleans a little valuable information from a friendly barkeeper who's got
+a brother-in-law at the Central Office, and so is in position to get
+hold of much interesting and timely chit-chat before it becomes common
+gossip throughout the neighborhood. So then I takes the Sweet Caps Kid
+off to one side and I says to him, I says:</p>
+
+<p>"'Kiddo,' I says, 'listen: I've got a strong presentiment that we should
+oughter be going completely away from here. If we don't, the first thing
+you know some plain-clothes bull with fallen arches and his neck shaved
+'way up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> high in the back will be coming round asking us to go riding
+with him down town into the congested district, and if we declines the
+invitation, like as not he'll muss our clothes all up. Do you seem to
+get my general drift?' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Huh,' he says, 'you talk as if there'd been a squeal.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Squeal?' I says. 'Squeal? Son, you can take it from me there's been a
+regular season of grand opera. You and me are about to be accused of
+pernicious activity. What's more, they're liable to prove it. There's a
+movement on foot in influential quarters to provide us with board and
+lodgings at a place which I will not name to you in so many words on
+account of your weak heart. The work there,' I says, 'is regular, and
+the meals is served on time, and you're protected from the damp night
+air; but,' I says, 'the hours is too long and too confining to suit me.'
+I've knowed probably a thousand fellers in my time that sojourned up at
+Bird Center-on-the-Hudson anywhere from one to fifteen years on a
+stretch, and I never seen one of them yet but had some fault to find
+with the place.</p>
+
+<p>"'Whereas, on the other hand,' I says, 'all nature seems to beckon to
+us. Let's you and me steal forth under the billowy blue caliber of
+Heaven and make hay while the haymakers are good. Let us quit the city
+with its temptations and its snares and its pitfalls, 'specially the
+last named,' I says, 'and in some peaceful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> spot far, far away, let us
+teach Uncle Joshua Whitcomb that the hand is quicker than the eye, him
+paying cash down in advance for the lessons. Tubby sure, the pickings
+has been excellent here in the shadow of the skyscrapers, and it'll
+probably be harder sledding out amongst the disk-harrow boys. Everybody
+reads the papers these days, only the Rube believes what he reads and
+the city guy don't. I hate to go, but I ain't comfortable where I am.
+When my scalp begins to itch like it does now that's a sign of a close
+hair-cut coming on. I've got educated dandruff,' I says, 'and it ain't
+never fooled me yet. In short,' I says, 'I've been handed the office to
+skiddoo, and in such cases I believe in skiddooing. Let us create a
+vacancy in these parts <i>sine quinine</i>&mdash;which,' I says, 'is Latin,
+meaning it's a bitter dose but you gotta take it.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I can start right this minute,' says Sweet Caps; 'my tooth-brush is
+packed and all I've got to do is to put on my hat. S'pose we run up to a
+Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, which is a nice secluded spot,' he
+says, 'and catch the rattler.'</p>
+
+<p>"'How are you fixed for currency?' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Fixed?' he says. 'I ain't fixed a-tall. A'int you been carrying the
+firm's bank-roll? Say, ain't you?'</p>
+
+<p>"Well, right there I has to break the sad news to him. I does it as
+gentle as I could but still he seems peeved. Money has caused a lot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> of
+suffering in this world, they tell me, but I'm here to tell you the lack
+of it's been responsible for consider'ble many heartburnings too. Up
+until that minute I hadn't had the heart to tell the Sweet Caps Kid that
+our little joint partnership bank-roll is no longer with us. I'd been
+saving back them tidings for a more suitable moment, but now I has to
+tell him.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems that the night before, I had been tiger hunting in the jungle
+down at Honest John Donohue's. Of course I should have knowed better
+than to go up against a game run by anybody calling hisself Honest John.
+Them complimentary monakers always work with the reverse English. You
+are walking along and you see a gin-mill across the street with a sign
+over the door which says it's Smiling Pete's Place, and you cross over
+and look in, and behind the bar is an old guy who ain't heard anything
+that really pleased him since the Martinique disaster. He's standing
+there with his lip stuck out like a fender on a street car, and a bung
+starter handy, just hoping that somebody will come in and start to start
+something. That's Smiling Pete. As for this here Donohue, he's so
+crooked he can't eat nothing such as stick candy and cheese straws
+without he gets cramps in his stomach. He'd take the numbers off your
+house. That's why they call him Honest John. I know all this, good and
+well, but what's a feller going to do when his is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span> the only place in
+town that's open? You've got to play somewheres, ain't you? Somehow, I
+always was sort of drawed to faro.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you know the saying&mdash;one man's meat is another's pizen. He was my
+pizen and I certainly was his meat. So now, I ain't got nothing in my
+pockets except the linings.</p>
+
+<p>"I tells the Sweet Caps Kid just how it was&mdash;how right up to the very
+last minute I kept expecting the luck to turn and how even then I mighta
+got it all back if the game-keeper hadn't been so blamed unreasonable
+and mercenary. When my last chip is gone I holds up a finger for a
+marker and tells him I'll take another stack of fifty, all blues this
+time, but he only looks at me sort of chilly and distrustful and remarks
+in a kind of a bored way that there's nothing doing.</p>
+
+<p>"'That'll be all right,' I says to him. 'I'll see you to-morrow.'</p>
+
+<p>"'No, you wont,' he says, spiteful-like.</p>
+
+<p>"'Why,' I says, 'wont you be here to-morrow?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, yes,' he says, 'we'll be here to-morrow, but you wont.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Is that so?' I says, sarcastical. 'Coming in,' I says, 'I thought I
+seen the word <i>Welcome</i> on the doormat.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Going out,' he says, 'you'll notice that, spelled backward, it's a
+French word signifying <i>Mind Your Step</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>"And while I'm thinking up a proper <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span>comeback for that last remark of
+his'n somebody hands me my hat, and in less'n a minute, seems-like, I'm
+out in the street keeping company with myself.</p>
+
+<p>"I tells all this to the Sweet Caps Kid, but still he don't seem
+satisfied with my explanation. That's one drawback to the Kid's
+disposition&mdash;he gets all put out over the least little thing. So I says
+to him: 'Cheer up,' I says, 'things ain't so worse. Due to my being in
+right with the proper parties we gets this here advance tip, and we
+beats the barrier while this here fat Central Office bull, who thinks he
+wants us, is slipping his collar on over his head in the morning.
+Remember,' I says, 'we are going to the high grass where the little
+birdies sing and the flowers bloom. Providence,' I says, 'has an eye on
+every sparrow that falls, but nothing is said about the jays,' I says,
+'and we'll see if a few of them wont fall for our little cute tricks.'</p>
+
+<p>"Tubby sure, I'm speaking figurative. I aint really aiming for the deep
+woods proper. Only I've been in Noo Yawk long enough to git the Noo Yawk
+habit of thinking everybody beyond Rahway, New Jersey, is the Far West.
+I'm really figuring to land in one of them small junction points, such
+as Cleveland or Pittsburgh. And we would too, if it hadn'ta been for
+that there head brakeman.</p>
+
+<p>"Anyway, we moons round in a kind of an unostentatious way, with the Kid
+still acting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span> peevish and low in his mind, and me saying little things
+every now and then to chirk him up, until the shank of the evening
+arrives 'long about two <span class="smaller">A.M.</span> Then we slips over into the yards below
+Riverside Drive, taking due care not to wake up no sleeping policeman on
+the way. There we presently observes a freight train, which is giving
+signs of getting ready to make up its mind to go somewheres.</p>
+
+<p>"A freight train is like a woman. When you see a woman coming out of the
+front door and running back seven or eight times to get something she's
+forgot, you know that woman is on her way. And it's the same with
+freights; that's why they call 'em '<i>shes</i>'. Pretty soon this here
+freight quits vacilliating back and forth, and comes sliding down past
+where we're waiting.</p>
+
+<p>"'Here comes a side-door Pullman, with the side door open,' I says.
+'Let's get on and book a couple of lowers.'</p>
+
+<p>"'How do you know where she's going?' says the Kid, him being greatly
+addicted to idle questions.</p>
+
+<p>"'I don't,' I says; 'the point is that she's going. To-night she will be
+here but to-morrow she will be extensively elsewhere; and so,' I says,
+'will we. Let us therefore depart from these parts while the departing
+is good,' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"Which we done so, just like I'm telling you. And for some hours we
+trundles along very snug and comfortable, both of us being <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span>engrossed in
+sleep. When we wakes up it's another day, and the wicked city is far,
+far behind us, and we are running through a district which is entirely
+surrounded by scenery. If it hadn'ta been that something keeps reminding
+me I ai'nt had no breakfast I coulda been just as happy.</p>
+
+<p>"'Where'll we git off?' says Sweet Caps, setting up and rubbing his
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' I says, 'we takes our choice. Maybe Albany,' I says. 'The
+legislature is in special session there, and a couple of grafters more
+or less wont make no material difference&mdash;they'll probably take us for
+members. Maybe Rochester,' I says, 'which is a pleasant city, full of
+large and thriving industries. Maybe,' I says, 'if this here train don't
+take a notion to climb down off the track and go berry-picking, maybe
+Chicago. Of course,' I says, 'Chi ain't quite so polished as Noo Yawk.
+Chi has been called crude by some. When I think of Noo Yawk,' I says, 'I
+think of a peroxide chorus lady going home at three o'clock in the
+morning in two taxicabs, but when I think of Chicago I'm reminded of a
+soused hired girl, with red hair, on a rampage. But,' I says, 'what's
+the difference? Everywhere you go,' I says, 'there's always human life,
+and Chicago is reputed to be quite full of population and very probably
+we can find a few warm-hearted persons there who are more or less
+addicted to taking a chance.'</p>
+
+<p>"But you know how it is in these matters<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span>&mdash;you never can tell. Just as
+I'm concluding my remarks touching on our two largest cities, this here
+brakeman comes snooping along and intimates that we better be thinking
+about getting off. He's probably the biggest brakeman living. If he was
+any bigger than what he is, he'd be twins. We endeavors to argue him out
+of the notion but it seems like he's sort of set in his mind. Besides,
+being so much larger than either one of us or both of us put together,
+for that matter, he has the advantage in repartee. So he makes an issue
+of it and we sees our way clear to getting off without waiting for the
+locomotive to slow up or anything. After our departure, the train
+continues on its way thither, we remaining hither.</p>
+
+<p>"'My young friend,' I says when the dust has settled down, 'the question
+which you propounded about five minutes ago is now answered in the
+affirmative. This is where we get off&mdash;right here on this identical
+spot. I don't know the name of the place,' I says; 'maybe it's so far
+out in the suburbs that they ain't found time to get round to it yet and
+give it a name; but,' I says, 'there's one consolation. By glancing
+first up this way and then down that way you will observe that from here
+to the point where the rails meet down yonder is exactly the same
+distance that it is from here to where the rails meet up
+yonderways&mdash;proving,' I says, 'that we are in the exact center of the
+country. So let us be up and doing,'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> I says, 'specially doing. But the
+first consideration,' I say, 'is vittles.'</p>
+
+<p>"You know me well enough to know," interjected Mr. Doolan, interrupting
+the thread of his narrative for a moment and turning to me with a wave
+of his stout arm, "that I ain't no glutton. I can eat my grub when it's
+set before me or I can let it alone, only I never do. I never begin to
+think about the next meal till I'm almost through with the last one. And
+right now my mind seems to dwell on breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, anyway we arises up and goes away from there, walking in a
+general direction, and before long we comes to a sign which says we are
+now approaching the incorporated village of Plentiful Valley&mdash;Autos
+Reduce Speed to Eight Miles an Hour&mdash;No Tramps Allowed. I kind of
+favors the sound of that name&mdash;Plentiful Valley. And as I remarks to the
+Sweet Caps Kid, 'We ain't no autos and we ain't no tramps but merely two
+professional men, looking for a chance to practise our profession.'</p>
+
+<p>"This here is the first valley I ever see in the course of a long and
+more or less polka-dotted career that it is all up-hill and never no
+downhill. Be that as it may, we rambles on until it must be going on
+towards nine forty-five o'clock, and comes to a neat bungalow on a green
+slope inside of a high white fence. There's a venerable party setting on
+the front porch, in his shirt-sleeves. He looks beneficent and well fed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span></p><p>"'Pull down your vest, son-boy,' I says to Sweet Caps, 'and please
+remember not to drink your coffee out of the sasser. I have a growing
+conviction,' I says, 'that we are about to partake of refreshment.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Hadn't we better sell this ancient guy a few Bermuda oats, or
+something to start off with?' says he.</p>
+
+<p>"'Not until after we have et,' I says; business before pleasure. And
+anyway,' I says, 'I works best on a full stomach. Follow your dear
+uncle,' I says, 'and don't do nothing till you hear from me.'</p>
+
+<p>"With that I opens the gate and we meanders up a neat gravel path. As we
+draws near, the venerable party takes his feet down off the railings.</p>
+
+<p>"'Come in,' he says cordially, 'come right in and rest your face and
+hands. You're out nice and early.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Suffer us,' I says, 'to introduce ourselves. We are a couple of
+prominent tourist-pedestrians walking from Noo Yawk to Portland, Oregon,
+on a bet. This,' I says, pointing to Sweet Caps, 'is Young Twinkletoes,
+and I am commonly knowed as old King Lightfoot the First. By an
+unfortunate coincidence,' I says, 'we got separated at an early hour
+from our provision wagon, as a result of which we have omitted breakfast
+and feel the omission severely. If we might impose,' I says, 'upon your
+good nature to the extent of&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span></p><p>"'Don't mention it,' he says; 'take two or three chairs and set down,
+and we'll talk it over. To tell you the truth,' he says, 'I was jest
+setting here wishing somebody would come along and visit with me a
+spell. I'm keeping bachelor's hall,' he says, 'and raising chickens on
+the side, and sometimes I get a mite lonely. I guess maybe the Chink
+might scare up something, although,' he says, 'to tell you the truth
+there ain't hardly a bite in the house, except a couple of milk-fed
+broilers and some fresh tomattuses right out of the garden and a few hot
+biscuits and possibly some razzberries with cream; for I'm a simple
+feeder,' he says, 'and a very little satisfies me.'</p>
+
+<p>"He pokes his head inside the door and yells to a Jap to put two more
+places at the table. So we reclines and indulges in edifying
+conversation upon the current topics of the day and, very shortly,
+nourishing smells begin for to percolate forth from within, causing me
+to water at the mouth until I has all the outward symptoms of being an
+ebb-tide. But this here pernicious Sweet Caps Kid, he can't let well
+enough alone. Observing copious signs of affluence upon every side he
+gets ambitious and would abuse the sacred right of hospitality about
+half to three-quarters of an hour too soon. Out of the tail of my eye I
+sees him reaching in his pocket for the educated pasteboards and I gives
+him the high sign to soft pedal, but he don't mind me. Out he comes with
+'em.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span></p><p>"'A little harmless game of cards,' he says, addressing the elderly
+guy, 'entitled,' he says, 'California euchre. I have here, you will
+observe, two jacks and an ace&mdash;the noble ace of spades. I riffle and
+shuffle and drop 'em in a row, the trick being to pick out the ace. Now,
+then,' goes on this besetted Sweet Caps, with a winning smile, 'just to
+while away the time before breakfast, s'pose you make a small bet with
+me regarding the present whereabouts of said ace.'</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"The party with the whiskers gets up; and now, when he speaks I sees
+that in spite of him wearing a brush arbor, he aint no real rube.</p>
+
+<p>"'To think,' he says, more in sorrow than in anger, 'to think that I
+should live to see this day! To think that me, who helped Canady Bill
+sell the first gold brick that ever was molded in this country, should
+in my declining years have a couple of wooden-fingered amatoors come
+along and try to slip me the oldest graft in the known world! It is too
+much,' he says, 'it is too much too much. You lower a noble pursuit,' he
+says, 'and I must respectfully but firmly request you to be on your way.
+I'll try to forgive you,' he says, 'but at this moment your mere
+presence offends me. On your way out,' he says, 'kindly latch the gate
+behind you&mdash;the chickens might stray off. Chickens,' he says, 'is not
+exciting for steady company,' he says, 'but in comparison with some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span>
+humans I've met lately, chickens is absolutely gifted intellectually.</p>
+
+<p>"'Furthermore,' he says, 'I would offer you a word of advice, although
+you don't really deserve it. Beware,' he says, 'of the constable in the
+village beyond. You'll recognize him by his whiskers,' he says.
+'Alongside of him, I look like an onion in the face. Ten years ago,' he
+says, 'that constable swore a solemn oath not never to shave until he'd
+locked up a thousand bums, and,' he says, 'he's now on his last lap.
+Keep moving,' he says, 'till you feel like stopping, and then don't
+stop.'</p>
+
+<p>"Them edifying smells has made me desperate. Besides, not counting the
+Chink, who don't count we outnumbers him two to one.</p>
+
+<p>"'We don't go,' I says, 'until we gets a bite.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh! I'll see that you get a bite,' he says. 'Sato,' he says, calling
+off-stage, 'kindly unchain Ophelia and Ralph Waldo. Ophelia,' he says,
+turning to us, 'is a lady Great Dane, standing four feet high at the
+shoulder and very morose in disposition. But Ralph Waldo is a
+crossbreed&mdash;part Boston bull and part snapping turtle. Sometimes I think
+they don't neither one of them care much for strangers. Here they come
+now! Sick 'em, pups!'</p>
+
+<p>"Sweet Caps starts first but I beats him to the gate by half a length,
+Ophelia and Ralph Waldo finishing third and fourth, respectively. We
+fades away down the big road, and the last thing we sees as we turns a
+wistful farewell look over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> our shoulders is them two man-eaters raging
+back and forth inside the fence trying to gnaw down the palings, and the
+old guy standing on the steps laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"So we pikes along, me frequently reproaching Sweet Caps for his
+precipitancy in spilling the beans. We passes through the village of
+Plentiful Valley without stopping and walks on and on and on some more,
+until we observes a large, prosperous-looking building of red brick,
+like a summer hotel with a lawn in front and a high stone wall in front
+of that. A large number of persons of both sexes, but mainly females, is
+wandering about over the front yard dressed in peculiar styles. Leaning
+over the gates is a thickset man gazing with repugnance upon a lettuce
+leaf which he is holding in his right hand. He sees us and his face
+lights up some, but not much.</p>
+
+<p>"'What ho, comrades!' he says; 'what's the latest and newest in the
+great world beyond?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Mister,' I says, disregarding these pleasantries, 'how's the prospects
+for a pair of footsore travelers to get a free snack of vittles here?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Poor,' he says, 'very poor. Even the pay-patients, one or two of whom
+I am which, don't get anything to eat to speak of. The diet here,' says,
+'is exclusively vegeterrible. You wouldn't scarcely believe it,' he
+says, 'but we're paying out good money for this. Some of us is here to
+get cured of what the docters think we've got, and some of us is here,'
+he says, 'because as long as we stay here they ain't so liable to lock
+us up in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span> a regular asylum. Yes,' he says, pensively, 'we've got all
+kinds here. That lady yonder,' he says, pointing to a large female who's
+dressed all in white like a week's washing and ain't got no shoes on,
+'she's getting back to nature. She walks around in the dew barefooted.
+It takes quite a lot of dew,' he says. 'And that fat one just beyond her
+believes in reincarnation.'</p>
+
+<p>"'You don't say!' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Yes,' he says, 'I do. She wont eat potatoes not under no
+circumstances, because she thinks that in her last previous existence
+she was a potato herself.'</p>
+
+<p>"I takes a squint at the lady. She has a kind of a round face with two
+or three chins that she don't actually need, and little knobby features.</p>
+
+<p>"'Well,' I says, 'if I'm any judge, she ain't entirely recovered yet.
+Might I ask,' I says, 'what is your particular delusion? Are you a
+striped cabbage worm or a pet white rabbit?'</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinking about that lettuce leaf which he held in his mitt.</p>
+
+<p>"'Not exactly,' he says, 'I was such a good liver that I developed a bad
+one and so I paid a specialist eighty dollars to send me here. At this
+writing,' he says, 'the beasts of the field have but little on me. We
+both browse, but they've got cuds to chew on afterwards. It's
+sickening,' he says in tones of the uttermost conviction. 'Do you know
+what we had for breakfast this morning? Nuts,' he says, 'mostly nuts,
+which it certainly was rank cannibalism on the part of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span> many of those
+present to partake thereof,' he says. 'This here frayed foliage which I
+hold in my hand,' he says, 'is popularly known as the mid-forenoon
+refreshment. It's got imitation salad dressing on it to make it more
+tasty. Later on there'll be more of the same, but the big doings will be
+pulled off at dinner to-night. You just oughter see us at dinner,' he
+says with a bitter laugh. 'There'll be a mess of lovely boiled carrots,'
+he says, 'and some kind of chopped fodder, and if we're all real good
+and don't spill things on our bibs or make spots on the tablecloth, why,
+for dessert we'll each have a nice dried prune. I shudder to think,' he
+says, 'what I could do right this minute to a large double sirloin
+cooked with onions <i>Desdemona</i> style, which is to say, smothered.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Mister,' I says, 'I never thought I'd fall so low as to be a
+vegeterrier, but necessity,' I says, 'is the mother of vinegar. Could
+you please, sir, spare us a couple of bites out of that there ensilage
+of yourn&mdash;one large bite for me and one small bite for my young friend
+there to keep what little life we have until the coming of the corned
+beef and cabbage?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Fellow sufferer,' he says, 'listen here to me. I've got a dear old
+white-haired grandmother, which she was seventy-four her last birthday
+and has always been a life-long member of the First Baptist Church. I
+love my dear old grandmother, but if she was standing right here now and
+asked me for a nibble off my mid-day <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span>refreshment I'd tell her to go
+find a truck patch of her own. Yes sir, I'd turn her down cold; because
+if I don't eat enough to keep me alive to get out of here when the times
+comes I wont be alive to get out of here when the time comes. Anywhere
+else I could love you like a brother,' he says, 'and divide my last bite
+with you, but not here,' he says, 'not here! Do you get me?' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Sir,' I says, 'I get you. Take care of yourself and don't get
+foundered on the green truck,' I says. 'A bran mash now and then and a
+wisp of cured timothy hay about once in so long ought to keep off the
+grass colic,' I says. 'Come on, little playmate,' I says to Sweet Caps,
+'let us meander further into this here vale of plenty of everything
+except something to eat. Which, by rights,' I says, 'its real name
+oughter be Hungry Hollow.'</p>
+
+<p>"So we meanders some more miles and pretty soon I'm that empty that I
+couldn't be no emptier than I am without a surgical operation. My voice
+gets weak, and objects dance before my eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"After while they quits dancing, and I realizes that I'm bowing low
+before probably the boniest lady that ever lived. A gold watch has got
+more extra flesh on it than this lady has on her. She is looking out of
+the front window of a small cottage and her expression verges on the
+disapproving. As nearly as I can figure out she disapproves of
+everything in general, and a large number of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> things in particular. And
+I judges that if there is any two things in the world which she
+disapproves of more than any other two things, those two things is me
+and the Sweet Caps Kid.</p>
+
+<p>"I removes my lid and starts to speak, but she merely waves her arm in a
+majestic manner, meaning, if I know anything about the sign language,
+'Exit in case of dog.' So we exits without even passing the time of the
+day with her and continues upon our way through the bright sunshine. The
+thermometer now registers at least ninety-eight in the shade, but then
+of course we don't have to stay in the shade, and that's some
+consolation.</p>
+
+<p>"The next female land-owner we encounters lives away down in the woods.
+She's plump and motherly-looking, with gold bows on her spec's. She is
+out in her front garden picking pansies and potato bugs and other flora
+and fauna common to the soil. She looks up as the gate-latch clicks, and
+beholds me on the point of entering.</p>
+
+<p>"'Madam,' I says, 'pardon this here intrusion but in us you behold two
+weary travelers carrying no script and no purse. Might I ask you what
+the chances are of us getting a square meal before we perish?'</p>
+
+<p>"'You might,' she says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Might what?' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Might ask me,' she says,'but I warn you in advance, that I ain't very
+good at conundrums. I'm a lone widder woman,' she says, 'and I've<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span> got
+something to do,' she says, 'besides standing out here in the hot sun
+answering riddles for perfect strangers,' she says. 'So go ahead,' she
+says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Madam,' I says pretty severe, 'don't trifle with me. I'm a desperate
+man, and my friend here is even desperater than what I am. Remember you
+are alone, and at our mercy and&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh,' she says, with a sweet smile, 'I ain't exactly alone. There's
+Tige,' she says.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see no Tige,' I says, glancing around hurriedly.</p>
+
+<p>"'That ain't his fault,' she says. 'I'll call him,' she says, looking
+like it wont be no trouble whatsoever to show goods.</p>
+
+<p>"But we don't wait. 'Sweet Caps,' I says to him as we hikes round the
+first turn in the road, 'this district ain't making no pronounced hit
+with me. Every time you ast 'em for bread they give you a dog. The next
+time,' I says,' anybody offers me a canine, I'm going to take him,' I
+says. 'If he can eat me any faster than I can eat him,' I says, 'he'll
+have to work fast. And,' I says, 'if I should meet a nice little clean
+boy with fat legs&mdash;Heaven help him!'</p>
+
+<p>"And just as I'm speaking them words we comes to a lovely glade in the
+woods and stops with our mouths ajar and our eyes bulged out like push
+buttons. 'Do I sleep,' I says to myself, 'or am I just plain delirious?'</p>
+
+<p>"For right there, out in the middle of the woods, is a table with a
+white cloth on it, and it's all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span> covered over with the most lucivicious
+looking viands you ever see in your life, including a ham and a couple
+of chickens and a pie and some cool-looking bottles with long necks on
+'em and gilt-foil crowns upon their regal heads. And a couple of
+flunkies in long-tailed coats and knee breeches and white wigs are
+mooning round, fixing things up ship shape. And just then a tall lady
+comes sauntering out of the bushes, and she strolls up close and the
+flunkies bow and fall back and she says something about everything being
+now ready for Lady Gwyndolin's garden party and departs the same way she
+came. And the second she's out of sight, me and Sweet Caps can't hold in
+no longer. We busts through the roadside thicket and tear acrost that
+open place, licketty-split. It seems too good to be true. And it is.
+When we gets up close we realizes the horrible truth.</p>
+
+<p>"The ham is wood and the chickens is pasteboard and the pie is a prop
+pie and the bottles aint got nothing in 'em but the corks. As we pauses,
+stupefied with disappointment, a cheerful voice calls out: 'That's the
+ticket! Hold the spot and register grief&mdash;we can work the scene in and
+it'll be a knock-out!'</p>
+
+<p>"And right over yonder at the other side of the clearing stands a guy in
+a checked suit grinding the handle of a moving-picture machine. We has
+inadvertently busted right into the drammer. So we kicks over his table
+and departs on the run, with a whole troupe of them cheap fillum<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span>
+troopers chasing after us, calling hard names and throwing sticks and
+rocks and things.</p>
+
+<p>"After while, by superior footwork, we loses 'em and resumes our
+journey. Well, unless you've got a morbid mind you wont be interested in
+hearing about our continued sufferings. I will merely state that by the
+time five o'clock comes we have traveled upwards of nine hundred miles,
+running sometimes but mostly walking, and my feet is so full of water
+blisters I've got riparian rights. Nearly everything has happened to us
+except something to eat. So we comes to the edge of a green field
+alongside the road and I falls in a heap, and Sweet Caps he falls in
+another heap alongside of me, making two heaps in all.</p>
+
+<p>"'Kiddo,' I says, 'let us recline here and enjoy the beauties of
+Nature,' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Dern the beauties of Nature!' says Sweet Caps. 'I've had enough Nature
+since this morning to last me eleven thousand years. Nature,' he says,
+'has been overdone, anyway.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Ain't you got no soul?' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh yes,' he says, 'I've got a soul, but the trouble is,' he says,
+'I've got a lot of other vital organs, too. When I ponder,' he says,
+'and remember how many times I've got up from the table and gone away
+leaving bones and potato peels and clam shells and lobster claws on the
+plate&mdash;when I think,' he says, 'of them old care-free, prodigal days, I
+could bust right out crying.'</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span></p><p>"'Sh-h!' I says, 'food has gone out of fashion&mdash;the best people ain't
+eating any more. Put your mind on something else,' I says. 'Consider the
+setting sun,' I says, 'a-sinking in the golden west. Gaze yonder,' I
+says, 'upon that great yellow orb with all them fleecy white clouds
+banked up behind it.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I'm gazing,' he says. 'It looks something like a aig fried on one
+side. That's the way I always uster take mine,' he says, 'before I quit
+eating&mdash;fried with the sunny side up.'</p>
+
+<p>"I changed the subject.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ain't it a remarkable fact,' I says, 'how this district is addicted to
+dogs? Look at that there little stray pup, yonder,' I says, 'jumping up
+and down in the wild mustard, making himself all warm and panty. That's
+an edifying sight,' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'You bet,' says the Sweet Caps Kid, kind of dreamy, 'it's a great
+combination,' he says, '&mdash;hot dog with fresh mustard. That's the way we
+got 'em at Coney,' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Sweet Caps,' I says, 'you are breaking my heart. Desist,' I says. 'I
+ask you to desist. If you don't desist,' I says, 'I'm going to tear your
+head off by the roots and after that I'll probably get right rough with
+you. Fellow me,' I says, 'and don't speak another word of no description
+whatsoever. I've got a plan,' I says, 'and if it don't work I'll know
+them calamity howlers is right and I wont vote Democratic never
+again&mdash;not,' I says, 'if I have to vote for Bryan!'</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span></p><p>"He trails along behind me, and his head is hanging low and he mutters
+to hisself. Injun file we retraces our weary footsteps until we comes
+once more to the village of Plentiful Valley. We goes along Main
+Street&mdash;I know it's Main Street because it's the only street there
+is&mdash;until we comes to a small brick building which you could tell by the
+bars at the windows that it was either the local bank or the calaboose.
+On the steps of this here establishment stands a party almost entirely
+concealed in whiskers. But on his breast I sees a German silver badge
+gleaming like a full moon seen through thick brush.</p>
+
+<p>"'The town constable, I believe?' I says to him.</p>
+
+<p>"'The same,' he says. 'What can I do for for you?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Lock us up,' I says, '&mdash;him and me both. We're tramps,' I says,
+'vagrants, derilicks wandering to and fro,' I says, 'like raging lions
+seeking whatsoever we might devour&mdash;and not,' I says, 'having no luck.
+We are dangerous characters,' I says, 'and it's a shame to leave us at
+large. Lock us up,' I says, 'and feed us.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Nothing doing,' he says. 'Try the next town&mdash;it's only nine miles and
+a good hard road all the way.'</p>
+
+<p>"'I thought,' I says, 'that you took a hidebound oath never to shave
+until you'd locked up a thousand tramps.'</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span></p><p>"'Yep, he says, 'that's so; but you're a little late. I pinched him
+about an hour ago.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Pinched who?' I says.</p>
+
+<p>"'The thousandth one,' he says. 'Early to-morrow morning,' he says, 'I'm
+going to get sealed bids and estimates on a clean shave. But first,' he
+says, 'in celebration of a historic occasion, I'm giving a little supper
+to-night to the regular boarders in the jail. I guess you'll have to
+excuse me&mdash;seems to me like I smell the turkey dressing scorching.'</p>
+
+<p>"And with that he goes inside and locks the door behind him, and don't
+pay no attention to us beating on the bars, except to open an upstairs
+window and throw a bucket of water at us.</p>
+
+<p>"That's the last straw. My legs gives way, both at once, in opposite
+directions. Sweet Caps he drags me across the street and props me up
+against a building, and as he fans me with his hat I speaks to him very
+soft and faint and low.</p>
+
+<p>"'Sweep Caps,' I says, 'I'm through. Leave me,' I says, 'and make for
+civilization. And,' I says, 'if you live to get there, come back
+sometime and collect my mortal remains and bury 'em,' I says, 'in some
+quiet, peaceful spot. No,' I says, 'don't do that neither! Bury me,' I
+says, 'in a Chinee cemetary. The Chinees,' I says, 'puts vittles on the
+graves of their dear departeds, instead of flowers. Maybe,' I says, 'my
+ghost will walk at night,' I says, 'and eat chop suey.'</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span></p><p>"'Wait,' he says, 'don't go yet. Look yonder,' he says, pointing up
+Main Street on the other side. 'Read that sign,' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"I looks and reads, and it says on a front window; '<i>Undertaking and
+Emba'ming In All Its Branches.</i>'</p>
+
+<p>"I rallies a little. 'Son boy,' I says, 'you certainly are one
+thoughtful little guy&mdash;but can't you take a joke? I talk about passing
+away, and before I get the words out of my pore exhausted vacant frame
+you begin to pick out the fun'el director. What's your rush?' I says.
+'Can't you wait for the remains?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Keep ca'm,' he says, 'and look again. Your first look wasn't a
+success. I don't mean the undertaker's,' he says; 'I mean the place next
+door beyond. It's a delicatessen dump,' he says, 'containing cold grub
+all ready to be et without tools,' he says. 'And what's more,' he says,
+'the worthy delicatessener is engaged at this present moment in locking
+up and going away from here. In about a half an hour,' he says, 'he'll
+be setting in his happy German-American home picking his teeth after
+supper, and reading comic jokes to his little son August out of the
+<i>Fleagetty Bladder</i>. And shortly thereafter,' he says, 'what'll you and
+me be doing? We'll be there, in that vittles emporium, in the midst of
+plenty,' he says, 'filling our midsts with plenty of plenty. That's what
+we'll be doing,' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Sweet Caps,' I says, reviving slightly, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span>remember who we are? Remember
+the profession which we adorn? Would you,' I says, 'sink to burglary?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Scandalous,' he says, with feeling, 'I'm so hollow I could sink about
+three feet without touching nothing whatsoever. Death before dishonor,
+but not death by quick starvation. Are you with me,' he says, 'or ain't
+you?'</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what could you say to an argument like that? Nothing, not a
+syllable. So eventually night ensoos. And purty soon the little stars
+come softly out and at the same juncture me and the Sweet Caps Kid goes
+in. We goes into an alley behind that row of shops and after feeling
+about in the darkness for quite a spell and falling over a couple of
+fences and a lurking wheelbarrow and one thing and another, we finds a
+back window with a weak latch on it and we pries it open and we crawls
+in.</p>
+
+<p>"Only, just as we gits inside all nice and snug, Sweet Caps he has to go
+and turn over a big long box that's standing up on end, and down it
+comes <i>ker-blim</i>! making a most hideous loud noise.</p>
+
+<p>"Then we hears somebody upstairs run across the floor over our heads and
+hears 'em pile down the steps, which is built on the outside of the
+building to save building 'em on the inside of the building, and in
+about a half a minute a fire bell or some similar appliance down the
+street a piece begins to ring its head off.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span></p><p>"'The stuff's off,' says Sweet Caps to me in a deep, skeered whisper.
+'Let's beat it.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Nix,' I says. 'You fasten that there window! I'm too weak to run now,
+and if they'll give me about five minutes among the vittles I'll be too
+full to run. Either way,' I says, 'it's pinch, and,' I says, 'we'd
+better face it on a full stomach, than an empty one.'</p>
+
+<p>"'But they'll have the goods on us,' he says.</p>
+
+<p>"'Son,' I says, 'if they'll only hang back a little we'll have the goods
+in us. They won't have no trouble proving the corpus delicatessen,' I
+says, '&mdash;not if they bring a stomach pump along. Bar that window,' I
+says, 'and let joy be unconfined.'</p>
+
+<p>"So he fastens her up from the inside, and while we hears the aroused
+and infuriated populace surrounding the place and getting ready to begin
+to think about making up their minds to advance en massy, I pulls down
+the front shades and strikes a match and lights up a coal-oil lamp and
+reaches round for something suitable to take the first raw edge off my
+appetite&mdash;such as a couple of hams.</p>
+
+<p>"Then right off I sees where we has made a fatal mistake, and my heart
+dies within me and I jest plum collapses and folds up inside of myself
+like a concertina. And that explains," he concluded, "why you ain't seen
+me for going on the last eighteen months."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"Did they give you eighteen months for breaking into the delicatessen
+shop?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span></p><p>Mr. Doolan fetched a long, deep, mournful sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said simply, "they gave us eighteen months for breaking into
+the undertaker's next door."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>A TALE OF WET DAYS</h3>
+
+<p>In the days before the hydrant-headed specter of Prohibition reared its
+head in the Sunny South I had this tale from a true Kentucky gentleman.
+As he gave it to me, so, reader, do I give it to you:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, suh, to this good day Colonel Bud Crittenden ain't never fergot
+that time he made the mistake about Stony Buggs and the Bear Grass
+County man. It learnt him a lesson, though. It learnt him that the
+deceivingest pusson on earth, when it comes to seeping up licker, is a
+little feller with his eyes fur apart and one of these here excitable
+Adamses' apples.</p>
+
+<p>"Speaking about it afterwards to a passel of boys over in the swopping
+ring, he said the experience, while dissapinting at the time, was worth
+a right smart to him subsequent. Previous to that time he said he was in
+error regarding the amount of licker a little man, with them
+peculiarities of features I just mentioned, could chamber at one
+setting.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span></p><p>"Said he knowed some of the derndest, keenest gunfighters in the state
+was little men and he'd always acknowledged that spare-built,
+narrer-waisted men made the best hands driving trotting hawses; but he
+didn't know, not until then, that they was so gifted in the matter of
+putting away sweet'ning drams.</p>
+
+<p>"It happened the time we all was up at Frankfort nomernating a Clerk of
+the Court of Appeals. There'd been a deadlock for nigh on to three days.
+The up-state delegates was all solid for old General Marcellus Brutus
+Hightower of Limestone County, and our fellers to a man was pledged to
+Major Zach Taylor Simms, of Pennroyal.</p>
+
+<p>"Ballot after ballot it stood the same way&mdash;fifty-three to fifty-three.
+Then on the mawning of the third day one of their deligates from the
+mountains was called home suddenly by a message saying a
+misunderstanding had come up with a neighboring fambly and two of his
+boys was shot up consid'rable.</p>
+
+<p>"The convention had voted the first day not to recognize no proxies for
+absentees, and so, having one vote the advantage, we was beginning to
+feel like winners, when just then Breck Calloway from McCorkin County,
+he up and taken the cramps the worst way. For a spell it shore looked
+like he was going to be cholera-morbussed. Breck started in for luxuries
+in the line of vittles soon as he hit town, and between votes he kept
+filling hisself up on fried<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span> catfeesh and red bananas and pickled pigs'
+feet and gum drops and cove eyesters and cocoanut out of the shell and
+ice cream and sardines&mdash;greasy minners, Breck called 'em&mdash;and aig-kisses
+and a whole lot of them kind of knick-knacks.</p>
+
+<p>"That mout not a-bothered him so much if he hadn't switched from
+straight licker and taken on consid'able many drinks of this here
+new-fangled stuff called creamy de mint&mdash;green stuff like what you see
+in a big bottle in a drug store winder with a light behind it. By the
+middle of the third day Breck was trying to walk on his hands. He had a
+figger like one of them Mystic Mazes. 'Course, all kinked up that way,
+he warn't fitten for a deligate, and Colonel Bud Crittenden had to ship
+him home.</p>
+
+<p>"I heard tell afterwards that going back on the steam cars the conductor
+told Breck he didn't care if he was a contortionist, he couldn't
+practise none of his didoes on that there train.</p>
+
+<p>"So there we was, each side shy one vote and still tied&mdash;52 and 52. And
+at dinner time the convention taken a recess until ha'f past three in
+the evening with the understanding that we'd vote again at foah o'clock.</p>
+
+<p>"Jest as soon as our fellers had got a drink or two and a snack to eat,
+Colonel Bud Crittenden, he called a caucus, him being not only manager
+of Major Zach Taylor Simms' campaign but likewise chairman of the
+district committee. Colonel Bud rapped for order and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span> made a speech. He
+said the paramountest issue was how to nominate Major Simms on that
+there next ballot. Said they'd done trying buying off members of the
+opposition and other regular methods without no success whatsomever.
+Said the Chair would now be glad to hear suggestions from any gen'elman
+present.</p>
+
+<p>"So Morg Holladay he got up and moved the Chair to appoint a committee
+of one or more to shoot up some deligate or, if desired, deligates, in
+the other crowd. But the Colonel said no. We wuz in a strange town, fur
+removed from the time-honored institutions of home, and the police mout
+be hosstile. Customs differed in different towns. Whil'st shooting up of
+a man for purely political purposes mout be accepted as necessary and
+proper in one place; then agin it mout lead to trouble, sich as
+lawsuits, in another. And so on.</p>
+
+<p>"Morg he got up again and said how he recognized the wisdom of the
+Chair's remarks. Then he moved to amend his motion by substituting the
+word 'kidnapping' for 'shooting up.' Said as a general proposition he
+favored shooting up, not being familiar with kidnapping; in fact not
+knowing none of the rules, but was willing to try kidnapping as an
+experiment. But Colonel Bud 'peared to be even more dead set, ef
+possible, agin kidnapping than agin shooting. He advanced the thought
+that shooting was recognized as necessary under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span> proper conditions and
+safeguards, ever'where, but that kidnapping was looked on as bordering
+on the criminal even in the case of a child. How much more so, then, in
+the case of a growed-up adult man and Dimocrat?</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody couldn't think of nothing else then, but Colonel Bud 'lowed we
+was bleeged to do something. There warn't no telling, he said, when
+another one of our deligates would get to craving dainties and
+gormandize hisself with a lot of them fancy vittles the same as Breck
+Calloway had done, and go home all quiled up like a blue racer in a
+pa'tridge nest. Finally Colonel Bud he said he had a suggestion to
+advance his ownse'f, and we all set up and taken notice, knowing there
+wasn't no astuter political leader in the State and maybe none so
+astuted.</p>
+
+<p>"Colonel Bud he said he was shamed to admit that the scheme hadn't
+suggested itself to him or ary other gen'elman present before now&mdash;it
+was so plum doggone simple.</p>
+
+<p>"'We got mighty nigh three hours yet,' says Colonel Bud, 'and enduring
+of that time all we got to do is to get one of them Hightower deligates
+deef, dumb and blind drunk&mdash;so drunk he won't never git back to answer
+roll-call; and if he does, won't know his own name if he heered it. We
+will simply appint a committee of one, composed of some gen'elman from
+amongst our midst of acknowledged capacity and experience, to accomplish
+this here undertaking, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span>likewise also at the same time we will pick
+out some accessible deligate in the opposition and commission said
+committee of one to put said opposition deligate out of commission by
+means of social conversation and licker between the present time and the
+hour of 4 <span class="smaller">P.M.</span> By so doing victory will perch on our banners, and there
+can't be no claim of underhand work or fraud from the other side. It'll
+all be according to the ethics made and purvided in such emergencies.'</p>
+
+<p>"Right off everybody seen Colonel Bud had the right idee, and he put the
+suggestion in the form of a motion and it carried unanimous. Colonel Bud
+stated that it now devolved upon the caucus to name the committee of
+one. And of course we all said that Colonel Bud was the very man for the
+place hisse'f; there wasn't none of us qualified like him for sich a
+job. Everybody was bound to admit that. But Colonel Bud said much as he
+appreciated the honor and high value his colleagues put on his humble
+abilities, he must, purforce, sacrifice pussonal ambition in the
+intrusts of his esteemed friend, Major Zach Taylor Simms. As manager of
+the campaign he must remain right there on the ground to see which way
+the cat was going to jump&mdash;and be ready to jump with her. So, if the
+caucus would kindly indulge him for one moment moah he would nominate
+for the post of honor and responsibility as noble a Dimocrat, as true a
+Kintuckian and as chivalrous a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span>gen'elman as ever wore hair. And with
+all the requisited qualifications and gifts, too.</p>
+
+<p>"Needless to state he referred to that sterling leader of Fulman
+County's faithful cohorts, Captain Stonewall Jackson Bugg, Esquire.</p>
+
+<p>"And so everybody voted for Stony. We knowed of course that while Stony
+Bugg had both talents and education he warn't no sich genius as Colonel
+Bud Crittenden when it came to storing away licker; yet so far as the
+record showed he never had been waterlooed by anybody. And we couldn't
+ask no more than that. Stony was all hoped up and proud at being
+selected.</p>
+
+<p>"Then there came up the question of picking out the party of the second
+part, as Colonel Bud said he would call him for short. Colonel Bud said
+he felt the proper object for treatment, beyond the peradventure of a
+doubt, was that there Mr. Wash Burnett, of Bear Grass.</p>
+
+<p>"He believed the caucus would ricolect this here Burnett gen'elman
+referred to by the Chair. And when he described him we all done so,
+owing to his onusual appearance. He was a little teeny feller, rising of
+five feet tall, with a cough that unbuttoned his vest about every three
+minutes. He had eyes 'way round on the side of his head like a
+grasshopper and the blamest, busiest, biggest, scariest, nervousest
+Adamses' apple I ever see. It 'peared like it tried to beat his brains
+out every time he taken a swaller of licker&mdash;or even water.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span></p><p>"Right there old Squire Buck Throckmorton objected to the selection of
+Mr. Wash Burnett. Near as I can recall here's what Squire says:</p>
+
+<p>"'You all air suttenly fixing to make a monstrous big mistake. I've give
+a heap of study in my time to this question of licker drams. I have
+observed that when you combine in a gen'elman them two features jest
+mentioned&mdash;a Adamses' apple that's always running up and down like a cat
+squirrel on a snag, and eyes away 'round yonder so's he can see both
+ways at once without moving his head&mdash;you've got a gen'elman that's
+specially created to store away licker.</p>
+
+<p>"'I don't care ef your Bear Grass County man is so shortwaisted he can
+use his hip pockets for year-muffs in the winter time. Concede, if you
+will, that every time he coughs it shakes the enamel off'n his teeth.
+The pint remains, I repeat, my feller citizens, that there ain't no
+licker ever distilled can throw him with them eyes and that there
+Adamses' apple. You gen'elmen 'd a sight better pick out some big feller
+which his eyes is bunched up close together like the yallers in a double
+yolk aig and which his Adamses' apple is comparatively stationary.'</p>
+
+<p>"But Colonel Bud, he wouldn't listen. Maybe he was kinder jealous at
+seeing old Squire Buck Throckmorton setting hisse'f up as a jedge of
+human nature that-a-way. Even the greatest of us air but mortal, and I
+reckon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span> Colonel Bud wouldn't admit that anybody could outdo him reading
+character offhand, and he taken the floor agin. Replying to his
+venerable friend and neighbor, he would say that the Squire was talking
+like a plain derned fool. Continuing he would add that it didn't make no
+difference if both eyes was riding the bridge of the nose side-saddle,
+or if they was crowding the ears for position.</p>
+
+<p>"'Now, as to the Adamses' apple, which he would consider next in this
+brief reply,' he went on to explain, 'Science teached us that the
+Adamses' apple didn't have no regular functions to speak of, and what
+few it did have bore no relation to the consumption of licker in the
+reg'lar and customary manner, viz., to-wit, by swallowing of the same
+from demijohn, dipper, tumbler or gourd. The Adamses' apple was but a
+natchel ornament nestled at the base of the chin whiskers. He asked if
+any gen'elman in the sound of his voice ever see a bowlder on the side
+of a dreen, enlessen it was covered, in whole or in part, by vines? The
+same wise provision of Nature was to be observed in the Adamses' apple,
+it being, ef he mout be pardoned for using such a figger of speech, at
+sich a time, the bowlder, and the chin whiskers, the vine.</p>
+
+<p>"'It's the size that counts,' said Colonel Bud Crittenden. 'It natchelly
+stands to reason that a big scaffolded-up man like Stony Bugg can
+chamber more licker than a little runt like that Burnett. Why, he could
+do it if Burnett was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span> spangled all over with Adamses' apples and all of
+them palpitating like skeered lizards. He could do it if Burnett's eyes
+were so fur apart he was cross-eyed behind. Besides, this here Burnett
+is a mountaineering gen'elman, and I mistrust not, he's been educated
+altogether on white moonshine licker fresh out of the still. When red
+licker, with some age behind it, takes holt of his abbreviated vitals
+he's shore going to wilt and wilt sudden and complete.</p>
+
+<p>"'Red licker, say about fourteen year old, is mighty deceivin' to a
+mountaineer. It tastes so smooth he forgets that it's strong enough to
+take off warts.'</p>
+
+<p>"Well, suzz, that argument fetched us and we all coincided; all but
+Squire Buck Throckmorton, who still looked mighty dubiousome. Anyway,
+Stony Bugg, he went out and found this here Mister Wash Burnett and
+invited him to see if there was anything left in the bar; and Burnett,
+he fell into the trap, not apparently suspicioning nothing, and said he
+didn't care if he did. So they sashayed off together t'wards the nighest
+grocery arm in arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Being puffectly easy in our minds, we all went back to the convention
+hall 'bout half past two. The Forks of Elkhorn William Jinnings Bryan
+and Silver Cornet Band was there and give a concert, playin 'Dixie' foah
+times and 'Old Kentucky Home' five. And Senator Joe Blackburn spoke
+three or foah times. I never before heard Republicans called out of
+their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span> name like he done it. Senator Joe Blackburn shore proved hisse'f
+a statesman that day.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it got on t'wards half past three, and while we warn't noways
+uneasy we taken to wishing that Stony Bugg would report back. At ten
+minutes befoah foah there warn't no signs of Stony Bugg. At five minutes
+befoah foah our fellers was gettin' shore nuff worried, and jest then
+the doah opened and in comes that there little Wash Burnett&mdash;alone! He
+was coughing fit to kill hisse'f. His Adamses' apple was sticking out
+like a guinney egg, and making about eighteen reverlutions to the
+second, and them fur-apart eyes of his'n was the glassiest I ever seen,
+but it was him all right. He stopped jest inside the hall and turned up
+his pants at the bottom and stepped high over a shadder on the floor.
+But he warn't too fur gone to walk. Nor he warn't too fur gone to vote.</p>
+
+<p>"'Fore we could more'n ketch our breaths the chairman called for a
+ballot and they taken it, and General Hightower was nominated&mdash;52 to
+51&mdash;Captain Stonewall J. Bugg being recorded by the secretary as absent
+and not voting. And while the up-state fellers was carrying on and
+swapping cheers with one another, our fellers sat there jest
+dumfoundered. Colonel Bud Crittenden, he was the first one to speak.</p>
+
+<p>"'Major Simms being beat ain't the wust of it,' he says. 'Our committee
+on irrigation is deceased. The solemn and sorryful duty devolves upon
+us, his associates, to go send a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span> dispatch to Mrs. Stony Bugg and fambly
+informing them that they air widows. Stony, he must have choked hisse'f
+to death on some free barroom vittles, or else he got run over by a
+hawse and waggin. Otherwise he'd a' been here as arranged, and that
+there little human wart of a Wash Burnett would be spraddled out on the
+floor, face-down, right this very minute, a'trying to swim out of some
+licker store dog fashion.'</p>
+
+<p>"But jest then we heard a kind of to-do outside, and the doah flew open
+and something rolled in and flattened out in the main aisle. Would you
+believe me, it was Stony Bugg, more puffectly disguised in licker than I
+ever expected to see.</p>
+
+<p>"Two of us grabbed holt of him by the arms and pulled him up on his
+feet. He opened his eyes kind of dazed-like and looked around. Colonel
+Bud, he done the talking.</p>
+
+<p>"'Stony,' he says, not angry but real pitiful, in his tones, 'Stony, why
+the name of Gawd didn't you git him drunk?'</p>
+
+<p>"Stony, he sort of studied a minute. Then he says, slow and deliberate
+and thick:</p>
+
+<p>"'Drunk? Why, boys, I gozzom so drunk I couldn't see him.'</p>
+
+<p>"And as we came on home, we all had to admit you couldn't git a man no
+drunker than that, and live."</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sundry Accounts, by Irvin S. Cobb
+
+
+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: Sundry Accounts
+
+
+Author: Irvin S. Cobb
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 7, 2008  [eBook #27439]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUNDRY ACCOUNTS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Audrey Longhurst, Martin Pettit, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+SUNDRY ACCOUNTS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+BY IRVIN S. COBB
+
+
+FICTION
+
+SUNDRY ACCOUNTS
+J. POINDEXTER, COLORED
+BACK HOME
+FROM PLACE TO PLACE
+OLD JUDGE PRIEST
+LOCAL COLOR
+THOSE TIMES AND THESE
+THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM
+
+
+WIT AND HUMOR
+
+ONE THIRD OFF
+A PLEA FOR OLD CAP COLLIER
+THE ABANDONED FARMERS
+THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
+EATING IN TWO OR THREE LANGUAGES
+"OH, WELL, YOU KNOW HOW WOMEN ARE!"
+FIBBLE D. D.
+"SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS----"
+EUROPE REVISED
+ROUGHING IT DE LUXE
+COBB'S BILL OF FARE
+COBB'S ANATOMY
+
+
+MISCELLANY
+
+THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE
+THE GLORY OF THE COMING
+PATHS OF GLORY
+"SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS----"
+
+
+NEW YORK
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+SUNDRY ACCOUNTS
+
+by
+
+IRVIN S. COBB
+
+Author of "Back Home," "Speaking of Operations--,"
+"Old Judge Priest," Etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+New York
+George H. Doran Company
+
+Copyright, 1922,
+by George H. Doran Company
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+TO JOHN WILSON TOWNSEND, ESQUIRE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER                                  PAGE
+
+   I DARKNESS                              11
+
+  II THE CATER-CORNERED SEX                57
+
+ III A SHORT NATURAL HISTORY              104
+
+  IV IT COULD HAPPEN AGAIN TO-MORROW      157
+
+   V THE RAVELIN' WOLF                    212
+
+  VI "WORTH 10,000"                       246
+
+ VII MR. LOBEL'S APOPLEXY                 300
+
+VIII ALAS, THE POOR WHIFFLETIT!           341
+
+  IX PLENTIFUL VALLEY                     392
+
+   X A TALE OF WET DAYS                   424
+
+
+
+
+SUNDRY ACCOUNTS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DARKNESS
+
+
+There was a house in this town where always by night lights burned. In
+one of its rooms many lights burned; in each of the other rooms at least
+one light. It stood on Clay Street, on a treeless plot among flower
+beds, a small dull-looking house; and when late on dark nights all the
+other houses on Clay Street were solid blockings lifting from the lesser
+blackness of their background, the lights in this house patterned its
+windows with squares of brilliancy so that it suggested a grid set on
+edge before hot flames. Once a newcomer to the town, a transient guest
+at Mrs. Otterbuck's boarding house, spoke about it to old Squire Jonas,
+who lived next door to where the lights blazed of nights, and the answer
+he got makes a fitting enough beginning for this account.
+
+This stranger came along Clay Street one morning, and Squire Jonas, who
+was leaning over his gate contemplating the world as it passed in
+review, nodded to him and remarked that it was a fine morning; and the
+stranger was emboldened to stop and pass the time of day, as the saying
+goes.
+
+"I'm here going over the books of the Bernheimer Distilling Company," he
+said when they had spoken of this and that, "and, you know, when a
+chartered accountant gets on a job he's supposed to keep right at it
+until he's done. Well, my work keeps me busy till pretty late. And the
+last three nights, passing that place yonder adjoining yours, I've
+noticed she was all lit up like as if for a wedding or a christening or
+a party or something. But I didn't see anybody going in or coming out,
+or hear anybody stirring in there, and it struck me as blamed curious.
+Last night--or this morning, rather, I should say--it must have been
+close on to half-past two o'clock when I passed by, and there she was,
+all as quiet as the tomb and still the lights going from top to bottom.
+So I got to wondering to myself. Tell me, sir, is there somebody sick
+over there next door?"
+
+"Yes, suh," stated the squire, "I figure you might say there is somebody
+sick there. He's been sick a powerful long time too. But it's not his
+body that's sick; it's his soul."
+
+"I don't know as I get you, sir," said the other man in a puzzled sort
+of way.
+
+"Son," stated the squire, "I reckin you've been hearin' 'em, haven't
+you, singin' this here new song that's goin' 'round about, 'I'm Afraid
+to Go Home in the Dark'? Well, probably the man who wrote that there
+song never was down here in these parts in his life; probably he just
+made the idea of it up out of his own head. But he might 'a' had the
+case of my neighbor in his mind when he done so. Only his song is kind
+of comical and this case here is about the most uncomic one you'd be
+likely to run acrost. The man who lives here alongside of me is not only
+afraid to go home in the dark but he's actually feared to stay in the
+dark after he gets home. Once he killed a man and he come clear of the
+killin' all right enough, but seems like he ain't never got over it; and
+the sayin' in this town is that he's studied it out that ef ever he gets
+in the dark, either by himself or in company, he'll see the face of that
+there man he killed. So that's why, son, you've been seein' them lights
+a-blazin'. I've been seein' 'em myself fur goin' on twenty year or more,
+I reckin 'tis by now, and I've got used to 'em. But I ain't never got
+over wonderin' whut kind of thoughts he must have over there all alone
+by himself at night with everything lit up bright as day around him,
+when by rights things should be dark. But I ain't ever asted him, and
+whut's more, I never will. He ain't the kind you could go to him astin'
+him personal questions about his own private affairs. We-all here in
+town just accept him fur whut he is and sort of let him be. He's whut
+you might call a town character. His name is Mr. Dudley Stackpole."
+
+In all respects save one, Squire Jonas, telling the inquiring stranger
+the tale, had the rights of it. There were town characters aplenty he
+might have described. A long-settled community with traditions behind it
+and a reasonable antiquity seems to breed curious types of men and women
+as a musty closet breeds mice and moths. This town of ours had its town
+mysteries and its town eccentrics--its freaks, if one wished to put the
+matter bluntly; and it had its champion story-teller and its champion
+liar and its champion guesser of the weight of livestock on the hoof.
+
+There was crazy Saul Vance, the butt of cruel small boys, who deported
+himself as any rational creature might so long as he walked a straight
+course; but so surely as he came to where the road forked or two streets
+crossed he could not decide which turning to take and for hours angled
+back and forth and to and fro, now taking the short cut to regain the
+path he just had quitted, now retracing his way over the long one, for
+all the world like a geometric spider spinning its web. There was old
+Daddy Hannah, the black root-and-yarb doctor, who could throw spells and
+weave charms and invoke conjures. He wore a pair of shoes which had been
+worn by a man who was hanged, and these shoes, as is well known, leave
+no tracks which a dog will nose after or a witch follow, or a ha'nt.
+Small boys did not gibe at Daddy Hannah, you bet you! There was Major
+Burnley, who lived for years and years in the same house with the wife
+with whom he had quarreled and never spoke a word to her or she to him.
+But the list is overlong for calling. With us, in that day and time,
+town characters abounded freely. But Mr. Dudley Stackpole was more than
+a town character. He was that, it is true, but he was something else
+besides; something which tabbed him a mortal set apart from his fellow
+mortals. He was the town's chief figure of tragedy.
+
+If you had ever seen him once you could shut your eyes and see him over
+again. Yet about him there was nothing impressive, nothing in his port
+or his manner to catch and to hold a stranger's gaze. With him,
+physically, it was quite the other way about. He was a short spare man,
+very gentle in his movements, a toneless sort of man of a palish gray
+cast, who always wore sad-colored clothing. He would make you think of a
+man molded out of a fog; almost he was like a man made of smoke. His
+mode of living might testify that a gnawing remorse abode ever with him,
+but his hair had not turned white in a single night, as the heads of
+those suddenly stricken by a great shock or a great grief or any greatly
+upsetting and disordering emotion sometimes are reputed to turn. Neither
+in his youth nor when age came to him was his hair white. But for so
+far back as any now remembered it had been a dullish gray, suggesting at
+a distance dead lichens.
+
+The color of his skin was a color to match in with the rest of him. It
+was not pale, nor was it pasty. People with a taste for comparisons were
+hard put to it to describe just what it was the hue of his face did
+remind them of, until one day a man brought in from the woods the
+abandoned nest of a brood of black hornets, still clinging to the
+pendent twig from which the insect artificers had swung it. Darkies used
+to collect these nests in the fall of the year when the vicious swarms
+had deserted them. Their shredded parchments made ideal wadding for
+muzzle-loading scatter-guns, and sufferers from asthma tore them down,
+too, and burned them slowly and stooped over the smoldering mass and
+inhaled the fumes and the smoke which arose, because the country
+wiseacres preached that no boughten stuff out of a drug store gave such
+relief from asthma as this hornet's-nest treatment. But it remained for
+this man to find a third use for such a thing. He brought it into the
+office of Gafford's wagon yard, where some other men were sitting about
+the fire, and he held it up before them and he said:
+
+"Who does this here hornet's nest put you fellers in mind of--this gray
+color all over it, and all these here fine lines runnin' back and forth
+and every which-a-way like wrinkles? Think, now--it's somebody you all
+know."
+
+And when they had given it up as a puzzle too hard for them to guess he
+said:
+
+"Why, ain't it got percisely the same color and the same look about it
+as Mr. Dudley Stackpole's face? Why, it's a perfect imitation of him!
+That's whut I said to myself all in a flash when I first seen it
+bouncin' on the end of this here black birch limb out yonder in the
+flats."
+
+"By gum, if you ain't right!" exclaimed one of the audience. "Say, come
+to think about it, I wonder if spendin' all his nights with bright
+lights burnin' round him is whut's give that old man that gray color
+he's got, the same as this wasp's nest has got it, and all them puckery
+lines round his eyes. Pore old devil, with the hags furever ridin' him!
+Well, they tell me he's toler'ble well fixed in this world's goods, but
+poor as I am, and him well off, I wouldn't trade places with him fur any
+amount of money. I've got my peace of mind if I ain't got anything else
+to speak of. Say, you'd 'a' thought in all these years a man would get
+over broodin' over havin' killed another feller, and specially havin'
+killed him in fair fight. Let's see, now, whut was the name of the
+feller he killed that time out there at Cache Creek Crossin's? I
+actually disremember. I've heard it a thousand times, too, I reckin, if
+I've heard it oncet."
+
+For a fact, the memory of the man slain so long before only endured
+because the slayer walked abroad as a living reminder of the taking off
+of one who by all accounts had been of small value to mankind in his day
+and generation. Save for the daily presence of the one, the very
+identity even of the other might before now have been forgotten. For
+this very reason, seeking to enlarge the merits of the controversy which
+had led to the death of one Jesse Tatum at the hands of Dudley
+Stackpole, people sometimes referred to it as the Tatum-Stackpole feud
+and sought to liken it to the Faxon-Fleming feud. But that was a real
+feud with fence-corner ambuscades and a sizable mortality list and
+nighttime assassinations and all; whereas this lesser thing, which now
+briefly is to be dealt with on its merits, had been no more than a
+neighborhood falling out, having but a solitary homicide for its
+climactic upshot. So far as that went, it really was not so much the
+death of the victim as the survival of his destroyer--and his fashion of
+living afterwards--which made warp and woof for the fabric of the
+tragedy.
+
+With the passage of time the actuating causes were somewhat blurred in
+perspective. The main facts stood forth clear enough, but the underlying
+details were misty and uncertain, like some half-obliterated scribble on
+a badly rubbed slate upon which a more important sum has been overlaid.
+One rendition had it that the firm of Stackpole Brothers sued the two
+Tatums--Harve and Jess--for an account long overdue, and won judgment in
+the courts, but won with it the murderous enmity of the defendant pair.
+Another account would have it that a dispute over a boundary fence
+marching between the Tatum homestead on Cache Creek and one of the
+Stackpole farm holdings ripened into a prime quarrel by reasons of
+Stackpole stubbornness on the one hand and Tatum malignity on the other.
+By yet a third account the lawsuit and the line-fence matter were
+confusingly twisted together to form a cause for disputation.
+
+Never mind that part though. The incontrovertible part was that things
+came to a decisive pass on a July day in the late 80's when the two
+Tatums sent word to the two Stackpoles that at or about six o'clock of
+that evening they would come down the side road from their place a mile
+away to Stackpole Brothers' gristmill above the big riffle in Cache
+Creek prepared to fight it out man to man. The warning was explicit
+enough--the Tatums would shoot on sight. The message was meant for two,
+but only one brother heard it; for Jeffrey Stackpole, the senior member
+of the firm, was sick abed with heart disease at the Stackpole house on
+Clay Street in town, and Dudley, the junior, was running the business
+and keeping bachelor's hall, as the phrase goes, in the living room of
+the mill; and it was Dudley who received notice.
+
+Now the younger Stackpole was known for a law-abiding and a
+well-disposed man, which reputation stood him in stead subsequently; but
+also he was no coward. He might crave peace, but he would not flee from
+trouble moving toward him. He would not advance a step to meet it,
+neither would he give back a step to avoid it. If it occurred to him to
+hurry in to the county seat and have his enemies put under bonds to keep
+the peace he pushed the thought from him. This, in those days, was not
+the popular course for one threatened with violence by another; nor,
+generally speaking, was it regarded exactly as the manly one to follow.
+So he bided that day where he was. Moreover, it was not of record that
+he told anyone at all of what impended. He knew little of the use of
+firearms, but there was a loaded pistol in the cash drawer of the mill
+office. He put it in a pocket of his coat and through the afternoon he
+waited, outwardly quiet and composed, for the appointed hour when
+single-handed he would defend his honor and his brother's against the
+unequal odds of a brace of bullies, both of them quick on the trigger,
+both smart and clever in the handling of weapons.
+
+But if Stackpole told no one, someone else told someone. Probably the
+messenger of the Tatums talked. He currently was reputed to have a leaky
+tongue to go with his jimberjaws; a born trouble maker, doubtless, else
+he would not have loaned his service to such employment in the first
+place. Up and down the road ran the report that before night there would
+be a clash at the Stackpole mill. Peg-Leg Foster, who ran the general
+store below the bridge and within sight of the big riffle, saw fit to
+shut up shop early and go to town for the evening. Perhaps he did not
+want to be a witness, or possibly he desired to be out of the way of
+stray lead flying about. So the only known witness to what happened,
+other than the parties engaged in it, was a negro woman. She, at least,
+was one who had not heard the rumor which since early forenoon had been
+spreading through the sparsely settled neighborhood. When six o'clock
+came she was grubbing out a sorghum patch in front of her cabin just
+north of where the creek cut under the Blandsville gravel pike.
+
+One gets a picture of the scene: The thin and deficient shadows
+stretching themselves across the parched bottom lands as the sun slid
+down behind the trees of Eden's swamp lot; the heat waves of a
+blistering hot day still dancing their devil's dance down the road like
+wriggling circumflexes to accent a false promise of coolness off there
+in the distance; the ominous emptiness of the landscape; the brooding
+quiet, cut through only by the frogs and the dry flies tuning up for
+their evening concert; the bandannaed negress wrangling at the weeds
+with her hoe blade inside the rail fence; and, half sheltered within
+the lintels of the office doorway of his mill, Dudley Stackpole, a slim,
+still figure, watching up the crossroad for the coming of his
+adversaries.
+
+But the adversaries did not come from up the road as they had advertised
+they would. That declaration on their part had been a trick and device,
+cockered up in the hope of taking the foe by surprise and from the rear.
+In a canvas-covered wagon--moving wagons, we used to call them in Red
+Gravel County--they left their house half an hour or so before the time
+set by them for the meeting, and they cut through by a wood lane which
+met the pike south of Foster's store; and then very slowly they rode up
+the pike toward the mill, being minded to attack from behind, with the
+added advantage of unexpectedness on their side.
+
+Chance, though, spoiled their strategy and made these terms of primitive
+dueling more equal. Mark how: The woman in the sorghum patch saw it
+happen. She saw the wagon pass her and saw it brought to a standstill
+just beyond where she was; saw Jess Tatum slide stealthily down from
+under the overhanging hood of the wagon and, sheltered behind it, draw a
+revolver and cock it, all the while peeping out, searching the front and
+the nearer side of the gristmill with his eager eyes. She saw Harve
+Tatum, the elder brother, set the wheel chock and wrap the lines about
+the sheathed whipstock, and then as he swung off the seat catch a boot
+heel on the rim of the wagon box and fall to the road with a jar which
+knocked him cold, for he was a gross and heavy man and struck squarely
+on his head. With popped eyes she saw Jess throw up his pistol and fire
+once from his ambush behind the wagon, and then--the startled team
+having snatched the wagon from before him--saw him advance into the open
+toward the mill, shooting again as he advanced.
+
+All now in the same breath and in a jumble of shock and terror she saw
+Dudley Stackpole emerge into full sight, and standing clear a pace from
+his doorway return the fire; saw the thudding frantic hoofs of the nigh
+horse spurn Harve Tatum's body aside--the kick broke his right leg, it
+turned out--saw Jess Tatum suddenly halt and stagger back as though
+jerked by an unseen hand; saw him drop his weapon and straighten again,
+and with both hands clutched to his throat run forward, head thrown back
+and feet drumming; heard him give one strange bubbling, strangled
+scream--it was the blood in his throat made this outcry sound thus--and
+saw him fall on his face, twitching and heaving, not thirty feet from
+where Dudley Stackpole stood, his pistol upraised and ready for more
+firing.
+
+As to how many shots, all told, were fired the woman never could say
+with certainty. There might have been four or five or six, or even
+seven, she thought. After the opening shot they rang together in almost
+a continuous volley, she said. Three empty chambers in Tatum's gun and
+two in Stackpole's seemed conclusive evidence to the sheriff and the
+coroner that night and to the coroner's jurors next day that five shots
+had been fired.
+
+On one point, though, for all her fright, the woman was positive, and to
+this she stuck in the face of questions and cross-questions. After Tatum
+stopped as though jolted to a standstill, and dropped his weapon,
+Stackpole flung the barrel of his revolver upward and did not again
+offer to fire, either as his disarmed and stricken enemy advanced upon
+him or after he had fallen. As she put it, he stood there like a man
+frozen stiff.
+
+Having seen and heard this much, the witness, now all possible peril for
+her was passed, suddenly became mad with fear. She ran into her cabin
+and scrouged behind the headboard of a bed. When at length she
+timorously withdrew from hiding and came trembling forth, already
+persons out of the neighborhood, drawn by the sounds of the fusillade,
+were hurrying up. They seemed to spring, as it were, out of the ground.
+Into the mill these newcomers carried the two Tatums, Jess being
+stone-dead and Harve still senseless, with a leg dangling where the
+bones were snapped below the knee, and a great cut in his scalp; and
+they laid the two of them side by side on the floor in the gritty dust
+of the meal tailings and the flour grindings. This done, some ran to
+harness and hitch and to go to fetch doctors and law officers, spreading
+the news as they went; and some stayed on to work over Harve Tatum and
+to give such comfort as they might to Dudley Stackpole, he sitting dumb
+in his little, cluttered office awaiting the coming of constable or
+sheriff or deputy so that he might surrender himself into custody.
+
+While they waited and while they worked to bring Harve Tatum back to his
+senses, the men marveled at two amazing things. The first wonder was
+that Jess Tatum, finished marksman as he was, and the main instigator
+and central figure of sundry violent encounters in the past, should have
+failed to hit the mark at which he fired with his first shot or with his
+second or with his third; and the second, a still greater wonder, was
+that Dudley Stackpole, who perhaps never in his life had had for a
+target a living thing, should have sped a bullet so squarely into the
+heart of his victim at twenty yards or more. The first phenomenon might
+perhaps be explained, they agreed, on the hypothesis that the mishap to
+his brother coming at the very moment of the fight's beginning, unnerved
+Jess and threw him out of stride, so to speak. But the second was not in
+anywise to be explained excepting on the theory of sheer chance. The
+fact remained that it was so, and the fact remained that it was strange.
+
+By form of law Dudley Stackpole spent two days under arrest; but this
+was a form, a legal fiction only. Actually he was at liberty from the
+time he reached the courthouse that night, riding in the sheriff's buggy
+with the sheriff and carrying poised on his knees a lighted lantern.
+Afterwards it was to be recalled that when, alongside the sheriff, he
+came out of his mill technically a prisoner he carried in his hand this
+lantern, all trimmed of wick and burning, and that he held fast to it
+through the six-mile ride to town. Afterwards, too, the circumstance was
+to be coupled with multiplying circumstances to establish a state of
+facts; but at the moment, in the excited state of mind of those present,
+it passed unremarked and almost unnoticed. And he still held it in his
+hand when, having been released under nominal bond and attended by
+certain sympathizing friends, he walked across town from the county
+building to his home on Clay Street. That fact, too, was subsequently
+remembered and added to other details to make a finished sum of
+deductive reasoning.
+
+Already it was a foregone conclusion that the finding at the coroner's
+inquest, to be held the next day, would absolve him; foregone, also,
+that no prosecutor would press for his arraignment on charges and that
+no grand jury would indict. So, soon all the evidence in hand was
+conclusively on his side. He had been forced into a fight not of his own
+choosing; an effort, which had failed, had been made to take him
+unfairly from behind; he had fired in self-defense after having first
+been fired upon; save for a quirk of fate operating in his favor, he
+should have faced odds of two deadly antagonists instead of facing one.
+What else then than his prompt and honorable discharge? And to top all,
+the popular verdict was that the killing off of Jess Tatum was so much
+good riddance of so much sorry rubbish; a pity, though, Harve had
+escaped his just deserts.
+
+Helpless for the time being, and in the estimation of his fellows even
+more thoroughly discredited than he had been before, Harve Tatum here
+vanishes out of our recital. So, too, does Jeffrey Stackpole, heretofore
+mentioned once by name, for within a week he was dead of the same heart
+attack which had kept him out of the fight at Cache Creek. The rest of
+the narrative largely appertains to the one conspicuous survivor, this
+Dudley Stackpole already described.
+
+Tradition ever afterwards had it that on the night of the killing he
+slept--if he slept at all--in the full-lighted room of a house which was
+all aglare with lights from cellar to roof line. From its every opening
+the house blazed as for a celebration. At the first, so the tale of it
+ran, people were of two different minds to account for this. This one
+rather thought Stackpole feared punitive reprisals under cover of night
+by vengeful kinsmen of the Tatums, they being, root and branch, sprout
+and limb, a belligerent and an ill-conditioned breed. That one suggested
+that maybe he took this method of letting all and sundry know he felt no
+regret for having gunned the life out of a dangerous brawler; that
+perhaps thereby he sought to advertise his satisfaction at the outcome
+of that day's affair. But this latter theory was not to be credited. For
+so sensitive and so well-disposed a man as Dudley Stackpole to joy in
+his own deadly act, however justifiable in the sight of law and man that
+act might have been--why, the bare notion of it was preposterous! The
+repute and the prior conduct of the man robbed the suggestion of all
+plausibility. And then soon, when night after night the lights still
+flared in his house, and when on top of this evidence accumulated to
+confirm a belief already crystallizing in the public mind, the town came
+to sense the truth, which was that Mr. Dudley Stackpole now feared the
+dark as a timid child might fear it. It was not authentically chronicled
+that he confessed his fears to any living creature. But his fellow
+townsmen knew the state of his mind as though he had shouted of it from
+the housetops. They had heard, most of them, of such cases before. They
+agreed among themselves that he shunned darkness because he feared that
+out of that darkness might return the vision of his deed, bloodied and
+shocking and hideous. And they were right. He did so fear, and he
+feared mightily, constantly and unendingly.
+
+That fear, along with the behavior which became from that night
+thenceforward part and parcel of him, made Dudley Stackpole as one set
+over and put apart from his fellows. Neither by daytime nor by nighttime
+was he thereafter to know darkness. Never again was he to see the
+twilight fall or face the blackness which comes before the dawning or
+take his rest in the cloaking, kindly void and nothingness of the
+midnight. Before the dusk of evening came, in midafternoon sometimes, of
+stormy and briefened winter days, or in the full radiance of the sun's
+sinking in the summertime, he was within doors lighting the lights which
+would keep the darkness beyond his portals and hold at bay a gathering
+gloom into which from window or door he would not look and dared not
+look.
+
+There were trees about his house, cottonwoods and sycamores and one
+noble elm branching like a lyre. He chopped them all down and had the
+roots grubbed out. The vines which covered his porch were shorn away. To
+these things many were witnesses. What transformations he worked within
+the walls were largely known by hearsay through the medium of Aunt
+Kassie, the old negress who served him as cook and chambermaid and was
+his only house servant. To half-fearsome, half-fascinated audiences of
+her own color, whose members in time communicated what she told to
+their white employers, she related how with his own hands, bringing a
+crude carpentry into play, her master ripped out certain dark closets
+and abolished a secluded and gloomy recess beneath a hall staircase, and
+how privily he called in men who strung his ceilings with electric
+lights, although already the building was piped for gas; and how, for
+final touches, he placed in various parts of his bedroom tallow dips and
+oil lamps to be lit before twilight and to burn all night, so that
+though the gas sometime should fail and the electric bulbs blink out,
+there still would be abundant lighting about him. His became the house
+which harbored no single shadow save only the shadow of morbid dread
+which lived within its owner's bosom. An orthodox haunted house should
+by rights be deserted and dark. This house, haunted if ever one was,
+differed from the orthodox conception. It was tenanted and it shone with
+lights.
+
+The man's abiding obsession--if we may call his besetment thus--changed
+in practically all essential regards the manners and the practices of
+his daily life. After the shooting he never returned to his mill. He
+could not bring himself to endure the ordeal of revisiting the scene of
+the killing. So the mill stood empty and silent, just as he left it that
+night when he rode to town with the sheriff, until after his brother's
+death; and then with all possible dispatch he sold it, its fixtures,
+contents and goodwill, for what the property would fetch at quick sale,
+and he gave up business. He had sufficient to stay him in his needs. The
+Stackpoles had the name of being a canny and a provident family, living
+quietly and saving of their substance. The homestead where he lived,
+which his father before him had built, was free of debt. He had funds in
+the bank and money out at interest. He had not been one to make close
+friends. Now those who had counted themselves his friends became rather
+his distant acquaintances, among whom he neither received nor bestowed
+confidences.
+
+In the broader hours of daylight his ways were such as any man of
+reserved and diffident ways, having no fixed employment, might follow in
+a smallish community. He sat upon his porch and read in books. He worked
+in his flower beds. With flowers he had a cunning touch, almost like a
+woman's. He loved them, and they responded to his love and bloomed and
+bore for him. He walked downtown to the business district, always alone,
+a shy and unimpressive figure, and sat brooding and aloof in one of the
+tilted-back cane chairs under the portico of the old Richland House,
+facing the river. He took long solitary walks on side streets and
+byways; but it was noted that, reaching the farther outskirts, he
+invariably turned back. In all those dragging years it is doubtful if
+once he set foot past the corporate limits into the open country. Dun
+hued, unobtrusive, withdrawn, he aged slowly, almost imperceptibly. Men
+and women of his own generation used to say that save for the wrinkles
+ever multiplying in close cross-hatchings about his puckered eyes, and
+save for the enhancing of that dead gray pallor--the wasp's-nest
+overcasting of his skin--he still looked to them exactly as he had
+looked when he was a much younger man.
+
+It was not so much the appearance or the customary demeanor of the
+recluse that made strangers turn about to stare at him as he passed, and
+that made them remember how he looked when he was gone from their sight.
+The one was commonplace enough--I mean his appearance--and his conduct,
+unless one knew the underlying motives, was merely that of an
+unobtrusive, rather melancholy seeming gentleman of quiet tastes and
+habits. It was the feeling and the sense of a dismal exhalation from
+him, an unhealthy and unnatural mental effluvium that served so
+indelibly to fix the bodily image of him in the brainpans of casual and
+uninformed passers-by. The brand of Cain was not on his brow. By every
+local standard of human morality it did not belong there. But built up
+of morbid elements within his own conscience, it looked out from his
+eyes and breathed out from his person.
+
+So year by year, until the tally of the years rolled up to more than
+thirty, he went his lone unhappy way. He was in the life of the town,
+to an extent, but not of it. Always, though, it was the daylit life of
+the town which knew him. Excepting once only. Of this exceptional
+instance a story was so often repeated that in time it became
+permanently embalmed in the unwritten history of the place.
+
+On a summer's afternoon, sultry and close, the heavens suddenly went all
+black, and quick gusts smote the earth with threats of a great
+windstorm. The sun vanished magically; a close thick gloaming fell out
+of the clouds. It was as though nightfall had descended hours before its
+ordained time. At the city power house the city electrician turned on
+the street lights. As the first great fat drops of rain fell, splashing
+in the dust like veritable clots, citizens scurrying indoors and
+citizens seeing to flapping awnings and slamming window blinds halted
+where they were to peer through the murk at the sight of Mr. Dudley
+Stackpole fleeing to the shelter of home like a man hunted by a terrible
+pursuer. But with all his desperate need for haste he ran no
+straightaway course. The manner of his flight was what gave added
+strangeness to the spectacle of him. He would dart headlong, on a sharp
+oblique from the right-hand corner of a street intersection to a point
+midway of the block--or square, to give it its local name--then go
+slanting back again to the right-hand corner of the next street
+crossing, so that his path was in the pattern of one acutely slanted
+zigzag after another. He was keeping, as well as he could, within the
+circles of radiance thrown out by the municipal arc lights as he made
+for his house, there in his bedchamber to fortify himself about, like
+one beset and besieged, with the ample and protecting rays of all the
+methods of artificial illumination at his command--with incandescent
+bulbs thrown on by switches, with the flare of lighted gas jets, with
+the tallow dip's slim digit of flame, and with the kerosene's wick
+three-finger breadth of greasy brilliance. As he fumbled, in a very
+panic and spasm of fear, with the latchets of his front gate Squire
+Jonas' wife heard him screaming to Aunt Kassie, his servant, to turn on
+the lights--all of them.
+
+That once was all, though--the only time he found the dark taking him
+unawares and threatening to envelop him in thirty years and more than
+thirty. Then a time came when in a hospital in Oklahoma an elderly man
+named A. Hamilton Bledsoe lay on his deathbed and on the day before he
+died told the physician who attended him and the clergyman who had
+called to pray for him that he had a confession to make. He desired that
+it be taken down by a stenographer just as he uttered it, and
+transcribed; then he would sign it as his solemn dying declaration, and
+when he had died they were to send the signed copy back to the town from
+whence he had in the year 1889 moved West, and there it was to be
+published broadcast. All of which, in due course of time and in
+accordance with the signatory's wishes, was done.
+
+With the beginning of the statement as it appeared in the _Daily Evening
+News_, as with Editor Tompkins' introductory paragraphs preceding it, we
+need have no interest. That which really matters began two-thirds of the
+way down the first column and ran as follows:
+
+"How I came to know there was likely to be trouble that evening at the
+big-riffle crossing was this way"--it is the dying Bledsoe, of course,
+who is being quoted. "The man they sent to the mill with the message did
+a lot of loose talking on his way back after he gave in the message, and
+in this roundabout way the word got to me at my house on the Eden's
+Swamp road soon after dinnertime. Now I had always got along fine with
+both of the Stackpoles, and had only friendly feelings toward them; but
+maybe there's some people still alive back there in that county who can
+remember what the reason was why I should naturally hate and despise
+both the Tatums, and especially this Jess Tatum, him being if anything
+the more low-down one of the two, although the youngest. At this late
+day I don't aim to drag the name of anyone else into this, especially a
+woman's name, and her now dead and gone and in her grave; but I will
+just say that if ever a man had a just cause for craving to see Jess
+Tatum stretched out in his blood it was me. At the same time I will
+state that it was not good judgment for a man who expected to go on
+living to start out after one of the Tatums without he kept on till he
+had cleaned up the both of them, and maybe some of their cousins as
+well. I will not admit that I acted cowardly, but I will state that I
+used my best judgment.
+
+"Therefore and accordingly, no sooner did I hear the news about the dare
+which the Tatums had sent to the Stackpoles than I said to myself that
+it looked like here was my fitting chance to even up my grudge with Jess
+Tatum and yet at the same time not run the prospect of being known to be
+mixed up in the matter and maybe getting arrested, or waylaid afterwards
+by members of the Tatum family or things of such a nature. Likewise I
+figured that with a general amount of shooting going on, as seemed
+likely to be the case, one shot more or less would not be noticed,
+especially as I aimed to keep out of sight at all times and do my work
+from under safe cover, which it all of it turned out practically exactly
+as I had expected. So I took a rifle which I owned and which I was a
+good shot with and I privately went down through the bottoms and came
+out on the creek bank in the deep cut right behind Stackpole Brothers'
+gristmill. I should say offhand this was then about three o'clock in the
+evening. I was ahead of time, but I wished to be there and get
+everything fixed up the way I had mapped it out in my mind, without
+being hurried or rushed.
+
+"The back door of the mill was not locked, and I got in without being
+seen, and I went upstairs to the loft over the mill and I went to a
+window just above the front door, which was where they hoisted up grain
+when brought in wagons, and I propped the wooden shutter of the window
+open a little ways. But I only propped it open about two or three
+inches; just enough for me to see out of it up the road good. And I made
+me a kind of pallet out of meal sacks and I laid down there and I
+waited. I knew the mill had shut down for the week, and I didn't figure
+on any of the hands being round the mill or anybody finding out I was up
+there. So I waited, not hearing anybody stirring about downstairs at
+all, until just about three minutes past six, when all of a sudden came
+the first shot.
+
+"What threw me off was expecting the Tatums to come afoot from up the
+road, but when they did come it was in a wagon from down the main
+Blandsville pike clear round in the other direction. So at this first
+shot I swung and peeped out and I seen Harve Tatum down in the dust
+seemingly right under the wheels of his wagon, and I seen Jess Tatum
+jump out from behind the wagon and shoot, and I seen Dudley Stackpole
+come out of the mill door right directly under me and start shooting
+back at him. There was no sign of his brother Jeffrey. I did not know
+then that Jeffrey was home sick in bed.
+
+"Being thrown off the way I had been, it took me maybe one or two
+seconds to draw myself around and get the barrel of my rifle swung round
+to where I wanted it, and while I was doing this the shooting was going
+on. All in a flash it had come to me that it would be fairer than ever
+for me to take part in this thing, because in the first place the Tatums
+would be two against one if Harve should get back upon his feet and get
+into the fight; and in the second place Dudley Stackpole didn't know the
+first thing about shooting a pistol. Why, all in that same second, while
+I was righting myself and getting the bead onto Jess Tatum's breast, I
+seen his first shot--Stackpole's, I mean--kick up the dust not twenty
+feet in front of him and less than halfway to where Tatum was. I was as
+cool as I am now, and I seen this quite plain.
+
+"So with that, just as Stackpole fired wild again, I let Jess Tatum have
+it right through the chest, and as I did so I knew from the way he acted
+that he was done and through. He let loose of his pistol and acted like
+he was going to fall, and then he sort of rallied up and did a strange
+thing. He ran straight on ahead toward the mill, with his neck craned
+back and him running on tiptoe; and he ran this way quite a little ways
+before he dropped flat, face down. Somebody else, seeing him do that,
+might have thought he had the idea to tear into Dudley Stackpole with
+his bare hands, but I had done enough shooting at wild game in my time
+to know that he was acting like a partridge sometimes does, or a wild
+duck when it is shot through the heart or in the head; only in such a
+case a bird flies straight up in the air. Towering is what you call it
+when done by a partridge. I do not know what you would call it when done
+by a man.
+
+"So then I closed the window shutter and I waited for quite a little
+while to make sure everything was all right for me, and then I hid my
+rifle under the meal sacks, where it stayed until I got it privately two
+days later; and then I slipped downstairs and went out by the back door
+and came round in front, running and breathing hard as though I had just
+heard the shooting whilst up in the swamp. By that time there were
+several others had arrived, and there was also a negro woman crying
+round and carrying on and saying she seen Jess Tatum fire the first shot
+and seen Dudley Stackpole shoot back and seen Tatum fall. But she could
+not say for sure how many shots there were fired in all. So I saw that
+everything was all right so far as I was concerned, and that nobody, not
+even Stackpole, suspicioned but that he himself had killed Jess Tatum;
+and as I knew he would have no trouble with the law to amount to
+anything on account of it, I felt that there was no need for me to
+worry, and I did not--not worry then nor later. But for some time past I
+had been figuring on moving out here on account of this new country
+opening up. So I hurried up things, and inside of a week I had sold out
+my place and had shipped my household plunder on ahead; and I moved out
+here with my family, which they have all died off since, leaving only
+me. And now I am about to die, and so I wish to make this statement
+before I do so.
+
+"But if they had thought to cut into Jess Tatum's body after he was
+dead, or to probe for the bullet in him, they would have known that it
+was not Dudley Stackpole who really shot him, but somebody else; and
+then I suppose suspicion might have fell upon me, although I doubt it.
+Because they would have found that the bullet which killed him was fired
+out of a forty-five-seventy shell, and Dudley Stackpole had done all of
+the shooting he done with a thirty-eight caliber pistol, which would
+throw a different-sized bullet. But they never thought to do so."
+
+Question by the physician, Doctor Davis: "You mean to say that no
+autopsy was performed upon the body of the deceased?"
+
+Answer by Bledsoe: "If you mean by performing an autopsy that they
+probed into him or cut in to find the bullet I will answer no, sir, they
+did not. They did not seem to think to do so, because it seemed to
+everybody such a plain open-and-shut case that Dudley Stackpole had
+killed him."
+
+Question by the Reverend Mr. Hewlitt: "I take it that you are making
+this confession of your own free will and in order to clear the name of
+an innocent party from blame and to purge your own soul?"
+
+Answer: "In reply to that I will say yes and no. If Dudley Stackpole is
+still alive, which I doubt, he is by now getting to be an old man; but
+if alive yet I would like for him to know that he did not fire the shot
+which killed Jess Tatum on that occasion. He was not a bloodthirsty man,
+and doubtless the matter may have preyed upon his mind. So on the bare
+chance of him being still alive is why I make this dying statement to
+you gentlemen in the presence of witnesses. But I am not ashamed, and
+never was, at having done what I did do. I killed Jess Tatum with my own
+hands, and I have never regretted it. I would not regard killing him as
+a crime any more than you gentlemen here would regard it as a crime
+killing a rattlesnake or a moccasin snake. Only, until now, I did not
+think it advisable for me to admit it; which, on Dudley Stackpole's
+account solely, is the only reason why I am now making this statement."
+
+And so on and so forth for the better part of a second column, with a
+brief summary in Editor Tompkins' best style--which was a very dramatic
+and moving style indeed--of the circumstances, as recalled by old
+residents, of the ancient tragedy, and a short sketch of the deceased
+Bledsoe, the facts regarding him being drawn from the same veracious
+sources; and at the end of the article was a somewhat guarded but
+altogether sympathetic reference to the distressful recollections borne
+for so long and so patiently by an esteemed townsman, with a concluding
+paragraph to the effect that though the gentleman in question had
+declined to make a public statement touching on the remarkable
+disclosures now added thus strangely as a final chapter to the annals of
+an event long since occurred, the writer felt no hesitancy in saying
+that appreciating, as they must, the motives which prompted him to
+silence, his fellow citizens would one and all join the editor of the
+_Daily Evening News_ in congratulating him upon the lifting of this
+cloud from his life.
+
+"I only wish I had the language to express the way that old man looked
+when I showed him the galley proofs of Bledsoe's confession," said
+Editor Tompkins to a little interested group gathered in his sanctum
+after the paper was on the streets that evening. "If I had such a power
+I'd have this Frenchman Balzac backed clear off the boards when it came
+to describing things. Gentlemen, let me tell you--I've been in this
+business all my life, and I've seen lots of things, but I never saw
+anything that was the beat of this thing.
+
+"Just as soon as this statement came to me in the mails this morning
+from that place out in Oklahoma I rushed it into type, and I had a set
+of galley proofs pulled and I stuck 'em in my pocket and I put out for
+the Stackpole place out on Clay Street. I didn't want to trust either of
+the reporters with this job. They're both good, smart, likely boys; but,
+at that, they're only boys, and I didn't know how they'd go at this
+thing; and, anyway, it looked like it was my job.
+
+"He was sitting on his porch reading, just a little old gray shell of a
+man, all hunched up, and I walked up to him and I says: 'You'll pardon
+me, Mr. Stackpole, but I've come to ask you a question and then to show
+you something. Did you,' I says, 'ever know a man named A. Hamilton
+Bledsoe?'
+
+"He sort of winced. He got up and made as if to go into the house
+without answering me. I suppose it'd been so long since he had anybody
+calling on him he hardly knew how to act. And then that question coming
+out of a clear sky, as you might say, and rousing up bitter
+memories--not probably that his bitter memories needed any rousing,
+being always with him, anyway--may have jolted him pretty hard. But if
+he aimed to go inside he changed his mind when he got to the door. He
+turned round and came back.
+
+"'Yes,' he says, as though the words were being dragged out of him
+against his will, 'I did once know a man of that name. He was commonly
+called Ham Bledsoe. He lived near where'--he checked himself up,
+here--'he lived,' he says, 'in this county at one time. I knew him
+then.'
+
+"'That being so,' I says, 'I judge the proper thing to do is to ask you
+to read these galley proofs,' and I handed them over and he read them
+through without a word. Without a word, mind you, and yet if he'd spoken
+a volume he couldn't have told me any clearer what was passing through
+his mind when he came to the main facts than the way he did tell me just
+by the look that came into his face. Gentlemen, when you sit and watch a
+man sixty-odd years old being born again; when you see hope and life
+come back to him all in a minute; when you see his soul being remade in
+a flash, you'll find you can't describe it afterwards, but you're never
+going to forget it. And another thing you'll find is that there is
+nothing for you to say to him, nothing that you can say, nor nothing
+that you want to say.
+
+"I did manage, when he was through, to ask him whether or not he wished
+to make a statement. That was all from me, mind you, and yet I'd gone
+out there with the idea in my head of getting material for a long newsy
+piece out of him--what we call in this business heart-interest stuff.
+All he said, though, as he handed me back the slips was, 'No, sir; but I
+thank you--from the bottom of my heart I thank you.' And then he shook
+hands with me--shook hands with me like a man who'd forgotten almost
+how 'twas done--and he walked in his house and shut the door behind him,
+and I came on away feeling exactly as though I had seen a funeral turned
+into a resurrection."
+
+Editor Tompkins thought he had that day written the final chapter, but
+he hadn't. The final chapter he was to write the next day, following
+hard upon a denouement which to Mr. Tompkins, he with his own eyes
+having seen what he had seen, was so profound a puzzle that ever
+thereafter he mentally catalogued it under one of his favorite
+headlining phrases: "Deplorable Affair Shrouded in Mystery."
+
+
+Let us go back a few hours. For a fact, Mr. Tompkins had been witness to
+a spirit's resurrection. It was as he had borne testimony--a life had
+been reborn before his eyes. Even so, he, the sole spectator to and
+chronicler of the glory of it, could not know the depth and the sweep
+and the swing of the great heartening swell of joyous relief which
+uplifted Dudley Stackpole at the reading of the dead Bledsoe's words.
+None save Dudley Stackpole himself was ever to have a true appreciation
+of the utter sweetness of that cleansing flood, nor he for long.
+
+As he closed his door upon the editor, plans, aspirations, ambitions
+already were flowing to his brain, borne there upon that ground swell of
+sudden happiness. Into the back spaces of his mind long-buried desires
+went riding like chips upon a torrent. The substance of his patiently
+endured self-martyrdom was lifted all in a second, and with it the
+shadow of it. He would be thenceforth as other men, living as they
+lived, taking, as they did, an active share and hand in communal life.
+He was getting old. The good news had come late, but not too late. That
+day would mark the total disappearance of the morbid lonely recluse and
+the rejuvenation of the normal-thinking, normal-habited citizen. That
+very day he would make a beginning of the new order of things.
+
+And that very day he did; at least he tried. He put on his hat and he
+took his cane in his hand and as he started down the street he sought to
+put smartness and springiness into his gait. If the attempt was a sorry
+failure he, for one, did not appreciate the completeness of the failure.
+He meant, anyhow, that his step no longer should be purposeless and
+mechanical; that his walk should hereafter have intent in it. And as he
+came down the porch steps he looked about him, not dully, with sick and
+uninforming eyes, but with a livened interest in all familiar homely
+things.
+
+Coming to his gate he saw, near at hand, Squire Jonas, now a gnarled but
+still sprightly octogenarian, leaning upon a fence post surveying the
+universe at large, as was the squire's daily custom. He called out a
+good morning and waved his stick in greeting toward the squire with a
+gesture which he endeavored to make natural. His aging muscles, staled
+by thirty-odd years of lack of practice at such tricks, merely made it
+jerky and forced. Still, the friendly design was there, plainly to be
+divined; and the neighborly tone of his voice. But the squire,
+ordinarily the most courteous of persons, and certainly one of the most
+talkative, did not return the salutation. Astonishment congealed his
+faculties, tied his tongue and paralyzed his biceps. He stared dumbly a
+moment, and then, having regained coherent powers, he jammed his
+brown-varnished straw hat firmly upon his ancient poll and went
+scrambling up his gravel walk as fast as two rheumatic underpinnings
+would take him, and on into his house like a man bearing incredible and
+unbelievable tidings.
+
+Mr. Stackpole opened his gate and passed out and started down the
+sidewalk. Midway of the next square he overtook a man he knew--an
+elderly watchmaker, a Swiss by birth, who worked at Nagel's jewelry
+store. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times he had passed this man upon
+the street. Always before he had passed him with averted eyes and a
+stiff nod of recognition. Now, coming up behind the other, Mr. Stackpole
+bade him a cheerful good day. At the sound of the words the Swiss spun
+on his heel, then gulped audibly and backed away, flinching almost as
+though a blow had been aimed at him. He muttered some meaningless
+something, confusedly: he stared at Mr. Stackpole with widened eyes like
+one who beholds an apparition in the broad of the day; he stepped on his
+own feet and got in his own way as he shrank to the outer edge of the
+narrow pavement. Mr. Stackpole was minded to fall into step alongside
+the Swiss, but the latter would not have it so. He stumbled along for a
+few yards, mute and plainly terribly embarrassed at finding himself in
+this unexpected company, and then with a muttered sound which might be
+interpreted as an apology or an explanation, or as a token of profound
+surprise on his part, or as combination of them all, he turned abruptly
+off into a grassed side lane which ran up into the old Enders orchard
+and ended nowhere at all in particular. Once his back was turned to Mr.
+Stackpole, he blessed himself fervently. On his face was the look of one
+who would fend off what is evil and supernatural.
+
+Mr. Stackpole continued on his way. On a vacant lot at Franklin and Clay
+Streets four small boys were playing one-eyed-cat. Switching his cane at
+the weed tops with strokes which he strove to make casual, he stopped to
+watch them, a half smile of approbation on his face. Pose and expression
+showed that he desired their approval for his approval of their skill.
+They stopped, too, when they saw him--stopped short. With one accord
+they ceased their play, staring at him. Nervously the batsman withdrew
+to the farther side of the common, dragging his bat behind him. The
+three others followed, casting furtive looks backward over their
+shoulders. Under a tree at the back of the lot they conferred together,
+all the while shooting quick diffident glances toward where he stood. It
+was plain something had put a blight upon their spirits; also, even at
+this distance, they radiated a sort of inarticulate suspicion--a
+suspicion of which plainly he was the object.
+
+For long years Mr. Stackpole's faculties for observation of the motives
+and actions of his fellows had been sheathed. Still, disuse had not
+altogether dulled them. Constant introspection had not destroyed his
+gift for speculation. It was rusted, but still workable. He had read
+aright Squire Jonas' stupefaction, the watchmaker's ludicrous alarm. He
+now read aright the chill which the very sight of his altered
+mien--cheerful and sprightly where they had expected grim aloofness--had
+thrown upon the spirits of the ball players. Well, he could understand
+it all. The alteration in him, coming without prior warning, had
+startled them, frightened them, really. Well, that might have been
+expected. The way had not been paved properly for the transformation. It
+would be different when the _Daily Evening News_ came out. He would go
+back home--he would wait. When they had read what was in the paper
+people would not avoid him or flee from him. They would be coming into
+his house to wish him well, to reestablish old relations with him. Why,
+it would be almost like holding a reception. He would be to those of his
+own age as a friend of their youth, returning after a long absence to
+his people, with the dour stranger who had lived in his house while he
+was away now driven out and gone forever.
+
+He turned about and he went back home and he waited. But for a while
+nothing happened, except that in the middle of the afternoon Aunt Kassie
+unaccountably disappeared. She was gone when he left his seat on the
+front porch and went back to the kitchen to give her some instruction
+touching on supper. At dinnertime, entering his dining room, he had,
+without conscious intent whistled the bars of an old air, and at that
+she had dropped a plate of hot egg bread and vanished into the pantry,
+leaving the split fragments upon the floor. Nor had she returned. He had
+made his meal unattended. Now, while he looked for her, she was hurrying
+down the alley, bound for the home of her preacher. She felt the need of
+his holy counsels and the reading of scriptural passages. She was used
+to queerness in her master, but if he were going crazy all of a sudden,
+why that would be a different matter altogether. So, presently, she was
+confiding to her spiritual adviser.
+
+Mr. Stackpole returned to the porch and sat down again and waited for
+what was to be. Through the heat of the waning afternoon Clay Street
+was almost deserted; but toward sunset the thickening tides of
+pedestrian travel began flowing by his house as men returned homeward
+from work. He had a bowing acquaintance with most of those who passed.
+
+Two or three elderly men and women among them he had known fairly well
+in years past. But no single one of those who came along turned in at
+his gate to offer him the congratulation he so eagerly desired; no
+single one, at sight of him, all poised and expectant, paused to call
+out kindly words across the palings of his fence. Yet they must have
+heard the news. He knew that they had heard it--all of them--knew it by
+the stares they cast toward the house front as they went by. There was
+more, though, in the staring than a quickened interest or a sharpened
+curiosity.
+
+Was he wrong, or was there also a sort of subtle resentment in it? Was
+there a sense vaguely conveyed that even these old acquaintances of his
+felt almost personally aggrieved that a town character should have
+ceased thus abruptly to be a town character--that they somehow felt a
+subtle injustice had been done to public opinion, an affront offered to
+civic tradition, through this unexpected sloughing off by him of the
+role he for so long had worn?
+
+He was not wrong. There was an essence of a floating, formless
+resentment there. Over the invisible tendons of mental telepathy it
+came to him, registering emphatically.
+
+As he shrank back in his chair he summoned his philosophy to give him
+balm and consolation for his disappointment. It would take time, of
+course, for people to grow accustomed to the change in him--that was
+only natural. In a few days, now, when the shock of the sensation had
+worn off, things would be different. They would forgive him for breaking
+a sort of unuttered communal law, but one hallowed, as it were, by rote
+and custom. He vaguely comprehended that there might be such a law for
+his case--a canon of procedure which, unnatural in itself, had come with
+the passage of the passing years to be quite naturally accepted.
+
+Well, perhaps the man who broke such a law, even though it were
+originally of his own fashioning, must abide the consequences. Even so,
+though, things must be different when the minds of people had
+readjusted. This he told himself over and over again, seeking in its
+steady repetition salve for his hurt, overwrought feelings.
+
+And his nights--surely they would be different! Therein, after all, lay
+the roots of the peace and the surcease which henceforth would be his
+portion. At thought of this prospect, now imminent, he uplifted his soul
+in a silent paean of thanksgiving.
+
+Having no one in whom he ever had confided, it followed naturally that
+no one else knew what torture he had suffered through all the nights of
+all these years stretching behind him in so terribly long a perspective.
+No one else knew how he had craved for the darkness which all the time
+he had both feared and shunned. No one else knew how miserable a
+travesty on sleep his sleep had been, he reading until a heavy physical
+weariness came, then lying in his bed through the latter hours of the
+night, fitfully dozing, often rousing, while from either side of his
+bed, from the ceiling above, from the headboard behind him, and from the
+footboard, strong lights played full and flary upon his twitching,
+aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his
+eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness
+of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the
+stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in
+his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured
+unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely
+worse--the agonized, twisted, dying face of Jess Tatum leaping at him
+out of shadows. But now, thank God, that ghost of his own conjuring,
+that wraith never seen but always feared, was laid to rest forever.
+Never again would conscience put him, soul and body, upon the rack. This
+night he would sleep--sleep as little children do in the all-enveloping,
+friendly, comforting dark.
+
+Scarcely could he wait till a proper bedtime hour came. He forgot that
+he had had no supper; forgot in that delectable anticipation the
+disillusionizing experiences of the day. Mechanically he had, as dusk
+came on, turned on the lights throughout the house, and force of habit
+still operating, he left them all on when at eleven o'clock he quitted
+the brilliantly illuminated porch and went to his bedroom on the second
+floor. He undressed and he put on him his night wear, becoming a
+grotesque shrunken figure, what with his meager naked legs and his ashen
+eager face and thin dust-colored throat rising above the collarless
+neckband of the garment. He blew out the flame of the oil lamp which
+burned on a reading stand at the left side of his bed and extinguished
+the two candles which stood on a table at the right side.
+
+Then he got in the bed and stretched out his arms, one aloft, the other
+behind him, finding with the fingers of this hand the turncock of the
+gas burner which swung low from the ceiling at the end of a goosenecked
+iron pipe, finding with the fingers of that hand the wall switch which
+controlled the battery of electric lights roundabout, and with a
+long-drawn sigh of happy deliverance he turned off both gas and
+electricity simultaneously and sank his head toward the pillow.
+
+The paeaned sigh turned to a shriek of mortal terror. Quaking in every
+limb, crying out in a continuous frenzy of fright, he was up again on
+his knees seeking with quivering hands for the switch; pawing about then
+for matches with which to relight the gas. For the blackness--that
+blackness to which he had been stranger for more than half his life--had
+come upon him as an enemy smothering him, muffling his head in its
+terrible black folds, stopping his nostrils with its black fingers,
+gripping his windpipe with black cords, so that his breathing stopped.
+
+That blackness for which he had craved with an unappeasable hopeless
+craving through thirty years and more was become a horror and a devil.
+He had driven it from him. When he bade it return it returned not as a
+friend and a comforter but as a mocking fiend.
+
+For months and years past he had realized that his optic nerves,
+punished and preyed upon by constant and unwholesome brilliancy, were
+nearing the point of collapse, and that all the other nerves in his
+body, frayed and fretted, too, were all askew and jangled. Cognizant of
+this he still could see no hope of relief, since his fears were greater
+than his reasoning powers or his strength of will. With the fear lifted
+and eternally dissipated in a breath, he had thought to find solace and
+soothing and restoration in the darkness. But now the darkness, for
+which his soul in its longing and his body in its stress had cried out
+unceasingly and vainly, was denied him too. He could face neither the
+one thing nor the other.
+
+Squatted there in the huddle of the bed coverings, he reasoned it all
+out, and presently he found the answer. And the answer was this: Nature
+for a while forgets and forgives offenses against her, but there comes a
+time when Nature ceases to forgive the mistreatment of the body and the
+mind, and sends then her law of atonement, to be visited upon the
+transgressor with interest compounded a hundredfold. The user of
+narcotics knows it; the drunkard knows it; and this poor self-crucified
+victim of his own imagination--he knew it too. The hint of it had that
+day been reflected in the attitude of his neighbors, for they merely had
+obeyed, without conscious realization or analysis on their part, a law
+of the natural scheme of things. The direct proof of it was, by this
+nighttime thing, revealed and made yet plainer. He stood convicted, a
+chronic violator of the immutable rule. And he knew, likewise, there was
+but one way out of the coil--and took it, there in his bedroom, vividly
+ringed about by the obscene and indecent circlet of his lights which
+kept away the blessed, cursed darkness while the suicide's soul was
+passing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE CATER-CORNERED SEX
+
+
+They had a saying down our way in the old days that Judge Priest
+administered law inside his courthouse and justice outside of it.
+Perhaps they were right. Certainly he had a way of seeking short cuts
+through thickets of legal verbiage to the rights of things, the which
+often gave acute sorrow to the souls of those members of the bar who
+venerated the very ink in which the statutory act had been printed and
+worshiped manfully before the graven images of precedent. But elsewise,
+generally speaking, it appeared to give satisfaction. Nobody ever beat
+the judge in any of his races for reelection, and after a while they
+just naturally quit trying.
+
+Nor did it seem to distress him deeply when the grave and learned lords
+of the highest tribunal of the commonwealth saw fit, as they sometimes
+did, to quarrel with a decision of his which, according to their lights,
+ran counter to the authorities and the traditions revered by these
+august gentlemen.
+
+"Ah-hah!" he would say in his high penny-flute voice when such a thing
+happened. "I see where the honorable court of appeals has disagreed with
+me agin. Well, they've still got quite a piece to go yit before they
+ketch up with the number of times I've disagreed with them."
+
+But he never said such a thing in open court. Such utterances he
+reserved for his cronies and confidants. Once he was under the dented
+tin dome where he sat for so many years he became so firm a stickler for
+the forms and the dignities that practically a sacerdotal air was
+imparted to the proceedings. As you might say, he was almost high church
+in his adherence to the ritualisms. Lawyers coming before him did not
+practice the law in their shirt sleeves. They might do this when
+appearing on certain neighbor circuits, but not here. They did not smoke
+while court was in session, or sit reared back in their chairs with
+their feet up on the counsel tables and on the bar railings. Of course
+when not actually engaged in addressing the court one might chew tobacco
+in moderation, it being an indisputable fact that such was conducive to
+lubrication of the mental processes and a sedative for the nerves
+besides; but the act of chewing must be discreetly and inaudibly carried
+on, and he who in the heat of argument or under the stress of
+cross-questioning a perverse witness failed to patronize the cuspidors
+which dotted the floor at suitable intervals stood in peril of a stern
+admonishment for the first offense and a fine for the second.
+
+Off the bench our judge was the homeliest and simplest of men. On the
+bench he wore his baggy old alpaca coat as though it were a silken robe.
+And, as has been heretofore remarked, he had for his official and his
+private lives two different modes of speech. As His Honor, presiding,
+his language was invariably grammatical and precise and as carefully
+accented as might be expected of a man whose people never had very much
+use anyway for the consonant "r." As William Pitman Priest, Esq.,
+citizen, taxpayer, and Confederate veteran he mishandled the king's
+English as though he had but small personal regard for the king or his
+English either.
+
+Similarly he always showed respect, outwardly at least, for the written
+letter of the statute as written and cited. But when it seemed to him
+that justice tempered with mercy stood in danger of being choked in a
+lawyer's loop of red tape he sheared through the entanglements with a
+promptitude which appealed more strongly, perhaps, to the lay mind than
+to the professional. And if, from the bench, he might not succor the
+deserving litigant or the penitent offender without violation to the
+given principles of the law, which, aiming ever for the greater good to
+the greater number, threatened present disaster for one deserving, he
+very often privily would busy himself in the matter. This, then, was why
+they had that saying about him.
+
+It largely was in a private capacity that Judge Priest figured in the
+various phases relating to the Millsap case, with which now we are about
+to deal. The beginning of this was the ending of Felix Millsap, but from
+its start to its finish he alone held the secrets of all its aspects.
+The best people in town, those who made up the old families, knew the
+daughter of this Felix Millsap; the people whose families were not so
+old perhaps, but by way of compensation more likely to be large ones,
+the common people, as the word goes, knew the father. The best people
+commiserated decorously with the daughter when her father was abruptly
+taken from this life; the others wondered what was going to become of
+his widow. For, you see, the daughter moved in very different circles
+from the one in which her parents moved. Their lines did not touch. But
+Judge Priest had the advantage on his side of moving at will in both
+circles. Indeed he moved in all circles without serious impairment to
+his social position in the community at large.
+
+Briefly, the case of her who had been Eleanor Millsap was the case of a
+child who, diligently climbing out of the environment of her childhood,
+has attained to heights where her parents may never hope to come, a
+common enough case here in flux and fluid America, and one which some
+will applaud and some will deplore, depending on how they view such
+matters; a daughter proclaiming by her attitude that she is ashamed of
+the sources of her origin; a father and a mother visibly proud of their
+offspring's successful rise, yet uncomplainingly accepting the roles to
+which she has assigned them--there you have this small family tragedy in
+forty words or less.
+
+When the Millsaps moved to our town their baby was in her second summer.
+With the passage of years the father and the mother came, as suitably
+mated couples often do, to look rather like each other. But then,
+probably there never had been a time when they, either in temperament or
+port, had appeared greatly unlike, seeing that both the pair were
+colorless, prosaic folk. So for Nature to mold them into a common
+pattern was merely a detail of time and patience. But their little
+Eleanor betrayed no resemblance to either in figure or face or
+personality. It was in this instance as though hereditary traits had
+been thwarted; as though two sober barnyard fowl had mated to bear a
+golden pheasant. They were secluded, shy, unimaginative; she was vivid
+and sprightly, with dash to her, and audacity.
+
+They lived in one of those small gloomy houses whose shutters always are
+closed and whose fronts always are blank; a house where the business of
+living seems to be carried on surreptitiously, almost by stealth. She,
+from the time she could walk alone, was actively abroad, a bright splash
+of color in the small oblong of shabby front yard. The father, Felix
+Millsap, was an odd-jobs woodworker. He made his living by undertakings
+too trivial for a contracting carpenter and joiner to bid on and too
+complicated for an amateur to attempt. The mother, Martha by name, took
+in plain sewing to help out. She had about her the air of the needle
+drudge, with shoulders bowed in and the pricked, scored fingers of a
+seamstress, and a permanent pucker at one corner of her mouth from
+holding pins there. The daughter showed trim, slender limbs and a bodily
+grace and a piquant face which generations of breeding and wealth so
+very often fail to fashion.
+
+When she graduated as the valedictorian of her class in the high school
+she cut a far better figure in the frock her mother had made for her
+than did any there on the stage at St. Clair Hall; she had a trick of
+wearing simple garments which gave them distinction. Already she had
+half a dozen sweethearts. Boys were drawn to her; girls she repelled
+rather. Girls found her too self-centered, too intent on attaining her
+own aims to give much heed to companionships. They called her selfish.
+Well, if selfishness is another name for a constant, bounding ambition
+to get on and up in the world Eleanor Millsap was selfish. But for the
+boys she had a tremendous attraction. They admired her quick, cruel wit,
+her energy, her good looks. She met her sweethearts on the street, at
+the soda fountain, in that trysting place for juvenile sweetheartings,
+the far corner of the post-office corridor.
+
+She never invited any of these youthful squires of hers to her house;
+they kept rendezvous with her at the corner below and they parted from
+her at the gate. They somehow gathered, without being told it in so many
+words, that she was ashamed of the poverty of her home, and, boylike,
+they felt a dumb sympathy for her that she should be denied what so many
+girls had. But for all her sidewalk flirtations, she kept herself aloof
+from any touch of scandal; the very openness of her gaddings protected
+her from that. Besides, she seemed instinctively to know that if she
+meant to make the best possible bargain for herself in life she must
+keep herself unblemished--must give of her charms but not give too
+freely. Town gossips might call her a forward piece, as they did;
+jealousy among girls of her own age might have it that she was flip and
+fresh; but no one, with truth, might brand her as fast.
+
+Having graduated with honors, she learned stenography--learned it
+thoroughly and well, as was her way with whatever she undertook--and
+presently found a place as secretary to Dallam Wybrant, the leading
+merchandise broker of the three in town. Now Dallam Wybrant was youngish
+and newly widowed--bereft but rallying fast from the grief of losing a
+wife who had been his senior by several years. Knowing people--persons
+who could look through a grindstone as far as the next one, and maybe
+farther--smiled with meaning when they considered the prospect. A
+good-looking, shrewd girl, always smart and trig and crisp, always with
+an eye open for the main chance, sitting hour by hour and day by day in
+the same office with a lonely, impressionable, conceited man--well,
+there was but one answer to it. But one answer to it there was. Nobody
+was very much surprised, although probably some mothers with
+marriageable daughters on their hands were wrung by pangs of envy, when
+Dallam Wybrant and Eleanor Millsap slipped away one day to Memphis and
+there were married.
+
+As Eleanor Millsap, self-reliant, self-sufficient and latterly
+self-supporting, the girl through the years had steadily been growing
+out of the domestic orbit which bounded the lives of her parents. As
+Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bride of an up-and-coming business man, with an
+assured social position and wealth--as our town measured wealth--in his
+own name she was now to pass entirely beyond their humble horizon and
+vanish out of their narrowed social ken. True enough, they kept right on
+living, all three of them, in the same town and indeed upon paralleling
+and adjacent streets; only the parents lived in their shabby little
+sealed-up coffin box of a house down at the poorer end of Yazoo Street;
+the daughter, in her handsome new stucco house, as formal and slick as a
+wedding cake, up at the aristocratic head of Chickasaw Drive. And yet to
+all intents and purposes they were as far apart, these two Millsaps and
+their only child, as though they abode in different countries. For she,
+mind you, had been taken up by the best people. But none of the best
+people had the least intention of taking up her father and mother as
+well. She probably was as far from expecting it or desiring it as any
+other could be. In fact a tale ran about that she served notice upon her
+parents that thereafter their lives were to run in different grooves.
+They were not to seek to see her without her permission; she did not
+mean to see them except when and where she chose, or if she chose--and
+she did not choose.
+
+One evening--it might have been about a year and a half after the
+marriage of his daughter--Felix Millsap was on his way home from work, a
+middle-aged figure, moving with the clunking gait of a tired laborer who
+wears cheap, heavy shoes, his broad splayed hands dangling at the ends
+of his arms as though in either of them he carried an invisible weight.
+It had been a hot day, and where he had been toiling on a roof shed
+which required reshingling the sun had blazed down upon him until it
+sucked his strength out of him, leaving him limp and draggy. He walked
+with his head down, indifferent in his sweated weariness to things about
+him. All the same, the motorman on the Belt Line car swinging out of
+Yazoo Street into Commercial should have sounded his gong for the
+turning. Therein lay his contributory negligence. Also, disinterested
+witnesses subsequently agreed that he took the curve at high speed. It
+was one of these witnesses who saw what was about to happen and cried
+out a vain warning even as the motorman ground on his brakes in a
+belated effort to avoid the inevitable. Felix Millsap was dead when they
+got him out from under the forward trucks. The doctors said he must have
+died instantly; probably he never knew what hit him.
+
+In all the short and simple annals of the poor nothing, usually, is
+shorter and simpler than the funeral of one of them. For the putting
+away underground of the odd-jobs man perhaps thirty persons of his own
+walk in life assembled, attesting their sympathies by their presence.
+But the daughter of the deceased neither attended the brief services at
+the place of his late residence nor rode to the cemetery to witness the
+burial. It was explained by the minister and by the undertaker to those
+who made inquiry that for good and sufficient reasons Mrs. Wybrant was
+not going anywhere at present. But she sent a great stiff set piece of
+flowers, an elaborate, inadequate thing with a wire back to it and a
+tin-foil footing, which sat alongside the black box during the service
+and afterwards was propped upright in the rank grass at the head of the
+grave. It was doubly conspicuous by reason of being the only example of
+what greenhouse men call floral offerings that graced the occasion. And
+she had written her mother a nice letter; the clergyman made this point
+plain to such as spoke to him regarding the absence of Mrs. Wybrant. He
+had seen the letter; that is to say, he had seen the envelope containing
+it. What the clergyman did not know was that to the letter the daughter
+had added a paragraph, underscored, suggesting the name of a leading
+firm of lawyers as suitable and competent to defend their interests--her
+mother's and her own--in an action for damages against the street-car
+company.
+
+However, as it developed, there was no need for the pressing of suit.
+The street-railway company, tacitly confessing fault on the part of one
+of its employees, preferred to compromise out of hand and so avoid the
+costs of litigation and the vexations of a trial. The sum paid in
+settlement was by order of the circuit court lodged in the hands of a
+special administrator, as temporary custodian of the estate of the late
+Felix Millsap, by him to be handed over to the heirs at law. So far as
+the special administrator was concerned, this would end his duties in
+the premises, seeing that other than this sum there was no property to
+be divided.
+
+The little house at the foot of Yazoo Street belonged to the widow. It
+had been deeded to her at the time of its purchase years and years
+before, and she had been a copartner in the undertaking of paying off
+the mortgage upon it by dribs and bitlets which represented hard work
+and the strictest economy. Naturally her husband had made no will.
+Probably it had never occurred to him that he would have any property to
+bequeath to anyone. But by virtue of his having died under a street car
+rather than in his bed he was worth more dead than ever, living, he had
+dreamed of being worth. He was worth eight thousand dollars in cash. So,
+as it turned out, he had left something other than a name for sober
+reliability and a reputation for paying his debts. And no doubt, in that
+bourn to which his spirit had been translated out of a battered body,
+his spirit rejoiced that the manner of his taking off had been as it
+was.
+
+But if the special administrator rested content in the thought that his
+share in the transaction practically would end with but few added
+details, his superior, the chief judicial officer of the district, felt
+called upon to take certain steps on his own initiative solely, and
+without consulting any person regarding the advisability of his action.
+It was characteristic of Judge Priest that he should move promptly in
+the matter. To a greater degree it also was characteristic of him that,
+setting out for a visit to one of no social account whatsoever, he
+should garb himself with more care than he might have shown had he been
+going to see one of those mighty ones who sit in the high places. In a
+suit of rumply but spotless white linen, and carrying in one hand his
+best tape-edged palm-leaf fan, he rather suggested a plump old mandarin
+as, on that same evening of the day when the street-railway company
+effected settlement, he knocked at the front door of the cottage of the
+Widow Millsap.
+
+She was in and she was alone. She was one of those women who always are
+in and nearly always are alone. Immediately, then, they sat in her front
+room, which was her best room. Her sewing machine was there, and her
+biggest oil lamp and her few small sticks of company furniture, her few
+scraps of parlor ornamentation; a bad picture or two, gaudily framed;
+china vases on a mantel-shelf; two golden-oak rockers, wearing on their
+slick and shiny frontlets the brand of an installment-house Cain who
+murdered beauty and yet failed in his designings to achieve comfort. It
+was as hot as a Dutch oven, that little box of a room inclosed within
+its thin-planked walls. It was not a place where one would care to
+linger longer than one had to. Judge Priest came swiftly to the heart of
+the business which had sent him thither.
+
+"Ma'am," he was saying, "this is a kind of a pussonal matter that's
+brought me down here this hot night, and with your consent I'll git
+right to the point of it. Ordinarily I'm a poor hand at diggin' into the
+business of other people. But seein' that I knowed your late lamented
+husband both ez a worthy citizen and ez an honest, hard-workin' man, and
+seein' that in my official capacity it has been incumbent upon me to
+issue certain orders in connection with your rights and claims arisin'
+out of his ontimely death, I have felt emboldened to interest myself,
+privately, in your case--and that's why I'm here now.
+
+"To-day at the cotehouse, when the settlement wuz formally agreed to by
+the legal representatives of both sides, an idea come to me. And that
+idea is this: Now there's eight thousand dollars due the heirs, you
+bein' one and your daughter, Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bein' the other. Half
+of eight thousand dollars wouldn't be so very much to help take keer of
+a person, no matter how keerful they wuz; but eight thousand dollars,
+put out at interest, would provide a livin' in a way fur one who lived
+simply, and more especially in the case of one who owned their own home
+and had it free from debt, ez I understand is the situation with
+reguards to you.
+
+"On the other hand, your daughter is well fixed. Her husband is a rich
+man, ez measured by the standards of our people. It's probable that
+she'll always be well and amply provided fur. Moreover, she's young, and
+you, ma'am, will some day come to the time when you won't be able to go
+on workin' with your hands ez you now do.
+
+"So things bein' thus and so, it seems to me that ef the suggestion was
+made to your daughter, Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, that she should waive her
+claim to her share of them eight thousand dollars and sign over her
+rights to you, thereby inshorin' you frum the fear of actual want in
+your declinin' years; and her, ez I have jest been statin', not needin'
+the money--well, it seems to me that she would jest naturally jump at
+the notion. So if you would go to her yourself with the suggestion, or
+git somebody in whose good sense and judgment you've got due confidence
+to go to her and her husband and lay the facts before them, I, fur one,
+knowin' a little somethin' of human nature, feel morally sure of the
+outcome. Why, I expect she'd welcome the idea; maybe she's already
+thinkin' of the same thing and wonderin' how, legally, it kin be done.
+And that, ma'am, is what brings me here to your residence to-night. And
+I trust you will appreciate the motive which has prompted me and furgive
+me if I, who's almost a stranger to you, seem to have meddled in your
+affairs without warrant or justification."
+
+He reared back in his chair, a plump hand upon either knee.
+
+Through this the widow had not spoken, or offered to speak. Now that he
+had finished, she answered him from the half shadow in which she sat on
+the farther side of the sewing machine upon which the lamp burned. There
+was no bitterness, he thought, in her words; merely a sense of
+resignation to and acceptance of a state of things not of her own
+contriving, and not, conceivably, to be of her own undoing.
+
+"Judge," she said, "perhaps you know by hearsay at least that since my
+daughter's marriage she has lived apart from us. Neither my husband nor
+I ever set foot in the house where she lives. It was her wish"--she
+caught herself here, and he, sensing that she was equivocating,
+nevertheless inwardly approved of the deceit--"I mean to say that it was
+not my wish to go among her friends, who are not my friends, or to
+embarrass her in any way. I am proud that in marrying she has done so
+well for herself. In thinking of her happiness I shall always try to
+find happiness for myself.
+
+"But, judge, you must know this too: She did not come to the--the
+funeral. Well, there was a cause for that; she had a reason. But--but
+she had not been here for months before that. She--oh, you might as well
+hear it if you are to understand--she has never once been here since she
+married!
+
+"And so, Judge Priest, I cannot go to her until I am sent for--not under
+any circumstances nor for any purpose. If she has her pride, I in my
+poor small way have my pride, too, my self-respect. When she needs
+me--if ever she does--I'll go to her wherever she may be if I have to
+crawl there on my hands and knees. What has gone before will all be
+forgotten. But don't you see, sir?--I can't go until she sends for me.
+And so, Judge Priest, while I thank you with all my heart for your
+thoughtfulness and your kindness, and while I'd be glad, too, if Ellie
+saw fit or could be made to see that it would be a fine thing to give me
+this money in the way you have suggested, I say to you again that I
+cannot be the one to go to her. I will not even write to her on the
+subject. That, with me, is final."
+
+"But, ma'am," he said, "ef somebody else went--some friend of yours and
+of hers--how about it then?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Her friends--now--are not my friends. My friends are not hers any more;
+most of them never were her friends. Besides, the idea did not originate
+with me. Either the proposition must come from her direct or it must be
+presented to her by some third party. And I can think of no third party
+of my choosing that she would care to hear. No, Judge Priest, I have
+nobody to send."
+
+"All right then," he stated, "since I set this here ball in motion I'll
+keep it rollin'. Ma'am, I'll take it on myself to speak to Mrs. Dallam
+Wybrant in your behalf."
+
+"But, Judge Priest," she protested, "I couldn't ask you to do that for
+me--I couldn't!"
+
+"Ma'am, you ain't asked me and you don't need to ask me. I'm askin'
+myself--I'm doin' this on my own hook, and ef you'll excuse me I'll
+start at it right away. When there's a thing which needs to be done ez
+bad ez this thing needs to be done, there oughtn't to be no time lost."
+He stood up and looked about him for his hat. "Ma'am, I confidently
+expect to be back here inside of half an hour, or an hour at most, with
+some good news fur you."
+
+To one who had traveled about more and seen the homes of wealthy
+folk--to a professional decorator, say, or an expert in furnishing
+values--the drawing-room into which Judge Priest presently was being
+ushered might have seemed overdone, overly cluttered up with drapery and
+adornment. But to Judge Priest's eye the room was all that a rich man's
+best room should be. The thick stucco walls cut out the heat of the
+night; an electric fan whirred upon him as he sat in a deep chair of
+puffed red damask. A mulatto girl in neat uniform--this uniform itself
+an astonishing innovation--had answered his ring at the door and had
+ushered him into this wonderful parlor and had taken his name and had
+gone up the broad stairs with the word that he desired to see the lady
+of the house for a few minutes upon important business. He had asked
+first for Mr. and Mrs. Dallam Wybrant; but Mr. Wybrant, it seemed, was
+out of town; Mrs. Wybrant, then, would do. The maid, having delivered
+the message, had returned to say her mistress would be down presently
+and the caller was to wait, please. Waiting, he had had opportunity to
+contrast the present settings with those he had just quitted. Perhaps
+the contrast between them appeared all the greater by reason of the
+freshness of his recollection of the physical surroundings at the scene
+of his first visit of that evening.
+
+She came down soon, wearing a loose, frilly, wrapperlike garment which
+hid her figure. Approaching maternity had not softened her face, had not
+given to it the glorified Madonna look. Rather it had drawn her features
+to haggardness and put in her eyes a look of sharpened apprehension as
+though dread of the nearing ordeal of suffering and danger overrode the
+hope which, along with the new life, was quick within her. She greeted
+Judge Priest with a matter-of-fact directness. Her expression plainly
+enough told him she was at a loss to account for his coming.
+
+"I'm sorry, sir," she said in her rather metallic fashion of speaking,
+"that Dallam isn't here. But he was called to St. Louis this morning on
+business. I hope you will pardon my receiving you in negligee. I'm not
+seeing much company at present. The maid, though, said the business was
+imperative."
+
+"Yes, ma'am, it is," answered Judge Priest, rather ceremoniously for
+him, "and I am grateful to you fur lettin' me see you and I don't aim to
+detain you very long. I kin tell you in a few words whut it is that has
+brought me."
+
+He was as good as his promise--he did tell her in a few words. Outlining
+his suggestion, he used much the same language which he had used once
+already that night. He did not tell her, though, he had come to her
+direct from her mother. He did not tell her he had been to her mother at
+all. It might have been inferred that his present hearer was the first
+to hear that which now he set forth.
+
+"Well, ma'am," he concluded, "that's the condition ez I view it. And if
+you likewise see your way clear to view it ez I do the whole thing kin
+be accomplished with the scratch of a pen. And you'll have the
+satisfaction of knowin' that through your act your mother will be well
+provided fur fur the rest of her life." He added a final argument, being
+moved thereto perhaps by the fact that she had heard him without change
+of expression and with no glance which might be interpreted as approval
+for his plan. "I take it, ma'am, that you do not need the money
+involved. You never will need it, the chances are. You are rich fur this
+town--your husband is, anyway."
+
+She replied then, and to the old man, harkening, it seemed that her
+words fell sharp and brittle like breaking icicles. One thing, though,
+might be said for her--she sought no roundabout course. She did not
+quibble or seek to enwrap the main issue in specious excuses or
+apologies for her position.
+
+"I decline to do it," she said. "I do not feel that I have the right to
+do it. I understand the motives which may have actuated you to interest
+yourself in this affair, but I tell you very frankly that I have no
+intention of surrendering my legal rights in the slightest degree. You
+say I do not need the money, but in the very same breath you go on to
+say the chances are that I shall never need it. So there you yourself
+practically admit there is a chance that some day I might need it.
+Besides, I do not rate my husband a rich man, though you may do so. He
+is well-to-do, nothing more. And his business is uncertain--all business
+is. He might lose every cent he has to-morrow in some bad investment or
+some poor speculation.
+
+"There is still another reason I think of: I have nothing--absolutely
+nothing--in my own name. It irks me to ask my husband, generous though
+he is, for every cent I use, to have to account to him for my personal
+expenditures. Before I married him I earned my own living and I paid my
+own way and learned to love the feeling of independence, the feeling of
+having a little money that was all my own. My share of this inheritance
+will provide me with a private fund, a fund upon which I may draw at
+will, or which I may put away for a possible rainy day, just as I
+choose."
+
+"But ma'am," he blurted, knowing full well he was beaten, yet inspired
+by a desperate, forlorn hope that some added plea from him might break
+through the shell of this steel-surfaced selfishness--"but, ma'am, do
+you stop to realize that it's your own mother who'd benefit by this
+sacrifice on your part? Do you stop to consider that if there's one
+person in all this world who's entitled--"
+
+"Pardon me, sir, for interrupting you," she said crisply, her tone icy
+and sharp, "but the one person who is entitled to most consideration at
+my hands has not actually come into the world yet. It is of that person
+that I must think. I had not meant to speak of this, but your insistence
+forces me to it. As you may guess, Judge Priest, I am about to become a
+mother myself. If my baby lives--and my baby is going to live--that
+money will belong to my child should anything happen to me. I must think
+of what lies ahead of me, not of what has gone before. My mother owns
+the home where she lives; she will have her half of this sum of money;
+she is, I believe, in good health; she is amply able to go on, as she
+has in the past, adding to her income with her needle. So much for my
+mother. As a mother myself it will be my duty, as I see it, to safeguard
+the future of my own child, and I mean to do it, regardless of
+everything else. That is all I have to say about it--that is, if I have
+made myself sufficiently plain to you, Judge Priest."
+
+"Madam," said he, and for once at least he dropped his lifelong
+affectation of ungrammatical speech and reverted to that more stately
+and proper English which he reserved for his judgments from the bench,
+"you have indeed made your position so clear by what you have just said
+that I feel there is nothing whatsoever to be added by either one of us.
+Madam, I have the pleasure to bid you good night."
+
+He clamped his floppy straw hat firmly down upon his head--a thing the
+old judge in all his life never before had done in the presence of a
+woman of his race--and he turned the broad of his back upon her; and if
+a man whose natural gait was a waddle could be said to stride, then be
+it stated that Judge Priest strode out of that room and out of that
+house. Had he looked back before he reached the door he would have seen
+that she sat in her chair, huddled in her silken garments, on her face a
+half smile of tolerant contempt for his choler and in her eye a light
+playing like winter sunlight on frozen water; would have seen that about
+her there was no suggestion whatsoever that she was ruffled or upset or
+in the least regretful of the course she had elected to follow. But
+Judge Priest did not look back. He was too busy striding.
+
+Perhaps it was the heat or perhaps it was inability long to maintain a
+gait so forced, but the volunteer emissary ceased to stride long before
+he had traversed the three-quarters of a mile--and yet, when one came to
+think it over, a span as wide as a continent--which lay between the
+restricted, not to say exclusive, head of Chickasaw Drive and the
+shabby, not to say miscellaneous, foot of Yazoo Street. It was a very
+wilted, very lag-footed, very droopy old gentleman who, come another
+half hour or less, let himself drop with an audible thump into a
+golden-oak rocker alongside the Widow Millsap's sewing machine.
+
+"Ma'am," he had confessed, without preamble, as he entered her house,
+she holding the door open for his passage, "I come back to you licked.
+Your daughter absolutely declines even to consider the proposition I put
+before her. As a plenipotentiary extraordinary I admit I'm a teetotal
+failure. I return to you empty-handed--and licked."
+
+To this she had said nothing. She had waited until he was seated; then
+as she seated herself in her former place, with the lamp between them,
+she asked quietly, almost listlessly, "My daughter saw you then?"
+
+"She did, ma'am, she did. And she refused point-blank!"
+
+"I am sorry, Judge Priest--sorry that you should have been put to so
+much trouble needlessly," she said, still holding her voice at that
+emotionless level. "I am sorry, sir, for your sake; but it is no more
+than I expected. I let you go to her against my better judgment. I
+should have known that your errand would be useless. Knowing Ellie, I
+should have known better than to send you."
+
+He snorted.
+
+"Ma'am, when a little while ago, settin' right here, I told you I
+thought I knowed a little something about human nature I boasted too
+soon. Sech a thing ez this thing which has happened to-night is
+brand-new in my experience. You will excuse my sayin' so, but I kin not
+fathom the workin's of a mind that would--that would--" He floundered
+for words in his indignation. "It is not natural, this here thing I have
+just seen and heard. How your own flesh and blood could--"
+
+"Judge Priest," she said steadily, "it is not my own flesh and blood
+that you accuse. That is my consolation now. For I know the stock that
+is in me. I know the stock that was in my husband. My own flesh and
+blood could never treat me so."
+
+He stared at her, his forehead twisted in a perplexed frown.
+
+"I mean to say just this," she went on: "Ellie is not my own child. She
+has not a drop of my blood or my husband's blood in her. Judge Priest, I
+am about to tell you something which not another soul in this town
+excepting me--now that my husband is gone--has ever known. We never had
+any children, Felix and I. Always we wanted children, but none came to
+us. Nearly twenty-three years ago it is now, we had for a neighbor a
+young woman whose husband had deserted her--had run away with another
+woman, leaving her without a cent, in failing health and with a
+six-month-old girl baby. That was less than two years before we came to
+this town. We lived then in a little town called Calais, on the Eastern
+Shore of Maryland.
+
+"Three months after the husband ran away the wife died. I guess it was
+shame and a broken heart more than anything else that killed her. She
+had not a soul in the world to whom she could turn for help when she was
+dying. We two did what we could for her. We didn't have much--we never
+have had much all through our lives--but what we had we divided with
+her. We were literally the only friends she had in this world. At the
+last we took turns nursing her, my husband and I did. When she was dying
+she put her baby in my arms and asked me to take her and to care for
+her. That was what I had been praying all along that she would do, and I
+was glad and I gave her my promise and she lay back on the pillow and
+died.
+
+"Well, she was buried and we took the child and cared for her. We came
+to love her as though she had been our own; we always loved her as
+though she had been our own. Less than a year after the mother
+died--that was when Ellie was about eighteen months old--we brought her
+with us out here to this town. Her baptismal name was Eleanor, which had
+been her mother's name--Eleanor Major. The father who ran away was named
+Richard Major. We went on calling her Eleanor, but as our child she
+became Eleanor Millsap. She has never suspected--she has never for one
+moment dreamed that she was not our own. After she grew up and showed
+indifference to us, and especially after she had married and began to
+behave toward us in a way which has caused her, I expect, to be
+criticized by some people, we still nursed that secret and it gave us
+comfort. For we knew, both of us, that it was the alien blood in her
+that made her turn her back upon us. We knew the reason, if no one else
+did, for she was not our own flesh and blood. Our own could never have
+served us so. And to-night I know better than ever before, and it
+lessens my sense of disappointment and distress.
+
+"Judge Priest, perhaps you will not understand me, but the mother
+instinct is a curious thing. Through these last few years of my life I
+have felt as though there were two women inside of me. One of these
+women grieved because her child had denied her. The other of these women
+was reconciled because she could see reflected in the actions of that
+child the traits of a breed of strangers. And yet both these women can
+still find it in them to forgive her for all that she has done and all
+that she may ever do. That's motherhood, I suppose."
+
+"Yes, ma'am," he said slowly, "I reckin you're right--that's
+motherhood." He tugged at his tab of white chin whisker, and his
+puckered old eyes behind their glasses were shadowed with a deep
+compassion. Then with a jerk he sat erect.
+
+"I take it that you adopted the child legally?" he said, seeking to make
+his tone casual.
+
+"We took her just as I told you," she answered. "We always treated her
+as though she had been ours. She never knew any difference."
+
+"Yes, ma'am, quite so. You've made that clear enough. But by law, before
+you left Maryland, you gave her your name, I suppose? You went through
+the legal form of law of adoptin' her, didn't you?"
+
+"No, sir, we didn't do that. It didn't seem necessary--it never occurred
+to us to do it. Her mother was dead and her father was gone nobody knew
+where. He had abandoned her, had shown he didn't care what might become
+of her. And her mother on her deathbed had given her to me. Wasn't that
+sufficient?"
+
+Apparently he had not heard her question. Instead of answering it he put
+one of his own:
+
+"Do you reckin now, ma'am, by any chance that there are any people still
+livin' back there in that town of Calais--old neighbors of yours, or
+kinfolks maybe--who'd remember the circumstances in reguard to your
+havin' took this baby in the manner which you have described?"
+
+"Yes, sir; two at least that I know of are still living. One is my half
+sister. I haven't seen her in twenty-odd years, but I hear from her
+regularly. And another is a man who boarded with us at the time. He was
+young then and very poor, but he has become well-to-do since. He lives
+in Baltimore now; is prominent there in politics. Occasionally I see his
+name in the paper. He has been to Congress and he ran for senator once.
+And there may be still others if I could think of them."
+
+"Never mind the others; the two you've named will be sufficient. Whut
+did you say their names were, ma'am?"
+
+She told him. He repeated them after her as though striving to fix them
+in his memory.
+
+"Ah-hah," he said. "Ma'am, have you got some writin' material handy? Any
+blank paper will do--and a pen and ink?"
+
+From a little stand in a corner she brought him what he required, and
+wonderingly but in silence watched him as he put down perhaps a dozen
+close-written lines. She bided until he had concluded his task and read
+through the script, making a change here and there. Then all at once
+some confused sense of realization of his new purpose came to her. She
+stood up and took a step forward and laid one apprehensive hand upon the
+paper as though to stay him.
+
+"Judge Priest," she said, "what have you written down here? And what do
+you mean to do with what you have written?"
+
+"Whut I have written here is a short statement--a memorandum, really, of
+whut you have been tellin' me, ma'am," he explained. "I'll have it
+written out more fully in the form of an affidavit, and then to-morrow I
+want you to sign it either here or at my office in the presence of
+witnesses."
+
+"But is it necessary?" she demurred. "I'm ignorant of the law, and you
+spoke just now of my failure to adopt Ellie by law. But if at this late
+date I must do it, can't it be done privately, in secret, so that
+neither Ellie nor anyone else will ever know?"
+
+"Ellie will have to know, I reckin," he stated grimly, "and other folks
+will know too. But this here paper has nothin' to do with any sech
+proceedin' ez you imagine. It's too late now fur you legally to adopt
+Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, even though any person should suggest sech a thing,
+and I, fur my part, don't see how any right-thinkin' person could or
+would do so. She's a free agent, of full age, and she's a married woman.
+No, ma'am, she has no legal claim on you and to my way of thinkin' she
+has no moral claim on you neither. She's not your child, a fact which
+I'm shore kin mighty easy be proved ef anyone should feel inclined to
+doubt your word. She ain't your legal heir. She ain't got a leg--excuse
+me, ma'am--she ain't got a prop to stand on. I thought Ellie had us
+licked. Instid it would seem that we've got Ellie licked."
+
+He broke off, checked in his exultant flight by the look upon her face.
+Her fingers turned inward, the blunted nails scratching at the sheet of
+paper as though she would tear it from him.
+
+"No, no, no!" she cried. "I won't do that! I can't do that! You mustn't
+ask me to do that, judge!"
+
+"But, ma'am, don't you git my meanin' yit? Don't you realize that not a
+penny of this eight thousand dollars belongs to Mrs. Dallam Wybrant?
+That she has no claim upon any part of it? That it's all yours and that
+you're goin' to have it all for yourself--every last red cent of
+it--jest ez soon ez the proof kin be filed and the order made by me in
+court?"
+
+"I'm not thinking of that," she declared. "It's Ellie I think of. Her
+happiness means more to me than a million dollars would. What I have
+told you was in confidence, and, judge, you must treat it so. I beg you,
+I demand it of you. You must promise me not to go any further in this.
+You must promise me not to tell a living soul what I have told you
+to-night. I won't sign any affidavit. I won't sign anything. I won't do
+anything to humiliate her. Don't you see, Judge Priest--oh, don't you
+see? She feels shame already because she thinks she was humbly born.
+She would be more deeply ashamed than ever if she knew how humbly she
+really was born--knew that her father was a scoundrel and her mother
+died a pauper and was buried in a potter's field; that the name she has
+borne is not her own name; that she has eaten the bread of charity
+through the most of her life. No, Judge Priest, I tell you no, a
+thousand times no. She doesn't know. Through me she shall never know. I
+would die to spare her suffering--die to spare her humiliation or
+disgrace. Before God's eyes I am her mother, and it is her mother who
+tells you no, not that, not that!"
+
+He got upon his feet too. He crumpled the paper into a ball and thrust
+it out of sight as though it had been a thing abominable and unclean. He
+took no note that in wadding the sheet he had overturned the inkwell and
+a stream from it was trickling down his trouser legs, marking them with
+long black zebra streaks. He looked at her, she standing there, a
+stooped and meager shape in her scant, ill-fitting gown of sleazy black,
+yet seeming to him an embodiment of all the beatitudes and all the
+beauties of this mortal world.
+
+"Ma'am," he said, "your wishes shall be respected. It shall be ez you
+say. My lawyer's sense tells me that you are wrong--foolishly, blindly
+wrong. But my memory of my own mother tells me that you are right, and
+that no mother's son has got the right to question you or try to
+persuade you to do anything different. Ma'am, I'd count it an honor to
+be able to call myself your friend."
+
+Already, within the hour, Judge Priest had broken two constant rules of
+his daily conduct. Now, involuntarily, without forethought on his part,
+he was about to break another. This would seem to have been a night for
+the smashing of habits by our circuit judge. For she put out to him her
+hand--a most unlovely hand, all wrinkled at the back where dimples might
+once have been and corded with big blue veins and stained and shriveled
+and needle scarred. And he took her hand in his fat, pudgy, awkward one,
+and then he did this thing which never before in all his days he had
+done, this thing which never before he had dreamed of doing. Really,
+there is no accounting for it at all unless we figure that somewhere far
+back in Judge Priest's ancestry there were Celtic gallants, versed in
+the small sweet tricks of gallantry. He bent his head and he kissed her
+hand with a grace for which a Tom Moore or a Raleigh might have envied
+him.
+
+
+Let us now for a briefened space cast up in a preliminary way the tally
+on behalf of the whimsical devils of circumstance and the part they are
+to play in the culminating and concluding periods of this narrative. On
+the noon train of the day following the night when that occurred which
+has been set forth in the foregoing pages, Judge Priest, in the company
+of Doctor Lake and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of King's Hell Hounds,
+C.S.A., departs for Reelfoot Lake upon his annual fishing trip. In the
+afternoon Jeff Poindexter, the judge's body servant, going through his
+master's wardrobe seeking articles suitable for his own adornment in the
+master's absence, is pained to discern stripings of spilled ink down the
+legs of a pair of otherwise unmarred white trousers, and, having no
+intention that garments which will one day come into his permanent
+possession shall be thus disfigured and sullied, promptly bundles them
+up and bears them to the cleansing, pressing and repairing establishment
+of one Hyman Pedaloski. The coat which matches the trousers goes along
+too. Upon the underside of one of its sleeves there is a big ink blob.
+Include in the equation this _emigre_, Hyman Pedaloski, newly landed
+from Courland and knowing as yet but little of English, whether written
+or spoken, yet destined to advance by progressive stages until a day
+comes when we proudly shall hail him as our most fashionable merchant
+prince--Hy Clay Pedaloski, the Square Deal Clothier, Also Hats, Caps &
+Leather Goods. Include as a factor Hyman by all means, for lacking him
+our chain of chancy coincidence would lack a most vital link.
+
+At Reelfoot Lake many black bass, bronze-backed and big-mouthed, meet
+the happy fate which all true anglers wish for them; and the white
+perch do bite with a whole-souled enthusiasm only equaled by the
+whole-souled enthusiasm with which also the mosquitoes bite. This brings
+us to the end of the week and to the fifth day of the expedition, with
+Judge Priest at rest at the close of a satisfactory day's sports,
+exhaling scents of the oil of penny-royal. Sitting-there under a tent
+fly, all sun blistered and skeeter stung, all tired out but most
+content, he picks up a two-day-old copy of the _Daily Evening News_
+which the darky boatman has just brought over to camp from the post
+office at Walnut Log, and he opens it at the department headed Local
+Laconics, and halfway down the first column his eye falls upon a
+paragraph at sight of which he gives so deep a snort that Doctor Lake
+swings about from where he is shaving before a hand mirror hung on a
+tree limb and wants to know whether the judge has happened upon
+disagreeable tidings. What the judge has read is a small item in this
+wise, namely:
+
+
+     Born last evening to Mr. and Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, at their palatial
+     mansion on Chickasaw Drive, in the new Beechmont Park Realty
+     Development tract, an infant daughter, their first-born. Mother and
+     child both doing well; the proud papa reported this morning as
+     being practically out of danger and is expected to be entirely
+     recovered shortly, as Dock Boyd, the attending medico, says he has
+     brought three hundred babies into the world and never lost a father
+     yet. Ye editor extends heartiest congrats. Dal, it looks like the
+     cigars were on you!
+
+
+The next chapter in the sequence of chapters leading to our climax is
+short but essential. Returning home Sunday evening, Judge Priest is
+informed that twice that day a strange young white lady has stopped at
+the house urgently requesting that immediately upon his arrival he be so
+good as to call on Mrs. Dallam Wybrant on a matter of pressing moment.
+Bidden to describe the messenger, Jeff Poindexter can only say that she
+'uz a powerful masterful-lookin' Yankee-talkin' lady, all dressed up lak
+she mout belong to some kind of a new secret s'ciety lodge, which is
+Jeff's way of summing up his impressions of the first professional
+trained nurse ever imported, capped, caped and white shod, to our town.
+
+It was this same professional, a cool and starchy vision, who led the
+way up the wide stairs of the Chickasaw Drive house, the old judge, much
+mystified, following close behind her. She ushered him into a bedroom,
+bigger and more gorgeous than any bedroom he had ever seen, and leaving
+him standing, hat in hand, at the bedside of her chief charge, she went
+out and closed the door behind her.
+
+From the pillows there looked up at him a face that was paler than when
+he had last seen it, a face still drawn from pangs of agony recently
+endured, but a face transfigured and radiant. The Madonna look was in it
+now. Outside, the dusk of an August evening was thickening; and inside,
+the curtains were half drawn and the electrics not yet turned on, but
+even so, in that half light, the judge could mark the change here
+revealed to him. He could sense, too, that the change was more spiritual
+than physical, and he could feel his animosity for this woman softening
+into something distantly akin to sympathy. At her left side, harbored in
+the crook of her elbow, lay a cuddling bundle; a tiny head, all red and
+bare, as though offering to Judge Priest's own bald, pinkish pate the
+sincere flattery of imitation, was exposed; and the tip of a very small
+ear, curled and crinkled like a sea shell. You take the combination of a
+young mother cradling her first-born within the hollow of her arm and
+you have the combination which has tautened the heartstrings of man
+since the first man child came from the womb. The old man made a silent
+obeisance of reverence; then waited for her to speak and expose the
+purpose behind this totally unexpected summons.
+
+"Judge Priest," she said, "I have been lying here all day hoping you
+would come before night. I have been wishing for you to come ever since
+I came out from under the ether. Thank you for coming."
+
+"Ma'am, I started fur here ez soon ez I got your word," he said. "In
+whut way kin I be of service to you? I'm at your command."
+
+She slid her free hand beneath the pillow on which her head rested and
+brought forth a crinkled sheet of paper and held it out to him.
+
+"Didn't you write this?" she asked.
+
+He took it and looked at it, and a great astonishment and a great
+chagrin screwed his eyes and slackened his lower jaw.
+
+"Yes, ma'am," he admitted, "I wrote it. But it wuzn't meant fur you to
+see. It wuzn't meant fur anybody a-tall to see--ever. And I'm wonderin',
+ma'am, and waitin' fur you to tell me how come it to reach you."
+
+"I'll tell you," she answered. "But first, before we get to that, would
+you mind telling me how you came to write it, and when, and all? I think
+I can guess. I think I have already pieced the thing together for
+myself. Women can't reason much, you know; but they have intuition." She
+smiled a little at this conceit. "And I want to know if my deductions
+and my conclusions are correct."
+
+"Well, ma'am," he said, "ez I wuz sayin', no human eye wuz to have read
+this here. But since you have read it, I feel it's my bounden duty, in
+common justice to another, to tell you the straight of it, even though
+in doin' so I'm breakin' a solemn pledge."
+
+So he told her--the how and the why and the where and the when of it;
+details of which the reader is aware.
+
+"I thought I wasn't very far wrong, and I wasn't," she said when he had
+finished his confession. She was quiet for a minute, her eyes fixed on
+the farther wall. Then: "Judge Priest, unwittingly, it seems, you have
+been the god of the machine. I wonder if you'd be willing to continue
+to serve?"
+
+"Ef it lies within my powers to do so--yessum, and gladly."
+
+"It does lie within your power. I want you to have the necessary papers
+drawn up which will signalize my giving over to my mother my share of
+that money which the railway paid two weeks ago, and then if you will
+send them to me I will sign them. I want this done at once, please--as
+soon as possible."
+
+"Ma'am," he said, "it shall be as you desire; but ef it's all the same
+to you I'd like to write out that there paper with my own hand. I kin
+think of no act of mine, official or private, in my whole lifetime which
+would give me more honest pleasure. I'll do so before I leave this
+house." He did not tell her that by the letter of the law she would be
+giving away what by law was not hers to give. He would do nothing to
+spoil for her the sweet savor of her surrender. Instead he put a
+question: "It would appear that you have changed your mind about this
+here matter since I seen you last?"
+
+"It was changed for me," she said. "This paper helped to change it for
+me; and you, too, helped without your knowledge; and one other, and most
+of all my baby here, helped to change it for me. Judge Priest, since my
+baby came to me my whole view of life seems somehow to have been
+altered. I've been lying here to-day with her beside me, thinking
+things out. Suppose I should be taken from her, and suppose her father
+should be taken, too, and she should be left, as I was, to the mercy of
+the world and the charity of strangers. Suppose she should grow up, as I
+did--although until I read that paper I didn't know it--beholden to the
+goodness and the devotion and the love of one who was not her real
+mother. Wouldn't she owe to that other woman more than she could have
+owed to me, her own mother, had I been spared to rear her? I think
+so--no, I know it is so. Every instinct of motherhood in me tells me it
+is so."
+
+"Lady," he answered, "to a mere man woman always will be an everlastin'
+puzzle and a riddle; but even a man kin appreciate, in a poor, faint
+way, the depths of mother love. It's ez though he looked through a break
+in the clouds and ketched a vision of the glories of heaven. But you
+ain't told me yit how you come to be in possession of this here sheet of
+note paper."
+
+"Oh, that's right! I had forgotten," she answered. "Try to think now,
+judge--when my mother refused to let you go farther with your plan that
+night at her house, what did you do with the paper?"
+
+"I shoved it out of sight quick ez ever I could. I recall that much
+anyway."
+
+"Did you by any chance put it in your pocket?"
+
+"Well, by Nathan Bedford Forrest!" he exclaimed. "I believe that's
+purzackly the very identical thing I did do. And bein' a careless old
+fool, I left it there instid of tearin' it up or burnin' it, and then I
+went on home and plum' furgot it wuz still there--not that I now regret
+havin' done so, seein' whut to-night's outcome is."
+
+"And did your servant, after you were gone, send the suit you had worn
+that night downtown to be cleaned or repaired? Or do you know about
+that?"
+
+"I suspicion that he done that very thing," he said, a light beginning
+to break in upon him. "Jeff is purty particular about keepin' my clothes
+in fust-rate order. He aims fur them to be in good condition when he
+decides it's time to confiscate 'em away frum me and start in wearin'
+'em himself. Yessum, my Jeff's mighty funny that way. And now, come to
+think of it, I do seem to reckerlect that I spilt a lot of ink on 'em
+that same night."
+
+"Well, then, the mystery is no mystery at all," she said. "On that very
+same day--the day your darky sent your clothes to the cleaner's--I had
+two of Dallam's suits sent down to be pressed. That little man at the
+tailor shop--Pedaloski--found this paper crumpled up in your pocket and
+took it out and then later forgot where he had found it. So, as I
+understand, he tried to read it, seeking for a clue to its ownership. He
+can't read much English, you know, so probably he has had no idea then
+or thereafter of the meaning of it; but he did know enough English to
+make out the name of Wybrant. Look at it and you'll see my name occurs
+twice in it, but your name does not occur at all. So don't you see what
+happened--what he did? Thinking the paper must have come from one of my
+husband's pockets, he smoothed it out as well as he could and folded it
+up and pinned it to the sleeve of Dallam's blue serge and sent it here.
+My maid found it when she was undoing the bundle before hanging up the
+clothes in Dallam's closet, and she brought it to me, thinking, I
+suppose, it was a bill from the cleaner's shop, and I read it. Simple
+enough explanation, isn't it, when you know the facts?"
+
+"Simple," he agreed, "and yit at the same time sort of wonderful too.
+And whut did you do when you read it?"
+
+"I was stunned at first. I tried at first not to believe it. But I
+couldn't deceive myself. Something inside of me told me that it was
+true--every word of it. I suppose it was the woman in me that told me.
+And somehow I knew that you had written it, although really that part
+was not so very hard a thing to figure out, considering everything. And
+somehow--I can't tell you why though--I was morally sure that after you
+had written it some other person had forbidden your making use of it in
+any way, and instinctively--anyhow, I suppose you might say it was by
+instinct--I knew that it had reached me, of all persons, by accident and
+not by design.
+
+"I tried to reach you--you were gone away. But I did reach that funny
+little man Pedaloski by telephone, and found out from him why he had
+pinned the paper on Dallam's coat. I did not tell my husband about it.
+He doesn't know yet. I don't think I shall ever tell him. For two days,
+judge, I wrestled with the problem of whether I should send for my
+mother and tell her that now I knew the thing which all her life she had
+guarded from me. Finally I decided to wait and see you first, and try to
+find out from you the exact circumstances under which the paper was
+written, and the reason why, after writing it, you crumpled it up and
+hid it away.
+
+"And then--and then my baby came, and since she came my scheme of life
+seems all made over. And oh, Judge Priest"--she reached forth a white,
+weak hand and caught at his--"I have you and my baby and--yes, that
+little man to thank that my eyes have been opened and that my heart has
+melted in me and that my soul has been purged from a terrible selfish
+deed of cruelty and ingratitude. And one thing more I want you to know:
+I'm not really sorry that I was born as I was. I'm glad, because--well,
+I'm just glad, that's all. And I suppose that, too, is the woman in me."
+
+One given to sonorous and orotund phrases would doubtless have coined a
+most splendid speech here. But all the old judge, gently patting her
+hand, said was:
+
+"Well, now, ma'am, that's powerful fine--the way it's all turned out.
+And I'm glad I had a blunderin' hand in it to help bring it about. I
+shorely am, ma'am. I'd like to keep on havin' a hand in it. I wonder now
+ef you wouldn't like fur me to be the one to go right now and fetch your
+mother here to you?"
+
+She shook her head, smiling.
+
+"Thank you, judge, that's not necessary. She's here now. She was here
+when the baby came. I sent for her. She's in her room right down the
+hall; it'll be her room always from now on. I expect she's sewing on
+things for the baby; we can't make her stop it. She's terribly jealous
+of Miss McAlpin--that's the trained nurse Dallam brought back with him
+from St. Louis--but Miss McAlpin will be going soon, and then she'll be
+in sole charge. She doesn't know, Judge Priest, that what she told to
+you I now know. She never shall know if I can prevent it, and I know
+you'll help me guard our secret from her."
+
+"I reckin you may safely count on me there, ma'am," he promised. "I've
+frequently been told by disinterested parties that I snore purty loud
+sometimes, but I don't believe anybody yit caught me talkin' in my
+sleep. And now I expect you're sort of tired out. So ef you'll excuse
+me I'll jest slip downstairs, and before I go do that there little piece
+of writin' we spoke about a while ago."
+
+"Wouldn't you like to see my baby before you go?" she asked. Her left
+hand felt for the white folds which half swaddled the tiny sleeper.
+"Judge Priest, let me introduce you to little Miss Martha Millsap
+Wybrant, named for her grandmammy."
+
+"Pleased to meet you, young lady," said he, bowing low and elaborately.
+"At your early age, honey, it's easier fur a man, to understand you than
+ever it will be agin after you start growin' up. Pleased indeed to meet
+you."
+
+
+If memory serves him aright, this chronicler of sundry small happenings
+in the life and times of the Honorable William Pitman Priest has more
+than once heretofore commented upon the fact that among our circuit
+judge's idiosyncrasies was his trick, when deeply moved, of talking to
+himself. This night as he went slowly homeward through the soft and
+velvety cool of the summer darkness he freely indulged himself in this
+habit. Oddly enough, he punctuated his periods, as it were, with
+lamp-posts. When he reached a street light he would speak musingly to
+himself, then fall silent until he had trudged along to the next light.
+Something after this fashion:
+
+Corner of Chickasaw Drive and Exall Boulevard:
+
+"Well, sir, the older I git the more convinced I am that jest about the
+time a man decides he knows a little something about human nature it's a
+shore sign he don't know nothin' a-tall about it, 'specially human
+nature ez it applies to the female of the species. Now, f'rinstance, you
+take this here present instance: A woman turns aginst the woman she
+thinks is her own mother. Then she finds out the other woman ain't her
+own mother a-tall, and she swings right back round agin and--well, it's
+got me stumped. Now ef in her place it had 'a' been a man. But a
+woman--oh, shuckin's, whut's the use?"
+
+Corner of Chickasaw Drive and Sycamore Avenue:
+
+"Still, of course we've got to figger the baby as a prime factor
+enterin' into the case and helpin' to straighten things out. Spry little
+trick fur three days old, goin' on four, wuzn't she? Ought to be purty,
+too, when she gits herself some hair and a few teeth and plumps out so's
+she taken up the slack of them million wrinkles, more or less, that
+she's got now. Babies, now--great institutions anyway you take 'em."
+
+Corner of Sycamore Avenue, turning into Clay Street:
+
+"And still, dog-gone it, you'll find folks in this world so blind that
+they'll tell you destiny or fate, or whutever you want to call it, jest
+goes along doin' things by haphazard without no workin' plans and no
+fixed designs. But me, I'm different--me. I regard the scheme of
+creation ez a hell of a success. Look at this affair fur a minute. I go
+meddlin' along like an officious, absent-minded idiot, which I am, and
+jest when it looks like nothin' is goin' to result frum my interference
+but fresh heartaches fur one of the noblest souls that ever lived on
+this here footstool, why the firm of Providence, Pedaloski and
+Poindexter steps in, and bang, there you are! It wouldn't happen agin
+probably in a thousand years, but it shore happened this oncet, I'll
+tell the world. Let's see, now, how does that there line in the hymn
+book run?--'moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.' Ain't it
+the truth?"
+
+Last street lamp on Clay Street before you come to Judge Priest's house:
+
+"And they call 'em the opposite sex! I claim the feller that fust coined
+that there line wuz a powerful conservative pusson. Opposite? Huh!
+Listen here to me: They're so dad-gum opposite they're plum'
+cater-cornered!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A SHORT NATURAL HISTORY
+
+
+If ever a person might be said to have dedicated his being to the
+pursuit of leisure, that selfsame was Red Hoss Shackleford, of color,
+and highly so. He was one who specialized in the deft and fine high art
+of doing nothing at all. With him leisure was at once a calling to be
+followed regularly and an ideal to be fostered. But also he loved to
+eat, and he had a fancy for wearing gladsome gearings, and these
+cravings occasionally interfered with the practice of his favorite
+vocation. In order that he might enjoy long periods of manual inactivity
+it devolved upon him at intervals to devote his reluctant energies to
+gainful labor. When driven to it by necessity, which is said to be the
+mother of invention and which certainly is the full sister to appetite,
+Red Hoss worked. He just naturally had to--sometimes.
+
+You see, in the matter of being maintained vicariously he was less
+fortunately circumstanced than so many of his fellows in our town were,
+and still are. He had no ministering parent doing cookery for the white
+folks, and by night, in accordance with a time-hallowed custom with
+which no sane housekeeper dared meddle, bringing home under a dolman
+cape loaded tin buckets and filled wicker baskets. Ginger Dismukes,
+now--to cite a conspicuous example--was one thus favored by the
+indulgent fates.
+
+Aunt Ca'line Dismukes, mother of the above, was as honest as the day was
+long; but when the evening of that day came, such trifles, say, as part
+of a ham or a few left-over slices of cake fell to her as a legitimate
+if unadvertised salvage. Every time the quality in the big house had
+white meat for their dinner, Ginger, down the alley, enjoyed drumsticks
+and warmed-up stuffing for his late supper. He might be like the
+tapeworm in that he rarely knew in advance what he would have to eat,
+but still, like the tapeworm, he gratefully absorbed what was put before
+him and asked no questions of the benefactor. Without prior effort on
+his part he was fed even as the Prophet Elijah was fed by the ravens of
+old. This simile would acquire added strength if you'd ever seen Aunt
+Ca'line, her complexion being a crow's-wing sable.
+
+Red Hoss had no dependable helpmate, such as Luther Maydew had, with a
+neatly lettered sign in her front window: GOING-OUT WASHING TAKEN IN
+HERE. Luther's wife was Luther's only visible means of support, yet
+Luther waxed fat and shiny and larded the earth when he walked abroad.
+Neither had Red Hoss an indulgent and generous patron such as Judge
+Priest's Jeff--Jeff Poindexter--boasted in the person of his master.
+Neither was he gifted in the manipulation of the freckled bones as the
+late Smooth Crumbaugh had been; nor yet possessed he the skill of shadow
+boxing as that semiprofessional pugilist, Con Lake, possessed it. Con
+could lick any shadow that ever lived, and the punching bag that could
+stand up before his onslaughts was not manufactured yet; wherefore he
+figured in exhibition bouts and boxing benefits, and between these lived
+soft and easy. He enjoyed no such sinecure as fell to the lot of Uncle
+Zack Matthews, who waited on the white gentlemen's poker game at the
+Richland House, thereby harvesting many tips and whose otherwise nimble
+mind became a perfect blank twice a year when he was summoned before the
+grand jury.
+
+Red Hoss did, indeed, have a sister, but the relations between them were
+strained since the day when Red Hoss' funeral obsequies had been
+inopportunely interrupted by the sudden advent among the mourners of the
+supposedly deceased, returning drippingly from the river which
+presumably had engulfed him. His unexpected and embarrassing
+reappearance had practically spoiled the service for his chief relative.
+She never had forgiven Red Hoss for his failure to stay dead, and he
+long since had ceased to look for free pone bread and poke chops in that
+quarter.
+
+So when he had need to eat, or when his wardrobe required replenishing,
+he worked at odd jobs; but not oftener. Ordinarily speaking, his heart
+was not in it at all. But at the time when this narrative begins his
+heart was in it. One speaks figuratively here in order likewise to speak
+literally. A romantic enterprise carried on by Red Hoss Shackleford
+through a period of months promised now a delectable climax. As between
+him and one Melissa Grider an engagement to join themselves together in
+the bonds of matrimony had been arranged.
+
+Before he fell under Melissa's spell Red Hoss had been regarded as one
+of the confirmed bachelors of the Plunkett's Hill younger set. He had
+never noticeably favored marriage and giving in marriage--especially
+giving himself in marriage. It may have been--indeed the forked tongue
+of gossip so had it--that the fervor of Red Hoss' courting, when once he
+did turn suitor, had been influenced by the fortuitous fact that Melissa
+ran as chambermaid on the steamboat _Jessie B._ The fact outstanding,
+though, was that Red Hoss, having ardently wooed, seemed now about to
+win.
+
+But Melissa, that comely and comfortable person, remained practical even
+when most loving. The grandeur of Red Hoss' dress-up clothes may have
+entranced her, and certainly his conversational brilliancy was
+altogether in his favor, but beyond the glamour of the present, Melissa
+had the vision to appraise the possibilities of the future. Before
+finally committing herself to the hymeneal venture she required it of
+her swain that he produce and place in her capable hands for
+safe-keeping, first, the money required to purchase the license; second,
+the amount of the fee for the officiating clergyman; and third, cash
+sufficient to pay the expenses of a joint wedding journey to St. Louis
+and return. It was specified that the traveling must be conducted on a
+mutual basis, which would require round-trip tickets for both of them.
+Melissa, before now, had heard of these one-sided bridal tours. If Red
+Hoss went anywhere to celebrate being married she meant to go along with
+him.
+
+Altogether, under these headings, a computed aggregate of at least
+eighty dollars was needed. With his eyes set then on this financial
+goal, Red Hoss sought service in the marts of trade. Perhaps the
+unwonted eagerness he displayed in this regard may have been quickened
+by the prospect that the irksomeness of employment before marriage would
+be made up to him after the event in a vacation more prolonged than any
+his free spirit had ever known. Still, that part of it is none of our
+affair. For our purposes it is sufficient to record that the campaign
+for funds had progressed to a point where practically fifty per cent of
+the total specified by his prudent inamorata already had been earned,
+collected and, in accordance with the compact, intrusted to the
+custodianship of one who was at once fiancee and trustee.
+
+On a fine autumnal day Red Hoss made a beginning at the task of amassing
+the remaining half of the prenuptial sinking fund by accepting an
+assignment to deliver a milch cow, newly purchased by Mr. Dick Bell, to
+Mr. Bell's dairy farm three miles from town on the Blandsville Road.
+This was a form of toil all the more agreeable to Red Hoss--that is to
+say, if any form of toil whatsoever could be deemed agreeable to
+him--since cows when traveling from place to place are accustomed to
+move languidly. By reason of this common sharing of an antipathy against
+undue haste, it was late afternoon before the herder and the herded
+reached the latter's future place of residence; and it was almost dusk
+when Red Hoss, returning alone, came along past Lone Oak Cemetery. Just
+ahead of him, from out of the weed tangle hedging a gap in the cemetery
+fence, a half-grown rabbit hopped abroad. The cottontail rambled a few
+yards down the road, then erected itself on its rear quarters and with
+adolescent foolhardiness contemplated the scenery. In his hand Red Hoss
+still carried the long hickory stick with which he had guided the steps
+of Mr. Bell's new cow. He flung his staff at the inviting mark now
+presented to him. Whirling in its flight, it caught its target squarely
+across the neck, and the rabbit died so quickly it did not have time to
+squeak, and barely time to kick.
+
+Now it is known of all men that luck of two widely different kinds
+resides in the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit. There is bad luck
+in it for the rabbit itself, seeing that the circumstance of its having
+a left hind foot, to begin with, renders life for that rabbit more
+perilous even than is the life of a commonplace rabbit. But there is
+abiding good luck in it for the human who falls heir to the foot after
+the original possessor has passed away. To insure the maximum of fair
+fortune for the legatee, the rabbit while in the act of jumping over a
+sunken grave in the dark of the moon should be killed with a crooked
+stick which a dead man has carried; but since there is no known record
+of a colored person hanging round sunken graves in the dark of the moon,
+the left hind foot of an authentic graveyard rabbit slain under any
+circumstances is a charm of rare preciousness.
+
+With murky twilight impending, it was not for Red Hoss Shackleford to
+linger for long in the vicinity of a burying ground. Already, in the
+gloaming, the white fence palings gleamed spectrally and the shadows
+were thickening in the honeysuckle jungles beyond them. Nor was it for
+him to think of eating the flesh of a graveyard rabbit, even though it
+be plump and youthful, as this one was.
+
+Graveyard rabbits, when indubitably known to be such, decorate no
+Afro-American skillet. Destiny has called them higher than frying pans.
+
+Almost before the victim of his aim had twitched its valedictory twitch
+he was upon it. In his hand, ready for use, was his razor; not his
+shaving razor, but the razor he carried for social purposes. He bent
+down, and with the blade made swift slashes right and left at a limber
+ankle joint, then rose again and was briskly upon his homeward way,
+leaving behind him the maimed carcass, a rumpled little heap, lying in
+the dust. A dozen times before he reached his boarding house he fingered
+the furry talisman where it rested in the bottom of his hip pocket, and
+each touching of it conveyed to him added confidences in propitious
+auguries.
+
+Surely enough, on the very next day but one, events seemed organizing
+themselves with a view to justifying his anticipations. As a consequence
+of the illness of Tom Montjoy he was offered and accepted what promised
+to be for the time being a lucrative position as Tom Montjoy's
+substitute on the back end of one of Fowler & Givens' ice wagons. The
+Eighteenth Amendment was not as yet an accomplished fact, though the
+dread menace of it hung over that commonwealth which had within its
+confines the largest total number of distilleries and bonded warehouses
+to be found in any state of this union. Observing no hope of legislative
+relief, sundry local saloon keepers had failed to renew their licenses
+as these expired. But for every saloon which closed its doors it seemed
+there was a soda fountain set up to fizz and to spout; and the books of
+Fowler & Givens showed the name of a new customer to replace each
+vanished old one. So trade ran its even course, and Red Hoss was
+retained temporarily to understudy, as it were, the invalid Montjoy.
+
+In an afternoon lull following the earlier rush of deliveries Mr. Ham
+Givens came out to where Tallow Dick Evans, Bill Tilghman and Red Hoss
+reclined at ease in the lee of the ice factory's blank north wall and
+bade Red Hoss hook up one of the mules to the light single wagon and
+carry three of the hundred-pound blocks out to Biederman's ex-corner
+saloon, now Biederman's soft-drink and ice-cream emporium, at Ninth and
+Washington.
+
+"Better let him take Blue Wing," said Mr. Givens, addressing Bill
+Tilghman, who by virtue of priority of service and a natural affinity
+for draft stock was stable boss for the firm.
+
+It was Bill Tilghman who once had delivered himself of the sage remark
+that "A mule an' a nigger is 'zackly alike--'specially de mule."
+
+"Can't tek Blue Wing, Mist' Givens," answered Bill. "She done went up to
+Mist' Gallowayses' blacksmith shop to git herse'f some new shoes."
+
+This pluralization of a familiar name was evidence on Bill Tilghman's
+part of the estimation in which he held our leading farrier, Mr. P. J.
+Galloway.
+
+"All right, take one of the other mules then. But get a hustle on,"
+ordered Mr. Givens as he reentered his office.
+
+"Dat bein' de case, I reckin I'll tek dat white Frank mule," said Red
+Hoss. "'Tain't no use of him standin' in de stall eatin' his ole fool
+haid off jes' 'cause Tom Montjoy is laid up."
+
+"Boy," said Bill Tilghman, "lissen! You 'cept a word of frien'ship an'
+warnin' f'um somebody dat's been kicked by more mules 'en whut you ever
+seen in yore whole life, an' you let dat Frank mule stay right whar he
+is. You kin have yore choice of de Maud mule or de Maggie mule or Friday
+or January Thaw; but my edvice to you is, jes' leave dat Frank mule be
+an' don't pester him none."
+
+"How come?" demanded Red Hoss. "I reckin I got de strength to drive ary
+mule dey is."
+
+"I ain't sayin' you ain't," stated Bill Tilghman. "A born ijiot could
+drive dat mule, so I jedge you mout mek out to qualify. 'Tain't de
+drivin' of him--hit's de hitchin' up of him which I speaks of."
+
+Tallow Dick put in, "Hit's dis way wid dat Frank: In his early chilehood
+somebody muster done somethin' painful to dat mule's haid, an' it seem
+lak it lef' one ondurin' scar in his mind. Anyway, f'um dat day
+hencefor'ard he ain't let nobody a-tall, let alone hit's a plum'
+stranger to him lak you is, go prankin' round his haid. Ef you think a
+mule's back end is his dangersome end you jes' try to walk up to ole
+Frank face to face, ez nigger to mule, an' try to hang de mule jewelry
+over his years. Da's all, jes' try it! Tom Montjoy is de onliest one
+which kin slip de bit in dat mule's mouf, an' de way he do it is to go
+into de nex' stall an' keep speakin' soothin' words to him, an' put de
+bridle on him f'um behinehand of his shoulder lak. But when Tom Montjoy
+ain't wukkin', de Frank mule he ain't wukkin' neither any. Yessuh, Tom
+Montjoy is de sole one which dat Frank mule gives his confidences to,
+sech as dey is."
+
+Red Hoss snorted his contempt for his warning.
+
+"Huh, de trouble wid dat mule is he's pampered! You niggers done pamper
+him twell he think he owns dese whole ice-factory premises. Whut he need
+fur whut ails him is somebody which ain't skeered of him. Me, I aims to
+go 'crost to dat stable barn over yonder 'crost de street an' walk right
+in de same stall wid dat Frank same ez whut I would wid ary other mule,
+an' ef he mek jes' one pass at me I'm gwine up wid my fistes an' give
+him somethin' to brood over."
+
+Bill Tilghman looked at Tallow Dick, looking at him sorrowfully, as
+though haunted by forebodings of an impending tragedy, and shook his
+head slowly from side to side. Tallow Dick returned the glance in kind,
+and then both of them gazed steadfastly at the vainglorious new hand.
+
+"Son, boy," inquired old Bill softly, "whut is de name of yore mos'
+favorite hymn?"
+
+"Whut my favorite hymn got to do wid it?"
+
+"Oh, nothin', only I wuz jes' studyin'. Settin' yere, I got to thinkin'
+dat mebbe dey wuz some purticular tune you might lak sung at de grave."
+
+"An' whilst you's tellin' Unc' Bill dat much, you mout also tell us whar
+'bouts in dis town you lives at?" added Tallow Dick.
+
+"You knows good an' well whar I lives at," snapped Red Hoss.
+
+"I thought mebbe you mout 'a' moved," said Tallow Dick mildly.
+"'Twouldn't never do fur me an' Bill yere to be totin' de remains to de
+wrong address. Been my experience dat nothin' ain't mo' onwelcome at a
+strange house 'en a daid nigger, especially one dat's about six feet two
+inches long an' all mussed up wid fresh mule tracks."
+
+"Huh! You two ole fools is jes' talkin' to hear yo'se'fs talk," quoth
+Red Hoss. "All I axes you to do is jes' set quiet yere, an' in 'bout six
+minutes f'um now you'll see me leadin' a tamed-down white mule wid de
+britchin' all on him outen through dem stable barn do's."
+
+"All right, honey, have it yo' own way. Ef you won't hearken an' you
+won't heed, go ahaid!" stated Uncle Bill, with a wave of his hand. "You
+ain't too young to die, even ef you is too ole to learn. Only I trust
+an' prays dat you won't be blamin' nobody but yo'se'f 'bout this time
+day after to-mor' evenin' w'en de sexton of Mount Zion Cullud Cemetery
+starts pattin' you in de face wid a spade."
+
+"Unc' Bill, you said a moufful den," added Tallow Dick. "De way I looks
+at it, dey ain't no use handin' out sense to a nigger ef he ain't got no
+place to put it. 'Sides, dese things offen-times turns out fur de best;
+orphants leaves de fewest mourners. Good-by, Red Hoss, an' kindly give
+my reguards to any frien's of mine dat you meets up wid on 'yother side
+of Jordan."
+
+With another derisive grunt, Red Hoss rose from where he had been
+resting, angled to the opposite side of the street and disappeared
+within the stable. For perhaps ninety seconds after he was gone the
+remaining two sat in an attitude of silent waiting. Their air was that
+of a pair of black seers who likewise happen to be fatalists, and who
+having conscientiously discharged a duty of prophecy now await with
+calmness the fulfillment of what had been foretold. Then they heard,
+over there where Red Hoss had vanished, a curious muffled outcry. As
+they subsequently described it, this sound was neither shriek nor moan,
+neither oath nor prayer. They united in the declaration that it was more
+in the nature of a strangled squeak, as though a very large rat had
+suddenly been trodden beneath an even larger foot. However, for all its
+strangeness, they rightfully interpreted it to be an appeal for succor.
+Together they rose and ran across Water Street and into the stable.
+
+The Frank mule had snapped his tether and, freed, was backing himself
+out into the open. If a mule might be said to pick his teeth, here was a
+mule doing that very thing. Crumpled under the manger of the stall he
+just had quitted was a huddled shape. The rescuers drew it forth, and in
+the clear upon the earthen stable floor they stretched it. It was
+recognizable as the form of Red Hoss Shackleford.
+
+Red Hoss seemed numbed rather than unconscious. Afterward Bill Tilghman
+in recounting the affair claimed that Red Hoss, when discovered, was
+practically nude clear down to his shoes, which being of the variety
+known as congress gaiters had elastic uppers to hug the ankles. This
+snugness of fit, he thought, undoubtedly explained why they had stayed
+on when all the rest of the victim's costume came off. In his version,
+Tallow Dick averred he took advantage of the circumstance of Red Hoss'
+being almost totally undressed to tally up bruise marks as
+counter-distinguished from tooth marks, and found one of the former for
+every two sets of the latter. From this disparity in the count, and
+lacking other evidence, he was bound to conclude that considerable
+butting had been done before the biting started.
+
+However, these conclusions were to be arrived at later. For the moment
+the older men busied themselves with fanning Red Hoss and with sluicing
+a bucket of water over him. His first intelligible words upon partially
+reviving seemed at the moment of their utterance to have no direct
+bearing upon that which had just occurred. It was what he said next
+which, in the minds of the hearers, established the proper connection.
+
+"White folks suttinly is curious." Such was his opening remark,
+following the water application. "An' also, dey suttinly do git up some
+mouty curious laws." He paused a moment as though in a still slightly
+dazed contemplation of the statutory idiosyncrasies of the Caucasian,
+and then added the key words: "F'rinstance, now, dey got a law dat you
+got to keep lions an' tigers in a cage. Yassuh, da's de law. Can't no
+circus go 'bout de country widout de lions an' de tigers an' de
+highyenas is lock' up hard an' fas' in a cage." Querulously his voice
+rose in a tone of wondering complaintfulness: "An' yit dey delibert'ly
+lets a man-eatin' mule go ramblin' round loose, wid nothin' on him but a
+rope halter."
+
+Across the prostrate form of the speaker Bill Tilghman eyed Tallow Dick
+in the reminiscent manner of one striving to recall the exact words of a
+certain quotation and murmured, "De trouble wid dat Frank mule is dat
+he's pampered."
+
+"Br'er Tilghman," answered back Tallow Dick solemnly, "you done said
+it--de mule is been pampered!"
+
+The sufferer stirred and blinked and sat up dizzily.
+
+"Uh-huh," he assented. "An' jes' ez soon ez I gits some of my strength
+back ag'in, an' some mo' clothes on, I'm gwine tek de longes', sharpes'
+pitchfork dey is in dis yere stable an' I'm gwine pamper dat devilish
+mule wid it fur 'bout three-quarters of an hour stiddy."
+
+But he didn't. If he really cherished any such disciplinary designs he
+abandoned them next morning at sunup, when, limping slightly, he propped
+open the stable doors preparatory to invading its interior. The white
+demon, which appeared to have the facility of snapping his bonds
+whenever so inclined, came sliding out of the darkness toward him, a
+malignant and menacing apparition, with a glow of animosity in two
+deep-set eyes and with a pair of prehensile lips curled back to display
+more teeth than by rights an alligator should have. It was immediately
+evident to Red Hoss that in the Frank mule's mind a deep-seated aversion
+for him had been engendered. He had the feeling that potential ill
+health lurked in that neighborhood; that death and destruction, riding
+on a pale mule, might canter up at any moment. Personally, he decided to
+let bygones be bygones. He dropped the grudge as he tumbled backward
+through the stable doors and slammed them behind him. That same day he
+went to Mr. Ham Givens and announced his intention of immediately
+breaking off his present associations with the firm.
+
+"Me, I is done quit foolin' wid ole ice waggins," he announced airily
+after Mr. Givens had given him his time. "Hit seems lak my gift is fur
+machinery."
+
+"A pusson which wuz keerful wouldn't trust you wid a shoe
+buttoner--dat's how high I reguards yore gift fur machinery," commented
+Bill Tilghman acidly. Red Hoss chose to ignore the slur. Anyhow, at the
+moment he could put his tongue to no appropriate sentence of counter
+repartee. He continued as though there had been no interruption:
+
+"Yassuh, de nex' time you two pore ole foot-an'-mouth teamsters sees me
+I'll come tearin' by yere settin' up on de boiler deck of a taxiscab.
+You better step lively to git out of de way fur me den."
+
+"I 'lows to do so," assented Bill. "I ain't aimin' to git shot wid no
+stray bullets."
+
+"How come stray bullets?"
+
+"Anytime I sees you runnin' a taxiscab I'll know by dat sign alone dat
+de sheriff an' de man which owns de taxiscab will be right behine
+you--da's whut I means."
+
+"Don't pay no 'tention to Unc' Bill," put in Tallow Dick. "Whar you aim
+to git dis yere taxiscab, Red Hoss?"
+
+"Mist' Lee Farrell he's done start up a regular taxiscab line,"
+expounded Red Hoss. "He's lookin' fur some smart, spry cullid men ez
+drivers. Dat natchelly bars you two out, but it lets me in. Mist' Lee
+Farrell he teach you de trade fust, an' den he gives you three dollars a
+day, an' you keeps all de tips you teks in. So it's so long and fare you
+well to you mule lovers, 'ca'se Ise on my way to pick myse' out my
+taxiscab."
+
+"Be sure to pick yo'se'f out one which ain't been pampered," was Bill
+Tilghman's parting shot.
+
+"Nummine dat part," retorted Red Hoss. "You jes' remember dis after I'm
+gone: Mules' niggers an' niggers' mules is 'bout to go out of style in
+dis man's town."
+
+In a way of speaking, Red Hoss in his final taunt had the rights of it.
+Lumbering drays no longer runneled with their broad iron tires the
+red-graveled flanks of the levee leading down to the wharf boats. They
+had given way almost altogether to bulksome motor trucks. Closed hacks
+still found places in funeral processions, but black chaser craft,
+gasoline driven and snorting furiously, met all incoming trains and sped
+to all outgoing ones. Betimes, beholding as it were the handwriting on
+the wall, that enterprising liveryman, Mr. Lee Farrell, had set up a
+garage and a service station on the site of his demolished stable, and
+now was the fleet commander of a whole squadron of these tin-armored
+destroyers.
+
+Under his tutelage Red Hoss proved a reasonably apt pupil. At the end of
+an apprenticeship covering a fortnight he matriculated into a regular
+driver, with a badge and a cap to prove it and a place on the night
+shift. Red Hoss felt impressive, and bore himself accordingly. He began
+taking sharp turns on two wheels. He took one such turn too many. On
+Friday night of his first week as a graduate chauffeur he steered his
+car headlong into a smash-up from which she emerged with a dished front
+wheel and a permanent marcel wave in one fender. As he nursed the
+cripple back to the garage Red Hoss exercised an imagination which never
+yet had failed him, and fabricated an explanation so plausibly shaped
+and phrased as to absolve him of all blameful responsibility for the
+mishap.
+
+Mr. Farrell listened to and accepted this account of the accident with
+no more than a passing exhibition of natural irritation; but next
+morning when Attorney Sublette called, accompanied by an irate client
+with a claim for damages sustained to a market wagon, and bringing with
+him also the testimony of at least two disinterested eye-witnesses to
+prove upon whose shoulders the fault must rest, Mr. Farrell somewhat
+lost his customary air of sustained calm. Cursing softly under his
+breath, he settled on the spot with a cash compromise; and then calling
+the offender to his presence, he used strong and bitter words.
+
+"Look here, boy," he proclaimed, "I've let you off this time with a
+cussing, but next time anything happens to a car that you are driving
+you've got to come clean with me. It ain't to be expected that a lot of
+crazy darkies can go sky-hooting round this town driving pot-metal
+omnibuses for me without one of them getting in a smash-up about every
+so often, and I'm carrying accident insurance and liability insurance to
+cover my risks; but next time you get into a jam I want you to come
+through with the absolute facts in the case, so's I'll know where I
+stand and how to protect myself in court or out of it. I don't care two
+bits whose fault it is--your fault or some other lunatic's fault. The
+truth is what I want--the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
+truth, so help you God. And He'll need to help you if I catch you lying
+again! Get me?"
+
+"Boss," said Red Hoss fervently, "I gits you."
+
+Two nights later the greater disaster befell. It was a thick, drizzly,
+muggy night, when the foreground of one's perspective was blurred by the
+murk and when there just naturally was not any background at all. Down
+by the Richland House a strange white man wearing a hand-colored
+mustache and a tiger-claw watch charm hailed Red Hoss. This person
+desired to be carried entirely out of town, to the south yards of the P.
+T. & A. Railroad, where Powers Brothers' Carnival Company was detraining
+from its cars with intent to pitch camp in the suburb of Mechanicsville
+hard by and furnish the chief attractions for a three days' street fair
+to be given under the auspices of the Mechanicsville lodge of Knights of
+Damon.
+
+After they had quit the paved streets, Red Hoss drove a bumpy course
+diagonally across many switch spurs, and obeying instructions from his
+fare brought safely up alongside a red-painted sleeping car which formed
+the head end of the show train where it stood on a siding. But starting
+back he decided to skirt alongside the track, where he hoped the going
+might be easier. As he backed round and started off, directly in front
+of him he made out through the encompassing mists the dim flare of a
+gasoline torch, and he heard a voice uplifted in pleading:
+
+"Come on, Lena! Come on, Baby Doll! Come on out of that, you Queenie!"
+
+Seemingly an unseen white man was urging certain of his lady friends to
+quit some mysterious inner retreat and join him where he stood; all of
+which, as Red Hoss figured it, was none of his affair. Had he known more
+he might have moved more slowly; indeed might have stopped moving
+altogether. But--I ask you--how was Red Hoss to know that the chief bull
+handler for Powers Brothers was engaged in superintending the unloading
+of his large living charges from their traveling accommodations in the
+bull car?
+
+There were three of these bulls, all of them being of the gentler sex.
+Perhaps it might be well to explain here that the word "bull," in the
+language of the white tops, means elephant. To a showman all cow
+elephants are bulls just as in a mid-Victorian day, more refined than
+this one, all authentic bulls were, to cultured people, cows.
+
+Obeying the insistent request of their master, forth now and down a
+wooden runway filed the members of Powers Brothers' World Famous Troupe
+of Ponderous Pachydermic Performers. First came Lena, then Baby Doll and
+last of all the mighty Queenie; and in this order they lumberingly
+proceeded, upon huge but silent feet, to follow him alongside the
+cindered right of way, feeling their way through the fog.
+
+Now it is a fact well established in natural history--and in this
+instance was to prove a lamentable one--that elephants, unlike lightning
+bugs, carry no tail lamps. Of a sudden Red Hoss was aware of a vast,
+indefinite, mouse-colored bulk looming directly in the path before him.
+He braked hard and tried to swing out, but he was too close upon the
+obstacle to avoid a collision.
+
+With a loud metallic smack the bow of the swerving taxicab, coming up
+from the rear, treacherously smote the mastodonic Queenie right where
+her wrinkles were thickest. Her knees bent forward, and involuntarily
+she squatted. She squatted, as one might say, on all points south.
+Simultaneously there was an agonized squeal from Queenie and a crunching
+sound from behind and somewhat under her, and the tragic deed was done.
+The radiator of Red Hoss' car looked something like a concertina which
+had seen hard usage and something like a folded-in crush hat, but very
+little, if any, like a radiator.
+
+At seven o'clock next morning, when Mr. Farrell arrived at his
+establishment, his stricken gaze fastened upon a new car of his which
+had become to all intents and purposes practically two-thirds of a car.
+The remnant stood at the curbing, where his service car, having towed it
+in, had left it as though the night foreman had been unwilling to give
+so complete a ruin storage space within the garage. Alongside the
+wreckage was Red Hoss, endeavoring more or less unsuccessfully to make
+himself small and inconspicuous. Upon him menacingly advanced his
+employer.
+
+"The second time in forty-eight hours for you, eh?" said Mr. Farrell.
+"Well, boy, you do work fast! Come on now, and give me the cold facts.
+How did the whole front end of this car come to get mashed off?"
+
+Tone and mien alike were threatening. Red Hoss realized there was no
+time for extended preliminary remarks. From him the truth came
+trippingly on the tongue.
+
+"Boss, man, I ain't aimin' to tell you no lies dis time. I comes clean."
+
+"Come clean and come fast."
+
+"A elephint set down on it."
+
+"What!"
+
+"I sez, suh, a elephint set down on it."
+
+In moments of stress, when tempted beyond his powers of self-control,
+Mr. Farrell was accustomed to punctuate physically, as it were, the
+spoken word. What he said--all he said--before emotion choked him was:
+"Why--you--you--" What he did was this: His right arm crooked upward
+like a question mark; it straightened downward like an exclamation
+point; his fist made a period, or, as the term goes, a full stop on the
+point of Red Hoss Shackleford's jaw. What Red Hoss saw resembled this:
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Only they were all printed flashingly in bright primary colors, reds and
+greens predominating.
+
+As the last gay asterisk faded from before his blinking eyes Red Hoss
+found himself sitting down on a hard concrete sidewalk. Coincidentally
+other discoveries made themselves manifest to his understanding. One was
+that the truth which often is stranger than fiction may also on occasion
+be a more dangerous commodity to handle. Another was that abruptly he
+had severed all business connections with Mr. Lee Farrell's industry.
+His resignation had been accepted on the spot, and the spot was the
+bulge of his left jaw.
+
+Somewhat dazed, filled with an inarticulate but none the less sincere
+conviction that there was neither right nor justice left in a misshapen
+world, Red Hoss got up and went away from there. He deemed it the part
+of prudence to go utterly and swiftly away from there. It seemed
+probable that at any moment Mr. Farrell might emerge from his inner
+office, whither, as might be noted through an open window, he had
+retired to pour cold water on his bruised knuckles, and get violent
+again. The language he was using so indicated.
+
+Presently Red Hoss, with one side of his face slightly swollen and a
+curious taste in his mouth, might have been seen boarding a Locust
+Street car southbound. He was on his way to Mechanicsville. In the back
+part of his brain lurked vaguely a project to seek out the man who owned
+those elephants and plead for some fashion of redress for painful
+injuries innocently sustained. Perhaps the show gentleman might incline
+a charitable ear upon hearing Red Hoss' story. Just how the sufferer
+would go about the formality of presenting himself to the consideration
+of the visiting dignitary he did not yet know. It was all nebulous and
+cloudy; a contingency to be shaped by circumstances as they might
+develop. Really sympathy was the balm Red Hoss craved most.
+
+He quit the car when the car quit him--at the end of the line where the
+iron bridge across Island Creek marked the boundary between the
+municipality and its principal suburb. Even at this hour
+Mechanicsville's broadest highway abounded in fascinating sights and
+alluring zoological aromas. The carnival formally would not open till
+the afternoon, but by Powers Brothers' crews things already had been
+prepared against the coming of that time. In all available open spaces,
+such as vacant lots abutting upon the sidewalks and the junctions of
+cross streets, booths and tents and canvas-walled arenas had been set
+up. Boys of assorted sizes and colors hung in expectant clumps about
+marquees and show fronts. Also a numerous assemblage of adults of the
+resident leisure class, a majority of these being members of Red Hoss'
+own race, moved back and forth through the line of fairings, inspired by
+the prospect of seeing something interesting without having to pay for
+it.
+
+Red Hoss forgot temporarily the more-or-less indefinite purpose which
+had brought him hither. He joined a cluster of watchful persons who
+hopefully had collected before the scrolled and ornamented wooden
+entrance of a tarpaulin structure larger than any of the rest. From
+beneath the red-and-gold portico of this edifice there issued a blocky
+man in a checkered suit, with a hard hat draped precariously over one
+ear and with a magnificent jewel gleaming out of the bosom of a
+collarless shirt. All things about this man stamped him as one having
+authority over the housed mysteries roundabout. Visibly he rayed that
+aura of proprietorship common to some monarchs and to practically all
+owners of traveling caravansaries. Seeing him, Red Hoss promptly
+detached himself from the group he had just joined, and advanced, having
+it in mind to seek speech with this superior-appearing personage. The
+white man beat him to it.
+
+"Say, boy, that's right, keep a-coming," he called. His experienced eye
+appraised Red Hoss' muscular proportions. "Do you want a job?"
+
+"Whut kinder job, boss?"
+
+"Best job you ever had in your life," declared the white man. "You get
+fourteen a week and cakes. Get me? Fourteen dollars just as regular as
+Saturday night comes, and your scoffing free--all the chow you can eat
+thrown in. Then you hear the band play absolutely free of charge, and
+you see the big show six times a day without having to pay for it, and
+you travel round and see the country. Don't that sound good to you? Oh,
+yes, there's one thing else!" He dangled a yet more alluring temptation.
+"And you wear a red coat with brass buttons on it and a cap with a plume
+in it."
+
+"Sho' does sound good," said Red Hoss, warming. "Whut else I got to do,
+cunnel?"
+
+"Oh, just odd jobs round this pitch here--this animal show."
+
+"Hole on, please, boss! I don't have no truck wid elephints, does I?"
+
+"Nope. The elephants are down the line in a separate outfit of their
+own. You work with this show--clean out the cages and little things like
+that. Don't get worried," he added quickly, interpreting aright a look
+of sudden concern upon Red Hoss' face. "You don't have to go inside the
+cages to clean 'em out. You stay outside and do it with a long-handled
+tool. I had a good man on this job, but he quit on me unexpectedly night
+before last."
+
+The speaker failed to explain that the recent incumbent had quit thus
+abruptly as a result of having a forearm clawed by a lady leopard named
+Violet.
+
+"'Bout how long is dis yere job liable to last?" inquired Red Hoss. "You
+see, cunnel, Ise 'spectin' to have some right important private business
+in dis town 'fore so very long."
+
+"Then this is the very job you want. After we leave here to-morrow night
+we strike down across the state line and play three more stands, and
+then we wind up with a week in Memphis. We close up the season there and
+go into winter quarters, and you come on back home. What's your name?"
+
+"My full entitled name is Roscoe Conklin' Shackleford, but 'count of my
+havin' a kinder brightish complexion dey mos' gin'rally calls me Red
+Hoss. I reckin mebbe dey's Injun blood flowin' in me."
+
+"All right, Red Hoss, let it flow. You just come on with me and I'll
+show you what you'll have to do. My name is Powers--Captain Powers."
+
+Proudly sensing that already he was an envied figure in the eyes of the
+group behind him, Red Hoss followed the commanding Powers back through a
+canvas-sided marquee into a circular two-poled tent. There were no
+seats. The middle spaces were empty. Against the side walls were ranged
+four cages. One housed a pair of black bears of a rather weather-beaten
+and travel-worn aspect. Next to the bears, the lady leopard, Violet,
+through the bars contemplated space, meanwhile wearing that air of
+intense boredom peculiar to most caged animals. A painted inscription
+above the front of the third cage identified its occupant as none other
+than The Educated Ostrich; the Bird That Thinks.
+
+Red Hoss' conductor indicated these possessions with a lordly wave of
+his arm, then led the way to the fourth cage. It was the largest cage of
+all; it was painted a bright and passionate red. It had gilded
+scrollings on it. Upon the ornamented facade which crossed its front
+from side to side a lettered legend ran. Red Hoss spelled out the
+pronouncement:
+
+Chieftain, King of Feline Acrobats! The Largest Black-maned Nubian Lion
+in Captivity! Danger!
+
+The face of the cage was boarded halfway up, but above the top line of
+the planked cross panel Red Hoss could make out in the foreground of the
+dimmed interior a great tawny shape, and at the back, in one corner, an
+orderly clutter of objects painted a uniform circus blue. There was a
+barrel or two, an enormous wooden ball, a collapsible fold-up seesaw and
+other impedimenta of a trained-animal act. Red Hoss had heard that the
+lion was a noble brute--in short, was the king of beasts. He now was
+prepared to swear it had a noble smell. Beneath the cage a white man in
+overalls slumbered audibly upon a tarpaulin folded into a pallet.
+
+"There's the man you take your orders from if you join us," explained
+Powers, flirting a thumb toward the sleeper. "Name of Riley, he is. But
+you draw your pay from me." With his arm he described a circle. "And
+here's the stock you help take care of. The only one you need to be
+careful about is that leopard over yonder. She gets a little peevish
+once in a while. Well, I would sort of keep an eye on the ostrich here
+alongside you too. The old bird's liable to cut loose when you ain't
+looking and kick the taste out of your mouth. You give them both their
+distances. But those bears behind you is just the same as a pair of
+puppies, and old Chieftain here--well, he looks pretty fierce and he
+acts sort of fierce too when he's called on for it, but it's just acting
+with him; he's trained to it. Off watch, he's just as gentle as an
+overgrown kitten. Riley handles him and works him, and all you've got to
+do when Riley is putting him through his stunts is to stand outside here
+and hand him things he wants in through the bars. Well, is it a go?
+Going to take the job?"
+
+"Boss," said Red Hoss, "you speaks late--I done already tooken it."
+
+"Good!" said Powers. "That's the way I love to do business--short and
+sweet. You hang round for an hour or two and sort of get acquainted with
+things until Riley has his nap out. When he wakes up, if I ain't back by
+that time, you tell him you're the new helper, and he'll wise you up."
+
+"Yas suh," said Red Hoss. "But say, boss, 'scuse me, but did I
+understand you to mention dat eatin' was in de contract?"
+
+"Sure! Hungry already?"
+
+"Well, suh, you see I mos' gin'rally starts de day off wid breakfust,
+an' to tell you de truth I ain't had nary grain of breakfust yit!"
+
+"Got the breakfast habit, eh? Well, come on with me to the cook house
+and I'll see if there ain't something left over."
+
+Despite the nature of his calling as a tamer of ferocious denizens of
+the tropic jungle, Mr. Riley, upon wakening, proved to be a person of a
+fairly amiable disposition. He made it snappy but not unduly burdensome
+as he initiated Red Hoss into the rudimentary phases of the new
+employment. As the forenoon wore on the conviction became fixed in Red
+Hoss' mind that for an overlord he had a white man who would be apt to
+listen to reason touching on any proposition promising personal profits
+with no personal risks.
+
+Sharp upon this diagnosis of his new master's character, a magnificent
+idea, descending without warning like a bolt from the blue, struck Red
+Hoss on top of his head and bored in through his skull and took prompt
+root in his entranced and dazzled brain. It was a gorgeous conception;
+one which promised opulent returns for comparatively minor exertions. To
+carry it out, though, required cooperation, and in Riley he saw with a
+divining glance--or thought he saw--the hope of that cooperation.
+
+In paving the way for confidential relations he put to Riley certain
+leading questions artfully disguised, and at the beginning seemingly
+artlessly presented. By the very nature of Riley's answers he was
+further assured of the safety of the ground on which he trod, whereupon
+Red Hoss cautiously broached the project, going on to amplify it in
+glowing colors the while Riley hearkened attentively.
+
+It was a sheer pleasure to outline a proposition to a white gentleman
+who received it so agreeably. Fifteen minutes after the first tentative
+overtures had been thrown out feeler-wise, Red Hoss found that he and
+Riley were in complete accord on all salient points. Indeed they already
+were as partners jointly committed to a joint undertaking.
+
+After the third and last afternoon performance, in which Red Hoss,
+wearing a proud mien and a somewhat spotty uniform coat, had acquitted
+himself in all regards creditably, Riley gave him a leave of absence of
+two hours, ostensibly for the purpose of quitting his boarding house and
+collecting his traveling wardrobe. As a matter of fact, these details
+really required but a few minutes, and it had been privily agreed
+between them that the rest of the time should be devoted by Red Hoss to
+setting in motion the actual preliminaries of their scheme.
+
+This involved a personal call upon Mr. Moe Rosen, who conducted a hide,
+pelt, rag, junk, empty-bottle and old-iron emporium on lower Court
+Street, just off the Market Square. September's hurried twilight had
+descended upon the town when the scouting conspirator tapped for
+admission at the alley entrance to the back room of Mr. Rosen's
+establishment, where the owner sat amid a variegated assortment of
+choicer specimens culled from his collected wares. Mr. Rosen needed no
+sign above his door to inform the passing public of the nature of his
+business. When the wind was right you could stand two blocks away and
+know it without being told. Here at Mr. Rosen's side door Red Hoss
+smacked his nostrils appreciatively. Even to one newly come from a
+wild-animal show, and even when smelled through a brick wall, Mr.
+Rosen's place had a graphic and striking atmosphere which was all its
+own.
+
+As one well acquainted with the undercurrents of community life, Red
+Hoss shared, with many others, the knowledge that Mr. Rosen, while
+ostensibly engaged in one industry, carried on another as a sort of
+clandestine by-product. Now this side line, though surreptitiously
+conducted and perilous in certain of its aspects, was believed by the
+initiated to be really more lucrative than his legitimatized and avowed
+calling. Mr. Rosen was by way of being--by a roundabout way of
+being--what technically is known as a bootlegger. He bootlegged upon a
+larger scale than do most of those pursuing this precarious avocation.
+
+It was stated in an earlier paragraph that national prohibition had not
+yet come to pass. But already local option held the adjoining
+commonwealth of Tennessee in a firm and arid grasp; wherefore Mr.
+Rosen's private dealings largely had to do with discreet clients
+thirstily residing below the state line. It was common rumor in certain
+quarters that lately this traffic had suffered a most disastrous
+interruption. Tennessee revenue agents suddenly had evinced an
+unfriendly curiosity touching on vehicular movements from the Kentucky
+side.
+
+A considerable chunk of Mr. Rosen's profits for the current year had
+been irretrievably swallowed up when a squad of these suspicious
+excisemen laid their detaining hands upon a sizable order of case stuff
+which--disguised and broadly labeled as crated household goods--was
+traveling southward by nightfall in a truck, heading toward a
+destination in a district which that truck was destined never to reach.
+
+Bottle by bottle the aromatic contents of the packages had been poured
+into the wayside ditch to be sucked up by an unappreciative if porous
+soil. The truck itself had been confiscated. Its driver barely had
+escaped, to return homeward afoot across country bearing dire tidings to
+his employer, who was reported, upon hearing the lamentable news,
+literally to have scrambled the air with disconsolate flappings of his
+hands, meanwhile uttering shrill cries of grief.
+
+Moreover, as though to top this stroke of ill luck, further activities
+in the direction of his most profitable market practically had been
+brought to a standstill by reason of enhanced vigilance on the part of
+the Tennessee authorities along the main highroads running north and
+south. Between supply and demand, or perhaps one should say between
+purveyor and consumer, the boundary mark dividing the sister
+commonwealths stretched its dead line like a narrow river of despair. It
+was not to be wondered at, therefore, that the sorely pestered Mr. Rosen
+should be at this time a prey to care so carking as to border on
+forthright melancholia. Never a particularly cheerful person, at Red
+Hoss' soft knock upon his outer door he raised a countenance completely
+clothed in moroseness where not clothed in whiskers and grunted
+briefly--a sound which might or might not be taken as an invitation to
+enter. Nor was his greeting, following upon the caller's soft-footed
+entrance, calculated to promote cordial intercourse.
+
+"What you want, nigger?" he demanded, breaking in on Red Hoss' politely
+phrased greeting. Then without waiting for a reply, "Well, whatever it
+is, you don't get it. Get out!"
+
+Nevertheless, Red Hoss came right on in. Carefully he closed the door
+behind him, shutting himself in with Mr. Rosen and privacy and a
+symposium of strong, rich smells.
+
+"'Scuse me, Mist' Rosen," he said, "fur bre'kin' in on you lak dis, but
+I got a little sumpin' to say to you in mos' strictes' confidence. Seems
+lak to me I heard tell lately dat you'd had a little trouble wid some
+white folkses down de line. Co'se dat ain't none o' my business. I jes'
+mentioned it so's you'd understan' whut it is I wants to talk wid you
+about."
+
+He drew up an elbow length away from Mr. Rosen and sank his voice to an
+intimate half whisper.
+
+"Mist' Rosen, le's you an' me do a little s'posin'. Le's s'posen' you
+has a bar'l of vinegar or molasses or sumpin' which you wants delivered
+to a frien' in Memphis, Tennessee. Seems lak I has heared somewhars dat
+you already is got a frien' or two in Memphis, Tennessee? All right den!
+S'posin', den, dat you wrote to your frien' dat dis yere bar'l would be
+comin' along to him inside of a week or ten days f'um now wid me in de
+full charge of it. S'posin', den, on top o' dat I could guarantee you to
+deliver dat bar'l to your frien' widout nobody botherin' dat bar'l on de
+way, and widout nobody 'spectin' whut wuz in dat bar'l, an' widout
+nobody axin' no hard questions about dat bar'l. S'posin' all dem things,
+ef you please, suh, an' den I axes you dis question: How much would dat
+favor be wuth to you in cash money?"
+
+As a careful business man, Mr. Rosen very properly pressed for further
+particulars before in any way committing himself in the matter of the
+amount of remuneration to be paid for the accommodation proposed. At
+this evidence of interest on the other's part Red Hoss grinned in happy
+optimism.
+
+"Mist' Rosen, 'twon't hardly be no trouble a-tall," he stated. "In de
+fust place, you teks a pot o' blue paint an' you paints dat bar'l blue
+f'um head to foot. De bluer dat bar'l is de more safer she'll be. An' to
+mek sure dat de color will be right yere's a sample fur you to go by."
+
+With that, Red Hoss produced from a hip pocket a sliver of plank
+painted on both sides in the cerulean hue universally favored by circus
+folk for covering seat boards, tent poles and such paraphernalia of a
+portable caravansary as is subject to rough treatment and frequent
+handling. At this the shock of surprise was such as almost to lift Mr.
+Rosen up on top of the cluttered desk which separated him from his
+visitor. It did lift him halfway out of his chair.
+
+"Nigger," he declared incredulously, "you talk foolishness! A mile away
+those dam Tennessee constables would be able to see a plain barrel which
+ain't got no paint on it at all, and now you tell me I should paint a
+barrel so blue as the sky, and yet it should get through from here to
+Memphis. Are you crazy in the head or something, or do you maybe think I
+am?"
+
+"Nummine dat," went on Red Hoss. "You do lak I tells you, an' you paints
+de bar'l right away so de paint'll git good an' dry twixt now an'
+We'n'sday night. Come We'n'sday night, you loads dat blue bar'l in a
+waggin an' covers it up an' you fetches it to me at de back do' of de
+main wild animal tent of dat carnival show which is now gwine on up yere
+in Mechanicsville. Don't go to de tent whar de elephints is. Go to de
+tent whar de educated ostrich is. Dar you'll fin' me. I done tuk a job
+as de fust chief 'sistant wild-animal trainer, an' right dar I'll be
+waitin'. So den you turns de bar'l over to me an' you goes on back home
+an' you furgits all 'bout it. Den in 'bout two weeks mo' when I gits
+back yere I brings you a piece o' writin' f'um de gen'elman in Memphis
+sayin' dat de bar'l has been delivered to him in good awder, an' den you
+pays me de rest o' de money dat's comin' to me." He had a canny second
+thought. "Mebbe," he added, "mebbe it would be better for all concern'
+ef you wrote to yore frien' in Memphis to hand me over de rest of de
+money when I delivers de bar'l. Yassuh, I reckins dat would be de best."
+
+"The rest of what money?" demanded Mr. Rosen sharply. "I ain't said
+nothing about giving no money to nobody. What do you mean--money?"
+
+"I mean de rest of de money which'll be comin' to me ez my share,"
+explained Red Hoss patiently. "De white man dat's goin' to he'p me wid
+dis yere job, he 'sists p'intedly dat he must have his share paid down
+cash in advance 'count of him not bein' able to come back yere an'
+collek it fur hisse'f, an' likewise 'count of him not keerin' to have no
+truck wid de gen'elman at de other end of de line. De way he put it, he
+wants all of his'n 'fore he starts. But me, Ise willin' to wait fur de
+bes' part of mine anyhow. So dat's how it stands, Mist' Rosen, an'
+'scusin' you an' me an' dis yere white man an' your frien' in Memphis,
+dey ain't nary pusson gwine know nothin' 'bout it a-tall, 'ceptin' mebbe
+hit's de lion. An' ez fur dat, w'y de lion don't count noways, 'count
+of him not talkin' no language 'ceptin' 'tis his own language."
+
+"The lion?" echoed Mr. Rosen blankly. "What lion? First you tell me blue
+barrel and then you tell me lion."
+
+"I means Chieftain--de larges' black-mangy Nubbin lion in captivation,"
+stated Red Hoss grandly, quoting from memory his own recollection of an
+inscription he but lately had read for the first time. "Mist' Rosen,
+twixt you an' me, I reckins dey ain't no revenue officer in de whole
+state of Tennessee which is gwine go projeckin' round a lion cage
+lookin' fur evidence."
+
+Disclosing the crux of his plot, his voice took on a jubilant tone.
+"Mist' Rosen, please, suh, lissen to me whut Ise revealin' to you. Dat
+blue bar'l of yourn is gwine ride f'um yere plum' to Memphis, Tennessee,
+in a cage wid a lion ez big ez ary two lions got ary right to be! An'
+now den, Mist' Rosen, le's you an' me talk 'bout de money part of it;
+'cause when all is said an' done, dat's de principalest part, ain't it?"
+
+
+The town of Wyattsville was, as the saying goes, all agog. Indeed, as
+the editor of the Wyattsville Tri-Weekly Statesman most aptly phrased it
+in the introductory sentence of a first-page, full-column article in his
+latest issue: "This week all roads run to Wyattsville."
+
+The occasion for all this pleasurable excitement wast the annual fair
+and races of the Forked Deer County Jockey Club, and superimposed upon
+that the street carnival conducted under the patronage and for the
+benefit of Wyattsville Herd Number 1002 of the Beneficent and Patriotic
+Order of American Bison. Each day would be a gala day replete with
+thrills and abounding in incident; in the forenoons grand free
+exhibitions upon the streets, also judgings and awards of prizes in
+various classes, such as farm products, livestock, poultry, needlework,
+pickles, preserves and art objects; in the afternoons, on the half-mile
+track out at the fair grounds, trotting, pacing and running events; in
+the evenings the carnival spirit running high and free, with
+opportunities for innocent mirth, merriment and entertainment afforded
+upon every hand.
+
+This was Monday night, the opening night. The initial performance of the
+three on the nightly schedule of Powers Brothers' Trained Wild Animal
+Arena approached now its climax, the hour approximately being
+eight-forty-five. The ballyhoo upon the elevated platform without had
+been completed. Hard upon this an audience of townspeople and visitors
+which taxed the standing capacity of the tented enterprise had flowed
+in, after first complying with the necessary financial details at the
+ticket booth. The Educated Ostrich, the Bird That Thinks, had performed
+to the apparent satisfaction of all, though it might as well be
+confessed that if one might judge by the intelligent creature's
+expression, the things it thought while going through its paces scarcely
+would be printable. Violet, the lady leopard, had obliged by yowling in
+a spirited and spitty manner when stirred up with a broom handle. The
+two bears had given a complete if somewhat lackadaisical rendition of
+their act. And now the gentlemanly orator in charge, who, after his
+ballyhoos, doubled as master of ceremonies and announcer of events,
+directed the attention of the patrons to the largest cage of the four.
+
+As was customary, the culminating feature of the program had been
+invested with several touches of skillful stage management, the purpose
+being to enhance the thrills provided and send the audience forth
+pleased and enthusiastic. In high boots and a tiger-skin tunic, Mr.
+Riley, armed with an iron bar held in one hand and a revolver loaded
+with blank cartridges in the other, stood poised and prepared to leap
+into the den at the ostensible peril of his life and put his ferocious
+charge through a repertoire of startling feats. His eye was set, his
+face determined; his lower jaw moved slowly. This steel-hearted man was
+chewing tobacco to hide any concern he might feel.
+
+Red Hoss Shackleford, resplendent in his official trappings, made an
+elaborate ceremonial of undoing the pins and bolts which upheld the
+wooden panels across the front elevation of the cage. The announcer took
+advantage of the pause thus artfully contrived to urge upon the
+spectators the advisability of standing well back from the guard ropes.
+Every precaution had been taken, he informed them, every possible
+safeguard provided, but for their own sakes it were well to be on the
+prudent side in case the dauntless trainer should lose control over his
+dangerous pupil. This warning had its usual effect. With a forward rush
+everyone instantly pressed as closely as possible into the zone of
+supposed menace.
+
+Here a curious psychological fact obtrudes. In each gathering of this
+character is at least one parent, generally a father, who habitually
+conveys his offsprings of tender years to places where they will be
+acutely uncomfortable, and by preference more especially to spots where
+there is a strong likelihood that they may meet with a sudden and
+violent end. Wyattsville numbered at least one such citizen within her
+enrolled midst. He was here now, jammed up against the creaking rope,
+holding fast with either clutch to a small and a sorely frightened child
+who wept.
+
+Red Hoss finished with the iron catches. Behind the shielding falsework
+he heard and felt the rustle and the heave of a great sinewy body
+threshing about in a confined space. He turned his head toward the
+announcer, awaiting the ordained signal.
+
+"Are you all ready?" clarioned that person. "Then go!"
+
+With a clatter and crash down came the wooden frontage. It was a part
+of the mechanics intrusted to the docile and intelligent Chieftain that
+so soon as the woodwork had dropped he, counterfeiting an unappeasable
+bloodthirstiness, should fling himself headlong against the straining
+bars, uttering hair-raising roars. This also was the cue for Riley to
+wriggle nimbly through a door set in the end of the cage and slam the
+door behind him; then to outface the great beast and by threats, with
+bar and pistol both extended, to force him backward step by step, still
+snarling but seemingly daunted, round and round the cage. Finally, when
+through the demonstrated power of the human eye Chieftain had been
+sufficiently cowed, Riley would begin the stirring entertainment for
+which all this had been a spectacular overture. Such was the preliminary
+formula, but for once in his hitherto blameless life Chieftain failed to
+sustain his role.
+
+He did not dash at his prison bars as though to rend them from their
+sockets; he did not growl in an amazingly deep bass, as per inculcated
+schooling; he did not bare the yellow fang nor yet unsheathe the cruel
+claw. With apparent difficulty, rising on his all fours from where he
+was crouched in the rear left-hand corner of his den, Chieftain advanced
+down stage with what might properly be called a rolling gait. Against
+the iron uprights he lurched, literally; then, as though grateful for
+their support, remained fixed there at a slanted angle for a brief
+space.
+
+A faunal naturalist, versed in the ways of lions, would promptly have
+taken cognizance of the fact that Chieftain, upon his face, wore an
+expression unnatural for lions to wear. It was an expression which might
+be classified as dreamily good-natured. His eyes drooped heavily, his
+lips were wreathed in a jovial feline smile. Transfixed as he was by a
+shock of astonishment and chagrin, Riley under his breath snapped a word
+of command.
+
+In subconscious obedience to his master's voice, Chieftain slowly
+straightened himself, came to an about face, and with his massive head
+canted far to one side and all adroop as though its weight had become to
+him suddenly burdensome, and his legs spraddled widely apart to hold him
+upright, he benignantly contemplated the sea of expectant and eager
+faces that stretched before him. Slowly he lifted a broad forefoot and
+with its padded undersurface made a fumbling gesture which might have
+been interpreted as an attempt on his part to wipe his nose.
+
+The effort proved too much for him. Lacking one important prop, he lost
+his balance, toppled over and fell heavily upon his side. The fall
+jolted his mouth widely ajar, and from the depths of his great throat
+was emitted an immense but unmistakable hiccup--a hiccup deep, sincere
+and sustained, having a high muzzle velocity and humidly freighted with
+an aroma as of a hundred hot mince pies.
+
+From the spellbound crowd rose a concerted gasp of surprise. Chieftain
+heeded it not. With the indubitable air of just recalling a pleasant but
+novel experience, and filled with a newborn desire to renew the
+sensation, he groggily regained his feet and reeled back to the corner
+from whence he had come. Here, with the other properties of his act, a
+slickly painted blue barrel stood upended. Applying his nose to a spot
+at the base of it, he lapped greedily at a darkish aromatic liquid
+which, as the entranced watchers now were aware, oozed forth in a stream
+upon the cage floor through a cranny treacherously opened between two
+sprung staves. And all the while he tongued up the escaping runlet of
+fluid he purred and rumbled joyously and his tawny sides heaved and
+little tremors of pure ecstasy ran lengthwise through him to expire
+diminishingly in lesser wriggles at the tufted tip of his gently
+flapping tail.
+
+Then all at once understanding descended upon the audience, and from
+them together rose a tremendous whoop. A joyous whoop it was, yet tinged
+with a feather edging of jealous regret on the part of certain adult
+whoopers there. They had paid their quarters, these worthy folk, to see
+a lion perform certain tricks and antics; and lo, they had been
+vouchsafed the infinitely more unique spectacle of a lion with a jag
+on! It was a boon such as comes but once in many lifetimes, this
+opportunity to behold majestic Leo, converted into a confirmed inebriate
+by his first indulgence in strong and forbidden waters, returning to his
+tippling.
+
+To some perhaps in this land of ours the scene would have served to
+point a moral and provide a text--a lamentable picture of the evils of
+intemperance as exemplified in its effects upon a mere unreasoning dumb
+brute. But in this assemblage were few or none holding the higher view.
+Unthoughtedly they yelled their appreciation, yelling all the louder
+when Chieftain, having copiously refreshed himself, upreared upon his
+hind legs, with both his forepaws winnowing the perfumed air, and after
+executing several steps of a patently impromptu dance movement, tumbled
+with a happy, intoxicated gurgle flat upon his back and lapsed into a
+coma of total insensibility.
+
+But there was one among them who did not cheer. This one was a
+square-jawed person who, shoving and scrooging, cleft a passage through
+the applauding multitude, and slipped deftly under the ropes and laid a
+detaining grasp upon the peltry-clad shoulder of the astonished Riley.
+With his free hand he flipped back the lapel of his coat to display a
+badge of authority pinned on the breast of his waistcoat.
+
+"What's the main idea?" His tone was rough. "Who's the chief booze
+smuggler of this outfit? How'd that barrel yonder come to be traveling
+across country with a soused lion?"
+
+"You can search me!" lied Riley glibly. "So help me, Mike, all I know is
+that that barrel was slipped over on me by a big nigger that joined out
+with us up here in Kentucky a week ago! I told him to get me a barrel,
+meaning to teach the lion a new trick, and he stuck that one in there.
+But I hadn't never got round to using it yet, and I didn't know it was
+loaded--I'll swear to that!"
+
+Cast in another environment, Mr. Riley might have made a good actor.
+Even here, in an embarrassing situation calling for lines spoken ad lib.
+and without prior rehearsals, he had what the critics term sincerity.
+His fine dissembling deceived the revenue man.
+
+"Well, that being the case, where is this here nigger, then?" demanded
+the officer.
+
+Riley looked about him.
+
+"I don't see him," he said. "He was right alongside just a moment ago
+too. I guess he's gone."
+
+This, in a sense, was the truth, and in still another sense an
+exaggeration. Red Hoss was not exactly gone, but he certainly was going.
+A man on horseback might have overtaken him, but with the handicap of
+Red Hoss' flying start against the pursuing forces no number of men
+afoot possibly could hope to do so.
+
+At the end of the second mile, and still going strong, the fugitive
+bethought him to part with his red coat. He already had run out from
+under his uniform cap, but a red coat with a double row of brass buttons
+and brass-topped epaulettes on it flashing next morning across a bland
+autumnal landscape would be calculated to attract undesired attention.
+So without slackening speed he took it off and cast it behind him into
+the darkness. Figuratively speaking, he breathed easier when he crossed
+the state line at or about five A.M. As a matter of fact, though, he was
+breathing harder. Some hours elapsed before he caught up with his
+panting.
+
+Traveling in his shirt sleeves, he reached home too late for the
+wedding. Still, considering everything, he hardly would have cared to
+attend anyhow. Either he would have felt embarrassed to be present or
+else the couple would, or perhaps all three. On such occasions nothing
+is more superfluous than an extra bridegroom. The wedding in question
+was the one uniting Melissa Grider and Homer Holmes. It was generally
+unexpected--in fact, sudden.
+
+The marriage took place on a Wednesday at high noon in the office of
+Justice of the Peace Dycus. Red Hoss arrived the same afternoon, shortly
+after the departure of the happy pair for Cairo, Illinois, on a
+honeymoon tour. All along, Melissa had had her heart set on going to
+St. Louis; but after the license had been paid for and the magistrate
+had been remunerated there remained but thirty-four dollars of the fund
+she had been safeguarding, dollar by dollar, as her other, or regular,
+fiance earned it. So she and Homer compromised on Cairo, and by their
+forethought in taking advantage of a popular excursion rate they had, on
+their return, enough cash left over to buy a hanging lamp with which to
+start up housekeeping.
+
+Late that evening, while Red Hoss still wrestled mentally with the
+confusing problem of being engaged to a girl who just had been married
+to another, a disquieting thought came abruptly to him, jolting him like
+a blow. Looking back on events, he was reminded that the sequence of
+painful misadventures which had befallen him recently dated, all and
+sundry, from that time when he was coming back down the Blandsville Road
+after delivering Mr. Dick Bell's new cow and acquired a fresh hind foot
+of a graveyard rabbit. He had been religiously toting that presumably
+infallible charm against disaster ever since--and yet just see what had
+happened to him! Surely here was a situation calling for interpretive
+treatment by one having the higher authority. In the person of the
+venerable Daddy Hannah--root, herb and conjure doctor--he found such a
+one.
+
+Before going into consultation the patriarch forethoughtedly collected a
+fee of seventy-five cents from Red Hoss. At the outset he demanded two
+dollars, but accepted the six bits, because that happened to be all the
+money the client had. This formality concluded, he required it of Red
+Hoss that he recount in their proper chronological order those various
+strokes of ill fortune which lately had plagued him; after which Daddy
+Hannah asked to see the talisman which coincidentally had been in the
+victim's ownership from beginning to culmination of the enumerated
+catastrophes. He took it in his wrinkled hand and studied it, sides, top
+and bottom, the while Red Hoss detailed the exact circumstances
+attending the death of the bunny. Then slowly the ancient delivered his
+findings.
+
+"In de fust an' fo'mos' place," stated Daddy Hannah, "dis yere warn't no
+reg'lar graveyard rabbit to start off wid. See dis li'l' teeny black
+spot on de und'neath part? Well, dat's a sho' sign of a witch rabbit. A
+witch rabbit he hang round a buryin' ground, but he don't go inside of
+one--naw, suh, not never nur nary. He ain't dare to. He stay outside an'
+frolic wid de ha'nts w'en dey comes fo'th, but da's all. De onliest
+thing which dey is to do when you kills a witch rabbit is to cut off de
+haid f'um de body an' bury de haid on de north side of a log, an' den
+bury de body on de south side so's dey can't jine together ag'in an'
+resume witchin'. So you havin' failed to do so, 'tain't no wonder you
+been havin' sech a powerful sorry time." He started to return the foot
+to its owner, but snatched it back.
+
+"Hole on yere a minute, boy! Lemme tek' nuther look at dat thing." He
+took it, then burst forth with a volley of derisive chuckling. "Huh,
+huh, well ef dat ain't de beatenes' part of it all!" wheezed Daddy
+Hannah. "Red Hoss, you sho' muster been in one big hurry to git away
+f'um dat spot whar you kilt your rabbit and ketched your charm. Looky
+yere at dis yere shank j'int! Don't you see nothin' curious about de
+side of de leg whar de hock sticks out? Well den, cullid boy, ef you
+don't, all I got to say is you mus' be total blind ez well ez monst'ous
+ignunt. Dis ain't no lef' hind foot of no rabbit."
+
+"Whut is it den?"
+
+"It's de right hind foot, dat's whut 'tis!" He tossed it away
+contemptuously.
+
+After a long minute Red Hoss, standing at Daddy Hannah's doorstep with
+his hands rammed deep in pockets, which were both empty, spoke in tones
+of profound bitterness. He addressed his remarks to space, but Daddy
+Hannah couldn't help overhearing.
+
+"Fust off, I gits fooled by de right laig of de wrong rabbit. Den a
+man-eatin' mule come a-browsin' on me an' gnaw a suit of close right
+offen my back. Den I runs into a elephint in a fog an' busts one of
+Mist' Lee Farrell's taxiscabs fur him an' he busts my jaw fur me. Den I
+gits tuk advantage of by a fool lion dat can't chamber his licker lak a
+gen'l'man, in consequence of which I loses me a fancy job an' a chunk of
+money. Den Melissa, she up an'--well, suh, I merely wishes to say dat
+f'um now on, so fur ez I is concerned, natchel history is a utter
+failure."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+IT COULD HAPPEN AGAIN TO-MORROW
+
+
+"Sorry, ma'am," said the Pullman conductor, "but there's not a bit of
+space left in the chair car, nor the sleeper neither."
+
+"I'm sorry too," said the young woman in the tan-colored tailor-mades.
+She was smartly hatted and smartly spatted; smart all over from
+toque-tip to toe-tip. "I didn't know until almost the last minute that
+I'd have to catch this train, and trusted to chance for a seat."
+
+"Yes'm, I see," commiserated the man in blue. "But you know what the
+rush is this time of year, and right now on top of all that so many of
+the soldiers getting home from the other side and their folks coming
+East to meet 'em and everything. I guess though, miss, you won't have
+much trouble getting accommodated in one of the day coaches."
+
+"I'll try it," she said, "and thank you all the same."
+
+She picked up her hand bag.
+
+"Wait a minute," he suggested. "I'll have my porter carry your valise on
+up to the other cars."
+
+Men of all stations in life were rather given to offering help to Miss
+Mildred Smith, the distinguished interior decorator and--on the
+side--amateur investigator for Uncle Sam with a wartime record for
+services rendered which many a professional might have envied. Perhaps
+they were the more ready to offer it since the young woman seemed so
+rarely to need it.
+
+This man's reward was a brisk little nod.
+
+"Please don't bother," she said. "This bag isn't at all heavy, and I'm
+used to traveling alone and looking out for myself." She footed it
+briskly along the platform of the Dobb's Ferry station. At the door of
+the third coach back from the baggage car a flagman stopped her.
+
+"All full up in here, lady," he told her, "but I think maybe you might
+find some place to sit in the next car beyond. If you'll just leave your
+grip here I'll bring it along to you after we pull out."
+
+As she reached the door of the coach ahead the train began to move. This
+coach was comfortably filled--and more than comfortably filled. Into the
+aisles projected elbows and feet and at either side doubled rows of
+backs of heads showed above the red plush seats. She shrugged her
+shoulders; it meant standing for a while at least; probably someone
+would be getting off soon--this train was a local, making frequent
+stops. It was not the train she would have chosen had the choosing been
+left altogether to her, but Mullinix of the Secret Service, her
+unofficial chief, had called her away from a furnishing and finishing
+contract at a millionaire's mansion in the country back of Dobb's Ferry
+to run up state to Troy, where there had arisen a situation which in the
+opinion of the espionage squad a woman was best fitted to handle,
+provided only that woman be Miss Mildred Smith. And so on an hour's
+notice she had dropped her own work and started.
+
+Now, though, near the more distant end of the car she saw a break in one
+line of heads. Perhaps the gap might mean there would be room for her.
+She made her way toward the spot, her trim small figure swaying to the
+motion as the locomotive picked up speed. Drawing nearer, she saw the
+back of one seat had been turned so that its occupants faced rearward
+toward her. In this seat, the one farther from her as she went up the
+aisle, were a man and a woman; in the nearer seat, facing this pair and
+sitting next the window, was a second woman--a girl rather--all three of
+them, she deduced from the seating arrangement, being members of the
+same party. A suitcase rested upon the cushions alongside the younger
+woman.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the lone passenger, halting here, "but is
+this place taken?"
+
+The man's face twisted as though in annoyance. He made an undecided
+gesture which might be interpreted either as an affirmative or the other
+thing. "I'm sorry if I am disturbing you," added Miss Smith, "but the
+car is crowded--every inch of it except this seems to be occupied."
+
+"Oh, I guess it's all right," he said, though in his begrudged consent
+was a sort of indirect intimation that it was not altogether all right.
+He half rose and swung the suitcase up into the luggage rack overhead,
+then tucked in his knees so she might slip into the place opposite him
+next the aisle.
+
+"Excuse me," he said a moment later, "but I could change seats with you
+if you don't mind."
+
+Her eyebrows went up a trifle.
+
+In her experiences it had not often happened that seemingly without
+reason a male fellow traveler had suggested that she give him a place
+commonly regarded as preferable to his own.
+
+"I do mind, rather," she answered. "Riding backward makes me carsick
+sometimes. Still I will change with you if you insist on it. I'm the
+intruder, you know."
+
+"No, no, never mind!" he hastened to say. "I guess it don't make any
+difference. And there's no intrusion, miss--honest now, there ain't."
+
+Miss Smith opened the book she had brought along and began to read. She
+felt that obliquely her enforced companions were studying her--at least
+two of them were. The one with whom she shared a seat had not looked her
+way; except to draw in her body a trifle as Miss Smith sat down she had
+made no movement of any sort. Certainly she had manifested no interest
+in the new arrival. In moments when her glance did not cross theirs,
+Miss Smith, turning the pages of her book, considered the two who faced
+her, subconsciously trying--as was her way--to appraise them for what
+outwardly they presumably were. Offhand she decided the man might be the
+superintendent of an estate; or then again he might be somebody's head
+gardener. He was heavily built and heavily mustached with a reddish cast
+to his skin and fat broad hands. The woman alongside him had the look
+about her of being a high-class domestic employee, possibly a
+housekeeper or perhaps a seamstress. Miss Smith decided that if not
+exactly a servant she was accustomed to dealing with servants and in her
+own sphere undoubtedly would figure as a competent and authoritative
+person.
+
+Of her own seat mate she could make out little except that she was
+young--young enough to be the daughter of the woman across from her, and
+yet plainly enough not the woman's daughter. Indeed if first impressions
+counted for anything she was of a different type and a different fiber
+from the pair who rode in her company. One somehow felt that she was
+with them but not of them; that she formed the alien apex of a triangle
+otherwise harmonious in its social composition. She was muffled cheek to
+knees in a loose cape of blue military cloth which quite hid the
+outlines of her figure, yet nevertheless revealed that she was slimly
+formed and of fair height. The flaring collar of the garment was
+upturned, shielding her face almost to the line of her brows. But out of
+the tail of her eye Miss Smith caught a suggestion of a youthful regular
+profile and admiringly observed the texture of a mass of thick, fine,
+auburn hair. Miss Smith was partial to auburn hair; she wondered if this
+girl had a coloring to match the rich reddish tones that glinted in the
+smooth coils about her head.
+
+Presently the man fumbled in a breast pocket of his waistcoat and found
+a long malignant-looking cigar. He bit the end of it and inserted the
+bitten end in his mouth, rolling it back and forth between his lips.
+Before long this poor substitute of the confirmed nicotinist for a smoke
+failed to satisfy his cravings. He whispered a word to his middle-aged
+companion, who nodded, and then with a mutter of apology to Miss Smith
+for troubling her he scrouged out into the aisle and disappeared in the
+direction of the smoker.
+
+Left alone, the woman very soon began to yawn. It was to be judged that
+the stuffy air of the car made her dozy. She kept her eyes open with an
+effort, her head lolling in spite of her drowsy efforts to hold it
+straight, yet all the while bearing herself after the fashion of one
+determined not to fall asleep.
+
+A voice spoke in Miss Smith's ear--a low and well-bred and musical
+voice.
+
+"I beg your pardon," it said hesitatingly, then stopped.
+
+Miss Smith turned her head toward the speaker and now for the first time
+had a fair chance to look into the face of the voice's owner. She looked
+and saw the oval of a most comely face, white and drawn as though by
+exhaustion or by deep sorrow, or perhaps by both. For all their pallor
+the cheeks were full and smooth; the brow was broad and low; the mouth
+firm and sweet. From between the tall collars of the cape the throat,
+partly revealed, rose as a smooth fair column. What made the girl almost
+beautiful were her eyes--eyes big and brown with a fire in them to
+suggest the fine high mettle of a resolute character, but out of them
+there looked--or else the other was woefully wrong--a great grief, a
+great distress bravely borne. To herself--all in that instant of
+looking--she said mentally that these were the saddest, most courageous
+eyes she ever had seen set in a face so young and seemingly bespeaking
+so healthful a body. For a moment Miss Smith was so held by what she saw
+that she forgot to speak.
+
+"I beg your pardon," repeated the girl. "I wonder if you would be good
+enough to bring me a drink of water--if it isn't too much trouble. I'm
+so thirsty. I can't very well go myself--there are reasons why I can't.
+And I don't think she"--with a sidelong glance toward the nodding figure
+opposite--"I don't think she would feel that she could go and leave me.'
+
+"Certainly I will," said Miss Smith. "It's not a bit of bother."
+
+"What is it?" The woman had been roused to full wakefulness by the
+movement of the stranger in rising.
+
+"Please don't move," said Miss Smith. "Your young lady is thirsty and
+I'm going to bring her a drink of water--that's all."
+
+"It's very good of you, miss," said the elder woman. She reached for her
+hand bag. "I think I've got a penny here for the cup."
+
+"I've plenty of pennies," said Miss Smith.
+
+At the cooler behind the forward door she filled a paper cup and brought
+it back to where the two were. To her surprise the elder woman reached
+for the cup and took it from her and held it to the girl's lips while
+she drank. With a profound shock of sympathy the realization went
+through Miss Smith that the girl had not the use of her hands.
+
+Having drunk, the girl settled back in her former posture, her face half
+turned toward the window and her head drooping as if from weariness. The
+woman laid the emptied cup aside and at once was dozing off again. The
+third member of the group sat in pitying wonder. She wondered what
+affliction had made a cripple of this wholesome-looking bonny creature.
+She thought of ghastly things she had read concerning the dreadful after
+effects of infantile paralysis, but rejected the suggestion, because no
+matter what else of dread and woe the girl's eyes had betrayed the face
+was too plump and the body, which she could feel touching hers, too firm
+and well nourished to betoken a present and wasting infirmity. So then
+it must have been some accident--some maiming mishap which probably had
+not been of recent occurrence, since nothing else about the girl
+suggested physical impairment. If this deduction were correct, the
+wearing of the shrouding blue cape in an atmosphere almost stiflingly
+close stood explained. It was so worn to hide the injured limbs from
+view. That, of course, would be the plausible explanation. Yet at the
+same time an inner consciousness gave Miss Smith a certain and absolute
+conviction that the specter of tearfulness lurking at the back of those
+big brown eyes meant more than the ever-present realization of some
+bodily disfigurement.
+
+Fascinated, she found her eyes searching the shape beside her for a clew
+to the answer of this lamentable mystery. In her covert scrutiny there
+was no morbid desire to spy upon another's hidden miseries--our Miss
+Smith was too well-bred for that--only was there a sudden quickened
+pity and with that pity a yearning to offer, if opportunity served, any
+small comfort of act or word which might fitly come her way. As her
+glance--behind the cover of her reopened book--traveled over the cloaked
+shape searching for a clew to the secret she saw how that chance
+promised to serve her ends. The girl was half turned from her, a
+shoulder pressing against the window ledge; the twist of her body had
+drawn one front breadth of the cape awry so that no longer did it
+completely overlap its fellow. In the slight opening thus unwittingly
+contrived Miss Smith could make out at the wearer's belt line a partly
+obscured inch or two of what seemed to be a heavy leathern gear, or
+truss, which so far as the small limits of the exposed area gave hint as
+to its purpose appeared to engage the forearms like a surgical device,
+supporting their weight below the bend of the elbows. With quickening
+and enhanced sympathy the little woman winced.
+
+Then she started, her gaze lifting quickly. Of a sudden she became aware
+that the girl was regarding her straightforwardly with those haggard
+eyes.
+
+"Can you tell what the--the trouble is with me?" she asked.
+
+She spoke under her breath, the wraith of a weary little smile about her
+mouth.
+
+"Oh, I'm so sorry," answered Miss Smith contritely. "But please believe
+me--it was not mere cheap inquisitiveness that made me look."
+
+"I think I know," said the girl softly. "You were sorry. And it doesn't
+matter much--your seeing. Somehow I don't mind your seeing."
+
+"But I haven't really seen--I only caught a glimpse. And I'm afraid now
+that I've been pressing too closely against your side; perhaps giving
+you pain by touching your arms."
+
+"My arms are not hurting me," said the girl, still with that queer ghost
+of a smile at her lips. "I've not been hurt or injured in any way."
+
+"Not hurt? Then why--"
+
+She choked the involuntary question even as she was framing it.
+
+"This--this has been done, I suppose, to keep me from hurting anyone
+else."
+
+"But--but I don't understand."
+
+"Don't you--yet? Then lift a fold of my wrap--carefully, so no one else
+can see while you are looking. I'd rather you did," she continued,
+seeing how Miss Smith hesitated.
+
+"But I am a stranger to you. I don't wish to pry. I----"
+
+"Please do! Then perhaps you won't be worrying later on about--about me
+if you know the truth now."
+
+With one hand Miss Smith turned back the edge of the cape, enlarging
+slightly the opening, and what she saw shocked her more deeply than
+though she had beheld some hideous mutilation. She saw that about both
+of the girl's wrists were snugly strapped broad leather bands, designed
+something after the fashion of the armlets sometimes worn by athletes
+and artisans, excepting that here the buckle fastenings were set upon
+the tops of the wrists instead of upon the inner sides; saw, too, that
+these cuffs were made fast to a wide leather belt, which in an unbroken
+band encircled the girl's trunk, so that her prisoned forearms were
+pressed in and confined closely against her body at the line of her
+waist. Her elbows she might move slightly and her fingers freely; but
+the hands were held well apart and the fingers in play might touch only
+the face of the broad girthing, which presumably was made fast by
+buckles or lacings at her back. As if the better to indicate how firmly
+she was secured, the wearer of these strange bonds flexed her arm
+muscles slightly; the result was a little creaking sound as the harness
+answered the strain. Then the girl relaxed and the sound ended.
+
+"Oh, you poor child!" The gasped exclamation came involuntarily,
+carrying all the deeper burden of compassion because it was uttered in a
+half whisper. Quickly she snugged the cloak in to cover the ugly thing
+she had looked upon. "What have you done that you should be treated so?"
+
+Indignation was in the asking--that and an incredulous disbelief that
+here had been any wrongdoing.
+
+"It isn't what I've done--exactly. I imagine it is their fear of what
+they think I might do if my hands were free."
+
+"But where are you going? Where are these people taking you? You're no
+criminal. I know you're not. You couldn't be!"
+
+"I am being taken to a place up the road to be confined as a dangerous
+lunatic."
+
+In the accenting of the words was no trace of rebellion or even of
+self-pity, but merely there was the dead weight and numbness of a
+hopeless resignation to make the words sound flat and listless.
+
+"I don't believe one word of it!" exclaimed Miss Smith, then broke off
+short, realizing that the shock of the girl's piteous admission had sent
+her own voice lifting and that now she had a second listener. The woman
+diagonally across from her was sitting bolt upright and a pair of small
+eyes were narrowing upon her in a squint of watchful and hostile
+suspicion. Instantly she stood up--a small, competent, determined body.
+
+"I'll be back," she stated, disregarding the elder woman and speaking to
+the younger. "And I'm going to find out more about you, too, before I'm
+done."
+
+Her step, departing, was brisk and resolute.
+
+In the aisle near the forward door she encountered the flagman.
+
+"There is a man in the smoker I must see at once," she said. "Will you
+please go in there and find him and tell him I wish--no, never mind. I
+see him coming now."
+
+She went a step or two on to meet the person she sought, halting him in
+the untenanted space at the end of the coach.
+
+"I want to speak with you, please," she began.
+
+"Well, you'll have to hurry," he told her, "because I'm getting off with
+my party in less'n five minutes from now. What was it you wanted to say
+to me?"
+
+"That young girl yonder--I became interested in her. I thought perhaps
+she had been injured. Then more or less by chance I found out the true
+facts. I spoke to her; she told me a little about her plight."
+
+"Well, if you've been talking to her what's the big idea in talking to
+me?"
+
+His tone was churlish.
+
+"This isn't mere vulgar curiosity on my part. I have a perfectly proper
+motive, I think, in inquiring into her case. What is her name."
+
+"Margaret Vinsolving."
+
+"Spell it for me, please--the last name?"
+
+He spelled it out, and she after him to fix it in her mind.
+
+"Where does she live--I mean where is her home?"
+
+"Village of Pleasantdale, this state," shortly.
+
+"Who are her people?"
+
+"She's got a mother and that's all, far as I know."
+
+"What asylum are you taking her to?"
+
+"No asylum. We're taking her to Doctor Shorter's Sanitarium back of
+Peekskill two miles--Dr. Clement Shorter, specialist in nervous
+disorders--he's the head."
+
+"It is a private place then and not a state asylum?"
+
+"You said it."
+
+"You are connected with this Doctor Shorter's place, I assume?"
+
+"Yep."
+
+"In what capacity?"
+
+"Oh, sort of an outside man--look after the grounds and help out
+generally with the patients and all. And now, say, lady, if that'll
+satisfy you I guess I better be stepping along. I got to see about
+getting this here patient and the matron off the train; that's the
+matron that's setting with her."
+
+"Just a moment more, please."
+
+She felt in a fob set under the cuff of her left sleeve and brought
+forth a small gold badge and held it cupped in her gloved hand for him
+to see. As he bent his head and made out the meaning of the badge the
+gruff air dropped from him magically.
+
+"Oh, I see!" he said. "Secret Service, eh? All right, ma'am, what more
+did you want to know? Only I'd ask you speak brisk because there ain't
+so much time."
+
+"Tell me briefly what you know of that child."
+
+"Not such a lot, excepting she's a dangerous lunatic, having been
+legally adjudged so yestiddy. And her mother's paying for her keep at a
+high-class place where she can have special treatment and special care
+instead of letting her be put away in one of the state asylums. And so
+I'm taking her there--me and the matron yonder. That's about all, I
+guess."
+
+"I don't believe it."
+
+"You don't believe what?"
+
+He was beginning to bristle anew.
+
+"Don't believe she is insane at all, much less dangerously so. Why, I've
+just been talking with her. We exchanged only a few words, but in all
+that she said she was so perfectly rational, so perfectly sensible.
+Besides, one has only to look at her to feel sure some terrible mistake
+or some terrible injustice is being done. Surely there is nothing
+eccentric, nothing erratic about her; now is there? You must have been
+studying her. Don't you yourself feel that there might have been
+something wrong about her commitment?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Not a chancet. Everything's been positively regular and aboveboard. You
+can't railroad folks into Doctor Shorter's place; he's got too high a
+standing. Shorter takes no chances with anybody."
+
+"But she seemed so absolutely normal in speech, manner--everything. I've
+seen insane persons before now and--"
+
+"Excuse me, but about how many have you seen?"
+
+"Not many, I admit, but--"
+
+"Well, excuse me again, lady, but I thought as much. Well, I
+have--plenty of 'em I've seen in my time. See 'em every day for the
+matter of that. Listen to me! For instance, now, we've got a case up
+there with us now. He's been there going on fifteen years; used to be a
+preacher, highly educated and all that. Look at him and you wouldn't see
+a thing out of the way with him except that he'd be wearing a
+strait-jacket. Talk to him for maybe a week and you wouldn't notice a
+single thing wrong about him. He'd just strike you all along as being
+one of the nicest, mildest, old Christian gents you ever met up with in
+your whole life. But get him on a certain subject; just mention a
+certain word to him and he'd tear your throat out with his bare hands if
+he could get at you."
+
+"But this poor girl, surely her case is different? Was it really
+necessary to bind her hands as you've done?"
+
+"Lady, about these here violent ones you can't never tell. Me, I never
+saw her in my life before I went down after her this morning, and up to
+now she hasn't made me a mite of trouble. But I had my warning from them
+that turned her over to me. Anyhow, all I needed was the story of her
+own mother, as fine a lady as you'd care to see and just about
+broken-hearted over all this. You'd think from the way she carried on
+she was the one that was being put away and not the daughter. And yet,
+what did the mother swear to on her sacred oath? She swore to the
+daughter's having tried, not once but half a dozen separate times to
+kill her, till she was afraid for her own life--positively!
+
+"Besides, lady, it's been my experience, and I've had a heap of it, that
+it's the quiet-acting ones that are apt to strike the quickest and do
+the most damage when the fit comes on 'em. So taking everything into
+consideration, I felt like as if I oughter be purty careful handling her
+on this trip. But she's all right. Probably nobody on this train,
+outside of you, knows there's anything wrong with her and it was
+accidental-like, so you tell me, the way you come to find out--you
+taking that seat alongside her and getting into talk with her whilst I
+was in yonder smoking. It's better she should be under control thataway
+than that she should maybe get a spell on her right here in this car or
+somewheres and me be forced to hold her down by main strength and
+possibly have to handle her pretty rough. I put it to you now, ain't it?
+The way she's fixed she can't harm herself nor no one else. You take it
+from me, lady, that while I've been in this business for so long I don't
+always get my private feelings harrowed up over the case of a
+nice-looking young girl like this one is, like an outsider might, still
+at that I ain't hard-hearted and I ain't aiming to be severe just
+because I can. But what else is there for me to do except what I'm
+doing? I ask you. Say, it's funny she talked to you. She ain't said
+hardly a word to us since she started. Didn't even say nothing when I
+put the hobbles on her."
+
+"I'm not questioning your judgment," said Miss Smith, "but she is so
+pitiable! She seemed to me like some dumb, frightened, wild creature
+caught in a trap. And despite what you say I'm sure she can't be mad.
+Please, may I speak with her again--if she herself doesn't mind?"
+
+"I'm afeared it's too late," he said not unkindly. "We're slowing down
+for Peekskill now. I'll have to step lively as it is to get 'em off
+shipshape. But if you've still got any doubts left in your mind you can
+look up the court records at White Plains. You'll find everything's been
+done positively legal and regular. And if you should want to reach me
+any time to find out how she's getting along or anything like that, why
+my name is Abram Foley, care of Doctor Shorter."
+
+He cast this farewell information back over his shoulder as he hurried
+from her.
+
+Half convinced yet doubting still, and filled wholly with an
+overmastering pity, Miss Smith stood where she was while the train
+jerkily came to a standstill. There she stayed, watching, as the trio
+quitted the car. Past her where she stood the man Foley led the way,
+burdened with the heavy suitcase. Next came his charge, walking steadily
+erect, mercifully cloaked to her knees in the blue garment; and the
+matron, in turn behind her, bearing a hand bag and an odd parcel or two.
+About the departing group a casual onlooker would have sensed nothing
+unusual. But our Miss Smith, knowing what she did know, held a clenched
+hand to the lump that had formed in her throat. She was minded to speak
+in farewell to the prisoner, and yet a second impulse held her mute.
+
+She fell in behind the three of them though, following as far as the
+platform, being minded to witness the last visible act of the tragedy
+upon which she had stumbled. Her eyes and her heart went with them as
+they crossed through the open shed of the station, the man still
+leading, the matron with one hand guiding their unresisting ward toward
+where a closed automobile, a sort of hybrid between a town car and an
+ambulance, was drawn up on the driveway just beyond the eaves of the
+building. A driver in a gray livery opened the door of the car for its
+occupants.
+
+Alongside the automobile the girl swung herself round, her head thrown
+back, as a felon might face about at the gateway of his prison--for a
+last view of the free world he was leaving behind. Seemingly the
+vigilant woman misinterpreted this movement as the first indication of
+a spirit of kindling obstinacy. Alarmed, she caught at the girl to
+restrain her. Her grasp closed upon the shoulder of the cape and as the
+wrenched garment came away in her hand the prisoner stood revealed in
+her bonds--a slim graceful figure, for all the disfigurement of the
+clumsy harness work which fettered her.
+
+An instant later the cape had been replaced upon her shoulders, hiding
+her state from curious eyes, but in that same brief space of time she
+must have seen leaning from the train, which now again was in motion,
+the shape of her unknown champion, for she nodded her head as though in
+gratitude and good-by and her white face suddenly was lighted with what
+the passenger upon the car platform, seeing this through a sudden mist
+of tears, thought to be the bravest, most pitiable smile that ever she
+had seen.
+
+The train doubled round an abrupt curve, in the sharpness of its swing
+almost throwing her off her feet, and when she had regained her balance
+and looked again the station was furlongs behind her, hidden from sight
+by intervening buildings.
+
+It was that smile of farewell which acted as a flux to carry into the
+recipient's mind a resolution already forming. Into things her emotions
+were likely to lead her headlong and impetuously, but for a way out of
+them this somewhat unusual young woman named Smith generally had for
+her guide a certain clear quality of reasoning, backed by an intuition
+which helped her frequently to achieve satisfactory results. So it was
+with her in this instance.
+
+Her share of the business in Troy completed, as speedily it was, she
+stayed in Albany for half a day on her way back and called upon the
+governor. At first sight he liked her, for her good looks, for her
+trigness, her directness and more than any of these for the excellent
+mental poise which so patently was a part of her. The outcome of her
+visit to him and his enthusiastic admiration for her was that the
+district attorney of Westchester County shortly thereafter instituted an
+investigation, the chief fruitage of that investigation being embodied
+in a somewhat longish letter from him, which Miss Smith read in her
+studio apartment one afternoon perhaps three weeks after the date of her
+meeting on trainboard with that adjudged maniac, the girl Margaret
+Vinsolving.
+
+To the letter was a polite preamble. She skipped it. We may do well to
+follow her lead and come to the body of it, which ran like this:
+
+
+"Mrs. Janet Vinsolving is the widow of a colonel in our Regular Army. My
+information is that she is a woman of culture and refinement. Since the
+death of her husband some eight years ago she has been residing in a
+small home which she owns in the outskirts of Pleasantdale village in
+this county. From the fact that she keeps no servants and from other
+facts brought to me I gather that she is in very modest circumstances.
+She has been living quite alone except for the daughter, Margaret, who
+is her only child. The daughter was educated in the public schools of
+the county. Lately she has been studying applied designing with a view
+to becoming an interior decorator."
+
+"Ah, now I know another reason why I was drawn to her!" interpolated the
+reader, speaking to herself. With heightened interest she read on:
+
+"On inquiry it appears that among her former schoolmates and teachers
+she was popular, though not inclined to make intimates. She is reputed
+to have been rather high-tempered, but seemingly throughout her
+childhood and young girlhood there was nothing about her conduct or
+appearance to indicate a disordered mind. Indeed there was no suggestion
+of mental aberration on her part from any source until within the past
+month. However, I should add that it is rather hard to arrive at any
+accurate estimate of her general behavior by reason of the fact that
+mother and daughter led so secluded a life. They had acquaintances in
+the community, but apparently no close friends there or elsewhere.
+
+"About four weeks ago, on the twenty-eighth of last month to be exact,
+the mother, described to me as being in a state of great distress,
+visited Justice Cannavan, then sitting in chambers at White Plains, and
+asking for a private interview with him, requested an inquiry into the
+sanity of the girl Margaret, with a view, as she explained, of
+protecting her own life. Her daughter, she alleged, had without warning
+developed a homicidal tendency aimed at the applicant.
+
+"According to Mrs. Vinsolving, the girl, who always theretofore had been
+a devoted and affectionate child, had made at least five separate and
+distinct attempts to kill her, first by putting poison into her food and
+later by attempting to strangle her at night in her bed. Next only to a
+natural desire to have her own physical safety insured, the mother was
+apparently inspired by a wish to surround the truth regarding her
+beloved child's aberration with as much secrecy as possible. At the same
+time she realized that a certain amount of publicity was inevitable.
+
+"Acting under the statutes, the justice appointed two reputable
+practicing physicians of the county, namely Dr. Ernest Malt, of
+Wincorah, and Dr. James P. McGlore, of Pleasantdale, to sit as a
+commission for the purpose of inquiring into Miss Vinsolving's mental
+state. The mother, still exhibiting every evidence of maternal grief,
+appeared before these gentlemen and repeated in detail the account of
+the attacks made upon her, as previously described to His Honor.
+
+"The girl was then brought before the commission. It was explained to
+her that under the law she had the right to demand a hearing in open
+court before a jury chosen to pass upon her sanity. This she waived, but
+from this point on throughout the inquiry she steadfastly declined to
+make answers to the questions propounded to her by the members of the
+commission in an effort to ascertain her mental status, but on the
+contrary persistently maintained a silence which they interpreted as a
+phase of insane cunning characteristic of a type of abnormality not
+often encountered, but in their opinion the more sinister and
+significant because of its rarity.
+
+"They accordingly drew up a finding setting forth that in their opinion
+and deliberate judgment the unfortunate young woman was suffering from a
+progressive and therefore probably incurable form of dementia. The
+justice immediately signed the necessary orders for her detention and
+commitment. To save the daughter from being sent to a state institution
+the mother provided funds sufficient for her care at Doctor Shorter's
+sanitarium, an establishment of unimpeachable reputation, and she
+accordingly was taken there in proper custody, as you yourself are
+aware.
+
+"My information from the sanitarium, which I procured in response to
+your request, and the governor's instructions to me for a full inquiry
+into all the circumstances is that since her confinement Miss
+Vinsolving has been under constant observation. She has been orderly and
+obedient and except for slightly melancholic tendencies, which might
+easily be provoked by the nature of her environment, is quite natural in
+her behavior. I draw the inference, however, that this docility may be
+merely the forerunner of an outburst at any time.
+
+"Altogether my investigation convinces me that no miscarriage of the law
+could possibly have occurred in this instance. There is certainly no
+ground for suspecting that the mother had any ulterior or improper
+motive in seeking to have her daughter and sole companion deprived of
+liberty. Neither the mother nor any other person alive can hope to
+profit in a financial sense by reason of the girl's temporary or
+permanent detention.
+
+"The girl herself is without means of her own. The mother for her
+maintenance is largely dependent upon the pension she receives from the
+United States Government. The girl had no income or estate of her own
+and no expectancy of any inheritance from any imaginable source other
+than the small estate she will legally inherit at the death of her
+mother. Finally I may add that nowhere in the case has there developed
+any suggestion of a scandal in the life of mother or daughter or of any
+clandestine love affair on the part of either.
+
+"These briefly are the available facts as compiled by a trustworthy
+member of my staff, Assistant District Attorney Horace Wilkes, to whom
+I detailed the duty of making a painstaking inquiry. If I may hereafter
+be of service to you in this matter or any other matter, kindly command
+me. I have the honor to be,
+
+"Yours etc., etc."
+
+
+With a little gesture of despairful resignation Miss Smith laid the
+letter down. Well, there was nothing more she could do; nothing more to
+be done. She had come to a blind end. The proof was conclusive of the
+worst. But in her thoughts, waking and sleeping, persisted the image of
+that gallant, pathetic little figure which she had seen last at the
+Peekskill station, bound, helpless, alone and all so courageously facing
+what to most of us would be worse than death itself. Awake or in sleep
+she could not get it out of her mind.
+
+At length one night following on a day which for the greater part she
+had spent in a study of the somewhat curious laws that in New York
+State--as well as in divers other states of the Union--govern the
+procedure touching certain classes coming within purview of the code,
+she awoke in the little hours preceding the dawn to find herself saying
+aloud: "There's something wrong--there must be--there has to be!"
+
+Until daylight and after she lay there planning a course of action until
+finally she had it completed. True, it was a grasping at feeble straws,
+but even so she meant to follow along the only course which seemed open
+to her.
+
+First she did some long-distance telephoning. Then immediately after
+breakfast she sent to the garage round the corner for her runabout and
+in it she rode up through the city and on into Westchester, now
+beginning to flaunt the circus colors of a gorgeous Indian summer. An
+hour and a half of steady driving brought her to the village of
+Pleasantdale. She found it a place well named, seeing that it was tucked
+down in a cove among the hills between the Hudson on the one side and
+the Sound on the other.
+
+Following the directions given her by a lone policeman on duty in the
+tiny public square, she ran two blocks along the main street and drew up
+where a window sign giving name and hours advertised that James P.
+McGlore, M.D., here professionally received patients in his office on
+the lower floor of his place of residence. A maidservant answered the
+caller's knock, and showing her into a chamber furnished like a parlor
+which had started out to be a reception room and then had tried--too
+late--to change back again into a parlor, bade her wait. She did not
+have long to wait. Almost immediately an inner door opened and in the
+opening appeared the short and blocky figure of a somewhat elderly,
+old-fashioned-looking man with a square homely face--a face which
+instantly she classified as belonging to a rather stupid, very dogmatic
+and utterly honest man. He had outjutting, belligerent eyebrows and a
+stubborn underjaw that was badly undershot. He spoke as he entered and
+his tone was noticeably not cordial.
+
+"The girl tells me your name is Smith. I suppose from that you're the
+young person that the district attorney telephoned me about an hour or
+so ago. Well, how can I serve you?"
+
+"Perhaps, doctor, the district attorney told you I had interested myself
+in the case of the Vinsolving girl--Margaret Vinsolving," she began. "I
+had intended to call also upon your associate, Doctor Malt, over at
+Wincorah, but I learn he is away."
+
+"Yes, yes," he said with a sort of hurried petulance. "Know all about
+that. Malt's like a lot of these young new physicians--always running
+off on vacations. Mustn't hold me responsible for his absences. Got no
+time to think about the other fellow. Own affairs are enough--keep me
+busy. Well, go on, why don't you? You were speaking of the Vinsolving
+girl. Well, what of her?"
+
+"I was saying that I had interested myself in her case and--"
+
+He snapped in: "One moment. Let's get this all straightened out before
+we start. May I inquire if you are closely related to the young person
+in question?"
+
+"I am not. I never saw her but once."
+
+"Are you by any chance a close friend of the young woman?"
+
+He towered over her, for she was seated and he had not offered to sit
+down. Indeed throughout the interview he remained standing.
+
+Looking up at him, where he glowered above her, she answered back
+promptly:
+
+"As I was saying, I never saw her but once--that was on the day she
+was carried away to be placed in confinement. So I cannot call myself
+her friend exactly, though I would like to be her friend. It was
+because of the sympathy which her position--and I might add, her
+personality--roused in me that I have taken the liberty of coming here
+to see you about her."
+
+Under his breath he growled and grunted and puffed certain sounds. She
+caught the purport of at least two of the words.
+
+"Pardon me, doctor," she said briskly, "but I am not an amateur
+philanthropist. I trust I'm not an amateur anything. I am a business
+woman earning my own living by my own labors and I pay taxes and for the
+past year or so I have been a citizen and a voter. Please do not regard
+me merely as an officious meddler--a busybody with nothing to do except
+to mind other people's affairs. It was quite by chance that I came upon
+this poor child and learned something of her unhappy state."
+
+The choleric brows went up like twin stress marks accenting unspoken
+skepticism.
+
+"A child--of twenty-four?" he commented ironically.
+
+"A child, measured by my age or yours. As I told you, I met her quite
+accidentally. She appealed to me so--such a plucky, helpless, friendless
+little thing she seemed with those hideous leather straps binding her."
+
+"Do you mean to imply that she was being mistreated by those who had her
+in charge?"
+
+"No, her escorts--or attendants or warders or guards or whatever one
+might call them--seemed kindly enough, according to their lights. But
+she was so quiet, so passive that I--"
+
+"Well, would you expect anyone who felt a proper sense of responsibility
+to suffer dangerous maniacs to run at large without restraint or control
+of any sort upon their limbs and their actions?"
+
+"But, doctor, that is just the point--are you so entirely sure that she
+is a dangerous maniac? That is what I want to ask you--whether there
+isn't a possibility, however remote, that a mistake may conceivably have
+been made? Please don't misunderstand me," she interjected quickly,
+seeing how he--already stiff and bristly--had at her words stiffened and
+bristled still more. "I do not mean to intimate that anything unethical
+has been done. In fact I am quite sure that everything has been quite
+ethical. And I am not questioning your professional standing or decrying
+your abilities.
+
+"But as I understand it, neither you nor Doctor Malt is avowedly an
+alienist. I assume that neither of you has ever specialized in nervous
+or mental disorders. Such being the case, don't you agree with me--this
+idea has just occurred to me--that if an alienist, a man especially
+versed in these things rather than a general practitioner, however
+experienced and competent, were called in even now--"
+
+"And you just said you were not reflecting upon my professional
+abilities!"
+
+His tone was heavily sarcastic.
+
+"Of course I am not! I beg your pardon if my poor choice of language has
+conveyed any such impression. What I am trying to get at, doctor, in my
+inexpert way, is that I talked with this girl, and while I exchanged
+only a few words with her, nevertheless what she said--yes, and her
+bearing as well, her look, everything about her--impressed me as being
+entirely rational."
+
+He fixed her with a hostile glare and at her he aimed a blunt gimlet of
+a forefinger.
+
+"Are you quite sure you are entirely sane yourself?"
+
+"I trust I am fairly normal."
+
+"Got any little funny quirks in your brain? Any little temperamental
+crotchets in which you differ from the run of people round you? Think
+now!"
+
+"Well," she confessed, "I don't like cats--I hate cats. And I don't like
+figured wall paper. And I don't like--"
+
+"That will be sufficient. Take the first point: You hate cats. On that
+count alone any confirmed cat lover would regard you as being as crazy
+as a March hare. But until you start going round trying to kill other
+people's cats or trying to kill other people who own cats there's
+probably no danger that anyone will prefer charges of lunacy against you
+and have you locked up."
+
+She smiled a little in spite of her earnestness.
+
+"Perhaps it is symptomatic of a lesion in my brain that I should be
+concerning myself in the case of a strange girl whom I have seen but
+once--is that also in your thoughts, Doctor McGlore?"
+
+"We'll waive that," he said. "For the sake of argument we'll concede
+that your indicative peculiarities assume a harmless phase at present.
+But this Vinsolving girl's case is different--hers were not harmless.
+Her acts were amply conclusive to establish proof of her mental
+condition."
+
+"From the district attorney's statement to me I rather got the
+impression that she did not indulge in any abnormal conduct while before
+you for examination."
+
+"Did he tell you of her blank refusal to answer the simplest of the
+questions my associate and I put to her?"
+
+"Doctor," she countered, seeking to woo him into a better humor, "would
+you construe silence on a woman's part as necessarily a mark of
+insanity? It is a rare thing, I concede. But might it not sometimes be
+an admirable thing as well?"
+
+But this gruff old man was not to be cajoled into pleasanter channels
+than the course his mood steered for him.
+
+"We'll waive that too. Anyhow, the mother's evidence was enough."
+
+"But was there anything else other than the mother's unsupported story
+for you to go on and be guided by?"
+
+"What else was needed?" he retorted angrily. "What motive could the
+mother have except the motives that were prompted by mother love? That
+was a devoted, desolated woman if ever I saw one. Look here! A daughter
+without cause suddenly turns upon her mother and tries to kill her.
+Well, then, either she's turned criminal or she has gone crazy!
+
+"But why should I go on debating with you a matter which you don't know
+anything about in the first place and in which you have no call to
+interfere in the second place?
+
+"I don't want to be sharp with you, young woman, but that's the plain
+fact. The duty which I undertook under the law and as a reputable
+physician was not a pleasant one, and it becomes all the less pleasant
+when an unqualified layman--laywoman if you prefer to phrase it that
+way--cross-examines me on my judgment."
+
+"Doctor, let me repeat again I have not sought to cross-question you or
+belittle your knowledge. But you speak of the law. Do you not think it a
+monstrous thing that two men even though they be of high standing in
+their profession as general practitioners, but without special
+acquaintance with mental derangements--I am not speaking of this
+particular case now but of hundreds of other cases--do you not think it
+a wrong thing that two such persons may pass upon a third person's
+sanity and upon the uncorroborated testimony of some fourth person
+recommend the confinement of the accused third person in an asylum for
+the insane?"
+
+"I suppose you know a person so complained of--or accused, as you put
+it--has the right to a jury trial in open court. This girl that you're
+so worked up about had that right. She waived it."
+
+"But is a presumably demented person a fit judge of his or her own best
+course of conduct? In your opinion shouldn't there be other safeguards
+in their interests to insure against what conceivably might be a
+terrible error or a terrible injustice?"
+
+He didn't exactly sneer, but he indulged himself in the first cousin of
+a sneer.
+
+"You've evidently been fortifying yourself to give me a battle--reading
+up on the subject, eh?"
+
+"I've been reading up on the subject--not, though, for the purpose of
+entering into a joint debate on the subject with anyone. But, doctor, I
+have read enough to startle me. I never knew before there were such laws
+on the statute books. And I have learned about another case, the case of
+that rich man--a multimillionaire the papers called him, which means I
+suppose that at least he was well-to-do. You remember about him, I am
+sure? A commission declared him of unsound mind. He got away to another
+state where the legal processes of this state could not reach him. The
+courts of that other state declared him mentally competent and capable
+of managing his own affairs--and for a period of years he did manage
+them. Here the other month, under a pledge of safe conduct, he returned
+to New York on legal business and while he was here he carried his cause
+to a higher court and that court ruled him to be sane and entitled to
+his complete freedom of body and action. But for years he had been a
+pseudofugitive in enforced exile and for years he had carried the stigma
+of having been adjudged insane. This thing happened, incredible as it
+sounds. It might happen again to-day or to-morrow. It--"
+
+"Excuse me for interrupting your flow of eloquence," he said with a
+labored politeness, "but I thought you came here to discuss the case of
+a girl named Vinsolving, not the case of a man I never heard of before.
+Now, at least I'm not going to discuss generalities with you and I'm not
+going to sit here and join with you in questioning the workings of the
+law either. The laws are good enough for me as they stand. I'm a
+law-abiding citizen, not one of these red-eyed socialistic Bolsheviks
+that are forever trying to tear down things. I believe in taking the
+laws as I find them. Let well enough alone--that's my motto, young
+woman. And there are a whole lot more like me in this country."
+
+"Pardon me for breaking in on you, sir," she said, fighting hard to keep
+her temper, "but neither am I a socialist or a Bolshevik."
+
+"Then I reckon probably you're one of these rampant suffragists. Anyhow,
+what's the use of discussing abstracts? If you don't like the law why
+don't you have it changed?"
+
+"That's one of the very things I hope before long to try to do," she
+replied.
+
+"It'll keep you pretty busy," he responded with a sniff of profound
+disapproval. "But then you seem to have a lot of spare time on your
+hands to spend in crusading round. Well, I haven't. I've got my patients
+to see to. One of 'em is waiting for me now--if you'll kindly excuse
+me?"
+
+She rose.
+
+"I'm sorry," she said sincerely, "if either my mission or my language
+has irritated you. I seem somehow to have defeated the purpose that
+brought me--I mean a faint hope that perhaps somehow I might help that
+girl. Something tells me--call it intuition or sentimentality or what
+you will--but something tells me I must keep on trying to help her. I
+only wish I could make you share my point of view."
+
+"Well, you can't. Say, see here, why don't you go to see the mother? I
+judge she might convince you that you are on the wrong tack, even if I
+can't."
+
+"That's exactly what I mean to do," she declared.
+
+Something inside her brain gave a little jump. It was curious that she
+had not thought of it before; even more curious that his labored
+sarcasms had been required to set her on this new trail.
+
+"Well, at that, you'd better think twice before you go," he retorted.
+"She was a mighty badly broken-up woman the last time I saw her, but
+even so I judge she's still got spunk enough left in her to resent
+having an unauthorized and uninvited stranger coming about, seeking to
+pry into her own private sorrow. But it's your affair, not mine.
+Besides, judging by everything, you probably don't think my advice is
+worth much anyhow."
+
+"Oh, yes, but I do--I do indeed! And I thank you for it."
+
+"Don't mention it! And good day!"
+
+The slamming of the inner door behind him made an appropriate
+exclamation point to punctuate the brevity of his offended and indignant
+departure. For a moment she felt like laughing outright. Then she felt
+like crying. Then she did neither. She left.
+
+"Poor, old opinionated, stupid old, conscientious old thing!" she was
+saying to herself as she let herself, unattended, out of the front door.
+"And yet I'll wager he would sit up all night and work his fingers to
+the bone trying to save a life. And when it comes to serving poor people
+without expecting payment or even asking for it, I know he is a perfect
+dear. Besides, I should be grateful to him--he gave me an idea. I don't
+know where he got it from either--I don't believe he ever had so very
+many of his own."
+
+Again the handy cop in the communal center set her upon her way. But
+when she came to the destination she sought--a small, rather shabby
+cottage standing a mile or so westward from the middle of things
+communal, out in the fringes of the village where outlying homesteads
+tailed away into avowed farmsteads--the house itself was closed up fast
+and tight. The shutters all were closely drawn and against the gatepost
+was fastened a newly painted sign reading: "For Sale or Rent. Apply to
+Searle, the Up-to-Date Real Estate Man, Next Door to Pythian Hall."
+
+Not quite sure she had stopped at the right place, Miss Smith hailed a
+man pottering in a chrysanthemum bed in the yard of the adjoining
+cottage.
+
+"Mrs. Vinsolving?" he said, lifting a tousled head above his palings.
+"Yessum, she lives there--leastwise she did. She moved away only the day
+before yesterday. Sort of sudden, I think it must have been. I didn't
+know she was going till she was gone." He grinned in extenuation of the
+unaccountable failure of a small-town man to acquaint himself with all
+available facts regarding a neighbor's private affairs. "But then she
+never wasn't much of a hand, Mrs. Vinsolving wasn't, for mixing with
+folks. I'll say she wasn't!"
+
+Back she turned to seek out Searle, he of up-to-date real estate. In a
+dingy office upstairs over the local harness store a lean and rangy
+gentleman raised a brindled beard above a roll-top desk and in answer to
+her first question crisply remarked, "Can't tell."
+
+"But surely if she put her property in your hands for disposal she must
+have given you some address where you might communicate with her?"
+pressed Miss Smith.
+
+"Oh, yes, she done that all right, but that ain't the question you ast
+me first. You ast me if I could tell you where she was--and that I can't
+do."
+
+"I see. Then I presume she left instructions with you not to give her
+present whereabouts to anyone?"
+
+"Well, you might figger it out that way and mebbe not so far wrong,"
+said the cryptic Mr. Searle. "But if you think you'd like to buy or rent
+her place I'm fully empowered to act. Got the keys right here and a car
+standing outside--take you right on out there in a jiffy if you say the
+word."
+
+He rose up and followed her halfway down the steps, plainly torn
+between a desire to make a commission and a regret that under orders
+from his client he could furnish no details regarding her late
+movements.
+
+"If you're interested in any other piece of property in this vicinity--"
+were the last words she heard floating down the stair well as she passed
+out upon the uneven sidewalk.
+
+She knew exactly what she meant to do next. At sight of her badge, as
+shown to him through his wicketed window marked "General Delivery," the
+village postmaster gave her a number on a side street well up-town in
+New York, adding: "Going away, Mrs. Vinsolving particularly asked me not
+to tell anybody where her mail was to be sent on to. Kind of a secretive
+woman anyhow, she was, and besides she's had some very pressing trouble
+come on her lately. I presume you've heard something about that matter?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"I suppose now," went on the postmaster, his features sharpening with
+curiosity, "that the Federal authorities ain't looking into that
+particular matter? Not that I care to know myself, but I just thought it
+wouldn't be any harm to ask."
+
+"No," said Miss Smith, "I merely wanted to see her on a personal matter
+and I only let you see my credential in order to learn her forwarding
+address."
+
+Provided with the requisite information, she figured that before night
+she would interview the widow or know good reasons why. That the other
+woman had quitted her home seemingly in a hurry and with efforts at
+secrecy gave zest to the quest and added a trace of bepuzzlement to it
+too. Even so, she did not herself know what she meant to say to the
+woman when she had found her in her present abiding place or what
+questions she would ask. Only she knew that an inner prompting stronger
+than any reasoned-out process drove her forward upon her vague and
+blinded mission. Fool's errand it might be--probably was--yet she meant
+to see it through.
+
+But she had not reckoned upon the contingency that on this fine October
+forenoon, for the first time since buying his new touring car, Mr. Jake
+Goebel, shirt-waist manufacturer in a small way in Broome Street and
+head of a family in a large way in West One Hundred and Ninety-ninth
+Street, would be undertaking to drive the said car unaided and untutored
+by a more experienced charioteer on a trial spin up the Albany Post
+Road, accompanied--it being merely a five-passenger car--only by Mrs.
+Rosa Goebel, wife of the above, six little Goebels of assorted sizes and
+ages and Mrs. Goebel's unmated sister, Miss Freda Hirschfeld of
+Rivington Street. In Getty Square, Yonkers, about noontime occurred a
+head-on collision, the subsequent upshots of which were variously that
+divers of those figuring in the accident went in the following
+directions:
+
+
+Miss Smith to a doctor's office near by to have a sprained wrist
+bandaged; and thence home in a hired automobile.
+
+Her runabout to a Yonkers repair shop and garage.
+
+Mr. Goebel, with lamentations, to the office of an attorney making a
+specialty of handling damage suits, thence home by train with the seven
+members of his family party, all uninjured as to their limbs and members
+but in a highly distracted state nervously.
+
+Mr. Goebel's car to another repair shop and garage.
+
+The traffic policeman on duty in Getty Square to the station house to
+make a report of the fifth smash-up personally officered by him within
+eight hours--on a Sunday his casualty list would have been longer, but
+this was a week day, when pleasure travel was less fraught with highway
+perilousness.
+
+
+It so happened that Mullinix came to town from Washington next morning
+and, following his custom, rang up his unpaid but none the less valued
+aid to inquire whether he might come a-calling. No, he might not, Miss
+Smith being confined to her room with cold compresses on her injured
+wrist, but he might render a service for her if so minded--and he was.
+To him, then, over the wire Miss Smith stated her requirements.
+
+"I want you please to go to this address"--giving it--"and see whether
+you find there a Mrs. Janet Vinsolving, a widow. I rather imagine the
+place may be a boarding house, though I won't be sure as to that. It
+will not be necessary for you to see her in person; in fact I'd rather
+you did not. What I want you to do is to learn whether she is still
+there, and if so how long she expects to stay there, and generally
+anything you can about her movements. She went there only three days ago
+and inasmuch as she has a reputation in her former home for keeping very
+much to herself this may be a more difficult job than it sounds. But do
+the best you can, won't you, and then notify me of the results by
+telephone? No, it is a personal affair--nothing to do with any of our
+official undertakings. I'll tell you more about it when I see you. I
+expect I shall be able to receive visitors in a day or two; just now I
+feel a bit shaken up and unstrung. That's all, and thank you ever so
+much."
+
+Within an hour he had her on the telephone again.
+
+"Hello!" she said. "Yes, this is Miss Smith. Oh, it's you, is it? Well,
+what luck?... Oh, so it was a boarding house, after all.... And you
+found her there?... No? Then where is she?... What? Where did you say?
+Bellevue!... I knew it, I knew it, something told me!... No, no, never
+mind my ravings! Go on, please, go on!... Yes, all right. Now then,
+listen please: You jump in a taxi and get here to my apartments as soon
+as you can. I'll be dressed and ready when you arrive to go over there
+with you.... What?... Oh, bother the doctor's instructions. It's only a
+sprain anyhow and I feel perfectly fit by now, honestly I do ... tell
+you I'd get up out of my dying bed to go.... Yes, indeed, it is
+important--much more important than you think! Come on for me, I'll be
+waiting."
+
+When fifteen minutes later the perplexed Mullinix halted a taxi at the
+Deansworth Studio Building she was at the curbing, her left arm in a
+sling and her eyes ablaze with barely controlled emotions. Before he
+could move to get out and help her in she was already in.
+
+"Bellevue Hospital, psychopathic ward," he told the driver as she
+climbed nimbly inside.
+
+As the taxi started she turned to Mullinix, demanding: "Now tell it to
+me all over again. When you are through, then I'll explain to you why I
+am so interested."
+
+"Well," he said, "there isn't so very much to tell. The address you gave
+me turned out to be a boarding house just as you suspected it might--a
+second-rate place but apparently highly respectable, kept by a Mrs.
+Sheehan. It's been under the same management at the same place for a
+good many years. It wasn't very much trouble for me to find out what
+you wanted to know, because the whole place was in turmoil after what
+had happened just an hour or so before I got there. And when it
+developed that I had come to inquire about the cause of all the
+excitement every old-lady boarder in the house wanted to tell me about
+it all at the same time.
+
+"It seems that three days ago this Mrs. Vinsolving applied at the place
+for room and board. Mrs. Sheehan vaguely remembered her as having been
+her guest for a short time ten or twelve years ago. At that time she was
+with her husband, Colonel Vinsolving, who it appears has since died, and
+a daughter about ten years or twelve years of age--a little girl with
+red hair, as Mrs. Sheehan recalls. This time, though, she came alone,
+carrying only hand baggage. Except that she seemed to be nervous and
+rather harassed and unhappy looking, there was nothing noticeably
+unusual about her. Mrs. Sheehan took her in willingly enough.
+
+"She went straight to her room on the third floor and stayed there,
+having her meals brought up to her. But this morning early she went to
+the landlady and begged for protection, saying she was in fear of her
+life. Mrs. Sheehan very naturally inquired to know what was up--and then
+Mrs. Vinsolving told her this story:
+
+"She said she had discovered a conspiracy to murder her, headed
+by--guess who? The late Kaiser, no less! She said that the Kaiser in
+disguise had escaped from Holland, leaving behind him in his recent
+place of exile over there a double made up to look like him, and was now
+in hiding in this country for the sole purpose of having Mrs. Vinsolving
+assassinated in revenge, because her late husband, while an officer in
+the Army, had perfected a poison gas deadlier than any other known,
+which, being kept a secret by this Government and used against the
+German army in the war, had brought about the victory for our side and
+led to the overthrow of the Kaiser's outfit.
+
+"She went on to say she had run away from some suburban town or other to
+hide in New York and that was why she had taken refuge at Mrs.
+Sheehan's, thinking she would be in safety. But now she knew the
+plotters had tracked her, because she had just detected that the maid
+who had been bringing up her meals to her was really a German agent, and
+acting under orders from the Kaiser had put poison into her food. All of
+which naturally surprised Mrs. Sheehan considerably, especially as the
+accused servant happened to be a perfectly reliable Finnish girl who has
+been working for Mrs. Sheehan for five years and who had two brothers in
+the Seventy-seventh Division overseas.
+
+"It didn't take Mrs. Sheehan two minutes--she being a pretty
+level-headed person evidently--to see what ailed her new boarder. She
+managed to get Mrs. Vinsolving quieted down and get her back again into
+her room, and then she called in the policeman on the post and inside
+of an hour the woman had been smuggled out of the house and was on her
+way to Bellevue in an ambulance with a doctor and a policeman guarding
+her. But by that time, of course, the news had leaked out among the
+other boarders and the whole place was beginning to stew with
+excitement. It was still stewing when I got there.
+
+"Well, as soon as you told me over the telephone that you were bent and
+determined on going to Bellevue, though I do not see why you should be
+in such a hurry about it and taking chances on setting up an
+inflammation in your injured arm, because even though you do know the
+poor crazed creature you can't be of any help--"
+
+"I don't know her. I never saw her in my life."
+
+"Then why--"
+
+"That part can wait. I'll explain later. You were saying that as soon as
+you talked with me over the telephone you did something. What was it?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I called up Doctor Steele, chief surgeon in the psychopathic
+ward, who happens to be a friend of mine and one of us besides"--he
+tapped the badge he wore under his coat lapel--"and told him I was
+bringing you down to see this woman, and he volunteered some information
+of the case in advance of your coming. I've forgotten just what he
+called the form of insanity which has seized her--it's a jaw-breaking
+Latin name--but anyhow, he said his preliminary diagnosis convinced him
+that it must have been coming on her for some time; that it was marked
+by delusions of persecution and by an exaggerated ego, causing its
+victims to imagine themselves the objects of plots engineered by the
+most distinguished personages, such as rulers and high dignitaries; and
+that while in this state a man or a woman suffering from this particular
+brand of lunacy was apt to shift his or her suspicion from one person to
+another--first perhaps accusing some perfectly harmless and well-meaning
+individual, who might be a relative or a near friend, and then nearly
+always progressing to the point in his or her madness where the charge
+was directed against some famous character."
+
+"Did you hear anywhere any mention made of a daughter--the red-haired
+child of twelve years ago?" inquired Miss Smith.
+
+"To be sure I did, but I'd forgotten about her," said Mullinix. "Mrs.
+Sheehan told me that somewhere in her excited narrative Mrs. Vinsolving
+did say something about the daughter. As nearly as I can recall, she
+told Mrs. Sheehan that five or six weeks ago, or some such matter, her
+daughter had tried to kill her and that she thought then the daughter
+had gone mad, but that now she knew the girl had joined the Kaiser's
+gang for pay. I made a mental note of this part of the rigmarole at the
+time Mrs. Sheehan was repeating it to me, and then it slipped my mind.
+But now putting that yarn alongside of what Doctor Steele tells me about
+the symptoms of the disease, I see the connection--first the daughter,
+then the strange servant girl and finally the Kaiser. But say, I wonder
+why the daughter hasn't been keeping some sort of a guard over the poor
+demented creature? What can she have been thinking about herself to let
+her mother go running foot-loose round the country, nursing these
+changing delusions?"
+
+"She couldn't very well help herself," put in Miss Smith. "The daughter
+is in an asylum--put there five weeks ago on the mother's complaint."
+
+"But heavens alive, how could that have happened?"
+
+"Very easily--under the laws of this state," she answered grimly. Then
+speaking more quickly: "I've changed my mind about going to Bellevue
+with you. Please tell the driver to take me to the Grand Central
+Station. I don't know what train I'm going to catch, except that it's
+the next one leaving on the Hudson River Division for up state. You go
+on then, please, to the hospital and find out all you can about this
+case and call me on the long-distance to-night--no, that won't do
+either. I don't know where I'll be. I may be in Peekskill or in
+Albany--I can't say which. I tell you--I'll call you at eight o'clock;
+that will be better.
+
+"No, no!" she went on impetuously, reading on his face the protest he
+meant to utter. "My wrist is well bandaged and giving me no pain. I'm
+thinking now of what a poor brave girl had on both her wrists when last
+I saw her and of what she must have been enduring since then. I'll
+explain the biggest chapter of the story to you on the way over before
+you drop me at the station."
+
+At the Grand Central she left behind a thoroughly astonished gentleman.
+He was clear on some points which had been puzzling him from time to
+time during this exceedingly busy morning, but still much mystified to
+make out the meaning of Miss Smith's farewell remark as he put her
+aboard her train.
+
+"I only wish one thing," she had said. "I only wish I might take the
+time to stop at the village of Pleasantdale and break the news to a
+certain Doctor McGlore who lives there. I trust I am not unduly cattish,
+but I dearly would love to watch the expression on his face when he
+heard it. I think I'd do it, too, if I were not starting on the most
+imperative errand that ever called me in my life."
+
+
+A week later, to the day, two expected visitors were ushered into the
+private chamber of the governor at Albany--one of them a small,
+exceedingly well-groomed and good-looking woman in her thirties, and
+one a slender pretty girl with big brown eyes and wonderful auburn hair.
+
+"Governor," said Miss Smith, "I want the pleasure of introducing to you
+the gamest girl in the whole world--Margaret Vinsolving."
+
+He took the firm young hand she offered him. "Miss Vinsolving," he said,
+"in the name of the State of New York and on behalf of it I ask your
+forgiveness for the great and cruel wrong which unintentionally was done
+to you."
+
+"And I want to thank you for what you have done for me, sir," she
+answered him simply.
+
+"Don't thank me," he said. "You know the one to thank. If I had not set
+the machinery of my office in motion on your behalf within five minutes
+after your benefactress here reached me the other day I should have
+deserved impeachment. But I should never have lived to face impeachment.
+I'm sure the slightest sign of hesitation on my part would have been the
+signal for your advocate to brain me with my own inkstand." His face
+sobered. "But, my child, for my own information there are some things I
+want cleared up. Why in the face of the monstrous charges laid against
+you did you keep silent--that is one of the things I want to know?"
+
+Before answering, the girl glanced inquiringly at her companion.
+
+"Tell him," counseled Miss Smith.
+
+Steadily the girl made answer.
+
+"When my poor mother accused me of trying to kill her I realized for the
+first time that her mind had become affected. No one else, though,
+appeared to suspect the real truth. Perhaps this was because she seemed
+so normal on every other subject. So I decided to keep silent. I thought
+that if I were taken away from her for a while possibly the separation
+and with it the lifting of the imaginary fear of injury at my hands,
+which had upset her, might help her to regain her reason and no outsider
+be ever the wiser for it. I am young and strong; I believed I could bear
+the imprisonment without serious injury to me. I believe yet--for her
+sake--I could have borne it. And I knew--I realized what would happen to
+her if she were placed in such surroundings as I have been in and made
+to pass through such experiences as those through which I have passed. I
+felt that all hope of a cure for her would then be gone forever. And I
+love my mother." She faltered, her voice trembling a bit, then added:
+"That is why I kept silent, sir."
+
+"But, my dear child," he said, "what a wrong thing for you to have done.
+It was a splendid, chivalrous, gallant sacrifice, but it was wrong. And
+if you don't mind I'd like to shake hands with you again."
+
+"You see, sir, there was no one with whom I might advise in the
+emergency that came upon me without warning," she explained. "I had no
+confidante except my mother, and she--through madness--had turned
+against me. I had no friend then--I have one now, though."
+
+And she went to Miss Smith and put her head on the elder woman's
+shoulder.
+
+With her arms about the girl, Miss Smith addressed the governor.
+
+"We are going away a while together for a rest," she told him. "We both
+need it. And when we come back she is going to join me in my work. Some
+day Margaret will be a better interior decorator than her teacher can
+ever hope to be."
+
+"Then from now on, so far as you two are concerned, this ghastly thing
+should be only an unhappy dream which you'll strive to forget, I'm
+sure," he said. "It's all over and done with, isn't it?"
+
+"Over and done with for her--yes," said Miss Smith. "But how about your
+duty as governor? How about my duty as a citizen? Shouldn't we each of
+us, you in your big way and I in my small way, work to bring about a
+reform in the statutes under which such errors are possible? Think,
+governor, of what happened to this child! It may happen again to-day or
+to-morrow to some other equally innocent sufferer. It might happen to
+any one of us--to me or to someone dear to you."
+
+"Miss Smith," he stated, "if ever it happens to you I shall take the
+witness stand on your account and testify to two things: First, that you
+are the sanest human being in this state; and second, that you certainly
+do know how to play a hunch when you get one. If I had your intuition,
+plus my ambition, I wouldn't be governor--I'd be running for president.
+And I'd win out too!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE RAVELIN' WOLF
+
+
+When the draft came to our town as it came to all towns it enmeshed Jeff
+Poindexter, who to look at him might be any age between twenty-one and
+forty-one. Jeff had a complexion admirably adapted for hiding the wear
+and tear of carking years and as for those telltale wrinkles which
+betray care he had none, seeing that care rarely abode with him for
+longer than twenty-four hours on a stretch. Did worry knock at the front
+door Jeff had a way of excusing himself out of the back window. But this
+dread thing they called a draft was a worry which just opened the door
+and walked right in--and outside the window stood a jealous Government,
+all organized to start a rookus if anybody so much as stepped sideways.
+
+Jeff had no ambition to engage in the jar and crash of actual combat;
+neither did the idea of serving in a labor battalion overseas appeal to
+one of his habits. The uniform had its lure, to be sure, but the
+responsibilities presaged by the putting on of the uniform beguiled him
+not a whipstitch. Anyhow, his ways were the ways of peace. As a diplomat
+he had indubitable gifts; as a warrior he felt that he would be out of
+his proper element. So when answering a summons which was not to be
+disregarded Jeff appeared before the draft board he was not noticeably
+happy.
+
+"Unmarried, eh?" inquired his chief inquisitor.
+
+"Yas, suh--I means, naw, suh," stated Jeff. "I ain't never been much of
+a hand fur marryin' round."
+
+He forced an ingratiating smile. The smile fell as seed on barren
+soil--fell and died there.
+
+"Mother and father? Either one or both of them living?"
+
+Never had Jeff looked more the orphan than as he stood there confessing
+himself one. He fumbled his hat in his hands.
+
+"No dependents at all then, I take it?"
+
+"Yas, suh, dey shorely is," answered Jeff smartly, hope rekindling
+within him.
+
+"Well, who is it that you help support--if it's anybody?"
+
+"Hit's Jedge Priest--tha's who. Jedge, he jes' natchelly couldn't git
+'long noways 'thout me lookin' after him, suh. The older he git the more
+it seem lak he leans heavy on me."
+
+"Well, Judge Priest may have to lean on himself for a while. Uncle Sam
+needs every able-bodied man he can get these times and you look to be as
+strong as a mule. Here, take this card and go on through that door
+yonder to the second room down the hall and let Doctor Dismukes look you
+over."
+
+Jeff cheered up slightly. He knew Doctor Dismukes--knew him mighty well.
+In Doctor Dismukes' hands he would be in the hands of a friend. Beyond
+question the doctor would understand the situation as this strange and
+most unsympathetic white man undoubtedly did not.
+
+But Doctor Dismukes, all snap and smartness, went over him as though he
+had never seen him before in all his life. If Jeff had been a horse for
+sale and the doctor a professional horse coper, scarcely could the
+examination have been carried forward with a more businesslike dispatch.
+
+"Jeff," said the doctor when he had finished and the other was
+rearranging his wardrobe, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself for being
+so healthy. Take your teeth now--your teeth are splendid. I only wish I
+had a set like 'em."
+
+"Is dey?" said Jeff despondently, for the first time in his life
+regretting his unblemished ivory.
+
+"They certainly are. You wouldn't need a gun, not with those teeth you
+wouldn't--you could just naturally bite a German in two."
+
+Jeff shivered. The very suggestion was abhorrent to his nature.
+
+"Please suh, don't--don't talk lak that," he entreated. "I ain't
+cravin' to bite nobody a-tall, 'specially 'tis Germans. Live an' let
+live--tha's my sayin'."
+
+"Yep," went on the doctor, prolonging the agony for the victim, "your
+teeth are perfect and your lungs are sound, your heart action is
+splendid and I know something about your appetite myself, having seen
+you eat. Black boy, listen to me! In every respect you are absolutely
+qualified physically to make a regular man-eating bearcat of a
+soldier"--he paused--"in every respect excepting one--no, two."
+
+If a drowning man clutching for a straw might be imagined as
+coincidentally asking a question, it is highly probable he would ask it
+in the tone now used by Jeff.
+
+"Meanin'--meanin' w'ich, suh?"
+
+"I mean your feet. You've got flat feet, Jeff--you've got the flattest
+feet I ever saw. I don't understand it either. So far as I've been able
+to observe you've spent the greater part of your life sitting down.
+Somebody must have hit you on the head with an ax when you were standing
+on a plowshare and broke your arches down."
+
+It was an old joke, but it fitted the present case, and Jeff, not to be
+outdone in politeness, laughed louder at it than its maker did. Indeed
+Jeff felt he had reason to laugh; a great load was lifting from his
+soul.
+
+"Jeff," went on the doctor, "deeply though it may grieve both of us, it
+nevertheless is my painful duty to inform you that you have two
+perfectly good exemptions from military service--a right one and a left
+one. Now grab your hat and get out of here."
+
+"Boss," cried Jeff, "Ise gone. Exemptions, tek me away frum yere!"
+
+So while many others went away to fight or to learn how to fight, as the
+case might be, Jeff stayed behind and did his bit by remaining
+steadfastly cheerful. Never before, sartorially speaking, had he cut so
+splendid a figure as now when such numbers of young white gentlemen of
+his acquaintance were putting aside civilian garb to put on khaki. Jeff
+had one of those adaptable figures. The garments to which he fell heir
+might never have fitted their original owner, but always they would fit
+Jeff. Gorgeous in slightly worn but carefully refurbished raiment, he
+figured in the wartime activities of the colored population and in
+ostensibly helpful capacities figured in some of the activities of the
+white folks too.
+
+Going among his own set his frequent companion was that straw-colored
+light of his social hours, Ophelia Stubblefield. It helped to reconcile
+Jeff to the rigors of the period of enforced rationing as he reflected
+that the same issues and causes which made lump sugar a rarity and fat
+meat a scarcity had rid him of his more dangerous competition in the
+quarter where his affections centered. Particularly on one account did
+he feel reconciled. A spirit of the most soothful resignation filled him
+when he gave thought to the moral certainty that the most formidable and
+fearsome of his rivals, that bloody-minded bravo, Smooth Crumbaugh,
+would daunt him never again with threats of articular dismemberment with
+a new-honed razor. For Smooth Crumbaugh was gone and gone for good.
+First the draft had carried him away and then the pneumonia had carried
+him off. War had its compensations after all.
+
+Wearing Ophelia upon one arm and wearing in the crook of the other a
+high hat which once had been the property of a young man now bossing an
+infantry battalion in the muddiest part of France, Jeff appeared
+prominently in the Armistice celebration at the First Ward Colored
+Baptist Church. Still so accoutered--Ophelia on his one hand and the
+high hat held in proper salute against his breast--he served upon the
+official reception committee headed by the Rev. Potiphar Grasty and by
+Prof. Rutherford B. H. Champers, principal of the Colored High School,
+which greeted the first returning squad of service men of color.
+
+Home-comers who had been clear across the ocean brought back with them
+almost unbelievable but none the less fascinating accounts of life and
+customs in foreign parts. The tales these traveled ones had to tell were
+eagerly listened to and as eagerly passed along, dowered at each time
+of retelling with prodigal enlargements and amplifications the most
+generous.
+
+A ferment of discontent began to stir under the surface of things; a
+sort of inarticulate rebellion against existing conditions, which
+presently manifested itself in small irritations at various points of
+contact with the white race. It was nothing tangible as yet, nothing
+upon which one might put a hand or cap with a word of comprehensive
+description. Indeed it had been working for weeks like a yeast in the
+minds of sundry black folk before their Caucasian neighbors began to
+sense it at all, and for this there was a reason easily understandable
+by anyone born and reared in any sizable town in any one of the older
+states lying below Mason and Dixon's Line. For in each such community
+there are two separate and distinct worlds--a black one and a white
+one--interrelated by necessities of civic coordination and in an
+economic sense measurably dependent one upon the other, and yet in many
+other aspects as far apart as the North Pole is from the South.
+
+Regarding what the white world is feeling and thinking and saying, the
+lesser black world that is set down within it is nearly always better
+informed than is the other and larger group touching on new movements
+and growing sentiments amongst the darker-skinned factors. Into the
+white man's house, serving in this or that domestic capacity, goes the
+negro as an observant witness to the moods and emotions of his or her
+employer and bringing away an understanding of the family complexities
+and the current trend of opinion as it shapes itself beneath that roof.
+
+But the white man, generally speaking, views the negro's private life
+only from the outside, and if he be a Southern-born white man, wise in
+his generation, seeks to look no further, for surface garrulity and
+surface exuberance do not deceive him, but serve only to make him
+realize all the more clearly that he is dealing with members of what at
+heart is one of the most secretive and sensitive of all the breeds of
+men. But since this started out to be the chronicle of an episode
+largely relating to Jeff Poindexter and one other and not a
+psychological study of actions and reactions as between the two most
+numerous races in this republic, it is perhaps as well that we should
+get on with our narrative.
+
+If the leaven of unrest, vague and formless as it was at the outset,
+properly might be said to date from the time of the return of divers
+black veterans, it took on shape and substance after the advent of one
+Dr. J. Talbott Duvall, an individual engaging in manner, and in
+language, dress and deportment fascinating beyond degree; likewise an
+organizer by profession and a charmer of the opposite sex by reason of
+qualifications both natural and acquired.
+
+A doctor he was, as witness the handle to his name, and yet a doctor of
+any known variety he was not. Confessedly he was no doctor of medicine,
+though his speech dripped gorgeous ear-filling Latin words which sounded
+as though they might be the names of difficult and sinister diseases;
+nor was he doctor of divinity, though speedily he proved himself to be
+at home in pulpits. He was not a horse doctor or a corn doctor or a
+conjure doctor or a root-and-herb doctor or a healer by faith or the
+laying on of hands. His title, it seemed, was his by virtue of a degree
+conferred upon him by a college--a white man's college--somewhere in the
+North. His accent was that of a traveled cosmopolite superimposed upon
+the speech of a place away off somewhere called the West Indies. He had
+money and he spent it; he had a wardrobe of distinction and he wore it;
+he had a gift for argumentation and he exercised it; he had a way with
+the ladies and he used it. His coming had created a social furor; his
+subsequent ministrations amounted to what for lack of a better word is
+commonly called a sensation.
+
+If there were those who from motives, let us say, of envy looked with
+the jaundiced eye of disfavor upon his mounting popularity and his
+constantly widening scope of influence they mainly kept their own
+counsel or at least refrained from voicing their private prejudices in
+public places. One gets fewer bumps traveling with the crowd than
+against it.
+
+Even so bold a spirit and customarily so outspoken a speaker as Aunt
+Dilsey Turner, Judge Priest's black cook of many years' incumbency, saw
+fit somewhat to dissemble on the occasion of a call paid by Sister
+Eldora Menifee, who came dressed to kill and inspired by the zeal of the
+new convert to win yet other converts. Entering by way of the alley gate
+one fine forenoon, Sister Eldora found Aunt Dilsey sitting in the
+kitchen doorway hulling out a mess of late green peas newly picked from
+the house garden.
+
+"Sist' Turner," began the visitor, "I hopes I ain't disturbin' you by
+runnin' in on you this mawnin'."
+
+"Honey," said Aunt Dilsey, "you're jes' ez welcome ez day is frum night.
+Lemme fetch you a cheer out yere on the gallery." And she made as if to
+heave her vast comfortable bulk upright.
+
+"No'm, set right where you is," begged Sister Menifee. "I ain't got only
+jes' a few minutes to stay. Things is mighty pressin' with me. I got
+quite a number of my lady frien's to see to-day an' you happens to be
+the fust one on de list."
+
+"Is tha' so?" inquired Aunt Dilsey. Her tone was cordiality itself, but
+one less carried away by the enthusiasm of the mission which had brought
+her than Sister Eldora Menifee was might have caught a latent gleam of
+hostility in the elder woman's eye. "Well, go on, Ise lis'enin'."
+
+"Well, Sist' Turner, ef you's heared 'bout de work I been doin' lately
+I reckin mebbe you kin guess whut brung me to yore do'. I is solicitin'
+you fur yore fellership ez a reg'lar member of de ladies' auxiliary of
+de new s'ciety w'ich Doct' J. Talbott Duvall is got up."
+
+"Meanin' perzactly w'ich s'ciety? Dis yere Doct' Duvall 'pears to be so
+busy gittin' up fust one thing an' then 'nother seems lak I ain't been
+able to keep track of his doin's, 'count of my bein' so slow gittin'
+round on my feet by reason of de rheumatism."
+
+"Meanin' de Shinin' Star Cullid Uplift and Progress League--dat's de
+principalest activity in w'ich he's now engaged. De dues is one dollar
+down on 'nitiation an' twenty cents a week an'--"
+
+"Wait jes' one minute, Sist' Menifee, ef you please. 'Fore we gits any
+furder 'long answer me dis one question Ise fixin' to ast you--do dis
+yere new lodge perpose to fune'lize de daid?"
+
+"We ain't tuck up dat point yit; doubtless we'll come to de plans fur
+dat part later. Fur de time bein' de work is jes' to form de ladies'
+auxiliary an' git de main objec's set fo'th."
+
+"Lis'en, chile. Me, I don't aim never so long as I lives an' keeps my
+reason to jine no lodge w'ich don't start out fust thing by fune'lizin'
+de daid. Ise thinkin' now of de case of dat pore shif'less Sist'
+Clarabelle Hardin dat used to live out yere on Plunkett's Hill. She up
+an' jined one of dese newfandangle' lodges w'ich didn't have nothin' to
+it but a fancy name an' a fancy strange nigger man runnin' it, an' right
+on top of dat she up an' died 'thout a cent to her back. An' you know
+whut happen den? Well, I'm gwine tell you. Dat pore chile laid round de
+house daid fur gwine on three days an' den she jes' natchelly had to git
+out to de cemetery de bes' way she could. Not fur me, honey, not fur me.
+Dey got to have de money in de bank waitin' an' ready to bury de fus'
+member dat passes frum dis life before dey gits a cent of mine."
+
+"But dis yere lodge is gwine have a more 'portant puppose 'en jes' to
+fune'lize de daid," protested Sister Eldora. "We aims to do somethin'
+fur de livin' whilst yet dey's still alive. Curious you ain't tuck
+notice of de signs of de times ez dey's been expounded 'mongst de people
+by Doct' Duvall. He sho' kin 'splain things in a way to mek you a true
+believer." The advocate of the new order of things sank her voice to a
+discreet half whisper. "Sist' Turner, we aims at gittin' mo' of de
+rights dat's due us. We aims to see dat de pore an' de lowly an' de
+downtrodden-on is purtected in dey rights. We aims--"
+
+"Num'mine whut you aims at--de question is, is you gwine be able hit
+whar you aims? An' lemme tell you somethin' more, Sist' Eldora Menifee.
+I ain't needin' no ladies' auxiliary to tell me whut my rights is.
+Neither I ain't needin' to pay out no twenty cents a week to find out
+neither. W'en it comes to dat, all de ladies' auxiliary w'ich I needs is
+jes' me, myse'f. I knows good an' well whut my rights is already an' Ise
+gwine have 'em, too, or somebody'll sho' git busted plum wide open. Mind
+you, I ain't sayin' nothin' 'ginst dis new man nur 'ginst dem w'ich
+chooses to follow 'long after his teachin's. Ise jes' sayin' dat so fur
+ez my jinin' in wid dis yere lodge is concern' you's wastin' yore
+breath. Better pass along, honey, to de nex' one on dat list of your'n,
+'thout you's a mind to stay yere an' watch me dish up Jedge Priest's
+vittles fur 'im."
+
+"Mebbe if Doct' Duvall wuz to come hisse'f an' mek manifest to you de
+high pupposes--" began Sister Eldora. But Aunt Dilsey cut her off short.
+
+"Wouldn't mek no diffe'nce ef he come eighty times a day an' twice ez
+offen on Sunday. Anyway, I reckins my day fur jinin' things is done
+over."
+
+There was a dead weight of finality in her words. She rose heavily. As
+Sister Menifee departed Aunt Dilsey became aware of the presence of Jeff
+Poindexter. He was emerging from behind the door.
+
+"Been hidin' inside dat kitchen lis'enin', I s'pose?" demanded Aunt
+Dilsey.
+
+"Couldn't help frum hearin'," admitted Jeff. It was evident that he was
+not deeply grieved over the failure of Sister Menifee to make headway
+against Aunt Dilsey's opposition. "At the last you suttinly give dat
+woman her marchin' orders, didn't you, Aunt Dilsey?"
+
+"An' sech wuz my intention frum de start off," she confided. "Minute she
+come th'ough dat back gate yonder I knowed whut she wuz comin' fur an' I
+wuz set an' ready wid de words waitin' on de tip of my tongue."
+
+"Me, I don't fancy dat Duvall neither," stated Jeff. "I ain't been
+sayin' much 'bout him one way or 'nother but I been doin' a heap o'
+steddyin'."
+
+"Yas, I knows all 'bout dat too," snapped Aunt Dilsey. "I got eyes in my
+haid. You los' yore taste fur dis yere big-talkin', fine-lookin' man jes
+ez soon ez he started sparkin' round dat tore-down limb of a 'Phelia
+Stubblefield. Whut ails you is you is jealous; hadn't been fur dat I lay
+you'd be runnin' round wid yore tongue hangin' out suckin' in ever'thing
+he sez ez de gospil truth same ez a lot of dese other weak-minded ones
+is doin'. Oh, I know you, boy, frum ze ground up! An' furthermo' I knows
+dis Doct' Duvall likewise also, even ef I ain't never seen him but oncet
+or twicet sence fust he come yere to dis town all dress' up lak a
+persidin' elder. I don't lak his looks an' I don't lak his ways, jedgin'
+by whut I hears of 'em frum dis one an' dat one, an' most in special I
+don't lak his color. He ain't clear brown lak whut I is, an' he ain't
+muddy black lak whut you is, neither he ain't high yaller lak some is.
+To me he looks most of all lak de ground side of a nickel wahtermelon.
+An' in all de goin' on sixty-two yeahs of my life I ain't never seen no
+pusson callin' theyselves Affikins dat had dat kind of a sickly
+greenish-yaller-whitish complexion but whut trouble come pourin' frum
+'em sooner or later, an' most gin'rally sooner, lak manna pourin' from
+de gourd of de Prophet Jonah. Dat man is a ravelin' wolf, ef ever I seen
+one."
+
+"Whut kind of a wolf did you say, Aunt Dilsey?" asked Jeff.
+
+"Consult de Scriptures an' you won't be so ignunt," she answered
+crushingly. "Consult de Scriptures an' you'll read whar de ravelin' wolf
+come down on de fold, an' whut he done to de fold after he'd done come
+down on it wuz more'n aplenty. An' now, boy, you git on out of my
+kitchen an' go on 'bout yore business--ef you's got any business, w'ich
+I doubts. I ain't got no mo' time to waste on you den whut I is on dat
+flighty-haided Eldora Menifee, a-traipsin' round frum one back do' to
+'nother with her talk 'bout ladies' auxiliaries an' gittin' yo rights
+fur a dollah down an' twenty cents a week."
+
+Jeff faded away. It was comforting in a way to find Aunt Dilsey on his
+side, even though her manner rather indicated she resented the fact that
+he was on hers. A few evenings later he found out something else. He was
+made to know that in another and entirely unsuspected quarter the
+endeavors of the diligently crusading and organizing Duvall person had
+roused more than a passing curiosity.
+
+One evening, supper being over, Judge Priest lingered on in his
+low-ceiled dining room smoking his corncob pipe while Jeff cleared away
+the supper dishes. It was the same high-voiced deliberately
+ungrammatical Judge Priest that the kindly reader may recall--somewhat
+older than at last accounts, somewhat slower in his step--but then he
+never had been given to fast movements--and perhaps just a trifle
+balder.
+
+"Wuz dey anythin' else you wanted, jedge, 'fore I locks up the back of
+the house an' lights out?" Jeff inquired when the table had been reset
+for breakfast.
+
+"Yes, I think mebbe there wuz," drawled the old man. He hesitated a
+moment almost as though at a loss for a proper phrasing of the thing he
+meant to say next. Then: "Jeff, what's come over your race in this town
+here lately?"
+
+"Meanin' w'ich, suh?" countered Jeff. "Me, I ain't notice nothin' out of
+the way--nothin' particular."
+
+"Haven't you? Well, I think I have. Jeff, I don't want to be put in the
+position of pryin' into the private and the personal affairs of other
+folks, reguardless of color. I have to do enough of that sort of thing
+in my official capacity when I'm settin' in judgment up at the big cote
+house. But unless I can get some confidential information frum you I
+don't know where else I'm likely to git it, and at the same time I sort
+of feel as ef I should try to get hold of it somewheres or other ef it's
+humanly possible."
+
+"Yas, suh."
+
+"Now heretofore in this community the two races--white and black--have
+got along purty tolerably well together. We managed to put up with your
+shortcomings and you managed to put up with ours, which at times may
+have been considerable of a strain on both sides. Still we've done it.
+But it seems to me here of late there's been a kind of an undercurrent
+of discontent stirrin' amongst your people--and no logical reason fur it
+either, so fur as I kin see. Yet there it is.
+
+"There wuz that rumpus two-three weeks ago down in Market Square. A
+little more and that affair could have growed into a first-class race
+riot. And here last Saturday night followed that mix-up out by the Union
+Depot when Policeman Gip Futtrell got all carved up and two darkies got
+purty extensively shot. And night before last the trouble that occurred
+on that Belt Line car out in Hollandville; that looked mighty
+threatenin', too, fur a while. And in between all these more serious
+things a lot of little unpleasantnesses keep croppin' up--always takin'
+the form of friction between whites and blacks.
+
+"One of these here occurrences might be what you'd call an accident and
+two of them in rapid succession a coincidence, but it looks to me like
+now it's gittin' to be a habit. It's leadin' to bad blood and what's
+worse it's leadin' to a lot of spilt blood and our city gittin' a bad
+name and all that.
+
+"And I know the respectable black folks in this town don't want that to
+happen any more than the respectable white people do.
+
+"Now then, Jeff, whut's at the bottom of all this--I mean on your side
+of the color line? Who's stirrin' up old grudges and kindlin' new ones?
+I've sort of got my own private suspicions, but I'd like to see ef your
+ideas run along with mine. Got any suggestions as to the underlying
+causes of this ill feelin' that's sprung up so lately and without any
+good reason for it either so fur ez I kin see?"
+
+Now ordinarily Jeff would have held firmly to the doctrine that white
+folks should tend to their business and let black folks tend to theirs.
+For all his loyalty to his master, a certain race consciousness in him
+would have bade him keep hands off and tongue locked. But here a strong
+personal prejudice operated to steer Jeff away from what otherwise would
+have been his customary course.
+
+"Jedge," he said, drawing a pace or two nearer his employer, "did you
+ever hear tell of a pale-yaller party w'ich calls hisse'f Doct' J.
+Talbott Duvall dat come yere a few weeks ago?"
+
+"Ah, hah!" said the judge as though satisfied of the correctness of a
+prior conclusion. "I thought possibly my mind might be on the right
+track. Yes, I've heard of him and I've seen him. Whut of him?"
+
+"Jedge, I trusts you won't tell nobody else whut I'm tellin' you, but
+dat's sho' de one dat's at the bottom of the whole mess. He's the one
+dat's plantin' the pizen. Me, I ain't had no truck wid him myse'f, but
+dat ain't sayin' I don't know whut he's doin', case I do. He calls
+hisse'f a organizer."
+
+"Ah, hah! And whut is he organizin'?"
+
+"Trouble, jedge. Dat's whut--trouble fur a lot of folks. Jedge, fo' we
+goes any further lemme ast you a coupler questions, please, suh. Is it
+true dat over dere in some of dem Youropean countries black folks is
+jes' the same ez white folks, ef not more so?"
+
+Choosing his words, the old man elucidated his understanding of the
+social order as it prevailed in certain geographical divisions and
+subdivisions of the continent of Europe.
+
+"Yas, suh, thanky, suh," said Jeff when the judge had finished. "I
+reckin mebbe one main trouble over dere is, jedge, dat dem folks ain't
+been raised de way you an' me is."
+
+"Jeff," said the judge, "I'm inclined to think probably you're right."
+
+"Yas, suh. Now den, jedge, here's one mo' thing. Is it true dat in all
+dem furrin countries--Russia an' Germany an' Bombay an' all--dat the
+po' people, w'ite or black or whutever dey color is, is fixin' to rise
+up in they might an' tek the money an' de gover'mint an' de fine houses
+an' the cream of ever'thing away frum dem dat's had it all 'long?"
+
+Again the judge expounded at length, touching both upon upheavals abroad
+and on discords nearer home. Next it was Jeff's turn to make disclosures
+having a purely local application and he made them. Listening intently,
+Judge Priest puckered his bald brow into furrows of perplexity.
+
+"Jeff," he said finally, "I'm much obliged to you fur tellin' me all
+this. It backs up what I'd sort of figgered out all by myself. The whole
+world appears to be engaged in standin' on its esteemed head at this
+writin'. I reckin when old Mister Kaiser turned loose the war he didn't
+stop to think that mebbe the war was only one of a whole crop of evils
+he wuz lettin' out of his box of tricks. Or mebbe he didn't care--bein'
+the kind of a person he wuz. And I'm prone to believe also that when the
+Germans stopped fightin' us with guns they begun fightin' us with other
+weapons almost as dangersome to our peace of mind and future well-bein'.
+Different parts of this country are in quite a swivet--agitators
+preachin' bad doctrine--some of 'em drawin' pay from secret enemies
+across the sea fur preachin' it, too, I figger--and a lot of highly
+disagreeable disturbances croppin' up here and there. But I was hopin'
+that mebbe our little corner of the world wouldn't be pestered. But now
+it looks ez ef we weren't goin' to escape our share of the trouble."
+
+"Jedge," asked Jeff, "ain't they some way dis Duvall pusson could be
+fetched up in cote? I suttinly would admire to see dat yaller man
+wearin' a striped suit of clothes."
+
+"Well, Jeff," said the judge, "I doubt either the legality or the
+propriety of such a step, ef you get what I mean. From whut you tell me
+I don't see where he's really broken any laws. He's got a right to come
+here and organize his societies and lodges and things so long as he
+don't actually come out in the open and preach violence. He's got a
+perfect right under the law to organize this here new drill company you
+speak about. I sometimes think that ef all the young men in this country
+had been required to do a little more drillin' in years gone by we'd be
+feelin' somewhat safer to-day. Anyway, it's a mighty great mistake
+sometimes to make a martyr out of a rascal. Puttin' him in jail, unless
+you're absolutely certain that a jail is where he properly belongs,
+gives him a chance to raise the cry of persecution and gives his
+followers an excuse to cut loose and smash up things. You git my drift,
+don't you?"
+
+"Yas, suh, think I do. Well den, suh, ef I wuz runnin' dis town seems to
+me I'd git a crowd of strong-minded gen'elmen together some evenin' in
+the dark of the moon an' let 'em call on dis yere slick-haided
+half-strainer an' invite him to tek his foot in his hand an' marvil
+further. Ef one of 'em wuz totin' a rope in his hand sorter keerless lak
+it might help. Ropes is powerful influential. An' the sight of tar an'
+feathers meks a mighty strong argument, too, Ise heared tell."
+
+"Jeff," said the judge, "I'm astonished that you'd even suggest sech a
+thing! Mob law is worse even than no law at all. Besides," he added--and
+now there was a small twinkle in his eye to offset to a degree the
+severity in his tones--"besides, the feller that was bein' called on by
+the committee might decline to take the hint and then purty soon you
+might have another self-made martyr on your hands. But ef he ran away on
+his own hook now--ef something came up that made him go of his own
+accord and go fast and cut a sort of a cheap figure in the eyes of his
+deluded followers whilst he was goin'--that'd be a different thing
+altogether. Start a crowd of folks, white or black or brown, to laughin'
+at a feller and they'll quit believin' in him. Worshipin' a false god
+and laughin' at him at the same time never has been successfully done
+yit."
+
+He sucked his pipe. "Jeff," he resumed, "what do you know, ef anything,
+about the past career and movements of this here J. Talbott Et Cetery?"
+
+Jeff knew a good deal--at second hand. Didn't the object of his deepest
+aversions persist in almost nightly calls upon the object of his
+deepest affections? Paying such calls, didn't the enemy spend
+hours--hours upon hours doubtless--pouring into Ophelia's ear accounts
+of his recent triumphs as an uplifter in other towns and other states?
+Didn't the fascinated and flattered Ophelia in turn recount these tales
+to one whose opportunities for traveling and seeing the great world had
+been more circumscribed? Had not Jeff writhed in jealous misery the
+while he heard the annals of a rival's successes? So Jeff made prompt
+answer.
+
+"Yas, suh, I suttinly does. Ise heared a right smart 'bout dis yere
+Duvall's past life frum--frum somebody. 'Cordin' to the way he norrates
+it, he wuz in Nashville, Tennessee 'fore he come yere; an' 'fore dat in
+Mobile, Alabama; an' 'fore dat in Little Rock, Arkansaw. Seem lak w'en
+he ain't organizin' or speechifyin' he ain't got nothin' better to do
+den run round amongst young cullid gals braggin' 'bout the places he's
+been an' the things he done whilst in 'em."
+
+Jeff spoke with an enhanced bitterness.
+
+"I see. Then I take it ef he spends so much time in seekin' out female
+society that he's not a married man?"
+
+"So he say--so he say! But, Jedge Priest, ef ever I looked on the
+spittin'-image of a natchel-born marryin' nigger, dat ver' same Duvall
+is de one."
+
+Judge Priest seemed not to have heard this last. He sat for a bit
+apparently studying the tips of his square-toed, low-quarter shoes.
+
+"Jeff," he said when he had given his feet a long half minute of seeming
+consideration, "I would like to know some facts about the previous life
+and general history of the individual we've been discussin'--I really
+would. In fact my curiosity is sech that I might even be willin' to
+spend a little money out of my own pocket, ef needs be, in order to find
+out. So I was jest wonderin' whether you wouldn't like to take a little
+trip, with all expenses paid, and tour round through some of our sister
+states and make a few private inquiries. It occurs to me that everything
+considered you might make a better job of it as an amateur investigator
+than a regular professional detective of a different color might. Do you
+know where by any chance you could git hold of a good photograph of this
+here individual--I mean without lettin' him know anything about it?"
+
+"Yas, suh, dat I does," stated Jeff briskly.
+
+The conference between master and man lasted perhaps fifteen minutes
+longer before Jeff was dismissed for the night. Mainly it dealt with
+ways, means and purposes. Upon the heels of it, within forty-eight hours
+two events--seemingly nowise related or bearing one upon the
+other--occurred. An ornately framed photograph lately bestowed as a gift
+and treasured as a trophy of sentimental value mysteriously vanished
+from the mantelpiece of the front room of Ophelia Stubblefield's pa's
+house; and Jefferson Poindexter, carrying a new and very shiny suitcase,
+unostentatiously left town late at night on a southbound train.
+
+Darktown in Nashville knew him for a brief space as a visiting nobleman
+with money in all his pockets and apparently nothing of importance to do
+except to spend it in divertisements suitable to the social instincts of
+a capitalist of leisure. In Mobile at the Elite Colored Beauty Parlors
+for the first time in his life he tendered his finger nails for
+ministrations at the hands of a dashing chocolate-ice-cream-colored
+manicurist and spent the remainder of that same afternoon in a sunny
+spot, glistening pleasantly.
+
+If in both these cities and likewise in Little Rock, which next he
+favored with his presence, he made himself known to brothers of his
+particular lodge--the Afro-American Order of Supreme Kings of the
+Universe has a large and a widely distributed membership--and if under
+the sacred pledge of secrecy which only may be broken on pain of
+mutilation and death by torture he--with the aid of these fraternal
+allies of his--conducted certain discreet inquiries, why, that was his
+own private business. Assuredly, so far as surface indications counted,
+he appeared to have no business other than pleasurable pursuits. From
+Little Rock he turned his face southeastward, landing at Macon, Georgia,
+where he lingered on for upward of a week, breaking his visit only by a
+day's side trip to a smaller town south of Macon. Altogether Jeff was
+an absentee from his favorite haunts back home for the greater part of a
+month.
+
+He reached town on a Monday. Betimes Tuesday morning, inspired outwardly
+by the zeal of one just won over from skepticism to the immediate
+advisability of following a sapient course, he sought opportunity to
+become a member in good standing of the Shining Star Colored Uplift and
+Progress League, a simple ceremony and a brief, since it involved merely
+the signing of one's name on Dotted Line A of a printed form card and
+the paying of a dollar into the hand of Dr. J. Talbott Duvall. On
+Tuesday evening the league met in stated session at Hillman's Hall on
+Yazoo Street and Jeff was early on hand, visibly enthusiastic and
+professedly ready to do all within his power to further the aims and
+intents of the organization. As a brand snatched from the burning he was
+elevated before the eyes of the assemblage so that all might see him and
+mark his mien of newborn fervor, for Doctor Duvall, following his
+custom, called to places upon the platform the proselytes enrolled since
+the previous meeting, to the end that older members might observe the
+physical proof of a steady and a healthful growth.
+
+So there sat Jefferson in the very front row of wooden chairs, where all
+might behold him and he might behold all and sundry. About him were his
+recent fellow converts. Almost directly behind him was a door giving
+upon a side entrance; there was another door serving similar purposes
+upon the opposite side of the stage. Beyond him to the left in the
+center of the stage were grouped the honorary officers of the league,
+flanking and supporting their chief.
+
+Being an honorary officer carried with it, as the title might imply,
+honor and prominence second only to that enjoyed by the
+president-organizer, but it entailed no great weight of responsibility,
+since practically all the actual work of the league had from the very
+outset been generously assumed by Doctor Duvall. It was he who cared for
+the funds, he who handled disbursements, he who conducted the
+proceedings, he who made the principal addresses on meeting nights, he
+who between meetings labored without cessation to spread educational
+propaganda. That he found time for all these purposeful endeavors and
+yet crowded in such frequent opportunity for mingling socially among the
+lambs of his flock--notably the ewe lambs--was but evidence,
+accumulating daily, of his genius for leadership and direction.
+
+This night the session opened with a prayer--by Doctor Duvall; an
+eloquent and a moving prayer indeed, its sonorous periods set off and
+adorned with noble big words and quotations in foreign tongues. The
+prayer would be followed, it had been announced, by the reading of the
+minutes of the previous session, after which Doctor Duvall would speak
+at length with particular reference to things lately accomplished and
+the even more important things in contemplation for the near future.
+
+Standing for the prayer, Jeff could look out over what a master of words
+before now has fitly described as a sea of upturned faces--faces black,
+brown and yellow. Had he been minded to give thought to details he might
+have noted how at every polysyllabic outburst from the inspired
+invocationist old Uncle Ike Fauntleroy, himself accounted a powerful
+hand at wrestling with sinners in prayer, was visibly jolted by
+admiration; might, if he had had a head for figures, have kept count of
+the hearty amens with which Sister Eldora Menifee punctuated each pause
+when Doctor Duvall was taking a fresh breath; might have cast a side
+glance upon Ophelia Stubblefield in a new and most becoming hat with
+ostrich plumage grandly surmounting it. But under the hand which he held
+reverently cupped over his brow Jeff's eyes were fixed upon a certain
+focal point,--to wit, the door of the main entrance at the length of the
+hall from him. It was as though Jeff waited for something or somebody he
+was expecting.
+
+Nor did he have so very long to wait. The prayer was done and well done.
+In its wake, so to speak, there spouted up from every side veritable
+geysers of hallelujahs and amens. The honorary secretary, Brother Lemuel
+Diuguid, smelling grandly of expensive hair ointments--Brother Diuguid
+being by calling a head barber--stood up to read the minutes of the
+preceding regular session, and having read them sat down again. A
+friendly and flattering bustle of anticipation filled the body of the
+hall as Doctor Duvall rose and moved one pace forward and--raising a
+hand for silence--began to speak. But he had no more than begun, had
+progressed no farther than part way of his first smoothly launched
+sentence, when he was made to break off by an unseemly interruption at
+the rear. The honorary grand inner guard on duty at the far street door,
+after a brief and unsuccessful struggle with unseen forces, was observed
+to be shoved violently aside from his post. Bursting in together there
+entered two strangers--a tall yellow woman and a short black man, and
+both of them of a most grim and determined aspect. He moved fast, this
+man, but even so his companion moved faster still. She was three paces
+ahead of him when, bulging impetuously past those who sprang into the
+center aisle as though to halt her onward rush--all others present being
+likewise up on their feet--she came to a halt near the middle of the
+hall and, glaring about her defiantly, just double-dog-dared any present
+to lay so much as the weight of one detaining finger upon her. There was
+something about her calculated to daunt the most willing of volunteer
+opponents, and so while those at a safe distance demanded the ejection
+of the intruders, those nearer her hesitated.
+
+"Th'ow me out?" she whooped, echoing the words of outraged and startled
+members of the Shining Star. "I'd lak to see de one dat's gwine try it!
+An' 'fo' anybody talk 'bout th'owin' out lettum heah me whilst I sez my
+say!"
+
+Towering until she seemed to increase in stature by inches, she aimed a
+long and bony finger dead ahead.
+
+"Ax dat slinky yaller man up yonder on dat flatfo'm ef he gwine give de
+order to th'ow me out!" she clarioned in a voice which rose to a
+compelling shriek. "But fust off ax him whut he meant--marryin' me in
+Mobile, Alabama, an' den runnin' 'way frum his lawful wedded wife under
+cover of de night! Ax him--dat's all, ax him!"
+
+"An' ax him one thing mo'!" It was the voice of her short companion
+rising above the tumult. "Ax him whut he done wid de funds of de s'ciety
+he 'stablished at Little Rock, Arkansaw, all of w'ich he absconded wid
+dis last spring!"
+
+As though the same set of muscles controlled every neck the heads of all
+swung about, their eyes following where the accusers pointed, their ears
+twitching for the expected blast of denial and denunciation which would
+wither these mad and scandalous detractors in their tracks.
+
+Alas and alackaday! With his splendid figure suddenly all diminished and
+shrunken, with distress writ large and plain upon his features, the
+popular idol was step by step flinching backward from the edge of the
+platform--was step by step inching, edging toward the side door in the
+right-hand wall.
+
+And in this same instant the stunned assemblage realized that Jeff
+Poindexter, by nimble maneuvering, had thrust himself between the
+retreating figure and the exit, and Jeff was crying out: "Not dis way
+out, Doct' Duvall. Not dis way! The one you married down below Macon is
+waitin' fur you behin' dis do'!"
+
+The doctor stopped in midflight and swung about and his eye fell upon
+the right-hand door and he moved a yard or two in that direction; but no
+more than a yard or two, for again Jeff spoke in warning, halting him
+short:
+
+"Not dat way neither! The one frum dat other town whar you uster live is
+waitin' outside dat do'--wid a pistil! Seems lak you's entirely
+s'rounded by wives dis evenin'!"
+
+To the verge of the footlights the beset man darted, and like a
+desperate swimmer plunging from a foundering bark into a stormy sea he
+leaped far out and projected himself, a living catapult, along the
+middle aisle. He struck the tall yellow woman as the irresistible force
+strikes the supposedly immovable object of the scientists' age-old
+riddle, but on his side was impetus and on hers surprise. She was bowled
+over flat and her hands, clutching as she went down, closed, but on
+empty and unresisting air. Literally he hurdled over the stocky form of
+the little black man behind her, but as the other flitted by him the
+fists of the stranger knotted firmly into the skirts of its wearer's
+long black frock coat and held on. There was a rending, tearing sound
+and as the back breadth of the garment ripped bodily away from the
+waistband there flew forth from the capsized tail pockets a veritable
+cloudburst of currency--floating, fluttering green and yellow bills and
+with them pattering showers of dollars and halves and dimes and quarters
+and nickels.
+
+That canny instinct which had led the fugitive apostle of the uplift to
+hide the collected funds of the league upon his person rather than trust
+to banks and strong boxes was to prove his ruination financially but his
+salvation physically. While those who had believed in him, now
+forgetting all else, scrambled for the scattered money--their money--he
+fled out of the unguarded door and was instantly gone into the shielding
+night--a sorry shape in a bob-tailed garment.
+
+At a somewhat later hour Judge Priest in his living room was receiving
+from Jefferson Poindexter a much lengthier and more elaborated account
+of the main occurrences of the evening at Hillman's Hall than has here
+been presented. Speaking as he did in the dual role of spectator and of
+an actuating force in the events of that crowded and exciting night,
+Jeff spared no details. He had come to the big scene of his narrative
+when his master interrupted him:
+
+"Hold on a minute, Jeff! I don't know ez I get the straight of it all
+yit. I rather gathered frum whut you told me yesterday when you landed
+back home and made your report that you'd only been able to dig up one
+certain-sure wife of this feller's--the one that came along with you and
+that little Arkansaw darky. You didn't say anything then about bein'
+able to prove he wuz a bigamist."
+
+"Huh, jedge, I didn't have to prove it! Dat man wuz more'n jes' a plain
+bigamist. He sho' wuz a trigamist, an' ef the full truth wuz knowed I
+'spects he wuz a quadrupler at the very least. He proved it hisself--way
+he act' w'en the big 'splosion come."
+
+"But the two women you told him were waitin' behind those side doors for
+him--how about them?"
+
+"Law, jedge, dey wuzn't dere--neither one of 'em wuzn't. Jes' lak I told
+you yistiddy, I couldn't find only jest one woman dat nigger'd married
+an' run off frum, an' her I fetched 'long wid me. But lak I also told
+you, I got kind of traces of one dat uster live below Macon but w'ich is
+now vanished, an' ever'whar else I went whar he'd lived befo' he come
+yere de signs wuz manifold dat he wuz a natchel-born marryin' fool, jes'
+lak I 'spicioned fust time ever I see him. So w'en he started fur dat
+fust do' I taken a chancet on him an' w'en I seen how he cringed an'
+ducked back I taken another chancet on him, an' the subsequent evidences
+offers testimony dat both times I reckined right. Jedge, the late Doct'
+Duvall muster married some powerful rough-actin' gals in his time ef he
+thought the Mobile one wuz the gentlest out of three. Well, anyway, suh,
+the ravelin' wolf is gone frum us, an' fur one I ain't 'spectin' him
+back never no mo'. An' I reckin dat's the main pint wid you an' me
+both."
+
+"The ravelin' whut?"
+
+"Dat's whut Aunt Dilsey called him oncet, speechifyin' to me 'bout
+him--the ravelin' wolf. Only he suttinly did look he wuz comin'
+unraveled mighty fast the last I seen of him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+"WORTH 10,000"
+
+
+You might have called Vincent C. Marr a self-made man and be making no
+mistake about it. For he was self-made; not merely self-assembled, as so
+many men are who attain distinction in this profession or that calling.
+Entirely through his own efforts, with only his native wit to light the
+way for him, he had pulled himself up, step by step, from the very
+bottom of his trade to the very top of it. His trade was the applied
+trade of crookedness; his pursuit the pursuit of other folks' cash
+resources. He had the envy and admiration of his friends in allied
+branches of the same general industry; he had the begrudged respect of
+his official enemies, the police; while his accomplishments--the tricks
+he pulled, the coups he scored, the purses he garnered--were discussed
+and praised by the human nits and lice of the Seamy Side, just as the
+achievements in a legitimate field of a Hill or a Schwab or a
+Rockefeller might be talked of among petty shopkeepers and little
+business men. He had, as the phrase goes, everything--imagination,
+resource, ingenuity, audacity, utter ruthlessness.
+
+Yet it would seem hard to conceive a more humble beginning than his had
+been. His father was a cobbler in a little West Virginia coal town. At
+sixteen he ran away from home to go with a small circus. This circus was
+a traveling shield for all manner of rough extortioners. Card sharps,
+shell workers, petermen, sneak thieves, pickpockets, even burglars rode
+its train. They had a saying that the owner of this show sold the
+safe-blowing privileges outright but retained a one-third interest in
+the hold-up concession. That was a whimsical exaggeration of what
+perhaps had a kern of truth in it. Certainly it was the fact of the case
+that the owner depended more upon his lion's cut of the swag which the
+trailing jackals amassed than upon the intake at the ticket windows. Bad
+weather might kill his business for a week; a crop failure might lame it
+for a month; but the graft was as sure as anything graftified can be.
+When the runaway youth, Vince Marr, inserted himself beneath the
+protecting wing of this patron he knew exactly whither his ultimate
+ambitions tended. He had no vague boyish design to serve a 'prenticeship
+as stake driver or roustabout in the hope some day of graduating into a
+rider or a tumbler, a ringmaster or a clown. He joined out in order that
+among these congenial influences he might the quicker become an
+accomplished thief.
+
+Starting as a novice he had to carve out his own little niche in
+company where the competition already was fierce. His rise, though, was
+rapid. So far as the records show he was the first of the Monday guys.
+He developed the line himself and gave to it its name. A Monday guy was
+a plunderer of clotheslines. He followed the route of the daily street
+parade; rather he followed a route running roughly parallel to it. He
+set out coincidentally with it and he aimed to have his pilfering stint
+finished when the parade was over. He prowled in alleys and skinned over
+back fences, progressing from house yard to house yard while the parade
+passed through the streets upon which the houses faced. From kitchen
+boilers and laundry heaps, from wash baskets and drying ropes, he
+skimmed the pick of what was offered--silk shirts, fancy hose, women's
+embroidered blouses, women's belaced under-things. His work was made
+comparatively easy for him, since the dwellers of the houses would be
+watching the parade.
+
+His strippings he carried to the show lot and there he hid them away.
+That night in the privilege car the collections of the day would be
+disposed of by sale or trade to members of the troupe and the affiliated
+rogues. Especially desirable pieces might be reserved to be shipped on
+to a professional receiver of stolen goods in a certain city. Naturally,
+pickings were at their best on a Monday, for since Mother Eve on the
+first Monday hanged her fig leaf out to dry, Monday has been wash day
+the world over. Hence the name for the practitioner of the business.
+
+Vince Marr did not very long remain a Monday guy. The risks were not
+very great, everything considered. Suppose detection did come; suppose
+the cry of "Stop thief!" was raised. Who would quit watching a circus
+parade to join in a hunt for a marauder already vanished in a maze of
+outbuildings and alleyways? Still there were risks to be taken, and the
+rewards on the whole were small and uncertain. Before he reached his
+nineteenth year young Marr was the manager of a weighing pitch.
+Apparently he had but one associate in the enterprise; as a matter of
+fact he had four. In the place where holidaying crowds gathered--on a
+circus lot, at a street carnival, outside the gates of a county fair--he
+and his visible partner would set up his weighing device, and then
+stationing himself near it he would beseech you to let him guess your
+correct weight. If he guessed within three pounds of it, as recorded by
+the machine, you owed him a nickel; if he failed to guess within three
+pounds of it you owed him nothing. "Take a chance, brother!" he would
+entreat you with friendly jovial banter. "Be a sport--take a chance!"
+Let us say you accepted his proposition. Swiftly he would flip with his
+hands along your sides, would slap your flanks, would pinch you gently
+as though testing your flesh for solidity, then would call out loudly
+so that all within earshot might hear: "I figure that the gentleman
+weighs--let me see--exactly one hundred and forty-seven pounds." Or
+perhaps he would predict: "This big fellow will pull her down at two
+hundred and eight pounds, no more and no less." Then you placed yourself
+in the swinging seat of the machine with your feet clear of the earth,
+and his partner duly weighed you. Sometimes Marr guessed your weight;
+quite as often, though, he failed to come within three pounds of it and
+you paid him nothing for his pains. It was difficult to figure how so
+precarious a means of income could be made to yield a proper return
+unless the scales were dishonest.
+
+The scales were honest enough. The real profits were derived from quite
+a different source. Three master dips--pickpockets--were waiting for you
+as you moved off; they attended to your case with neatness and dispatch.
+Their work was expedited for them by reason that already they knew where
+you carried your valuables. Once Marr ran his swift and practiced
+fingers over your body he knew where your watch was, your wallet, your
+purse for small change, your roll of bills.
+
+A code word in his patter advertised to his confederates exactly
+whereabouts upon your person the treasure was carried. Really the
+business gave splendid returns. It was Marr, though, who had seized upon
+it when it merely was a catchpenny carnival device and made of it a
+real money earner. Moreover, the pickpockets took the real peril. Even
+in the infrequent event of the detection of them there was no evidence
+to justify the suspicion that the proprietors of the weighing machine
+were accessories to the pocket looting. Vince Marr was like that--always
+playing safe for himself, always thinking a jump ahead of his crowd and
+a jump and a half ahead of the police.
+
+He was never the one to get into a rut and stay there. Long before the
+old-time grafting circuses grew scarce and scarcer, and before the
+street-fairing concessions progressed out of their primitive beginnings
+into orderly and recognized organizations, he had quitted both fields
+for higher and more lucrative ramifications of his craft. Ask any
+old-time con man who ostensibly has reformed. If he tells you the
+truth--which is doubtful--he will tell you it was Chappy Marr who really
+evolved the fake foot-racing game, who patched up the leaks in the
+wireless wire-tapping game, who standardized at least two popular forms
+of the send game, who improved marvelously upon three differing versions
+of the pay-off game.
+
+All the time he was perfecting himself in his profession, fitting
+himself for the practice of it in its highermost departments. He learned
+to tone down his wardrobe. He polished his manners until they had a
+gloss on them. He labored assiduously to correct his grammar, and so
+well succeeded at the task that except when he was among associates and
+relapsed into the argot of the breed, he used language fit for a college
+professor--fit for some college professors anyway. At thirty he was a
+glib, spry person with a fancy for gay housings. At forty-five, when he
+reached the top of his swing, he had the looks, the vocabulary and the
+presence of an educated and a traveled person.
+
+He had one technical defect, if defect it might be called. In the larger
+affairs of his unhallowed business he displayed a mental adaptability, a
+talent to think quickly and shift his tactics to meet the suddenly
+arisen emergency, which was the envy of lesser underworld notables; but
+in smaller details of life he was prone to follow the line of least
+resistance, which is true of the most of us, honest and dishonest men
+the same. For instance, though he had half a dozen or more common
+aliases--names which he changed as he changed his collars--he pursued a
+certain fixed rule in choosing them, just as a man in picking out
+neckties might favor mixed weaves and varied patterns but stick always
+to the same general color scheme. He might be Vincent C. Marr, which was
+his proper name, or among intimates Chappy Marr. Then again he might be
+Col. Van Camp Morgan, of Louisiana; or Mr. Vance C. Michaels, a Western
+mine owner; or Victor C. Morehead; he might be a Markham or a Murrill or
+a Marsh or a Murphy as the occasion and the role and his humor suited.
+Always, though, the initials were the same. Partly this was for
+convenience--the name was so much easier to remember then--but partly it
+was due to that instinct for ordered routine which in a reputable sphere
+of endeavor would have made this man rather conventional and methodical
+in his personal habits, however audacious and resourceful he might have
+been on his public side and his professional. He especially was lucky in
+that he never acquired any of those mouth-filling nicknames such as
+Paper Collar Joe wore, and Grand Central Pete and Appetite Willie and
+the Mitt-and-a-Half Kid and the late Soapy Smith--picturesque enough,
+all of them, but giving to the wearers thereof an undesirable prominence
+in newspapers and to that added extent curtailing their usefulness in
+their own special areas of operation.
+
+Nor had he ever smelled the chloride-of-lime-and-circus-cage smell of
+the inside of a state's prison; no Bertillon sharp had on file his
+measurements and thumb prints, nor did any central office or detective
+bureau contain his rogues-gallery photograph. Times almost past counting
+he had been taken up on suspicion; more than once had been arrested on
+direct charges, and at least twice had been indicted. But because of
+connections with crooked lawyers and approachable politicians and venal
+police officials and because also of his own individual canniness, he
+always had escaped conviction and imprisonment. There was no stink of
+the stone hoosgow on his correctly tailored garments, and no barber
+other than one of his own choosing had ever shingled Chappy Marr's hair.
+Within reason, therefore, he was free to come and go, to bide and to
+tarry; and come and go at will he did until that unfortuitous hour when
+the affair of the wealthy Mrs. Propbridge and her husband came to pass.
+
+When the period of post-wartime inflation came upon this country
+specialized thievery marched abreast with legitimate enterprise; with it
+as with the other, rewards became tremendously larger; small turnovers
+were regarded as puny and contemptible, and operators thought in terms
+of pyramiding thousands of dollars where before they had been glad to
+strive for speculative returns of hundreds. By now Chappy Marr had won
+his way to the forefront of his kind. The same intelligence invoked, the
+same energies exercised, and in almost any proper field he would before
+this have been a rich man and an honored one. By his twisted code of
+ethics and unmorals, though, the dubious preeminence he enjoyed was
+ample reward. He stood forth from the ruck and run, a creator and a
+leader who could afford to pass by the lesser, more precarious games,
+with their prospect of uncertain takings, for the really big and
+important things. He was like a specialist who having won a prominent
+position may now say that he will accept only such patients as he
+pleases and treat only such cases as appeal to him.
+
+This being so, there were open to him two especially favored lines: he
+might be a deep-sea fisherman, meaning by that a crooked card player
+traveling on ocean steamers; or he might be the head of a swell mob of
+blackmailers preying upon more or less polite society. For the first he
+had not the digital facility which was necessary; his fingers lacked the
+requisite deftness, however agile and flexible the brain which directed
+the fingers might be. So Chappy Marr turned his talents to blackmailing.
+Blackmailing plants had acquired a sudden vogue; nearly all the
+wise-cracking kings and queens of Marr's world had gone or were going
+into them. Moreover, blackmailing offered an opportunity for variety of
+scope and ingenuity in the mechanics of its workings which appealed
+mightily to a born originator. Finally there was a paramount
+consideration. Of all the tricks and devices at the command of the
+top-hole rogue it was the very safest to play. Ninety-nine times out of
+a hundred the victim had his social position or his business reputation
+to think of, else in the first place he would never have been picked on
+as a fit subject for victimizing. Therefore he was all the more disposed
+to pay and keep still, and pay again.
+
+The bait in the trap of the average blackmailing plant is a woman--a
+young woman, good-looking, well groomed and smart. It is with her that
+the quarry is compromisingly entangled. But against women confederates
+Chappy Marr had a strong prejudice. They were such uncertain quantities;
+you never could depend upon them. They were emotional, temperamental;
+they let their sentimental attachments run away with their judgment;
+they fell in love, which was bad; they talked too much, which was worse;
+they were fickle-minded and jealous; they were given to falling out with
+male pals, and they had been known to carry a jealous grudge to the
+point of turning informer. So he set his inventions to the task of
+evolving a blackmailing snare which might be set and sprung, and
+afterwards dismantled and hidden away without the intervention of the
+female knave of the species in any of its stages. Trust him--smooth as
+lubricating oil, a veritable human graphite--to turn the trick. He
+turned it.
+
+The upshot was a lovely thing, almost foolproof and practically
+cop-proof. To be sure, a woman figured in it, but her part was that of
+the chosen prey, not the part of an accessory and accomplice. The
+greater simplicity of the device was attested by the fact that for its
+mounting, from beginning to end, only three active performers were
+needed. The chief role he would play. For his main supporting cast he
+needed two men, and knew moreover exactly where to find them. Of these
+two only one would show ever upon the stage. The other would bide out
+of sight behind the scenes, doing his share of the work, unsuspected,
+from under cover.
+
+For the part which he intended her to take in his production--the part
+of dupe--Mrs. Justus Propbridge was, as one might say, made to order.
+Consider her qualifications: young, pretty, impressionable, vain and
+inexperienced; the second wife of a man who even in these times of
+suddenly inflated fortunes was reckoned to be rich; newly come out of
+the boundless West, bringing a bounding social ambition with her;
+spending money freely and having plenty more at command to spend when
+the present supply was gone; her name appearing frequently in those
+newspapers and those weekly and monthly magazines catering particularly
+to the so-called smart set, which is so called, one gathers, because it
+is not a set and is not particularly smart.
+
+Young Mrs. Propbridge figured that her name was becoming tolerably well
+known along the Gold Coast of the North Atlantic Seaboard. It was too.
+For example, there was at least one person entirely unknown to her who
+kept a close tally of her comings and her goings, of her social
+activities, of her mode of daily life. This person was Vincent Marr.
+Thanks to the freedom with which a certain type of journal discusses the
+private and the public affairs of those men and women most commonly
+mentioned in its columns, he presently had in his mind a very clear
+picture of this lady, and he followed her movements, as reflected in
+print, with care and fidelity; it was as though he had a deep personal
+interest in her. For a matter of fact, he did; he had a very personal
+interest in her. He had been doing this for months; in his trade, as in
+many others, patience was not only a virtue but a necessity. For
+example, he knew that her determined and persistent but somewhat crudely
+engineered campaigning to establish herself in what New York calls--with
+a big S--Society was the subject in some quarters of a somewhat thinly
+veiled derision; he knew that her husband was rather an elemental, not
+to say a primitive creature, but genuine and aboveboard and generous, as
+elemental beings are likely to be. Marr figured him to be of the jealous
+type. He hoped he was; it might simplify matters tremendously.
+
+On a certain summer morning a paragraph appeared in at least three daily
+papers to the effect that Mr. and Mrs. Justus Propbridge had gone down
+to Gulf Stream City, on the Maryland coast; they would be at the
+Churchill-Fontenay there for a week or ten days. It was at his breakfast
+that Marr read this information. At noon, having in the meantime done a
+considerable amount of telephoning, he was on his way to the seaside
+too. Mentally he was shaking hands with himself in a warmly
+congratulatory way. Gulf Stream City was a place seemingly designed,
+both by Nature and by man, for the serving of his purposes.
+
+Residing there were persons of his own kidney and persuasion, on whom
+he might count for at least one detail of invaluable cooperation. For a
+certain act of his piece, a short but highly important one, he also must
+have a borrowed stage setting and a supernumerary actor or so.
+
+Immediately upon his arrival he sought out certain dependable
+individuals and put them through a rough rehearsal. This he did before
+he claimed the room he had engaged by wire at the Hotel Crofter. The
+Hotel Crofter snuggled its lesser bulk under an imposing flank of the
+supposedly exclusive and admittedly expensive Churchill-Fontenay. From
+its verandas one might command a view of the main entrance of the
+greater hotel.
+
+It was on a Tuesday that the Propbridges reached Gulf Stream City. It
+was on Wednesday afternoon that the husband received a telegram, signed
+with the name of a business associate, calling him to Toledo for a
+conference--so the wire stated--upon an urgent complication newly
+arisen. Mr. Propbridge, as all the world knew, was one of the heaviest
+stockholders and a member of the board of the Sonnesbein-Propbridge Tire
+Company, which, as the world likewise knew, had had tremendous dealings
+in contracts with the Government and now was having trouble closing up
+the loose ends of its wartime activities.
+
+He packed a bag and caught a night train West. On the following morning,
+which would be Thursday, Mrs. Propbridge took a stroll on Gulf Stream
+City's famous boardwalk. It was rather a lonely stroll. She had no
+particular objective. It was too early in the day for a full display of
+vivid costumes among the bathers on the beach. She encountered no one
+she knew.
+
+Really, for a resort so extensively advertised, Gulf Stream City was not
+a particularly exciting place. For lack of anything better to do she had
+halted to view the contents of a shop window when an exclamation of
+happy surprise from someone immediately behind her caused Mrs.
+Propbridge to turn around.
+
+Immediately it was her turn to register astonishment. A tall,
+well-dressed, gray-haired man, a stranger to her, was taking possession
+of her right hand and shaking it warmly.
+
+"Why, my dear Mrs. Watrous," he was saying, "how do you do? Well, this
+is an unexpected pleasure! When did you come down from Wilmington? And
+who is with you? And how long are you going to stay? General Dunlap and
+his daughter Claire--you know, the second daughter--and Mrs.
+Gordon-Tracy and Freddy Urb will be here in a little while. They'll be
+delighted to see you! Why, we'll have a reunion! Well, well, well!"
+
+He had said all this with scarcely a pause for breath and without giving
+her an opportunity to speak, as though surprise made him disregardful of
+labial punctuation of his sentences. Indeed, Mrs. Propbridge did not
+succeed in getting her hand free from his grasp until he had uttered
+the final "well."
+
+"You have the advantage of me," she said. "I do not know you. I am sure
+I never saw you before."
+
+At this his sudden shift from cordiality to a look half incredulous,
+half embarrassed was almost comic.
+
+"What?" he demanded, falling back a pace. "Surely this is Mrs. Beeman
+Watrous of Wilmington? I can't be mistaken!"
+
+"But you are mistaken," she insisted; "very much mistaken. My name is
+not Watrous; my name is Propbridge."
+
+"Madam," he cried, "I beg ten thousand pardons! Really, though, this is
+one of the most remarkable things I ever saw in my life--one of the most
+remarkable cases of resemblance, I mean. I am sure anyone would be
+deceived by it; that is my apology. In my own behalf, madam, I must tell
+you that you are an exact counterpart of someone I know--of Mrs. Beeman
+Watrous, a very good friend of mine. Pardon me once more, but may I ask
+if you are related to Mrs. Beeman Watrous? Her cousin perhaps? It isn't
+humanly possible that two persons should look so much alike and not be
+related?"
+
+"I don't think I ever heard of the lady," stated Mrs. Propbridge
+somewhat coldly.
+
+"Again, madam, please excuse me," he said. "I am very, very sorry to
+have annoyed you." He bowed his bared head and turned away. Then
+quickly he swung on his heel and returned to her, his hat again in his
+left hand.
+
+"Madam," he said, "I am fearful that you are suspecting me of being one
+of the objectionable breed of he-flirts who infest this place. At the
+risk of being tiresome I must repeat once more that your wonderful
+resemblance to another person led me into this awkward error. My name,
+madam, is Murrill--Valentine C. Murrill--and I am sure that if you only
+had the time and the patience to bear with me I could find someone
+here--some acquaintance of yours perhaps--who would vouch for me and
+make it plain to you that I am not addicted to the habit of forcing
+myself upon strangers on the pretext that I have met them somewhere."
+
+His manner was disarming. It was more than that; it was outright
+engaging. He was carefully groomed, smartly turned out; he had the
+manner and voice of a well-bred person. To Mrs. Propbridge he seemed a
+candid, courteous soul unduly distressed over a small matter.
+
+"Please don't concern yourself about it," she said. "I didn't suspect
+you of being a professional masher; I was only rather startled, that's
+all."
+
+"Thank you for telling me so," he said. "You take a load off my mind, I
+assure you. Pardon me again, please--but did I understand you to say a
+moment ago that your name was Propbridge?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It isn't a very common name. Surely you are not the Mrs. Propbridge?"
+
+Without being in the least presuming he somehow had managed to convey a
+subtle tribute.
+
+"I am Mrs. Justus Propbridge, if that is what you mean," she said.
+
+"Well, then," he said in tones of relief, "that simplifies matters. Is
+your husband about, madam? If he is I will do myself the honor of
+introducing myself to him and repeating to him the explanation I have
+just made to you. You see, I am by way of being one of the small fish
+who circulate on the outer edge of the big sea where the large financial
+whales swim, and it is possible that he may have heard my name and may
+know who I am."
+
+"My husband isn't here," she explained. "He was called away last night
+on business."
+
+"Again my misfortune," he said.
+
+They were in motion now; he had fallen into step alongside her as she
+moved on back up the boardwalk. Plainly her amazing resemblance to
+someone else was once more the uppermost subject in his mind. He went
+back to it.
+
+"I've heard before now of dual personalities," he said, "but this is my
+first actual experience with a case of it. When I first saw you standing
+there with your back to me and even when you turned round facing me
+after I spoke to you, I was ready to swear that you were Mrs. Beeman
+Watrous. Look, manner, size, voice, hair, eyes--all identical. I know
+her very well too. I've been a guest at one or two of her house parties.
+It's curious that you never heard of her, Mrs. Propbridge; she's the
+widow of one of the Wilmington Watrouses--the firearms people, you
+know--guns, rifles, all that sort of thing--and he left her more
+millions than she knows what to do with."
+
+Now Mrs. Propbridge had never heard of any Wilmington Watrouses, but
+plainly, here in the East they were persons of consequence--persons who
+would be worth knowing.
+
+She nodded as though to indicate that now she did faintly recall who it
+was this kindly stranger had meant.
+
+He went on. It was evident that he was inclined to be talkative. The
+impression was conveyed to her that here was a well-meaning but rather
+shallow-minded gentleman who was reasonably fond of the sound of his own
+voice. Yet about him was nothing to suggest over-effusiveness or
+familiarity.
+
+"I've a sort of favor to ask of you," he said. "I've some friends who're
+motoring over to-day from Philadelphia. I had to run on down ahead of
+them to see a man on business. They're to join me in about an hour from
+now"--he consulted his watch--"and we're all driving back together
+to-night. General Dunlap and Mrs. Claire Denton, his daughter--she's the
+amateur tennis champion, you know--and Mrs. Gordon-Tracy, of Newport,
+and Freddy Urb, the writer--they're all in the party. And the favor I'm
+asking is that I may have the pleasure of presenting them to you--that
+is, of course, unless you already know them--so that I may enjoy the
+looks on their faces when they find out that you are not Mrs. Beeman
+Watrous. I know they'll behave as I did. They won't believe it at first.
+May I?"
+
+What could Mrs. Propbridge do except consent? Indeed, inwardly she
+rejoiced at the prospect. She did not know personally the four named by
+this Mr. Murrill, but she knew mighty well who they were. What person
+familiar with the Social Register could fail to know who they were?
+Another thing had impressed her: The stranger had mentioned these
+notables with no especial emphasis on the names; but instead, quite
+casually and in a manner which carried with it the impression that such
+noted folk as Mrs. Denton and her distinguished father, and Freddy Urb
+the court jester of the innermost holies of holies of Newport and Bar
+Harbor and Palm Beach, and Mrs. Gordon-Tracy, the famous beauty, were of
+the sort with whom customarily he associated. Plainly here was a
+gentleman who not only belonged to the who's-who but had a very clear
+perception of the what-was-what. So fluttered little Mrs. Propbridge
+promptly said yes--said it with a gratified sensation in her heart.
+
+"That's fine of you!" said Murrill, visibly elated. It would appear
+that small favors were to him great pleasures. "That's splendid!
+Up until now the joke of this thing has been on me. I want to
+transfer it to them. I'm to meet them up here in the lounge of the
+Churchill-Fontenay."
+
+"That's where I am stopping," said Mrs. Propbridge.
+
+"Is it? Better and better! We might stroll along that way if you don't
+mind. By Jove, I've an idea! Suppose when they arrive they found us
+chatting together like old friends--suppose as they came up they were to
+overhear me calling you Mrs. Beeman Watrous. That would make the shock
+all the greater for them when they found out you really weren't Mrs.
+Watrous at all, but somebody they'd never seen before! Are you game for
+it?... Capital! Only, if we mean to do that we'll have to kill the time,
+some way, for forty or fifty minutes or so. Do you mind letting me bore
+you for a little while? I know it's unconventional--but I like to do the
+unconventional things when they don't make one conspicuous."
+
+Mrs. Propbridge did not in the least mind. So they killed the time and
+it died a very agreeable death, barring one small incident. On Mr.
+Murrill's invitation they took a short turn in a double-seated roller
+chair, Mr. Murrill chatting briskly all the while and savoring his
+conversation with offhand reference to this well-known personage and
+that. At his suggestion they quit the wheel chair at a point well down
+the boardwalk to drink orangeades in a small glass-fronted cafe which
+faced the sea. He had heard somewhere, he said, that they made famous
+orangeades in this shop. They might try for themselves and find out.
+
+The experiment was not entirely a success. To begin with, a waiter
+person--Mr. Murrill referred to him as a waiter person--sat them down
+near the front at a small, round table whose enamel top was decorated
+with two slopped glasses and a bottle one-third filled with wine gone
+stale. At least the stuff looked and smelled like wine--like a poor
+quality of champagne.
+
+"Ugh!" said Mr. Murrill, tasting the air. "Somebody evidently couldn't
+wait until lunch time before he started his tippling. And I didn't
+suspect either that this place might be a bootlegging place in disguise.
+Well, since prohibition came in it's hard to find a resort shop anywhere
+where you can't buy bad liquor--if only you go about it the right way."
+
+When the waiter person brought their order he bade him remove the bottle
+and the slopped glasses, and the waiter person obliged, but so sulkily
+and with such slowness of movement that Mr. Murrill was moved to speak
+to him rather sharply. Even so, the sullen functionary took his time
+about the thing. Nor did the orangeade prove particularly appetizing.
+Mr. Murrill barely tasted his.
+
+"Shall we clear out?" he asked, making a fastidious little grimace.
+
+At the door, on the way out, he made excuses.
+
+"Sorry I suggested coming into this place," he said, sinking his voice.
+"Either it is a shop which has gone off badly or its merits have been
+overadvertised by its loving friends. To me the whole atmosphere of the
+establishment seemed rather dubious, eh, what? Well, what shall we do
+next? I see a few bathers down below. Shall we go down on the beach and
+find a place to sit and watch them for a bit?"
+
+They went; and he found a bench in a quiet place under the shorings of
+the boardwalk close up alongside one of the lesser bathing pavilions,
+and they sat there, and he talked and she listened. The man had an
+endless fund of gossip about amusing and noted people; most of them, it
+would seem, were his intimates. Telling one or two incidents in which
+these distinguished friends had figured, he felt it expedient to sink
+his voice to a discreet undertone. There was plainly apparent a delicacy
+of feeling in this; one did not shout out the names of such persons for
+any curious passer-by to hear. It developed that there was one specially
+close bond between him and the members of General Dunlap's family, an
+attachment partly based upon old acquaintance and partly upon the fact
+that the Dunlaps thought he once upon a time had saved the life of the
+general's youngest daughter, Millicent.
+
+"Really, though, it was nothing," he said deprecatingly, as befitted a
+modest and a mannerly man. "The thing came about like this: It was once
+when we were all out West together. We were spending a week at the Grand
+Canyon. One morning we took the Rim Drive over to Mohave Point. No doubt
+you know the spot? I was standing with Millicent on the outer edge of
+the cliff and we were looking down together into that tremendous void
+when all of a sudden she fainted dead away. Her heart isn't very
+strong--she isn't athletic as Claire, her older sister, and the other
+Dunlap girls are--and I suppose the altitude got her. Luckily I was as
+close to her as I am to you now, and I saw her totter and I threw out my
+arms--pardon me--like this." He illustrated with movements of his arms.
+"And luckily I managed to catch her about the waist as she fell forward.
+I held on and dragged her back out of danger. Otherwise she would have
+dropped for no telling how many hundreds of feet. Of course it was only
+a chance that I happened to be touching elbows with the child, and
+naturally I only did what anyone would have done in the same
+circumstances, but the whole family were tremendously grateful and made
+a great pother over it. By the way, speaking of rescues, have you heard
+about the thing that happened to the two Van Norden girls at Bailey's
+Beach last week? I must tell you about that."
+
+Presently they both were surprised to find that forty-five minutes had
+passed. Mr. Murrill said they had better be getting along; he made so
+bold as to venture the suggestion that possibly Mrs. Propbridge might
+want to go to her rooms before the automobile party arrived, to change
+her frock or something. Not that he personally thought she should change
+it. If he might be pardoned for saying so, he thought it a most becoming
+frock; but women were curious about such things, now honestly weren't
+they? And Mrs. Propbridge was constrained to confess that about such
+things women were curious. She had a conviction that if all things moved
+smoothly she presently would be urged to waive formality and join the
+party at luncheon. Mr. Murrill had not exactly put the idea into words
+yet, but she sensed that the thought of offering the invitation was in
+his mind. In any event the impending meeting called for efforts on her
+part to appear at her best.
+
+"I believe I will run up to our rooms for a few minutes before your
+friends arrive," she said as they arose from the bench. "I want to
+freshen up a bit."
+
+"Quite so," he assented.
+
+He left her at the doors of the Churchill-Fontenay, saying he would idle
+about and watch for the others in case they should arrive ahead of time.
+
+Ten minutes later, while she was still trying to make a choice between
+three frocks, her telephone rang. She answered the ring; it was Mr.
+Murrill, who was at the other end of the line. He was distressed to have
+to tell her that word had just reached him that on the way down from
+Philadelphia General Dunlap had been taken suddenly ill--an attack of
+acute indigestion, perhaps, or possibly a touch of the sun--and the
+motor trip had been halted at a small town on the mainland fifteen miles
+back of Gulf Stream City. He was starting immediately for the town in a
+car with a physician. He trusted the general's indisposition was not
+really serious but of course the party would be called off; and the
+invalid would return to Philadelphia as soon as he felt well enough to
+move. He was awfully sorry--Mr. Murrill was--terribly put out, and all
+that sort of thing; hoped that another opportunity might be vouchsafed
+him of meeting Mrs. Propbridge; he had enjoyed tremendously meeting her
+under these unconventional circumstances; and now he must go.
+
+It was not to be denied that young Mrs. Propbridge felt distinctly
+disappointed. The start of the little adventure had had promise in it.
+She had forecast all manner of agreeable contingencies as the probable
+outcome.
+
+For some reason, though, or perhaps for no definite reason at all, she
+said nothing to her husband, on his return from Toledo, of her encounter
+with the agreeable Mr. Murrill. Anyway, he arrived in no very affable
+state of mind. As a matter of fact he was most terrifically out of
+temper. Somebody or other--presumably some ass of a practical joker, he
+figured, or possibly a person with a grudge against him who had curious
+methods of taking vengeance--had lured him into taking a hot, dusty,
+tiresome and entirely useless trip. There was no business conference on
+out at Toledo; no need for his presence there. If he could lay hands on
+the idiot who had sent him that forged telegram--well, the angered Mr.
+Propbridge indicated with a gesture of a large and knobby fist what he
+would do to the aforesaid idiot.
+
+The next time Mr. Propbridge was haled to the broiling Corn Belt he made
+very sure that the warrant was genuine. One of these wild-goose chases a
+summer was quite enough for a man with a size-nineteen collar and a
+forty-six-inch waistband.
+
+The next time befell some ten days after the Propbridges returned from
+the shore to their thirty-thousand-dollars-a-year apartment on Upper
+Park Avenue. The very fact that they did live in an apartment and that
+they did spend a good part of their time there would stamp them for what
+they were--persons not yet to be included among the really fashionable
+group. The really fashionable maintained large homes which they occupied
+when they came to town to have dental work done or to launch a debutante
+daughter into society; the rest of the year they usually were elsewhere.
+It was the thing.
+
+Business of importance sent Mr. Propbridge to Detroit, and then on to
+Chicago and Des Moines. On a certain afternoon he caught the Wolverine
+Limited. Almost before his train had passed One Hundred and Twenty-fifth
+Street Mrs. Propbridge had a caller. She was informed that a member of
+the staff of that live paper, People You Know, desired to see her for a
+few minutes. Persons of social consequence or persons who craved to be
+of social consequence did not often deny themselves to representatives
+of People You Know. Mrs. Propbridge told the switchboard girl downstairs
+to tell the hallman to invite the gentleman to come up.
+
+He proved to be a somewhat older man than she had expected to see. He
+was well dressed enough, but about him was something hard and
+forbidding, almost formidable in fact. Yet there was a soothing,
+conciliatory tone in his voice when he spoke.
+
+"Mrs. Propbridge," he began, "my name is Townsend. I am one of the
+editors of People You Know. I might have sent one of our reporters to
+see you, but in a matter so important--and so delicate as this one is--I
+felt it would be better if I came personally to have a little talk with
+you and get your side of the affair for publication."
+
+"My side of what affair?" she asked, puzzled.
+
+He lifted one lip in a cornerwise smile.
+
+"Let me give you a little advice, Mrs. Propbridge," he said. "I've had a
+lot of experience in such matters as these. The interested parties will
+be better off if they're perfectly frank in talking to the press. Then
+all misunderstandings are avoided and everybody gets a fair deal in
+print. Don't you agree with me that I am right?"
+
+"You may be right," she said, "but I haven't the least idea what you are
+talking about."
+
+"I mean your trouble with your husband--if you force me to speak
+plainly; I'd like to have your statement, that's all."
+
+"But I haven't had any trouble with my husband!" she said. Her amazement
+made her voice shrill. "My husband and I are living together in perfect
+happiness. You've made a mistake."
+
+"No chance," he said, and suddenly his manner changed from the
+sympathetic to the accusing. "Mrs. Propbridge, we have exclusive advance
+information from reliable sources--a straight tip--that the proof
+against you is about to be turned over to your husband and we've every
+reason to believe that when he gets it in his hands he's going to sue
+you for divorce, naming as corespondent a certain middle-aged man. Do
+you mean to tell me you don't know anything about that?"
+
+"Of course I mean to! Why, you're crazy! You're--"
+
+"Wait just one minute please," he interrupted the distressed lady. "Wait
+until I get through telling you how much I know already; then you'll see
+that denials won't help you any. As a matter of fact we're ready now to
+go ahead and spring the story in next week's issue, but I thought it
+was only fair to come to you and give you a chance to make your defense
+in print--if you care to make one."
+
+"I still tell you that you've made a terrible mistake," she declared.
+Her anger began to stir within her, as indignation succeeded to
+astonishment. "How dare you come here accusing me of doing anything
+wrong!"
+
+"I'm accusing you of nothing. I'm only going by the plain evidence. I
+might be lying to you. Other people might lie to you. But, madam,
+photographs don't lie. That's why they're the best possible evidence in
+a divorce court. And I've seen the evidence. I've got it in my pocket
+right now."
+
+"Evidence against me? Photographs of me?"
+
+"Sure. Photographs of you and the gray-haired party." He reached in a
+breast pocket and brought out a thin sheaf of unmounted photographs and
+handed them to her. "Mrs. Propbridge, just take a look at these and then
+tell me if you blame me for assuming that there's bound to be trouble
+when your husband sees them?"
+
+She looked, and her twirling brain told her it was all a nightmare, but
+her eyes told her it was not. Here were five photographs, enlarged
+snapshots apparently: One, a profile view, showing her standing on a
+boardwalk, her hand held in the hand of the man she had known as
+Valentine C. Murrill; one, a quartering view, revealing them riding
+together in a wheel chair, their heads close together, she smiling and
+he apparently whispering something of a pleasing and confidential nature
+to her, the posture of both almost intimate; one, a side view, showing
+the pair of them emerging from an open-fronted cafe--she recognized the
+facade of the place where they had found the orangeades so
+disappointing--and in this picture Mr. Murrill had been caught by the
+camera as he was saying something of seeming mutual interest, for she
+was glancing up sidewise at him and he had lowered his head until his
+lips almost touched her ear; one, showing them sitting at a small round
+table with a wine bottle and glasses in front of them and behind them a
+background suggesting the interior of a rather shabby drinking place, a
+distinct impression of sordidness somehow conveyed; and one, a rear
+view, showing them upon a bench alongside a seemingly deserted wooden
+structure of some sort, and in this one the man had been snapped in the
+very act of putting his arms about her and drawing her toward him.
+
+That was all--merely five oblong slips of chemically printed paper, and
+yet on the face of them they told a damning and a condemning story.
+
+She stared at them, she who was absolutely innocent of thought or intent
+of wrong-doing, and could feel the fabric of her domestic life trembling
+before it came crashing down.
+
+"Oh, but this is too horrible for words!" the distressed lady cried
+out. "How could anybody have been so cruel, so malicious, as to follow
+us and waylay us and catch us in these positions? It's monstrous!"
+
+"Somebody did catch you, then, in compromising attitudes--you admit
+that?"
+
+"You twist my words to give them a false meaning!" she exclaimed. "You
+are trying to trap me into saying something that would put me in a wrong
+light. I can explain--why, the whole thing is so simple when you
+understand."
+
+"Suppose you do explain, then. Get me right, Mrs. Propbridge--I'm all
+for you in this affair. I want to give you the best of it from every
+standpoint."
+
+So she explained, her words pouring forth in a torrent. She told him in
+such details as she recalled the entire history of her meeting with the
+vanished Mr. Murrill--how a doctored telegram sent her husband away and
+left her alone, how Murrill had accosted her, and why and what
+followed--all of it she told him, withholding nothing.
+
+He waited until she was through. Then he sped a bolt, watching her
+closely, for upon the way she took it much, from his viewpoint,
+depended.
+
+"Well," he said, "if that's the way this thing happened and if you've
+told your husband about it"--he dragged his words just a trifle--"why
+should you be so worried, even if these pictures should reach him?"
+
+Her look told him the shot had struck home. Inwardly he rejoiced,
+knowing, before she answered, what her answer would be.
+
+"But I didn't tell him," she confessed, stricken with a new cause for
+concern. "I--I forgot to tell him."
+
+"Oh, you forgot to tell him?" he repeated. Now suddenly he became a
+cross-examiner, snapping his questions at her, catching her up sharply
+in her replies. "And you say you never saw this Mr. Murrill--as you call
+him--before in all your life?"
+
+"No."
+
+"And you've never seen the mysterious stranger since?"
+
+"There was nothing mysterious about him, I tell you. He was merely
+interesting."
+
+"Anyhow, you've never seen him since?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Nor had any word from him other than that telephone talk you say you
+had with him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Did you ever make any inquiries with a view to finding out whether
+there was such a person as this Mrs. Beeman Watrous?"
+
+"No; why should I?"
+
+"That's a question for you to decide. Did you think to look in the
+papers to see whether General Dunlap had really been taken ill on a
+motor trip?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Yet he's a well-known person. Surely you expected the papers would
+mention his illness?"
+
+"It never occurred to me to look. I tell you there was nothing wrong
+about it. Why do you try to trip me up so?"
+
+"Excuse me, I'm only trying to help you out of what looks like a pretty
+bad mess. But I've got to get the straight of it. Let me run over the
+points in your story: No sooner do you land in Gulf Stream City than
+your husband gets a faked-up telegram and goes away? And you are left
+all alone? And you go for a walk all by yourself? And a man you never
+laid eyes on before comes up to you and tells you that you look a lot
+like a friend of his, a certain very rich widow, Mrs. Watrous--somebody,
+though, that I for one never heard of, and I know the Social Register
+from cover to cover, and know something about Wilmington too. And on the
+strength of your imaginary resemblance to an imaginary somebody he
+introduced himself to you? And then you let him walk with you? And you
+let him whisper pleasant things in your ear? Two of those pictures that
+you've got in your hand prove that. And you let him take you into one of
+the most notorious blind tigers on the beach? And you sit there with him
+in this dump--this place with a shady reputation--"
+
+"I've explained to you how that happened. We didn't stay there. We came
+right out."
+
+"Let me go on, please. And you let him buy you wine there?"
+
+"I've told you about that part, too--how the bottles and the glasses
+were already on the table when we sat down."
+
+"I'm merely going by what the photographs tell, Mrs. Propbridge. I'm
+merely saying to you what a smart divorce lawyer would say to you if
+ever he got you on the witness stand; only he'd be trying to convict you
+by your own words and I'm trying to give you every chance to clear
+yourself. And then after that you go and sit with him--this perfect
+stranger--in a lonely place alongside a deserted bath house and nobody
+else in sight?"
+
+"There were people bathing right in front of us all the time."
+
+"Were there? Well, take a look at Photograph Number Five and see if it
+shows any bathers in sight. And he slips his arm around you and draws
+you to him?"
+
+"I explained to you how that happened," protested the badgered,
+desperate woman. "No matter what the circumstances seem to be, I did
+nothing wrong, I tell you."
+
+"All right, just as you say. Remember, I'm taking your side of it; I'm
+trying to be your friend. But here's the important thing for you to
+consider: With those pictures laid before them would any jury on earth
+believe your side of it? Would they believe you had no hand in sending
+your husband that faked-up telegram? Would they believe it wasn't a
+trick to get him away so you could keep an appointment with this man?
+Would any judge believe you? Would your friends believe you? Or would
+they all say that they never heard such a transparent cock-and-bull
+story in their lives?"
+
+"Oh, oh!" she cried chokingly, and put her face in her hands. Then she
+threw up her head and stared at him out of her miserable eyes. "Where
+did those pictures come from? You say you believe in me, that you are
+willing to help me. Then tell me where they came from and who took them?
+And how did you manage to get hold of them?"
+
+His baitings had carried her exactly to the desired place--the turning
+point, they call it in the vernacular of the confidence sharp. The rest
+should be easy.
+
+"Mrs. Propbridge," he said, "you've been pretty frank with me. I'll be
+equally frank with you. Those pictures were brought to our office by the
+man who took them. I have his name and address, but am not at liberty to
+tell them to anyone. I don't know what his motives were in taking them;
+we did not ask him that either. We can't afford to question the motives
+of people who bring us these exclusive tips. We pay a fancy price for
+them and that lets us out. Besides, these photographs seemed to speak
+for themselves. So we paid him the price he asked for the use of them.
+Destroying these copies wouldn't help you any. That man still has the
+plates; he could print them over again. The only hope you've got is to
+get hold of those plates. And I'm afraid he'll ask a big price for
+them."
+
+"How big a price?"
+
+"That I couldn't say without seeing him. Knowing the sort of person he
+is, my guess is that he'd expect you to hand him over a good-sized chunk
+of money to begin with--as a proof of your intentions to do business
+with him. You'd have to pay him in cash; he'd be too wise to take a
+check. And then he might want so much apiece for each plate or he might
+insist on your paying him a lump sum for the whole lot. You see, what he
+evidently expects to do is to sell them to your husband, and he'd expect
+you at least to meet the price your husband would have to pay. Any way
+you look at it he's got you at his mercy--and, as I see it, you'll
+probably have to come to his terms if you want to keep this thing a
+secret."
+
+"Where is this man? You keep saying you want to serve me--can't you
+bring him to me?"
+
+"I'm afraid he wouldn't come. If he's engaged in a shady business--if
+he's cooked up a deliberate scheme to trap you--he won't come near you.
+That's my guess. But if you are willing to trust me to act as your
+representative maybe the whole thing might be arranged and no one except
+us ever be the wiser for it."
+
+Mrs. Propbridge being an average woman did what the average woman, thus
+cruelly circumstanced and sorely frightened and half frantic and
+lacking advice from honest folk, would do. She paid and she paid and she
+kept on paying. First off, it appeared the paper had to be recompensed
+for its initial outlay and for various vaguely explained incidental
+expenses which it had incurred in connection with the affair. Then,
+through Townsend, the unknown principal demanded that a larger sum
+should be handed over as an evidence of good faith on her part before he
+would consider further negotiations. This, though, turned out to be only
+the beginning of the extortion processes.
+
+When, on this pretext and that, she had been mulcted of nearly fourteen
+thousand dollars, when her personal bank account had been exhausted,
+when most of her jewelry was secretly in pawn, when still she had not
+yet been given the telltale plates, but daily was being tortured by
+threats of exposure unless she surrendered yet more money, poor badgered
+beleaguered little Mrs. Propbridge, being an honest and a
+straightforward woman, took the course she should have taken at the
+outset. She went to her husband and she told him the truth. And he
+believed her.
+
+He did not stop with believing her; he bestirred himself. He had money;
+he had the strength and the authority which money gives. He had
+something else--he had that powerful, intangible thing which among
+police officials and in the inner politics of city governments is
+variously known as a pull and a drag. Straightway he invoked it.
+
+Of a sudden Chappy Marr was aware that he had made a grievous mistake.
+He had calculated to garner for himself a fat roll of the Propbridge
+currency; had counted upon enjoying a continuing source of income for so
+long as the wife continued to hand over hush money. Deduct the cuts
+which went to Zach Traynor, alias Townsend, for playing the part of the
+magazine editor, and to Cheesy Mike Zaugbaum, that camera wizard of
+newspaper staff work turned crook's helper--Zaugbaum it was who had
+worked the trick of the photographs--and still the major share of the
+spoils due him ought, first and last, to run into five gratifying
+figures. On this he confidently had figured. He had not reckoned into
+the equation the possibility of invoking against him the Propbridge pull
+backed by the full force of this double-fisted, vengeful millionaire's
+rage. Indeed he never supposed that there might be any such pull. And
+here, practically without warning, he found his influence arrayed
+against an infinitely stronger influence, so that his counted for
+considerably less than nothing at all.
+
+Still, there was a warning. He got away to Toronto. Traynor made Chicago
+and went into temporary seclusion there. Cheesy Zaugbaum lacked the luck
+of these two. As soon as Mrs. Propbridge had described the ingratiating
+Mr. Murrill and the obliging Mr. Townsend to M. J. Brock, head of the
+Brock private-detective agency, that astute but commonplace-appearing
+gentleman knew whom she meant. Knowing so much, it was not hard for him
+to add one to one and get three. He deduced who the third member of the
+triumvirate must be. Mr. Brock owed his preeminence in his trade to one
+outstanding faculty--he was an honest man who could think like a thief.
+Three hours after he concluded his first interview with the lady one of
+his operatives walked up behind Cheesy and tapped him on the shoulder
+and inquired of him whether he would go along nice and quiet for a talk
+with the boss or was inclined to make a fuss about it. In either event,
+so Cheesy was assured, he, could have his wish gratified. And Cheesy,
+who had the heart of a rabbit--a rabbit feeding on other folks' cabbage,
+but a timorous, nibbling bunny for all that--Cheesy, he went.
+
+In Toronto Marr peaked and pined. He probably was safe enough for so
+long as he bided there; there had been no newspaper publicity, and he
+felt reasonably sure that openly, at least, the aid of regular police
+departments would not be set in motion against him; so he put the
+thoughts of arrest and extradition and such like unpleasant
+contingencies out of his mind. But li'l' old N'York was his proper
+abiding place. The smell of its streets had a lure for him which no
+other city's streets had. His crowd was there--the folk who spoke his
+tongue and played his game. And there the gudgeons on which his sort
+fed schooled the thickest and carried the most savory fat on their bones
+as they skittered over the asphaltum shoals of the Main Stem.
+
+For a month, emulating Uncle Remus' Brer Fox, he lay low, resisting the
+gnawing discontent that kept screening delectable visions of Broadway
+and the Upper Forties and Seventh Avenue before his homesick eyes. It
+was a real nostalgia from which he suffered. He endured it, though, with
+what patience he might lest a worse thing befall. And at the end of that
+month he went back to the big town; an overpowering temptation was the
+reason for his going. There had arisen a chance for a large turnover and
+a quick get-away again, with an attractively large sum to stay him and
+comfort him after he resumed his enforced exile. An emissary from the
+Gulwing mob ran up to Toronto and dangled the lure before his eyes.
+
+Harbored in New York at the present moment was a beautiful prospect--a
+supremely credulous cattleman from the Far West, who had been playing
+the curb market. A crooks' tipster who was a clerk in a bucket shop
+downtown had for a price passed the word to the Gulwings, and the
+Gulwings--Sig and Alf--were intentful to strip the speculative Westerner
+before the curb took from him the delectable core of his bank roll. But
+the Gulwing organization, complete as it is in most essential details,
+lacked in its personnel for the moment a person of address to undertake
+the steering and the convincing--to worm a way into the good graces of
+the prospective quarry; to find out approximately about how much in
+dollars and cents he might reasonably be expected to yield, and then to
+stand by in the pose of a pretended fellow investor and fellow loser,
+while the cleaning up of the plunger was done by the competent but
+crude-mannered Messrs. Sigmund and Alfred Gulwing and their associates.
+For the important role of the convincer Marr was suited above all
+others. It was represented to him that he could slip back to town and,
+all the while keeping well under cover, rib up the customer to go, as
+the trade term has it, and then withdraw again to the Dominion. A price
+was fixed, based on a sliding scale, and Marr returned to New York.
+
+Three days from the day he reached town the Westerner, whose name was
+Hartridge, lunched with him as his guest at the Roychester, a small,
+discreetly run hotel in Forty-sixth Street. After luncheon they sat down
+in the lobby for a smoke. For good and sufficient reasons Marr preferred
+as quiet a spot and as secluded a one as the lobby of the hotel might
+offer. He found it where a small red-leather sofa built for two stood in
+a sort of recess formed on one side by a jog in the wall and on the
+other side by the switchboard and the two booths which constituted the
+Roychester's public telephone equipment. To call the guest rooms one
+made use of an instrument on the clerk's desk, farther over to the left.
+
+To this retreat Marr guided the big Oregonian. From it he had a fairly
+complete view of the lobby. This was essential since presently, if
+things went well or if they did not go well, he must privily give a
+designated signal for the benefit of a Gulwing underling, a lesser
+member of the mob, who was already on hand, standing off and on in the
+offing. Sitting there Marr was well protected from the view of persons
+passing through, bound to or from the grill room, the desk or the
+elevators. This also was as it should be. Better still, he was
+practically out of sight of those who might approach the telephone
+operator to enlist her services in securing outside calls. The
+outjutting furniture of her desk and the flanks of the nearermost pay
+booth hid him from them; only the top of the young woman's head was
+visible as she sat ten feet away, facing her perforated board.
+
+The voices of her patrons came to him, and her voice as she repeated the
+numbers after them: "Greenwich 978, please."
+
+"Larchmont 54 party J."
+
+"Worth 9009, please, miss."
+
+"Vanderbilt 100."
+
+And so on and so forth, in a steady patter, like raindrops falling; but
+though he could hear he could not be seen. Altogether, the spot was, for
+his own purposes, admirably arranged.
+
+So they sat and smoked, and pretty soon, the occasion and the conditions
+and the time being ripe, Marr outlined to his new friend Hartridge, on
+pledge of secrecy, a wonderfully safe and wonderfully simple plan for
+taking its ill-gotten money away from a Tenderloin pool room. Swiftly he
+sketched in the details; the opportunity, he divulged in strict
+confidence, had just come to him. He confessed to having taken a great
+liking to Hartridge during their short acquaintance; Hartridge had
+impressed him as one who might be counted upon to know a good thing when
+he saw it, and so, inspired by these convictions, he was going to give
+Hartridge a chance to join him in the plunge and share with him the
+juicy proceeds. Besides, the more money risked the greater the killing.
+He himself had certain funds in hand, but more funds were needed if a
+real fortune was to be realized.
+
+There was need, though, for prompt decision on the part of all
+concerned, because that very afternoon--in fact, within that same
+hour--there in the Roychester he was to meet, by appointment, the
+conniving manager of an uptown branch office of the telegraph company,
+who would cooperate in the undertaking and upon whose good offices in
+withholding flashed race results at Belmont Park until his fellow
+conspirators, acting on the information, could get their bets down upon
+the winners, depended the success of the venture. Only, strictly
+speaking, it would not be a venture at all, but a moral certainty, a
+cinch, the surest of all sure things. Guaranties against mischance
+entailing loss would be provided; he could promise his friend Hartridge
+that; and the telegraph manager, when he came shortly, would add further
+proof.
+
+The question then was: Would Hartridge join him as a partner? And if so,
+about how much, in round figures, would Hartridge be willing to put up?
+He must know this in advance because he was prepared to match
+Hartridge's investment dollar for dollar.
+
+And at that Hartridge, to Marr's most sincere discomfiture, shook his
+head.
+
+"I'll tell you how it is with me," said Hartridge. "These broker fellows
+downtown have been touchin' me up purty hard. I guess this here New York
+game ain't exactly my game. I'm aimin' to close up what little deals
+I've still got on here and beat it back to God's country while I've
+still got a shirt on my back. I'm much obliged to you, Markham, for
+wantin' to take me into your scheme. It sounds good the way you tell it,
+but it seems like ever'thing round this burg sounds good till you test
+it out--and so I guess you better count me out and find yourself a
+partner somewheres else."
+
+There was definiteness in his refusal; the shake of his head emphasized
+it too. Marr's role should have been the persuasive, the insistent, the
+argumentative, the cajoling; but Marr was distinctly out of temper.
+
+Here he had ventured into danger to play for a fat purse and all he
+would get for his trouble and his pains and the risk he had run would
+be just those things--pains and trouble and risk--these, and nothing
+more nourishing.
+
+"Oh, very well then, Hartridge," he said angrily, "if you haven't any
+confidence in me--if you can't see that this is a play that naturally
+can't go wrong--why, we'll let it drop."
+
+"Oh, I've got confidence in you--" began Hartridge, but Marr, no
+patience left in him, cut him short.
+
+"Looks like it, doesn't it?" he snapped. "Forget it! Let's talk about
+the weather."
+
+He lifted his straw hat as though to ease its pressure upon his head and
+then settled it well down over his eyes. This was the sign to the
+Gulwings' messenger, watching him covertly from behind a newspaper over
+on the far side of the lobby, that the plan had failed. The signal he
+had so confidently expected to give--a trick of relighting his cigar and
+flipping the match into the air--would have conveyed to the watcher the
+information that all augured well. The latter's job then would have been
+to get up from his chair and step outside and bear the word to Sig
+Gulwing, who, letter-perfect in the part of the conspiring telegraph
+manager, would promptly enter and present himself to Marr, and by Marr
+be introduced to the Westerner. The hat-shifting device had been devised
+in the remote contingency of failure on Marr's part to win over the
+chosen victim. Plainly the collapse of the plot had been totally
+unexpected by the messenger. Over his paper he stared at Marr until
+Marr repeated the gesture. Then, fully convinced now that there had been
+no mistake, the messenger arose and headed for the door, the whole
+thing--signaling, duplicated signaling and all--having taken very much
+less time for its action than has here been required to describe it.
+
+The signal bearer had taken perhaps five steps when Hartridge spoke
+words which instantly filled Marr with regret that he had been so
+impetuously prompt to take a no for a no.
+
+"Say, hold your hosses, Markham," said Hartridge contritely. "Don't be
+in such a hurry! Come to think about it, I might go so far as to risk
+altogether as much, say, as eight or ten thousand dollars in this scheme
+of yours--I don't want to be a piker."
+
+In the hundredth part of a second Marr's mind reacted; his brain was
+galvanized into speedy action. Ten thousand wasn't very much--not nearly
+so much as he had counted on--still, ten thousand dollars was ten
+thousand dollars; besides, if the Gulwings did their work cannily the
+ten thousand ought to be merely a starter, an initiation fee, really,
+for the victim. Once he was enmeshed, trust Sig and Alf to trim him to
+his underwear; the machinery of the wire-tapping game was geared for
+just that.
+
+He must stop the departing messenger then, must make him understand that
+the wrong sign had been given and that the fish was nibbling the bait.
+Yet the messenger's back was to them; ten steps, fifteen steps more, and
+he would be out of the door.
+
+For Marr suddenly to hail a man he was supposed not to know might be
+fatal; almost surely at this critical moment it would stir up suspicion
+in Hartridge's mind. Yet some way, somehow, at once, he must stop the
+word bearer. But how? That was it--how?
+
+Ah, he had it! In the fraction of a moment he had it. It came to him
+now, fully formed, the shape of it conjured up out of that jumble of
+words which had been flowing to him from the telephone desk all the
+while he had been sitting there and which had registered subconsciously
+in his quick brain. The pause, naturally spaced, which fell between
+Hartridge's 'bout-faced concession and Marr's reply, was not unduly
+lengthened, yet in that flash of time Marr had analyzed the puzzle of
+the situation and had found the answer to it.
+
+"Bully, Hartridge!" he exclaimed. "You'll never regret it. Our man ought
+to be here any minute now.... By Jove! That reminds me--I meant to
+telephone for some tickets for to-night's Follies--you're going with me
+as my guest. Just a moment!"
+
+He got on his feet and as he came out of the corner and still was eight
+feet distant from the telephone girl, he called out loudly, as a man
+might call whose hurried anxiety to get an important number made him
+careless of the pitch of his voice: "Worth 10,000! Worth 10,000!"
+
+He feared to look toward the door--yet. For the moment he must seem
+concerned only with the hasty business of telephoning.
+
+Annoyed by his shouting, the girl raised her head and stared at him as
+he came toward her.
+
+"What's the excitement?" she demanded.
+
+With enhanced vehemence he answered, putting on the key words all the
+emphasis he dared employ:
+
+"I should think anybody in hearing could understand what I said and what
+I meant--_Worth 10,000_!"
+
+He was alongside her now; he could risk a glance toward the door. He
+looked, and his heart rejoiced inside of him, for the messenger had
+swung about, as had half a dozen others, all arrested by the harshness
+of his words--and the messenger was staring at him. Marr gave the
+correct signal--with quick well-simulated nervousness drew a loose match
+from his waistcoat pocket, struck it, applied it to his cigar, then
+flipped the still burning match halfway across the floor. No need for
+him again to look--he knew the artifice had succeeded.
+
+"Here's your number," said the affronted young woman. With a vicious
+little slam she stuck a metal plug into its proper hole.
+
+Marr had not the least idea what concern or what individual owned Worth
+10,000 for a telephone number. Nor did it concern him now. Even so, he
+must of course carry out the pretense which so well had served him in
+the emergency. He entered the booth, leaving the door open for
+Hartridge's benefit.
+
+"Hello, hello!" he called into the transmitter. "This is V. C. Markham
+speaking. I want to speak to"--he uttered the first name which popped
+into his mind--"to George Spillane. Want to order some tickets for a
+show to-night." He paused a moment for the sake of the verities; then,
+paying no heed to the confused rejoinder coming to him from the other
+end of the wire, and improvising to round out his play, went on: "What's
+that?... Not there? Oh, very well! I'll call him later.... No, never
+mind, Spillane's the man I want. I'll call again."
+
+He hung up the receiver. Out of the tail of his eye as he hung it up he
+saw Sig Gulwing just entering the hotel, in proper disguise for the
+character of the district telegraph manager with a grudge against pool
+rooms and a plan for making enough at one coup to enable him to quit his
+present job; the job was mythical, and the grudge, too--bits merely of
+the fraudulent drama now about to be played--but surely Gulwing was most
+solid and dependable and plausible looking. His make-up was perfect. To
+get here so soon after receiving the cue he must have been awaiting the
+word just outside the entrance. Gulwing was smart but he was not so
+smart as Marr--Marr exulted to himself. In high good humor, he dropped
+a dollar bill at the girl's elbow.
+
+"Pay for the call out of that, miss, and keep the change," he said
+genially. "Sorry I was so boisterous just now."
+
+Thirty minutes later, still radiating gratification, Marr stood at the
+cigar stand making a discriminating choice of the best in the humidor of
+imported goods. Gulwing and Hartridge were over there on the sofa, cheek
+by jowl, and all was going well.
+
+Half aloud, to himself, he said, smiling in prime content: "Well, I
+guess I'm bad!"
+
+"I guess you are!" said a voice right in his ear; "and you're due to be
+worse, Chappy, old boy--much worse!"
+
+The smile slipped. He turned his head and looked into the complacent,
+chubby face and the pleased eyes of M. J. Brock, head of Brock's
+Detective Agency--the man of all men in this world he wished least to
+see. For once, anyhow, in his life Marr was shaken, and showed it.
+
+"That's all right, Chappy," said Brock soothingly, rocking his short
+plump figure on his heels; "there won't be any rough stuff. I've got a
+cop off the corner who's waiting outside if I should need him--in case
+of a jam--but I guess we won't need him, will we? You'll go along with
+me nice and friendly in a taxicab, won't you?" He flirted his thumb over
+his shoulder. "And you needn't bother about Gulwing either. I've seen
+him--saw him as soon as I came in. I guess he'll be seeing me in a
+minute, too, and then he'll suddenly remember where it was he left his
+umbrella and take it on the hop."
+
+Marr said not a word. Brock rattled on in high spirits, still
+maintaining that cat-with-a-mouse attitude which was characteristic of
+him.
+
+"Never mind worrying about old pal Gulwing--I don't want him now. You're
+the one you'd better be worrying about; because that's going to be a
+mighty long taxi ride that you're going to take with me, Chappy--fifteen
+minutes to get there, say, and anywhere from five to ten years to get
+back--or I miss my guess.... Yes, Chappy, you're nailed with the goods
+this time. Propbridge is going through; his wife too. They'll go to
+court; they'll shove the case. And Cheesy Zaugbaum has come clean. Oh, I
+guess it's curtains for you all right, all right."
+
+"You don't exactly hate yourself, do you?" gibed Marr. "Sort of pleased
+with yourself?"
+
+"Not so much pleased with myself as disappointed in you, Chappy,"
+countered the exultant Brock. "I figured you were different from the
+rest of your crowd, maybe; but it turns out you're like all the
+others--you will do your thinking in a groove." He shook his head in
+mock sorrow. "Chappy, tell me--not that it makes any difference
+particularly, but just to satisfy my curiosity--curiosity being my
+business, as you might say--what number was it you called up from here
+about thirty minutes back? Come on. The young lady over yonder will tell
+me if you don't. Was it Worth 10,000?"
+
+"Yes," said Marr, "it was."
+
+"I thought so," said Brock. "I guessed as much. But say Chappy, that's
+the trunk number of the Herald. Before this you never were the one to
+try to break into the newspapers on your own hook. What did you want
+with that number?"
+
+"That's my business," said Marr.
+
+"Have it your way," assented Brock with ironic mildness. "Now, Chappy,
+follow me a minute and you'll see how you dished your own beans: You
+call up Worth 10,000--that's a private matter, as you say. But Central
+gets the call twisted and gives you another number--that's a mistake.
+And the number she happens to give you is the number of my new branch
+office down in the financial district--that's an accident. And the
+fellow who answers the call at my shop happens to be Costigan, my chief
+assistant, who's been working on the Propbridge case for five weeks
+now--and that's a coincidence. He doesn't recognize your voice over the
+wire--that would be luck. But when, like a saphead, you pull your new
+moniker, but with the same old initials hitched to it, and when on top
+of that you ask for George Spillane, which is Cheesy by his most popular
+alias--when you do these things, why Chappy, it's your own fault.
+
+"Because Costigan is on then, bigger than a house. You've tipped him
+your hand, see? And with our connections it's easy--and quick--for
+Costigan to trace the call to this hotel. And inside of two minutes
+after that he has me on the wire at my uptown office over here in West
+Fortieth. And here I am; as a matter of fact, I've been here all of
+fifteen minutes.
+
+"It all proves one thing to me, Chappy. You're wiser than the run of
+'em, but you've got your weak spot, and now I know what it is: You think
+in a groove, Chappy, and this time, by looking at the far end of the
+groove, you can see little old Warble-Twice-on-the-Hudson looming up.
+And you won't have to look very hard to see it, either.... Well, I see
+Gulwing has taken a tumble to himself and has gone on a run to look for
+his umbrella. Suppose we start on our little taxi ride, old groove
+thinker?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MR. LOBEL'S APOPLEXY
+
+
+The real purpose of this is to tell about Mr. Lobel's attack of
+apoplexy. What comes before must necessarily be in its nature
+preliminary and preparatory, leading up to the climactic stroke which
+leaves the distinguished victim stretched upon the bed of affliction.
+
+First let us introduce our principal. Reader, meet Mr. Max Lobel,
+president of Lobel Masterfilms, Inc., also its founder, its chief
+stockholder and its general manager. He is a short, broad, thick,
+globular man and a bald one, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, carrying a
+gold-headed cane and using a private gold-mounted toothpick after meals.
+His collars are of that old-fashioned open-faced kind such as our
+fathers and Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., used to wear; collars rearing
+at the back but shorn widely away in front to show two things--namely,
+the Adam's apple and that Mr. Lobel is conservative. But for his
+neckwear he patronizes those shops where ties are exclusively referred
+to as _scarves_ and cost from five dollars apiece up, which proves also
+he is progressive and keeps abreast of the times. When he walks he
+favors his feet. Mostly, though, he rides in as good a car as domestic
+currency can buy in foreign marts.
+
+Aside from his consuming desire to turn out those surpassing
+achievements of the cellular-cinema art known as Lobel's Masterfilms, he
+has in life two great passions, one personal in its character, the other
+national in its scope--the first a craving for fancy waistcoats, the
+second a yearning to see the name of Max Lobel in print as often as
+possible and in as large letters as likewise is possible; and for either
+of these is a plausible explanation. Mr. Lobel has a figure excellently
+shaped for presenting the patternings of a fanciful stomacher to the
+world and up until a few years ago there were few occasions when he
+might hope to see the name Lobel in print. For, know you, Mr. Lobel has
+not always been in the moving-picture business. Nobody in the
+moving-picture business has always been in the moving-picture
+business--excepting some of the child wonders under ten years of age.
+And ten years ago our hero was the M. Lobel Company, cloak and suit
+jobbers in rather an inconspicuous Eastern town.
+
+What was true of him as regards his comparatively recent advent into the
+producing and distributing fields was true of his major associates.
+Back in 1911 the vice president and second in command, Mr. F. X.
+Quinlan, moved upward into a struggling infantile industry via the
+stepping-stone of what in the vernacular of his former calling is known
+as a mitt joint--summers at Coney, winters in store pitches--where he
+guided the professional destinies of Madame Zaharat, the Egyptian
+seeress, in private, then as now, Mrs. F. X. Quinlan nee Clardy.
+
+The treasurer and secretary, Mr. Simeon Geltfin, had once upon a time
+been proprietor of the Ne Plus Ultra Misfit Clothing Parlors at Utica,
+New York, a place where secondhand habiliments, scoured and ironed,
+dangled luringly in show windows bearing such enticing labels as
+"Tailor's Sample--Nobby--$9.80," "Bargain--Take Me Home For $5.60," and
+"These Trousers Were Uncalled For--$2.75."
+
+The premier director, Mr. Bertram Colfax, numbered not one but two
+chrysalis changes in his career. In the grub stage, as it were, he had
+begun life as Lemuel Sims, a very grubby grub indeed, becoming Colfax at
+the same time he became property man for a repertoire troupe playing
+county-fair weeks in the Middle West.
+
+As for the scenario editor and continuity writer, he in a prior
+condition of life had solicited advertisements for a trade journal. So
+it went right down the line.
+
+At the time of the beginning of this narrative Lobel Masterfilms, Inc.,
+had attained an eminence of what might be called fair-to-medium
+prominence in the moving-picture field. In other words, it now was able
+to pay its stars salaries running up into the multiples of tens of
+thousands of dollars a year and the bank which carried its paper had not
+yet felt justified in installing a chartered accountant in the home
+offices to check the finances and collect the interest on the loans
+outstanding. Before reaching this position the concern had passed
+through nearly all the customary intervening stages. Nearly a decade
+rearward, back in the dark ages of the filmic cosmos, the Jurassic
+Period of pictures, so to speak, this little group of pathfinders
+tracking under the chieftainship of Mr. Lobel into almost uncharted
+wilds of artistic endeavor had dabbled in slap-stick one reelers
+featuring the plastic pie and the treacherous seltzer siphon, also the
+trick staircase, the educated mustache and the performing doormat.
+
+Next--following along the line of least resistance--the adventurers went
+in more or less extensively for wild-western dramas replete with
+stagecoach robberies and abounding in hair pants. If the head bad
+man--not the secondary bad man who stayed bad all through, or the
+tertiary bad man who was fatally extinguished with gun-fire in Reel Two,
+but the chief, or primary, bad man who reformed and married Little Nell,
+the unspoiled child of Death Valley--wore the smartest frontier get-up
+of current year's vintage that the Chicago mail-order houses could turn
+out; if Little Nell's father, appearing contemporaneously, dressed
+according to the mode laid down for Forty-niners by such indubitable
+authorities as Bret Harte; if the sheriff stalked in and out of lens
+range attired as a Mississippi River gambler was popularly supposed to
+have been attired in the period 1860 to 1875; and if finally the cavalry
+troopers from the near-by army post sported the wide hats and khaki
+shirts which came into governmental vogue about the time of the Spanish
+War, all very well and good. The action was everything; the sartorial
+accessories were as they might be and were and frequently still are.
+
+Along here there intruded a season when the Lobel shop tentatively
+experimented with costume dramas--the Prisoner of Chillon wearing the
+conventional black and white in alternating stripes of a Georgia chain
+gang and doing the old Sing Sing lock step and retiring for the night to
+his donjon cell with a set of shiny and rather modern-looking leg irons
+on his ankles; Mary Queen of Scots and Catharine de' Medici in costumes
+strikingly similar; Oliver Goldsmith in Sir Walter Raleigh's neck ruff
+and Captain Kidd's jack boots.
+
+But this season endured not for long. Costume stuff was nix. It was not
+what the public wanted. It was over their heads. Mr. Lobel himself said
+so. Wake him up in the middle of the night and he could tell you exactly
+what the public did and did not want. Divining the popular will amounted
+with him to a gift; it approximated an exact art; really it formed the
+corner stone of his success. Likewise he knew--but this knowledge
+perhaps had come to him partly by experience rather than altogether by
+intuition--that historical ten reelers dealing with epochal events in
+the life of our own people were entirely unsuited for general
+consumption.
+
+When this particular topic untactfully was broached in his presence Mr.
+Lobel, recalling the fate of the elaborate feature entitled Let Freedom
+Ring, had been known to sputter violently and vehemently. Upon this
+production--now abiding as a memory only, yet a memory bitter as
+aloes--he had spared neither expense nor pains, even going so far as
+personally to direct the filming of all the principal scenes. And to
+what ends? Captious critics, including those who wrote for the daily
+press and those who merely sent in offensive letters--college professors
+and such like cheap high-brows--had raised yawping voices to point out
+that Paul Revere galloping along the pre-Revolutionary turnpike to
+spread the alarm passed en route two garages and one electric power
+house; that Washington crossing the Delaware stood in the bow of his
+skiff half shrouded in an American flag bearing forty-eight stars upon
+its field of blue; that Andrew Jackson's riflemen filing out from New
+Orleans to take station behind their cotton-bale breastworks marched for
+some distance beneath a network of trolley wires; that Abraham Lincoln
+signing the Emancipation Proclamation did so while seated at a desk in a
+room which contained in addition to Lincoln and the desk and the
+Proclamation a typewriter and a Persian rug; that at Manila Bay Admiral
+Dewey wore spats and a wrist watch.
+
+But these primitive adventurings, these earlier pioneering quests into
+the realm of the speculative were all in limbo behind them, all wiped
+off the slate, in part forgiven, in a measure forgotten. Since that
+primitive beginning and those formulative middle periods Lobel
+Masterfilms had found their field, and having found it, now plowed and
+tilled it. To those familiar with the rise and the ever-forward movement
+of this, now the fourth largest industry in the civilized globe--or is
+it the third?--it sufficiently will fix the stage of evolutionary
+development attained by this component unit of that industry when I
+state that Lobel Masterfilms now dealt preponderantly with vampires. To
+be sure, it continued to handle such side lines as taffy-haired ingenues
+from the country, set adrift among the wiles and pitfalls of a cruel
+city; such incidentals as soft-pie comickers and chin-whiskered
+by-Hectors; such necessary by-products as rarely beautiful he-juveniles
+with plush eyelashes and the hair combed slickly back off the forehead
+in the approved Hudson seal effect--splendid, manly youths these, who
+might have dodged a draft or two but never yet had flinched from before
+the camera's aiming muzzle. But even though it had to be conceded that
+Goldilockses and Prince Charmings endure and that while drolls and
+jesters may come and go, pies are permanent and stale not, neither do
+they wither; still, and with all that, such like as these were, in the
+Lobel scheme of things, merely so many side lines and incidentals and
+by-products devised and designed to fatten out a program.
+
+Where Mr. Lobel excelled was in the vamp stuff. Even his competitors
+admitted it the while they vainly strove to rival him. In this, his own
+chosen realm of exploration and conquest he stood supremely alone; a
+monarch anointed with the holy oils of superiority, coroneted with
+success's glittering diadem. Look at his Woman of a Million Sins! Look
+at his Satan's Stepchild, or How Human Souls are Dragged Down to Hell,
+in six reels! Look at A Daughter of Darkness! Look at The Wrecker of
+Lives! Look at The Spider Lady, or The Net Where Men Were the Flies!
+Look at Fair of Face Yet Black of Heart! All of them his, all box-office
+best bets and all still going strong!
+
+Moreover by now Lobel Masterfilms had progressed to that milestone on
+the path of progress and enterprise where genuine live authors--guys
+that wrote regular books--frequently furnished vehicles for stardom's
+regal usages. By purchase, upon the basis of so much cash or--as the
+case might be--so little cash down on the signing of the contract and
+the promise of so much more--often very very much more--to be paid in
+royalties out of accrued net profits, the rights to a published work
+would be acquired. Its name, say, was A Commonplace Person, which
+promptly would be changed in executive conclave to The Cataract of
+Destiny, or perhaps Fate's Plaything, or in any event some good catchy
+title which would look well in electrics and on three sheets.
+
+This important point having been decided on, Mr. Ab Connors, the
+scenario editor, would take the script in hand to labor and bring forth
+the screen adaptation. If the principal character in the work, as
+originally evolved by her creator, was the daughter of a storekeeper in
+a small town in Indiana who ran away from home and went to Chicago to
+learn the millinery business, he, wielding a ruthless but gifted blue
+pencil, would speedily transform her into the ebon-hearted heiress of a
+Klondyke millionaire, an angel without but a harpy within, and after
+opening up Reel One with scenes in a Yukon dance hall speedily would
+move all the important characters to New York, where the plot thickened
+so fast that only a succession of fade-outs and fade-ins, close-ups and
+cut-backs saved it from clabbering right on Mr. Connors' hands.
+
+The rest would be largely a matter of continuity and after that there
+was nothing to worry about except picking out the cast and the locations
+and building the sets and starting to shoot and mayhap detailing a head
+office boy to stall off the author in case that poor boob came butting
+in kicking about changes in his story or squawking about overdue royalty
+statements or something. Anyhow, what did he know--what could he be
+expected to know--about continuity or what the public wanted or what the
+limitations and the possibilities of the screen were? He merely was the
+poor fish who'd wrote the book and he should ought to be grateful that a
+fellow with a real noodle had took his stuff and cut all that dull
+descriptive junk out of it and stuck some pep and action and punch and
+zip into the thing and wrote some live snappy subtitles, instead of
+coming round every little while, like he was, horning in and beefing all
+over the place.
+
+And besides, wasn't he going to have his name printed in all the
+advertising matter and flashed on the screen, too, in letters nearly a
+fifth as tall as the letters of Mr. Lobel's name and nearly one-third as
+tall as the name of the star and nearly one-half as tall as the name of
+the director and nearly--if not quite--as tall as the name of the camera
+man, and so get a lot of absolutely free advertising that would be
+worth thousands of dollars to him and start people all over the country
+to hearing about him? Certainly he was! And yet, with all that, was
+there any satisfying some of these cheap ginks? The answer was that
+there was not.
+
+There was never any trouble, though, about casting the principal role.
+That was easy--a matter of natural selection. If it could be played
+vampishly from the ground up, and it usually could--trust Mr. Connors
+for that--it went without question to Vida Monte, greatest of all the
+luminaries in the Lobel constellation and by universal acknowledgment
+the best vampire in the business. In vampiring Vida Monte it was who
+led; others imitatively followed. Compared with her these envying lady
+copy cats were as pale paprikas are to the real tabasco. Five pictures
+she had done for Lobel Masterfilms since placing herself under Lobel's
+management and a Lobel contract, all of them overpowering knock-outs,
+sensations, sure-fire hits. On the sixth she now was at work and her
+proud employer in conversation and in announcements to the trade stood
+sponsor for the pledge that in its filming Monte literally would
+out-Monte Monte.
+
+Making his word good, he took over volunteer supervision of the main
+scenes. His high-domed forehead glistening with sweat, his spectacles
+aflame like twin burning glasses, his coat off, his collar off, his
+waistcoat off, he snorted and churned, a ninety-horse dynamo of a
+little fat man, through the hot glary studio, demanding this
+improvement, detecting that defect, calling for this, that or the other
+perfect thing in a voice which would have detained the admiring ear of
+an experienced bull whacker. Before him Josephson, the little camera
+man, quailed. From his path extra people departed, fleeing headlong; and
+in his presence property men were as though they were not and never had
+been. Out of the hands of Bertram Colfax, born Sims, he wrenched a
+megaphone and through it he bellowed:
+
+"Put more punch in it, Monte--that's what I'm asking you for--the punch!
+Choke her, Harcourt! Choke him right back, Monte! Now-w-w then, clinch!
+Clinch and hang on! Good! And now the kiss! You know, Monte, the long
+kiss--the genuwine Monte kiss! Oh, if you love me, Monte, give me
+footage on that kiss! That's it--hold it! Hold it! Keep on holding it!"
+
+"But, Mr. Lobel, now," protested Colfax, born a Sims but living it down
+and feeling that never more than at this minute, when rudely the
+steersman's helm had been snatched from his grasp, was there greater
+need that he should be a Colfax through and through----"but, Mr. Lobel,
+it was my idea that up to this point anyway the action should be played
+with restraint to sort of prepare the way for----"
+
+"What do you mean restraint?"
+
+"Well, I thought to emphasize what comes later--for a sort of
+comparative value--that if we were just a little subtle at the
+beginning--"
+
+"Sufficient, Colfax! Listen! Don't come talking to me about no subtles!
+When you're working the supporting members of the cast you maybe could
+stick in some subtles once in a while to salve them censors, but so far
+as Monte is concerned you leave 'em out!"
+
+"But--but--"
+
+"Don't but me any buts! Listen! Ain't I taken my paralyzed oath that
+this here picture should make all the other vamp pictures which ever
+were taken look like pikers? I have! Listen! For Monte, the way I feel,
+I shouldn't care if she don't do a single subtle in the whole damn
+picture."
+
+He had taken his paralyzed oath and he kept it. It was a wonderful
+story. The queen of the apaches, ruling the Parisian underworld by her
+fire, her beauty, her courage, accepts German gold to betray her
+country, and attempts by siren wiles to seduce from the path of duty
+Capt. Stuyvesant Schuyler of the U. S. A. general staff; almost succeeds
+too because of his blind passion for this glorious, sinful creature. At
+the crucial moment, when about to surrender to his Delilah secrets which
+would destroy the entire Allied cause and open the gates of Paris to the
+conquering foe, he is saved by a vision of his sainted,
+fade-in-and-fade-out mother's face. Overcome with remorse, he resigns
+his commission, and fleeing from temptation returns to America, a
+broken-hearted man; proves heart is broken by constantly pressing
+clenched hand to left breast as though to prevent pieces from slipping
+down into the abdominal cavity. Distress of the apache queen on finding
+her intended victim gone. Suddenly a real love, not the love of the
+wanton, but a purer, deeper emotion wakens in her breast. Close-up
+showing muscular reflexes produced upon the human face by wakening
+processes in the heart.
+
+Quitting the gay life, she follows him to Land of Free. Finds him about
+to marry his sweetheart of childhood, a New York society girl worth
+uncounted millions but just middling looking. Prompt bust-up of
+childhood sweetheart's romance. Abandonment of social position, wealth,
+everything by Schuyler, who declares he will make the stranger his
+bride--accompanying subtitle, "What should we care what the world may
+say? For after all, love is all!" Discovery on day before marriage of
+papers proving that Lolita--that's the lady apache's name--is really
+Schuyler's half sister, due to carryings-on of Schuyler's late father as
+a young art student in Paris with Lolita's mother, a famous gypsy model.
+Renunciation by Lolita of Schuyler. Her suicide by imbibing poison from
+secret receptacle in ring. Schuyler, after registering copious grief,
+reenters American Army under assumed name as a private in the ranks.
+Returns to battlefield in time to take part in decisive action of the
+war. All the officers in his brigade above the rank of corporal having
+apparently been killed by one devastating blast of high explosive, he
+assumes command and leads dauntless charge of the heavy artillery
+through the Hindenburg Line. Is made a colonel on the spot. Rides up
+Fifth Avenue alongside of Pershing in grand triumphant parade of
+home-coming First Division, carrying a large flag and occasionally
+chatting pleasantly with Pershing. On eve of marriage to childhood's
+sweetheart, who remains faithful, he goes to lonely spot where Lolita
+lies buried and places upon the silent mound her favorite flower, a
+single long-stemmed tiger lily. Fade out--finish!
+
+Artistically, picturesquely, from the standpoint of timeliness, from the
+standpoint of vampirishness, from any standpoint at all, it satisfied
+fully every demand. It was one succession of thrilling, gripping,
+heart-lifting scenes set amid vividly contrasting surroundings--the
+lowest dive in all Paris; the citadel at Verdun; grand ballroom of the
+Schuyler mansion at Newport; the Place Vendome on a day when it was
+entirely unoccupied except by moving-picture actors; Fifth Avenue on its
+most gala occasion--these were but a few samples. The subtitles fairly
+hissed to the sibilant swishing of such words as traitress, temptress,
+tigress and sorceress. And the name of it--you'd never guess--the name
+of it was The She-Demon's Doom! When Mr. Lobel spoke those words
+inspired he literally took them up in his arms and fondled them and
+kissed them on the temples. And why not? They were his own brain
+children.
+
+He had kept his paralyzed word and he could prove it. For because this
+Vida Monte was one of those mimetic pieces of flesh which, without any
+special mental cooperation, may alter the body, the face, the muscles,
+the expression, the very look out of the eyes, to suit the demands of
+prompters and teachers; because of the plan of direction so powerfully
+engineered by the master mind of Lobel and, under Lobel, the lesser mind
+of Colfax, born Sims; because of the very nature of the role of Lolita
+the abandoned, this picture was more daring, more sensual, more filled
+up with voluptuous suggestion, with coiling, clinging, writhing
+snakiness, with rampant, naked sexuality--in short and in fine was more
+vampirishly vampiratious than this, the greatest of all modern mediums
+for the education, the moral uplift and the entertainment of the masses,
+had ever known.
+
+And then one week to the day after Mr. Lobel shot the last scene she up
+and died on him.
+
+That is to say, a woman named Glassman, a Hungarian by birth, in age
+thirty-two years, widowed and without children or known next of kin,
+died in a small bungalow in a small town up in the coast range north of
+Los Angeles. When the picture was done and Vida Monte took off the
+barbaric trappings and the heavy paste jewels and the clinging reptilian
+half gowns of the role she played, with them she took off and laid aside
+the animal emotionalism, the theatricalistic fever and fervor, the
+passion and the lure that professionally made up Vida Monte, movie star.
+She took off even the very aspect of herself as the show shop and as
+patrons of the cinemas knew her; and she put on a simple traveling gown
+and she tucked her black hair up in coils beneath a severely plain hat
+and she became what really she was and always had been--a quiet,
+self-contained, frugal and--except for her splendid eyes, her fine
+figure and her full mobile mouth--a not particularly striking-looking
+woman, by name Sarah Glassman, which was, in fact, her name; and quite
+alone she got on a train and she went up into the foothills to a tiny
+bungalow which she had rented there for a month or so to live alone, to
+do her own simple housekeeping, to sew and to read and to rest.
+
+It was the day after the taking of the last segment of the picture that
+she went away. It was four days later that she sickened of the Spanish
+influenza, so called. It was not Spanish and not influenza, though by
+any other name it would have been as deadly in its devastating sweep
+across this country. And it was within forty-eight hours after that, on
+a November afternoon, that word came to the Lobel plant that she was
+dead. Down there they had not known even that she was sick.
+
+"The doctor in that there little jay town up there by the name
+Hamletsburg is the one which just gets me on the long-distance telephone
+and tells me that she died maybe half an hour ago."
+
+Mr. Lobel in his private office was telling it to Vice President Quinlan
+and Secretary-Treasurer Geltfin, the only two among his associates that
+his messenger had been able to find about the executive department at
+the moment. He continued:
+
+"Coming like a complete shock, you could 'a' knocked me down with a
+feather, I assure you. For a minute I couldn't believe it. This doctor
+he has to say it to me twice before I get it into my head.
+Shocking--huh? Sudden--huh? Awful--what? You bet you! That poor girl,
+for her my heart is bleeding. Dead and gone like that, with absolutely
+practically no warning! It don't seem possible! Taken down day before
+yesterday, the doctor says, and commenced getting from bad to worse
+right away. And this morning she goes out of her head and at
+two-forty-five this afternoon all of a sudden her heart gives out on her
+and she is dead before anybody knows it. Awful, awful!"
+
+Mr. Lobel wagged a mournful poll.
+
+"More than awful--actually it is horrifying!" quoth Mr. Geltfin. Visibly
+at least his distress seemed greater than the distress of either of the
+others. "All off alone up there by herself in some little rube town it
+must come to her! Maybe if she had been down here with specialists and
+surgeons and nurses and all she would 'a' been saved. Too bad, too bad!
+People got no business going away from a big town! Me, I get nervous
+even on a motor trip in the country and--"
+
+"Everything possible which could be done was done," resumed Mr. Lobel.
+"So you don't need you should worry there, Geltfin. The doctor tells me
+he can't get no regular trained nurse on account there is so much
+sickness from this flu and no regular nurses there anyway, but he tells
+me he brings in his wife which she understands nursing and he says the
+wife sticks right there day and night and gives every attention. There
+ain't nothing we should reproach ourselves about, and besides we didn't
+know even she was sick--nobody knew.
+
+"Dead and gone, poor girl, and not one week ago--six days, if I got to
+be exact--she is sitting right there in that same seat where you're
+sitting now, Geltfin, looking just as natural and healthy as what you
+look, Geltfin; looking just as if nothing is ever going to happen to
+her."
+
+Mr. Geltfin had hastily risen and moved nearer the outer door.
+
+"An awful thing--that flu!" he declared. "Lobel, do you think maybe she
+could 'a' had the germs of it on her then?"
+
+"Don't be a coward, Geltfin!" rebuked his senior severely. "Look at me
+how I am not frightened, and yet it was me she seen last, not you!
+Besides, only to-day I am reading where that big doctor in Cincinnati,
+Ohio--Silverwater--says it is not a disease which you could catch from
+somebody else until after they have actually got down sick with it. Yes,
+sir, she sits right there telling me good-by. 'Mr. Lobel,' she says to
+me--I had just handed her her check--'Mr. Lobel,' she says, 'always to
+you,' she says, 'I should be grateful. Always to you,' she says, 'I
+should give thanks that two years ago when I am practically
+comparatively unknown you should 'a' given me my big chance.' In them
+very words she says it, and me setting here at this desk listening at
+her while she said so!
+
+"Well, I ain't lost no time, boys. Before even I sent to find you I
+already got busy. I've got Appel starting for up there in half an hour
+in my car to take charge of everything and with orders to spare no
+expense. The funeral what I am going to give that girl! Well, she
+deserves it. Always a hard worker, always on the job, always she minds
+her own business, always she saves her money, always a perfect lady,
+never throwing any of these here temperamentals, never going off in any
+of these here highsterics, never making a kick if something goes wrong
+because it happens I ain't on the lot to run things, never----"
+
+It threatened to become a soliloquy. This time it was Quinlan who
+interrupted:
+
+"You said it all, Lobel, and it's no need that you should go on saying
+it any more. The main points, I take it, are that we're all sorry and
+that we've lost one swell big asset by her dying--only it's lucky for us
+she didn't take ill before we got through shooting The She-Demon."
+
+"Lucky? Huh! Actually, lucky ain't the right word for it!" said the
+president. "When I think of the fix we should 'a' been in if she hadn't
+finished up the picture first, I assure you, boys, it gives me the
+shivers. Right here and now in the middle of being sorry it gives me the
+shivers!"
+
+"It does, does it?" There was something so ominous in Mr. Geltfin's
+sadly ironic remark--something in tone and accent so lugubriously
+foreboding that his hearers swung about to stare at him. "It does, does
+it? Well, all what I've got to say is, Lobel, you've got some shivers
+coming to you! We've all got some shivers coming to us! Having this girl
+die on us is bad business!"
+
+"Sure it is," agreed the head, "but it might be worse. There's one
+awful big salary cut off the pay roll and if we can't have her with
+us no longer there's nobody else can have her. And the profits
+from that last picture should ought to be something positively
+enormous--stupendous--sensational. Listen! I bet you that from the hour
+we release----"
+
+"You ain't going to release!" broke in Geltfin, his wizen features
+sharpening into a peaky mask of grief.
+
+"Don't talk foolishness!" snapped Mr. Lobel. "For why shouldn't we be
+going to release?"
+
+"That's it--why?" Mr. Quinlan seconded the demand.
+
+"Because you wouldn't dare do it!" In his desire to make clear his point
+Mr. Geltfin fairly shoveled the words out of himself, bringing them
+forth overlapping one another like shingles on a roof. "Because the
+public wouldn't stand for it! Always you brag, Lobel, that you know what
+the public want! Well then, would the public stand for a picture where a
+good, decent, straight girl that's dead and will soon be in her grave is
+for six reels doing all them suggestive vampire stunts like what you
+yourself, Lobel, made her do? Would the public stand for calling a dead
+woman names like she-demon? They would not--not in a thousand years--and
+you should both know it without I should have to tell you! With some
+pretty rough things we could get by, but with that thing we could never
+get by! The public, I tell you, would not stand for it. No, sir; when
+that girl died the picture died with her. You just think it over once!"
+
+Out of popped eyes he glared at them. They glared at him, then they
+looked at each other. Slowly Mr. Lobel's head drooped forward as though
+an unseen hand pressed against the back of his neck. Quinlan casting his
+eyes downward traced with one toe the pattern of the rug under his feet.
+
+On top of one sudden blow, heavy and hard to bear, another now had
+followed. Since Lobel had become one of the topnotchers with a
+reputation to maintain, expenses had been climbing by high jumps, but
+receipts had not kept pace with expenses. There were the vast salaries
+which even the lesser drawing cards among the stars now demanded--and
+got. There were war taxes, excess profit taxes, amusement taxes. There
+was to be included in the reckoning the untimely fate of Let Freedom
+Ring, a vastly costly thing and quickly laughed to death, yet a smarting
+memory still. Its failure had put a crimp in the edge of the exchequer.
+This stroke would run a wide fluting of deficit right through the middle
+of it.
+
+The pall of silence lasted no longer than it has here taken to describe
+how it fell and enveloped them. Mr. Geltfin broke the silence without
+lifting the prevalent gloom. Indeed his words but depressingly served to
+darken it to a very hue of midnight.
+
+"Besides," he added, "there is anyhow another reason. We know what a
+nice clean girl she was in private life. We know that all them wild
+romance stories about her was cooked up in the press department to make
+the suckers believe that both on and off the screen she was the same.
+But she wasn't, and so I for one should be afraid that if we put that
+fillum out she'd come back from the dead to stop it!"
+
+He sank his voice, glancing apprehensively over his shoulder.
+
+"Lobel, you wouldn't dare do it!"
+
+"Lobel," said Quinlan, "he's right! We wouldn't dare do it!"
+
+"Quinlan," admitted Lobel, "it's right--I wouldn't dare do it."
+
+In that same instant of his confession, though, Mr. Lobel bounded out of
+his chair, magically changing from a dumpy static figure of woe into the
+dynamo of energy and resourcefulness the glassed-in studios and the
+out-of-door locations knew.
+
+"I got it!" he whooped. "I got it!" He threw himself at an inner door of
+the executive suite and jerked it open. "Appel," he shouted, "don't
+start yet! I got more instructions still for you. And say, Appel, you
+ain't seen nobody but only Quinlan and Geltfin--eh? You ain't told
+nobody only just them? Good! Well, don't! Don't telephone nobody! Don't
+speak a word to nobody! Don't move from where you are!"
+
+He closed the door and stood against it as though to hold his private
+secretary a close prisoner within, and faced his amazed partners.
+
+"It's a cinch!" he proclaimed to them. "I just this minute thought it up
+myself. If I must say it myself, always in a big emergency I can think
+fast. Listen! Nobody ain't going to know Monte is dead; not for a year,
+not maybe for two years; not until this last big picture is old and worn
+out; not until we get good and ready they should know. Vida Monte, she
+goes right on living till we say the word."
+
+"But--but--"
+
+"Wait, wait, can't you? If I must do all the quick thinking for this
+shop shouldn't I sometimes get a word in sideways? What I'm telling you,
+if you'll please let me, is this: The girl is dead all right! But nobody
+knows it only me and you, Quinlan, and you, Geltfin, and Appel in this
+next room here. Even the doctor up there at Hamletsburg he don't know it
+and his wife she don't know it and nobody in all that town knows it. And
+why don't they know? Because they think only it is a woman named Sarah
+Glassman that is dead. Actually that sickness no doubt changed her so
+that even if them rubes ever go to see high-class feature fillums there
+didn't nobody recognize her. If they didn't suspect nothing when she was
+alive, for why should they suspect something now she is dead? They
+shouldn't and they won't and they can't!
+
+"What give me the idea was, I just remembered that when the doctor
+called me up he spoke only the name Glassman, not the name Monte. He
+tells me he calls up here because he finds in her room where she died a
+card with the name Lobel Masterfilms on it. And likewise also I just
+remembered that in the excitement of getting such a sad news over the
+telephone I don't tell him who really she is neither."
+
+"Holy St. Patrick!" blurted Quinlan, up now on his feet. "You mean,
+Lobel----"
+
+"Wait, wait, I ain't done--I ain't hardly started!" With flapperlike
+motions of his hands Mr. Lobel waved him down. "It's easy--a pipe.
+Listen! To date her salary is paid. The day she went away I gave her a
+check in full, and if she done what always before she does, it's in the
+bank drawing interest. Let it go on staying in the bank drawing
+interest. So far as we know, she ain't got no people in this country at
+all. In the old country, in Hungary? Maybe, yes. But Hungary is yet all
+torn up by this war--no regular government there, no regular mails, no
+American consuls there, no nothing. Time for them foreigners that they
+should get their hands on her property one year from now or two years or
+three. They couldn't come to claim it even if we should notify them,
+which we can't. They don't lose nothing by waiting. Instead they
+gain--the interest it piles up.
+
+"Should people ask questions, why then through the papers we give it out
+that Miss Vida Monte is gone far off away somewhere for a long rest;
+that maybe she don't take no more pictures for a long time. That should
+make The She-Demon go all the better. And to-morrow up there in that
+little rube town very quietly we bury Sarah Glassman, deceased, with
+the burial certificate made out in her own name." He paused a moment to
+enjoy his triumph. "Boys, when I myself think out something, am I right
+or am I wrong?"
+
+He answered his own question.
+
+"I'm right!"
+
+By the look on Quinlan's face he read conviction, consent, full and
+hearty approval. But Geltfin wavered. Inside Geltfin superstition
+wrestled with opposing thoughts. Upon him then Lobel, the master mind,
+advanced, dominating the scene and the situation and determined also to
+dominate the lesser personality.
+
+"But--but say--but look here now, Lobel," stammered Geltfin, hesitating
+on the verge of a decision, "she might come back."
+
+"Geltfin," commanded Lobel, "you should please shut up. Do you want that
+we should make a lot of money or do you want that we should lose a lot
+of money? I ask you. Listen! The dead they don't come back. When just
+now you made your spiel, that part of it which you said about the dead
+coming back didn't worry me. It was the part which you said about the
+public not standing for it that got me, because for once, anyhow, in
+your life you were right and I give you right. But what the public don't
+know don't hurt 'em. And the public won't know. You leave it to me!"
+
+It was as though this argument had been a mighty arm outstretched to
+shove him over the edge. Geltfin ceased to teeter on the brim--he fell
+in. He nodded in surrender and Lobel quit patting him on the back to
+wave the vice president into activity.
+
+"Quinlan," he ordered as he might order an office boy, "get busy! Tell
+'em to rush The She-Demon! Tell 'em to rush the subtitles and all! Tell
+'em to rush out an announcement that the big fillum is going to be
+released two months before expected--on account the demand of the public
+is so strong to see sooner the greatest vampire feature ever fillumed."
+
+Quinlan was no office boy, but he obeyed as smartly as might any newly
+hired office boy.
+
+
+If it was Mr. Lobel's genius which guided the course of action,
+energizing and speeding it, neither could it be denied that circumstance
+and yet again circumstance and on top of that more circumstance matched
+in with hue and shade to give protective coloration to his plan.
+Continued success for it as time should pass seemed assured and
+guaranteed, seeing that Vida Monte, beyond the studios and off the
+locations, had all her life walked a way so secluded, so inconspicuous
+and so utterly commonplace that no human being, whether an attache of
+the company or an outsider, would be likely to miss her, or missing her,
+to pry deeply into the causes for her absence. So much for the
+contingencies of the future as those in the secret foresaw it. As for
+the present, that was simplicity.
+
+As quietly as she had moved in those earlier professional days of hers,
+when she played small roles in provincial stock companies; as quietly as
+she had gone on living after film fame and film money came her way; as
+quietly as she had laid her down and died, so--very quietly--was her
+body put away in the little cemetery at Hamletsburg. To the physician
+who had ministered to her, to his good-hearted wife, to the official who
+issued the burial certificate, to the imported clergyman who held the
+service, to the few villagers who gathered for the funeral, drawn by the
+morbid lure which in isolated communities brings folk to any funeral--to
+all of these the dead woman merely was a stranger with a strange name
+who, temporarily abiding here, had fallen victim to the plague which
+filled the land.
+
+Of those who had a hand in the last mortal role she would ever play only
+Lobel's private secretary, young Appel, who came to pay the bills and
+take over the private effects of this Sarah Glassman and after some
+fashion to play the roles of next friend and chief mourner, kenned the
+truth. The clergyman having done his duty by a deceased coreligionist,
+to him unknown, went back to the city where he belonged. The physician
+hurried away from the cemetery to minister to more patients than he
+properly could care for. The townspeople scattered, intent upon their
+own affairs. Appel returned to headquarters, reporting all well.
+
+At headquarters all likewise went well--so briskly well in fact that
+under the urge for haste things essential were accomplished in less time
+by fewer craftsmen than had been the case since those primitive
+beginnings when Lobel's, then a struggling short-handed concern,
+frequently had doubled up its studio staffs for operative service in the
+makeshift laboratory. Reporting progress to the president, Mr. Quinlan
+expanded with self-satisfaction.
+
+"I'm fixing to show you something in the way of a speed record," he
+proudly proclaimed. "The way I looked at it, the fewer people I had
+rushing this thing through the factory the less chance there was for
+loose talk round the plant and the less loose talk there was going on
+round the plant the less chance there was for maybe more loose talk
+outside. Yes, I know we'd figured we'd got everything caulked up
+air-tight, but I says to myself, 'What's the use in taking a chance on a
+leak if you don't have to?'
+
+"So I practically turned the big part of the job--developing and all the
+rest of it--over to Josephson, same as we used to do back yonder when we
+was starting out in this game and didn't have a regular film cutter and
+the camera man had to jump in and develop and cut and assemble and print
+and everything. Josephson shot all the scenes for The She-Demon--he
+knows the run of it better even than the director does. Besides,
+Josephson is naturally close-mouthed. He minds his own business and
+never butts in anywhere. To look at him you can't never tell what he's
+thinking about. But even if he suspected anything--and, of course, he
+don't--he's the kind that'd know enough to keep his trap shut. So I've
+had him working like a nailer and he's pretty near done.
+
+"Soon as he had the negative ready, which was late yesterday afternoon
+after you'd went home, I had it run off with nobody there but me and
+Josephson, and I took a flash at it--and, Lobel, it's a bear! No need
+for you to worry about the negative--it was a heap too long, of course,
+in the shape it was yesterday, but it had everything in it we hoped
+would be in it--and more besides.
+
+"So then without losing a minute I stuck Josephson on the printing
+machine himself. I'd already gave the girl on the machine a couple of
+days off to get her out of the way. Josephson stayed on the job alone
+pretty near all last night, I guess. He had things to himself without
+anybody to bother him and I tell you he shoved it along.
+
+"Connors ain't lost no time neither. He's got the subtitles pretty near
+done, and believe it or not, as you're a mind to, but, Lobel, I'm
+telling you that this time to-morrow morning and not a minute later I'll
+have the first sample print all cut and assembled and ready for you to
+give it a look! Then it'll just be a job of matching up the negative and
+sticking in the subtitles and starting to turn out the positives faster
+than the shipping-room gang can handle 'em. I guess that ain't moving,
+heh?"
+
+"Quinlan," said Mr. Lobel, "I give you right."
+
+
+By making his word good to the minute the gratified Mr. Quinlan derived
+additional gratification. At the time appointed they sat in darkness in
+the body of the projection room--Lobel, Quinlan, Geltfin and Appel,
+these four and none other--behind a door locked and barred. Promptly on
+Quinlan's order the operator in the box behind them started his machine
+and the accomplished rough draft of the great masterpiece leaped into
+being and actuality upon the lit square toward which they faced.
+
+The beginning was merely a beginning--graphic enough and offering
+abundant proof that in this epochal undertaking the Lobel shop had
+spared no expense to make the production sumptuous, but after all only
+preliminary stuff to sauce the palate of the patron for a greater feast
+to come and suitably to lead up to the introduction of the star. Soon
+the star was projected upon the screen, a purring, graceful panther of a
+woman, to change at once into a sinuous python of a woman and then to
+merge the feline and the ophidian into a sinister, splendid, menacing
+composite bespeaking the dramatic conception and the dramatic
+presentment of all feminine evil, typifying in every move of the lithe,
+half-clad body, in every shift of the big eyes, wickedness unleashed and
+unashamed.
+
+Mr. Lobel sitting unseen in the velvet blackness uttered grunts of
+approbation. The greatest of all film vampires certainly had delivered
+the goods in this her valedictory. Never before had she so well
+delivered them. The grunting became a happy rumble.
+
+But all this, too, was in a measure dedicatory--a foretaste of more
+vivid episodes to follow, when the glorious siren, displaying to the
+full her powers of fascination over the souls and the bodies of men,
+would rise to heights yet greater and the primitive passion she so well
+simulated would shine forth like a malignant jewel in a setting that was
+semibarbaric and semicivilized, too, and altogether prodigal and lavish.
+The first of these bigger scenes started--the scene where the queen of
+the apaches set herself to win the price of her hire from the Germans by
+seducing the young army officer into a betrayal of the Allied cause; the
+same scene wherein at the time of filming it Mr. Lobel himself had taken
+over direction from Colfax's hands.
+
+The scene was launched, acquired headway, then was halted as a bellow
+from Mr. Lobel warned the operator behind him to cut off the power.
+
+"What the hell!" sputtered the master. "There's a blur on the picture
+here, a sort of a kind of smokiness. Did you see it, Geltfin? Right
+almost directly in front of Monte it all of a sudden comes! Did you,
+Quinlan?"
+
+"Sure I seen it," agreed Geltfin. "Like a spot--sort of."
+
+"It wasn't on the negative when I seen it day before yesterday," stated
+Quinlan. "I can swear to that. A little defect from faulty printing, I
+guess."
+
+"All right then," said Mr. Lobel. "Only where you got efficiency like I
+got it in this plant such things should have no business occurring.
+
+"Go on, operator--let's see how goes it from now on."
+
+Out again two shadow figures--the vampire and the vampire's
+prey--flashed in motion. Yes, the cloudy spot was there, a bit of murky
+shadow drifting between the pair of figures and the audience. It
+thickened and broadened--and then from the suddenly constricted throats
+of the four watchers, almost as though all in the same moment an
+invisible hand had laid gripping hold on each of their several
+windpipes, came a chorused gasp.
+
+For they saw how out of the drifting patch of spumy wrack there emerged
+a shape vague and indistinct and ghostly, but taking on instantly the
+sharpened outlines of one they recognized. It was the shape, not of Vida
+Monte, the fabled wrecker of lives, but the shape of her other self,
+Sarah Glassman, and the face it wore was not the face of the stage
+vampire, aflame with the counterfeited evil which the actor woman had so
+well known how to simulate but the real face of the real woman, who lay
+dead and buried under a mound of fresh-cut sods seventy miles away--her
+own face, melancholy and sadly placid, as God had fashioned it for her.
+
+Out from the filmy umbra it advanced to the center, thus hiding its
+half-naked double writhing in the embrace of the deluded lover, and
+clearly revealed itself in long sweeping garments of pure white--fit
+grave clothes for one lately entombed--with great masses of loosened
+black hair falling like a pall about the passionless brooding face; and
+now lifting reproachful eyes, it looked out across the intervening void
+of blackness into their staring eyes, and from the folds of the cerement
+robes raised a bare arm high as though to forbid a lying sacrilege. And
+stood there then as a wraith newly freed from the burying mold, filling
+and dominating the picture so that one looking saw nothing else save the
+shrouded figure and the head and the face and those eyes and that upheld
+white arm.
+
+Cowering low in his seat with a sleeve across his eyes to shut out the
+accusing apparition, Mr. Geltfin whispered between chattering teeth: "I
+told him! I told him the dead could maybe come back!"
+
+Mr. Quinlan, a bolder nature but even so terribly shaken, was muttering
+to himself: "But it wasn't in the negative! I swear to God it wasn't in
+the negative!"
+
+It is probable that Mr. Lobel heard neither of them, or if he heard he
+gave no heed. He had a feeling that the darkness was smothering him.
+
+"Shut off the machine!" he roared as he wrenched his body free of the
+snug opera chair in which he sat. "And turn on the lights in this
+room--quick! And let me out of here--quick!"
+
+Lunging into the darkness he stumbled over Appel's legs and tumbled
+headlong out into the narrow aisle. On all fours as the lights flashed
+on, he gave in a choking bellow his commands.
+
+"Burn that print--you hear me, burn it now! And then burn the negative
+too! Quick you burn it, like I am telling you!"
+
+"But, Lobel, I'll swear to the negative!" protested Quinlan, jealous
+even in his fright for his own vindication. "If you'll look at the
+neg--"
+
+"I wouldn't touch it for a million dollars!" roared Lobel. "Burn it up,
+I tell you! And bury the ashes!"
+
+Still choking, still bellowing, he scrambled to his feet, an ungainly
+embodiment of mortal agitation, and ran for the door. But Mr. Geltfin
+beat him to it and through it, Quinlan and Appel following in the order
+named.
+
+Outside their chief fell up against a wall, panting and wheezing for
+breath, his face swollen and all congested with purple spots. They
+thought he was about to have a stroke or a seizure of some sort. But
+they were wrong. This merely was Nature's warning to a man with a size
+seventeen neckband and a forty-six-inch girth measurement. The stroke he
+was to have on the following day.
+
+Probably Quinlan and Geltfin as experienced business men should have
+known better than to come bursting together into the office of a stout
+middle-aged man who so lately had suffered a considerable nervous shock
+and still was unstrung; and having after such unseemly fashion burst in,
+then to blurt out their tidings in concert without first by soft and
+soothing words preparing their hearer's system to receive the tidings
+they bore. But themselves, they were upset by what they just had learned
+and so perhaps may be pardoned for a seeming unthoughtfulness. Both
+speaking at once, both made red of face and vehement by mingled emotions
+of rage and chagrin, each nourishing a perfectly natural and human
+desire to place the blame for a catastrophe on shoulders other than
+their own two pairs, they sought to impart the tale they brought. Ensued
+for an exciting moment a baffling confusion of tongues.
+
+"It was that Josephson done it--the mousy little sneak!"
+
+These words became intelligible as Quinlan, exerting his superior vocal
+powers, dinned out the sputtering inarticulate accents of Geltfin.
+
+"He fixed it so that you'd spill the beans, Lobel! He fixed The
+She-Demon--Josephson. And me trusting him!
+
+"How should I be knowing that all this time him and that girl was
+secretly engaged to be married? How should I be knowing that he would
+find out for himself the day after the funeral that she was dead and yet
+never say a word about it? How should I be knowing that he would have
+all tucked away somewhere a roll of film showing her dressed up like a
+madonna or a saint or a martyr or a ghost or something which he took
+privately one time when they was out together on location--slipping away
+with her and taking 'em without nobody knowing about it? How should I be
+knowing that without tipping his hand he would cook up the idea to work
+a slick fake on you, Lobel, and scare you into killing off the whole
+thing? How should I be knowing that while he was on the printing machine
+all by himself the other night that he would work the old double
+exposure stunt and throw such a scare into you in the projecting room
+yesterday?"
+
+By reason of his valvular resources Mr. Quinlan might shout louder than
+Geltfin. But he could not shout louder than Mr. Lobel. Nobody in that
+section of Southern California could. Mr. Lobel outblared him:
+
+"How should you be knowing? You come now and ask me that when all along
+it was you that had the swell idee to stick him into the laboratory all
+by himself where he could play some funny business? You!"
+
+"But it was you, Lobel, that wouldn't listen to me when I begged you to
+wait and not burn up the negative. I tried to tell you that the negative
+was O. K. when I'd seen it run off."
+
+"You told me? It's a lie!"
+
+"Sure I told you! Geltfin remembers my telling you, don't you, Geltfin?
+You're an old bird, Lobel--you ought to know by now about retouching and
+doctoring and all. You know how easy it is to slip over a double
+exposure. But it was only the sample print that was doctored. The
+negative was all right, but you wouldn't listen."
+
+"That's right too, Lobel!" shrilled Geltfin. "I heard him when he yelled
+out to you that you should wait!"
+
+Quinlan amplified the indictment.
+
+"Sure he heard me--and so did you! But no, you had to lose your nerve
+and lose your head just because you'd had a scare throwed into you."
+
+"I never lose my head! I never lose my nerve!" denied Mr. Lobel. He
+turned the counter tide of recriminations on Geltfin.
+
+"Anyhow,--it was you started it, Geltfin--you in the first place, right
+here in this room, with your craziness about the dead coming back. Only
+for your fool talk I would never have had the idee of a ghost at all.
+And now--now when the cow is all spilt milk you two come and--"
+
+"Oh, but Lobel," countered Geltfin, "remember you was the one that made
+'em burn up the negative without giving it a look at all!"
+
+"He said it, Lobel!" reenforced Quinlan. "You was the one that just
+would have the negative burned up whether or no. And now it's burned
+up!"
+
+Mr. Lobel was not used to being bullied in his own office or elsewhere.
+If there was bullying to be done by anyone, he was his own candidate
+always. Surcharged with distracting regrets as he was, he had an
+inspiration. He would turn the flood of accusation away from himself.
+
+"Where is that Josephson?" he whooped. "He is the one actually to blame,
+not us. Let me get my hands on that Josephson once!"
+
+"You can't!" jeered Quinlan. "He's quit--he's gone--he's beat it! He
+wrote me a note, though, and mailed it back to me when he was beating it
+out of town, telling me to tell you how slick he'd worked it on you." He
+felt in his pockets. "I got that note here somewhere--here it is. I'll
+read it to you, Lobel--he calls you an old scoundrel in one place and an
+old sucker in another."
+
+"Look out--catch him, Quinlan!" cried Mr. Geltfin. "Look at his
+face--he's fixing to faint or something."
+
+
+The prime intent of this recital, as set forth at the beginning, was to
+tell why Mr. Max Lobel had an attack of apoplexy. That original purpose
+having been now carried out, there remains nothing more to be added and
+the chapter ends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ALAS, THE POOR WHIFFLETIT!
+
+
+Over Jefferson Poindexter's usually buoyant spirits a fabric of gloom,
+black, thick, and heavy, was spread like a burying-pall. His thoughts
+were the color of twelve o'clock at night at the bottom of a coal-mine
+and it the dark of the moon. Moroseness crowned his brow; sorrow berode
+his soul, and on his under lip the bull-bat, that eccentric bird which
+has to sit lengthwise of the limb, might have perched with room to
+spare. You couldn't see the ointment for the flies, and Gilead had gone
+out of the balm business. There was a reason. The reason was Ophelia
+Stubblefield.
+
+On an upturned watering-piggin alongside Mittie May's stall in the
+stable back of the house, Jeff sat and just naturally gloomed. To this
+retreat he had been harried against his will. Out of her domain, which
+was the kitchen, Aunt Dilsey had driven him with words barbed and
+bitter.
+
+"Tek yo'se'f on 'way f'um yere, black boy!" Such had been her command.
+"Me, I's plum distracted an' wore out jes' f'um lookin' at you settin'
+'round sullin' lak a' ole possum. Ef Satan fine some labor still fur
+idle hands to do, same ez de Holy Word say he do, he suttinly must be
+stedyin' 'bout openin' up a branch employmint agency fur cullid only,
+'specially on yore account. You ain't de Grand President of de Order of
+de Folded Laigs, tho' you shorely does ack lak it. You's s'posed to be
+doin' somethin' fur yore keep an' wages. H'ist yo'se'f an' move."
+
+"I ain't doin' nothin'!" Jeff protested spiritlessly.
+
+"Dat you ain't!" agreed Aunt Dilsey. "An' whut you better do is better
+do somethin'--tha's my edvices to you. S'posin' ole boss-man came back
+yere to dis kitchen an' ketch you 'cumberin' de earth de way you is. You
+knows, well ez I does, w'ite folks suttinly does hate to see a strappin'
+nigger settin' 'round doin' nothin'."
+
+"Boss-man ain't yere," said Jeff. "He's up at the cote-house. Mos'
+doubtless jes' about right now he's sendin' some flippy cullid woman to
+the big jail fur six months fur talkin' too much 'bout whut don't
+concern her."
+
+"Is tha' so?" she countered. "Well, ef he should come back home he'll
+find one of de most fragrant cases of vagromcy he ever run acrost right
+yere 'pon his own household premises. Boy, is you goin' move, lak I
+patiently is warned you, or ain't you? Git on out yander to de stable
+an' confide yo' sorrows to de Jedge's old mare. Mebbe she mout be able
+to endure you, but you p'intedly gives me de fidgits. Git--befo' I
+starts findin' out ef dat flat haid of yourn fits up smooth ag'inst de
+back side of a skillit."
+
+Nervously she fingered the handle of her largest frying-pan. Jeff knew
+the danger-signals. Too deeply sunken in melancholy to venture any
+further retorts, he withdrew himself, seeking sanctuary in the lee of
+Mittie May. He squatted upon the capsized keeler, automatically
+balancing himself as it wabbled under him on its one projecting handle,
+and, with his eyes fixed on nothing, gave himself over unreservedly to a
+consuming canker. For all that unhappiness calked his ears as with
+pledgets of cotton wool, there presently percolated to his aloof
+understanding the consciousness that somebody was speaking on the other
+side of the high board fence which marked the dividing line between
+Judge Priest's place and the Enders' place next door. Listlessly he
+identified the voice as the property of the young gentleman from up
+North who was staying with his kinsfolk, the Enders family. This was a
+gentleman already deeply admired by Jeff at long distance for the
+sprightliness of his wardrobe and for his gay and gallus ways. Against
+his will--for he craved to be quite alone with his griefs and no
+distracting influences creeping in--Jeff listened. Listening, he heard
+language of such splendor as literally to force him to rise up and
+approach the fence and apply his eye to a convenient cranny between two
+whitewashed boards.
+
+Under an Injun-cigar tree which grew in the Enders' back yard the
+fascinating visitor out of Northern parts was stretched in a hammock,
+between draws on a cigarette discoursing grandiloquently to a
+half-incredulous but wholly delighted audience of three. His three small
+nephews were hunkered on the earth beside him, their grinning faces
+upturned to his the while he dealt first with this and then with that
+variety of curious fauna which, he alleged, were to be encountered in
+the wilds of a strange place called the State of Rhode Island, where, it
+seemed, he had spent the greater part of an adventurous and crowded
+youth.
+
+"Well," he was saying now, beginning, as it were, a new chapter, "if you
+think the sulfur-crested parabola is a funny bird you should hear about
+the great flannel-throated golosh, or arctic bird of the polar seas,
+which is a creature so rare that nobody ever saw one, although Dr. Cook,
+the imminent ex-explorer, made an exhaustive study of its habits and
+peculiarities and told the King of Denmark about them, afterward
+amplifying his remarks on the subject in the lecture which he delivered
+in this, his native land, under the auspices of the International
+School of Poor Fish. By the way, I'm sure the Doctor must have visited
+this town on his tour. Only yesterday, I think it was, I saw an
+illuminated sign down on Franklin Street which surely was used
+originally to advertise his lecture. It was a sign which said, 'Cook
+With Gas!' But speaking of fish, I am reminded of the fur-bearing
+whiffletit; only some authorities say the whiffletit is not a fish at
+all, but a subspecies of the wampus family. Now, the wampus--"
+
+"Say, tell us about the whiffletit next," begged one wriggling
+youngster, plainly allured by the sound of the name.
+
+"With pleasure," said the speaker. "The whiffletit is found only in
+streams running in a south-northerly direction. This is because the
+whiffletit, being a sensitive creature with poor vision, insists on
+having the light falling over its left shoulder at all times. A creek,
+river, inlet, or estuary which has a wide mouth and a narrow head, such
+as a professional after-dinner speaker has, is a favorite haunt for the
+whiffletit. To the naturalist it is a constant source of joy. It always
+swims backward upstream, to keep the water out of its eyes, and it has
+only one fin, which grows just under its chin, so that the whiffletit
+can fan itself in warm weather, thus keeping cool, calm, and collected.
+Most marvelous thing of all about this marvelous creature is its diet.
+For the whiffletit, my dear young friends, lives exclusively on imported
+Brie cheese.
+
+"Did I say exclusively? Ah, there I fell into error. It has been known
+to nibble at a chiropodist's finger, but it prefers imported Brie
+cheese, aged in the wood. The mode employed in catching it is very
+interesting, and I shall now describe it to you. Selecting a body of
+water wherein the whiffletit resides, you enter a round-bottomed boat
+and row out to the middle of it. Then you take a square timber, and,
+driving it into the water, withdraw it very swiftly so as to leave a
+square hole in the water. Care should be taken to use a perfectly square
+timber because the whiffletit being, as I forgot to tell you, shaped
+like a brick, cannot move up and down a round hole without barking its
+shins, much to the discomfort of the pretty creature.
+
+"Pray follow me closely now, for at this juncture we come to the most
+important phase of the undertaking. You bait the edges of the hole with
+the cheese cut in small cubes and quietly await results. Nor do you have
+long to wait. Far down below in his watery retreat the whiffletit
+catches the alluring aroma of the cheese. He swims to the surface and
+devours it to the last crumb. But alas for the greedy whiffletit!
+Instantly the cheese swells him up so that he cannot change gears nor
+retreat back down the hole, and as he circles about, flapping
+helplessly, you lean over the side of the boat and laugh him to death!
+And such, my young friends, such is the fate of the whiffletit."
+
+"'Scuse me, suh."
+
+The amateur aspirant for the robe of Munchausen paused from lighting a
+fresh cigarette and lifted his eyes, and was aware of an
+anthracite-colored face risen, like some new kind of crayoned full moon,
+above the white skyline of the side fence.
+
+"'Scuse me, suh, fur interruptin'," repeated the voice belonging to the
+apparition, "but I couldn't he'p frum overhearin' whut you wuz tellin'
+the boys yere. An' I got sort of interested myse'f."
+
+"It's Judge Priest's Jeff, Uncle Dwight," explained the oldest nephew.
+"Jeff makes us fluttermills out of corn-stalks, and he learned
+us--taught us, I mean--to call a brickbat an alley-apple, and he can
+make his ears wiggle just like a rabbit and everything. Don't you,
+Jeff?--I mean, can't you, Jeff?"
+
+"Ah, I see," said the fabulist with a wink aside for Jeff's benefit. "I
+am indeed delighted to make the acquaintance of one thus gifted, even
+under the present informal circumstances. In what way, if any, may I be
+of service to you, Judge Priest's Jeff?"
+
+"That air thing you named the whiffletit--near ez I made out you said,
+boss, that fust you tolled him up to whar you wanted him wid cheese an'
+'en you jest natchelly laffed him to death?"
+
+"Such are the correct facts accurately repeated, Judge Priest's Jeff,"
+gravely assented this affable faunalist.
+
+"Yas, suh," said Jeff. "D'ye s'pose now, boss, it would he'p any ef
+they wuz a whole passel of folks to do the laffin' 'stid of jes' one?"
+
+"Beyond the peradventure of a doubt. Concerted action on the part of
+many, guffawing merrily in chorus, assuredly would hasten the death of
+the ill-starred victim, if you get what I mean, Judge Priest's most
+estimable Jeff?"
+
+"Yas, suh," said Jeff. "Thanky, suh." He did not exactly smile his
+thanks, but the mask of his melancholy crinkled round the edges and
+raised slightly. One who knew Jeff, and more particularly one who had
+been cognizant of his depressed state during the past fortnight, would
+have said that a heartening thought suddenly had come to him, lightening
+and lifting in ever so small a degree the funereal mantlings. He made as
+though to withdraw from sight. A gesture from the visiting naturalist
+detained him.
+
+"One moment," said Uncle Dwight. "Might I, a comparative stranger, be
+pardoned for inquiring into the motives underlying the interest you have
+evinced in my perhaps poorly expressed but veracious narration?"
+
+The wraith of Jeff's grin took on flesh visibly. It was a pleasure--even
+to one beset by grievous perplexities--it was a pleasure to hear such
+noble big words fall thus trippingly from human lips. His answer, tho,
+was in a measure evasive, not to say cryptic.
+
+"I wuz jes' stedyin', tha's all, suh," he fenced. He ducked from view,
+then bobbed his head up again.
+
+"'Scuse me, suh, but they is one mo' thing I craves to ast you."
+
+"Proceed, I pray you. Our aim is to please and instruct."
+
+"Well, suh, I jes' wanted to ast you ef you ever run acrost one of these
+yere whiffletits w'ich played on the jazzin'-valve?"
+
+"Prithee?"
+
+"Naw, suh, not the prith--prith--whut you jes' said. I mentioned the
+jazzin'-valve--whut some folks calls the saxophone. D'ye reckin they
+mout' 'a' been a whiffletit onct 'at played on one?"
+
+"Oh, the saxophone! Well, as to that I could not with certainty speak.
+But, mark you, the whiffletit is a creature of infinite
+resources--versatile, abounding in quaint conceits and whimsies, and,
+having withal a wide repertoire. Sometimes its repertoire is twice as
+wide as it is, thus producing a peculiar effect when the whiffletit is
+viewed from behind. On second thought, I have no doubt that in the
+privacy of its subterranean fireside the whiffletit wiles away the
+tedium of the long winter evenings by playing on the saxophone."
+
+"Come on over, Jeff, and Uncle Dwight will tell us some more," urged the
+hospitable oldest nephew.
+
+But Jeff had vanished. He wished to be alone for the working out of a
+project as yet vague and formless, but having a most definite object to
+be attained. Stimulated by hope new-born, he was now a sort of twelfth
+carbon-copy of the regular Jeff--faint, perhaps, and blurry, but
+recognizable. Through the clouds which encompassed him the faint promise
+of a rift was apparent.
+
+By rights one would have said that Jeff had no excuse for hiding in a
+shadowed hinterland at all. The world might have been excused for its
+failure to plumb the underlying causes which roiled the waters of his
+soul. Seemingly the currents of life ran for him in agreeable channels.
+He had an indulgent employer whose clothes fitted Jeff. Indeed,
+anybody's clothes fitted Jeff. He had one of those figures which seem to
+give and take. He was well nourished, gifted conversationally, of a
+nimble wit, resourceful, apt. Moreover, home-grown watermelons were
+ripe. The Eighth of August, celebrated in these parts by the race as
+Emancipation Day, impended. The big revival--the biggest and most
+tremendously successful revival in his people's local history--was in
+full swing at the Twelfth Ward tabernacle, affording thrill and
+entertainment every week-night and thrice on Sundays.
+
+There never had been such a revival; probably there never would be
+another such. Justifiably, the pastor of Emmanuel Chapel took credit to
+himself that he had planted the seed which at this present time so
+gloriously yielded harvest. Theretofore his chief claim to public
+attention had rested upon the sound of the name he wore. He had been
+born a Shine and christened a Rufus. But to him the name of Rufus Shine
+had seemed lacking in impressiveness and euphony for use by one about
+entering the ministry. Thanks to the ingenuity of a white friend who was
+addicted to puns and plays upon words, the defect had been cured. As the
+Rev. A. Risen Shine he bore a name which fitted its bearer and its
+bearer's calling--at once it was a slogan and a testimony, a trade-mark
+and a watch-cry.
+
+Proudly now he walked the earth, broadcasting the favor of his smile on
+every side. For it had been he who divined that the times were ripe for
+the importation of that greatest of all exhorting evangelists of his
+denomination, the famous Sin Killer Wickliffe, of Nashville, Tenn. His
+had been the zeal which inspired the congregation to form committees on
+ways and means, on place and time, on finance; his, mainly, the energy
+behind the campaign for subscriptions which filled the war-chest. As
+resident pastor, chief promotor, and general manager of the project, he
+had headed the delegation which personally waited upon the great man at
+his home and extended the invitation. Almost immediately, upon learning
+that the amount of his customary guaranty already had been raised and
+deposited in bank, the Rev. Wickliffe felt that he had a call to come
+and labor, and he obeyed it. He brought with him his entire
+organization--his private secretary, his treasurer, his musical
+director. For, mind you, the Sin Killer had borrowed a page from the
+book of certain distinguished revivalists of a paler skin-pigmentation
+than his. As the saying goes among the sinful, he saw his Caucasian
+brethren and went them one better. His musical director was not only an
+instrumentalist but a composer as well. He adapted, he wrote, he
+originated, he improvised, he interpolated, he orchestrated, he played.
+As one inspired, this genius played the saxophone.
+
+Now, in the world at large the saxophone has its friends and its foes.
+Its detractors agree that the late Emperor Nero was a maligned man;
+cruel, perhaps, in some of his aspects, but not so cruel as has been
+made out in the case against him. It was a fiddle he played while Rome
+burned--it might have been a saxophone. But to the melody-loving heart
+of the black race in our land the mooing tones of this long-waisted,
+dark-complected horn carry messages as of great joy. It had remained,
+though, for the resourceful Rev. Wickliffe to prove that it might be
+made to fill a nobler and a higher destiny than setting the feet of the
+young men to dancing and the daughters to treading the syncopated
+pathways of the ungodly. Discerning this by a sort of higher intuition,
+he had thrown himself into the undertaking of luring the most expert
+saxophone performer of his acquaintance away from the flaunting tents of
+the transgressor and herding him into the fold of the safely regenerate.
+He succeeded. He saved Cephus Fringe, plucking him up as a brand from
+the burning, to remold him into a living torch fitted to light the way
+for others.
+
+Of Cephus it might be said, paraphrasing the lines about little dog
+Rover, that when he was saved he was saved all over. Being redeemed, he
+straightway disbanded his orchestra. He tore up his calling-card
+reading,
+
+
+     +-----------------------------------------+
+     |     PROFESSOR CEPHUS FRINGE ESQUIRE     |
+     |        THE ANGLO-SAXOPHONE KING         |
+     |   Address: Care Champey's Barber-Shop   |
+     |SOLE PROPRIETOR FRINGE'S ALL-STAR TROUPE |
+     +-----------------------------------------+
+
+
+He enlisted under the militant banners and on the personal staff of the
+Sin Killer. Amply then was the prior design of his new commander
+justified. For if it was the eloquence, the magnetism, the compelling
+force of the revivalist which brought the penitents shouting down the
+tan-bark trail to the mourner's bench, it was the harmonious croonings
+of Prof. Fringe as he conducted the introductory program--now rendering
+as a solo his celebrated original composition, "The Satan Blues," now
+leading the special choir--which psychologically paved the way for the
+greater scene to follow after. There was distress in the devil's
+glebe-lands when this pair struck their proper stride--first the
+Fringian outpourings harmoniously exalting the spirits of the assemblage
+and then the exhorters tying his hands to the Gospel plow and driving
+down into the populous valleys of sin, there to furrow and harrow, to
+sow and tend, to garner and glean.
+
+The team had struck its stride early at the protracted meeting so
+competently fostered by the resident pastor of Emmanuel Chapel, the Rev.
+A. Risen Shine. To himself, as already stated, the latter took prideful
+credit for results achieved and results promised. Well he might. Already
+hundreds of converts had come halleluiahing through; hundreds more
+teetered and swayed, back and forth, between doubt and conviction, ready
+at a touch to fall like the ripe and sickled grain in the lap of the
+husbandman. Wavering brethren had been fortified and were made stalwart
+again. Confirmed backsliders rubbed their wayward feet in the resin of
+faith and were boosted up the treacherous skids of their temptation and
+over the citadel walls to bask among the chosen in a Jericho City of
+repentance. Proselytes from other and hostile creeds trooped over with
+hosannas and loud outcries of rejoicing. Even the place where, each
+evening, the triumph of the preceding evening was repeated and amplified
+seemed appropriate for such scenes. For the Twelfth Ward tabernacle had
+not always been a tabernacle; it had been a tobacco-warehouse--but it
+was converted. And its present chief ornament, next only to the Sin
+Killer himself--indeed, its chiefest ornament of all in the estimation
+of impressionable younger unmarried female members--was Prof. Cephus
+Fringe.
+
+At thought of him and of this, Jeff Poindexter, reperched on his wabbly
+piggin, wove his furrowed brow into a closer and more intricate pattern
+of cordial dislike. For if the main reason of his unhappiness was
+Ophelia Stubblefield, the secondary reason and principal contributory
+cause was this same Cephus Fringe. Ophelia's favorite letter may not
+have been F, but it should have been. She was fair, fickle, fawn-toned,
+flirty, flighty, and frequently false. Jeff cast back in his mind. He
+certainly had had his troubles since he became permanently engaged to
+Ophelia. For instance, there had been her affair with that ferocious
+razor-wielder Smooth Crumbaugh. In this matter the fortuitous return
+from the dead of Red Hoss Shackleford, as skilfully engineered by Jeff,
+had broken up Red Hoss's own memorial services, had also operated to
+scare Smooth Crumbaugh clean out of Colored Odd Fellows' Hall and leave
+the fainting Ophelia in the rescuing arms of Jeff. But there had been
+half a dozen other affairs, each of such intensity as temporarily to
+undermine Jeff's peace of mind. Between spells of infatuations for
+attractive strangers, she accepted Jeff's devotions. The trouble was,
+though, that life, with Ophelia, seemed to be just one infatuation after
+another. And now, to cap all, she had suffered herself, nay, offered
+herself, to fall thrall to the dashing personality and the varied
+accomplishments of this Fringe person. It was this entanglement which
+for two weeks past had made Jeff, her official 'tween-times fiance, a
+prey to carking cares and dark forebodings.
+
+Hourly and daily the situation, from Jeff's point of view, had grown
+more desperate as Ophelia's passion for the fascinating sojourner grew.
+He had even lost his relish for victuals which, with Jeff, was indeed a
+serious sign. In long periods of self-imposed solitude he had devised
+and discarded as hopeless various schemes for bringing discomfiture upon
+his latest and most dangerous rival. For a while he had thought somehow,
+somewhere, to rake up proofs of the interloper's former wild and
+reckless life. But of what avail to do that?
+
+By his own frank avowal the Professor had had a spangled past; had been
+an adventurer and a wanton, a wandering minstrel bard; had even been in
+jail. This background of admitted transgressions, now that he was so
+completely reformed and reclaimed, merely made him an all-the-more
+attractive figure in the eyes of those to whom he offered confession.
+Again, Jeff had trifled with a vague design of taunting Fringe into a
+quarrel and beating him up something scandalous. To this end he
+tentatively had approached our leading exponent of the art of
+self-defense and our most dependable sporting authority, one Mr. Jerry
+Ditto.
+
+Mr. Ditto had grown out of a clerkship at Gus Neihiem's cigar-store into
+the realm of fistiana. As a shadow-boxer he excelled; as a bag-puncher
+also. But in an incautious hour for himself and his backer, Flash Purdy,
+owner of Purdy's Dixieland Bar, he had permitted himself to be entered
+for a match before an athletic club at Louisville against one Max
+Schorrer, a welter-weight appearing professionally under the _nom de
+puge_ of Slugging Fogarty. It was to have been a match of twelve rounds,
+but early in the second round Mr. Ditto suddenly lost all conscious
+interest in the proceedings.
+
+He retired from the ring after this with a permanent lump on the point
+of his jaw and a profound conviction that the Lord had made a mistake
+and drowned the wrong crowd that time at the Red Sea. He fitted up a
+gymnasium in the old plow factory and gave instructions in sparring to
+the youth of the town. Naturally, his patronage was all-white, but he
+offered to take Jeff on for a few strictly private lessons at night
+provided Jeff would promise not to tell anybody about it. But at last
+the prospective client drew back. His ways were the ways of peace and
+diplomacy. Why depart from them? And, anyhow, this Cephus Fringe was so
+dog-goned sinewy-looking. Playing a saxophone ought to give a man wind
+and endurance. If not knocked cold in the first onslaught he might
+become seriously antagonized toward Jeff.
+
+But now, in the sportive fablings of the young white gentleman from up
+North who was visiting the Enders family, he had found a clue to what he
+sought. The difficult point, though, was to evolve the plan for the plot
+nebulously floating about in his brain; for while he envisaged the
+delectable outcome, the scheme of procedure was as yet entirely without
+form and substance. It was as though he looked through a tunnel under a
+hill. At the far end he beheld the sunlight, but all this side of it was
+utter darkness. Seeking to pluck inspiration out of the air, his roving
+eye fell upon the dappled rump of Mittie May as she stood in her stall
+placidly munching provender, and with that, _bang_! inspiration hit him
+spang between the eyes.
+
+To look on her, ruminative, ewe-like, fringed of fetlock and deliberate
+in her customary amblings, you would never have reckoned Mittie May to
+be a mare with a past. But such was the case. Her youth had been spent
+in travel over the continent with a tented caravan; in short, a circus.
+Her broad flat top-side, her dependable gait, her amiable disposition,
+her color--white with darkish half-moons on shoulder and flank--all
+these admirably had fitted her for the ring. When, long years before,
+Hooper's wagon-shows came to grief in our town Mittie May had been
+seized by Farrell Brothers to satisfy an unpaid hay-bill.
+
+Through her sobering maturer years she had passed from one set of hands
+to another, until finally, in her declining days, she found asylum in
+the affectionate ownership of Judge Priest, with Jeff to curry her fat
+sides and no more arduous labor to perform than occasionally to draw the
+Judge about from place to place in his ancient shovel-topped buggy.
+About her now there was naught to suggest the prancing rozin-back she
+once had been; the very look of her eye conjured up images of simple
+pastoral scenes--green meadows and purling brooks.
+
+But let a certain signal be sounded and on top of that let a certain air
+be played and Mittie May, instantly losing that air she had of a
+venerable and dignified sheep, became a Mittie May transformed; a Mittie
+May reverted to another and more feverish time; a Mittie May stirred by
+olden memories to nightmarish performances. By chance once Jeff had
+happened upon her secret, and now, all in one illuminating flash,
+recalling the conditions governing this discovery, he gave vent to a low
+anticipatory chuckle. It was the first chuckle he had uttered in a
+fortnight, and this one was edged with a sinister portent. He had his
+idea now. He had at hand the agency for bringing the scheme to fruition.
+But yet there remained much of preliminary detail to be worked out. His
+plan still was like a fine-toothed comb which has seen hard usage in a
+wiry thatch--there were wide gaps between its prongs.
+
+Jeff gave himself over to sustained thought. He made calculations
+calendar-wise. This was the first day of August; the eighth, therefore,
+was but seven short days removed. This plot of his seemed to resemble a
+number of things. It was like a piece of pottery, too. First the plastic
+clay must be assembled, then the vessel itself turned from it; finally
+the completed product must be given time to harden before it would be
+ready for use. He must move fast but warily.
+
+To begin with, now, he must create a setting of plausibility for the
+role he meant, in certain quarters, to essay; must dress the character,
+as it were, in its correct housings and provide just the right touches
+of local color. Ready at hand was Aunt Dilsey; he would make her,
+unwittingly so far as she kenned, a supporting member of the cast. She
+would never know it, but she would play an accessory part, small but
+important, in his prologue.
+
+Five minutes later she lifted her eyebrows in surprise. As he reinserted
+himself halfway across the portals of the realm where she queened it his
+recent moroseness was quite gone from him. About him now was the
+suggestion, subtly conveyed, that here stood one who, after profound
+cogitation, had found out what ailed him and, by the finding out, was
+filled with a gentle, chastened satisfaction. He seated himself on the
+kitchen door-step, facing outward so that comparative safety might be
+attained with a single flying leap did her uncertain temper, flaring up
+suddenly, lead her to acts of hostility before he succeeded in winning
+her over. He uttered a long-drawn sigh, then sat a minute in silence. In
+silence, too--a suspicious, menacing silence--she glared at him.
+
+"Aunt Dilsey," he ventured, speaking over his shoulder, with his face
+averted from her, "mebbe you been noticin' yere lately I seemed kind of
+downcasted an' shiftless, lak ez ef I had a mood on me?"
+
+"Has I noticed it?" she repeated--"huh!" The punctuating grunt was
+non-committal. It might mean nothing; it might mean anything.
+
+He cleared his throat and went on,
+
+"An', mebbe--I ain't sayin' you actually is; I's sayin' it with a
+mebbe--mebbe you been marvelin' in yore mind whut it wuz w'ich pestered
+me an' made me ack so kind of no-'count?"
+
+"I ain't needin' to marvel," she stated coldly. "I knows. Laziness! Jes'
+pyure summer-time nigger laziness, wid a rich streak of meanness th'owed
+in."
+
+"Nome, you is wrong," he corrected her gently. "You is wrong there.
+'Ca'se likewise an' furthermo' I also is been off my feed--ain't that a
+sign to you?"
+
+"Sign of a tapeworm, I 'spects."
+
+"Don't say that, please, Ma'am," he humbly pleaded. "You speakin' in
+sich a way meks me 'most discouraged to confide in you whut I aims to
+confide in you. I'm tellin' it to you the fust one, too. 'Tain't nary
+'nother soul heared it. Aunt Dilsey, I's grateful to you in my heart,
+honest I is, fur runnin' me 'way frum yore presence yere jes' a little
+w'ile ago. You never knowed it at the time--I didn't s'picion it also
+neither--but you done me a favor. 'Ca'se settin' out yonder in the
+stable all alone and ponderin' deep, all of a sudden somethin' jes' come
+right over me an' I knowed whut's been the matter wid me lately. Aunt
+Dilsey, I's felt the quickenin' tech."
+
+"Better fur you ef somebody made you feel de quickenin' buggy-whup."
+
+He disregarded the brutal suggestion.
+
+"Yessum, I's felt the quickenin' tech. Ez you doubtless full well knows,
+I ain't been 'tendin' much 'pon the big revival. But even so--even an'
+evermo' so--the influence frum it done stretch fo'th its hand an' reach
+me. I ain't sayin' I's plum won over yit, but 'way down deep insides of
+me I's stirred--yessum, tha's the word--stirred. I ain't sayin' the
+spirit of grace is actually th'owed me, but I feel prone to say I thinks
+it's fixin' to rassle wid me. I ain't sayin' I stands convicted, but I
+aims to be a searcher fur the truth; I aims to stop, look, an' lissen. I
+ain't sayin'--" He broke off, the floods of his imagery dammed by the
+skeptical eye which swept him; then made a lame conclusion, "Tha's whut
+I sez, Ma'am, to you in strict confidences."
+
+"Den lemme say somethin' to you. You figgers it's salvation you needs,
+huh? I figgers it's vermifuge. Oh, I knows you, boy--I knows you f'um de
+grass-roots up. Still an' wid all dat, ef you should crave to mend yo'
+ways--an' de Heavens above knows dey kin stand a heap of mendin'!--I
+ain't gwine be de one to hender you."
+
+Against her better judgment her tone was softening. For she gave her
+allegiance unrestrainedly to the doctrine preached at Emmanuel Chapel.
+She was one of its stanch pillows. Indeed, it might be said of her that
+she was one of its plumpest bolsters; and Jeff, although admittedly of
+no religious persuasion, had grown up in the shadow of a differing
+creed. The winning over of the black ram of another fold would be a
+greater victory than the reclamation of any wandering sheep who had been
+reared as a true believer.
+
+"Well, boy," she went on, in this new mood, "let us hope an' pray dat in
+yore case dey's yit hope. De ways of de Almighty is pas' findin' out.
+Fur do not de Scriptures say dey's room fur both man an' beast?--de maid
+servant an' de man servant, de ox an' de ass, dey all may enter in? So
+dey mout be a skimsy, bare chanct fur sech even ez you is. One thing
+shore--ef dey's ary grain of contritefulness in yore soul, trust de Sin
+Killer to fetch it fo'th to de light of day. He's de ole fambly doctor
+w'en it come to dat kind of sickness. You go to dat tabernickle to-night
+an' you keep on goin' an' le's see whut come to pass.... Jeffy, dey's a
+little mossil of cold peach cobbler lef over f'um dinner yistiddy
+settin' up yonder amongst de shelfs of my cu'board!"
+
+"Nome, thank you," said Jeff. "The emotions w'ich is in me seems lak
+they ain't left me no room fur nothin' else. Seems lak I can't git my
+mind on vittles yit. But I shore aims to be at the tabernickle to-night,
+Aunt Dilsey--I means, Sist' Dilsey. You jes' watch me. Tha's all I asts
+of you now--jes' watch me!"
+
+Head down and shoulders hunched, in the manner of one harkening to inner
+voices, Jeff betook himself around the corner of the back porch. Once
+out of her sight, though, he flung from him his mien of absorption. The
+overture had been rendered; there remained much to be done before the
+curtain rose. The languorous shade invited one to tarry and rest, but
+Jeff breasted the sunshine, going hither and yon upon his errands. Back
+of a cabin on Plunket's Hill he had private conference with one Gumbo
+Rollins, by profession a carnival concessionaire and purveyor of
+amusements in a small way. No cash actually changed hands, but on Jeff's
+part there was a promise of moneys to be paid in the event of certain
+as-yet-problematical contingencies.
+
+Next he sought for and, at the Bleeding Heart restaurant, found a limber
+individual named Tecumseh Sherman Glass, called Cump for short. This
+Tecumseh Sherman Glass was a person of two trades and one outstanding
+trait. By day a short-order cook, by night he played in 'Gustus
+Hillman's Colored String Band. It is to be marked down in the reader's
+memory that the instrument he played was the saxophone; also that he was
+heavily impregnated with that form of professional jealousy which lurks
+in the souls of so many _artistes_; likewise that he was a member in
+fair standing of the Rev. A. Risen Shine's congregation, and, finally,
+that he was a born meddler in other folks' affairs. These facts all
+should be borne in mind; they have their value.
+
+With Tecumseh Sherman Glass, Jeff spent some time in a confidential
+exchange of words. Here, again, the matter of a subsequent financial
+reward, to be paid by the party of the first part, meaning Jeff, to the
+party of the second part, meaning Cump, following the satisfactory
+outcome of sundry developments, was arranged. Would there were space to
+tell how cunningly, how craftily Jeff, in the subtleties marking this
+interview, played upon three chords in the other's being--the chord of
+vengeful envy, the chord of malice, the chord of avarice. There is not
+space.
+
+Four o'clock found the plotter entering the parlor of what once had
+been the establishment of T. Marshall, undertaker, now the Elite Colored
+Funeral Home, Marshall & Kivil, proprietors. These transformations had
+dated from the time Percy C. Kivil (Tuskegee '18) entered the firm. Here
+was no plain undertaker. Here was an expert and a graduate mortician,
+with diploma to prove it; also one gifted of the pen. Two inscriptions
+done in flowing type hung on the wall. One of these inscriptions read:
+
+
+     Oh, Death, where is thy sting
+       When we officiates?
+     Embalming done attentively
+       At standard pre-war rates.
+
+
+And the other:
+
+
+     Blest be the tie that binds!
+       Tho death thy form may shake.
+     Call in a brother of thy race
+       And let him undertake!
+
+
+At a desk between these two decorative objects and half shadowed by the
+bright-green fronds of a large artificial palm, sat AEsop Loving,
+son-in-law of the senior partner. From his parent-by-marriage AEsop had
+borrowed desk-room for the carrying on of the multitudinous business
+relating to the general management of one of the celebrations projected
+in honor, and on account of, the Eighth of August. He might appear to be
+absorbed in important details, as he now did. But inside of him he was
+not happy and Jeff knew the reasons; the reasons were common rumor.
+This year there was to be more than one celebration; there were to be
+two; and the opposition, organizing secretly and stealing a march on
+that usually wide-awake person, AEsop, had rented Belt Line Park, thus
+forcing AEsop's crowd to make a poor second choice of the old
+show-grounds, a treeless common away out near the end of Tennessee
+Street. On top of this and in an unexpected quarter, even more
+formidable competition was foreshadowed. A scant eighth of a mile
+distant from the show-lot and on the same thoroughfare stood the Twelfth
+Ward tabernacle, and here services would be held both afternoon and
+evening of the Eighth. The Rev. Wickliffe had so announced, and the Rev.
+Shine had backed him in the decision.
+
+It was inevitable, with this surpassing magnet of popular interest so
+near at hand, that for every truant convert who might halt to taste of
+the pleasures provided by AEsop Loving and his associate promoters, half
+a dozen possible patrons would pass on by and beyond, drawn away by the
+compelling power of the Sin Killer's eloquence. Representations had been
+made to the revivalist that, with propriety, he might suspend his
+ministry for the great day. His answer was the declaration that on the
+Eighth he would preach not merely once, but twice.
+
+By him and his there would be no temporizing with the powers of evil,
+however insidiously cloaked. Would not dancing be included in the
+entertainments planned by these self-seeking laymen who now approached
+him? Would not there be idle sports and vain pastimes calculated to
+entice the hearts of the populace away from consideration of the welfare
+of their own souls? Admittedly there would be drinking of soft drinks.
+And into the advertised softness some hardness assuredly would slip. You
+could not fool the Sin Killer. Having taken a firm stand, his rectitude
+presently moved him to further steps. On his behalf it was stated that
+he, personally, would lead the elect in triumphant procession out
+Tennessee Street to the tabernacle between the afternoon preaching and
+the evening. As an army with banners, the saved, the sober, and the
+seeking would march past, thus attesting their fealty to the cause which
+moved them. He defied all earthly forces to lure a single one from the
+ranks.
+
+And, after the preaching, under his auspices, there would be a mighty
+cutting of watermelons for those deemed to be qualified to participate
+therein. By the strict tenets of the Rev. Wickliffe's theology it seemed
+that watermelons were almost the only luscious things of this carnal
+world not held to be potentially or openly sinful. Small wonder then
+that Jeff, jauntily entering the Elite Funeral Home, read traces of an
+ill-concealed distress writ plain upon the face of AEsop Loving.
+
+"Well, Brother Lovin', you shore does look lak you'd hung yore harp
+'pon the willer-tree an' wuz fixin' to tek in sorrow fur a livin'," he
+said in greeting. "Cheer yo'se'f up; 'tain't nothin' so worse but whut
+it mout be worser."
+
+"Easy fur you to say so, Brother Poindexter; harder fur me to do so,"
+stated AEsop. "Gallivantin' 'round the way you is, you ain't got no idea
+of the aggervations w'ich keeps comin' up in connection wid an occasion
+sech ez this one, an' mo' 'specially the aggervations w'ich pussonally
+afflicts the director-general of the same, w'ich I is him."
+
+"I been hearin' somethings myse'f," said Jeff. "Word is come to me, fur
+one thing, that this yere smart-ellicky gang out at the Belt Line Park
+is aimin' to try to cut some of the groun' frum under yore feet. I
+regrets to hear it."
+
+"'Tain't them so much," said AEsop. "We couldn't 'spect to go 'long
+havin' a nomopoly furever. Sooner or late they wuz bound to be
+opposition arisin' up. 'Tain't them so much, although I will say it wuz
+a low-flung trick to tek an' rent that park right out frum under our
+noses 'thout givin' us no warnin' so's we mout go an' rent it fu'st. No,
+hit's the action of that Emmanuel Chapel bunch w'ich gives me the mos'
+deepest concern. Seems lak ev'ry time that Rev'n' Sin Killer open his
+mouth I kin feel cold cash crawlin' right out of my pocket. Mind you,
+Brother Poindexter, I ain't got a word to say ag'in religion. I's strong
+fur it on Sundays, ez you well knows, but dog-gone religion w'en it
+come interferin' wid a pusson's chanct to pick up a little spare change
+fur hisse'f on a week-day!"
+
+"Spoke lak a true business man, Brother Lovin'," said Jeff. "Still, I
+reckin you's mebbe countin' the spoilt eggs 'fore they's all laid. The
+way I sees it, you'll do fairly well, nevertheless an' to the contrary
+notwithstandin'. Le's see. Ain't you goin' to have the dancin'-pavilion
+goin' all day?"
+
+"Yas, but--"
+
+"Ain't you goin' to have money rollin' in frum all the snack-stands an'
+frum the fried-fish privilege an' frum the cane rackits an' frum the
+knock-the-babies-down an' all?"
+
+"Tubby shore, but--"
+
+"Ain't you due to pick up a right smart frum the kitty of the private
+crap game an' the chuck-a-luck layout?"
+
+"Natchelly. But--"
+
+"Hole on; I ain't th'ough yit. Seems lak to me you ain't properly
+counted up yore blessin's a-tall. Ain't the near-beer--" he sank his
+voice discreetly, although there was no one to overhear "ain't the
+near-beer an' the _still nearer_ beer goin' fetch you in a right peart
+lil' income? I'll say they is. An' ain't you goin' do mighty well on
+yore own account out of yore share of the commission frum Gumbo
+Rollinses' Flyin' Jinny?"
+
+"Hole on, hole on! How come Gumbo Rollins?"
+
+"W'y tha's all fixed," stated Jeff. "Gumbo he'll be out there 'fore
+sunup on the 'p'inted day wid his ole Flyin' Jinny an' his ole
+grind-organ an'--"
+
+"Tain't nothin' fixed," demurred the astonished and indignant AEsop.
+"'Tain't nothin' fixed 'thout I fixes it. Ain't I had pestermints 'nuff
+las' yeah settlin' up, or tryin' to, wid that Rollins? Ain't I told him
+then that never ag'in would I--"
+
+"Oh, tha's settled," announced Jeff soothingly.
+
+"Who settled it?"
+
+"Me."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yas, me--out of pyure frien'ship fur you. Lissen, Brother Lovin', an'
+give due heed. I comes to you d'rect frum Gumbo Rollins. He's done seen
+the error of the way he acked tow'ds you that time. He's cravin' that
+all the grudges of the bygone past shall be disremembered. Here's whut
+he's goin' to do: He's goin' give yore organization the reg'lar cut, an'
+'pon top of that he's goin' hand you, pussonally an' private, a special
+extra five pur cent, on all he teks in; that comes ez a free-will
+offerin' to you. He's goin' 'bandon his plan to run ez a independint
+attraction on the Eighth down back of the market-house. He's goin' be
+wid you heart an' soul an' Flyin' Jinny. All he asts, through me, is
+that he kin have the right to set her up on the purtic'lar spot w'ich
+he's got in mind out there on them show-ground lots. An' finally an'
+furthermo' he's done commission me to hand you ten dollars, unbeknownst
+to anybody, jes' to prove to you that his heart's in the right place an'
+that he's wishful fur to do the square thing." He felt in his pockets,
+producing a crumpled bill. "An' here 'tis!"
+
+AEsop pouched the currency on the flank where he carried his personal
+funds before his commercial instinct inspired him to seek out the
+motives actuating the volunteer peacemaker. Experience had taught him to
+beware of Greeks bearing gifts--not of the gifts particularly, but of
+the Greeks.
+
+"Well," he said, "ef Gumbo Rollins aims to be honest an' open an'
+abovebode wid us, w'y that puts a diff'unt face on it. But so fur ez I
+heared tell, you an' Gumbo Rollins ain't been so thick ez all this up
+till now. I's wonderin' whut does you 'spect to git out of the little
+transaction fur yo'se'f? 'Ca'se I gives you warnin' right yere an' now
+that ef you's hopin' to git a split out of me you mout jes' ez well stop
+dreamin' ary sech a delusion an' become undelirious ag'in."
+
+"Stop, Brother Lovin'," broke in Jeff in the tone of one aggrieved at
+being unjustly accused. "Has I asted you fur anything? Then wait till I
+does so."
+
+"All right," agreed AEsop. "I'll wait till you does so an' w'en you does
+so I'll say no, same ez I's already sayin' it to you in advance. Say,
+boy, you must have yore reasons fur the int'rust you is displayin' in
+dis matter."
+
+"Whutever 'tis 'taint got nothin' to do wid lurin' no money out of yore
+possession," said Jeff. His voice changed to one of deep gravity.
+"Brother Lovin', look yere at me."
+
+He glanced about him, making doubly sure they were alone. He advanced
+one step and came to a halt; he made his figure rigid and gave first the
+grand hailing-sign of the Afro-American Society of Supreme Kings of the
+Universe, then the private signal of distress which invokes succor and
+support, and he wound up by uttering the cabalistic words which bind a
+fellow Supreme King in the vows of eternal secrecy on pain of having his
+heart cut out of his bosom and burned and the ashes scattered to the
+four winds. For his part, AEsop Loving arose and, obeying the ritual,
+made the proper responses. In a solemn silence they exchanged the
+symbolic grip which is reserved only for occasions of emergency and
+stress and which unites brother to brother in bonds stronger than steel.
+A moment later AEsop Loving was alone.
+
+It was not Jeff, the intriguer, who had colleagued with Gumbo Rollins
+and conspired with Cump Glass, who came in the evening to the Twelfth
+Ward tabernacle and sought a seat on a bench well up toward the front
+where he could be fairly conspicuous and yet not too conspicuous;
+neither was it the persuasive person who had dangled the bait of
+private profit before the beguiled eyes of AEsop Loving. Rather was it
+the serious, self-searching, introspective Jeff, who earlier that day
+had besought counsel and comfort of Aunt Dilsey Turner. He came alone,
+walking with head bowed as walks one who is wrapped in his own thoughts.
+He arrived betimes; he remained silent and apart, inwardly communing,
+one would have said, while the audience rustled in.
+
+So engrossed was he that he seemed to have no eyes even for Ophelia, who
+perched high aloft, the brightest flower in the hanging garden of color
+that banked the tiers of the choir division terracing up behind the
+platform. She, in turn, had no eyes for any there save Prof. Cephus
+Fringe, who, it should be added, had one eye for Ophelia and the other
+for his own person. Even by those prejudiced in his favor it was not to
+be denied that the Professor was, as one might say, passionately
+addicted to himself. When, with Cephus Fringe accompanying and
+directing, the opening hymn was offered, Ophelia, lifting high her
+soprano voice, sang directly at, to, and for him. From the front this
+plainly was to be observed; in fact was the subject of whispered comment
+among some of Jeff's neighbors.
+
+As though he heard them not nor saw the byplay, he gave no sign which
+might be interpreted as denoting annoyance or chagrin. There was only a
+friendly and whole-souled approval in his look when, following the
+song, Prof. Fringe rendered--I believe this is the customary
+phrase--rendered as a solo on his saxophone one of the compositions
+bearing his name as author. There was rapt attention and naught else in
+his pose and on his face the while the Rev. Wickliffe, swinging his
+scythe of righteousness, mowed for a solid hour in Satan's weedy back
+yard, so that the penitents fell in a broad swath.
+
+From her place hard by, Aunt Dilsey vigilantly watched Jeff and was, in
+spite of herself, convinced of his sincerity. She marked how, at the
+close of the meeting, he passed slowly, almost reluctantly out, stopping
+more than once and looking rearward as though half inclined to turn back
+and join the ranks of those who clustered still at the foot of the
+pulpit, completely and utterly won over. She was moved to direct the
+notice of certain of the sistren and brethren to his behavior as
+conspicuous proof of the compelling fervor of the Sin Killer. Swiftly
+the word spread that Jeff Poindexter magically had ceased to be a
+horrible example and was betraying evidences that he might yet become
+what insurance agents call a prospect.
+
+As though to justify this hope Jeff attended Tuesday night; his presence
+attesting him a well-wisher, his deportment an added testimony that he
+deeply had been stirred by the outpoured words of the revivalist. Before
+the service got under way he seized upon an opportunity to be
+introduced to the Rev. Wickliffe. Many were spectators to the meeting
+between them, and speculation ran higher upon the possibility that
+before the week ended he would be enrolled among the avowedly convicted.
+Again on Wednesday night he was on hand, an attentive and earnest
+listener.
+
+Prior to the preliminary exercise of song on this night, the Rev.
+Wickliffe outlined the amplified plans for the great moral jubilation on
+the evening of the Eighth and invited suggestions from the assemblage to
+the end that naught be overlooked which might add to its splendors. At
+this invitation, almost as though he had been awaiting some such
+favorable opening, there stood up promptly Tecumseh Sherman Glass, and
+Tecumseh made a certain motion which on being put to the vote of the
+house carried unanimously amid sounds of a general approval. Some
+applauded, no doubt, because of the popularity of the idea embodied in
+the motion and some perhaps because the brother, in offering it, was
+deemed to have displayed a most generous, a most becoming, and a totally
+unexpected spirit of magnanimity toward a fellow professional occupying
+a place which Cump Glass or any other saxophonist might well envy him.
+
+If at this Jeff's heart gave a joyous jump inside of him, his face
+remained a mask to hide his real feelings. If, privily, by day he
+labored to gather up all the loose ends of his shaping design, publicly
+by night he patronized the tabernacle. He was present on Thursday night
+and on Friday and on Saturday, and three times on Sunday he was present,
+maintaining still his outward bearing of interest and sympathy. He was
+like a tree which bends before the compelling blast yet refuses for a
+little while longer to topple headlong. This brings us up to Monday, the
+Glorious Eighth.
+
+With the morning of that day or with its nooning or with its
+afternooning we need have no concern, replete though they were in
+variety of entertainment and abounding in pleasurable incident. For us
+the interest chiefly centers in the early evening and especially in that
+part of the evening falling between seven o'clock and forty minutes past
+seven. At seven, prompt on the clock's stroke and as guaranteed in the
+announcements, the parade fathered by the Rev. Wickliffe, started from
+the corner of Tennessee and Front Streets, down by the river, and
+wended, as the saying goes, its way due westward into the sunset's
+painted afterglow.
+
+This was a parade! A great man had sired it; a tried organizer had
+fostered it; proved executives had worked out the problems of its
+divisions and its groupings. At its head, suitably mounted upon a white
+steed, rode a grand marshal who was more than a grand marshal. For in
+his one person this dignitary combined two parts: not only was he the
+grand marshal with a broad sash draped diagonally across his torso to
+prove it, but likewise he was the official trumpeter. At intervals he
+raised his horn to his lips and sounded forth inspiring notes. That his
+horn was neither a trumpet nor yet a bugle but a long, goose-necked
+thing might be regarded as merely a detail. Only one who was overly
+technical would have noted the circumstance at all. Behind him, sixteen
+abreast, appeared the special tabernacle choristers with large
+fluttering badges of royal purple. They came on magnificently, filling
+the street from curb-line to curb-line, and the sound of their singing
+was as a great wind gathering. The second one on the left, counting from
+the end, in the front row, was Ophelia Stubblefield, tawny and splendid
+as a lithesome tiger-lily. She wore white with long white kid gloves and
+a beflowered hat which represented the hoarded total of six weeks'
+wages. You would have said it was worth the money. Anybody would.
+
+In the second section rode the Rev. Wickliffe and the Rev. Shine; they
+were in a touring-car with its top flattened back. You might say they
+composed the second section. Carriages and automobiles rolling along
+immediately behind them bore the members of the official board of
+Emmanuel Chapel in sets of fours, and the chief financial contributors
+to the revival which this night would reach its climax. Flanking the
+carriages and following after them marched the living garnerings of the
+campaign--the converts to date, a veritable Gideon's Band of them, in
+number amounting to a host, and all afoot as befitting the palmer and
+the pilgrim. Established members of the congregation, in hired hacks, in
+jitneys, in rented and privately owned equipages, and also afoot came
+next.
+
+Voluntarily aligned representatives of the colored population at large
+formed the tail of the column. Of these last there surely were hundreds.
+Hundreds more, in holiday dress now somewhat rumpled after a day of
+pleasure-seeking and pleasure-finding, lined the sidewalks to see this
+spectacle. Nowhere along the straightaway of the line of march did the
+pavements lack for onlookers, but nearing the end of the route, and
+especially where the wide vacant spaces of the Tennessee Street common
+had been preempted by the festal enterprises of Director General AEsop
+Loving and his confreres, the press became thicker and ever thicker.
+Here the crowds overflowed upon the gravel roadway, narrowing the
+thoroughfare to a lane through which the paraders barely might pass.
+They did pass, though at a lessened pace, until their front ranks had
+reached the approximate middle breadth of the old show-grounds, with the
+tabernacle looming against the sunset's dying fires an eighth of a mile
+on beyond.
+
+It is necessary here and now that, taking our eyes from this scene, we
+hark back to the Wednesday evening preceding. It will be recalled that
+on this evening a certain motion was made and by acclamation adopted.
+The maker of the motion, as we know, was Tecumseh Sherman Glass; its
+beneficiary, as the reader shrewdly may have divined, was Cephus Fringe.
+Beforehand perhaps the Professor had had vague misgivings as to the part
+he was to play in the pageantry on the Eighth; perhaps in his mind he
+had forecast the probability that he might suffer eclipse--a temporary
+eclipse--but to an _artiste_ none the less distasteful--in the shadow of
+the Sin Killer, for since the Sin Killer had originally promulgated the
+idea of the procession it was only natural and only human that the Sin
+Killer should devise to himself the outstanding place of honor in it.
+
+Be these conjectures as they may be, it is not to be gainsaid that the
+suggestion embodied in Cump Glass's motion was to Prof. Fringe highly
+agreeable, insuring, as it did, a fair measure of prominence for him
+without infringing upon his chief's distinctions. He showed his
+approbation. I believe I already have intimated that Prof. Fringe was
+not exactly prejudiced against himself. Any lingering aversions he may
+have entertained in this quarter had long since been overcome.
+Nevertheless a fresh doubt, arising from fresh causes, assailed him as
+the first flush of satisfaction abated within him.
+
+This new-born uneasiness betrayed itself in his voice and his manner
+when, at the conclusion of the night's services, he encountered Cump
+Glass in the middle aisle. The meeting was not entirely by chance; if
+the truth is to be known, Cump had maneuvered to bring it about. The act
+was his; a greater mind than his, though, had sponsored the act. And
+Cump Glass, rightly interpreting the look upon Prof. Fringe's large,
+plump face, guilefully set himself to play upon the emotional nature of
+the other. With a gracious wave of his hand he checked the Professor's
+expression of thanks.
+
+"Don't mention it," he said generously, "don't mention it. It teks a
+purformer to understand another purformer's feelin's. So I therefo'
+teken it 'pon myse'f to nomernate you fur the gran' marshal and also ez
+the proper one to sound the buglin' blasts endurin' of the turnout.
+Seems lak somebody else would 'a' had the sense to do so, but w'en they
+wuzn't nobody w'ich did so, I steps in. But right soon afterwards I gits
+to stedyin' 'bout the hoss you'll be ridin', an' it's been worryin' me
+quite some little--the question of the hoss."
+
+"I been thinkin' concernin' of 'at very same thing," confessed Cephus
+Fringe.
+
+"Is that possible?" exclaimed Cump Glass with well-simulated surprise.
+"Well, suh, smart minds shorely runs in the same grooves, ez the sayin'
+goes. Yas, suh, settin' yonder after I made that motion, I sez to
+myse'f, I sez, 'Glass, you done started this thing an' you must see it
+th'ough. 'Twon't never do in this world fur the gran' marshal to be
+stuck up 'pon the top side of a skittish, skeery liver'-stable hoss
+that'll mebbe start cuttin' up right in the smack middle of things and
+distrac' the gran' marshal's mind frum his business.' I seen that happen
+mo' times 'en onct, wid painful results. I s'pose, tho, you kin ride
+mighty nigh ary hoss they is, can't you, Purfessor?"
+
+"Well, I could do so onct," stated Cephus in the manner of one who
+formerly had followed rough-riding for a calling, "but leadin' a public
+life fur so long, lak I has, I ain't had much time fur private
+pleasures. 'Sides w'ich, ef I'm goin' sound the notes I'll be needin'
+both hands free fur my instermint."
+
+"Puzzactly the same thought w'ich came to me, jes' lak I'm tellin' it to
+you," agreed Cump. "It teks a musician to think of things w'ich an
+ordinary pusson wouldn't never dream of. So, fur the las' hour or so I
+been castin' about in my mind an' jes' a minute ago the idee come to me.
+I feels shore I kin arrange wid a frien' of mine to he'p us out. I
+s'pose you is acquainted with this yere Jeffy Poindexter?"
+
+"I has met him," said Cephus with chill creeping into his tones. "An' I
+has observed him present yere the last two-three nights. But I ain't
+aimin' to ax no favors frum him."
+
+"You ain't needin' to," said Cump. "I'll 'tend to that myse'f. Besides,
+Purfessor, you is sizin' up Jeffy Poindexter wrong. He's went an'
+'sperienced a change of heart in his feelin's tow'ds whut's goin' on
+yere. Furthermo'"--and here he favored his flattered listener with a
+confidential and a meaning wink--"he got sense 'nuff, Jeffy has, to know
+w'en he's crowded plum out of the runnin' by somebody w'ich is mo'
+swiftly gaited 'en whut he is, an' natchelly he crave to stand in well
+wid a winner. Naw, suh, that Jeffy, he'd be most highly overjoyed to
+haul off an' lend a helpin' hand, ef by so doin' he mout put you onder a
+favor to him."
+
+Cephus sniffed, half disarmed but wavering.
+
+"Wharin' could he he'p out? He ain't ownin' no private string of
+ridin'-hosses so fur ez I've took note of."
+
+"The w'ite man he wuks fur is got one an' Jeffy gits the borrowin' use
+of her--it's a mare--w'enever he want to, ez I knows frum whut he tells
+me an' frum whut I seen. Purfessor, that mare is jes' natchelly ordained
+an' cut out fur peradin'--broad ez a feather-tick, gentle ez the onborn
+lamb, an' mouty nigh pyure white--perzactly the right color fur a gran'
+marshal's hoss. Crowds ain't goin' pester that lady-mare none. Music
+ain't goin' disturb her none whutsoever, neither."
+
+"Whut's her reg'lar gait?"
+
+"Her reg'lar gait is standin' still. But w'en she's travelin' at her
+bestest speed she uses the cemetery walk. See that mare goin' pas' you
+w'en she's in a hurry an' you say to yo'se'f, you say, 'Yere you is,
+bound fur de buryin'-groun', but how come you got separated frum the
+hearse?' Purfessor, that mare's entitled Christian name is Mittie May.
+Did you ever hear of ary thing on fo' laigs, ur two, w'ich answered to
+the name of Mittie May that wuz tricky?"
+
+"Better be mouty sure," said the cautious Cephus, concerned for the
+safety and dignity of the creature which he held most dear of all on
+this earth. "'Member, I'll be needin' both hands free--'twon't be no
+time fur me to go jerkin' on the reins w'en my saxophone is requirin' to
+be played."
+
+"You's right there," agreed Cump. "Twouldn't never do, neither, fur you
+to slip off an' mebbe git yo'se'f crippled up. Whar would this yere
+pertracted meetin' be then? Lemme think. Ah, hah! I got it--the notion
+jes' come to me. Purfessor, listen yere." He placed his lips close to
+the other's ear and spoke perhaps fifty words in a confidential whisper.
+In token of approval and acquiescence the Professor warmly clasped the
+right hand of this forethoughted Glass.
+
+After such a manner was Cephus Fringe, all unwittingly, thrust into the
+pit which had been digged for him.
+
+At the point where the narrative was broken into for the interpolation
+of the episode now set forth, the head of the parade, as will be
+remembered, was just coming abreast of the old show-grounds. Now, the
+head of the parade was Cephus Fringe, and none other. One glance at him,
+upon a white steed, all glorious in high hat and frock coat and with
+that wide crimson sash dividing his torso in two parts, would have
+proved that to the most ignorant. As for his palfrey, she ambled along
+as though Eighth of August celebrations and a saxophone blaring between
+her drooping ears, and jubilating crowds and all that singing behind
+her, and all these carnival barkers shouting alongside her, had been her
+daily portion since first she was foaled into the world. The compound
+word lady-like would be the word fittest to describe her.
+
+Not twenty feet from her, close up to where the abutting common met the
+straggling brick pavement, stood the battered Flyin' Jinny of Gumbo
+Rollins. It was nearermost to the street-line of all the attractions
+provided by AEsop Loving and his associates. Here, on the site which he
+had chosen, was Gumbo Rollins himself, competently in charge. At the
+precise moment when Mittie May and her proud rider had reached a point
+just opposite him, Gumbo Rollins elected to set his device in motion and
+with it the steam-organ which was part and parcel of the thing's
+organism. Really he might have waited a bit.
+
+Lured by the prospect of beholding something for nothing, most of his
+consistent patrons temporarily had deserted him to flock out into the
+roadway and witness the passing by of the Sin Killer's cohorts. Two
+infatuated lovers, country darkies, sat with arms entwined in a rickety
+wooden chariot. Here and there a piccaninny clung to the back of a
+spotted wooden pony or a striped wooden zebra. These, for the moment,
+were his only customers; nevertheless Gumbo Jones Rollins swung a lever
+and started the machinery. The merry-go-round moved with a shriek of
+steam; the wheezy organ began spouting forth the introductory bars of a
+rollicking _galop_, a tune so old that its very name had been forgotten,
+although the air of it lived anonymously.
+
+As though she had been bee-stung, Mittie May flung up her head. She
+arched her neck and pranced with all four of her feet. She spun about,
+scattering those of the pedestrian classes who hemmed her so closely in.
+Unmindful of a sudden anxious command from her rider, she swung her
+foreparts this way and that. She was looking for it. It must be directly
+hereabouts somewhere. In those ancient days of her youthful vagabondage
+it had always been close at hand when that tune--her own tune--was
+played.
+
+Then above the heads of the crowd she saw it--a scuffed circlet of earth
+measuring exactly fifty-two feet across and marking the location where
+the middle ring had been builded when Runyon & Bulger's Mighty United
+Railroad Shows pitched their tents on the occasion of their annual
+Spring engagement. That had been in early May and this was summer's
+third month; the attrition of the weather had worn down the sharp edges
+of that low turfen parapet; by rights, too, there should have been much
+sawdust and much smell of the same and a center pole rising like one
+lone blasted tree from the exact middle of a circular island of this
+sawdust; there should have been a ringmaster and at least two clowns and
+an orderly clutter of paraphernalia. Nevertheless there before her was
+the middle ring. And the music had started. And Mittie May answered the
+cue which had lived in her brain for fifteen long years and more, just
+as always she answered it, or sought to, when that tune smote her
+eardrums.
+
+The startled spectators gave backward and to either side in scrambling
+retreat as she lunged forward, cleaving a passage for herself to the
+proper spot of entrance. She whisked in. Around the ring she sped, her
+hoofs drumming against the flanks of the ring-back, her barrel slanting
+far over in obedience to the laws of centripetal force, her tail
+rippling out behind her like a homebound pennon in a fair breeze--around
+and around and yet again and then some more.
+
+To be sure there were irregularities in the procedure. Upon her back,
+springily erect, there should have been a jaunty equestrian swinging a
+gay pink leg in air and anon uttering the traditional _Hoop-la_. Instead
+there was a heavy bulk which embraced her neck with two strong arms,
+which wallowed about on her spinal column, which continually cried out
+entreaties, threats, commands, even profanities. Yet with Mittie May,
+as with most of us, habit was stronger than all else. She knew her duty
+as of old. She did it. Accommodating her gait to the quickening measures
+of the music, she stretched her legs, passing out of a rolling gallop
+into a hard run. Yet one more thing, or rather the lack of it, perplexed
+her. Attendants should be bringing forth knockdown fence-panels for her
+to leap over and hoops of paper for her rider to leap through. Never
+mind; out of her imagination she would supply these missing details when
+the proper moment came. She'd hurdle the hurdles which weren't there.
+Meanwhile she knew what to do--around and around and around, right
+willingly, right blithely went Mittie May.
+
+And, with her, around and around went also Prof. Cephus Fringe, but not
+willingly and by no means blithely. He shed his high hat and with it all
+lingering essences of his dignity. One of Mittie May's feet squashed
+down on the high hat and it folded up like a condensed time-card. He
+lost the last vestige of his vanishing authority when he lost his
+saxophone. The Professor did not understate the case when he had
+intimated that he was somewhat out of practice at equestrian exercises.
+Stark terror convulsed his frame; instinct of self-preservation made him
+careless of the language he used. Indeed, a good deal of the language he
+used was bounced right out of him.
+
+Haply perhaps for him--and surely nothing else that happened was for
+him haply circumstanced--most of the naughty words reached no ears save
+those of Mittie May. There were sounds which drowned them--sounds which
+began with a fluttered outcry of alarm, which progressed to a great gasp
+of astonishment, which swelled and rippled into a titter, which grew
+into a vast rocking roar of unrestrained joyousness. Children shrieked,
+old women cackled, old men wheezed, adults guffawed, strong men rolled
+upon the earth in uncontrollable outbursts of thunderous mirth. As
+though stricken in all his members, Gumbo Rollins fell alongside his
+whirling Flyin' Jinny, but failed not, even in that excess of his
+mounting hysteria, to see to it that the steam-driven organ continued to
+grind out the one tune of its repertoire. The members of the choir
+forgot that their mission was to sing. They were too busy laughing to
+sing. And high and clear above the chorus of their glad outcry rose the
+soprano gurglings of Ophelia Stubblefield as she leaned for support up
+against somebody.
+
+You ask, Why did not Prof. Cephus Fringe fall off of Mittie May? He
+tried to. At first he sought only to stay on; then after a bit he sought
+to get off; he couldn't. The cause for his staying on was revealed when
+Mittie May took the first of those mental hazards of hers. As she rose
+grandly into space to clear the imagined top-rail of the imagined panel
+and with hind heels drawn well in under her, descended and continued on
+her circling way, a keen-eyed spectator, all bent double though he was,
+alongside the ring, and beating himself in the short ribs, caught a
+flashing glimpse of a strong but narrow strap which bound the rider's
+ankles to the saddle-girth and which, through the ordered march of the
+parade, had been safely hidden from view behind the ornament housings of
+the broad Spanish stirrups. Cump Glass had done his fiendish work well;
+those straps strained, but they held.
+
+"Name of Glory!" shouted out the observer. "He done tie hisse'f on! He
+done tie hisse'f--" Overcome he choked.
+
+With a great sweeping, swooping heave Mittie May made the last leap. And
+then at the precise second when the music stopped, the leathern thongs
+parted, and as the burden on her tumbled off and lay struggling in the
+dust, Mittie May swerved from the ring and, magically and
+instantaneously becoming once more Judge Priest's staidly respectable
+old buggy-mare, stood waiting for Jeff Poindexter to come and lead her
+out of all this shrieking, whooping jam of folks back to her stable. And
+Jeff came. He had been there all the time. It was against his supporting
+frame that Ophelia had slanted limply the while she laughed.
+
+Here the curtain is lowered for two seconds to denote the passage of two
+days. At its rise Jeff Poindexter and Gumbo Rollins are discovered
+sitting side by side on the back step of a cabin in the Plunket's Hill
+neighborhood.
+
+"An' so they ain't nobody seen him sence?" It is Jeff who is speaking.
+
+"So they tells me," answers Gumbo. "Ain't nary soul seen hair nur hide
+of him frum the moment he riz out 'en that ring an' tuk his foot in his
+hand an' marviled further. Yas, suh, the pertracted meetin' will have to
+worry 'long the best way it kin 'thout its champion purty man. Well,
+sometimes it seems lak these things turns out fur the bes'. It suttin'ly
+would damage his lacinated feelin's still mo' ef he wus yere an' heared
+folks all over town callin' him the Jazzed-up Circus Rider."
+
+"I got a better name fur him 'en that," says Jeff, "Whiffletit."
+
+"W'ich?" asks Gumbo.
+
+Seemingly Jeff has not heard his friend's question. In an undertone, and
+as though seeking to recall the words of a given formula, he communes
+with himself, "Fust you baits him wid the cheese. An' 'en w'en he nibble
+the cheese, he git all swelled up an' 'en whilst he's flappin' helpless
+you leans over the side of the boat an jes' natchelly laffs him to
+death."
+
+"Whut-all is you mumblin'?" demands Gumbo Rollins, puzzled by these
+seemingly unrelated and irrelevant mouthings. "Is you crazy?"
+
+"Yas," concurs Jeff, "crazy lak the king of the weazels."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+PLENTIFUL VALLEY
+
+
+"So this here head brakeman, the same being a large, coarse, hairy,
+rectangular person with a square-toed jaw and a square-jawed toe, he up
+and boots the two of us right off this here freight train."
+
+My old and revered friend, Scandalous Doolan, is much addicted to
+opening a narrative smack down the middle, as though it were an oyster,
+and then, by degrees, working both ways--toward the start and the
+finish. So it did not greatly surprise me that without preface,
+dedication, index or chapter-heading, he should suddenly introduce a
+head brakeman and a freight train into a conversation which until that
+moment had dealt with topics not in the least akin to these. Indeed,
+knowing him as I did, it seemed to me all the better reason why I should
+promptly incline the greedy ear, for over and above his eccentricities
+in the matter of launching a subject, Mr. Doolan is the only member of
+his calling I ever saw who talks in real life as all the members of his
+calling are fondly presumed to talk, in story-books and on the stage.
+
+I harkened, therefore, saying nothing, and sure enough, having dealt for
+a brief passage of time with the incident of a certain enforced
+departure from a certain as yet unnamed common carrier, he presently
+retraced his verbal footsteps and began at the beginning.
+
+I quote in full:
+
+
+"Yes, sir, that's what he does. Refusing to listen to reason, this here
+head brakeman, which anybody could tell just by looking at him that he
+didn't have no heart a-tall and no soul, so as you could notice it, he
+just red lights us off into the peaceful and sun-lit bosom of the rooral
+New York State landscape. But before reaching the landscape it becomes
+necessary for us to slide down a grade of a perpendicular character, and
+in passing I am much pleased to note that the right-of-way is
+self-trimmed to match the prevalent style of scenery, with maybe a few
+cinders interspersed for decorations. There is one class of travelers
+which prefers a road-bed rock-ballasted, and these is those which goes
+on trains from place to place. There's another kind which likes a
+road-bed done in the matched or natural materials, and them's the kind
+which goes off trains from time to time. And us two, being for the
+moment in this class, we are much gratified by the circumstance.
+
+"And we sits up and dusts ourselves off in a nonchalant manner while
+the little old choo-choo continues upon her way to Utica, Syracuse, and
+all points west, leaving me and the Sweet Caps Kid with all the bright
+world before us, and nothing behind us but the police force.
+
+"For some months previous to this, me and the Sweet Caps Kid has been
+sojourning in that favored metropolis which is bounded on one side by a
+loud Sound and on the other by a steep Bluff, and is doing her constant
+best at all times to live up to the surroundings. Needless to say, I
+refer to little Noo Yawk, the original haunt of the come-on and the
+native habitat of the sure thing, where the jays bite freely and the
+woods are full of fish. We have been doing very well there--very, very
+well, considering. What with working the nuts on the side streets right
+off Broadway and playing a little three-card monte down round Coney in
+the cool of the evening and once in a while selling a sturdy husbandman
+from over Jersey way a couple of admission tickets to Central Park, we
+have found no cause to complain at the business depression. It sure
+looks to us like confidence has been restored and any time she seems a
+little backward we take steps to restore her some ourselves. But all of
+a sudden, something seems to tell me that we oughter be moving.
+
+"You know how them mysterious premonitions comes to a feller. A little
+bird whispers to you, or you have a dream, or else you walk into the
+mitt-joint and hand a he-note to a dark complected lady wearing a red
+kimono and a brown mustache, and she takes a flash at your palm and
+seems to see a dark man coming with a warrant, followed by a trip up a
+great river to a large stone building like a castle. Or else
+Headquarters issues a general alarm, giving names, dates, personal
+description, size of reward and place where last seen. This time it's a
+general alarm. From what I could gather, a downcasted Issy Wisenheimer
+has been up to the front parlor beefing about his vanishing bankroll and
+his disappearing breast-pin. You wouldn't think a self-respecting
+citizen of a great Republic like this'n would carry on so over
+thirty-eight dollars in currency and a diamond so yeller it woulda been
+a topaz if it had been any yellower. But such was indeed the case. I
+gleans a little valuable information from a friendly barkeeper who's got
+a brother-in-law at the Central Office, and so is in position to get
+hold of much interesting and timely chit-chat before it becomes common
+gossip throughout the neighborhood. So then I takes the Sweet Caps Kid
+off to one side and I says to him, I says:
+
+"'Kiddo,' I says, 'listen: I've got a strong presentiment that we should
+oughter be going completely away from here. If we don't, the first thing
+you know some plain-clothes bull with fallen arches and his neck shaved
+'way up high in the back will be coming round asking us to go riding
+with him down town into the congested district, and if we declines the
+invitation, like as not he'll muss our clothes all up. Do you seem to
+get my general drift?' I says.
+
+"'Huh,' he says, 'you talk as if there'd been a squeal.'
+
+"'Squeal?' I says. 'Squeal? Son, you can take it from me there's been a
+regular season of grand opera. You and me are about to be accused of
+pernicious activity. What's more, they're liable to prove it. There's a
+movement on foot in influential quarters to provide us with board and
+lodgings at a place which I will not name to you in so many words on
+account of your weak heart. The work there,' I says, 'is regular, and
+the meals is served on time, and you're protected from the damp night
+air; but,' I says, 'the hours is too long and too confining to suit me.'
+I've knowed probably a thousand fellers in my time that sojourned up at
+Bird Center-on-the-Hudson anywhere from one to fifteen years on a
+stretch, and I never seen one of them yet but had some fault to find
+with the place.
+
+"'Whereas, on the other hand,' I says, 'all nature seems to beckon to
+us. Let's you and me steal forth under the billowy blue caliber of
+Heaven and make hay while the haymakers are good. Let us quit the city
+with its temptations and its snares and its pitfalls, 'specially the
+last named,' I says, 'and in some peaceful spot far, far away, let us
+teach Uncle Joshua Whitcomb that the hand is quicker than the eye, him
+paying cash down in advance for the lessons. Tubby sure, the pickings
+has been excellent here in the shadow of the skyscrapers, and it'll
+probably be harder sledding out amongst the disk-harrow boys. Everybody
+reads the papers these days, only the Rube believes what he reads and
+the city guy don't. I hate to go, but I ain't comfortable where I am.
+When my scalp begins to itch like it does now that's a sign of a close
+hair-cut coming on. I've got educated dandruff,' I says, 'and it ain't
+never fooled me yet. In short,' I says, 'I've been handed the office to
+skiddoo, and in such cases I believe in skiddooing. Let us create a
+vacancy in these parts _sine quinine_--which,' I says, 'is Latin,
+meaning it's a bitter dose but you gotta take it.'
+
+"'I can start right this minute,' says Sweet Caps; 'my tooth-brush is
+packed and all I've got to do is to put on my hat. S'pose we run up to a
+Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, which is a nice secluded spot,' he
+says, 'and catch the rattler.'
+
+"'How are you fixed for currency?' I says.
+
+"'Fixed?' he says. 'I ain't fixed a-tall. A'int you been carrying the
+firm's bank-roll? Say, ain't you?'
+
+"Well, right there I has to break the sad news to him. I does it as
+gentle as I could but still he seems peeved. Money has caused a lot of
+suffering in this world, they tell me, but I'm here to tell you the lack
+of it's been responsible for consider'ble many heartburnings too. Up
+until that minute I hadn't had the heart to tell the Sweet Caps Kid that
+our little joint partnership bank-roll is no longer with us. I'd been
+saving back them tidings for a more suitable moment, but now I has to
+tell him.
+
+"It seems that the night before, I had been tiger hunting in the jungle
+down at Honest John Donohue's. Of course I should have knowed better
+than to go up against a game run by anybody calling hisself Honest John.
+Them complimentary monakers always work with the reverse English. You
+are walking along and you see a gin-mill across the street with a sign
+over the door which says it's Smiling Pete's Place, and you cross over
+and look in, and behind the bar is an old guy who ain't heard anything
+that really pleased him since the Martinique disaster. He's standing
+there with his lip stuck out like a fender on a street car, and a bung
+starter handy, just hoping that somebody will come in and start to start
+something. That's Smiling Pete. As for this here Donohue, he's so
+crooked he can't eat nothing such as stick candy and cheese straws
+without he gets cramps in his stomach. He'd take the numbers off your
+house. That's why they call him Honest John. I know all this, good and
+well, but what's a feller going to do when his is the only place in
+town that's open? You've got to play somewheres, ain't you? Somehow, I
+always was sort of drawed to faro.
+
+"Well, you know the saying--one man's meat is another's pizen. He was my
+pizen and I certainly was his meat. So now, I ain't got nothing in my
+pockets except the linings.
+
+"I tells the Sweet Caps Kid just how it was--how right up to the very
+last minute I kept expecting the luck to turn and how even then I mighta
+got it all back if the game-keeper hadn't been so blamed unreasonable
+and mercenary. When my last chip is gone I holds up a finger for a
+marker and tells him I'll take another stack of fifty, all blues this
+time, but he only looks at me sort of chilly and distrustful and remarks
+in a kind of a bored way that there's nothing doing.
+
+"'That'll be all right,' I says to him. 'I'll see you to-morrow.'
+
+"'No, you wont,' he says, spiteful-like.
+
+"'Why,' I says, 'wont you be here to-morrow?'
+
+"'Oh, yes,' he says, 'we'll be here to-morrow, but you wont.'
+
+"'Is that so?' I says, sarcastical. 'Coming in,' I says, 'I thought I
+seen the word _Welcome_ on the doormat.'
+
+"'Going out,' he says, 'you'll notice that, spelled backward, it's a
+French word signifying _Mind Your Step_.'
+
+"And while I'm thinking up a proper comeback for that last remark of
+his'n somebody hands me my hat, and in less'n a minute, seems-like, I'm
+out in the street keeping company with myself.
+
+"I tells all this to the Sweet Caps Kid, but still he don't seem
+satisfied with my explanation. That's one drawback to the Kid's
+disposition--he gets all put out over the least little thing. So I says
+to him: 'Cheer up,' I says, 'things ain't so worse. Due to my being in
+right with the proper parties we gets this here advance tip, and we
+beats the barrier while this here fat Central Office bull, who thinks he
+wants us, is slipping his collar on over his head in the morning.
+Remember,' I says, 'we are going to the high grass where the little
+birdies sing and the flowers bloom. Providence,' I says, 'has an eye on
+every sparrow that falls, but nothing is said about the jays,' I says,
+'and we'll see if a few of them wont fall for our little cute tricks.'
+
+"Tubby sure, I'm speaking figurative. I aint really aiming for the deep
+woods proper. Only I've been in Noo Yawk long enough to git the Noo Yawk
+habit of thinking everybody beyond Rahway, New Jersey, is the Far West.
+I'm really figuring to land in one of them small junction points, such
+as Cleveland or Pittsburgh. And we would too, if it hadn'ta been for
+that there head brakeman.
+
+"Anyway, we moons round in a kind of an unostentatious way, with the Kid
+still acting peevish and low in his mind, and me saying little things
+every now and then to chirk him up, until the shank of the evening
+arrives 'long about two A.M. Then we slips over into the yards below
+Riverside Drive, taking due care not to wake up no sleeping policeman on
+the way. There we presently observes a freight train, which is giving
+signs of getting ready to make up its mind to go somewheres.
+
+"A freight train is like a woman. When you see a woman coming out of the
+front door and running back seven or eight times to get something she's
+forgot, you know that woman is on her way. And it's the same with
+freights; that's why they call 'em '_shes_'. Pretty soon this here
+freight quits vacilliating back and forth, and comes sliding down past
+where we're waiting.
+
+"'Here comes a side-door Pullman, with the side door open,' I says.
+'Let's get on and book a couple of lowers.'
+
+"'How do you know where she's going?' says the Kid, him being greatly
+addicted to idle questions.
+
+"'I don't,' I says; 'the point is that she's going. To-night she will be
+here but to-morrow she will be extensively elsewhere; and so,' I says,
+'will we. Let us therefore depart from these parts while the departing
+is good,' I says.
+
+"Which we done so, just like I'm telling you. And for some hours we
+trundles along very snug and comfortable, both of us being engrossed in
+sleep. When we wakes up it's another day, and the wicked city is far,
+far behind us, and we are running through a district which is entirely
+surrounded by scenery. If it hadn'ta been that something keeps reminding
+me I ai'nt had no breakfast I coulda been just as happy.
+
+"'Where'll we git off?' says Sweet Caps, setting up and rubbing his
+eyes.
+
+"'Well,' I says, 'we takes our choice. Maybe Albany,' I says. 'The
+legislature is in special session there, and a couple of grafters more
+or less wont make no material difference--they'll probably take us for
+members. Maybe Rochester,' I says, 'which is a pleasant city, full of
+large and thriving industries. Maybe,' I says, 'if this here train don't
+take a notion to climb down off the track and go berry-picking, maybe
+Chicago. Of course,' I says, 'Chi ain't quite so polished as Noo Yawk.
+Chi has been called crude by some. When I think of Noo Yawk,' I says, 'I
+think of a peroxide chorus lady going home at three o'clock in the
+morning in two taxicabs, but when I think of Chicago I'm reminded of a
+soused hired girl, with red hair, on a rampage. But,' I says, 'what's
+the difference? Everywhere you go,' I says, 'there's always human life,
+and Chicago is reputed to be quite full of population and very probably
+we can find a few warm-hearted persons there who are more or less
+addicted to taking a chance.'
+
+"But you know how it is in these matters--you never can tell. Just as
+I'm concluding my remarks touching on our two largest cities, this here
+brakeman comes snooping along and intimates that we better be thinking
+about getting off. He's probably the biggest brakeman living. If he was
+any bigger than what he is, he'd be twins. We endeavors to argue him out
+of the notion but it seems like he's sort of set in his mind. Besides,
+being so much larger than either one of us or both of us put together,
+for that matter, he has the advantage in repartee. So he makes an issue
+of it and we sees our way clear to getting off without waiting for the
+locomotive to slow up or anything. After our departure, the train
+continues on its way thither, we remaining hither.
+
+"'My young friend,' I says when the dust has settled down, 'the question
+which you propounded about five minutes ago is now answered in the
+affirmative. This is where we get off--right here on this identical
+spot. I don't know the name of the place,' I says; 'maybe it's so far
+out in the suburbs that they ain't found time to get round to it yet and
+give it a name; but,' I says, 'there's one consolation. By glancing
+first up this way and then down that way you will observe that from here
+to the point where the rails meet down yonder is exactly the same
+distance that it is from here to where the rails meet up
+yonderways--proving,' I says, 'that we are in the exact center of the
+country. So let us be up and doing,' I says, 'specially doing. But the
+first consideration,' I say, 'is vittles.'
+
+"You know me well enough to know," interjected Mr. Doolan, interrupting
+the thread of his narrative for a moment and turning to me with a wave
+of his stout arm, "that I ain't no glutton. I can eat my grub when it's
+set before me or I can let it alone, only I never do. I never begin to
+think about the next meal till I'm almost through with the last one. And
+right now my mind seems to dwell on breakfast.
+
+"Well, anyway we arises up and goes away from there, walking in a
+general direction, and before long we comes to a sign which says we are
+now approaching the incorporated village of Plentiful Valley--Autos
+Reduce Speed to Eight Miles an Hour--No Tramps Allowed. I kind of
+favors the sound of that name--Plentiful Valley. And as I remarks to the
+Sweet Caps Kid, 'We ain't no autos and we ain't no tramps but merely two
+professional men, looking for a chance to practise our profession.'
+
+"This here is the first valley I ever see in the course of a long and
+more or less polka-dotted career that it is all up-hill and never no
+downhill. Be that as it may, we rambles on until it must be going on
+towards nine forty-five o'clock, and comes to a neat bungalow on a green
+slope inside of a high white fence. There's a venerable party setting on
+the front porch, in his shirt-sleeves. He looks beneficent and well fed.
+
+"'Pull down your vest, son-boy,' I says to Sweet Caps, 'and please
+remember not to drink your coffee out of the sasser. I have a growing
+conviction,' I says, 'that we are about to partake of refreshment.'
+
+"'Hadn't we better sell this ancient guy a few Bermuda oats, or
+something to start off with?' says he.
+
+"'Not until after we have et,' I says; business before pleasure. And
+anyway,' I says, 'I works best on a full stomach. Follow your dear
+uncle,' I says, 'and don't do nothing till you hear from me.'
+
+"With that I opens the gate and we meanders up a neat gravel path. As we
+draws near, the venerable party takes his feet down off the railings.
+
+"'Come in,' he says cordially, 'come right in and rest your face and
+hands. You're out nice and early.'
+
+"'Suffer us,' I says, 'to introduce ourselves. We are a couple of
+prominent tourist-pedestrians walking from Noo Yawk to Portland, Oregon,
+on a bet. This,' I says, pointing to Sweet Caps, 'is Young Twinkletoes,
+and I am commonly knowed as old King Lightfoot the First. By an
+unfortunate coincidence,' I says, 'we got separated at an early hour
+from our provision wagon, as a result of which we have omitted breakfast
+and feel the omission severely. If we might impose,' I says, 'upon your
+good nature to the extent of--'
+
+"'Don't mention it,' he says; 'take two or three chairs and set down,
+and we'll talk it over. To tell you the truth,' he says, 'I was jest
+setting here wishing somebody would come along and visit with me a
+spell. I'm keeping bachelor's hall,' he says, 'and raising chickens on
+the side, and sometimes I get a mite lonely. I guess maybe the Chink
+might scare up something, although,' he says, 'to tell you the truth
+there ain't hardly a bite in the house, except a couple of milk-fed
+broilers and some fresh tomattuses right out of the garden and a few hot
+biscuits and possibly some razzberries with cream; for I'm a simple
+feeder,' he says, 'and a very little satisfies me.'
+
+"He pokes his head inside the door and yells to a Jap to put two more
+places at the table. So we reclines and indulges in edifying
+conversation upon the current topics of the day and, very shortly,
+nourishing smells begin for to percolate forth from within, causing me
+to water at the mouth until I has all the outward symptoms of being an
+ebb-tide. But this here pernicious Sweet Caps Kid, he can't let well
+enough alone. Observing copious signs of affluence upon every side he
+gets ambitious and would abuse the sacred right of hospitality about
+half to three-quarters of an hour too soon. Out of the tail of my eye I
+sees him reaching in his pocket for the educated pasteboards and I gives
+him the high sign to soft pedal, but he don't mind me. Out he comes with
+'em.
+
+"'A little harmless game of cards,' he says, addressing the elderly
+guy, 'entitled,' he says, 'California euchre. I have here, you will
+observe, two jacks and an ace--the noble ace of spades. I riffle and
+shuffle and drop 'em in a row, the trick being to pick out the ace. Now,
+then,' goes on this besetted Sweet Caps, with a winning smile, 'just to
+while away the time before breakfast, s'pose you make a small bet with
+me regarding the present whereabouts of said ace.'
+
+
+"The party with the whiskers gets up; and now, when he speaks I sees
+that in spite of him wearing a brush arbor, he aint no real rube.
+
+"'To think,' he says, more in sorrow than in anger, 'to think that I
+should live to see this day! To think that me, who helped Canady Bill
+sell the first gold brick that ever was molded in this country, should
+in my declining years have a couple of wooden-fingered amatoors come
+along and try to slip me the oldest graft in the known world! It is too
+much,' he says, 'it is too much too much. You lower a noble pursuit,' he
+says, 'and I must respectfully but firmly request you to be on your way.
+I'll try to forgive you,' he says, 'but at this moment your mere
+presence offends me. On your way out,' he says, 'kindly latch the gate
+behind you--the chickens might stray off. Chickens,' he says, 'is not
+exciting for steady company,' he says, 'but in comparison with some
+humans I've met lately, chickens is absolutely gifted intellectually.
+
+"'Furthermore,' he says, 'I would offer you a word of advice, although
+you don't really deserve it. Beware,' he says, 'of the constable in the
+village beyond. You'll recognize him by his whiskers,' he says.
+'Alongside of him, I look like an onion in the face. Ten years ago,' he
+says, 'that constable swore a solemn oath not never to shave until he'd
+locked up a thousand bums, and,' he says, 'he's now on his last lap.
+Keep moving,' he says, 'till you feel like stopping, and then don't
+stop.'
+
+"Them edifying smells has made me desperate. Besides, not counting the
+Chink, who don't count we outnumbers him two to one.
+
+"'We don't go,' I says, 'until we gets a bite.'
+
+"'Oh! I'll see that you get a bite,' he says. 'Sato,' he says, calling
+off-stage, 'kindly unchain Ophelia and Ralph Waldo. Ophelia,' he says,
+turning to us, 'is a lady Great Dane, standing four feet high at the
+shoulder and very morose in disposition. But Ralph Waldo is a
+crossbreed--part Boston bull and part snapping turtle. Sometimes I think
+they don't neither one of them care much for strangers. Here they come
+now! Sick 'em, pups!'
+
+"Sweet Caps starts first but I beats him to the gate by half a length,
+Ophelia and Ralph Waldo finishing third and fourth, respectively. We
+fades away down the big road, and the last thing we sees as we turns a
+wistful farewell look over our shoulders is them two man-eaters raging
+back and forth inside the fence trying to gnaw down the palings, and the
+old guy standing on the steps laughing.
+
+"So we pikes along, me frequently reproaching Sweet Caps for his
+precipitancy in spilling the beans. We passes through the village of
+Plentiful Valley without stopping and walks on and on and on some more,
+until we observes a large, prosperous-looking building of red brick,
+like a summer hotel with a lawn in front and a high stone wall in front
+of that. A large number of persons of both sexes, but mainly females, is
+wandering about over the front yard dressed in peculiar styles. Leaning
+over the gates is a thickset man gazing with repugnance upon a lettuce
+leaf which he is holding in his right hand. He sees us and his face
+lights up some, but not much.
+
+"'What ho, comrades!' he says; 'what's the latest and newest in the
+great world beyond?'
+
+"'Mister,' I says, disregarding these pleasantries, 'how's the prospects
+for a pair of footsore travelers to get a free snack of vittles here?'
+
+"'Poor,' he says, 'very poor. Even the pay-patients, one or two of whom
+I am which, don't get anything to eat to speak of. The diet here,' says,
+'is exclusively vegeterrible. You wouldn't scarcely believe it,' he
+says, 'but we're paying out good money for this. Some of us is here to
+get cured of what the docters think we've got, and some of us is here,'
+he says, 'because as long as we stay here they ain't so liable to lock
+us up in a regular asylum. Yes,' he says, pensively, 'we've got all
+kinds here. That lady yonder,' he says, pointing to a large female who's
+dressed all in white like a week's washing and ain't got no shoes on,
+'she's getting back to nature. She walks around in the dew barefooted.
+It takes quite a lot of dew,' he says. 'And that fat one just beyond her
+believes in reincarnation.'
+
+"'You don't say!' I says.
+
+"'Yes,' he says, 'I do. She wont eat potatoes not under no
+circumstances, because she thinks that in her last previous existence
+she was a potato herself.'
+
+"I takes a squint at the lady. She has a kind of a round face with two
+or three chins that she don't actually need, and little knobby features.
+
+"'Well,' I says, 'if I'm any judge, she ain't entirely recovered yet.
+Might I ask,' I says, 'what is your particular delusion? Are you a
+striped cabbage worm or a pet white rabbit?'
+
+"I was thinking about that lettuce leaf which he held in his mitt.
+
+"'Not exactly,' he says, 'I was such a good liver that I developed a bad
+one and so I paid a specialist eighty dollars to send me here. At this
+writing,' he says, 'the beasts of the field have but little on me. We
+both browse, but they've got cuds to chew on afterwards. It's
+sickening,' he says in tones of the uttermost conviction. 'Do you know
+what we had for breakfast this morning? Nuts,' he says, 'mostly nuts,
+which it certainly was rank cannibalism on the part of many of those
+present to partake thereof,' he says. 'This here frayed foliage which I
+hold in my hand,' he says, 'is popularly known as the mid-forenoon
+refreshment. It's got imitation salad dressing on it to make it more
+tasty. Later on there'll be more of the same, but the big doings will be
+pulled off at dinner to-night. You just oughter see us at dinner,' he
+says with a bitter laugh. 'There'll be a mess of lovely boiled carrots,'
+he says, 'and some kind of chopped fodder, and if we're all real good
+and don't spill things on our bibs or make spots on the tablecloth, why,
+for dessert we'll each have a nice dried prune. I shudder to think,' he
+says, 'what I could do right this minute to a large double sirloin
+cooked with onions _Desdemona_ style, which is to say, smothered.'
+
+"'Mister,' I says, 'I never thought I'd fall so low as to be a
+vegeterrier, but necessity,' I says, 'is the mother of vinegar. Could
+you please, sir, spare us a couple of bites out of that there ensilage
+of yourn--one large bite for me and one small bite for my young friend
+there to keep what little life we have until the coming of the corned
+beef and cabbage?'
+
+"'Fellow sufferer,' he says, 'listen here to me. I've got a dear old
+white-haired grandmother, which she was seventy-four her last birthday
+and has always been a life-long member of the First Baptist Church. I
+love my dear old grandmother, but if she was standing right here now and
+asked me for a nibble off my mid-day refreshment I'd tell her to go
+find a truck patch of her own. Yes sir, I'd turn her down cold; because
+if I don't eat enough to keep me alive to get out of here when the times
+comes I wont be alive to get out of here when the time comes. Anywhere
+else I could love you like a brother,' he says, 'and divide my last bite
+with you, but not here,' he says, 'not here! Do you get me?' he says.
+
+"'Sir,' I says, 'I get you. Take care of yourself and don't get
+foundered on the green truck,' I says. 'A bran mash now and then and a
+wisp of cured timothy hay about once in so long ought to keep off the
+grass colic,' I says. 'Come on, little playmate,' I says to Sweet Caps,
+'let us meander further into this here vale of plenty of everything
+except something to eat. Which, by rights,' I says, 'its real name
+oughter be Hungry Hollow.'
+
+"So we meanders some more miles and pretty soon I'm that empty that I
+couldn't be no emptier than I am without a surgical operation. My voice
+gets weak, and objects dance before my eyes.
+
+"After while they quits dancing, and I realizes that I'm bowing low
+before probably the boniest lady that ever lived. A gold watch has got
+more extra flesh on it than this lady has on her. She is looking out of
+the front window of a small cottage and her expression verges on the
+disapproving. As nearly as I can figure out she disapproves of
+everything in general, and a large number of things in particular. And
+I judges that if there is any two things in the world which she
+disapproves of more than any other two things, those two things is me
+and the Sweet Caps Kid.
+
+"I removes my lid and starts to speak, but she merely waves her arm in a
+majestic manner, meaning, if I know anything about the sign language,
+'Exit in case of dog.' So we exits without even passing the time of the
+day with her and continues upon our way through the bright sunshine. The
+thermometer now registers at least ninety-eight in the shade, but then
+of course we don't have to stay in the shade, and that's some
+consolation.
+
+"The next female land-owner we encounters lives away down in the woods.
+She's plump and motherly-looking, with gold bows on her spec's. She is
+out in her front garden picking pansies and potato bugs and other flora
+and fauna common to the soil. She looks up as the gate-latch clicks, and
+beholds me on the point of entering.
+
+"'Madam,' I says, 'pardon this here intrusion but in us you behold two
+weary travelers carrying no script and no purse. Might I ask you what
+the chances are of us getting a square meal before we perish?'
+
+"'You might,' she says.
+
+"'Might what?' I says.
+
+"'Might ask me,' she says,'but I warn you in advance, that I ain't very
+good at conundrums. I'm a lone widder woman,' she says, 'and I've got
+something to do,' she says, 'besides standing out here in the hot sun
+answering riddles for perfect strangers,' she says. 'So go ahead,' she
+says.
+
+"'Madam,' I says pretty severe, 'don't trifle with me. I'm a desperate
+man, and my friend here is even desperater than what I am. Remember you
+are alone, and at our mercy and--'
+
+"'Oh,' she says, with a sweet smile, 'I ain't exactly alone. There's
+Tige,' she says.
+
+"I don't see no Tige,' I says, glancing around hurriedly.
+
+"'That ain't his fault,' she says. 'I'll call him,' she says, looking
+like it wont be no trouble whatsoever to show goods.
+
+"But we don't wait. 'Sweet Caps,' I says to him as we hikes round the
+first turn in the road, 'this district ain't making no pronounced hit
+with me. Every time you ast 'em for bread they give you a dog. The next
+time,' I says,' anybody offers me a canine, I'm going to take him,' I
+says. 'If he can eat me any faster than I can eat him,' I says, 'he'll
+have to work fast. And,' I says, 'if I should meet a nice little clean
+boy with fat legs--Heaven help him!'
+
+"And just as I'm speaking them words we comes to a lovely glade in the
+woods and stops with our mouths ajar and our eyes bulged out like push
+buttons. 'Do I sleep,' I says to myself, 'or am I just plain delirious?'
+
+"For right there, out in the middle of the woods, is a table with a
+white cloth on it, and it's all covered over with the most lucivicious
+looking viands you ever see in your life, including a ham and a couple
+of chickens and a pie and some cool-looking bottles with long necks on
+'em and gilt-foil crowns upon their regal heads. And a couple of
+flunkies in long-tailed coats and knee breeches and white wigs are
+mooning round, fixing things up ship shape. And just then a tall lady
+comes sauntering out of the bushes, and she strolls up close and the
+flunkies bow and fall back and she says something about everything being
+now ready for Lady Gwyndolin's garden party and departs the same way she
+came. And the second she's out of sight, me and Sweet Caps can't hold in
+no longer. We busts through the roadside thicket and tear acrost that
+open place, licketty-split. It seems too good to be true. And it is.
+When we gets up close we realizes the horrible truth.
+
+"The ham is wood and the chickens is pasteboard and the pie is a prop
+pie and the bottles aint got nothing in 'em but the corks. As we pauses,
+stupefied with disappointment, a cheerful voice calls out: 'That's the
+ticket! Hold the spot and register grief--we can work the scene in and
+it'll be a knock-out!'
+
+"And right over yonder at the other side of the clearing stands a guy in
+a checked suit grinding the handle of a moving-picture machine. We has
+inadvertently busted right into the drammer. So we kicks over his table
+and departs on the run, with a whole troupe of them cheap fillum
+troopers chasing after us, calling hard names and throwing sticks and
+rocks and things.
+
+"After while, by superior footwork, we loses 'em and resumes our
+journey. Well, unless you've got a morbid mind you wont be interested in
+hearing about our continued sufferings. I will merely state that by the
+time five o'clock comes we have traveled upwards of nine hundred miles,
+running sometimes but mostly walking, and my feet is so full of water
+blisters I've got riparian rights. Nearly everything has happened to us
+except something to eat. So we comes to the edge of a green field
+alongside the road and I falls in a heap, and Sweet Caps he falls in
+another heap alongside of me, making two heaps in all.
+
+"'Kiddo,' I says, 'let us recline here and enjoy the beauties of
+Nature,' I says.
+
+"'Dern the beauties of Nature!' says Sweet Caps. 'I've had enough Nature
+since this morning to last me eleven thousand years. Nature,' he says,
+'has been overdone, anyway.'
+
+"'Ain't you got no soul?' I says.
+
+"'Oh yes,' he says, 'I've got a soul, but the trouble is,' he says,
+'I've got a lot of other vital organs, too. When I ponder,' he says,
+'and remember how many times I've got up from the table and gone away
+leaving bones and potato peels and clam shells and lobster claws on the
+plate--when I think,' he says, 'of them old care-free, prodigal days, I
+could bust right out crying.'
+
+"'Sh-h!' I says, 'food has gone out of fashion--the best people ain't
+eating any more. Put your mind on something else,' I says. 'Consider the
+setting sun,' I says, 'a-sinking in the golden west. Gaze yonder,' I
+says, 'upon that great yellow orb with all them fleecy white clouds
+banked up behind it.'
+
+"'I'm gazing,' he says. 'It looks something like a aig fried on one
+side. That's the way I always uster take mine,' he says, 'before I quit
+eating--fried with the sunny side up.'
+
+"I changed the subject.
+
+"'Ain't it a remarkable fact,' I says, 'how this district is addicted to
+dogs? Look at that there little stray pup, yonder,' I says, 'jumping up
+and down in the wild mustard, making himself all warm and panty. That's
+an edifying sight,' I says.
+
+"'You bet,' says the Sweet Caps Kid, kind of dreamy, 'it's a great
+combination,' he says, '--hot dog with fresh mustard. That's the way we
+got 'em at Coney,' he says.
+
+"'Sweet Caps,' I says, 'you are breaking my heart. Desist,' I says. 'I
+ask you to desist. If you don't desist,' I says, 'I'm going to tear your
+head off by the roots and after that I'll probably get right rough with
+you. Fellow me,' I says, 'and don't speak another word of no description
+whatsoever. I've got a plan,' I says, 'and if it don't work I'll know
+them calamity howlers is right and I wont vote Democratic never
+again--not,' I says, 'if I have to vote for Bryan!'
+
+"He trails along behind me, and his head is hanging low and he mutters
+to hisself. Injun file we retraces our weary footsteps until we comes
+once more to the village of Plentiful Valley. We goes along Main
+Street--I know it's Main Street because it's the only street there
+is--until we comes to a small brick building which you could tell by the
+bars at the windows that it was either the local bank or the calaboose.
+On the steps of this here establishment stands a party almost entirely
+concealed in whiskers. But on his breast I sees a German silver badge
+gleaming like a full moon seen through thick brush.
+
+"'The town constable, I believe?' I says to him.
+
+"'The same,' he says. 'What can I do for for you?'
+
+"'Lock us up,' I says, '--him and me both. We're tramps,' I says,
+'vagrants, derilicks wandering to and fro,' I says, 'like raging lions
+seeking whatsoever we might devour--and not,' I says, 'having no luck.
+We are dangerous characters,' I says, 'and it's a shame to leave us at
+large. Lock us up,' I says, 'and feed us.'
+
+"'Nothing doing,' he says. 'Try the next town--it's only nine miles and
+a good hard road all the way.'
+
+"'I thought,' I says, 'that you took a hidebound oath never to shave
+until you'd locked up a thousand tramps.'
+
+"'Yep, he says, 'that's so; but you're a little late. I pinched him
+about an hour ago.'
+
+"'Pinched who?' I says.
+
+"'The thousandth one,' he says. 'Early to-morrow morning,' he says, 'I'm
+going to get sealed bids and estimates on a clean shave. But first,' he
+says, 'in celebration of a historic occasion, I'm giving a little supper
+to-night to the regular boarders in the jail. I guess you'll have to
+excuse me--seems to me like I smell the turkey dressing scorching.'
+
+"And with that he goes inside and locks the door behind him, and don't
+pay no attention to us beating on the bars, except to open an upstairs
+window and throw a bucket of water at us.
+
+"That's the last straw. My legs gives way, both at once, in opposite
+directions. Sweet Caps he drags me across the street and props me up
+against a building, and as he fans me with his hat I speaks to him very
+soft and faint and low.
+
+"'Sweep Caps,' I says, 'I'm through. Leave me,' I says, 'and make for
+civilization. And,' I says, 'if you live to get there, come back
+sometime and collect my mortal remains and bury 'em,' I says, 'in some
+quiet, peaceful spot. No,' I says, 'don't do that neither! Bury me,' I
+says, 'in a Chinee cemetary. The Chinees,' I says, 'puts vittles on the
+graves of their dear departeds, instead of flowers. Maybe,' I says, 'my
+ghost will walk at night,' I says, 'and eat chop suey.'
+
+"'Wait,' he says, 'don't go yet. Look yonder,' he says, pointing up
+Main Street on the other side. 'Read that sign,' he says.
+
+"I looks and reads, and it says on a front window; '_Undertaking and
+Emba'ming In All Its Branches._'
+
+"I rallies a little. 'Son boy,' I says, 'you certainly are one
+thoughtful little guy--but can't you take a joke? I talk about passing
+away, and before I get the words out of my pore exhausted vacant frame
+you begin to pick out the fun'el director. What's your rush?' I says.
+'Can't you wait for the remains?'
+
+"'Keep ca'm,' he says, 'and look again. Your first look wasn't a
+success. I don't mean the undertaker's,' he says; 'I mean the place next
+door beyond. It's a delicatessen dump,' he says, 'containing cold grub
+all ready to be et without tools,' he says. 'And what's more,' he says,
+'the worthy delicatessener is engaged at this present moment in locking
+up and going away from here. In about a half an hour,' he says, 'he'll
+be setting in his happy German-American home picking his teeth after
+supper, and reading comic jokes to his little son August out of the
+_Fleagetty Bladder_. And shortly thereafter,' he says, 'what'll you and
+me be doing? We'll be there, in that vittles emporium, in the midst of
+plenty,' he says, 'filling our midsts with plenty of plenty. That's what
+we'll be doing,' he says.
+
+"'Sweet Caps,' I says, reviving slightly, remember who we are? Remember
+the profession which we adorn? Would you,' I says, 'sink to burglary?'
+
+"'Scandalous,' he says, with feeling, 'I'm so hollow I could sink about
+three feet without touching nothing whatsoever. Death before dishonor,
+but not death by quick starvation. Are you with me,' he says, 'or ain't
+you?'
+
+"Well, what could you say to an argument like that? Nothing, not a
+syllable. So eventually night ensoos. And purty soon the little stars
+come softly out and at the same juncture me and the Sweet Caps Kid goes
+in. We goes into an alley behind that row of shops and after feeling
+about in the darkness for quite a spell and falling over a couple of
+fences and a lurking wheelbarrow and one thing and another, we finds a
+back window with a weak latch on it and we pries it open and we crawls
+in.
+
+"Only, just as we gits inside all nice and snug, Sweet Caps he has to go
+and turn over a big long box that's standing up on end, and down it
+comes _ker-blim_! making a most hideous loud noise.
+
+"Then we hears somebody upstairs run across the floor over our heads and
+hears 'em pile down the steps, which is built on the outside of the
+building to save building 'em on the inside of the building, and in
+about a half a minute a fire bell or some similar appliance down the
+street a piece begins to ring its head off.
+
+"'The stuff's off,' says Sweet Caps to me in a deep, skeered whisper.
+'Let's beat it.'
+
+"'Nix,' I says. 'You fasten that there window! I'm too weak to run now,
+and if they'll give me about five minutes among the vittles I'll be too
+full to run. Either way,' I says, 'it's pinch, and,' I says, 'we'd
+better face it on a full stomach, than an empty one.'
+
+"'But they'll have the goods on us,' he says.
+
+"'Son,' I says, 'if they'll only hang back a little we'll have the goods
+in us. They won't have no trouble proving the corpus delicatessen,' I
+says, '--not if they bring a stomach pump along. Bar that window,' I
+says, 'and let joy be unconfined.'
+
+"So he fastens her up from the inside, and while we hears the aroused
+and infuriated populace surrounding the place and getting ready to begin
+to think about making up their minds to advance en massy, I pulls down
+the front shades and strikes a match and lights up a coal-oil lamp and
+reaches round for something suitable to take the first raw edge off my
+appetite--such as a couple of hams.
+
+"Then right off I sees where we has made a fatal mistake, and my heart
+dies within me and I jest plum collapses and folds up inside of myself
+like a concertina. And that explains," he concluded, "why you ain't seen
+me for going on the last eighteen months."
+
+
+"Did they give you eighteen months for breaking into the delicatessen
+shop?" I asked.
+
+Mr. Doolan fetched a long, deep, mournful sigh.
+
+"No," he said simply, "they gave us eighteen months for breaking into
+the undertaker's next door."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+A TALE OF WET DAYS
+
+
+In the days before the hydrant-headed specter of Prohibition reared its
+head in the Sunny South I had this tale from a true Kentucky gentleman.
+As he gave it to me, so, reader, do I give it to you:
+
+"Yes, suh, to this good day Colonel Bud Crittenden ain't never fergot
+that time he made the mistake about Stony Buggs and the Bear Grass
+County man. It learnt him a lesson, though. It learnt him that the
+deceivingest pusson on earth, when it comes to seeping up licker, is a
+little feller with his eyes fur apart and one of these here excitable
+Adamses' apples.
+
+"Speaking about it afterwards to a passel of boys over in the swopping
+ring, he said the experience, while dissapinting at the time, was worth
+a right smart to him subsequent. Previous to that time he said he was in
+error regarding the amount of licker a little man, with them
+peculiarities of features I just mentioned, could chamber at one
+setting.
+
+"Said he knowed some of the derndest, keenest gunfighters in the state
+was little men and he'd always acknowledged that spare-built,
+narrer-waisted men made the best hands driving trotting hawses; but he
+didn't know, not until then, that they was so gifted in the matter of
+putting away sweet'ning drams.
+
+"It happened the time we all was up at Frankfort nomernating a Clerk of
+the Court of Appeals. There'd been a deadlock for nigh on to three days.
+The up-state delegates was all solid for old General Marcellus Brutus
+Hightower of Limestone County, and our fellers to a man was pledged to
+Major Zach Taylor Simms, of Pennroyal.
+
+"Ballot after ballot it stood the same way--fifty-three to fifty-three.
+Then on the mawning of the third day one of their deligates from the
+mountains was called home suddenly by a message saying a
+misunderstanding had come up with a neighboring fambly and two of his
+boys was shot up consid'rable.
+
+"The convention had voted the first day not to recognize no proxies for
+absentees, and so, having one vote the advantage, we was beginning to
+feel like winners, when just then Breck Calloway from McCorkin County,
+he up and taken the cramps the worst way. For a spell it shore looked
+like he was going to be cholera-morbussed. Breck started in for luxuries
+in the line of vittles soon as he hit town, and between votes he kept
+filling hisself up on fried catfeesh and red bananas and pickled pigs'
+feet and gum drops and cove eyesters and cocoanut out of the shell and
+ice cream and sardines--greasy minners, Breck called 'em--and aig-kisses
+and a whole lot of them kind of knick-knacks.
+
+"That mout not a-bothered him so much if he hadn't switched from
+straight licker and taken on consid'able many drinks of this here
+new-fangled stuff called creamy de mint--green stuff like what you see
+in a big bottle in a drug store winder with a light behind it. By the
+middle of the third day Breck was trying to walk on his hands. He had a
+figger like one of them Mystic Mazes. 'Course, all kinked up that way,
+he warn't fitten for a deligate, and Colonel Bud Crittenden had to ship
+him home.
+
+"I heard tell afterwards that going back on the steam cars the conductor
+told Breck he didn't care if he was a contortionist, he couldn't
+practise none of his didoes on that there train.
+
+"So there we was, each side shy one vote and still tied--52 and 52. And
+at dinner time the convention taken a recess until ha'f past three in
+the evening with the understanding that we'd vote again at foah o'clock.
+
+"Jest as soon as our fellers had got a drink or two and a snack to eat,
+Colonel Bud Crittenden, he called a caucus, him being not only manager
+of Major Zach Taylor Simms' campaign but likewise chairman of the
+district committee. Colonel Bud rapped for order and made a speech. He
+said the paramountest issue was how to nominate Major Simms on that
+there next ballot. Said they'd done trying buying off members of the
+opposition and other regular methods without no success whatsomever.
+Said the Chair would now be glad to hear suggestions from any gen'elman
+present.
+
+"So Morg Holladay he got up and moved the Chair to appoint a committee
+of one or more to shoot up some deligate or, if desired, deligates, in
+the other crowd. But the Colonel said no. We wuz in a strange town, fur
+removed from the time-honored institutions of home, and the police mout
+be hosstile. Customs differed in different towns. Whil'st shooting up of
+a man for purely political purposes mout be accepted as necessary and
+proper in one place; then agin it mout lead to trouble, sich as
+lawsuits, in another. And so on.
+
+"Morg he got up again and said how he recognized the wisdom of the
+Chair's remarks. Then he moved to amend his motion by substituting the
+word 'kidnapping' for 'shooting up.' Said as a general proposition he
+favored shooting up, not being familiar with kidnapping; in fact not
+knowing none of the rules, but was willing to try kidnapping as an
+experiment. But Colonel Bud 'peared to be even more dead set, ef
+possible, agin kidnapping than agin shooting. He advanced the thought
+that shooting was recognized as necessary under proper conditions and
+safeguards, ever'where, but that kidnapping was looked on as bordering
+on the criminal even in the case of a child. How much more so, then, in
+the case of a growed-up adult man and Dimocrat?
+
+"Nobody couldn't think of nothing else then, but Colonel Bud 'lowed we
+was bleeged to do something. There warn't no telling, he said, when
+another one of our deligates would get to craving dainties and
+gormandize hisself with a lot of them fancy vittles the same as Breck
+Calloway had done, and go home all quiled up like a blue racer in a
+pa'tridge nest. Finally Colonel Bud he said he had a suggestion to
+advance his ownse'f, and we all set up and taken notice, knowing there
+wasn't no astuter political leader in the State and maybe none so
+astuted.
+
+"Colonel Bud he said he was shamed to admit that the scheme hadn't
+suggested itself to him or ary other gen'elman present before now--it
+was so plum doggone simple.
+
+"'We got mighty nigh three hours yet,' says Colonel Bud, 'and enduring
+of that time all we got to do is to get one of them Hightower deligates
+deef, dumb and blind drunk--so drunk he won't never git back to answer
+roll-call; and if he does, won't know his own name if he heered it. We
+will simply appint a committee of one, composed of some gen'elman from
+amongst our midst of acknowledged capacity and experience, to accomplish
+this here undertaking, and likewise also at the same time we will pick
+out some accessible deligate in the opposition and commission said
+committee of one to put said opposition deligate out of commission by
+means of social conversation and licker between the present time and the
+hour of 4 P.M. By so doing victory will perch on our banners, and there
+can't be no claim of underhand work or fraud from the other side. It'll
+all be according to the ethics made and purvided in such emergencies.'
+
+"Right off everybody seen Colonel Bud had the right idee, and he put the
+suggestion in the form of a motion and it carried unanimous. Colonel Bud
+stated that it now devolved upon the caucus to name the committee of
+one. And of course we all said that Colonel Bud was the very man for the
+place hisse'f; there wasn't none of us qualified like him for sich a
+job. Everybody was bound to admit that. But Colonel Bud said much as he
+appreciated the honor and high value his colleagues put on his humble
+abilities, he must, purforce, sacrifice pussonal ambition in the
+intrusts of his esteemed friend, Major Zach Taylor Simms. As manager of
+the campaign he must remain right there on the ground to see which way
+the cat was going to jump--and be ready to jump with her. So, if the
+caucus would kindly indulge him for one moment moah he would nominate
+for the post of honor and responsibility as noble a Dimocrat, as true a
+Kintuckian and as chivalrous a gen'elman as ever wore hair. And with
+all the requisited qualifications and gifts, too.
+
+"Needless to state he referred to that sterling leader of Fulman
+County's faithful cohorts, Captain Stonewall Jackson Bugg, Esquire.
+
+"And so everybody voted for Stony. We knowed of course that while Stony
+Bugg had both talents and education he warn't no sich genius as Colonel
+Bud Crittenden when it came to storing away licker; yet so far as the
+record showed he never had been waterlooed by anybody. And we couldn't
+ask no more than that. Stony was all hoped up and proud at being
+selected.
+
+"Then there came up the question of picking out the party of the second
+part, as Colonel Bud said he would call him for short. Colonel Bud said
+he felt the proper object for treatment, beyond the peradventure of a
+doubt, was that there Mr. Wash Burnett, of Bear Grass.
+
+"He believed the caucus would ricolect this here Burnett gen'elman
+referred to by the Chair. And when he described him we all done so,
+owing to his onusual appearance. He was a little teeny feller, rising of
+five feet tall, with a cough that unbuttoned his vest about every three
+minutes. He had eyes 'way round on the side of his head like a
+grasshopper and the blamest, busiest, biggest, scariest, nervousest
+Adamses' apple I ever see. It 'peared like it tried to beat his brains
+out every time he taken a swaller of licker--or even water.
+
+"Right there old Squire Buck Throckmorton objected to the selection of
+Mr. Wash Burnett. Near as I can recall here's what Squire says:
+
+"'You all air suttenly fixing to make a monstrous big mistake. I've give
+a heap of study in my time to this question of licker drams. I have
+observed that when you combine in a gen'elman them two features jest
+mentioned--a Adamses' apple that's always running up and down like a cat
+squirrel on a snag, and eyes away 'round yonder so's he can see both
+ways at once without moving his head--you've got a gen'elman that's
+specially created to store away licker.
+
+"'I don't care ef your Bear Grass County man is so shortwaisted he can
+use his hip pockets for year-muffs in the winter time. Concede, if you
+will, that every time he coughs it shakes the enamel off'n his teeth.
+The pint remains, I repeat, my feller citizens, that there ain't no
+licker ever distilled can throw him with them eyes and that there
+Adamses' apple. You gen'elmen 'd a sight better pick out some big feller
+which his eyes is bunched up close together like the yallers in a double
+yolk aig and which his Adamses' apple is comparatively stationary.'
+
+"But Colonel Bud, he wouldn't listen. Maybe he was kinder jealous at
+seeing old Squire Buck Throckmorton setting hisse'f up as a jedge of
+human nature that-a-way. Even the greatest of us air but mortal, and I
+reckon Colonel Bud wouldn't admit that anybody could outdo him reading
+character offhand, and he taken the floor agin. Replying to his
+venerable friend and neighbor, he would say that the Squire was talking
+like a plain derned fool. Continuing he would add that it didn't make no
+difference if both eyes was riding the bridge of the nose side-saddle,
+or if they was crowding the ears for position.
+
+"'Now, as to the Adamses' apple, which he would consider next in this
+brief reply,' he went on to explain, 'Science teached us that the
+Adamses' apple didn't have no regular functions to speak of, and what
+few it did have bore no relation to the consumption of licker in the
+reg'lar and customary manner, viz., to-wit, by swallowing of the same
+from demijohn, dipper, tumbler or gourd. The Adamses' apple was but a
+natchel ornament nestled at the base of the chin whiskers. He asked if
+any gen'elman in the sound of his voice ever see a bowlder on the side
+of a dreen, enlessen it was covered, in whole or in part, by vines? The
+same wise provision of Nature was to be observed in the Adamses' apple,
+it being, ef he mout be pardoned for using such a figger of speech, at
+sich a time, the bowlder, and the chin whiskers, the vine.
+
+"'It's the size that counts,' said Colonel Bud Crittenden. 'It natchelly
+stands to reason that a big scaffolded-up man like Stony Bugg can
+chamber more licker than a little runt like that Burnett. Why, he could
+do it if Burnett was spangled all over with Adamses' apples and all of
+them palpitating like skeered lizards. He could do it if Burnett's eyes
+were so fur apart he was cross-eyed behind. Besides, this here Burnett
+is a mountaineering gen'elman, and I mistrust not, he's been educated
+altogether on white moonshine licker fresh out of the still. When red
+licker, with some age behind it, takes holt of his abbreviated vitals
+he's shore going to wilt and wilt sudden and complete.
+
+"'Red licker, say about fourteen year old, is mighty deceivin' to a
+mountaineer. It tastes so smooth he forgets that it's strong enough to
+take off warts.'
+
+"Well, suzz, that argument fetched us and we all coincided; all but
+Squire Buck Throckmorton, who still looked mighty dubiousome. Anyway,
+Stony Bugg, he went out and found this here Mister Wash Burnett and
+invited him to see if there was anything left in the bar; and Burnett,
+he fell into the trap, not apparently suspicioning nothing, and said he
+didn't care if he did. So they sashayed off together t'wards the nighest
+grocery arm in arm.
+
+"Being puffectly easy in our minds, we all went back to the convention
+hall 'bout half past two. The Forks of Elkhorn William Jinnings Bryan
+and Silver Cornet Band was there and give a concert, playin 'Dixie' foah
+times and 'Old Kentucky Home' five. And Senator Joe Blackburn spoke
+three or foah times. I never before heard Republicans called out of
+their name like he done it. Senator Joe Blackburn shore proved hisse'f
+a statesman that day.
+
+"Well, it got on t'wards half past three, and while we warn't noways
+uneasy we taken to wishing that Stony Bugg would report back. At ten
+minutes befoah foah there warn't no signs of Stony Bugg. At five minutes
+befoah foah our fellers was gettin' shore nuff worried, and jest then
+the doah opened and in comes that there little Wash Burnett--alone! He
+was coughing fit to kill hisse'f. His Adamses' apple was sticking out
+like a guinney egg, and making about eighteen reverlutions to the
+second, and them fur-apart eyes of his'n was the glassiest I ever seen,
+but it was him all right. He stopped jest inside the hall and turned up
+his pants at the bottom and stepped high over a shadder on the floor.
+But he warn't too fur gone to walk. Nor he warn't too fur gone to vote.
+
+"'Fore we could more'n ketch our breaths the chairman called for a
+ballot and they taken it, and General Hightower was nominated--52 to
+51--Captain Stonewall J. Bugg being recorded by the secretary as absent
+and not voting. And while the up-state fellers was carrying on and
+swapping cheers with one another, our fellers sat there jest
+dumfoundered. Colonel Bud Crittenden, he was the first one to speak.
+
+"'Major Simms being beat ain't the wust of it,' he says. 'Our committee
+on irrigation is deceased. The solemn and sorryful duty devolves upon
+us, his associates, to go send a dispatch to Mrs. Stony Bugg and fambly
+informing them that they air widows. Stony, he must have choked hisse'f
+to death on some free barroom vittles, or else he got run over by a
+hawse and waggin. Otherwise he'd a' been here as arranged, and that
+there little human wart of a Wash Burnett would be spraddled out on the
+floor, face-down, right this very minute, a'trying to swim out of some
+licker store dog fashion.'
+
+"But jest then we heard a kind of to-do outside, and the doah flew open
+and something rolled in and flattened out in the main aisle. Would you
+believe me, it was Stony Bugg, more puffectly disguised in licker than I
+ever expected to see.
+
+"Two of us grabbed holt of him by the arms and pulled him up on his
+feet. He opened his eyes kind of dazed-like and looked around. Colonel
+Bud, he done the talking.
+
+"'Stony,' he says, not angry but real pitiful, in his tones, 'Stony, why
+the name of Gawd didn't you git him drunk?'
+
+"Stony, he sort of studied a minute. Then he says, slow and deliberate
+and thick:
+
+"'Drunk? Why, boys, I gozzom so drunk I couldn't see him.'
+
+"And as we came on home, we all had to admit you couldn't git a man no
+drunker than that, and live."
+
+
+
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