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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sixes and Sevens, by O. Henry
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Sixes and Sevens
+
+Author: O. Henry
+
+Release Date: August 14, 2000 [eBook #2851]
+[Most recently updated: October 30, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Glynn Burleson and Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIXES AND SEVENS ***
+
+
+
+
+Sixes and Sevens
+
+by O. Henry
+
+
+Contents
+
+ I. THE LAST OF THE TROUBADOURS
+ II. THE SLEUTHS
+ III. WITCHES’ LOAVES
+ IV. THE PRIDE OF THE CITIES
+ V. HOLDING UP A TRAIN
+ VI. ULYSSES AND THE DOGMAN
+ VII. THE CHAMPION OF THE WEATHER
+ VIII. MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN
+ IX. AT ARMS WITH MORPHEUS
+ X. A GHOST OF A CHANCE
+ XI. JIMMY HAYES AND MURIEL
+ XII. THE DOOR OF UNREST
+ XIII. THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES
+ XIV. LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE
+ XV. OCTOBER AND JUNE
+ XVI. THE CHURCH WITH AN OVERSHOT-WHEEL
+ XVII. NEW YORK BY CAMP FIRE LIGHT
+ XVIII. THE ADVENTURES OF SHAMROCK JOLNES
+ XIX. THE LADY HIGHER UP
+ XX. THE GREATER CONEY
+ XXI. LAW AND ORDER
+ XXII. TRANSFORMATION OF MARTIN BURNEY
+ XXIII. THE CALIPH AND THE CAD
+ XXIV. THE DIAMOND OF KALI
+ XXV. THE DAY WE CELEBRATE
+
+
+
+
+I.
+THE LAST OF THE TROUBADOURS
+
+
+Inexorably Sam Galloway saddled his pony. He was going away from the
+Rancho Altito at the end of a three-months’ visit. It is not to be
+expected that a guest should put up with wheat coffee and biscuits
+yellow-streaked with saleratus for longer than that. Nick Napoleon, the
+big Negro man cook, had never been able to make good biscuits. Once
+before, when Nick was cooking at the Willow Ranch, Sam had been forced
+to fly from his _cuisine_, after only a six-weeks’ sojourn.
+
+On Sam’s face was an expression of sorrow, deepened with regret and
+slightly tempered by the patient forgiveness of a connoisseur who
+cannot be understood. But very firmly and inexorably he buckled his
+saddle-cinches, looped his stake-rope and hung it to his saddle-horn,
+tied his slicker and coat on the cantle, and looped his quirt on his
+right wrist. The Merrydews (householders of the Rancho Altito), men,
+women, children, and servants, vassals, visitors, employés, dogs, and
+casual callers were grouped in the “gallery” of the ranch house, all
+with faces set to the tune of melancholy and grief. For, as the coming
+of Sam Galloway to any ranch, camp, or cabin between the rivers Frio or
+Bravo del Norte aroused joy, so his departure caused mourning and
+distress.
+
+And then, during absolute silence, except for the bumping of a hind
+elbow of a hound dog as he pursued a wicked flea, Sam tenderly and
+carefully tied his guitar across his saddle on top of his slicker and
+coat. The guitar was in a green duck bag; and if you catch the
+significance of it, it explains Sam.
+
+Sam Galloway was the Last of the Troubadours. Of course you know about
+the troubadours. The encyclopædia says they flourished between the
+eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. What they flourished doesn’t
+seem clear—you may be pretty sure it wasn’t a sword: maybe it was a
+fiddlebow, or a forkful of spaghetti, or a lady’s scarf. Anyhow, Sam
+Galloway was one of ’em.
+
+Sam put on a martyred expression as he mounted his pony. But the
+expression on his face was hilarious compared with the one on his
+pony’s. You see, a pony gets to know his rider mighty well, and it is
+not unlikely that cow ponies in pastures and at hitching racks had
+often guyed Sam’s pony for being ridden by a guitar player instead of
+by a rollicking, cussing, all-wool cowboy. No man is a hero to his
+saddle-horse. And even an escalator in a department store might be
+excused for tripping up a troubadour.
+
+Oh, I know I’m one; and so are you. You remember the stories you
+memorize and the card tricks you study and that little piece on the
+piano—how does it go?—ti-tum-te-tum-ti-tum—those little Arabian Ten
+Minute Entertainments that you furnish when you go up to call on your
+rich Aunt Jane. You should know that _omnæ personæ in tres partes
+divisæ sunt_. Namely: Barons, Troubadours, and Workers. Barons have no
+inclination to read such folderol as this; and Workers have no time: so
+I know you must be a Troubadour, and that you will understand Sam
+Galloway. Whether we sing, act, dance, write, lecture, or paint, we are
+only troubadours; so let us make the worst of it.
+
+The pony with the Dante Alighieri face, guided by the pressure of Sam’s
+knees, bore that wandering minstrel sixteen miles southeastward. Nature
+was in her most benignant mood. League after league of delicate, sweet
+flowerets made fragrant the gently undulating prairie. The east wind
+tempered the spring warmth; wool-white clouds flying in from the
+Mexican Gulf hindered the direct rays of the April sun. Sam sang songs
+as he rode. Under his pony’s bridle he had tucked some sprigs of
+chaparral to keep away the deer flies. Thus crowned, the long-faced
+quadruped looked more Dantesque than before, and, judging by his
+countenance, seemed to think of Beatrice.
+
+Straight as topography permitted, Sam rode to the sheep ranch of old
+man Ellison. A visit to a sheep ranch seemed to him desirable just
+then. There had been too many people, too much noise, argument,
+competition, confusion, at Rancho Altito. He had never conferred upon
+old man Ellison the favour of sojourning at his ranch; but he knew he
+would be welcome. The troubadour is his own passport everywhere. The
+Workers in the castle let down the drawbridge to him, and the Baron
+sets him at his left hand at table in the banquet hall. There ladies
+smile upon him and applaud his songs and stories, while the Workers
+bring boars’ heads and flagons. If the Baron nods once or twice in his
+carved oaken chair, he does not do it maliciously.
+
+Old man Ellison welcomed the troubadour flatteringly. He had often
+heard praises of Sam Galloway from other ranchmen who had been
+complimented by his visits, but had never aspired to such an honour for
+his own humble barony. I say barony because old man Ellison was the
+Last of the Barons. Of course, Mr. Bulwer-Lytton lived too early to
+know him, or he wouldn’t have conferred that sobriquet upon Warwick. In
+life it is the duty and the function of the Baron to provide work for
+the Workers and lodging and shelter for the Troubadours.
+
+Old man Ellison was a shrunken old man, with a short, yellow-white
+beard and a face lined and seamed by past-and-gone smiles. His ranch
+was a little two-room box house in a grove of hackberry trees in the
+lonesomest part of the sheep country. His household consisted of a
+Kiowa Indian man cook, four hounds, a pet sheep, and a half-tamed
+coyote chained to a fence-post. He owned 3,000 sheep, which he ran on
+two sections of leased land and many thousands of acres neither leased
+nor owned. Three or four times a year some one who spoke his language
+would ride up to his gate and exchange a few bald ideas with him. Those
+were red-letter days to old man Ellison. Then in what illuminated,
+embossed, and gorgeously decorated capitals must have been written the
+day on which a troubadour—a troubadour who, according to the
+encyclopædia, should have flourished between the eleventh and the
+thirteenth centuries—drew rein at the gates of his baronial castle!
+
+Old man Ellison’s smiles came back and filled his wrinkles when he saw
+Sam. He hurried out of the house in his shuffling, limping way to greet
+him.
+
+“Hello, Mr. Ellison,” called Sam cheerfully. “Thought I’d drop over and
+see you a while. Notice you’ve had fine rains on your range. They ought
+to make good grazing for your spring lambs.”
+
+“Well, well, well,” said old man Ellison. “I’m mighty glad to see you,
+Sam. I never thought you’d take the trouble to ride over to as
+out-of-the-way an old ranch as this. But you’re mighty welcome. ’Light.
+I’ve got a sack of new oats in the kitchen—shall I bring out a feed for
+your hoss?”
+
+“Oats for him?” said Sam, derisively. “No, sir-ee. He’s as fat as a pig
+now on grass. He don’t get rode enough to keep him in condition. I’ll
+just turn him in the horse pasture with a drag rope on if you don’t
+mind.”
+
+I am positive that never during the eleventh and thirteenth centuries
+did Baron, Troubadour, and Worker amalgamate as harmoniously as their
+parallels did that evening at old man Ellison’s sheep ranch. The
+Kiowa’s biscuits were light and tasty and his coffee strong.
+Ineradicable hospitality and appreciation glowed on old man Ellison’s
+weather-tanned face. As for the troubadour, he said to himself that he
+had stumbled upon pleasant places indeed. A well-cooked, abundant meal,
+a host whom his lightest attempt to entertain seemed to delight far
+beyond the merits of the exertion, and the reposeful atmosphere that
+his sensitive soul at that time craved united to confer upon him a
+satisfaction and luxurious ease that he had seldom found on his tours
+of the ranches.
+
+After the delectable supper, Sam untied the green duck bag and took out
+his guitar. Not by way of payment, mind you—neither Sam Galloway nor
+any other of the true troubadours are lineal descendants of the late
+Tommy Tucker. You have read of Tommy Tucker in the works of the
+esteemed but often obscure Mother Goose. Tommy Tucker sang for his
+supper. No true troubadour would do that. He would have his supper, and
+then sing for Art’s sake.
+
+Sam Galloway’s repertoire comprised about fifty funny stories and
+between thirty and forty songs. He by no means stopped there. He could
+talk through twenty cigarettes on any topic that you brought up. And he
+never sat up when he could lie down; and never stood when he could sit.
+I am strongly disposed to linger with him, for I am drawing a portrait
+as well as a blunt pencil and a tattered thesaurus will allow.
+
+I wish you could have seen him: he was small and tough and inactive
+beyond the power of imagination to conceive. He wore an
+ultramarine-blue woollen shirt laced down the front with a pearl-gray,
+exaggerated sort of shoestring, indestructible brown duck clothes,
+inevitable high-heeled boots with Mexican spurs, and a Mexican straw
+sombrero.
+
+That evening Sam and old man Ellison dragged their chairs out under the
+hackberry trees. They lighted cigarettes; and the troubadour gaily
+touched his guitar. Many of the songs he sang were the weird,
+melancholy, minor-keyed _canciones_ that he had learned from the
+Mexican sheep herders and _vaqueros_. One, in particular, charmed and
+soothed the soul of the lonely baron. It was a favourite song of the
+sheep herders, beginning: “_Huile, huile, palomita_,” which being
+translated means, “Fly, fly, little dove.” Sam sang it for old man
+Ellison many times that evening.
+
+The troubadour stayed on at the old man’s ranch. There was peace and
+quiet and appreciation there, such as he had not found in the noisy
+camps of the cattle kings. No audience in the world could have crowned
+the work of poet, musician, or artist with more worshipful and
+unflagging approval than that bestowed upon his efforts by old man
+Ellison. No visit by a royal personage to a humble woodchopper or
+peasant could have been received with more flattering thankfulness and
+joy.
+
+On a cool, canvas-covered cot in the shade of the hackberry trees Sam
+Galloway passed the greater part of his time. There he rolled his brown
+paper cigarettes, read such tedious literature as the ranch afforded,
+and added to his repertoire of improvisations that he played so
+expertly on his guitar. To him, as a slave ministering to a great lord,
+the Kiowa brought cool water from the red jar hanging under the brush
+shelter, and food when he called for it. The prairie zephyrs fanned him
+mildly; mocking-birds at morn and eve competed with but scarce equalled
+the sweet melodies of his lyre; a perfumed stillness seemed to fill all
+his world. While old man Ellison was pottering among his flocks of
+sheep on his mile-an-hour pony, and while the Kiowa took his siesta in
+the burning sunshine at the end of the kitchen, Sam would lie on his
+cot thinking what a happy world he lived in, and how kind it is to the
+ones whose mission in life it is to give entertainment and pleasure.
+Here he had food and lodging as good as he had ever longed for;
+absolute immunity from care or exertion or strife; an endless welcome,
+and a host whose delight at the sixteenth repetition of a song or a
+story was as keen as at its initial giving. Was there ever a troubadour
+of old who struck upon as royal a castle in his wanderings? While he
+lay thus, meditating upon his blessings, little brown cottontails would
+shyly frolic through the yard; a covey of white-topknotted blue quail
+would run past, in single file, twenty yards away; a _paisano_ bird,
+out hunting for tarantulas, would hop upon the fence and salute him
+with sweeping flourishes of its long tail. In the eighty-acre horse
+pasture the pony with the Dantesque face grew fat and almost smiling.
+The troubadour was at the end of his wanderings.
+
+Old man Ellison was his own _vaciero_. That means that he supplied his
+sheep camps with wood, water, and rations by his own labours instead of
+hiring a _vaciero_. On small ranches it is often done.
+
+One morning he started for the camp of Incarnación Felipe de la Cruz y
+Monte Piedras (one of his sheep herders) with the week’s usual rations
+of brown beans, coffee, meal, and sugar. Two miles away on the trail
+from old Fort Ewing he met, face to face, a terrible being called King
+James, mounted on a fiery, prancing, Kentucky-bred horse.
+
+King James’s real name was James King; but people reversed it because
+it seemed to fit him better, and also because it seemed to please his
+majesty. King James was the biggest cattleman between the Alamo plaza
+in San Antone and Bill Hopper’s saloon in Brownsville. Also he was the
+loudest and most offensive bully and braggart and bad man in southwest
+Texas. And he always made good whenever he bragged; and the more noise
+he made the more dangerous he was. In the story papers it is always the
+quiet, mild-mannered man with light blue eyes and a low voice who turns
+out to be really dangerous; but in real life and in this story such is
+not the case. Give me my choice between assaulting a large, loudmouthed
+rough-houser and an inoffensive stranger with blue eyes sitting quietly
+in a corner, and you will see something doing in the corner every time.
+
+King James, as I intended to say earlier, was a fierce,
+two-hundred-pound, sunburned, blond man, as pink as an October
+strawberry, and with two horizontal slits under shaggy red eyebrows for
+eyes. On that day he wore a flannel shirt that was tan-coloured, with
+the exception of certain large areas which were darkened by
+transudations due to the summer sun. There seemed to be other clothing
+and garnishings about him, such as brown duck trousers stuffed into
+immense boots, and red handkerchiefs and revolvers; and a shotgun laid
+across his saddle and a leather belt with millions of cartridges
+shining in it—but your mind skidded off such accessories; what held
+your gaze was just the two little horizontal slits that he used for
+eyes.
+
+This was the man that old man Ellison met on the trail; and when you
+count up in the baron’s favour that he was sixty-five and weighed
+ninety-eight pounds and had heard of King James’s record and that he
+(the baron) had a hankering for the _vita simplex_ and had no gun with
+him and wouldn’t have used it if he had, you can’t censure him if I
+tell you that the smiles with which the troubadour had filled his
+wrinkles went out of them and left them plain wrinkles again. But he
+was not the kind of baron that flies from danger. He reined in the
+mile-an-hour pony (no difficult feat), and saluted the formidable
+monarch.
+
+King James expressed himself with royal directness. “You’re that old
+snoozer that’s running sheep on this range, ain’t you?” said he. “What
+right have you got to do it? Do you own any land, or lease any?”
+
+“I have two sections leased from the state,” said old man Ellison,
+mildly.
+
+“Not by no means you haven’t,” said King James. “Your lease expired
+yesterday; and I had a man at the land office on the minute to take it
+up. You don’t control a foot of grass in Texas. You sheep men have got
+to git. Your time’s up. It’s a cattle country, and there ain’t any room
+in it for snoozers. This range you’ve got your sheep on is mine. I’m
+putting up a wire fence, forty by sixty miles; and if there’s a sheep
+inside of it when it’s done it’ll be a dead one. I’ll give you a week
+to move yours away. If they ain’t gone by then, I’ll send six men over
+here with Winchesters to make mutton out of the whole lot. And if I
+find you here at the same time this is what you’ll get.”
+
+King James patted the breech of his shot-gun warningly.
+
+Old man Ellison rode on to the camp of Incarnación. He sighed many
+times, and the wrinkles in his face grew deeper. Rumours that the old
+order was about to change had reached him before. The end of Free Grass
+was in sight. Other troubles, too, had been accumulating upon his
+shoulders. His flocks were decreasing instead of growing; the price of
+wool was declining at every clip; even Bradshaw, the storekeeper at
+Frio City, at whose store he bought his ranch supplies, was dunning him
+for his last six months’ bill and threatening to cut him off. And so
+this last greatest calamity suddenly dealt out to him by the terrible
+King James was a crusher.
+
+When the old man got back to the ranch at sunset he found Sam Galloway
+lying on his cot, propped against a roll of blankets and wool sacks,
+fingering his guitar.
+
+“Hello, Uncle Ben,” the troubadour called, cheerfully. “You rolled in
+early this evening. I been trying a new twist on the Spanish Fandango
+to-day. I just about got it. Here’s how she goes—listen.”
+
+“That’s fine, that’s mighty fine,” said old man Ellison, sitting on the
+kitchen step and rubbing his white, Scotch-terrier whiskers. “I reckon
+you’ve got all the musicians beat east and west, Sam, as far as the
+roads are cut out.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” said Sam, reflectively. “But I certainly do get
+there on variations. I guess I can handle anything in five flats about
+as well as any of ’em. But you look kind of fagged out, Uncle Ben—ain’t
+you feeling right well this evening?”
+
+“Little tired; that’s all, Sam. If you ain’t played yourself out, let’s
+have that Mexican piece that starts off with: ‘_Huile, huile,
+palomita_.’ It seems that that song always kind of soothes and comforts
+me after I’ve been riding far or anything bothers me.”
+
+“Why, _seguramente, señor_,” said Sam. “I’ll hit her up for you as
+often as you like. And before I forget about it, Uncle Ben, you want to
+jerk Bradshaw up about them last hams he sent us. They’re just a little
+bit strong.”
+
+A man sixty-five years old, living on a sheep ranch and beset by a
+complication of disasters, cannot successfully and continuously
+dissemble. Moreover, a troubadour has eyes quick to see unhappiness in
+others around him—because it disturbs his own ease. So, on the next
+day, Sam again questioned the old man about his air of sadness and
+abstraction. Then old man Ellison told him the story of King James’s
+threats and orders and that pale melancholy and red ruin appeared to
+have marked him for their own. The troubadour took the news
+thoughtfully. He had heard much about King James.
+
+On the third day of the seven days of grace allowed him by the autocrat
+of the range, old man Ellison drove his buckboard to Frio City to fetch
+some necessary supplies for the ranch. Bradshaw was hard but not
+implacable. He divided the old man’s order by two, and let him have a
+little more time. One article secured was a new, fine ham for the
+pleasure of the troubadour.
+
+Five miles out of Frio City on his way home the old man met King James
+riding into town. His majesty could never look anything but fierce and
+menacing, but to-day his slits of eyes appeared to be a little wider
+than they usually were.
+
+“Good day,” said the king, gruffly. “I’ve been wanting to see you. I
+hear it said by a cowman from Sandy yesterday that you was from Jackson
+County, Mississippi, originally. I want to know if that’s a fact.”
+
+“Born there,” said old man Ellison, “and raised there till I was
+twenty-one.”
+
+“This man says,” went on King James, “that he thinks you was related to
+the Jackson County Reeveses. Was he right?”
+
+“Aunt Caroline Reeves,” said the old man, “was my half-sister.”
+
+“She was my aunt,” said King James. “I run away from home when I was
+sixteen. Now, let’s re-talk over some things that we discussed a few
+days ago. They call me a bad man; and they’re only half right. There’s
+plenty of room in my pasture for your bunch of sheep and their increase
+for a long time to come. Aunt Caroline used to cut out sheep in cake
+dough and bake ’em for me. You keep your sheep where they are, and use
+all the range you want. How’s your finances?”
+
+The old man related his woes in detail, dignifiedly, with restraint and
+candour.
+
+“She used to smuggle extra grub into my school basket—I’m speaking of
+Aunt Caroline,” said King James. “I’m going over to Frio City to-day,
+and I’ll ride back by your ranch to-morrow. I’ll draw $2,000 out of the
+bank there and bring it over to you; and I’ll tell Bradshaw to let you
+have everything you want on credit. You are bound to have heard the old
+saying at home, that the Jackson County Reeveses and Kings would stick
+closer by each other than chestnut burrs. Well, I’m a King yet whenever
+I run across a Reeves. So you look out for me along about sundown
+to-morrow, and don’t worry about nothing. Shouldn’t wonder if the dry
+spell don’t kill out the young grass.”
+
+Old man Ellison drove happily ranchward. Once more the smiles filled
+out his wrinkles. Very suddenly, by the magic of kinship and the good
+that lies somewhere in all hearts, his troubles had been removed.
+
+On reaching the ranch he found that Sam Galloway was not there. His
+guitar hung by its buckskin string to a hackberry limb, moaning as the
+gulf breeze blew across its masterless strings.
+
+The Kiowa endeavoured to explain.
+
+“Sam, he catch pony,” said he, “and say he ride to Frio City. What for
+no can damn sabe. Say he come back to-night. Maybe so. That all.”
+
+As the first stars came out the troubadour rode back to his haven. He
+pastured his pony and went into the house, his spurs jingling
+martially.
+
+Old man Ellison sat at the kitchen table, having a tin cup of
+before-supper coffee. He looked contented and pleased.
+
+“Hello, Sam,” said he. “I’m darned glad to see ye back. I don’t know
+how I managed to get along on this ranch, anyhow, before ye dropped in
+to cheer things up. I’ll bet ye’ve been skylarking around with some of
+them Frio City gals, now, that’s kept ye so late.”
+
+And then old man Ellison took another look at Sam’s face and saw that
+the minstrel had changed to the man of action.
+
+And while Sam is unbuckling from his waist old man Ellison’s
+six-shooter, that the latter had left behind when he drove to town, we
+may well pause to remark that anywhere and whenever a troubadour lays
+down the guitar and takes up the sword trouble is sure to follow. It is
+not the expert thrust of Athos nor the cold skill of Aramis nor the
+iron wrist of Porthos that we have to fear—it is the Gascon’s fury—the
+wild and unacademic attack of the troubadour—the sword of D’Artagnan.
+
+“I done it,” said Sam. “I went over to Frio City to do it. I couldn’t
+let him put the skibunk on you, Uncle Ben. I met him in Summers’s
+saloon. I knowed what to do. I said a few things to him that nobody
+else heard. He reached for his gun first—half a dozen fellows saw him
+do it—but I got mine unlimbered first. Three doses I gave him—right
+around the lungs, and a saucer could have covered up all of ’em. He
+won’t bother you no more.”
+
+“This—is—King—James—you speak—of?” asked old man Ellison, while he
+sipped his coffee.
+
+“You bet it was. And they took me before the county judge; and the
+witnesses what saw him draw his gun first was all there. Well, of
+course, they put me under $300 bond to appear before the court, but
+there was four or five boys on the spot ready to sign the bail. He
+won’t bother you no more, Uncle Ben. You ought to have seen how close
+them bullet holes was together. I reckon playing a guitar as much as I
+do must kind of limber a fellow’s trigger finger up a little, don’t you
+think, Uncle Ben?”
+
+Then there was a little silence in the castle except for the
+spluttering of a venison steak that the Kiowa was cooking.
+
+“Sam,” said old man Ellison, stroking his white whiskers with a
+tremulous hand, “would you mind getting the guitar and playing that
+‘_Huile, huile, palomita_’ piece once or twice? It always seems to be
+kind of soothing and comforting when a man’s tired and fagged out.”
+
+There is no more to be said, except that the title of the story is
+wrong. It should have been called “The Last of the Barons.” There never
+will be an end to the troubadours; and now and then it does seem that
+the jingle of their guitars will drown the sound of the muffled blows
+of the pickaxes and trip hammers of all the Workers in the world.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+THE SLEUTHS
+
+
+In The Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and
+completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out. All the
+agencies of inquisition—the hounds of the trail, the sleuths of the
+city’s labyrinths, the closet detectives of theory and induction—will
+be invoked to the search. Most often the man’s face will be seen no
+more. Sometimes he will reappear in Sheboygan or in the wilds of Terre
+Haute, calling himself one of the synonyms of “Smith,” and without
+memory of events up to a certain time, including his grocer’s bill.
+Sometimes it will be found, after dragging the rivers, and polling the
+restaurants to see if he may be waiting for a well-done sirloin, that
+he has moved next door.
+
+This snuffing out of a human being like the erasure of a chalk man from
+a blackboard is one of the most impressive themes in dramaturgy.
+
+The case of Mary Snyder, in point, should not be without interest.
+
+A man of middle age, of the name of Meeks, came from the West to New
+York to find his sister, Mrs. Mary Snyder, a widow, aged fifty-two, who
+had been living for a year in a tenement house in a crowded
+neighbourhood.
+
+At her address he was told that Mary Snyder had moved away longer than
+a month before. No one could tell him her new address.
+
+On coming out Mr. Meeks addressed a policeman who was standing on the
+corner, and explained his dilemma.
+
+“My sister is very poor,” he said, “and I am anxious to find her. I
+have recently made quite a lot of money in a lead mine, and I want her
+to share my prosperity. There is no use in advertising her, because she
+cannot read.”
+
+The policeman pulled his moustache and looked so thoughtful and mighty
+that Meeks could almost feel the joyful tears of his sister Mary
+dropping upon his bright blue tie.
+
+“You go down in the Canal Street neighbourhood,” said the policeman,
+“and get a job drivin’ the biggest dray you can find. There’s old women
+always gettin’ knocked over by drays down there. You might see ’er
+among ’em. If you don’t want to do that you better go ’round to
+headquarters and get ’em to put a fly cop onto the dame.”
+
+At police headquarters, Meeks received ready assistance. A general
+alarm was sent out, and copies of a photograph of Mary Snyder that her
+brother had were distributed among the stations. In Mulberry Street the
+chief assigned Detective Mullins to the case.
+
+The detective took Meeks aside and said:
+
+“This is not a very difficult case to unravel. Shave off your whiskers,
+fill your pockets with good cigars, and meet me in the café of the
+Waldorf at three o’clock this afternoon.”
+
+Meeks obeyed. He found Mullins there. They had a bottle of wine, while
+the detective asked questions concerning the missing woman.
+
+“Now,” said Mullins, “New York is a big city, but we’ve got the
+detective business systematized. There are two ways we can go about
+finding your sister. We will try one of ’em first. You say she’s
+fifty-two?”
+
+“A little past,” said Meeks.
+
+The detective conducted the Westerner to a branch advertising office of
+one of the largest dailies. There he wrote the following “ad” and
+submitted it to Meeks:
+
+“Wanted, at once—one hundred attractive chorus girls for a new musical
+comedy. Apply all day at No. –––– Broadway.”
+
+Meeks was indignant.
+
+“My sister,” said he, “is a poor, hard-working, elderly woman. I do not
+see what aid an advertisement of this kind would be toward finding
+her.”
+
+“All right,” said the detective. “I guess you don’t know New York. But
+if you’ve got a grouch against this scheme we’ll try the other one.
+It’s a sure thing. But it’ll cost you more.”
+
+“Never mind the expense,” said Meeks; “we’ll try it.”
+
+The sleuth led him back to the Waldorf. “Engage a couple of bedrooms
+and a parlour,” he advised, “and let’s go up.”
+
+This was done, and the two were shown to a superb suite on the fourth
+floor. Meeks looked puzzled. The detective sank into a velvet armchair,
+and pulled out his cigar case.
+
+“I forgot to suggest, old man,” he said, “that you should have taken
+the rooms by the month. They wouldn’t have stuck you so much for ’em.
+
+“By the month!” exclaimed Meeks. “What do you mean?”
+
+“Oh, it’ll take time to work the game this way. I told you it would
+cost you more. We’ll have to wait till spring. There’ll be a new city
+directory out then. Very likely your sister’s name and address will be
+in it.”
+
+Meeks rid himself of the city detective at once. On the next day some
+one advised him to consult Shamrock Jolnes, New York’s famous private
+detective, who demanded fabulous fees, but performed miracles in the
+way of solving mysteries and crimes.
+
+After waiting for two hours in the anteroom of the great detective’s
+apartment, Meeks was shown into his presence. Jolnes sat in a purple
+dressing-gown at an inlaid ivory chess table, with a magazine before
+him, trying to solve the mystery of “They.” The famous sleuth’s thin,
+intellectual face, piercing eyes, and rate per word are too well known
+to need description.
+
+Meeks set forth his errand. “My fee, if successful, will be $500,” said
+Shamrock Jolnes.
+
+Meeks bowed his agreement to the price.
+
+“I will undertake your case, Mr. Meeks,” said Jolnes, finally. “The
+disappearance of people in this city has always been an interesting
+problem to me. I remember a case that I brought to a successful outcome
+a year ago. A family bearing the name of Clark disappeared suddenly
+from a small flat in which they were living. I watched the flat
+building for two months for a clue. One day it struck me that a certain
+milkman and a grocer’s boy always walked backward when they carried
+their wares upstairs. Following out by induction the idea that this
+observation gave me, I at once located the missing family. They had
+moved into the flat across the hall and changed their name to Kralc.”
+
+Shamrock Jolnes and his client went to the tenement house where Mary
+Snyder had lived, and the detective demanded to be shown the room in
+which she had lived. It had been occupied by no tenant since her
+disappearance.
+
+The room was small, dingy, and poorly furnished. Meeks seated himself
+dejectedly on a broken chair, while the great detective searched the
+walls and floor and the few sticks of old, rickety furniture for a
+clue.
+
+At the end of half an hour Jolnes had collected a few seemingly
+unintelligible articles—a cheap black hat pin, a piece torn off a
+theatre programme, and the end of a small torn card on which was the
+word “left” and the characters “C 12.”
+
+Shamrock Jolnes leaned against the mantel for ten minutes, with his
+head resting upon his hand, and an absorbed look upon his intellectual
+face. At the end of that time he exclaimed, with animation:
+
+“Come, Mr. Meeks; the problem is solved. I can take you directly to the
+house where your sister is living. And you may have no fears concerning
+her welfare, for she is amply provided with funds—for the present at
+least.”
+
+Meeks felt joy and wonder in equal proportions.
+
+“How did you manage it?” he asked, with admiration in his tones.
+
+Perhaps Jolnes’s only weakness was a professional pride in his
+wonderful achievements in induction. He was ever ready to astound and
+charm his listeners by describing his methods.
+
+“By elimination,” said Jolnes, spreading his clues upon a little table,
+“I got rid of certain parts of the city to which Mrs. Snyder might have
+removed. You see this hatpin? That eliminates Brooklyn. No woman
+attempts to board a car at the Brooklyn Bridge without being sure that
+she carries a hatpin with which to fight her way into a seat. And now I
+will demonstrate to you that she could not have gone to Harlem. Behind
+this door are two hooks in the wall. Upon one of these Mrs. Snyder has
+hung her bonnet, and upon the other her shawl. You will observe that
+the bottom of the hanging shawl has gradually made a soiled streak
+against the plastered wall. The mark is clean-cut, proving that there
+is no fringe on the shawl. Now, was there ever a case where a
+middle-aged woman, wearing a shawl, boarded a Harlem train without
+there being a fringe on the shawl to catch in the gate and delay the
+passengers behind her? So we eliminate Harlem.
+
+“Therefore I conclude that Mrs. Snyder has not moved very far away. On
+this torn piece of card you see the word ‘Left,’ the letter ‘C,’ and
+the number ‘12.’ Now, I happen to know that No. 12 Avenue C is a
+first-class boarding house, far beyond your sister’s means—as we
+suppose. But then I find this piece of a theatre programme, crumpled
+into an odd shape. What meaning does it convey. None to you, very
+likely, Mr. Meeks; but it is eloquent to one whose habits and training
+take cognizance of the smallest things.
+
+“You have told me that your sister was a scrub woman. She scrubbed the
+floors of offices and hallways. Let us assume that she procured such
+work to perform in a theatre. Where is valuable jewellery lost the
+oftenest, Mr. Meeks? In the theatres, of course. Look at that piece of
+programme, Mr. Meeks. Observe the round impression in it. It has been
+wrapped around a ring—perhaps a ring of great value. Mrs. Snyder found
+the ring while at work in the theatre. She hastily tore off a piece of
+a programme, wrapped the ring carefully, and thrust it into her bosom.
+The next day she disposed of it, and, with her increased means, looked
+about her for a more comfortable place in which to live. When I reach
+thus far in the chain I see nothing impossible about No. 12 Avenue C.
+It is there we will find your sister, Mr. Meeks.”
+
+Shamrock Jolnes concluded his convincing speech with the smile of a
+successful artist. Meeks’s admiration was too great for words. Together
+they went to No. 12 Avenue C. It was an old-fashioned brownstone house
+in a prosperous and respectable neighbourhood.
+
+They rang the bell, and on inquiring were told that no Mrs. Snyder was
+known there, and that not within six months had a new occupant come to
+the house.
+
+When they reached the sidewalk again, Meeks examined the clues which he
+had brought away from his sister’s old room.
+
+“I am no detective,” he remarked to Jolnes as he raised the piece of
+theatre programme to his nose, “but it seems to me that instead of a
+ring having been wrapped in this paper it was one of those round
+peppermint drops. And this piece with the address on it looks to me
+like the end of a seat coupon—No. 12, row C, left aisle.”
+
+Shamrock Jolnes had a far-away look in his eyes.
+
+“I think you would do well to consult Juggins,” said he.
+
+“Who is Juggins?” asked Meeks.
+
+“He is the leader,” said Jolnes, “of a new modern school of detectives.
+Their methods are different from ours, but it is said that Juggins has
+solved some extremely puzzling cases. I will take you to him.”
+
+They found the greater Juggins in his office. He was a small man with
+light hair, deeply absorbed in reading one of the bourgeois works of
+Nathaniel Hawthorne.
+
+The two great detectives of different schools shook hands with
+ceremony, and Meeks was introduced.
+
+“State the facts,” said Juggins, going on with his reading.
+
+When Meeks ceased, the greater one closed his book and said:
+
+“Do I understand that your sister is fifty-two years of age, with a
+large mole on the side of her nose, and that she is a very poor widow,
+making a scanty living by scrubbing, and with a very homely face and
+figure?”
+
+“That describes her exactly,” admitted Meeks. Juggins rose and put on
+his hat.
+
+“In fifteen minutes,” he said, “I will return, bringing you her present
+address.”
+
+Shamrock Jolnes turned pale, but forced a smile.
+
+Within the specified time Juggins returned and consulted a little slip
+of paper held in his hand.
+
+“Your sister, Mary Snyder,” he announced calmly, “will be found at No.
+162 Chilton street. She is living in the back hall bedroom, five
+flights up. The house is only four blocks from here,” he continued,
+addressing Meeks. “Suppose you go and verify the statement and then
+return here. Mr. Jolnes will await you, I dare say.”
+
+Meeks hurried away. In twenty minutes he was back again, with a beaming
+face.
+
+“She is there and well!” he cried. “Name your fee!”
+
+“Two dollars,” said Juggins.
+
+When Meeks had settled his bill and departed, Shamrock Jolnes stood
+with his hat in his hand before Juggins.
+
+“If it would not be asking too much,” he stammered—“if you would favour
+me so far—would you object to—”
+
+“Certainly not,” said Juggins pleasantly. “I will tell you how I did
+it. You remember the description of Mrs. Snyder? Did you ever know a
+woman like that who wasn’t paying weekly instalments on an enlarged
+crayon portrait of herself? The biggest factory of that kind in the
+country is just around the corner. I went there and got her address off
+the books. That’s all.”
+
+
+
+
+III.
+WITCHES’ LOAVES
+
+
+Miss Martha Meacham kept the little bakery on the corner (the one where
+you go up three steps, and the bell tinkles when you open the door).
+
+Miss Martha was forty, her bank-book showed a credit of two thousand
+dollars, and she possessed two false teeth and a sympathetic heart.
+Many people have married whose chances to do so were much inferior to
+Miss Martha’s.
+
+Two or three times a week a customer came in in whom she began to take
+an interest. He was a middle-aged man, wearing spectacles and a brown
+beard trimmed to a careful point.
+
+He spoke English with a strong German accent. His clothes were worn and
+darned in places, and wrinkled and baggy in others. But he looked neat,
+and had very good manners.
+
+He always bought two loaves of stale bread. Fresh bread was five cents
+a loaf. Stale ones were two for five. Never did he call for anything
+but stale bread.
+
+Once Miss Martha saw a red and brown stain on his fingers. She was sure
+then that he was an artist and very poor. No doubt he lived in a
+garret, where he painted pictures and ate stale bread and thought of
+the good things to eat in Miss Martha’s bakery.
+
+Often when Miss Martha sat down to her chops and light rolls and jam
+and tea she would sigh, and wish that the gentle-mannered artist might
+share her tasty meal instead of eating his dry crust in that draughty
+attic. Miss Martha’s heart, as you have been told, was a sympathetic
+one.
+
+In order to test her theory as to his occupation, she brought from her
+room one day a painting that she had bought at a sale, and set it
+against the shelves behind the bread counter.
+
+It was a Venetian scene. A splendid marble palazzio (so it said on the
+picture) stood in the foreground—or rather forewater. For the rest
+there were gondolas (with the lady trailing her hand in the water),
+clouds, sky, and chiaro-oscuro in plenty. No artist could fail to
+notice it.
+
+Two days afterward the customer came in.
+
+“Two loafs of stale bread, if you blease.
+
+“You haf here a fine bicture, madame,” he said while she was wrapping
+up the bread.
+
+“Yes?” says Miss Martha, revelling in her own cunning. “I do so admire
+art and” (no, it would not do to say “artists” thus early) “and
+paintings,” she substituted. “You think it is a good picture?”
+
+“Der balance,” said the customer, “is not in good drawing. Der
+bairspective of it is not true. Goot morning, madame.”
+
+He took his bread, bowed, and hurried out.
+
+Yes, he must be an artist. Miss Martha took the picture back to her
+room.
+
+How gentle and kindly his eyes shone behind his spectacles! What a
+broad brow he had! To be able to judge perspective at a glance—and to
+live on stale bread! But genius often has to struggle before it is
+recognized.
+
+What a thing it would be for art and perspective if genius were backed
+by two thousand dollars in bank, a bakery, and a sympathetic heart to—
+But these were day-dreams, Miss Martha.
+
+Often now when he came he would chat for a while across the showcase.
+He seemed to crave Miss Martha’s cheerful words.
+
+He kept on buying stale bread. Never a cake, never a pie, never one of
+her delicious Sally Lunns.
+
+She thought he began to look thinner and discouraged. Her heart ached
+to add something good to eat to his meagre purchase, but her courage
+failed at the act. She did not dare affront him. She knew the pride of
+artists.
+
+Miss Martha took to wearing her blue-dotted silk waist behind the
+counter. In the back room she cooked a mysterious compound of quince
+seeds and borax. Ever so many people use it for the complexion.
+
+One day the customer came in as usual, laid his nickel on the showcase,
+and called for his stale loaves. While Miss Martha was reaching for
+them there was a great tooting and clanging, and a fire-engine came
+lumbering past.
+
+The customer hurried to the door to look, as any one will. Suddenly
+inspired, Miss Martha seized the opportunity.
+
+On the bottom shelf behind the counter was a pound of fresh butter that
+the dairyman had left ten minutes before. With a bread knife Miss
+Martha made a deep slash in each of the stale loaves, inserted a
+generous quantity of butter, and pressed the loaves tight again.
+
+When the customer turned once more she was tying the paper around them.
+
+When he had gone, after an unusually pleasant little chat, Miss Martha
+smiled to herself, but not without a slight fluttering of the heart.
+
+Had she been too bold? Would he take offense? But surely not. There was
+no language of edibles. Butter was no emblem of unmaidenly forwardness.
+
+For a long time that day her mind dwelt on the subject. She imagined
+the scene when he should discover her little deception.
+
+He would lay down his brushes and palette. There would stand his easel
+with the picture he was painting in which the perspective was beyond
+criticism.
+
+He would prepare for his luncheon of dry bread and water. He would
+slice into a loaf—ah!
+
+Miss Martha blushed. Would he think of the hand that placed it there as
+he ate? Would he—
+
+The front door bell jangled viciously. Somebody was coming in, making a
+great deal of noise.
+
+Miss Martha hurried to the front. Two men were there. One was a young
+man smoking a pipe—a man she had never seen before. The other was her
+artist.
+
+His face was very red, his hat was on the back of his head, his hair
+was wildly rumpled. He clinched his two fists and shook them
+ferociously at Miss Martha. _At Miss Martha_.
+
+“_Dummkopf!_” he shouted with extreme loudness; and then
+“_Tausendonfer!_” or something like it in German.
+
+The young man tried to draw him away.
+
+“I vill not go,” he said angrily, “else I shall told her.”
+
+He made a bass drum of Miss Martha’s counter.
+
+“You haf shpoilt me,” he cried, his blue eyes blazing behind his
+spectacles. “I vill tell you. You vas von _meddingsome old cat!_”
+
+Miss Martha leaned weakly against the shelves and laid one hand on her
+blue-dotted silk waist. The young man took the other by the collar.
+
+“Come on,” he said, “you’ve said enough.” He dragged the angry one out
+at the door to the sidewalk, and then came back.
+
+“Guess you ought to be told, ma’am,” he said, “what the row is about.
+That’s Blumberger. He’s an architectural draftsman. I work in the same
+office with him.
+
+“He’s been working hard for three months drawing a plan for a new city
+hall. It was a prize competition. He finished inking the lines
+yesterday. You know, a draftsman always makes his drawing in pencil
+first. When it’s done he rubs out the pencil lines with handfuls of
+stale bread crumbs. That’s better than India rubber.
+
+“Blumberger’s been buying the bread here. Well, to-day—well, you know,
+ma’am, that butter isn’t—well, Blumberger’s plan isn’t good for
+anything now except to cut up into railroad sandwiches.”
+
+Miss Martha went into the back room. She took off the blue-dotted silk
+waist and put on the old brown serge she used to wear. Then she poured
+the quince seed and borax mixture out of the window into the ash can.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+THE PRIDE OF THE CITIES
+
+
+Said Mr. Kipling, “The cities are full of pride, challenging each to
+each.” Even so.
+
+New York was empty. Two hundred thousand of its people were away for
+the summer. Three million eight hundred thousand remained as caretakers
+and to pay the bills of the absentees. But the two hundred thousand are
+an expensive lot.
+
+The New Yorker sat at a roof-garden table, ingesting solace through a
+straw. His panama lay upon a chair. The July audience was scattered
+among vacant seats as widely as outfielders when the champion batter
+steps to the plate. Vaudeville happened at intervals. The breeze was
+cool from the bay; around and above—everywhere except on the stage—were
+stars. Glimpses were to be had of waiters, always disappearing, like
+startled chamois. Prudent visitors who had ordered refreshments by
+’phone in the morning were now being served. The New Yorker was aware
+of certain drawbacks to his comfort, but content beamed softly from his
+rimless eyeglasses. His family was out of town. The drinks were warm;
+the ballet was suffering from lack of both tune and talcum—but his
+family would not return until September.
+
+Then up into the garden stumbled the man from Topaz City, Nevada. The
+gloom of the solitary sightseer enwrapped him. Bereft of joy through
+loneliness, he stalked with a widower’s face through the halls of
+pleasure. Thirst for human companionship possessed him as he panted in
+the metropolitan draught. Straight to the New Yorker’s table he
+steered.
+
+The New Yorker, disarmed and made reckless by the lawless atmosphere of
+a roof garden, decided upon utter abandonment of his life’s traditions.
+He resolved to shatter with one rash, dare-devil, impulsive,
+hair-brained act the conventions that had hitherto been woven into his
+existence. Carrying out this radical and precipitous inspiration he
+nodded slightly to the stranger as he drew nearer the table.
+
+The next moment found the man from Topaz City in the list of the New
+Yorker’s closest friends. He took a chair at the table, he gathered two
+others for his feet, he tossed his broad-brimmed hat upon a fourth, and
+told his life’s history to his new-found pard.
+
+The New Yorker warmed a little, as an apartment-house furnace warms
+when the strawberry season begins. A waiter who came within hail in an
+unguarded moment was captured and paroled on an errand to the Doctor
+Wiley experimental station. The ballet was now in the midst of a
+musical vagary, and danced upon the stage programmed as Bolivian
+peasants, clothed in some portions of its anatomy as Norwegian fisher
+maidens, in others as ladies-in-waiting of Marie Antoinette,
+historically denuded in other portions so as to represent sea nymphs,
+and presenting the _tout ensemble_ of a social club of Central Park
+West housemaids at a fish fry.
+
+“Been in the city long?” inquired the New Yorker, getting ready the
+exact tip against the waiter’s coming with large change from the bill.
+
+“Me?” said the man from Topaz City. “Four days. Never in Topaz City,
+was you?”
+
+“I!” said the New Yorker. “I was never farther west than Eighth Avenue.
+I had a brother who died on Ninth, but I met the cortege at Eighth.
+There was a bunch of violets on the hearse, and the undertaker
+mentioned the incident to avoid mistake. I cannot say that I am
+familiar with the West.”
+
+“Topaz City,” said the man who occupied four chairs, “is one of the
+finest towns in the world.”
+
+“I presume that you have seen the sights of the metropolis,” said the
+New Yorker, “Four days is not a sufficient length of time in which to
+view even our most salient points of interest, but one can possibly
+form a general impression. Our architectural supremacy is what
+generally strikes visitors to our city most forcibly. Of course you
+have seen our Flatiron Building. It is considered—”
+
+“Saw it,” said the man from Topaz City. “But you ought to come out our
+way. It’s mountainous, you know, and the ladies all wear short skirts
+for climbing and—”
+
+“Excuse me,” said the New Yorker, “but that isn’t exactly the point.
+New York must be a wonderful revelation to a visitor from the West.
+Now, as to our hotels—”
+
+“Say,” said the man from Topaz City, “that reminds me—there were
+sixteen stage robbers shot last year within twenty miles of—”
+
+“I was speaking of hotels,” said the New Yorker. “We lead Europe in
+that respect. And as far as our leisure class is concerned we are far—”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” interrupted the man from Topaz City. “There were
+twelve tramps in our jail when I left home. I guess New York isn’t so—”
+
+“Beg pardon, you seem to misapprehend the idea. Of course, you visited
+the Stock Exchange and Wall Street, where the—”
+
+“Oh, yes,” said the man from Topaz City, as he lighted a Pennsylvania
+stogie, “and I want to tell you that we’ve got the finest town marshal
+west of the Rockies. Bill Rainer he took in five pickpockets out of the
+crowd when Red Nose Thompson laid the cornerstone of his new saloon.
+Topaz City don’t allow—”
+
+“Have another Rhine wine and seltzer,” suggested the New Yorker. “I’ve
+never been West, as I said; but there can’t be any place out there to
+compare with New York. As to the claims of Chicago I—”
+
+“One man,” said the Topazite—“one man only has been murdered and robbed
+in Topaz City in the last three—”
+
+“Oh, I know what Chicago is,” interposed the New Yorker. “Have you been
+up Fifth Avenue to see the magnificent residences of our mil—”
+
+“Seen ’em all. You ought to know Reub Stegall, the assessor of Topaz.
+When old man Tilbury, that owns the only two-story house in town, tried
+to swear his taxes from $6,000 down to $450.75, Reub buckled on his
+forty-five and went down to see—”
+
+“Yes, yes, but speaking of our great city—one of its greatest features
+is our superb police department. There is no body of men in the world
+that can equal it for—”
+
+“That waiter gets around like a Langley flying machine,” remarked the
+man from Topaz City, thirstily. “We’ve got men in our town, too, worth
+$400,000. There’s old Bill Withers and Colonel Metcalf and—”
+
+“Have you seen Broadway at night?” asked the New Yorker, courteously.
+“There are few streets in the world that can compare with it. When the
+electrics are shining and the pavements are alive with two hurrying
+streams of elegantly clothed men and beautiful women attired in the
+costliest costumes that wind in and out in a close maze of
+expensively—”
+
+“Never knew but one case in Topaz City,” said the man from the West.
+“Jim Bailey, our mayor, had his watch and chain and $235 in cash taken
+from his pocket while—”
+
+“That’s another matter,” said the New Yorker. “While you are in our
+city you should avail yourself of every opportunity to see its wonders.
+Our rapid transit system—”
+
+“If you was out in Topaz,” broke in the man from there, “I could show
+you a whole cemetery full of people that got killed accidentally.
+Talking about mangling folks up! why, when Berry Rogers turned loose
+that old double-barrelled shot-gun of his loaded with slugs at
+anybody—”
+
+“Here, waiter!” called the New Yorker. “Two more of the same. It is
+acknowledged by every one that our city is the centre of art, and
+literature, and learning. Take, for instance, our after-dinner
+speakers. Where else in the country would you find such wit and
+eloquence as emanate from Depew and Ford, and—”
+
+“If you take the papers,” interrupted the Westerner, “you must have
+read of Pete Webster’s daughter. The Websters live two blocks north of
+the court-house in Topaz City. Miss Tillie Webster, she slept forty
+days and nights without waking up. The doctors said that—”
+
+“Pass the matches, please,” said the New Yorker. “Have you observed the
+expedition with which new buildings are being run up in New York?
+Improved inventions in steel framework and—”
+
+“I noticed,” said the Nevadian, “that the statistics of Topaz City
+showed only one carpenter crushed by falling timbers last year and he
+was caught in a cyclone.”
+
+“They abuse our sky line,” continued the New Yorker, “and it is likely
+that we are not yet artistic in the construction of our buildings. But
+I can safely assert that we lead in pictorial and decorative art. In
+some of our houses can be found masterpieces in the way of paintings
+and sculpture. One who has the entree to our best galleries will find—”
+
+“Back up,” exclaimed the man from Topaz City. “There was a game last
+month in our town in which $90,000 changed hands on a pair of—”
+
+“Ta-romt-tara!” went the orchestra. The stage curtain, blushing pink at
+the name “Asbestos” inscribed upon it, came down with a slow midsummer
+movement. The audience trickled leisurely down the elevator and stairs.
+
+On the sidewalk below, the New Yorker and the man from Topaz City shook
+hands with alcoholic gravity. The elevated crashed raucously, surface
+cars hummed and clanged, cabmen swore, newsboys shrieked, wheels
+clattered ear-piercingly. The New Yorker conceived a happy thought,
+with which he aspired to clinch the pre-eminence of his city.
+
+“You must admit,” said he, “that in the way of noise New York is far
+ahead of any other—”
+
+“Back to the everglades!” said the man from Topaz City. “In 1900, when
+Sousa’s band and the repeating candidate were in our town you
+couldn’t—”
+
+The rattle of an express wagon drowned the rest of the words.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+HOLDING UP A TRAIN
+
+
+Note. The man who told me these things was for several years an outlaw
+in the Southwest and a follower of the pursuit he so frankly describes.
+His description of the _modus operandi_ should prove interesting, his
+counsel of value to the potential passenger in some future “hold-up,”
+while his estimate of the pleasures of train robbing will hardly induce
+any one to adopt it as a profession. I give the story in almost exactly
+his own words.
+O. H.
+
+
+Most people would say, if their opinion was asked for, that holding up
+a train would be a hard job. Well, it isn’t; it’s easy. I have
+contributed some to the uneasiness of railroads and the insomnia of
+express companies, and the most trouble I ever had about a hold-up was
+in being swindled by unscrupulous people while spending the money I
+got. The danger wasn’t anything to speak of, and we didn’t mind the
+trouble.
+
+One man has come pretty near robbing a train by himself; two have
+succeeded a few times; three can do it if they are hustlers, but five
+is about the right number. The time to do it and the place depend upon
+several things.
+
+The first “stick-up” I was ever in happened in 1890. Maybe the way I
+got into it will explain how most train robbers start in the business.
+Five out of six Western outlaws are just cowboys out of a job and gone
+wrong. The sixth is a tough from the East who dresses up like a bad man
+and plays some low-down trick that gives the boys a bad name. Wire
+fences and “nesters” made five of them; a bad heart made the sixth.
+
+Jim S–––– and I were working on the 101 Ranch in Colorado. The nesters
+had the cowman on the go. They had taken up the land and elected
+officers who were hard to get along with. Jim and I rode into La Junta
+one day, going south from a round-up. We were having a little fun
+without malice toward anybody when a farmer administration cut in and
+tried to harvest us. Jim shot a deputy marshal, and I kind of
+corroborated his side of the argument. We skirmished up and down the
+main street, the boomers having bad luck all the time. After a while we
+leaned forward and shoved for the ranch down on the Ceriso. We were
+riding a couple of horses that couldn’t fly, but they could catch
+birds.
+
+A few days after that, a gang of the La Junta boomers came to the ranch
+and wanted us to go back with them. Naturally, we declined. We had the
+house on them, and before we were done refusing, that old ’dobe was
+plumb full of lead. When dark came we fagged ’em a batch of bullets and
+shoved out the back door for the rocks. They sure smoked us as we went.
+We had to drift, which we did, and rounded up down in Oklahoma.
+
+Well, there wasn’t anything we could get there, and, being mighty hard
+up, we decided to transact a little business with the railroads. Jim
+and I joined forces with Tom and Ike Moore—two brothers who had plenty
+of sand they were willing to convert into dust. I can call their names,
+for both of them are dead. Tom was shot while robbing a bank in
+Arkansas; Ike was killed during the more dangerous pastime of attending
+a dance in the Creek Nation.
+
+We selected a place on the Santa Fé where there was a bridge across a
+deep creek surrounded by heavy timber. All passenger trains took water
+at the tank close to one end of the bridge. It was a quiet place, the
+nearest house being five miles away. The day before it happened, we
+rested our horses and “made medicine” as to how we should get about it.
+Our plans were not at all elaborate, as none of us had ever engaged in
+a hold-up before.
+
+The Santa Fé flyer was due at the tank at 11.15 p. m. At eleven, Tom
+and I lay down on one side of the track, and Jim and Ike took the
+other. As the train rolled up, the headlight flashing far down the
+track and the steam hissing from the engine, I turned weak all over. I
+would have worked a whole year on the ranch for nothing to have been
+out of that affair right then. Some of the nerviest men in the business
+have told me that they felt the same way the first time.
+
+The engine had hardly stopped when I jumped on the running-board on one
+side, while Jim mounted the other. As soon as the engineer and fireman
+saw our guns they threw up their hands without being told, and begged
+us not to shoot, saying they would do anything we wanted them to.
+
+“Hit the ground,” I ordered, and they both jumped off. We drove them
+before us down the side of the train. While this was happening, Tom and
+Ike had been blazing away, one on each side of the train, yelling like
+Apaches, so as to keep the passengers herded in the cars. Some fellow
+stuck a little twenty-two calibre out one of the coach windows and
+fired it straight up in the air. I let drive and smashed the glass just
+over his head. That settled everything like resistance from that
+direction.
+
+By this time all my nervousness was gone. I felt a kind of pleasant
+excitement as if I were at a dance or a frolic of some sort. The lights
+were all out in the coaches, and, as Tom and Ike gradually quit firing
+and yelling, it got to be almost as still as a graveyard. I remember
+hearing a little bird chirping in a bush at the side of the track, as
+if it were complaining at being waked up.
+
+I made the fireman get a lantern, and then I went to the express car
+and yelled to the messenger to open up or get perforated. He slid the
+door back and stood in it with his hands up. “Jump overboard, son,” I
+said, and he hit the dirt like a lump of lead. There were two safes in
+the car—a big one and a little one. By the way, I first located the
+messenger’s arsenal—a double-barrelled shot-gun with buckshot
+cartridges and a thirty-eight in a drawer. I drew the cartridges from
+the shot-gun, pocketed the pistol, and called the messenger inside. I
+shoved my gun against his nose and put him to work. He couldn’t open
+the big safe, but he did the little one. There was only nine hundred
+dollars in it. That was mighty small winnings for our trouble, so we
+decided to go through the passengers. We took our prisoners to the
+smoking-car, and from there sent the engineer through the train to
+light up the coaches. Beginning with the first one, we placed a man at
+each door and ordered the passengers to stand between the seats with
+their hands up.
+
+If you want to find out what cowards the majority of men are, all you
+have to do is rob a passenger train. I don’t mean because they don’t
+resist—I’ll tell you later on why they can’t do that—but it makes a man
+feel sorry for them the way they lose their heads. Big, burly drummers
+and farmers and ex-soldiers and high-collared dudes and sports that, a
+few moments before, were filling the car with noise and bragging, get
+so scared that their ears flop.
+
+There were very few people in the day coaches at that time of night, so
+we made a slim haul until we got to the sleeper. The Pullman conductor
+met me at one door while Jim was going round to the other one. He very
+politely informed me that I could not go into that car, as it did not
+belong to the railroad company, and, besides, the passengers had
+already been greatly disturbed by the shouting and firing. Never in all
+my life have I met with a finer instance of official dignity and
+reliance upon the power of Mr. Pullman’s great name. I jabbed my
+six-shooter so hard against Mr. Conductor’s front that I afterward
+found one of his vest buttons so firmly wedged in the end of the barrel
+that I had to shoot it out. He just shut up like a weak-springed knife
+and rolled down the car steps.
+
+I opened the door of the sleeper and stepped inside. A big, fat old man
+came wabbling up to me, puffing and blowing. He had one coat-sleeve on
+and was trying to put his vest on over that. I don’t know who he
+thought I was.
+
+“Young man, young man,” says he, “you must keep cool and not get
+excited. Above everything, keep cool.”
+
+“I can’t,” says I. “Excitement’s just eating me up.” And then I let out
+a yell and turned loose my forty-five through the skylight.
+
+That old man tried to dive into one of the lower berths, but a screech
+came out of it and a bare foot that took him in the bread-basket and
+landed him on the floor. I saw Jim coming in the other door, and I
+hollered for everybody to climb out and line up.
+
+They commenced to scramble down, and for a while we had a three-ringed
+circus. The men looked as frightened and tame as a lot of rabbits in a
+deep snow. They had on, on an average, about a quarter of a suit of
+clothes and one shoe apiece. One chap was sitting on the floor of the
+aisle, looking as if he were working a hard sum in arithmetic. He was
+trying, very solemn, to pull a lady’s number two shoe on his number
+nine foot.
+
+The ladies didn’t stop to dress. They were so curious to see a real,
+live train robber, bless ’em, that they just wrapped blankets and
+sheets around themselves and came out, squeaky and fidgety looking.
+They always show more curiosity and sand than the men do.
+
+We got them all lined up and pretty quiet, and I went through the
+bunch. I found very little on them—I mean in the way of valuables. One
+man in the line was a sight. He was one of those big, overgrown, solemn
+snoozers that sit on the platform at lectures and look wise. Before
+crawling out he had managed to put on his long, frock-tailed coat and
+his high silk hat. The rest of him was nothing but pajamas and bunions.
+When I dug into that Prince Albert, I expected to drag out at least a
+block of gold mine stock or an armful of Government bonds, but all I
+found was a little boy’s French harp about four inches long. What it
+was there for, I don’t know. I felt a little mad because he had fooled
+me so. I stuck the harp up against his mouth.
+
+“If you can’t pay—play,” I says.
+
+“I can’t play,” says he.
+
+“Then learn right off quick,” says I, letting him smell the end of my
+gun-barrel.
+
+He caught hold of the harp, turned red as a beet, and commenced to
+blow. He blew a dinky little tune I remembered hearing when I was a
+kid:
+
+
+Prettiest little gal in the country—oh!
+Mammy and Daddy told me so.
+
+
+I made him keep on playing it all the time we were in the car. Now and
+then he’d get weak and off the key, and I’d turn my gun on him and ask
+what was the matter with that little gal, and whether he had any
+intention of going back on her, which would make him start up again
+like sixty. I think that old boy standing there in his silk hat and
+bare feet, playing his little French harp, was the funniest sight I
+ever saw. One little red-headed woman in the line broke out laughing at
+him. You could have heard her in the next car.
+
+Then Jim held them steady while I searched the berths. I grappled
+around in those beds and filled a pillow-case with the strangest
+assortment of stuff you ever saw. Now and then I’d come across a little
+pop-gun pistol, just about right for plugging teeth with, which I’d
+throw out the window. When I finished with the collection, I dumped the
+pillow-case load in the middle of the aisle. There were a good many
+watches, bracelets, rings, and pocket-books, with a sprinkling of false
+teeth, whiskey flasks, face-powder boxes, chocolate caramels, and heads
+of hair of various colours and lengths. There were also about a dozen
+ladies’ stockings into which jewellery, watches, and rolls of bills had
+been stuffed and then wadded up tight and stuck under the mattresses. I
+offered to return what I called the “scalps,” saying that we were not
+Indians on the war-path, but none of the ladies seemed to know to whom
+the hair belonged.
+
+One of the women—and a good-looker she was—wrapped in a striped
+blanket, saw me pick up one of the stockings that was pretty chunky and
+heavy about the toe, and she snapped out:
+
+“That’s mine, sir. You’re not in the business of robbing women, are
+you?”
+
+Now, as this was our first hold-up, we hadn’t agreed upon any code of
+ethics, so I hardly knew what to answer. But, anyway, I replied: “Well,
+not as a specialty. If this contains your personal property you can
+have it back.”
+
+“It just does,” she declared eagerly, and reached out her hand for it.
+
+“You’ll excuse my taking a look at the contents,” I said, holding the
+stocking up by the toe. Out dumped a big gent’s gold watch, worth two
+hundred, a gent’s leather pocket-book that we afterward found to
+contain six hundred dollars, a 32-calibre revolver; and the only thing
+of the lot that could have been a lady’s personal property was a silver
+bracelet worth about fifty cents.
+
+I said: “Madame, here’s your property,” and handed her the bracelet.
+“Now,” I went on, “how can you expect us to act square with you when
+you try to deceive us in this manner? I’m surprised at such conduct.”
+
+The young woman flushed up as if she had been caught doing something
+dishonest. Some other woman down the line called out: “The mean thing!”
+I never knew whether she meant the other lady or me.
+
+When we finished our job we ordered everybody back to bed, told ’em
+good night very politely at the door, and left. We rode forty miles
+before daylight and then divided the stuff. Each one of us got
+$1,752.85 in money. We lumped the jewellery around. Then we scattered,
+each man for himself.
+
+That was my first train robbery, and it was about as easily done as any
+of the ones that followed. But that was the last and only time I ever
+went through the passengers. I don’t like that part of the business.
+Afterward I stuck strictly to the express car. During the next eight
+years I handled a good deal of money.
+
+The best haul I made was just seven years after the first one. We found
+out about a train that was going to bring out a lot of money to pay off
+the soldiers at a Government post. We stuck that train up in broad
+daylight. Five of us lay in the sand hills near a little station. Ten
+soldiers were guarding the money on the train, but they might just as
+well have been at home on a furlough. We didn’t even allow them to
+stick their heads out the windows to see the fun. We had no trouble at
+all in getting the money, which was all in gold. Of course, a big howl
+was raised at the time about the robbery. It was Government stuff, and
+the Government got sarcastic and wanted to know what the convoy of
+soldiers went along for. The only excuse given was that nobody was
+expecting an attack among those bare sand hills in daytime. I don’t
+know what the Government thought about the excuse, but I know that it
+was a good one. The surprise—that is the keynote of the train-robbing
+business. The papers published all kinds of stories about the loss,
+finally agreeing that it was between nine thousand and ten thousand
+dollars. The Government sawed wood. Here are the correct figures,
+printed for the first time—forty-eight thousand dollars. If anybody
+will take the trouble to look over Uncle Sam’s private accounts for
+that little debit to profit and loss, he will find that I am right to a
+cent.
+
+By that time we were expert enough to know what to do. We rode due west
+twenty miles, making a trail that a Broadway policeman could have
+followed, and then we doubled back, hiding our tracks. On the second
+night after the hold-up, while posses were scouring the country in
+every direction, Jim and I were eating supper in the second story of a
+friend’s house in the town where the alarm started from. Our friend
+pointed out to us, in an office across the street, a printing press at
+work striking off handbills offering a reward for our capture.
+
+I have been asked what we do with the money we get. Well, I never could
+account for a tenth part of it after it was spent. It goes fast and
+freely. An outlaw has to have a good many friends. A highly respected
+citizen may, and often does, get along with very few, but a man on the
+dodge has got to have “sidekickers.” With angry posses and
+reward-hungry officers cutting out a hot trail for him, he must have a
+few places scattered about the country where he can stop and feed
+himself and his horse and get a few hours’ sleep without having to keep
+both eyes open. When he makes a haul he feels like dropping some of the
+coin with these friends, and he does it liberally. Sometimes I have, at
+the end of a hasty visit at one of these havens of refuge, flung a
+handful of gold and bills into the laps of the kids playing on the
+floor, without knowing whether my contribution was a hundred dollars or
+a thousand.
+
+When old-timers make a big haul they generally go far away to one of
+the big cities to spend their money. Green hands, however successful a
+hold-up they make, nearly always give themselves away by showing too
+much money near the place where they got it.
+
+I was in a job in ’94 where we got twenty thousand dollars. We followed
+our favourite plan for a get-away—that is, doubled on our trail—and
+laid low for a time near the scene of the train’s bad luck. One morning
+I picked up a newspaper and read an article with big headlines stating
+that the marshal, with eight deputies and a posse of thirty armed
+citizens, had the train robbers surrounded in a mesquite thicket on the
+Cimarron, and that it was a question of only a few hours when they
+would be dead men or prisoners. While I was reading that article I was
+sitting at breakfast in one of the most elegant private residences in
+Washington City, with a flunky in knee pants standing behind my chair.
+Jim was sitting across the table talking to his half-uncle, a retired
+naval officer, whose name you have often seen in the accounts of doings
+in the capital. We had gone there and bought rattling outfits of good
+clothes, and were resting from our labours among the nabobs. We must
+have been killed in that mesquite thicket, for I can make an affidavit
+that we didn’t surrender.
+
+Now I propose to tell why it is easy to hold up a train, and, then, why
+no one should ever do it.
+
+In the first place, the attacking party has all the advantage. That is,
+of course, supposing that they are old-timers with the necessary
+experience and courage. They have the outside and are protected by the
+darkness, while the others are in the light, hemmed into a small space,
+and exposed, the moment they show a head at a window or door, to the
+aim of a man who is a dead shot and who won’t hesitate to shoot.
+
+But, in my opinion, the main condition that makes train robbing easy is
+the element of surprise in connection with the imagination of the
+passengers. If you have ever seen a horse that has eaten loco weed you
+will understand what I mean when I say that the passengers get locoed.
+That horse gets the awfullest imagination on him in the world. You
+can’t coax him to cross a little branch stream two feet wide. It looks
+as big to him as the Mississippi River. That’s just the way with the
+passenger. He thinks there are a hundred men yelling and shooting
+outside, when maybe there are only two or three. And the muzzle of a
+forty-five looks like the entrance to a tunnel. The passenger is all
+right, although he may do mean little tricks, like hiding a wad of
+money in his shoe and forgetting to dig-up until you jostle his ribs
+some with the end of your six-shooter; but there’s no harm in him.
+
+As to the train crew, we never had any more trouble with them than if
+they had been so many sheep. I don’t mean that they are cowards; I mean
+that they have got sense. They know they’re not up against a bluff.
+It’s the same way with the officers. I’ve seen secret service men,
+marshals, and railroad detectives fork over their change as meek as
+Moses. I saw one of the bravest marshals I ever knew hide his gun under
+his seat and dig up along with the rest while I was taking toll. He
+wasn’t afraid; he simply knew that we had the drop on the whole outfit.
+Besides, many of those officers have families and they feel that they
+oughtn’t to take chances; whereas death has no terrors for the man who
+holds up a train. He expects to get killed some day, and he generally
+does. My advice to you, if you should ever be in a hold-up, is to line
+up with the cowards and save your bravery for an occasion when it may
+be of some benefit to you. Another reason why officers are backward
+about mixing things with a train robber is a financial one. Every time
+there is a scrimmage and somebody gets killed, the officers lose money.
+If the train robber gets away they swear out a warrant against John Doe
+et al. and travel hundreds of miles and sign vouchers for thousands on
+the trail of the fugitives, and the Government foots the bills. So,
+with them, it is a question of mileage rather than courage.
+
+I will give one instance to support my statement that the surprise is
+the best card in playing for a hold-up.
+
+Along in ’92 the Daltons were cutting out a hot trail for the officers
+down in the Cherokee Nation, Those were their lucky days, and they got
+so reckless and sandy, that they used to announce before hand what job
+they were going to undertake. Once they gave it out that they were
+going to hold up the M. K. & T. flyer on a certain night at the station
+of Pryor Creek, in Indian Territory.
+
+That night the railroad company got fifteen deputy marshals in Muscogee
+and put them on the train. Beside them they had fifty armed men hid in
+the depot at Pryor Creek.
+
+When the Katy Flyer pulled in not a Dalton showed up. The next station
+was Adair, six miles away. When the train reached there, and the
+deputies were having a good time explaining what they would have done
+to the Dalton gang if they had turned up, all at once it sounded like
+an army firing outside. The conductor and brakeman came running into
+the car yelling, “Train robbers!”
+
+Some of those deputies lit out of the door, hit the ground, and kept on
+running. Some of them hid their Winchesters under the seats. Two of
+them made a fight and were both killed.
+
+It took the Daltons just ten minutes to capture the train and whip the
+escort. In twenty minutes more they robbed the express car of
+twenty-seven thousand dollars and made a clean get-away.
+
+My opinion is that those deputies would have put up a stiff fight at
+Pryor Creek, where they were expecting trouble, but they were taken by
+surprise and “locoed” at Adair, just as the Daltons, who knew their
+business, expected they would.
+
+I don’t think I ought to close without giving some deductions from my
+experience of eight years “on the dodge.” It doesn’t pay to rob trains.
+Leaving out the question of right and morals, which I don’t think I
+ought to tackle, there is very little to envy in the life of an outlaw.
+After a while money ceases to have any value in his eyes. He gets to
+looking upon the railroads and express companies as his bankers, and
+his six-shooter as a cheque book good for any amount. He throws away
+money right and left. Most of the time he is on the jump, riding day
+and night, and he lives so hard between times that he doesn’t enjoy the
+taste of high life when he gets it. He knows that his time is bound to
+come to lose his life or liberty, and that the accuracy of his aim, the
+speed of his horse, and the fidelity of his “sider,” are all that
+postpone the inevitable.
+
+It isn’t that he loses any sleep over danger from the officers of the
+law. In all my experience I never knew officers to attack a band of
+outlaws unless they outnumbered them at least three to one.
+
+But the outlaw carries one thought constantly in his mind—and that is
+what makes him so sore against life, more than anything else—he knows
+where the marshals get their recruits of deputies. He knows that the
+majority of these upholders of the law were once lawbreakers, horse
+thieves, rustlers, highwaymen, and outlaws like himself, and that they
+gained their positions and immunity by turning state’s evidence, by
+turning traitor and delivering up their comrades to imprisonment and
+death. He knows that some day—unless he is shot first—his Judas will
+set to work, the trap will be laid, and he will be the surprised
+instead of a surpriser at a stick-up.
+
+That is why the man who holds up trains picks his company with a
+thousand times the care with which a careful girl chooses a sweetheart.
+That is why he raises himself from his blanket of nights and listens to
+the tread of every horse’s hoofs on the distant road. That is why he
+broods suspiciously for days upon a jesting remark or an unusual
+movement of a tried comrade, or the broken mutterings of his closest
+friend, sleeping by his side.
+
+And it is one of the reasons why the train-robbing profession is not so
+pleasant a one as either of its collateral branches—politics or
+cornering the market.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+ULYSSES AND THE DOGMAN
+
+
+Do you know the time of the dogmen?
+
+When the forefinger of twilight begins to smudge the clear-drawn lines
+of the Big City there is inaugurated an hour devoted to one of the most
+melancholy sights of urban life.
+
+Out from the towering flat crags and apartment peaks of the cliff
+dwellers of New York steals an army of beings that were once men. Even
+yet they go upright upon two limbs and retain human form and speech;
+but you will observe that they are behind animals in progress. Each of
+these beings follows a dog, to which he is fastened by an artificial
+ligament.
+
+These men are all victims to Circe. Not willingly do they become
+flunkeys to Fido, bell boys to bull terriers, and toddlers after
+Towzer. Modern Circe, instead of turning them into animals, has kindly
+left the difference of a six-foot leash between them. Every one of
+those dogmen has been either cajoled, bribed, or commanded by his own
+particular Circe to take the dear household pet out for an airing.
+
+By their faces and manner you can tell that the dogmen are bound in a
+hopeless enchantment. Never will there come even a dog-catcher Ulysses
+to remove the spell.
+
+The faces of some are stonily set. They are past the commiseration, the
+curiosity, or the jeers of their fellow-beings. Years of matrimony, of
+continuous compulsory canine constitutionals, have made them callous.
+They unwind their beasts from lamp posts, or the ensnared legs of
+profane pedestrians, with the stolidity of mandarins manipulating the
+strings of their kites.
+
+Others, more recently reduced to the ranks of Rover’s retinue, take
+their medicine sulkily and fiercely. They play the dog on the end of
+their line with the pleasure felt by the girl out fishing when she
+catches a sea-robin on her hook. They glare at you threateningly if you
+look at them, as if it would be their delight to let slip the dogs of
+war. These are half-mutinous dogmen, not quite Circe-ized, and you will
+do well not to kick their charges, should they sniff around your
+ankles.
+
+Others of the tribe do not seem to feel so keenly. They are mostly
+unfresh youths, with gold caps and drooping cigarettes, who do not
+harmonize with their dogs. The animals they attend wear satin bows in
+their collars; and the young men steer them so assiduously that you are
+tempted to the theory that some personal advantage, contingent upon
+satisfactory service, waits upon the execution of their duties.
+
+The dogs thus personally conducted are of many varieties; but they are
+one in fatness, in pampered, diseased vileness of temper, in insolent,
+snarling capriciousness of behaviour. They tug at the leash
+fractiously, they make leisurely nasal inventory of every door step,
+railing, and post. They sit down to rest when they choose; they wheeze
+like the winner of a Third Avenue beefsteak-eating contest; they
+blunder clumsily into open cellars and coal holes; they lead the dogmen
+a merry dance.
+
+These unfortunate dry nurses of dogdom, the cur cuddlers, mongrel
+managers, Spitz stalkers, poodle pullers, Skye scrapers, dachshund
+dandlers, terrier trailers and Pomeranian pushers of the cliff-dwelling
+Circes follow their charges meekly. The doggies neither fear nor
+respect them. Masters of the house these men whom they hold in leash
+may be, but they are not masters of them. From cosey corner to fire
+escape, from divan to dumbwaiter, doggy’s snarl easily drives this
+two-legged being who is commissioned to walk at the other end of his
+string during his outing.
+
+One twilight the dogmen came forth as usual at their Circes’ pleading,
+guerdon, or crack of the whip. One among them was a strong man,
+apparently of too solid virtues for this airy vocation. His expression
+was melancholic, his manner depressed. He was leashed to a vile white
+dog, loathsomely fat, fiendishly ill-natured, gloatingly intractable
+toward his despised conductor.
+
+At a corner nearest to his apartment house the dogman turned down a
+side street, hoping for fewer witnesses to his ignominy. The surfeited
+beast waddled before him, panting with spleen and the labour of motion.
+
+Suddenly the dog stopped. A tall, brown, long-coated, wide-brimmed man
+stood like a Colossus blocking the sidewalk and declaring:
+
+“Well, I’m a son of a gun!”
+
+“Jim Berry!” breathed the dogman, with exclamation points in his voice.
+
+“Sam Telfair,” cried Wide-Brim again, “you ding-basted old
+willy-walloo, give us your hoof!”
+
+Their hands clasped in the brief, tight greeting of the West that is
+death to the hand-shake microbe.
+
+“You old fat rascal!” continued Wide-Brim, with a wrinkled brown smile;
+“it’s been five years since I seen you. I been in this town a week, but
+you can’t find nobody in such a place. Well, you dinged old married
+man, how are they coming?”
+
+Something mushy and heavily soft like raised dough leaned against Jim’s
+leg and chewed his trousers with a yeasty growl.
+
+“Get to work,” said Jim, “and explain this yard-wide hydrophobia
+yearling you’ve throwed your lasso over. Are you the pound-master of
+this burg? Do you call that a dog or what?”
+
+“I need a drink,” said the dogman, dejected at the reminder of his old
+dog of the sea. “Come on.”
+
+Hard by was a café. ’Tis ever so in the big city.
+
+They sat at a table, and the bloated monster yelped and scrambled at
+the end of his leash to get at the café cat.
+
+“Whiskey,” said Jim to the waiter.
+
+“Make it two,” said the dogman.
+
+“You’re fatter,” said Jim, “and you look subjugated. I don’t know about
+the East agreeing with you. All the boys asked me to hunt you up when I
+started. Sandy King, he went to the Klondike. Watson Burrel, he married
+the oldest Peters girl. I made some money buying beeves, and I bought a
+lot of wild land up on the Little Powder. Going to fence next fall.
+Bill Rawlins, he’s gone to farming. You remember Bill, of course—he was
+courting Marcella—excuse me, Sam—I mean the lady you married, while she
+was teaching school at Prairie View. But you was the lucky man. How is
+Missis Telfair?”
+
+“S-h-h-h!” said the dogman, signalling the waiter; “give it a name.”
+
+“Whiskey,” said Jim.
+
+“Make it two,” said the dogman.
+
+“She’s well,” he continued, after his chaser. “She refused to live
+anywhere but in New York, where she came from. We live in a flat. Every
+evening at six I take that dog out for a walk. It’s Marcella’s pet.
+There never were two animals on earth, Jim, that hated one another like
+me and that dog does. His name’s Lovekins. Marcella dresses for dinner
+while we’re out. We eat tabble dote. Ever try one of them, Jim?”
+
+“No, I never,” said Jim. “I seen the signs, but I thought they said
+‘table de hole.’ I thought it was French for pool tables. How does it
+taste?”
+
+“If you’re going to be in the city for awhile we will—”
+
+“No, sir-ee. I’m starting for home this evening on the 7.25. Like to
+stay longer, but I can’t.”
+
+“I’ll walk down to the ferry with you,” said the dogman.
+
+The dog had bound a leg each of Jim and the chair together, and had
+sunk into a comatose slumber. Jim stumbled, and the leash was slightly
+wrenched. The shrieks of the awakened beast rang for a block around.
+
+“If that’s your dog,” said Jim, when they were on the street again,
+“what’s to hinder you from running that habeas corpus you’ve got around
+his neck over a limb and walking off and forgetting him?”
+
+“I’d never dare to,” said the dogman, awed at the bold proposition. “He
+sleeps in the bed, I sleep on a lounge. He runs howling to Marcella if
+I look at him. Some night, Jim, I’m going to get even with that dog.
+I’ve made up my mind to do it. I’m going to creep over with a knife and
+cut a hole in his mosquito bar so they can get in to him. See if I
+don’t do it!”
+
+“You ain’t yourself, Sam Telfair. You ain’t what you was once. I don’t
+know about these cities and flats over here. With my own eyes I seen
+you stand off both the Tillotson boys in Prairie View with the brass
+faucet out of a molasses barrel. And I seen you rope and tie the
+wildest steer on Little Powder in 39 1-2.”
+
+“I did, didn’t I?” said the other, with a temporary gleam in his eye.
+“But that was before I was dogmatized.”
+
+“Does Misses Telfair—” began Jim.
+
+“Hush!” said the dogman. “Here’s another café.”
+
+They lined up at the bar. The dog fell asleep at their feet.
+
+“Whiskey,” said Jim.
+
+“Make it two,” said the dogman.
+
+“I thought about you,” said Jim, “when I bought that wild land. I
+wished you was out there to help me with the stock.”
+
+“Last Tuesday,” said the dogman, “he bit me on the ankle because I
+asked for cream in my coffee. He always gets the cream.”
+
+“You’d like Prairie View now,” said Jim. “The boys from the round-ups
+for fifty miles around ride in there. One corner of my pasture is in
+sixteen miles of the town. There’s a straight forty miles of wire on
+one side of it.”
+
+“You pass through the kitchen to get to the bedroom,” said the dogman,
+“and you pass through the parlour to get to the bath room, and you back
+out through the dining-room to get into the bedroom so you can turn
+around and leave by the kitchen. And he snores and barks in his sleep,
+and I have to smoke in the park on account of his asthma.”
+
+“Don’t Missis Telfair—” began Jim.
+
+“Oh, shut up!” said the dogman. “What is it this time?”
+
+“Whiskey,” said Jim.
+
+“Make it two,” said the dogman.
+
+“Well, I’ll be racking along down toward the ferry,” said the other.
+
+“Come on, there, you mangy, turtle-backed, snake-headed, bench-legged
+ton-and-a-half of soap-grease!” shouted the dogman, with a new note in
+his voice and a new hand on the leash. The dog scrambled after them,
+with an angry whine at such unusual language from his guardian.
+
+At the foot of Twenty-third Street the dogman led the way through
+swinging doors.
+
+“Last chance,” said he. “Speak up.”
+
+“Whiskey,” said Jim.
+
+“Make it two,” said the dogman.
+
+“I don’t know,” said the ranchman, “where I’ll find the man I want to
+take charge of the Little Powder outfit. I want somebody I know
+something about. Finest stretch of prairie and timber you ever squinted
+your eye over, Sam. Now if you was—”
+
+“Speaking of hydrophobia,” said the dogman, “the other night he chewed
+a piece out of my leg because I knocked a fly off of Marcella’s arm.
+‘It ought to be cauterized,’ says Marcella, and I was thinking so
+myself. I telephones for the doctor, and when he comes Marcella says to
+me: ‘Help me hold the poor dear while the doctor fixes his mouth. Oh, I
+hope he got no virus on any of his toofies when he bit you.’ Now what
+do you think of that?”
+
+“Does Missis Telfair—” began Jim.
+
+“Oh, drop it,” said the dogman. “Come again!”
+
+“Whiskey,” said Jim.
+
+“Make it two,” said the dogman.
+
+They walked on to the ferry. The ranchman stepped to the ticket window.
+
+Suddenly the swift landing of three or four heavy kicks was heard, the
+air was rent by piercing canine shrieks, and a pained, outraged,
+lubberly, bow-legged pudding of a dog ran frenziedly up the street
+alone.
+
+“Ticket to Denver,” said Jim.
+
+“Make it two,” shouted the ex-dogman, reaching for his inside pocket.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+THE CHAMPION OF THE WEATHER
+
+
+If you should speak of the Kiowa Reservation to the average New Yorker
+he probably wouldn’t know whether you were referring to a new political
+dodge at Albany or a leitmotif from “Parsifal.” But out in the Kiowa
+Reservation advices have been received concerning the existence of New
+York.
+
+A party of us were on a hunting trip in the Reservation. Bud Kingsbury,
+our guide, philosopher, and friend, was broiling antelope steaks in
+camp one night. One of the party, a pinkish-haired young man in a
+correct hunting costume, sauntered over to the fire to light a
+cigarette, and remarked carelessly to Bud:
+
+“Nice night!”
+
+“Why, yes,” said Bud, “as nice as any night could be that ain’t
+received the Broadway stamp of approval.”
+
+Now, the young man was from New York, but the rest of us wondered how
+Bud guessed it. So, when the steaks were done, we besought him to lay
+bare his system of ratiocination. And as Bud was something of a
+Territorial talking machine he made oration as follows:
+
+“How did I know he was from New York? Well, I figured it out as soon as
+he sprung them two words on me. I was in New York myself a couple of
+years ago, and I noticed some of the earmarks and hoof tracks of the
+Rancho Manhattan.”
+
+“Found New York rather different from the Panhandle, didn’t you, Bud?”
+asked one of the hunters.
+
+“Can’t say that I did,” answered Bud; “anyways, not more than some. The
+main trail in that town which they call Broadway is plenty travelled,
+but they’re about the same brand of bipeds that tramp around in
+Cheyenne and Amarillo, At first I was sort of rattled by the crowds,
+but I soon says to myself, ‘Here, now, Bud; they’re just plain folks
+like you and Geronimo and Grover Cleveland and the Watson boys, so
+don’t get all flustered up with consternation under your saddle
+blanket,’ and then I feels calm and peaceful, like I was back in the
+Nation again at a ghost dance or a green corn pow-wow.
+
+“I’d been saving up for a year to give this New York a whirl. I knew a
+man named Summers that lived there, but I couldn’t find him; so I
+played a lone hand at enjoying the intoxicating pleasures of the
+corn-fed metropolis.
+
+“For a while I was so frivolous and locoed by the electric lights and
+the noises of the phonographs and the second-story railroads that I
+forgot one of the crying needs of my Western system of natural
+requirements. I never was no hand to deny myself the pleasures of
+sociable vocal intercourse with friends and strangers. Out in the
+Territories when I meet a man I never saw before, inside of nine
+minutes I know his income, religion, size of collar, and his wife’s
+temper, and how much he pays for clothes, alimony, and chewing tobacco.
+It’s a gift with me not to be penurious with my conversation.
+
+“But this here New York was inaugurated on the idea of abstemiousness
+in regard to the parts of speech. At the end of three weeks nobody in
+the city had fired even a blank syllable in my direction except the
+waiter in the grub emporium where I fed. And as his outpourings of
+syntax wasn’t nothing but plagiarisms from the bill of fare, he never
+satisfied my yearnings, which was to have somebody hit. If I stood next
+to a man at a bar he’d edge off and give a Baldwin-Ziegler look as if
+he suspected me of having the North Pole concealed on my person. I
+began to wish that I’d gone to Abilene or Waco for my _paseado_; for
+the mayor of them places will drink with you, and the first citizen you
+meet will tell you his middle name and ask you to take a chance in a
+raffle for a music box.
+
+“Well, one day when I was particular hankering for to be gregarious
+with something more loquacious than a lamp post, a fellow in a caffy
+says to me, says he:
+
+“‘Nice day!’
+
+“He was a kind of a manager of the place, and I reckon he’d seen me in
+there a good many times. He had a face like a fish and an eye like
+Judas, but I got up and put one arm around his neck.
+
+“‘Pardner,’ I says, ‘sure it’s a nice day. You’re the first gentleman
+in all New York to observe that the intricacies of human speech might
+not be altogether wasted on William Kingsbury. But don’t you think,’
+says I, ‘that ’twas a little cool early in the morning; and ain’t there
+a feeling of rain in the air to-night? But along about noon it sure was
+gallupsious weather. How’s all up to the house? You doing right well
+with the caffy, now?’
+
+“Well, sir, that galoot just turns his back and walks off stiff,
+without a word, after all my trying to be agreeable! I didn’t know what
+to make of it. That night I finds a note from Summers, who’d been away
+from town, giving the address of his camp. I goes up to his house and
+has a good, old-time talk with his folks. And I tells Summers about the
+actions of this coyote in the caffy, and desires interpretation.
+
+“‘Oh,’ says Summers, ‘he wasn’t intending to strike up a conversation
+with you. That’s just the New York style. He’d seen you was a regular
+customer and he spoke a word or two just to show you he appreciated
+your custom. You oughtn’t to have followed it up. That’s about as far
+as we care to go with a stranger. A word or so about the weather may be
+ventured, but we don’t generally make it the basis of an acquaintance.’
+
+“‘Billy,’ says I, ‘the weather and its ramifications is a solemn
+subject with me. Meteorology is one of my sore points. No man can open
+up the question of temperature or humidity or the glad sunshine with
+me, and then turn tail on it without its leading to a falling
+barometer. I’m going down to see that man again and give him a lesson
+in the art of continuous conversation. You say New York etiquette
+allows him two words and no answer. Well, he’s going to turn himself
+into a weather bureau and finish what he begun with me, besides
+indulging in neighbourly remarks on other subjects.’
+
+“Summers talked agin it, but I was irritated some and I went on the
+street car back to that caffy.
+
+“The same fellow was there yet, walking round in a sort of back corral
+where there was tables and chairs. A few people was sitting around
+having drinks and sneering at one another.
+
+“I called that man to one side and herded him into a corner. I
+unbuttoned enough to show him a thirty-eight I carried stuck under my
+vest.
+
+“‘Pardner,’ I says, ‘a brief space ago I was in here and you seized the
+opportunity to say it was a nice day. When I attempted to corroborate
+your weather signal, you turned your back and walked off. Now,’ says I,
+‘you frog-hearted, language-shy, stiff-necked cross between a
+Spitzbergen sea cook and a muzzled oyster, you resume where you left
+off in your discourse on the weather.’
+
+“The fellow looks at me and tries to grin, but he sees I don’t and he
+comes around serious.
+
+“‘Well,’ says he, eyeing the handle of my gun, ‘it was rather a nice
+day; some warmish, though.’
+
+“‘Particulars, you mealy-mouthed snoozer,’ I says—‘let’s have the
+specifications—expatiate—fill in the outlines. When you start anything
+with me in short-hand it’s bound to turn out a storm signal.’
+
+“‘Looked like rain yesterday,’ says the man, ‘but it cleared off fine
+in the forenoon. I hear the farmers are needing rain right badly
+up-State.’
+
+“‘That’s the kind of a canter,’ says I. ‘Shake the New York dust off
+your hoofs and be a real agreeable kind of a centaur. You broke the
+ice, you know, and we’re getting better acquainted every minute. Seems
+to me I asked you about your family?’
+
+“‘They’re all well, thanks,’ says he. ‘We—we have a new piano.’
+
+“‘Now you’re coming it,’ I says. ‘This cold reserve is breaking up at
+last. That little touch about the piano almost makes us brothers.
+What’s the youngest kid’s name?’ I asks him.
+
+“‘Thomas,’ says he. ‘He’s just getting well from the measles.’
+
+“‘I feel like I’d known you always,’ says I. ‘Now there was just one
+more—are you doing right well with the caffy, now?’
+
+“‘Pretty well,’ he says. ‘I’m putting away a little money.’
+
+“‘Glad to hear it,’ says I. ‘Now go back to your work and get
+civilized. Keep your hands off the weather unless you’re ready to
+follow it up in a personal manner, It’s a subject that naturally
+belongs to sociability and the forming of new ties, and I hate to see
+it handed out in small change in a town like this.’
+
+“So the next day I rolls up my blankets and hits the trail away from
+New York City.”
+
+For many minutes after Bud ceased talking we lingered around the fire,
+and then all hands began to disperse for bed.
+
+As I was unrolling my bedding I heard the pinkish-haired young man
+saying to Bud, with something like anxiety in his voice:
+
+“As I say, Mr. Kingsbury, there is something really beautiful about
+this night. The delightful breeze and the bright stars and the clear
+air unite in making it wonderfully attractive.”
+
+“Yes,” said Bud, “it’s a nice night.”
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN
+
+
+The burglar stepped inside the window quickly, and then he took his
+time. A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before
+taking anything else.
+
+The house was a private residence. By its boarded front door and
+untrimmed Boston ivy the burglar knew that the mistress of it was
+sitting on some oceanside piazza telling a sympathetic man in a
+yachting cap that no one had ever understood her sensitive, lonely
+heart. He knew by the light in the third-story front windows, and by
+the lateness of the season, that the master of the house had come home,
+and would soon extinguish his light and retire. For it was September of
+the year and of the soul, in which season the house’s good man comes to
+consider roof gardens and stenographers as vanities, and to desire the
+return of his mate and the more durable blessings of decorum and the
+moral excellencies.
+
+The burglar lighted a cigarette. The guarded glow of the match
+illuminated his salient points for a moment. He belonged to the third
+type of burglars.
+
+This third type has not yet been recognized and accepted. The police
+have made us familiar with the first and second. Their classification
+is simple. The collar is the distinguishing mark.
+
+When a burglar is caught who does not wear a collar he is described as
+a degenerate of the lowest type, singularly vicious and depraved, and
+is suspected of being the desperate criminal who stole the handcuffs
+out of Patrolman Hennessy’s pocket in 1878 and walked away to escape
+arrest.
+
+The other well-known type is the burglar who wears a collar. He is
+always referred to as a Raffles in real life. He is invariably a
+gentleman by daylight, breakfasting in a dress suit, and posing as a
+paperhanger, while after dark he plies his nefarious occupation of
+burglary. His mother is an extremely wealthy and respected resident of
+Ocean Grove, and when he is conducted to his cell he asks at once for a
+nail file and the _Police Gazette_. He always has a wife in every State
+in the Union and fiancées in all the Territories, and the newspapers
+print his matrimonial gallery out of their stock of cuts of the ladies
+who were cured by only one bottle after having been given up by five
+doctors, experiencing great relief after the first dose.
+
+The burglar wore a blue sweater. He was neither a Raffles nor one of
+the chefs from Hell’s Kitchen. The police would have been baffled had
+they attempted to classify him. They have not yet heard of the
+respectable, unassuming burglar who is neither above nor below his
+station.
+
+This burglar of the third class began to prowl. He wore no masks, dark
+lanterns, or gum shoes. He carried a 38-calibre revolver in his pocket,
+and he chewed peppermint gum thoughtfully.
+
+The furniture of the house was swathed in its summer dust protectors.
+The silver was far away in safe-deposit vaults. The burglar expected no
+remarkable “haul.” His objective point was that dimly lighted room
+where the master of the house should be sleeping heavily after whatever
+solace he had sought to lighten the burden of his loneliness. A “touch”
+might be made there to the extent of legitimate, fair professional
+profits—loose money, a watch, a jewelled stick-pin—nothing exorbitant
+or beyond reason. He had seen the window left open and had taken the
+chance.
+
+The burglar softly opened the door of the lighted room. The gas was
+turned low. A man lay in the bed asleep. On the dresser lay many things
+in confusion—a crumpled roll of bills, a watch, keys, three poker
+chips, crushed cigars, a pink silk hair bow, and an unopened bottle of
+bromo-seltzer for a bulwark in the morning.
+
+The burglar took three steps toward the dresser. The man in the bed
+suddenly uttered a squeaky groan and opened his eyes. His right hand
+slid under his pillow, but remained there.
+
+“Lay still,” said the burglar in conversational tone. Burglars of the
+third type do not hiss. The citizen in the bed looked at the round end
+of the burglar’s pistol and lay still.
+
+“Now hold up both your hands,” commanded the burglar.
+
+The citizen had a little, pointed, brown-and-gray beard, like that of a
+painless dentist. He looked solid, esteemed, irritable, and disgusted.
+He sat up in bed and raised his right hand above his head.
+
+“Up with the other one,” ordered the burglar. “You might be amphibious
+and shoot with your left. You can count two, can’t you? Hurry up, now.”
+
+“Can’t raise the other one,” said the citizen, with a contortion of his
+lineaments.
+
+“What’s the matter with it?”
+
+“Rheumatism in the shoulder.”
+
+“Inflammatory?”
+
+“Was. The inflammation has gone down.” The burglar stood for a moment
+or two, holding his gun on the afflicted one. He glanced at the plunder
+on the dresser and then, with a half-embarrassed air, back at the man
+in the bed. Then he, too, made a sudden grimace.
+
+“Don’t stand there making faces,” snapped the citizen, bad-humouredly.
+“If you’ve come to burgle why don’t you do it? There’s some stuff lying
+around.”
+
+“’Scuse me,” said the burglar, with a grin; “but it just socked me one,
+too. It’s good for you that rheumatism and me happens to be old pals. I
+got it in my left arm, too. Most anybody but me would have popped you
+when you wouldn’t hoist that left claw of yours.”
+
+“How long have you had it?” inquired the citizen.
+
+“Four years. I guess that ain’t all. Once you’ve got it, it’s you for a
+rheumatic life—that’s my judgment.”
+
+“Ever try rattlesnake oil?” asked the citizen, interestedly.
+
+“Gallons,” said the burglar. “If all the snakes I’ve used the oil of
+was strung out in a row they’d reach eight times as far as Saturn, and
+the rattles could be heard at Valparaiso, Indiana, and back.”
+
+“Some use Chiselum’s Pills,” remarked the citizen.
+
+“Fudge!” said the burglar. “Took ’em five months. No good. I had some
+relief the year I tried Finkelham’s Extract, Balm of Gilead poultices
+and Potts’s Pain Pulverizer; but I think it was the buckeye I carried
+in my pocket what done the trick.”
+
+“Is yours worse in the morning or at night?” asked the citizen.
+
+“Night,” said the burglar; “just when I’m busiest. Say, take down that
+arm of yours—I guess you won’t—Say! did you ever try Blickerstaff’s
+Blood Builder?”
+
+“I never did. Does yours come in paroxysms or is it a steady pain?”
+
+The burglar sat down on the foot of the bed and rested his gun on his
+crossed knee.
+
+“It jumps,” said he. “It strikes me when I ain’t looking for it. I had
+to give up second-story work because I got stuck sometimes half-way up.
+Tell you what—I don’t believe the bloomin’ doctors know what is good
+for it.”
+
+“Same here. I’ve spent a thousand dollars without getting any relief.
+Yours swell any?”
+
+“Of mornings. And when it’s goin’ to rain—great Christopher!”
+
+“Me, too,” said the citizen. “I can tell when a streak of humidity the
+size of a table-cloth starts from Florida on its way to New York. And
+if I pass a theatre where there’s an ‘East Lynne’ matinee going on, the
+moisture starts my left arm jumping like a toothache.”
+
+“It’s undiluted—hades!” said the burglar.
+
+“You’re dead right,” said the citizen.
+
+The burglar looked down at his pistol and thrust it into his pocket
+with an awkward attempt at ease.
+
+“Say, old man,” he said, constrainedly, “ever try opodeldoc?”
+
+“Slop!” said the citizen angrily. “Might as well rub on restaurant
+butter.”
+
+“Sure,” concurred the burglar. “It’s a salve suitable for little Minnie
+when the kitty scratches her finger. I’ll tell you what! We’re up
+against it. I only find one thing that eases her up. Hey? Little old
+sanitary, ameliorating, lest-we-forget Booze. Say—this job’s off—’scuse
+me—get on your clothes and let’s go out and have some. ’Scuse the
+liberty, but—ouch! There she goes again!”
+
+“For a week,” said the citizen. “I haven’t been able to dress myself
+without help. I’m afraid Thomas is in bed, and—”
+
+“Climb out,” said the burglar, “I’ll help you get into your duds.”
+
+The conventional returned as a tidal wave and flooded the citizen. He
+stroked his brown-and-gray beard.
+
+“It’s very unusual—” he began.
+
+“Here’s your shirt,” said the burglar, “fall out. I knew a man who said
+Omberry’s Ointment fixed him in two weeks so he could use both hands in
+tying his four-in-hand.”
+
+As they were going out the door the citizen turned and started back.
+
+“‘Liked to forgot my money,” he explained; “laid it on the dresser last
+night.”
+
+The burglar caught him by the right sleeve.
+
+“Come on,” he said bluffly. “I ask you. Leave it alone. I’ve got the
+price. Ever try witch hazel and oil of wintergreen?”
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+AT ARMS WITH MORPHEUS
+
+
+I never could quite understand how Tom Hopkins came to make that
+blunder, for he had been through a whole term at a medical
+college—before he inherited his aunt’s fortune—and had been considered
+strong in therapeutics.
+
+We had been making a call together that evening, and afterward Tom ran
+up to my rooms for a pipe and a chat before going on to his own
+luxurious apartments. I had stepped into the other room for a moment
+when I heard Tom sing out:
+
+“Oh, Billy, I’m going to take about four grains of quinine, if you
+don’t mind— I’m feeling all blue and shivery. Guess I’m taking cold.”
+
+“All right,” I called back. “The bottle is on the second shelf. Take it
+in a spoonful of that elixir of eucalyptus. It knocks the bitter out.”
+
+After I came back we sat by the fire and got our briars going. In about
+eight minutes Tom sank back into a gentle collapse.
+
+I went straight to the medicine cabinet and looked.
+
+“You unmitigated hayseed!” I growled. “See what money will do for a
+man’s brains!”
+
+There stood the morphine bottle with the stopple out, just as Tom had
+left it.
+
+I routed out another young M.D. who roomed on the floor above, and sent
+him for old Doctor Gales, two squares away. Tom Hopkins has too much
+money to be attended by rising young practitioners alone.
+
+When Gales came we put Tom through as expensive a course of treatment
+as the resources of the profession permit. After the more drastic
+remedies we gave him citrate of caffeine in frequent doses and strong
+coffee, and walked him up and down the floor between two of us. Old
+Gales pinched him and slapped his face and worked hard for the big
+check he could see in the distance. The young M.D. from the next floor
+gave Tom a most hearty, rousing kick, and then apologized to me.
+
+“Couldn’t help it,” he said. “I never kicked a millionaire before in my
+life. I may never have another opportunity.”
+
+“Now,” said Doctor Gales, after a couple of hours, “he’ll do. But keep
+him awake for another hour. You can do that by talking to him and
+shaking him up occasionally. When his pulse and respiration are normal
+then let him sleep. I’ll leave him with you now.”
+
+I was left alone with Tom, whom we had laid on a couch. He lay very
+still, and his eyes were half closed. I began my work of keeping him
+awake.
+
+“Well, old man,” I said, “you’ve had a narrow squeak, but we’ve pulled
+you through. When you were attending lectures, Tom, didn’t any of the
+professors ever casually remark that m-o-r-p-h-i-a never spells
+‘quinia,’ especially in four-grain doses? But I won’t pile it up on you
+until you get on your feet. But you ought to have been a druggist, Tom;
+you’re splendidly qualified to fill prescriptions.”
+
+Tom looked at me with a faint and foolish smile.
+
+“B’ly,” he murmured, “I feel jus’ like a hum’n bird flyin’ around a
+jolly lot of most ’shpensive roses. Don’ bozzer me. Goin’ sleep now.”
+
+And he went to sleep in two seconds. I shook him by the shoulder.
+
+“Now, Tom,” I said, severely, “this won’t do. The big doctor said you
+must stay awake for at least an hour. Open your eyes. You’re not
+entirely safe yet, you know. Wake up.”
+
+Tom Hopkins weighs one hundred and ninety-eight. He gave me another
+somnolent grin, and fell into deeper slumber. I would have made him
+move about, but I might as well have tried to make Cleopatra’s needle
+waltz around the room with me. Tom’s breathing became stertorous, and
+that, in connection with morphia poisoning, means danger.
+
+Then I began to think. I could not rouse his body; I must strive to
+excite his mind. “Make him angry,” was an idea that suggested itself.
+“Good!” I thought; but how? There was not a joint in Tom’s armour. Dear
+old fellow! He was good nature itself, and a gallant gentleman, fine
+and true and clean as sunlight. He came from somewhere down South,
+where they still have ideals and a code. New York had charmed, but had
+not spoiled, him. He had that old-fashioned chivalrous reverence for
+women, that—Eureka!—there was my idea! I worked the thing up for a
+minute or two in my imagination. I chuckled to myself at the thought of
+springing a thing like that on old Tom Hopkins. Then I took him by the
+shoulder and shook him till his ears flopped. He opened his eyes
+lazily. I assumed an expression of scorn and contempt, and pointed my
+finger within two inches of his nose.
+
+“Listen to me, Hopkins,” I said, in cutting and distinct tones, “you
+and I have been good friends, but I want you to understand that in the
+future my doors are closed against any man who acts as much like a
+scoundrel as you have.”
+
+Tom looked the least bit interested.
+
+“What’s the matter, Billy?” he muttered, composedly. “Don’t your
+clothes fit you?”
+
+“If I were in your place,” I went on, “which, thank God, I am not, I
+think I would be afraid to close my eyes. How about that girl you left
+waiting for you down among those lonesome Southern pines—the girl that
+you’ve forgotten since you came into your confounded money? Oh, I know
+what I’m talking about. While you were a poor medical student she was
+good enough for you. But now, since you are a millionaire, it’s
+different. I wonder what she thinks of the performances of that
+peculiar class of people which she has been taught to worship—the
+Southern gentlemen? I’m sorry, Hopkins, that I was forced to speak
+about these matters, but you’ve covered it up so well and played your
+part so nicely that I would have sworn you were above such unmanly
+tricks.”
+
+Poor Tom. I could scarcely keep from laughing outright to see him
+struggling against the effects of the opiate. He was distinctly angry,
+and I didn’t blame him. Tom had a Southern temper. His eyes were open
+now, and they showed a gleam or two of fire. But the drug still clouded
+his mind and bound his tongue.
+
+“C-c-confound you,” he stammered, “I’ll s-smash you.”
+
+He tried to rise from the couch. With all his size he was very weak
+now. I thrust him back with one arm. He lay there glaring like a lion
+in a trap.
+
+“That will hold you for a while, you old loony,” I said to myself. I
+got up and lit my pipe, for I was needing a smoke. I walked around a
+bit, congratulating myself on my brilliant idea.
+
+I heard a snore. I looked around. Tom was asleep again. I walked over
+and punched him on the jaw. He looked at me as pleasant and ungrudging
+as an idiot. I chewed my pipe and gave it to him hard.
+
+“I want you to recover yourself and get out of my rooms as soon as you
+can,” I said, insultingly. “I’ve told you what I think of you. If you
+have any honour or honesty left you will think twice before you attempt
+again to associate with gentlemen. She’s a poor girl, isn’t she?” I
+sneered. “Somewhat too plain and unfashionable for us since we got our
+money. Be ashamed to walk on Fifth Avenue with her, wouldn’t you?
+Hopkins, you’re forty-seven times worse than a cad. Who cares for your
+money? I don’t. I’ll bet that girl don’t. Perhaps if you didn’t have it
+you’d be more of a man. As it is you’ve made a cur of yourself, and”—I
+thought that quite dramatic—“perhaps broken a faithful heart.” (Old Tom
+Hopkins breaking a faithful heart!) “Let me be rid of you as soon as
+possible.”
+
+I turned my back on Tom, and winked at myself in a mirror. I heard him
+moving, and I turned again quickly. I didn’t want a hundred and
+ninety-eight pounds falling on me from the rear. But Tom had only
+turned partly over, and laid one arm across his face. He spoke a few
+words rather more distinctly than before.
+
+“I couldn’t have—talked this way—to you, Billy, even if I’d heard
+people—lyin’ ’bout you. But jus’ soon’s I can s-stand up—I’ll break
+your neck—don’ f’get it.”
+
+I did feel a little ashamed then. But it was to save Tom. In the
+morning, when I explained it, we would have a good laugh over it
+together.
+
+In about twenty minutes Tom dropped into a sound, easy slumber. I felt
+his pulse, listened to his respiration, and let him sleep. Everything
+was normal, and Tom was safe. I went into the other room and tumbled
+into bed.
+
+I found Tom up and dressed when I awoke the next morning. He was
+entirely himself again with the exception of shaky nerves and a tongue
+like a white-oak chip.
+
+“What an idiot I was,” he said, thoughtfully. “I remember thinking that
+quinine bottle looked queer while I was taking the dose. Have much
+trouble in bringing me ’round?”
+
+I told him no. His memory seemed bad about the entire affair. I
+concluded that he had no recollection of my efforts to keep him awake,
+and decided not to enlighten him. Some other time, I thought, when he
+was feeling better, we would have some fun over it.
+
+When Tom was ready to go he stopped, with the door open, and shook my
+hand.
+
+“Much obliged, old fellow,” he said, quietly, “for taking so much
+trouble with me—and for what you said. I’m going down now to telegraph
+to the little girl.”
+
+
+
+
+X.
+A GHOST OF A CHANCE
+
+
+“Actually, a _hod_!” repeated Mrs. Kinsolving, pathetically.
+
+Mrs. Bellamy Bellmore arched a sympathetic eyebrow. Thus she expressed
+condolence and a generous amount of apparent surprise.
+
+“Fancy her telling everywhere,” recapitulated Mrs. Kinsolving, “that
+she saw a ghost in the apartment she occupied here—our choicest
+guest-room—a ghost, carrying a hod on its shoulder—the ghost of an old
+man in overalls, smoking a pipe and carrying a hod! The very absurdity
+of the thing shows her malicious intent. There never was a Kinsolving
+that carried a hod. Every one knows that Mr. Kinsolving’s father
+accumulated his money by large building contracts, but he never worked
+a day with his own hands. He had this house built from his own plans;
+but—oh, a hod! Why need she have been so cruel and malicious?”
+
+“It is really too bad,” murmured Mrs. Bellmore, with an approving
+glance of her fine eyes about the vast chamber done in lilac and old
+gold. “And it was in this room she saw it! Oh, no, I’m not afraid of
+ghosts. Don’t have the least fear on my account. I’m glad you put me in
+here. I think family ghosts so interesting! But, really, the story does
+sound a little inconsistent. I should have expected something better
+from Mrs. Fischer-Suympkins. Don’t they carry bricks in hods? Why
+should a ghost bring bricks into a villa built of marble and stone? I’m
+so sorry, but it makes me think that age is beginning to tell upon Mrs.
+Fischer-Suympkins.”
+
+“This house,” continued Mrs. Kinsolving, “was built upon the site of an
+old one used by the family during the Revolution. There wouldn’t be
+anything strange in its having a ghost. And there was a Captain
+Kinsolving who fought in General Greene’s army, though we’ve never been
+able to secure any papers to vouch for it. If there is to be a family
+ghost, why couldn’t it have been his, instead of a bricklayer’s?”
+
+“The ghost of a Revolutionary ancestor wouldn’t be a bad idea,” agreed
+Mrs. Bellmore; “but you know how arbitrary and inconsiderate ghosts can
+be. Maybe, like love, they are ‘engendered in the eye.’ One advantage
+of those who see ghosts is that their stories can’t be disproved. By a
+spiteful eye, a Revolutionary knapsack might easily be construed to be
+a hod. Dear Mrs. Kinsolving, think no more of it. I am sure it was a
+knapsack.”
+
+“But she told everybody!” mourned Mrs. Kinsolving, inconsolable. “She
+insisted upon the details. There is the pipe. And how are you going to
+get out of the overalls?”
+
+“Shan’t get into them,” said Mrs. Bellmore, with a prettily suppressed
+yawn; “too stiff and wrinkly. Is that you, Felice? Prepare my bath,
+please. Do you dine at seven at Clifftop, Mrs. Kinsolving? So kind of
+you to run in for a chat before dinner! I love those little touches of
+informality with a guest. They give such a home flavour to a visit. So
+sorry; I must be dressing. I am so indolent I always postpone it until
+the last moment.”
+
+Mrs. Fischer-Suympkins had been the first large plum that the
+Kinsolvings had drawn from the social pie. For a long time, the pie
+itself had been out of reach on a top shelf. But the purse and the
+pursuit had at last lowered it. Mrs. Fischer-Suympkins was the
+heliograph of the smart society parading corps. The glitter of her wit
+and actions passed along the line, transmitting whatever was latest and
+most daring in the game of peep-show. Formerly, her fame and leadership
+had been secure enough not to need the support of such artifices as
+handing around live frogs for favours at a cotillon. But, now, these
+things were necessary to the holding of her throne. Beside, middle age
+had come to preside, incongruous, at her capers. The sensational papers
+had cut her space from a page to two columns. Her wit developed a
+sting; her manners became more rough and inconsiderate, as if she felt
+the royal necessity of establishing her autocracy by scorning the
+conventionalities that bound lesser potentates.
+
+To some pressure at the command of the Kinsolvings, she had yielded so
+far as to honour their house by her presence, for an evening and night.
+She had her revenge upon her hostess by relating, with grim enjoyment
+and sarcastic humour, her story of the vision carrying the hod. To that
+lady, in raptures at having penetrated thus far toward the coveted
+inner circle, the result came as a crushing disappointment. Everybody
+either sympathized or laughed, and there was little to choose between
+the two modes of expression.
+
+But, later on, Mrs. Kinsolving’s hopes and spirits were revived by the
+capture of a second and greater prize.
+
+Mrs. Bellamy Bellmore had accepted an invitation to visit at Clifftop,
+and would remain for three days. Mrs. Bellmore was one of the younger
+matrons, whose beauty, descent, and wealth gave her a reserved seat in
+the holy of holies that required no strenuous bolstering. She was
+generous enough thus to give Mrs. Kinsolving the accolade that was so
+poignantly desired; and, at the same time, she thought how much it
+would please Terence. Perhaps it would end by solving him.
+
+Terence was Mrs. Kinsolving’s son, aged twenty-nine, quite good-looking
+enough, and with two or three attractive and mysterious traits. For
+one, he was very devoted to his mother, and that was sufficiently odd
+to deserve notice. For others, he talked so little that it was
+irritating, and he seemed either very shy or very deep. Terence
+interested Mrs. Bellmore, because she was not sure which it was. She
+intended to study him a little longer, unless she forgot the matter. If
+he was only shy, she would abandon him, for shyness is a bore. If he
+was deep, she would also abandon him, for depth is precarious.
+
+On the afternoon of the third day of her visit, Terence hunted up Mrs.
+Bellmore, and found her in a nook actually looking at an album.
+
+“It’s so good of you,” said he, “to come down here and retrieve the day
+for us. I suppose you have heard that Mrs. Fischer-Suympkins scuttled
+the ship before she left. She knocked a whole plank out of the bottom
+with a hod. My mother is grieving herself ill about it. Can’t you
+manage to see a ghost for us while you are here, Mrs. Bellmore—a
+bang-up, swell ghost, with a coronet on his head and a cheque book
+under his arm?”
+
+“That was a naughty old lady, Terence,” said Mrs. Bellmore, “to tell
+such stories. Perhaps you gave her too much supper. Your mother doesn’t
+really take it seriously, does she?”
+
+“I think she does,” answered Terence. “One would think every brick in
+the hod had dropped on her. It’s a good mammy, and I don’t like to see
+her worried. It’s to be hoped that the ghost belongs to the
+hod-carriers’ union, and will go out on a strike. If he doesn’t, there
+will be no peace in this family.”
+
+“I’m sleeping in the ghost-chamber,” said Mrs. Bellmore, pensively.
+“But it’s so nice I wouldn’t change it, even if I were afraid, which
+I’m not. It wouldn’t do for me to submit a counter story of a
+desirable, aristocratic shade, would it? I would do so, with pleasure,
+but it seems to me it would be too obviously an antidote for the other
+narrative to be effective.”
+
+“True,” said Terence, running two fingers thoughtfully into his crisp,
+brown hair; “that would never do. How would it work to see the same
+ghost again, minus the overalls, and have gold bricks in the hod? That
+would elevate the spectre from degrading toil to a financial plane.
+Don’t you think that would be respectable enough?”
+
+“There was an ancestor who fought against the Britishers, wasn’t there?
+Your mother said something to that effect.”
+
+“I believe so; one of those old chaps in raglan vests and golf
+trousers. I don’t care a continental for a Continental, myself. But the
+mother has set her heart on pomp and heraldry and pyrotechnics, and I
+want her to be happy.”
+
+“You are a good boy, Terence,” said Mrs. Bellmore, sweeping her silks
+close to one side of her, “not to beat your mother. Sit here by me, and
+let’s look at the album, just as people used to do twenty years ago.
+Now, tell me about every one of them. Who is this tall, dignified
+gentleman leaning against the horizon, with one arm on the Corinthian
+column?”
+
+“That old chap with the big feet?” inquired Terence, craning his neck.
+“That’s great-uncle O’Brannigan. He used to keep a rathskeller on the
+Bowery.”
+
+“I asked you to sit down, Terence. If you are not going to amuse, or
+obey, me, I shall report in the morning that I saw a ghost wearing an
+apron and carrying schooners of beer. Now, that is better. To be shy,
+at your age, Terence, is a thing that you should blush to acknowledge.”
+
+At breakfast on the last morning of her visit, Mrs. Bellmore startled
+and entranced every one present by announcing positively that she had
+seen the ghost.
+
+“Did it have a—a—a—?” Mrs. Kinsolving, in her suspense and agitation,
+could not bring out the word.
+
+“No, indeed—far from it.”
+
+There was a chorus of questions from others at the table. “Weren’t you
+frightened?” “What did it do?” “How did it look?” “How was it dressed?”
+“Did it say anything?” “Didn’t you scream?”
+
+“I’ll try to answer everything at once,” said Mrs. Bellmore,
+heroically, “although I’m frightfully hungry. Something awakened me—I’m
+not sure whether it was a noise or a touch—and there stood the phantom.
+I never burn a light at night, so the room was quite dark, but I saw it
+plainly. I wasn’t dreaming. It was a tall man, all misty white from
+head to foot. It wore the full dress of the old Colonial days—powdered
+hair, baggy coat skirts, lace ruffles, and a sword. It looked
+intangible and luminous in the dark, and moved without a sound. Yes, I
+was a little frightened at first—or startled, I should say. It was the
+first ghost I had ever seen. No, it didn’t say anything. I didn’t
+scream. I raised up on my elbow, and then it glided silently away, and
+disappeared when it reached the door.”
+
+Mrs. Kinsolving was in the seventh heaven. “The description is that of
+Captain Kinsolving, of General Greene’s army, one of our ancestors,”
+she said, in a voice that trembled with pride and relief. “I really
+think I must apologize for our ghostly relative, Mrs. Bellmore. I am
+afraid he must have badly disturbed your rest.”
+
+Terence sent a smile of pleased congratulation toward his mother.
+Attainment was Mrs. Kinsolving’s, at last, and he loved to see her
+happy.
+
+“I suppose I ought to be ashamed to confess,” said Mrs. Bellmore, who
+was now enjoying her breakfast, “that I wasn’t very much disturbed. I
+presume it would have been the customary thing to scream and faint, and
+have all of you running about in picturesque costumes. But, after the
+first alarm was over, I really couldn’t work myself up to a panic. The
+ghost retired from the stage quietly and peacefully, after doing its
+little turn, and I went to sleep again.”
+
+Nearly all listened, politely accepted Mrs. Bellmore’s story as a
+made-up affair, charitably offered as an offset to the unkind vision
+seen by Mrs. Fischer-Suympkins. But one or two present perceived that
+her assertions bore the genuine stamp of her own convictions. Truth and
+candour seemed to attend upon every word. Even a scoffer at ghosts—if
+he were very observant—would have been forced to admit that she had, at
+least in a very vivid dream, been honestly aware of the weird visitor.’
+
+Soon Mrs. Bellmore’s maid was packing. In two hours the auto would come
+to convey her to the station. As Terence was strolling upon the east
+piazza, Mrs. Bellmore came up to him, with a confidential sparkle in
+her eye.
+
+“I didn’t wish to tell the others all of it,” she said, “but I will
+tell you. In a way, I think you should be held responsible. Can you
+guess in what manner that ghost awakened me last night?”
+
+“Rattled chains,” suggested Terence, after some thought, “or groaned?
+They usually do one or the other.”
+
+“Do you happen to know,” continued Mrs. Bellmore, with sudden
+irrelevancy, “if I resemble any one of the female relatives of your
+restless ancestor, Captain Kinsolving?”
+
+“Don’t think so,” said Terence, with an extremely puzzled air. “Never
+heard of any of them being noted beauties.”
+
+“Then, why,” said Mrs. Bellmore, looking the young man gravely in the
+eye, “should that ghost have kissed me, as I’m sure it did?”
+
+“Heavens!” exclaimed Terence, in wide-eyed amazement; “you don’t mean
+that, Mrs. Bellmore! Did he actually kiss you?”
+
+“I said _it_,” corrected Mrs. Bellmore. “I hope the impersonal pronoun
+is correctly used.”
+
+“But why did you say I was responsible?”
+
+“Because you are the only living male relative of the ghost.”
+
+“I see. ‘Unto the third and fourth generation.’ But, seriously, did
+he—did it—how do you—?”
+
+“Know? How does any one know? I was asleep, and that is what awakened
+me, I’m almost certain.”
+
+“Almost?”
+
+“Well, I awoke just as—oh, can’t you understand what I mean? When
+anything arouses you suddenly, you are not positive whether you
+dreamed, or—and yet you know that— Dear me, Terence, must I dissect the
+most elementary sensations in order to accommodate your extremely
+practical intelligence?”
+
+“But, about kissing ghosts, you know,” said Terence, humbly, “I require
+the most primary instruction. I never kissed a ghost. Is it—is it—?”
+
+“The sensation,” said Mrs. Bellmore, with deliberate, but slightly
+smiling, emphasis, “since you are seeking instruction, is a mingling of
+the material and the spiritual.”
+
+“Of course,” said Terence, suddenly growing serious, “it was a dream or
+some kind of an hallucination. Nobody believes in spirits, these days.
+If you told the tale out of kindness of heart, Mrs. Bellmore, I can’t
+express how grateful I am to you. It has made my mother supremely
+happy. That Revolutionary ancestor was a stunning idea.”
+
+Mrs. Bellmore sighed. “The usual fate of ghost-seers is mine,” she
+said, resignedly. “My privileged encounter with a spirit is attributed
+to lobster salad or mendacity. Well, I have, at least, one memory left
+from the wreck—a kiss from the unseen world. Was Captain Kinsolving a
+very brave man, do you know, Terence?”
+
+“He was licked at Yorktown, I believe,” said Terence, reflecting. “They
+say he skedaddled with his company, after the first battle there.”
+
+“I thought he must have been timid,” said Mrs. Bellmore, absently. “He
+might have had another.”
+
+“Another battle?” asked Terence, dully.
+
+“What else could I mean? I must go and get ready now; the auto will be
+here in an hour. I’ve enjoyed Clifftop immensely. Such a lovely
+morning, isn’t it, Terence?”
+
+On her way to the station, Mrs. Bellmore took from her bag a silk
+handkerchief, and looked at it with a little peculiar smile. Then she
+tied it in several very hard knots, and threw it, at a convenient
+moment, over the edge of the cliff along which the road ran.
+
+In his room, Terence was giving some directions to his man, Brooks.
+“Have this stuff done up in a parcel,” he said, “and ship it to the
+address on that card.”
+
+The card was that of a New York costumer. The “stuff” was a gentleman’s
+costume of the days of ’76, made of white satin, with silver buckles,
+white silk stockings, and white kid shoes. A powdered wig and a sword
+completed the dress.
+
+“And look about, Brooks,” added Terence, a little anxiously, “for a
+silk handkerchief with my initials in one corner. I must have dropped
+it somewhere.”
+
+It was a month later when Mrs. Bellmore and one or two others of the
+smart crowd were making up a list of names for a coaching trip through
+the Catskills. Mrs. Bellmore looked over the list for a final
+censoring. The name of Terence Kinsolving was there. Mrs. Bellmore ran
+her prohibitive pencil lightly through the name.
+
+“Too shy!” she murmured, sweetly, in explanation.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+JIMMY HAYES AND MURIEL
+
+
+I
+
+Supper was over, and there had fallen upon the camp the silence that
+accompanies the rolling of corn-husk cigarettes. The water hole shone
+from the dark earth like a patch of fallen sky. Coyotes yelped. Dull
+thumps indicated the rocking-horse movements of the hobbled ponies as
+they moved to fresh grass. A half-troop of the Frontier Battalion of
+Texas Rangers were distributed about the fire.
+
+A well-known sound—the fluttering and scraping of chaparral against
+wooden stirrups—came from the thick brush above the camp. The rangers
+listened cautiously. They heard a loud and cheerful voice call out
+reassuringly:
+
+“Brace up, Muriel, old girl, we’re ’most there now! Been a long ride
+for ye, ain’t it, ye old antediluvian handful of animated carpet-tacks?
+Hey, now, quit a tryin’ to kiss me! Don’t hold on to my neck so
+tight—this here paint hoss ain’t any too shore-footed, let me tell ye.
+He’s liable to dump us both off if we don’t watch out.”
+
+Two minutes of waiting brought a tired “paint” pony single-footing into
+camp. A gangling youth of twenty lolled in the saddle. Of the “Muriel”
+whom he had been addressing, nothing was to be seen.
+
+“Hi, fellows!” shouted the rider cheerfully. “This here’s a letter fer
+Lieutenant Manning.”
+
+He dismounted, unsaddled, dropped the coils of his stake-rope, and got
+his hobbles from the saddle-horn. While Lieutenant Manning, in command,
+was reading the letter, the newcomer, rubbed solicitously at some dried
+mud in the loops of the hobbles, showing a consideration for the
+forelegs of his mount.
+
+“Boys,” said the lieutenant, waving his hand to the rangers, “this is
+Mr. James Hayes. He’s a new member of the company. Captain McLean sends
+him down from El Paso. The boys will see that you have some supper,
+Hayes, as soon as you get your pony hobbled.”
+
+The recruit was received cordially by the rangers. Still, they observed
+him shrewdly and with suspended judgment. Picking a comrade on the
+border is done with ten times the care and discretion with which a girl
+chooses a sweetheart. On your “side-kicker’s” nerve, loyalty, aim, and
+coolness your own life may depend many times.
+
+After a hearty supper Hayes joined the smokers about the fire. His
+appearance did not settle all the questions in the minds of his brother
+rangers. They saw simply a loose, lank youth with tow-coloured,
+sun-burned hair and a berry-brown, ingenuous face that wore a
+quizzical, good-natured smile.
+
+“Fellows,” said the new ranger, “I’m goin’ to interduce to you a lady
+friend of mine. Ain’t ever heard anybody call her a beauty, but you’ll
+all admit she’s got some fine points about her. Come along, Muriel!”
+
+He held open the front of his blue flannel shirt. Out of it crawled a
+horned frog. A bright red ribbon was tied jauntily around its spiky
+neck. It crawled to its owner’s knee and sat there, motionless.
+
+“This here Muriel,” said Hayes, with an oratorical wave of his hand,
+“has got qualities. She never talks back, she always stays at home, and
+she’s satisfied with one red dress for every day and Sunday, too.”
+
+“Look at that blame insect!” said one of the rangers with a grin. “I’ve
+seen plenty of them horny frogs, but I never knew anybody to have one
+for a side-partner. Does the blame thing know you from anybody else?”
+
+“Take it over there and see,” said Hayes.
+
+The stumpy little lizard known as the horned frog is harmless. He has
+the hideousness of the prehistoric monsters whose reduced descendant he
+is, but he is gentler than the dove.
+
+The ranger took Muriel from Hayes’s knee and went back to his seat on a
+roll of blankets. The captive twisted and clawed and struggled
+vigorously in his hand. After holding it for a moment or two, the
+ranger set it upon the ground. Awkwardly, but swiftly the frog worked
+its four oddly moving legs until it stopped close by Hayes’s foot.
+
+“Well, dang my hide!” said the other ranger. “The little cuss knows
+you. Never thought them insects had that much sense!”
+
+
+II
+
+Jimmy Hayes became a favourite in the ranger camp. He had an endless
+store of good-nature, and a mild, perennial quality of humour that is
+well adapted to camp life. He was never without his horned frog. In the
+bosom of his shirt during rides, on his knee or shoulder in camp, under
+his blankets at night, the ugly little beast never left him.
+
+Jimmy was a humourist of a type that prevails in the rural South and
+West. Unskilled in originating methods of amusing or in witty
+conceptions, he had hit upon a comical idea and clung to it reverently.
+It had seemed to Jimmy a very funny thing to have about his person,
+with which to amuse his friends, a tame horned frog with a red ribbon
+around its neck. As it was a happy idea, why not perpetuate it?
+
+The sentiments existing between Jimmy and the frog cannot be exactly
+determined. The capability of the horned frog for lasting affection is
+a subject upon which we have had no symposiums. It is easier to guess
+Jimmy’s feelings. Muriel was his _chef d’œuvre_ of wit, and as such he
+cherished her. He caught flies for her, and shielded her from sudden
+northers. Yet his care was half selfish, and when the time came she
+repaid him a thousand fold. Other Muriels have thus overbalanced the
+light attentions of other Jimmies.
+
+Not at once did Jimmy Hayes attain full brotherhood with his comrades.
+They loved him for his simplicity and drollness, but there hung above
+him a great sword of suspended judgment. To make merry in camp is not
+all of a ranger’s life. There are horse-thieves to trail, desperate
+criminals to run down, bravos to battle with, bandits to rout out of
+the chaparral, peace and order to be compelled at the muzzle of a
+six-shooter. Jimmy had been “’most generally a cow-puncher,” he said;
+he was inexperienced in ranger methods of warfare. Therefore the
+rangers speculated apart and solemnly as to how he would stand fire.
+For, let it be known, the honour and pride of each ranger company is
+the individual bravery of its members.
+
+For two months the border was quiet. The rangers lolled, listless, in
+camp. And then—bringing joy to the rusting guardians of the
+frontier—Sebastiano Saldar, an eminent Mexican desperado and
+cattle-thief, crossed the Rio Grande with his gang and began to lay
+waste the Texas side. There were indications that Jimmy Hayes would
+soon have the opportunity to show his mettle. The rangers patrolled
+with alacrity, but Saldar’s men were mounted like Lochinvar, and were
+hard to catch.
+
+One evening, about sundown, the rangers halted for supper after a long
+ride. Their horses stood panting, with their saddles on. The men were
+frying bacon and boiling coffee. Suddenly, out of the brush, Sebastiano
+Saldar and his gang dashed upon them with blazing six-shooters and
+high-voiced yells. It was a neat surprise. The rangers swore in annoyed
+tones, and got their Winchesters busy; but the attack was only a
+spectacular dash of the purest Mexican type. After the florid
+demonstration the raiders galloped away, yelling, down the river. The
+rangers mounted and pursued; but in less than two miles the fagged
+ponies laboured so that Lieutenant Manning gave the word to abandon the
+chase and return to the camp.
+
+Then it was discovered that Jimmy Hayes was missing. Some one
+remembered having seen him run for his pony when the attack began, but
+no one had set eyes on him since. Morning came, but no Jimmy. They
+searched the country around, on the theory that he had been killed or
+wounded, but without success. Then they followed after Saldar’s gang,
+but it seemed to have disappeared. Manning concluded that the wily
+Mexican had recrossed the river after his theatric farewell. And,
+indeed, no further depredations from him were reported.
+
+This gave the rangers time to nurse a soreness they had. As has been
+said, the pride and honour of the company is the individual bravery of
+its members. And now they believed that Jimmy Hayes had turned coward
+at the whiz of Mexican bullets. There was no other deduction. Buck
+Davis pointed out that not a shot was fired by Saldar’s gang after
+Jimmy was seen running for his horse. There was no way for him to have
+been shot. No, he had fled from his first fight, and afterward he would
+not return, aware that the scorn of his comrades would be a worse thing
+to face than the muzzles of many rifles.
+
+So Manning’s detachment of McLean’s company, Frontier Battalion, was
+gloomy. It was the first blot on its escutcheon. Never before in the
+history of the service had a ranger shown the white feather. All of
+them had liked Jimmy Hayes, and that made it worse.
+
+Days, weeks, and months went by, and still that little cloud of
+unforgotten cowardice hung above the camp.
+
+
+III
+
+Nearly a year afterward—after many camping grounds and many hundreds of
+miles guarded and defended—Lieutenant Manning, with almost the same
+detachment of men, was sent to a point only a few miles below their old
+camp on the river to look after some smuggling there. One afternoon,
+while they were riding through a dense mesquite flat, they came upon a
+patch of open hog-wallow prairie. There they rode upon the scene of an
+unwritten tragedy.
+
+In a big hog-wallow lay the skeletons of three Mexicans. Their clothing
+alone served to identify them. The largest of the figures had once been
+Sebastiano Saldar. His great, costly sombrero, heavy with gold
+ornamentation—a hat famous all along the Rio Grande—lay there pierced
+by three bullets. Along the ridge of the hog-wallow rested the rusting
+Winchesters of the Mexicans—all pointing in the same direction.
+
+The rangers rode in that direction for fifty yards. There, in a little
+depression of the ground, with his rifle still bearing upon the three,
+lay another skeleton. It had been a battle of extermination. There was
+nothing to identify the solitary defender. His clothing—such as the
+elements had left distinguishable—seemed to be of the kind that any
+ranchman or cowboy might have worn.
+
+“Some cow-puncher,” said Manning, “that they caught out alone. Good
+boy! He put up a dandy scrap before they got him. So that’s why we
+didn’t hear from Don Sebastiano any more!”
+
+And then, from beneath the weather-beaten rags of the dead man, there
+wriggled out a horned frog with a faded red ribbon around its neck, and
+sat upon the shoulder of its long quiet master. Mutely it told the
+story of the untried youth and the swift “paint” pony—how they had
+outstripped all their comrades that day in the pursuit of the Mexican
+raiders, and how the boy had gone down upholding the honour of the
+company.
+
+The ranger troop herded close, and a simultaneous wild yell arose from
+their lips. The outburst was at once a dirge, an apology, an epitaph,
+and a pæan of triumph. A strange requiem, you may say, over the body of
+a fallen, comrade; but if Jimmy Hayes could have heard it he would have
+understood.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+THE DOOR OF UNREST
+
+
+I sat an hour by sun, in the editor’s room of the Montopolis _Weekly
+Bugle_. I was the editor.
+
+The saffron rays of the declining sunlight filtered through the
+cornstalks in Micajah Widdup’s garden-patch, and cast an amber glory
+upon my paste-pot. I sat at the editorial desk in my non-rotary
+revolving chair, and prepared my editorial against the oligarchies. The
+room, with its one window, was already a prey to the twilight. One by
+one, with my trenchant sentences, I lopped off the heads of the
+political hydra, while I listened, full of kindly peace, to the
+home-coming cow-bells and wondered what Mrs. Flanagan was going to have
+for supper.
+
+Then in from the dusky, quiet street there drifted and perched himself
+upon a corner of my desk old Father Time’s younger brother. His face
+was beardless and as gnarled as an English walnut. I never saw clothes
+such as he wore. They would have reduced Joseph’s coat to a monochrome.
+But the colours were not the dyer’s. Stains and patches and the work of
+sun and rust were responsible for the diversity. On his coarse shoes
+was the dust, conceivably, of a thousand leagues. I can describe him no
+further, except to say that he was little and weird and old—old I began
+to estimate in centuries when I saw him. Yes, and I remember that there
+was an odour, a faint odour like aloes, or possibly like myrrh or
+leather; and I thought of museums.
+
+And then I reached for a pad and pencil, for business is business, and
+visits of the oldest inhabitants are sacred and honourable, requiring
+to be chronicled.
+
+“I am glad to see you, sir,” I said. “I would offer you a chair,
+but—you see, sir,” I went on, “I have lived in Montopolis only three
+weeks, and I have not met many of our citizens.” I turned a doubtful
+eye upon his dust-stained shoes, and concluded with a newspaper phrase,
+“I suppose that you reside in our midst?”
+
+My visitor fumbled in his raiment, drew forth a soiled card, and handed
+it to me. Upon it was written, in plain but unsteadily formed
+characters, the name “Michob Ader.”
+
+“I am glad you called, Mr. Ader,” I said. “As one of our older
+citizens, you must view with pride the recent growth and enterprise of
+Montopolis. Among other improvements, I think I can promise that the
+town will now be provided with a live, enterprising newspa—”
+
+“Do ye know the name on that card?” asked my caller, interrupting me.
+
+“It is not a familiar one to me,” I said.
+
+Again he visited the depths of his ancient vestments. This time he
+brought out a torn leaf of some book or journal, brown and flimsy with
+age. The heading of the page was the _Turkish Spy_ in old-style type;
+the printing upon it was this:
+
+“There is a man come to Paris in this year 1643 who pretends to have
+lived these sixteen hundred years. He says of himself that he was a
+shoemaker in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion; that his name is
+Michob Ader; and that when Jesus, the Christian Messias, was condemned
+by Pontius Pilate, the Roman president, he paused to rest while bearing
+his cross to the place of crucifixion before the door of Michob Ader.
+The shoemaker struck Jesus with his fist, saying: ‘Go; why tarriest
+thou?’ The Messias answered him: ‘I indeed am going; but thou shalt
+tarry until I come’; thereby condemning him to live until the day of
+judgment. He lives forever, but at the end of every hundred years he
+falls into a fit or trance, on recovering from which he finds himself
+in the same state of youth in which he was when Jesus suffered, being
+then about thirty years of age.
+
+“Such is the story of the Wandering Jew, as told by Michob Ader, who
+relates—” Here the printing ended.
+
+I must have muttered aloud something to myself about the Wandering Jew,
+for the old man spake up, bitterly and loudly.
+
+“’Tis a lie,” said he, “like nine tenths of what ye call history. ’Tis
+a Gentile I am, and no Jew. I am after footing it out of Jerusalem, my
+son; but if that makes me a Jew, then everything that comes out of a
+bottle is babies’ milk. Ye have my name on the card ye hold; and ye
+have read the bit of paper they call the _Turkish Spy_ that printed the
+news when I stepped into their office on the 12th day of June, in the
+year 1643, just as I have called upon ye to-day.”
+
+I laid down my pencil and pad. Clearly it would not do. Here was an
+item for the local column of the _Bugle_ that—but it would not do.
+Still, fragments of the impossible “personal” began to flit through my
+conventionalized brain. “Uncle Michob is as spry on his legs as a young
+chap of only a thousand or so.” “Our venerable caller relates with
+pride that George Wash—no, Ptolemy the Great—once dandled him on his
+knee at his father’s house.” “Uncle Michob says that our wet spring was
+nothing in comparison with the dampness that ruined the crops around
+Mount Ararat when he was a boy—” But no, no—it would not do.
+
+I was trying to think of some conversational subject with which to
+interest my visitor, and was hesitating between walking matches and the
+Pliocene age, when the old man suddenly began to weep poignantly and
+distressfully.
+
+“Cheer up, Mr. Ader,” I said, a little awkwardly; “this matter may blow
+over in a few hundred years more. There has already been a decided
+reaction in favour of Judas Iscariot and Colonel Burr and the
+celebrated violinist, Signor Nero. This is the age of whitewash. You
+must not allow yourself to become down-hearted.”
+
+Unknowingly, I had struck a chord. The old man blinked belligerently
+through his senile tears.
+
+“’Tis time,” he said, “that the liars be doin’ justice to somebody. Yer
+historians are no more than a pack of old women gabblin’ at a wake. A
+finer man than the Imperor Nero niver wore sandals. Man, I was at the
+burnin’ of Rome. I knowed the Imperor well, for in them days I was a
+well-known char-acter. In thim days they had rayspect for a man that
+lived forever.
+
+“But ’twas of the Imperor Nero I was goin’ to tell ye. I struck into
+Rome, up the Appian Way, on the night of July the 16th, the year 64. I
+had just stepped down by way of Siberia and Afghanistan; and one foot
+of me had a frost-bite, and the other a blister burned by the sand of
+the desert; and I was feelin’ a bit blue from doin’ patrol duty from
+the North Pole down to the Last Chance corner in Patagonia, and bein’
+miscalled a Jew in the bargain. Well, I’m tellin’ ye I was passin’ the
+Circus Maximus, and it was dark as pitch over the way, and then I heard
+somebody sing out, ‘Is that you, Michob?’
+
+“Over ag’inst the wall, hid out amongst a pile of barrels and old
+dry-goods boxes, was the Imperor Nero wid his togy wrapped around his
+toes, smokin’ a long, black segar.
+
+“‘Have one, Michob?’ says he.
+
+“‘None of the weeds for me,’ says I—‘nayther pipe nor segar. What’s the
+use,’ says I, ‘of smokin’ when ye’ve not got the ghost of a chance of
+killin’ yeself by doin’ it?’
+
+“‘True for ye, Michob Ader, my perpetual Jew,’ says the Imperor; ‘ye’re
+not always wandering. Sure, ’tis danger gives the spice of our
+pleasures—next to their bein’ forbidden.’
+
+“‘And for what,’ says I, ‘do ye smoke be night in dark places widout
+even a cinturion in plain clothes to attend ye?’
+
+“‘Have ye ever heard, Michob,’ says the Imperor, ‘of
+predestinarianism?’
+
+“‘I’ve had the cousin of it,’ says I. ‘I’ve been on the trot with
+pedestrianism for many a year, and more to come, as ye well know.’
+
+“‘The longer word,’ says me friend Nero, ‘is the tachin’ of this new
+sect of people they call the Christians. ’Tis them that’s raysponsible
+for me smokin’ be night in holes and corners of the dark.’
+
+“And then I sets down and takes off a shoe and rubs me foot that is
+frosted, and the Imperor tells me about it. It seems that since I
+passed that way before, the Imperor had mandamused the Impress wid a
+divorce suit, and Misses Poppæa, a cilibrated lady, was ingaged, widout
+riferences, as housekeeper at the palace. ‘All in one day,’ says the
+Imperor, ‘she puts up new lace windy-curtains in the palace and joins
+the anti-tobacco society, and whin I feels the need of a smoke I must
+be after sneakin’ out to these piles of lumber in the dark.’ So there
+in the dark me and the Imperor sat, and I told him of me travels. And
+when they say the Imperor was an incindiary, they lie. ’Twas that night
+the fire started that burnt the city. ’Tis my opinion that it began
+from a stump of segar that he threw down among the boxes. And ’tis a
+lie that he fiddled. He did all he could for six days to stop it, sir.”
+
+And now I detected a new flavour to Mr. Michob Ader. It had not been
+myrrh or balm or hyssop that I had smelled. The emanation was the odour
+of bad whiskey—and, worse still, of low comedy—the sort that small
+humorists manufacture by clothing the grave and reverend things of
+legend and history in the vulgar, topical frippery that passes for a
+certain kind of wit. Michob Ader as an impostor, claiming nineteen
+hundred years, and playing his part with the decency of respectable
+lunacy, I could endure; but as a tedious wag, cheapening his egregious
+story with song-book levity, his importance as an entertainer grew
+less.
+
+And then, as if he suspected my thoughts, he suddenly shifted his key.
+
+“You’ll excuse me, sir,” he whined, “but sometimes I get a little mixed
+in my head. I am a very old man; and it is hard to remember
+everything.”
+
+I knew that he was right, and that I should not try to reconcile him
+with Roman history; so I asked for news concerning other ancients with
+whom he had walked familiar.
+
+Above my desk hung an engraving of Raphael’s cherubs. You could yet
+make out their forms, though the dust blurred their outlines strangely.
+
+“Ye calls them ‘cher-rubs’,” cackled the old man. “Babes, ye fancy they
+are, with wings. And there’s one wid legs and a bow and arrow that ye
+call Cupid—I know where they was found. The
+great-great-great-grandfather of thim all was a billy-goat. Bein’ an
+editor, sir, do ye happen to know where Solomon’s Temple stood?”
+
+I fancied that it was in—in Persia? Well, I did not know.
+
+“’Tis not in history nor in the Bible where it was. But I saw it,
+meself. The first pictures of cher-rubs and cupids was sculptured upon
+thim walls and pillars. Two of the biggest, sir, stood in the adytum to
+form the baldachin over the Ark. But the wings of thim sculptures was
+intindid for horns. And the faces was the faces of goats. Ten thousand
+goats there was in and about the temple. And your cher-rubs was
+billy-goats in the days of King Solomon, but the painters misconstrued
+the horns into wings.
+
+“And I knew Tamerlane, the lame Timour, sir, very well. I saw him at
+Keghut and at Zaranj. He was a little man no larger than yerself, with
+hair the colour of an amber pipe stem. They buried him at Samarkand. I
+was at the wake, sir. Oh, he was a fine-built man in his coffin, six
+feet long, with black whiskers to his face. And I see ’em throw turnips
+at the Imperor Vispacian in Africa. All over the world I have tramped,
+sir, without the body of me findin’ any rest. ’Twas so commanded. I saw
+Jerusalem destroyed, and Pompeii go up in the fireworks; and I was at
+the coronation of Charlemagne and the lynchin’ of Joan of Arc. And
+everywhere I go there comes storms and revolutions and plagues and
+fires. ’Twas so commanded. Ye have heard of the Wandering Jew. ’Tis all
+so, except that divil a bit am I a Jew. But history lies, as I have
+told ye. Are ye quite sure, sir, that ye haven’t a drop of whiskey
+convenient? Ye well know that I have many miles of walking before me.”
+
+“I have none,” said I, “and, if you please, I am about to leave for my
+supper.”
+
+I pushed my chair back creakingly. This ancient landlubber was becoming
+as great an affliction as any cross-bowed mariner. He shook a musty
+effluvium from his piebald clothes, overturned my inkstand, and went on
+with his insufferable nonsense.
+
+“I wouldn’t mind it so much,” he complained, “if it wasn’t for the work
+I must do on Good Fridays. Ye know about Pontius Pilate, sir, of
+course. His body, whin he killed himself, was pitched into a lake on
+the Alps mountains. Now, listen to the job that ’tis mine to perform on
+the night of ivery Good Friday. The ould divil goes down in the pool
+and drags up Pontius, and the water is bilin’ and spewin’ like a wash
+pot. And the ould divil sets the body on top of a throne on the rocks,
+and thin comes me share of the job. Oh, sir, ye would pity me thin—ye
+would pray for the poor Wandering Jew that niver was a Jew if ye could
+see the horror of the thing that I must do. ’Tis I that must fetch a
+bowl of water and kneel down before it till it washes its hands. I
+declare to ye that Pontius Pilate, a man dead two hundred years,
+dragged up with the lake slime coverin’ him and fishes wrigglin’ inside
+of him widout eyes, and in the discomposition of the body, sits there,
+sir, and washes his hands in the bowl I hold for him on Good Fridays.
+’Twas so commanded.”
+
+Clearly, the matter had progressed far beyond the scope of the
+_Bugle’s_ local column. There might have been employment here for the
+alienist or for those who circulate the pledge; but I had had enough of
+it. I got up, and repeated that I must go.
+
+At this he seized my coat, grovelled upon my desk, and burst again into
+distressful weeping. Whatever it was about, I said to myself that his
+grief was genuine.
+
+“Come now, Mr. Ader,” I said, soothingly; “what is the matter?”
+
+The answer came brokenly through his racking sobs:
+
+“Because I would not … let the poor Christ … rest … upon the step.”
+
+His hallucination seemed beyond all reasonable answer; yet the effect
+of it upon him scarcely merited disrespect. But I knew nothing that
+might assuage it; and I told him once more that both of us should be
+leaving the office at once.
+
+Obedient at last, he raised himself from my dishevelled desk, and
+permitted me to half lift him to the floor. The gale of his grief had
+blown away his words; his freshet of tears had soaked away the crust of
+his grief. Reminiscence died in him—at least, the coherent part of it.
+
+“’Twas me that did it,” he muttered, as I led him toward the door—“me,
+the shoemaker of Jerusalem.”
+
+I got him to the sidewalk, and in the augmented light I saw that his
+face was seared and lined and warped by a sadness almost incredibly the
+product of a single lifetime.
+
+And then high up in the firmamental darkness we heard the clamant cries
+of some great, passing birds. My Wandering Jew lifted his hand, with
+side-tilted head.
+
+“The Seven Whistlers!” he said, as one introduces well-known friends.
+
+“Wild geese,” said I; “but I confess that their number is beyond me.”
+
+“They follow me everywhere,” he said. “’Twas so commanded. What ye hear
+is the souls of the seven Jews that helped with the Crucifixion.
+Sometimes they’re plovers and sometimes geese, but ye’ll find them
+always flyin’ where I go.”
+
+I stood, uncertain how to take my leave. I looked down the street,
+shuffled my feet, looked back again—and felt my hair rise. The old man
+had disappeared.
+
+And then my capillaries relaxed, for I dimly saw him footing it away
+through the darkness. But he walked so swiftly and silently and
+contrary to the gait promised by his age that my composure was not all
+restored, though I knew not why.
+
+That night I was foolish enough to take down some dust-covered volumes
+from my modest shelves. I searched “Hermippus Redivvus” and “Salathiel”
+and the “Pepys Collection” in vain. And then in a book called “The
+Citizen of the World,” and in one two centuries old, I came upon what I
+desired. Michob Ader had indeed come to Paris in the year 1643, and
+related to the _Turkish Spy_ an extraordinary story. He claimed to be
+the Wandering Jew, and that—
+
+But here I fell asleep, for my editorial duties had not been light that
+day.
+
+Judge Hoover was the _Bugle’s_ candidate for congress. Having to confer
+with him, I sought his home early the next morning; and we walked
+together down town through a little street with which I was unfamiliar.
+
+“Did you ever hear of Michob Ader?” I asked him, smiling.
+
+“Why, yes,” said the judge. “And that reminds me of my shoes he has for
+mending. Here is his shop now.”
+
+Judge Hoover stepped into a dingy, small shop. I looked up at the sign,
+and saw “Mike O’Bader, Boot and Shoe Maker,” on it. Some wild geese
+passed above, honking clearly. I scratched my ear and frowned, and then
+trailed into the shop.
+
+There sat my Wandering Jew on his shoemaker’s bench, trimming a
+half-sole. He was drabbled with dew, grass-stained, unkempt, and
+miserable; and on his face was still the unexplained wretchedness, the
+problematic sorrow, the esoteric woe, that had been written there by
+nothing less, it seemed, than the stylus of the centuries.
+
+Judge Hoover inquired kindly concerning his shoes. The old shoemaker
+looked up, and spoke sanely enough. He had been ill, he said, for a few
+days. The next day the shoes would be ready. He looked at me, and I
+could see that I had no place in his memory. So out we went, and on our
+way.
+
+“Old Mike,” remarked the candidate, “has been on one of his sprees. He
+gets crazy drunk regularly once a month. But he’s a good shoemaker.”
+
+“What is his history?” I inquired.
+
+“Whiskey,” epitomized Judge Hoover. “That explains him.”
+
+I was silent, but I did not accept the explanation. And so, when I had
+the chance, I asked old man Sellers, who browsed daily on my exchanges.
+
+“Mike O’Bader,” said he, “was makin’ shoes in Montopolis when I come
+here goin’ on fifteen year ago. I guess whiskey’s his trouble. Once a
+month he gets off the track, and stays so a week. He’s got a rigmarole
+somethin’ about his bein’ a Jew pedler that he tells ev’rybody. Nobody
+won’t listen to him any more. When he’s sober he ain’t sich a fool—he’s
+got a sight of books in the back room of his shop that he reads. I
+guess you can lay all his trouble to whiskey.”
+
+But again I would not. Not yet was my Wandering Jew rightly construed
+for me. I trust that women may not be allowed a title to all the
+curiosity in the world. So when Montopolis’s oldest inhabitant (some
+ninety score years younger than Michob Ader) dropped in to acquire
+promulgation in print, I siphoned his perpetual trickle of reminiscence
+in the direction of the uninterpreted maker of shoes.
+
+Uncle Abner was the Complete History of Montopolis, bound in butternut.
+
+“O’Bader,” he quavered, “come here in ’69. He was the first shoemaker
+in the place. Folks generally considers him crazy at times now. But he
+don’t harm nobody. I s’pose drinkin’ upset his mind—yes, drinkin’ very
+likely done it. It’s a powerful bad thing, drinkin’. I’m an old, old
+man, sir, and I never see no good in drinkin’.”
+
+I felt disappointment. I was willing to admit drink in the case of my
+shoemaker, but I preferred it as a recourse instead of a cause. Why had
+he pitched upon his perpetual, strange note of the Wandering Jew? Why
+his unutterable grief during his aberration? I could not yet accept
+whiskey as an explanation.
+
+“Did Mike O’Bader ever have a great loss or trouble of any kind?” I
+asked.
+
+“Lemme see! About thirty year ago there was somethin’ of the kind, I
+recollect. Montopolis, sir, in them days used to be a mighty strict
+place.
+
+“Well, Mike O’Bader had a daughter then—a right pretty girl. She was
+too gay a sort for Montopolis, so one day she slips off to another town
+and runs away with a circus. It was two years before she comes back,
+all fixed up in fine clothes and rings and jewellery, to see Mike. He
+wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with her, so she stays around town awhile,
+anyway. I reckon the men folks wouldn’t have raised no objections, but
+the women egged ’em on to order her to leave town. But she had plenty
+of spunk, and told ’em to mind their own business.
+
+“So one night they decided to run her away. A crowd of men and women
+drove her out of her house, and chased her with sticks and stones. She
+run to her father’s door, callin’ for help. Mike opens it, and when he
+sees who it is he hits her with his fist and knocks her down and shuts
+the door.
+
+“And then the crowd kept on chunkin’ her till she run clear out of
+town. And the next day they finds her drowned dead in Hunter’s mill
+pond. I mind it all now. That was thirty year ago.”
+
+I leaned back in my non-rotary revolving chair and nodded gently, like
+a mandarin, at my paste-pot.
+
+“When old Mike has a spell,” went on Uncle Abner, tepidly garrulous,
+“he thinks he’s the Wanderin’ Jew.”
+
+“He is,” said I, nodding away.
+
+And Uncle Abner cackled insinuatingly at the editor’s remark, for he
+was expecting at least a “stickful” in the “Personal Notes” of the
+_Bugle_.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES
+
+
+When Major Pendleton Talbot, of Mobile, sir, and his daughter, Miss
+Lydia Talbot, came to Washington to reside, they selected for a
+boarding place a house that stood fifty yards back from one of the
+quietest avenues. It was an old-fashioned brick building, with a
+portico upheld by tall white pillars. The yard was shaded by stately
+locusts and elms, and a catalpa tree in season rained its pink and
+white blossoms upon the grass. Rows of high box bushes lined the fence
+and walks. It was the Southern style and aspect of the place that
+pleased the eyes of the Talbots.
+
+In this pleasant, private boarding house they engaged rooms, including
+a study for Major Talbot, who was adding the finishing chapters to his
+book, “Anecdotes and Reminiscences of the Alabama Army, Bench, and
+Bar.”
+
+Major Talbot was of the old, old South. The present day had little
+interest or excellence in his eyes. His mind lived in that period
+before the Civil War, when the Talbots owned thousands of acres of fine
+cotton land and the slaves to till them; when the family mansion was
+the scene of princely hospitality, and drew its guests from the
+aristocracy of the South. Out of that period he had brought all its old
+pride and scruples of honour, an antiquated and punctilious politeness,
+and (you would think) its wardrobe.
+
+Such clothes were surely never made within fifty years. The major was
+tall, but whenever he made that wonderful, archaic genuflexion he
+called a bow, the corners of his frock coat swept the floor. That
+garment was a surprise even to Washington, which has long ago ceased to
+shy at the frocks and broadbrimmed hats of Southern congressmen. One of
+the boarders christened it a “Father Hubbard,” and it certainly was
+high in the waist and full in the skirt.
+
+But the major, with all his queer clothes, his immense area of plaited,
+ravelling shirt bosom, and the little black string tie with the bow
+always slipping on one side, both was smiled at and liked in Mrs.
+Vardeman’s select boarding house. Some of the young department clerks
+would often “string him,” as they called it, getting him started upon
+the subject dearest to him—the traditions and history of his beloved
+Southland. During his talks he would quote freely from the “Anecdotes
+and Reminiscences.” But they were very careful not to let him see their
+designs, for in spite of his sixty-eight years, he could make the
+boldest of them uncomfortable under the steady regard of his piercing
+gray eyes.
+
+Miss Lydia was a plump, little old maid of thirty-five, with smoothly
+drawn, tightly twisted hair that made her look still older. Old
+fashioned, too, she was; but ante-bellum glory did not radiate from her
+as it did from the major. She possessed a thrifty common sense; and it
+was she who handled the finances of the family, and met all comers when
+there were bills to pay. The major regarded board bills and wash bills
+as contemptible nuisances. They kept coming in so persistently and so
+often. Why, the major wanted to know, could they not be filed and paid
+in a lump sum at some convenient period—say when the “Anecdotes and
+Reminiscences” had been published and paid for? Miss Lydia would calmly
+go on with her sewing and say, “We’ll pay as we go as long as the money
+lasts, and then perhaps they’ll have to lump it.”
+
+Most of Mrs. Vardeman’s boarders were away during the day, being nearly
+all department clerks and business men; but there was one of them who
+was about the house a great deal from morning to night. This was a
+young man named Henry Hopkins Hargraves—every one in the house
+addressed him by his full name—who was engaged at one of the popular
+vaudeville theatres. Vaudeville has risen to such a respectable plane
+in the last few years, and Mr. Hargraves was such a modest and
+well-mannered person, that Mrs. Vardeman could find no objection to
+enrolling him upon her list of boarders.
+
+At the theatre Hargraves was known as an all-round dialect comedian,
+having a large repertoire of German, Irish, Swede, and black-face
+specialties. But Mr. Hargraves was ambitious, and often spoke of his
+great desire to succeed in legitimate comedy.
+
+This young man appeared to conceive a strong fancy for Major Talbot.
+Whenever that gentleman would begin his Southern reminiscences, or
+repeat some of the liveliest of the anecdotes, Hargraves could always
+be found, the most attentive among his listeners.
+
+For a time the major showed an inclination to discourage the advances
+of the “play actor,” as he privately termed him; but soon the young
+man’s agreeable manner and indubitable appreciation of the old
+gentleman’s stories completely won him over.
+
+It was not long before the two were like old chums. The major set apart
+each afternoon to read to him the manuscript of his book. During the
+anecdotes Hargraves never failed to laugh at exactly the right point.
+The major was moved to declare to Miss Lydia one day that young
+Hargraves possessed remarkable perception and a gratifying respect for
+the old regime. And when it came to talking of those old days—if Major
+Talbot liked to talk, Mr. Hargraves was entranced to listen.
+
+Like almost all old people who talk of the past, the major loved to
+linger over details. In describing the splendid, almost royal, days of
+the old planters, he would hesitate until he had recalled the name of
+the Negro who held his horse, or the exact date of certain minor
+happenings, or the number of bales of cotton raised in such a year; but
+Hargraves never grew impatient or lost interest. On the contrary, he
+would advance questions on a variety of subjects connected with the
+life of that time, and he never failed to extract ready replies.
+
+The fox hunts, the ’possum suppers, the hoe downs and jubilees in the
+Negro quarters, the banquets in the plantation-house hall, when
+invitations went for fifty miles around; the occasional feuds with the
+neighbouring gentry; the major’s duel with Rathbone Culbertson about
+Kitty Chalmers, who afterward married a Thwaite of South Carolina; and
+private yacht races for fabulous sums on Mobile Bay; the quaint
+beliefs, improvident habits, and loyal virtues of the old slaves—all
+these were subjects that held both the major and Hargraves absorbed for
+hours at a time.
+
+Sometimes, at night, when the young man would be coming upstairs to his
+room after his turn at the theatre was over, the major would appear at
+the door of his study and beckon archly to him. Going in, Hargraves
+would find a little table set with a decanter, sugar bowl, fruit, and a
+big bunch of fresh green mint.
+
+“It occurred to me,” the major would begin—he was always
+ceremonious—“that perhaps you might have found your duties at the—at
+your place of occupation—sufficiently arduous to enable you, Mr.
+Hargraves, to appreciate what the poet might well have had in his mind
+when he wrote, ‘tired Nature’s sweet restorer,’—one of our Southern
+juleps.”
+
+It was a fascination to Hargraves to watch him make it. He took rank
+among artists when he began, and he never varied the process. With what
+delicacy he bruised the mint; with what exquisite nicety he estimated
+the ingredients; with what solicitous care he capped the compound with
+the scarlet fruit glowing against the dark green fringe! And then the
+hospitality and grace with which he offered it, after the selected oat
+straws had been plunged into its tinkling depths!
+
+After about four months in Washington, Miss Lydia discovered one
+morning that they were almost without money. The “Anecdotes and
+Reminiscences” was completed, but publishers had not jumped at the
+collected gems of Alabama sense and wit. The rental of a small house
+which they still owned in Mobile was two months in arrears. Their board
+money for the month would be due in three days. Miss Lydia called her
+father to a consultation.
+
+“No money?” said he with a surprised look. “It is quite annoying to be
+called on so frequently for these petty sums. Really, I—”
+
+The major searched his pockets. He found only a two-dollar bill, which
+he returned to his vest pocket.
+
+“I must attend to this at once, Lydia,” he said. “Kindly get me my
+umbrella and I will go down town immediately. The congressman from our
+district, General Fulghum, assured me some days ago that he would use
+his influence to get my book published at an early date. I will go to
+his hotel at once and see what arrangement has been made.”
+
+With a sad little smile Miss Lydia watched him button his “Father
+Hubbard” and depart, pausing at the door, as he always did, to bow
+profoundly.
+
+That evening, at dark, he returned. It seemed that Congressman Fulghum
+had seen the publisher who had the major’s manuscript for reading. That
+person had said that if the anecdotes, etc., were carefully pruned down
+about one half, in order to eliminate the sectional and class prejudice
+with which the book was dyed from end to end, he might consider its
+publication.
+
+The major was in a white heat of anger, but regained his equanimity,
+according to his code of manners, as soon as he was in Miss Lydia’s
+presence.
+
+“We must have money,” said Miss Lydia, with a little wrinkle above her
+nose. “Give me the two dollars, and I will telegraph to Uncle Ralph for
+some to-night.”
+
+The major drew a small envelope from his upper vest pocket and tossed
+it on the table.
+
+“Perhaps it was injudicious,” he said mildly, “but the sum was so
+merely nominal that I bought tickets to the theatre to-night. It’s a
+new war drama, Lydia. I thought you would be pleased to witness its
+first production in Washington. I am told that the South has very fair
+treatment in the play. I confess I should like to see the performance
+myself.”
+
+Miss Lydia threw up her hands in silent despair.
+
+Still, as the tickets were bought, they might as well be used. So that
+evening, as they sat in the theatre listening to the lively overture,
+even Miss Lydia was minded to relegate their troubles, for the hour, to
+second place. The major, in spotless linen, with his extraordinary coat
+showing only where it was closely buttoned, and his white hair smoothly
+roached, looked really fine and distinguished. The curtain went up on
+the first act of “A Magnolia Flower,” revealing a typical Southern
+plantation scene. Major Talbot betrayed some interest.
+
+“Oh, see!” exclaimed Miss Lydia, nudging his arm, and pointing to her
+programme.
+
+The major put on his glasses and read the line in the cast of
+characters that her finger indicated.
+
+Col. Webster Calhoun . . . . H. Hopkins Hargraves.
+
+
+“It’s our Mr. Hargraves,” said Miss Lydia. “It must be his first
+appearance in what he calls ‘the legitimate.’ I’m so glad for him.”
+
+Not until the second act did Col. Webster Calhoun appear upon the
+stage. When he made his entry Major Talbot gave an audible sniff,
+glared at him, and seemed to freeze solid. Miss Lydia uttered a little,
+ambiguous squeak and crumpled her programme in her hand. For Colonel
+Calhoun was made up as nearly resembling Major Talbot as one pea does
+another. The long, thin white hair, curly at the ends, the aristocratic
+beak of a nose, the crumpled, wide, ravelling shirt front, the string
+tie, with the bow nearly under one ear, were almost exactly duplicated.
+And then, to clinch the imitation, he wore the twin to the major’s
+supposed to be unparalleled coat. High-collared, baggy, empire-waisted,
+ample-skirted, hanging a foot lower in front than behind, the garment
+could have been designed from no other pattern. From then on, the major
+and Miss Lydia sat bewitched, and saw the counterfeit presentment of a
+haughty Talbot “dragged,” as the major afterward expressed it, “through
+the slanderous mire of a corrupt stage.”
+
+Mr. Hargraves had used his opportunities well. He had caught the
+major’s little idiosyncrasies of speech, accent, and intonation and his
+pompous courtliness to perfection—exaggerating all to the purposes of
+the stage. When he performed that marvellous bow that the major fondly
+imagined to be the pink of all salutations, the audience sent forth a
+sudden round of hearty applause.
+
+Miss Lydia sat immovable, not daring to glance toward her father.
+Sometimes her hand next to him would be laid against her cheek, as if
+to conceal the smile which, in spite of her disapproval, she could not
+entirely suppress.
+
+The culmination of Hargraves’s audacious imitation took place in the
+third act. The scene is where Colonel Calhoun entertains a few of the
+neighbouring planters in his “den.”
+
+Standing at a table in the centre of the stage, with his friends
+grouped about him, he delivers that inimitable, rambling, character
+monologue so famous in “A Magnolia Flower,” at the same time that he
+deftly makes juleps for the party.
+
+Major Talbot, sitting quietly, but white with indignation, heard his
+best stories retold, his pet theories and hobbies advanced and
+expanded, and the dream of the “Anecdotes and Reminiscences” served,
+exaggerated and garbled. His favourite narrative—that of his duel with
+Rathbone Culbertson—was not omitted, and it was delivered with more
+fire, egotism, and gusto than the major himself put into it.
+
+The monologue concluded with a quaint, delicious, witty little lecture
+on the art of concocting a julep, illustrated by the act. Here Major
+Talbot’s delicate but showy science was reproduced to a hair’s
+breadth—from his dainty handling of the fragrant weed—“the
+one-thousandth part of a grain too much pressure, gentlemen, and you
+extract the bitterness, instead of the aroma, of this heaven-bestowed
+plant”—to his solicitous selection of the oaten straws.
+
+At the close of the scene the audience raised a tumultuous roar of
+appreciation. The portrayal of the type was so exact, so sure and
+thorough, that the leading characters in the play were forgotten. After
+repeated calls, Hargraves came before the curtain and bowed, his rather
+boyish face bright and flushed with the knowledge of success.
+
+At last Miss Lydia turned and looked at the major. His thin nostrils
+were working like the gills of a fish. He laid both shaking hands upon
+the arms of his chair to rise.
+
+“We will go, Lydia,” he said chokingly. “This is an
+abominable—desecration.”
+
+Before he could rise, she pulled him back into his seat. “We will stay
+it out,” she declared. “Do you want to advertise the copy by exhibiting
+the original coat?” So they remained to the end.
+
+Hargraves’s success must have kept him up late that night, for neither
+at the breakfast nor at the dinner table did he appear.
+
+About three in the afternoon he tapped at the door of Major Talbot’s
+study. The major opened it, and Hargraves walked in with his hands full
+of the morning papers—too full of his triumph to notice anything
+unusual in the major’s demeanour.
+
+“I put it all over ’em last night, major,” he began exultantly. “I had
+my inning, and, I think, scored. Here’s what the _Post_ says:
+
+His conception and portrayal of the old-time Southern colonel, with his
+absurd grandiloquence, his eccentric garb, his quaint idioms and
+phrases, his moth-eaten pride of family, and his really kind heart,
+fastidious sense of honour, and lovable simplicity, is the best
+delineation of a character role on the boards to-day. The coat worn by
+Colonel Calhoun is itself nothing less than an evolution of genius. Mr.
+Hargraves has captured his public.
+
+
+“How does that sound, major, for a first nighter?”
+
+“I had the honour”—the major’s voice sounded ominously frigid—“of
+witnessing your very remarkable performance, sir, last night.”
+
+Hargraves looked disconcerted.
+
+“You were there? I didn’t know you ever—I didn’t know you cared for the
+theatre. Oh, I say, Major Talbot,” he exclaimed frankly, “don’t you be
+offended. I admit I did get a lot of pointers from you that helped me
+out wonderfully in the part. But it’s a type, you know—not individual.
+The way the audience caught on shows that. Half the patrons of that
+theatre are Southerners. They recognized it.”
+
+“Mr. Hargraves,” said the major, who had remained standing, “you have
+put upon me an unpardonable insult. You have burlesqued my person,
+grossly betrayed my confidence, and misused my hospitality. If I
+thought you possessed the faintest conception of what is the sign
+manual of a gentleman, or what is due one, I would call you out, sir,
+old as I am. I will ask you to leave the room, sir.”
+
+The actor appeared to be slightly bewildered, and seemed hardly to take
+in the full meaning of the old gentleman’s words.
+
+“I am truly sorry you took offence,” he said regretfully. “Up here we
+don’t look at things just as you people do. I know men who would buy
+out half the house to have their personality put on the stage so the
+public would recognize it.”
+
+“They are not from Alabama, sir,” said the major haughtily.
+
+“Perhaps not. I have a pretty good memory, major; let me quote a few
+lines from your book. In response to a toast at a banquet given
+in—Milledgeville, I believe—you uttered, and intend to have printed,
+these words:
+
+The Northern man is utterly without sentiment or warmth except in so
+far as the feelings may be turned to his own commercial profit. He will
+suffer without resentment any imputation cast upon the honour of
+himself or his loved ones that does not bear with it the consequence of
+pecuniary loss. In his charity, he gives with a liberal hand; but it
+must be heralded with the trumpet and chronicled in brass.
+
+
+“Do you think that picture is fairer than the one you saw of Colonel
+Calhoun last night?”
+
+“The description,” said the major frowning, “is—not without grounds.
+Some exag—latitude must be allowed in public speaking.”
+
+“And in public acting,” replied Hargraves.
+
+“That is not the point,” persisted the major, unrelenting. “It was a
+personal caricature. I positively decline to overlook it, sir.”
+
+“Major Talbot,” said Hargraves, with a winning smile, “I wish you would
+understand me. I want you to know that I never dreamed of insulting
+you. In my profession, all life belongs to me. I take what I want, and
+what I can, and return it over the footlights. Now, if you will, let’s
+let it go at that. I came in to see you about something else. We’ve
+been pretty good friends for some months, and I’m going to take the
+risk of offending you again. I know you are hard up for money—never
+mind how I found out; a boarding house is no place to keep such matters
+secret—and I want you to let me help you out of the pinch. I’ve been
+there often enough myself. I’ve been getting a fair salary all the
+season, and I’ve saved some money. You’re welcome to a couple
+hundred—or even more—until you get—”
+
+“Stop!” commanded the major, with his arm outstretched. “It seems that
+my book didn’t lie, after all. You think your money salve will heal all
+the hurts of honour. Under no circumstances would I accept a loan from
+a casual acquaintance; and as to you, sir, I would starve before I
+would consider your insulting offer of a financial adjustment of the
+circumstances we have discussed. I beg to repeat my request relative to
+your quitting the apartment.”
+
+Hargraves took his departure without another word. He also left the
+house the same day, moving, as Mrs. Vardeman explained at the supper
+table, nearer the vicinity of the down-town theatre, where “A Magnolia
+Flower” was booked for a week’s run.
+
+Critical was the situation with Major Talbot and Miss Lydia. There was
+no one in Washington to whom the major’s scruples allowed him to apply
+for a loan. Miss Lydia wrote a letter to Uncle Ralph, but it was
+doubtful whether that relative’s constricted affairs would permit him
+to furnish help. The major was forced to make an apologetic address to
+Mrs. Vardeman regarding the delayed payment for board, referring to
+“delinquent rentals” and “delayed remittances” in a rather confused
+strain.
+
+Deliverance came from an entirely unexpected source.
+
+Late one afternoon the door maid came up and announced an old coloured
+man who wanted to see Major Talbot. The major asked that he be sent up
+to his study. Soon an old darkey appeared in the doorway, with his hat
+in hand, bowing, and scraping with one clumsy foot. He was quite
+decently dressed in a baggy suit of black. His big, coarse shoes shone
+with a metallic lustre suggestive of stove polish. His bushy wool was
+gray—almost white. After middle life, it is difficult to estimate the
+age of a Negro. This one might have seen as many years as had Major
+Talbot.
+
+“I be bound you don’t know me, Mars’ Pendleton,” were his first words.
+
+The major rose and came forward at the old, familiar style of address.
+It was one of the old plantation darkeys without a doubt; but they had
+been widely scattered, and he could not recall the voice or face.
+
+“I don’t believe I do,” he said kindly—“unless you will assist my
+memory.”
+
+“Don’t you ’member Cindy’s Mose, Mars’ Pendleton, what ’migrated
+’mediately after de war?”
+
+“Wait a moment,” said the major, rubbing his forehead with the tips of
+his fingers. He loved to recall everything connected with those beloved
+days. “Cindy’s Mose,” he reflected. “You worked among the
+horses—breaking the colts. Yes, I remember now. After the surrender,
+you took the name of—don’t prompt me—Mitchell, and went to the West—to
+Nebraska.”
+
+“Yassir, yassir,”—the old man’s face stretched with a delighted
+grin—“dat’s him, dat’s it. Newbraska. Dat’s me—Mose Mitchell. Old Uncle
+Mose Mitchell, dey calls me now. Old mars’, your pa, gimme a pah of dem
+mule colts when I lef’ fur to staht me goin’ with. You ’member dem
+colts, Mars’ Pendleton?”
+
+“I don’t seem to recall the colts,” said the major. “You know I was
+married the first year of the war and living at the old Follinsbee
+place. But sit down, sit down, Uncle Mose. I’m glad to see you. I hope
+you have prospered.”
+
+Uncle Mose took a chair and laid his hat carefully on the floor beside
+it.
+
+“Yassir; of late I done mouty famous. When I first got to Newbraska,
+dey folks come all roun’ me to see dem mule colts. Dey ain’t see no
+mules like dem in Newbraska. I sold dem mules for three hundred
+dollars. Yassir—three hundred.
+
+“Den I open a blacksmith shop, suh, and made some money and bought some
+lan’. Me and my old ’oman done raised up seb’m chillun, and all doin’
+well ’cept two of ’em what died. Fo’ year ago a railroad come along and
+staht a town slam ag’inst my lan’, and, suh, Mars’ Pendleton, Uncle
+Mose am worth leb’m thousand dollars in money, property, and lan’.”
+
+“I’m glad to hear it,” said the major heartily. “Glad to hear it.”
+
+“And dat little baby of yo’n, Mars’ Pendleton—one what you name Miss
+Lyddy—I be bound dat little tad done growed up tell nobody wouldn’t
+know her.”
+
+The major stepped to the door and called: “Lydia, dear, will you come?”
+
+Miss Lydia, looking quite grown up and a little worried, came in from
+her room.
+
+“Dar, now! What’d I tell you? I knowed dat baby done be plum growed up.
+You don’t ’member Uncle Mose, child?”
+
+“This is Aunt Cindy’s Mose, Lydia,” explained the major. “He left
+Sunnymead for the West when you were two years old.”
+
+“Well,” said Miss Lydia, “I can hardly be expected to remember you,
+Uncle Mose, at that age. And, as you say, I’m ‘plum growed up,’ and was
+a blessed long time ago. But I’m glad to see you, even if I can’t
+remember you.”
+
+And she was. And so was the major. Something alive and tangible had
+come to link them with the happy past. The three sat and talked over
+the olden times, the major and Uncle Mose correcting or prompting each
+other as they reviewed the plantation scenes and days.
+
+The major inquired what the old man was doing so far from his home.
+
+“Uncle Mose am a delicate,” he explained, “to de grand Baptis’
+convention in dis city. I never preached none, but bein’ a residin’
+elder in de church, and able fur to pay my own expenses, dey sent me
+along.”
+
+“And how did you know we were in Washington?” inquired Miss Lydia.
+
+“Dey’s a cullud man works in de hotel whar I stops, what comes from
+Mobile. He told me he seen Mars’ Pendleton comin’ outen dish here house
+one mawnin’.
+
+“What I come fur,” continued Uncle Mose, reaching into his
+pocket—“besides de sight of home folks—was to pay Mars’ Pendleton what
+I owes him.”
+
+“Owe me?” said the major, in surprise.
+
+“Yassir—three hundred dollars.” He handed the major a roll of bills.
+“When I lef’ old mars’ says: ‘Take dem mule colts, Mose, and, if it be
+so you gits able, pay fur ’em’. Yassir—dem was his words. De war had
+done lef’ old mars’ po’ hisself. Old mars’ bein’ ’long ago dead, de
+debt descends to Mars’ Pendleton. Three hundred dollars. Uncle Mose is
+plenty able to pay now. When dat railroad buy my lan’ I laid off to pay
+fur dem mules. Count de money, Mars’ Pendleton. Dat’s what I sold dem
+mules fur. Yassir.”
+
+Tears were in Major Talbot’s eyes. He took Uncle Mose’s hand and laid
+his other upon his shoulder.
+
+“Dear, faithful, old servitor,” he said in an unsteady voice, “I don’t
+mind saying to you that ‘Mars’ Pendleton’ spent his last dollar in the
+world a week ago. We will accept this money, Uncle Mose, since, in a
+way, it is a sort of payment, as well as a token of the loyalty and
+devotion of the old regime. Lydia, my dear, take the money. You are
+better fitted than I to manage its expenditure.”
+
+“Take it, honey,” said Uncle Mose. “Hit belongs to you. Hit’s Talbot
+money.”
+
+After Uncle Mose had gone, Miss Lydia had a good cry—for joy; and the
+major turned his face to a corner, and smoked his clay pipe
+volcanically.
+
+The succeeding days saw the Talbots restored to peace and ease. Miss
+Lydia’s face lost its worried look. The major appeared in a new frock
+coat, in which he looked like a wax figure personifying the memory of
+his golden age. Another publisher who read the manuscript of the
+“Anecdotes and Reminiscences” thought that, with a little retouching
+and toning down of the high lights, he could make a really bright and
+salable volume of it. Altogether, the situation was comfortable, and
+not without the touch of hope that is often sweeter than arrived
+blessings.
+
+One day, about a week after their piece of good luck, a maid brought a
+letter for Miss Lydia to her room. The postmark showed that it was from
+New York. Not knowing any one there, Miss Lydia, in a mild flutter of
+wonder, sat down by her table and opened the letter with her scissors.
+This was what she read:
+
+Dear Miss Talbot:
+
+    I thought you might be glad to learn of my good fortune. I have
+    received and accepted an offer of two hundred dollars per week by a
+    New York stock company to play Colonel Calhoun in “A Magnolia
+    Flower.”
+    There is something else I wanted you to know. I guess you’d better
+    not tell Major Talbot. I was anxious to make him some amends for
+    the great help he was to me in studying the part, and for the bad
+    humour he was in about it. He refused to let me, so I did it
+    anyhow. I could easily spare the three hundred.
+
+
+Sincerely yours,
+    H. Hopkins Hargraves,
+
+
+P.S. How did I play Uncle Mose?
+
+
+Major Talbot, passing through the hall, saw Miss Lydia’s door open and
+stopped.
+
+“Any mail for us this morning, Lydia, dear?” he asked.
+
+Miss Lydia slid the letter beneath a fold of her dress.
+
+“The _Mobile Chronicle_ came,” she said promptly. “It’s on the table in
+your study.”
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE
+
+
+So I went to a doctor.
+
+“How long has it been since you took any alcohol into your system?” he
+asked.
+
+Turning my head sidewise, I answered, “Oh, quite awhile.”
+
+He was a young doctor, somewhere between twenty and forty. He wore
+heliotrope socks, but he looked like Napoleon. I liked him immensely.
+
+“Now,” said he, “I am going to show you the effect of alcohol upon your
+circulation.” I think it was “circulation” he said; though it may have
+been “advertising.”
+
+He bared my left arm to the elbow, brought out a bottle of whiskey, and
+gave me a drink. He began to look more like Napoleon. I began to like
+him better.
+
+Then he put a tight compress on my upper arm, stopped my pulse with his
+fingers, and squeezed a rubber bulb connected with an apparatus on a
+stand that looked like a thermometer. The mercury jumped up and down
+without seeming to stop anywhere; but the doctor said it registered two
+hundred and thirty-seven or one hundred and sixty-five or some such
+number.
+
+“Now,” said he, “you see what alcohol does to the blood-pressure.”
+
+“It’s marvellous,” said I, “but do you think it a sufficient test? Have
+one on me, and let’s try the other arm.” But, no!
+
+Then he grasped my hand. I thought I was doomed and he was saying
+good-bye. But all he wanted to do was to jab a needle into the end of a
+finger and compare the red drop with a lot of fifty-cent poker chips
+that he had fastened to a card.
+
+“It’s the hæmoglobin test,” he explained. “The colour of your blood is
+wrong.”
+
+“Well,” said I, “I know it should be blue; but this is a country of
+mix-ups. Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick with
+some people on Nantucket Island, so—”
+
+“I mean,” said the doctor, “that the shade of red is too light.”
+
+“Oh,” said I, “it’s a case of matching instead of matches.”
+
+The doctor then pounded me severely in the region of the chest. When he
+did that I don’t know whether he reminded me most of Napoleon or
+Battling or Lord Nelson. Then he looked grave and mentioned a string of
+grievances that the flesh is heir to—mostly ending in “itis.” I
+immediately paid him fifteen dollars on account.
+
+“Is or are it or some or any of them necessarily fatal?” I asked. I
+thought my connection with the matter justified my manifesting a
+certain amount of interest.
+
+“All of them,” he answered cheerfully. “But their progress may be
+arrested. With care and proper continuous treatment you may live to be
+eighty-five or ninety.”
+
+I began to think of the doctor’s bill. “Eighty-five would be
+sufficient, I am sure,” was my comment. I paid him ten dollars more on
+account.
+
+“The first thing to do,” he said, with renewed animation, “is to find a
+sanitarium where you will get a complete rest for a while, and allow
+your nerves to get into a better condition. I myself will go with you
+and select a suitable one.”
+
+So he took me to a mad-house in the Catskills. It was on a bare
+mountain frequented only by infrequent frequenters. You could see
+nothing but stones and boulders, some patches of snow, and scattered
+pine trees. The young physician in charge was most agreeable. He gave
+me a stimulant without applying a compress to the arm. It was luncheon
+time, and we were invited to partake. There were about twenty inmates
+at little tables in the dining room. The young physician in charge came
+to our table and said: “It is a custom with our guests not to regard
+themselves as patients, but merely as tired ladies and gentlemen taking
+a rest. Whatever slight maladies they may have are never alluded to in
+conversation.”
+
+My doctor called loudly to a waitress to bring some phosphoglycerate of
+lime hash, dog-bread, bromo-seltzer pancakes, and nux vomica tea for my
+repast. Then a sound arose like a sudden wind storm among pine trees.
+It was produced by every guest in the room whispering loudly,
+“Neurasthenia!”—except one man with a nose, whom I distinctly heard
+say, “Chronic alcoholism.” I hope to meet him again. The physician in
+charge turned and walked away.
+
+An hour or so after luncheon he conducted us to the workshop—say fifty
+yards from the house. Thither the guests had been conducted by the
+physician in charge’s understudy and sponge-holder—a man with feet and
+a blue sweater. He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face; but
+the Armour Packing Company would have been delighted with his hands.
+
+“Here,” said the physician in charge, “our guests find relaxation from
+past mental worries by devoting themselves to physical
+labour—recreation, in reality.”
+
+There were turning-lathes, carpenters’ outfits, clay-modelling tools,
+spinning-wheels, weaving-frames, treadmills, bass drums,
+enlarged-crayon-portrait apparatuses, blacksmith forges, and
+everything, seemingly, that could interest the paying lunatic guests of
+a first-rate sanitarium.
+
+“The lady making mud pies in the corner,” whispered the physician in
+charge, “is no other than—Lula Lulington, the authoress of the novel
+entitled ‘Why Love Loves.’ What she is doing now is simply to rest her
+mind after performing that piece of work.”
+
+I had seen the book. “Why doesn’t she do it by writing another one
+instead?” I asked.
+
+As you see, I wasn’t as far gone as they thought I was.
+
+“The gentleman pouring water through the funnel,” continued the
+physician in charge, “is a Wall Street broker broken down from
+overwork.”
+
+I buttoned my coat.
+
+Others he pointed out were architects playing with Noah’s arks,
+ministers reading Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution,” lawyers sawing wood,
+tired-out society ladies talking Ibsen to the blue-sweatered
+sponge-holder, a neurotic millionaire lying asleep on the floor, and a
+prominent artist drawing a little red wagon around the room.
+
+“You look pretty strong,” said the physician in charge to me. “I think
+the best mental relaxation for you would be throwing small boulders
+over the mountainside and then bringing them up again.”
+
+I was a hundred yards away before my doctor overtook me.
+
+“What’s the matter?” he asked.
+
+“The matter is,” said I, “that there are no aeroplanes handy. So I am
+going to merrily and hastily jog the foot-pathway to yon station and
+catch the first unlimited-soft-coal express back to town.”
+
+“Well,” said the doctor, “perhaps you are right. This seems hardly the
+suitable place for you. But what you need is rest—absolute rest and
+exercise.”
+
+That night I went to a hotel in the city, and said to the clerk: “What
+I need is absolute rest and exercise. Can you give me a room with one
+of those tall folding beds in it, and a relay of bellboys to work it up
+and down while I rest?”
+
+The clerk rubbed a speck off one of his finger nails and glanced
+sidewise at a tall man in a white hat sitting in the lobby. That man
+came over and asked me politely if I had seen the shrubbery at the west
+entrance. I had not, so he showed it to me and then looked me over.
+
+“I thought you had ’em,” he said, not unkindly, “but I guess you’re all
+right. You’d better go see a doctor, old man.”
+
+A week afterward my doctor tested my blood pressure again without the
+preliminary stimulant. He looked to me a little less like Napoleon. And
+his socks were of a shade of tan that did not appeal to me.
+
+“What you need,” he decided, “is sea air and companionship.”
+
+“Would a mermaid—” I began; but he slipped on his professional manner.
+
+“I myself,” he said, “will take you to the Hotel Bonair off the coast
+of Long Island and see that you get in good shape. It is a quiet,
+comfortable resort where you will soon recuperate.”
+
+The Hotel Bonair proved to be a nine-hundred-room fashionable hostelry
+on an island off the main shore. Everybody who did not dress for dinner
+was shoved into a side dining-room and given only a terrapin and
+champagne table d’hôte. The bay was a great stamping ground for wealthy
+yachtsmen. The _Corsair_ anchored there the day we arrived. I saw Mr.
+Morgan standing on deck eating a cheese sandwich and gazing longingly
+at the hotel. Still, it was a very inexpensive place. Nobody could
+afford to pay their prices. When you went away you simply left your
+baggage, stole a skiff, and beat it for the mainland in the night.
+
+When I had been there one day I got a pad of monogrammed telegraph
+blanks at the clerk’s desk and began to wire to all my friends for
+get-away money. My doctor and I played one game of croquet on the golf
+links and went to sleep on the lawn.
+
+When we got back to town a thought seemed to occur to him suddenly. “By
+the way,” he asked, “how do you feel?”
+
+“Relieved of very much,” I replied.
+
+Now a consulting physician is different. He isn’t exactly sure whether
+he is to be paid or not, and this uncertainty insures you either the
+most careful or the most careless attention. My doctor took me to see a
+consulting physician. He made a poor guess and gave me careful
+attention. I liked him immensely. He put me through some coördination
+exercises.
+
+“Have you a pain in the back of your head?” he asked. I told him I had
+not.
+
+“Shut your eyes,” he ordered, “put your feet close together, and jump
+backward as far as you can.”
+
+I always was a good backward jumper with my eyes shut, so I obeyed. My
+head struck the edge of the bathroom door, which had been left open and
+was only three feet away. The doctor was very sorry. He had overlooked
+the fact that the door was open. He closed it.
+
+“Now touch your nose with your right forefinger,” he said.
+
+“Where is it?” I asked.
+
+“On your face,” said he.
+
+“I mean my right forefinger,” I explained.
+
+“Oh, excuse me,” said he. He reopened the bathroom door, and I took my
+finger out of the crack of it. After I had performed the marvellous
+digito-nasal feat I said:
+
+“I do not wish to deceive you as to symptoms, Doctor; I really have
+something like a pain in the back of my head.” He ignored the symptom
+and examined my heart carefully with a
+latest-popular-air-penny-in-the-slot ear-trumpet. I felt like a ballad.
+
+“Now,” he said, “gallop like a horse for about five minutes around the
+room.”
+
+I gave the best imitation I could of a disqualified Percheron being led
+out of Madison Square Garden. Then, without dropping in a penny, he
+listened to my chest again.
+
+“No glanders in our family, Doc,” I said.
+
+The consulting physician held up his forefinger within three inches of
+my nose. “Look at my finger,” he commanded.
+
+“Did you ever try Pears’—” I began; but he went on with his test
+rapidly.
+
+“Now look across the bay. At my finger. Across the bay. At my finger.
+At my finger. Across the bay. Across the bay. At my finger. Across the
+bay.” This for about three minutes.
+
+He explained that this was a test of the action of the brain. It seemed
+easy to me. I never once mistook his finger for the bay. I’ll bet that
+if he had used the phrases: “Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied,
+outward—or rather laterally—in the direction of the horizon, underlaid,
+so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet,” and “Now, returning—or
+rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my
+upraised digit”—I’ll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have
+passed the examination.
+
+After asking me if I had ever had a grand uncle with curvature of the
+spine or a cousin with swelled ankles, the two doctors retired to the
+bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath tub for their consultation. I
+ate an apple, and gazed first at my finger and then across the bay.
+
+The doctors came out looking grave. More: they looked tombstones and
+Tennessee-papers-please-copy. They wrote out a diet list to which I was
+to be restricted. It had everything that I had ever heard of to eat on
+it, except snails. And I never eat a snail unless it overtakes me and
+bites me first.
+
+“You must follow this diet strictly,” said the doctors.
+
+“I’d follow it a mile if I could get one-tenth of what’s on it,” I
+answered.
+
+“Of next importance,” they went on, “is outdoor air and exercise. And
+here is a prescription that will be of great benefit to you.”
+
+Then all of us took something. They took their hats, and I took my
+departure.
+
+I went to a druggist and showed him the prescription.
+
+“It will be $2.87 for an ounce bottle,” he said.
+
+“Will you give me a piece of your wrapping cord?” said I.
+
+I made a hole in the prescription, ran the cord through it, tied it
+around my neck, and tucked it inside. All of us have a little
+superstition, and mine runs to a confidence in amulets.
+
+Of course there was nothing the matter with me, but I was very ill. I
+couldn’t work, sleep, eat, or bowl. The only way I could get any
+sympathy was to go without shaving for four days. Even then somebody
+would say: “Old man, you look as hardy as a pine knot. Been up for a
+jaunt in the Maine woods, eh?”
+
+Then, suddenly, I remembered that I must have outdoor air and exercise.
+So I went down South to John’s. John is an approximate relative by
+verdict of a preacher standing with a little book in his hands in a
+bower of chrysanthemums while a hundred thousand people looked on. John
+has a country house seven miles from Pineville. It is at an altitude
+and on the Blue Ridge Mountains in a state too dignified to be dragged
+into this controversy. John is mica, which is more valuable and clearer
+than gold.
+
+He met me at Pineville, and we took the trolley car to his home. It is
+a big, neighbourless cottage on a hill surrounded by a hundred
+mountains. We got off at his little private station, where John’s
+family and Amaryllis met and greeted us. Amaryllis looked at me a
+trifle anxiously.
+
+A rabbit came bounding across the hill between us and the house. I
+threw down my suit-case and pursued it hotfoot. After I had run twenty
+yards and seen it disappear, I sat down on the grass and wept
+disconsolately.
+
+“I can’t catch a rabbit any more,” I sobbed. “I’m of no further use in
+the world. I may as well be dead.”
+
+“Oh, what is it—what is it, Brother John?” I heard Amaryllis say.
+
+“Nerves a little unstrung,” said John, in his calm way. “Don’t worry.
+Get up, you rabbit-chaser, and come on to the house before the biscuits
+get cold.” It was about twilight, and the mountains came up nobly to
+Miss Murfree’s descriptions of them.
+
+Soon after dinner I announced that I believed I could sleep for a year
+or two, including legal holidays. So I was shown to a room as big and
+cool as a flower garden, where there was a bed as broad as a lawn. Soon
+afterward the remainder of the household retired, and then there fell
+upon the land a silence.
+
+I had not heard a silence before in years. It was absolute. I raised
+myself on my elbow and listened to it. Sleep! I thought that if I only
+could hear a star twinkle or a blade of grass sharpen itself I could
+compose myself to rest. I thought once that I heard a sound like the
+sail of a catboat flapping as it veered about in a breeze, but I
+decided that it was probably only a tack in the carpet. Still I
+listened.
+
+Suddenly some belated little bird alighted upon the window-sill, and,
+in what he no doubt considered sleepy tones, enunciated the noise
+generally translated as “cheep!”
+
+I leaped into the air.
+
+“Hey! what’s the matter down there?” called John from his room above
+mine.
+
+“Oh, nothing,” I answered, “except that I accidentally bumped my head
+against the ceiling.”
+
+The next morning I went out on the porch and looked at the mountains.
+There were forty-seven of them in sight. I shuddered, went into the big
+hall sitting room of the house, selected “Pancoast’s Family Practice of
+Medicine” from a bookcase, and began to read. John came in, took the
+book away from me, and led me outside. He has a farm of three hundred
+acres furnished with the usual complement of barns, mules, peasantry,
+and harrows with three front teeth broken off. I had seen such things
+in my childhood, and my heart began to sink.
+
+Then John spoke of alfalfa, and I brightened at once. “Oh, yes,” said
+I, “wasn’t she in the chorus of—let’s see—”
+
+“Green, you know,” said John, “and tender, and you plow it under after
+the first season.”
+
+“I know,” said I, “and the grass grows over her.”
+
+“Right,” said John. “You know something about farming, after all.”
+
+“I know something of some farmers,” said I, “and a sure scythe will mow
+them down some day.”
+
+On the way back to the house a beautiful and inexplicable creature
+walked across our path. I stopped irresistibly fascinated, gazing at
+it. John waited patiently, smoking his cigarette. He is a modern
+farmer. After ten minutes he said: “Are you going to stand there
+looking at that chicken all day? Breakfast is nearly ready.”
+
+“A chicken?” said I.
+
+“A White Orpington hen, if you want to particularize.”
+
+“A White Orpington hen?” I repeated, with intense interest. The fowl
+walked slowly away with graceful dignity, and I followed like a child
+after the Pied Piper. Five minutes more were allowed me by John, and
+then he took me by the sleeve and conducted me to breakfast.
+
+After I had been there a week I began to grow alarmed. I was sleeping
+and eating well and actually beginning to enjoy life. For a man in my
+desperate condition that would never do. So I sneaked down to the
+trolley-car station, took the car for Pineville, and went to see one of
+the best physicians in town. By this time I knew exactly what to do
+when I needed medical treatment. I hung my hat on the back of a chair,
+and said rapidly:
+
+“Doctor, I have cirrhosis of the heart, indurated arteries,
+neurasthenia, neuritis, acute indigestion, and convalescence. I am
+going to live on a strict diet. I shall also take a tepid bath at night
+and a cold one in the morning. I shall endeavour to be cheerful, and
+fix my mind on pleasant subjects. In the way of drugs I intend to take
+a phosphorous pill three times a day, preferably after meals, and a
+tonic composed of the tinctures of gentian, cinchona, calisaya, and
+cardamon compound. Into each teaspoonful of this I shall mix tincture
+of nux vomica, beginning with one drop and increasing it a drop each
+day until the maximum dose is reached. I shall drop this with a
+medicine-dropper, which can be procured at a trifling cost at any
+pharmacy. Good morning.”
+
+I took my hat and walked out. After I had closed the door I remembered
+something that I had forgotten to say. I opened it again. The doctor
+had not moved from where he had been sitting, but he gave a slightly
+nervous start when he saw me again.
+
+“I forgot to mention,” said I, “that I shall also take absolute rest
+and exercise.”
+
+After this consultation I felt much better. The reëstablishing in my
+mind of the fact that I was hopelessly ill gave me so much satisfaction
+that I almost became gloomy again. There is nothing more alarming to a
+neurasthenic than to feel himself growing well and cheerful.
+
+John looked after me carefully. After I had evinced so much interest in
+his White Orpington chicken he tried his best to divert my mind, and
+was particular to lock his hen house of nights. Gradually the tonic
+mountain air, the wholesome food, and the daily walks among the hills
+so alleviated my malady that I became utterly wretched and despondent.
+I heard of a country doctor who lived in the mountains nearby. I went
+to see him and told him the whole story. He was a gray-bearded man with
+clear, blue, wrinkled eyes, in a home-made suit of gray jeans.
+
+In order to save time I diagnosed my case, touched my nose with my
+right forefinger, struck myself below the knee to make my foot kick,
+sounded my chest, stuck out my tongue, and asked him the price of
+cemetery lots in Pineville.
+
+He lit his pipe and looked at me for about three minutes. “Brother,” he
+said, after a while, “you are in a mighty bad way. There’s a chance for
+you to pull through, but it’s a mighty slim one.”
+
+“What can it be?” I asked eagerly. “I have taken arsenic and gold,
+phosphorus, exercise, nux vomica, hydrotherapeutic baths, rest,
+excitement, codein, and aromatic spirits of ammonia. Is there anything
+left in the pharmacopœia?”
+
+“Somewhere in these mountains,” said the doctor, “there’s a plant
+growing—a flowering plant that’ll cure you, and it’s about the only
+thing that will. It’s of a kind that’s as old as the world; but of late
+it’s powerful scarce and hard to find. You and I will have to hunt it
+up. I’m not engaged in active practice now: I’m getting along in years;
+but I’ll take your case. You’ll have to come every day in the afternoon
+and help me hunt for this plant till we find it. The city doctors may
+know a lot about new scientific things, but they don’t know much about
+the cures that nature carries around in her saddlebags.”
+
+So every day the old doctor and I hunted the cure-all plant among the
+mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge. Together we toiled up steep
+heights so slippery with fallen autumn leaves that we had to catch
+every sapling and branch within our reach to save us from falling. We
+waded through gorges and chasms, breast-deep with laurel and ferns; we
+followed the banks of mountain streams for miles; we wound our way like
+Indians through brakes of pine—road side, hill side, river side,
+mountain side we explored in our search for the miraculous plant.
+
+As the old doctor said, it must have grown scarce and hard to find. But
+we followed our quest. Day by day we plumbed the valleys, scaled the
+heights, and tramped the plateaus in search of the miraculous plant.
+Mountain-bred, he never seemed to tire. I often reached home too
+fatigued to do anything except fall into bed and sleep until morning.
+This we kept up for a month.
+
+One evening after I had returned from a six-mile tramp with the old
+doctor, Amaryllis and I took a little walk under the trees near the
+road. We looked at the mountains drawing their royal-purple robes
+around them for their night’s repose.
+
+“I’m glad you’re well again,” she said. “When you first came you
+frightened me. I thought you were really ill.”
+
+“Well again!” I almost shrieked. “Do you know that I have only one
+chance in a thousand to live?”
+
+Amaryllis looked at me in surprise. “Why,” said she, “you are as strong
+as one of the plough-mules, you sleep ten or twelve hours every night,
+and you are eating us out of house and home. What more do you want?”
+
+“I tell you,” said I, “that unless we find the magic—that is, the plant
+we are looking for—in time, nothing can save me. The doctor tells me
+so.”
+
+“What doctor?”
+
+“Doctor Tatum—the old doctor who lives halfway up Black Oak Mountain.
+Do you know him?”
+
+“I have known him since I was able to talk. And is that where you go
+every day—is it he who takes you on these long walks and climbs that
+have brought back your health and strength? God bless the old doctor.”
+
+Just then the old doctor himself drove slowly down the road in his
+rickety old buggy. I waved my hand at him and shouted that I would be
+on hand the next day at the usual time. He stopped his horse and called
+to Amaryllis to come out to him. They talked for five minutes while I
+waited. Then the old doctor drove on.
+
+When we got to the house Amaryllis lugged out an encyclopædia and
+sought a word in it. “The doctor said,” she told me, “that you needn’t
+call any more as a patient, but he’d be glad to see you any time as a
+friend. And then he told me to look up my name in the encyclopædia and
+tell you what it means. It seems to be the name of a genus of flowering
+plants, and also the name of a country girl in Theocritus and Virgil.
+What do you suppose the doctor meant by that?”
+
+“I know what he meant,” said I. “I know now.”
+
+A word to a brother who may have come under the spell of the unquiet
+Lady Neurasthenia.
+
+The formula was true. Even though gropingly at times, the physicians of
+the walled cities had put their fingers upon the specific medicament.
+
+And so for the exercise one is referred to good Doctor Tatum on Black
+Oak Mountain—take the road to your right at the Methodist meeting house
+in the pine-grove.
+
+Absolute rest and exercise!
+
+What rest more remedial than to sit with Amaryllis in the shade, and,
+with a sixth sense, read the wordless Theocritan idyl of the
+gold-bannered blue mountains marching orderly into the dormitories of
+the night?
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+OCTOBER AND JUNE
+
+
+The Captain gazed gloomily at his sword that hung upon the wall. In the
+closet near by was stored his faded uniform, stained and worn by
+weather and service. What a long, long time it seemed since those old
+days of war’s alarms!
+
+And now, veteran that he was of his country’s strenuous times, he had
+been reduced to abject surrender by a woman’s soft eyes and smiling
+lips. As he sat in his quiet room he held in his hand the letter he had
+just received from her—the letter that had caused him to wear that look
+of gloom. He re-read the fatal paragraph that had destroyed his hope.
+
+In declining the honour you have done me in asking me to be your wife,
+I feel that I ought to speak frankly. The reason I have for so doing is
+the great difference between our ages. I like you very, very much, but
+I am sure that our marriage would not be a happy one. I am sorry to
+have to refer to this, but I believe that you will appreciate my
+honesty in giving you the true reason.
+
+
+The Captain sighed, and leaned his head upon his hand. Yes, there were
+many years between their ages. But he was strong and rugged, he had
+position and wealth. Would not his love, his tender care, and the
+advantages he could bestow upon her make her forget the question of
+age? Besides, he was almost sure that she cared for him.
+
+The Captain was a man of prompt action. In the field he had been
+distinguished for his decisiveness and energy. He would see her and
+plead his cause again in person. Age!—what was it to come between him
+and the one he loved?
+
+In two hours he stood ready, in light marching order, for his greatest
+battle. He took the train for the old Southern town in Tennessee where
+she lived.
+
+Theodora Deming was on the steps of the handsome, porticoed old
+mansion, enjoying the summer twilight, when the Captain entered the
+gate and came up the gravelled walk. She met him with a smile that was
+free from embarrassment. As the Captain stood on the step below her,
+the difference in their ages did not appear so great. He was tall and
+straight and clear-eyed and browned. She was in the bloom of lovely
+womanhood.
+
+“I wasn’t expecting you,” said Theodora; “but now that you’ve come you
+may sit on the step. Didn’t you get my letter?”
+
+“I did,” said the Captain; “and that’s why I came. I say, now, Theo,
+reconsider your answer, won’t you?”
+
+Theodora smiled softly upon him. He carried his years well. She was
+really fond of his strength, his wholesome looks, his
+manliness—perhaps, if—
+
+“No, no,” she said, shaking her head, positively; “it’s out of the
+question. I like you a whole lot, but marrying won’t do. My age and
+yours are—but don’t make me say it again—I told you in my letter.”
+
+The Captain flushed a little through the bronze on his face. He was
+silent for a while, gazing sadly into the twilight. Beyond a line of
+woods that he could see was a field where the boys in blue had once
+bivouacked on their march toward the sea. How long ago it seemed now!
+Truly, Fate and Father Time had tricked him sorely. Just a few years
+interposed between himself and happiness!
+
+Theodora’s hand crept down and rested in the clasp of his firm, brown
+one. She felt, at least, that sentiment that is akin to love.
+
+“Don’t take it so hard, please,” she said, gently. “It’s all for the
+best. I’ve reasoned it out very wisely all by myself. Some day you’ll
+be glad I didn’t marry you. It would be very nice and lovely for a
+while—but, just think! In only a few short years what different tastes
+we would have! One of us would want to sit by the fireside and read,
+and maybe nurse neuralgia or rheumatism of evenings, while the other
+would be crazy for balls and theatres and late suppers. No, my dear
+friend. While it isn’t exactly January and May, it’s a clear case of
+October and pretty early in June.”
+
+“I’d always do what you wanted me to do, Theo. If you wanted to—”
+
+“No, you wouldn’t. You think now that you would, but you wouldn’t.
+Please don’t ask me any more.”
+
+The Captain had lost his battle. But he was a gallant warrior, and when
+he rose to make his final adieu his mouth was grimly set and his
+shoulders were squared.
+
+He took the train for the North that night. On the next evening he was
+back in his room, where his sword was hanging against the wall. He was
+dressing for dinner, tying his white tie into a very careful bow. And
+at the same time he was indulging in a pensive soliloquy.
+
+“’Pon my honour, I believe Theo was right, after all. Nobody can deny
+that she’s a peach, but she must be twenty-eight, at the very kindest
+calculation.”
+
+For you see, the Captain was only nineteen, and his sword had never
+been drawn except on the parade ground at Chattanooga, which was as
+near as he ever got to the Spanish-American War.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+THE CHURCH WITH AN OVERSHOT-WHEEL
+
+
+Lakelands is not to be found in the catalogues of fashionable summer
+resorts. It lies on a low spur of the Cumberland range of mountains on
+a little tributary of the Clinch River. Lakelands proper is a contented
+village of two dozen houses situated on a forlorn, narrow-gauge
+railroad line. You wonder whether the railroad lost itself in the pine
+woods and ran into Lakelands from fright and loneliness, or whether
+Lakelands got lost and huddled itself along the railroad to wait for
+the cars to carry it home.
+
+You wonder again why it was named Lakelands. There are no lakes, and
+the lands about are too poor to be worth mentioning.
+
+Half a mile from the village stands the Eagle House, a big, roomy old
+mansion run by Josiah Rankin for the accommodation of visitors who
+desire the mountain air at inexpensive rates. The Eagle House is
+delightfully mismanaged. It is full of ancient instead of modern
+improvements, and it is altogether as comfortably neglected and
+pleasingly disarranged as your own home. But you are furnished with
+clean rooms and good and abundant fare: yourself and the piny woods
+must do the rest. Nature has provided a mineral spring, grape-vine
+swings, and croquet—even the wickets are wooden. You have Art to thank
+only for the fiddle-and-guitar music twice a week at the hop in the
+rustic pavilion.
+
+The patrons of the Eagle House are those who seek recreation as a
+necessity, as well as a pleasure. They are busy people, who may be
+likened to clocks that need a fortnight’s winding to insure a year’s
+running of their wheels. You will find students there from the lower
+towns, now and then an artist, or a geologist absorbed in construing
+the ancient strata of the hills. A few quiet families spend the summers
+there; and often one or two tired members of that patient sisterhood
+known to Lakelands as “schoolmarms.”
+
+A quarter of a mile from the Eagle House was what would have been
+described to its guests as “an object of interest” in the catalogue,
+had the Eagle House issued a catalogue. This was an old, old mill that
+was no longer a mill. In the words of Josiah Rankin, it was “the only
+church in the United States, sah, with an overshot-wheel; and the only
+mill in the world, sah, with pews and a pipe organ.” The guests of the
+Eagle House attended the old mill church each Sabbath, and heard the
+preacher liken the purified Christian to bolted flour ground to
+usefulness between the millstones of experience and suffering.
+
+Every year about the beginning of autumn there came to the Eagle House
+one Abram Strong, who remained for a time an honoured and beloved
+guest. In Lakelands he was called “Father Abram,” because his hair was
+so white, his face so strong and kind and florid, his laugh so merry,
+and his black clothes and broad hat so priestly in appearance. Even new
+guests after three or four days’ acquaintance gave him this familiar
+title.
+
+Father Abram came a long way to Lakelands. He lived in a big, roaring
+town in the Northwest where he owned mills, not little mills with pews
+and an organ in them, but great, ugly, mountain-like mills that the
+freight trains crawled around all day like ants around an ant-heap. And
+now you must be told about Father Abram and the mill that was a church,
+for their stories run together.
+
+In the days when the church was a mill, Mr. Strong was the miller.
+There was no jollier, dustier, busier, happier miller in all the land
+than he. He lived in a little cottage across the road from the mill.
+His hand was heavy, but his toll was light, and the mountaineers
+brought their grain to him across many weary miles of rocky roads.
+
+The delight of the miller’s life was his little daughter, Aglaia. That
+was a brave name, truly, for a flaxen-haired toddler; but the
+mountaineers love sonorous and stately names. The mother had
+encountered it somewhere in a book, and the deed was done. In her
+babyhood Aglaia herself repudiated the name, as far as common use went,
+and persisted in calling herself “Dums.” The miller and his wife often
+tried to coax from Aglaia the source of this mysterious name, but
+without results. At last they arrived at a theory. In the little garden
+behind the cottage was a bed of rhododendrons in which the child took a
+peculiar delight and interest. It may have been that she perceived in
+“Dums” a kinship to the formidable name of her favourite flowers.
+
+When Aglaia was four years old she and her father used to go through a
+little performance in the mill every afternoon, that never failed to
+come off, the weather permitting. When supper was ready her mother
+would brush her hair and put on a clean apron and send her across to
+the mill to bring her father home. When the miller saw her coming in
+the mill door he would come forward, all white with the flour dust, and
+wave his hand and sing an old miller’s song that was familiar in those
+parts and ran something like this:
+
+“The wheel goes round,
+The grist is ground,
+    The dusty miller’s merry.
+He sings all day,
+His work is play,
+    While thinking of his dearie.”
+
+
+Then Aglaia would run to him laughing, and call:
+
+“Da-da, come take Dums home;” and the miller would swing her to his
+shoulder and march over to supper, singing the miller’s song. Every
+evening this would take place.
+
+One day, only a week after her fourth birthday, Aglaia disappeared.
+When last seen she was plucking wild flowers by the side of the road in
+front of the cottage. A little while later her mother went out to see
+that she did not stray too far away, and she was already gone.
+
+Of course every effort was made to find her. The neighbours gathered
+and searched the woods and the mountains for miles around. They dragged
+every foot of the mill race and the creek for a long distance below the
+dam. Never a trace of her did they find. A night or two before there
+had been a family of wanderers camped in a grove near by. It was
+conjectured that they might have stolen the child; but when their wagon
+was overtaken and searched she could not be found.
+
+The miller remained at the mill for nearly two years; and then his hope
+of finding her died out. He and his wife moved to the Northwest. In a
+few years he was the owner of a modern mill in one of the important
+milling cities in that region. Mrs. Strong never recovered from the
+shock caused by the loss of Aglaia, and two years after they moved away
+the miller was left to bear his sorrow alone.
+
+When Abram Strong became prosperous he paid a visit to Lakelands and
+the old mill. The scene was a sad one for him, but he was a strong man,
+and always appeared cheery and kindly. It was then that he was inspired
+to convert the old mill into a church. Lakelands was too poor to build
+one; and the still poorer mountaineers could not assist. There was no
+place of worship nearer than twenty miles.
+
+The miller altered the appearance of the mill as little as possible.
+The big overshot-wheel was left in its place. The young people who came
+to the church used to cut their initials in its soft and slowly
+decaying wood. The dam was partly destroyed, and the clear mountain
+stream rippled unchecked down its rocky bed. Inside the mill the
+changes were greater. The shafts and millstones and belts and pulleys
+were, of course, all removed. There were two rows of benches with
+aisles between, and a little raised platform and pulpit at one end. On
+three sides overhead was a gallery containing seats, and reached by a
+stairway inside. There was also an organ—a real pipe organ—in the
+gallery, that was the pride of the congregation of the Old Mill Church.
+Miss Phœbe Summers was the organist. The Lakelands boys proudly took
+turns at pumping it for her at each Sunday’s service. The Rev. Mr.
+Banbridge was the preacher, and rode down from Squirrel Gap on his old
+white horse without ever missing a service. And Abram Strong paid for
+everything. He paid the preacher five hundred dollars a year; and Miss
+Phœbe two hundred dollars.
+
+Thus, in memory of Aglaia, the old mill was converted into a blessing
+for the community in which she had once lived. It seemed that the brief
+life of the child had brought about more good than the three score
+years and ten of many. But Abram Strong set up yet another monument to
+her memory.
+
+Out from his mills in the Northwest came the “Aglaia” flour, made from
+the hardest and finest wheat that could be raised. The country soon
+found out that the “Aglaia” flour had two prices. One was the highest
+market price, and the other was—nothing.
+
+Wherever there happened a calamity that left people destitute—a fire, a
+flood, a tornado, a strike, or a famine, there would go hurrying a
+generous consignment of the “Aglaia” at its “nothing” price. It was
+given away cautiously and judiciously, but it was freely given, and not
+a penny could the hungry ones pay for it. There got to be a saying that
+whenever there was a disastrous fire in the poor districts of a city
+the fire chief’s buggy reached the scene first, next the “Aglaia” flour
+wagon, and then the fire engines.
+
+So this was Abram Strong’s other monument to Aglaia. Perhaps to a poet
+the theme may seem too utilitarian for beauty; but to some the fancy
+will seem sweet and fine that the pure, white, virgin flour, flying on
+its mission of love and charity, might be likened to the spirit of the
+lost child whose memory it signalized.
+
+There came a year that brought hard times to the Cumberlands. Grain
+crops everywhere were light, and there were no local crops at all.
+Mountain floods had done much damage to property. Even game in the
+woods was so scarce that the hunters brought hardly enough home to keep
+their folk alive. Especially about Lakelands was the rigour felt.
+
+As soon as Abram Strong heard of this his messages flew; and the little
+narrow-gauge cars began to unload “Aglaia” flour there. The miller’s
+orders were to store the flour in the gallery of the Old Mill Church;
+and that every one who attended the church was to carry home a sack of
+it.
+
+Two weeks after that Abram Strong came for his yearly visit to the
+Eagle House, and became “Father Abram” again.
+
+That season the Eagle House had fewer guests than usual. Among them was
+Rose Chester. Miss Chester came to Lakelands from Atlanta, where she
+worked in a department store. This was the first vacation outing of her
+life. The wife of the store manager had once spent a summer at the
+Eagle House. She had taken a fancy to Rose, and had persuaded her to go
+there for her three weeks’ holiday. The manager’s wife gave her a
+letter to Mrs. Rankin, who gladly received her in her own charge and
+care.
+
+Miss Chester was not very strong. She was about twenty, and pale and
+delicate from an indoor life. But one week of Lakelands gave her a
+brightness and spirit that changed her wonderfully. The time was early
+September when the Cumberlands are at their greatest beauty. The
+mountain foliage was growing brilliant with autumnal colours; one
+breathed aerial champagne, the nights were deliciously cool, causing
+one to snuggle cosily under the warm blankets of the Eagle House.
+
+Father Abram and Miss Chester became great friends. The old miller
+learned her story from Mrs. Rankin, and his interest went out quickly
+to the slender lonely girl who was making her own way in the world.
+
+The mountain country was new to Miss Chester. She had lived many years
+in the warm, flat town of Atlanta; and the grandeur and variety of the
+Cumberlands delighted her. She was determined to enjoy every moment of
+her stay. Her little hoard of savings had been estimated so carefully
+in connection with her expenses that she knew almost to a penny what
+her very small surplus would be when she returned to work.
+
+Miss Chester was fortunate in gaining Father Abram for a friend and
+companion. He knew every road and peak and slope of the mountains near
+Lakelands. Through him she became acquainted with the solemn delight of
+the shadowy, tilted aisles of the pine forests, the dignity of the bare
+crags, the crystal, tonic mornings, the dreamy, golden afternoons full
+of mysterious sadness. So her health improved, and her spirits grew
+light. She had a laugh as genial and hearty in its feminine way as the
+famous laugh of Father Abram. Both of them were natural optimists; and
+both knew how to present a serene and cheerful face to the world.
+
+One day Miss Chester learned from one of the guests the history of
+Father Abram’s lost child. Quickly she hurried away and found the
+miller seated on his favourite rustic bench near the chalybeate spring.
+He was surprised when his little friend slipped her hand into his, and
+looked at him with tears in her eyes.
+
+“Oh, Father Abram,” she said, “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know until to-day
+about your little daughter. You will find her yet some day—Oh, I hope
+you will.”
+
+The miller looked down at her with his strong, ready smile.
+
+“Thank you, Miss Rose,” he said, in his usual cheery tones. “But I do
+not expect to find Aglaia. For a few years I hoped that she had been
+stolen by vagrants, and that she still lived; but I have lost that
+hope. I believe that she was drowned.”
+
+“I can understand,” said Miss Chester, “how the doubt must have made it
+so hard to bear. And yet you are so cheerful and so ready to make other
+people’s burdens light. Good Father Abram!”
+
+“Good Miss Rose!” mimicked the miller, smiling. “Who thinks of others
+more than you do?”
+
+A whimsical mood seemed to strike Miss Chester.
+
+“Oh, Father Abram,” she cried, “wouldn’t it be grand if I should prove
+to be your daughter? Wouldn’t it be romantic? And wouldn’t you like to
+have me for a daughter?”
+
+“Indeed, I would,” said the miller, heartily. “If Aglaia had lived I
+could wish for nothing better than for her to have grown up to be just
+such a little woman as you are. Maybe you are Aglaia,” he continued,
+falling in with her playful mood; “can’t you remember when we lived at
+the mill?”
+
+Miss Chester fell swiftly into serious meditation. Her large eyes were
+fixed vaguely upon something in the distance. Father Abram was amused
+at her quick return to seriousness. She sat thus for a long time before
+she spoke.
+
+“No,” she said at length, with a long sigh, “I can’t remember anything
+at all about a mill. I don’t think that I ever saw a flour mill in my
+life until I saw your funny little church. And if I were your little
+girl I would remember it, wouldn’t I? I’m so sorry, Father Abram.”
+
+“So am I,” said Father Abram, humouring her. “But if you cannot
+remember that you are my little girl, Miss Rose, surely you can
+recollect being some one else’s. You remember your own parents, of
+course.”
+
+“Oh, yes; I remember them very well—especially my father. He wasn’t a
+bit like you, Father Abram. Oh, I was only making believe: Come, now,
+you’ve rested long enough. You promised to show me the pool where you
+can see the trout playing, this afternoon. I never saw a trout.”
+
+Late one afternoon Father Abram set out for the old mill alone. He
+often went to sit and think of the old days when he lived in the
+cottage across the road. Time had smoothed away the sharpness of his
+grief until he no longer found the memory of those times painful. But
+whenever Abram Strong sat in the melancholy September afternoons on the
+spot where “Dums” used to run in every day with her yellow curls
+flying, the smile that Lakelands always saw upon his face was not
+there.
+
+The miller made his way slowly up the winding, steep road. The trees
+crowded so close to the edge of it that he walked in their shade, with
+his hat in his hand. Squirrels ran playfully upon the old rail fence at
+his right. Quails were calling to their young broods in the wheat
+stubble. The low sun sent a torrent of pale gold up the ravine that
+opened to the west. Early September!—it was within a few days only of
+the anniversary of Aglaia’s disappearance.
+
+The old overshot-wheel, half covered with mountain ivy, caught patches
+of the warm sunlight filtering through the trees. The cottage across
+the road was still standing, but it would doubtless go down before the
+next winter’s mountain blasts. It was overrun with morning glory and
+wild gourd vines, and the door hung by one hinge.
+
+Father Abram pushed open the mill door, and entered softly. And then he
+stood still, wondering. He heard the sound of some one within, weeping
+inconsolably. He looked, and saw Miss Chester sitting in a dim pew,
+with her head bowed upon an open letter that her hands held.
+
+Father Abram went to her, and laid one of his strong hands firmly upon
+hers. She looked up, breathed his name, and tried to speak further.
+
+“Not yet, Miss Rose,” said the miller, kindly. “Don’t try to talk yet.
+There’s nothing as good for you as a nice, quiet little cry when you
+are feeling blue.”
+
+It seemed that the old miller, who had known so much sorrow himself,
+was a magician in driving it away from others. Miss Chester’s sobs grew
+easier. Presently she took her little plain-bordered handkerchief and
+wiped away a drop or two that had fallen from her eyes upon Father
+Abram’s big hand. Then she looked up and smiled through her tears. Miss
+Chester could always smile before her tears had dried, just as Father
+Abram could smile through his own grief. In that way the two were very
+much alike.
+
+The miller asked her no questions; but by and by Miss Chester began to
+tell him.
+
+It was the old story that always seems so big and important to the
+young, and that brings reminiscent smiles to their elders. Love was the
+theme, as may be supposed. There was a young man in Atlanta, full of
+all goodness and the graces, who had discovered that Miss Chester also
+possessed these qualities above all other people in Atlanta or anywhere
+else from Greenland to Patagonia. She showed Father Abram the letter
+over which she had been weeping. It was a manly, tender letter, a
+little superlative and urgent, after the style of love letters written
+by young men full of goodness and the graces. He proposed for Miss
+Chester’s hand in marriage at once. Life, he said, since her departure
+for a three-weeks’ visit, was not to be endured. He begged for an
+immediate answer; and if it were favourable he promised to fly,
+ignoring the narrow-gauge railroad, at once to Lakelands.
+
+“And now where does the trouble come in?” asked the miller when he had
+read the letter.
+
+“I cannot marry him,” said Miss Chester.
+
+“Do you want to marry him?” asked Father Abram.
+
+“Oh, I love him,” she answered, “but—” Down went her head and she
+sobbed again.
+
+“Come, Miss Rose,” said the miller; “you can give me your confidence. I
+do not question you, but I think you can trust me.”
+
+“I do trust you,” said the girl. “I will tell you why I must refuse
+Ralph. I am nobody; I haven’t even a name; the name I call myself is a
+lie. Ralph is a noble man. I love him with all my heart, but I can
+never be his.”
+
+“What talk is this?” said Father Abram. “You said that you remember
+your parents. Why do you say you have no name? I do not understand.”
+
+“I do remember them,” said Miss Chester. “I remember them too well. My
+first recollections are of our life somewhere in the far South. We
+moved many times to different towns and states. I have picked cotton,
+and worked in factories, and have often gone without enough food and
+clothes. My mother was sometimes good to me; my father was always
+cruel, and beat me. I think they were both idle and unsettled.
+
+“One night when we were living in a little town on a river near Atlanta
+they had a great quarrel. It was while they were abusing and taunting
+each other that I learned—oh, Father Abram, I learned that I didn’t
+even have the right to be—don’t you understand? I had no right even to
+a name; I was nobody.
+
+“I ran away that night. I walked to Atlanta and found work. I gave
+myself the name of Rose Chester, and have earned my own living ever
+since. Now you know why I cannot marry Ralph—and, oh, I can never tell
+him why.”
+
+Better than any sympathy, more helpful than pity, was Father Abram’s
+depreciation of her woes.
+
+“Why, dear, dear! is that all?” he said. “Fie, fie! I thought something
+was in the way. If this perfect young man is a man at all he will not
+care a pinch of bran for your family tree. Dear Miss Rose, take my word
+for it, it is yourself he cares for. Tell him frankly, just as you have
+told me, and I’ll warrant that he will laugh at your story, and think
+all the more of you for it.”
+
+“I shall never tell him,” said Miss Chester, sadly. “And I shall never
+marry him nor any one else. I have not the right.”
+
+But they saw a long shadow come bobbing up the sunlit road. And then
+came a shorter one bobbing by its side; and presently two strange
+figures approached the church. The long shadow was made by Miss Phœbe
+Summers, the organist, come to practise. Tommy Teague, aged twelve, was
+responsible for the shorter shadow. It was Tommy’s day to pump the
+organ for Miss Phœbe, and his bare toes proudly spurned the dust of the
+road.
+
+Miss Phœbe, in her lilac-spray chintz dress, with her accurate little
+curls hanging over each ear, courtesied low to Father Abram, and shook
+her curls ceremoniously at Miss Chester. Then she and her assistant
+climbed the steep stairway to the organ loft.
+
+In the gathering shadows below, Father Abram and Miss Chester lingered.
+They were silent; and it is likely that they were busy with their
+memories. Miss Chester sat, leaning her head on her hand, with her eyes
+fixed far away. Father Abram stood in the next pew, looking
+thoughtfully out of the door at the road and the ruined cottage.
+
+Suddenly the scene was transformed for him back almost a score of years
+into the past. For, as Tommy pumped away, Miss Phœbe struck a low bass
+note on the organ and held it to test the volume of air that it
+contained. The church ceased to exist, so far as Father Abram was
+concerned. The deep, booming vibration that shook the little frame
+building was no note from an organ, but the humming of the mill
+machinery. He felt sure that the old overshot-wheel was turning; that
+he was back again, a dusty, merry miller in the old mountain mill. And
+now evening was come, and soon would come Aglaia with flying colours,
+toddling across the road to take him home to supper. Father Abram’s
+eyes were fixed upon the broken door of the cottage.
+
+And then came another wonder. In the gallery overhead the sacks of
+flour were stacked in long rows. Perhaps a mouse had been at one of
+them; anyway the jar of the deep organ note shook down between the
+cracks of the gallery floor a stream of flour, covering Father Abram
+from head to foot with the white dust. And then the old miller stepped
+into the aisle, and waved his arms and began to sing the miller’s song:
+
+“The wheel goes round,
+The grist is ground,
+    The dusty miller’s merry.”
+
+
+—and then the rest of the miracle happened. Miss Chester was leaning
+forward from her pew, as pale as the flour itself, her wide-open eyes
+staring at Father Abram like one in a waking dream. When he began the
+song she stretched out her arms to him; her lips moved; she called to
+him in dreamy tones: “Da-da, come take Dums home!”
+
+Miss Phœbe released the low key of the organ. But her work had been
+well done. The note that she struck had beaten down the doors of a
+closed memory; and Father Abram held his lost Aglaia close in his arms.
+
+When you visit Lakelands they will tell you more of this story. They
+will tell you how the lines of it were afterward traced, and the
+history of the miller’s daughter revealed after the gipsy wanderers had
+stolen her on that September day, attracted by her childish beauty. But
+you should wait until you sit comfortably on the shaded porch of the
+Eagle House, and then you can have the story at your ease. It seems
+best that our part of it should close while Miss Phœbe’s deep bass note
+was yet reverberating softly.
+
+And yet, to my mind, the finest thing of it all happened while Father
+Abram and his daughter were walking back to the Eagle House in the long
+twilight, almost too glad to speak.
+
+“Father,” she said, somewhat timidly and doubtfully, “have you a great
+deal of money?”
+
+“A great deal?” said the miller. “Well, that depends. There is plenty
+unless you want to buy the moon or something equally expensive.”
+
+“Would it cost very, very much,” asked Aglaia, who had always counted
+her dimes so carefully, “to send a telegram to Atlanta?”
+
+“Ah,” said Father Abram, with a little sigh, “I see. You want to ask
+Ralph to come.”
+
+Aglaia looked up at him with a tender smile.
+
+“I want to ask him to wait,” she said. “I have just found my father,
+and I want it to be just we two for a while. I want to tell him he will
+have to wait.”
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+NEW YORK BY CAMP FIRE LIGHT
+
+
+Away out in the Creek Nation we learned things about New York.
+
+We were on a hunting trip, and were camped one night on the bank of a
+little stream. Bud Kingsbury was our skilled hunter and guide, and it
+was from his lips that we had explanations of Manhattan and the queer
+folks that inhabit it. Bud had once spent a month in the metropolis,
+and a week or two at other times, and he was pleased to discourse to us
+of what he had seen.
+
+Fifty yards away from our camp was pitched the teepee of a wandering
+family of Indians that had come up and settled there for the night. An
+old, old Indian woman was trying to build a fire under an iron pot hung
+upon three sticks.
+
+Bud went over to her assistance, and soon had her fire going. When he
+came back we complimented him playfully upon his gallantry.
+
+“Oh,” said Bud, “don’t mention it. It’s a way I have. Whenever I see a
+lady trying to cook things in a pot and having trouble I always go to
+the rescue. I done the same thing once in a high-toned house in. New
+York City. Heap big society teepee on Fifth Avenue. That Injun lady
+kind of recalled it to my mind. Yes, I endeavours to be polite and help
+the ladies out.”
+
+The camp demanded the particulars.
+
+“I was manager of the Triangle B Ranch in the Panhandle,” said Bud. “It
+was owned at that time by old man Sterling, of New York. He wanted to
+sell out, and he wrote for me to come on to New York and explain the
+ranch to the syndicate that wanted to buy. So I sends to Fort Worth and
+has a forty dollar suit of clothes made, and hits the trail for the big
+village.
+
+“Well, when I got there, old man Sterling and his outfit certainly laid
+themselves out to be agreeable. We had business and pleasure so mixed
+up that you couldn’t tell whether it was a treat or a trade half the
+time. We had trolley rides, and cigars, and theatre round-ups, and
+rubber parties.”
+
+“Rubber parties?” said a listener, inquiringly.
+
+“Sure,” said Bud. “Didn’t you never attend ’em? You walk around and try
+to look at the tops of the skyscrapers. Well, we sold the ranch, and
+old man Sterling asks me ’round to his house to take grub on the night
+before I started back. It wasn’t any high-collared affair—just me and
+the old man and his wife and daughter. But they was a fine-haired
+outfit all right, and the lilies of the field wasn’t in it. They made
+my Fort Worth clothes carpenter look like a dealer in horse blankets
+and gee strings. And then the table was all pompous with flowers, and
+there was a whole kit of tools laid out beside everybody’s plate. You’d
+have thought you was fixed out to burglarize a restaurant before you
+could get your grub. But I’d been in New York over a week then, and I
+was getting on to stylish ways. I kind of trailed behind and watched
+the others use the hardware supplies, and then I tackled the chuck with
+the same weapons. It ain’t much trouble to travel with the high-flyers
+after you find out their gait. I got along fine. I was feeling cool and
+agreeable, and pretty soon I was talking away fluent as you please, all
+about the ranch and the West, and telling ’em how the Indians eat
+grasshopper stew and snakes, and you never saw people so interested.
+
+“But the real joy of that feast was that Miss Sterling. Just a little
+trick she was, not bigger than two bits’ worth of chewing plug; but she
+had a way about her that seemed to say she was the people, and you
+believed it. And yet, she never put on any airs, and she smiled at me
+the same as if I was a millionaire while I was telling about a Creek
+dog feast and listened like it was news from home.
+
+“By and by, after we had eat oysters and some watery soup and truck
+that never was in my repertory, a Methodist preacher brings in a kind
+of camp stove arrangement, all silver, on long legs, with a lamp under
+it.
+
+“Miss Sterling lights up and begins to do some cooking right on the
+supper table. I wondered why old man Sterling didn’t hire a cook, with
+all the money he had. Pretty soon she dished out some cheesy tasting
+truck that she said was rabbit, but I swear there had never been a
+Molly cotton tail in a mile of it.
+
+“The last thing on the programme was lemonade. It was brought around in
+little flat glass bowls and set by your plate. I was pretty thirsty,
+and I picked up mine and took a big swig of it. Right there was where
+the little lady had made a mistake. She had put in the lemon all right,
+but she’d forgot the sugar. The best housekeepers slip up sometimes. I
+thought maybe Miss Sterling was just learning to keep house and
+cook—that rabbit would surely make you think so—and I says to myself,
+‘Little lady, sugar or no sugar I’ll stand by you,’ and I raises up my
+bowl again and drinks the last drop of the lemonade. And then all the
+balance of ’em picks up their bowls and does the same. And then I gives
+Miss Sterling the laugh proper, just to carry it off like a joke, so
+she wouldn’t feel bad about the mistake.
+
+“After we all went into the sitting room she sat down and talked to me
+quite awhile.
+
+“‘It was so kind of you, Mr. Kingsbury,’ says she, ‘to bring my blunder
+off so nicely. It was so stupid of me to forget the sugar.’
+
+“‘Never you mind,’ says I, ‘some lucky man will throw his rope over a
+mighty elegant little housekeeper some day, not far from here.’
+
+“‘If you mean me, Mr. Kingsbury,’ says she, laughing out loud, ‘I hope
+he will be as lenient with my poor housekeeping as you have been.’
+
+“‘Don’t mention it,’ says I. ‘Anything to oblige the ladies.’”
+
+Bud ceased his reminiscences. And then some one asked him what he
+considered the most striking and prominent trait of New Yorkers.
+
+“The most visible and peculiar trait of New York folks,” answered Bud,
+“is New York. Most of ’em has New York on the brain. They have heard of
+other places, such as Waco, and Paris, and Hot Springs, and London; but
+they don’t believe in ’em. They think that town is all Merino. Now to
+show you how much they care for their village I’ll tell you about one
+of ’em that strayed out as far as the Triangle B while I was working
+there.
+
+“This New Yorker come out there looking for a job on the ranch. He said
+he was a good horseback rider, and there was pieces of tanbark hanging
+on his clothes yet from his riding school.
+
+“Well, for a while they put him to keeping books in the ranch store,
+for he was a devil at figures. But he got tired of that, and asked for
+something more in the line of activity. The boys on the ranch liked him
+all right, but he made us tired shouting New York all the time. Every
+night he’d tell us about East River and J. P. Morgan and the Eden Musee
+and Hetty Green and Central Park till we used to throw tin plates and
+branding irons at him.
+
+“One day this chap gets on a pitching pony, and the pony kind of sidled
+up his back and went to eating grass while the New Yorker was coming
+down.
+
+“He come down on his head on a chunk of mesquit wood, and he didn’t
+show any designs toward getting up again. We laid him out in a tent,
+and he begun to look pretty dead. So Gideon Pease saddles up and burns
+the wind for old Doc Sleeper’s residence in Dogtown, thirty miles away.
+
+“The doctor comes over and he investigates the patient.
+
+“‘Boys,’ says he, ‘you might as well go to playing seven-up for his
+saddle and clothes, for his head’s fractured and if he lives ten
+minutes it will be a remarkable case of longevity.’
+
+“Of course we didn’t gamble for the poor rooster’s saddle—that was one
+of Doc’s jokes. But we stood around feeling solemn, and all of us
+forgive him for having talked us to death about New York.
+
+“I never saw anybody about to hand in his checks act more peaceful than
+this fellow. His eyes were fixed ’way up in the air, and he was using
+rambling words to himself all about sweet music and beautiful streets
+and white-robed forms, and he was smiling like dying was a pleasure.
+
+“‘He’s about gone now,’ said Doc. ‘Whenever they begin to think they
+see heaven it’s all off.’
+
+“Blamed if that New York man didn’t sit right up when he heard the Doc
+say that.
+
+“‘Say,’ says he, kind of disappointed, ‘was that heaven? Confound it
+all, I thought it was Broadway. Some of you fellows get my clothes. I’m
+going to get up.’
+
+“And I’ll be blamed,” concluded Bud, “if he wasn’t on the train with a
+ticket for New York in his pocket four days afterward!”
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+THE ADVENTURES OF SHAMROCK JOLNES
+
+
+I am so fortunate as to count Shamrock Jolnes, the great New York
+detective, among my muster of friends. Jolnes is what is called the
+“inside man” of the city detective force. He is an expert in the use of
+the typewriter, and it is his duty, whenever there is a “murder
+mystery” to be solved, to sit at a desk telephone at headquarters and
+take down the messages of “cranks” who ’phone in their confessions to
+having committed the crime.
+
+But on certain “off” days when confessions are coming in slowly and
+three or four newspapers have run to earth as many different guilty
+persons, Jolnes will knock about the town with me, exhibiting, to my
+great delight and instruction, his marvellous powers of observation and
+deduction.
+
+The other day I dropped in at Headquarters and found the great
+detective gazing thoughtfully at a string that was tied tightly around
+his little finger.
+
+“Good morning, Whatsup,” he said, without turning his head. “I’m glad
+to notice that you’ve had your house fitted up with electric lights at
+last.”
+
+“Will you please tell me,” I said, in surprise, “how you knew that? I
+am sure that I never mentioned the fact to any one, and the wiring was
+a rush order not completed until this morning.”
+
+“Nothing easier,” said Jolnes, genially. “As you came in I caught the
+odour of the cigar you are smoking. I know an expensive cigar; and I
+know that not more than three men in New York can afford to smoke
+cigars and pay gas bills too at the present time. That was an easy one.
+But I am working just now on a little problem of my own.”
+
+“Why have you that string on your finger?” I asked.
+
+“That’s the problem,” said Jolnes. “My wife tied that on this morning
+to remind me of something I was to send up to the house. Sit down,
+Whatsup, and excuse me for a few moments.”
+
+The distinguished detective went to a wall telephone, and stood with
+the receiver to his ear for probably ten minutes.
+
+“Were you listening to a confession?” I asked, when he had returned to
+his chair.
+
+“Perhaps,” said Jolnes, with a smile, “it might be called something of
+the sort. To be frank with you, Whatsup, I’ve cut out the dope. I’ve
+been increasing the quantity for so long that morphine doesn’t have
+much effect on me any more. I’ve got to have something more powerful.
+That telephone I just went to is connected with a room in the Waldorf
+where there’s an author’s reading in progress. Now, to get at the
+solution of this string.”
+
+After five minutes of silent pondering, Jolnes looked at me, with a
+smile, and nodded his head.
+
+“Wonderful man!” I exclaimed; “already?”
+
+“It is quite simple,” he said, holding up his finger. “You see that
+knot? That is to prevent my forgetting. It is, therefore, a
+forget-me-knot. A forget-me-not is a flower. It was a sack of flour
+that I was to send home!”
+
+“Beautiful!” I could not help crying out in admiration.
+
+“Suppose we go out for a ramble,” suggested Jolnes.
+
+“There is only one case of importance on hand just now. Old man
+McCarty, one hundred and four years old, died from eating too many
+bananas. The evidence points so strongly to the Mafia that the police
+have surrounded the Second Avenue Katzenjammer Gambrinus Club No. 2,
+and the capture of the assassin is only the matter of a few hours. The
+detective force has not yet been called on for assistance.”
+
+Jolnes and I went out and up the street toward the corner, where we
+were to catch a surface car.
+
+Half-way up the block we met Rheingelder, an acquaintance of ours, who
+held a City Hall position.
+
+“Good morning, Rheingelder,” said Jolnes, halting.
+
+“Nice breakfast that was you had this morning.”
+
+Always on the lookout for the detective’s remarkable feats of
+deduction, I saw Jolnes’s eye flash for an instant upon a long yellow
+splash on the shirt bosom and a smaller one upon the chin of
+Rheingelder—both undoubtedly made by the yolk of an egg.
+
+“Oh, dot is some of your detectiveness,” said Rheingelder, shaking all
+over with a smile. “Vell, I pet you trinks und cigars all round dot you
+cannot tell vot I haf eaten for breakfast.”
+
+“Done,” said Jolnes. “Sausage, pumpernickel and coffee.”
+
+Rheingelder admitted the correctness of the surmise and paid the bet.
+When we had proceeded on our way I said to Jolnes:
+
+“I thought you looked at the egg spilled on his chin and shirt front.”
+
+“I did,” said Jolnes. “That is where I began my deduction. Rheingelder
+is a very economical, saving man. Yesterday eggs dropped in the market
+to twenty-eight cents per dozen. To-day they are quoted at forty-two.
+Rheingelder ate eggs yesterday, and to-day he went back to his usual
+fare. A little thing like this isn’t anything, Whatsup; it belongs to
+the primary arithmetic class.”
+
+When we boarded the street car we found the seats all
+occupied—principally by ladies. Jolnes and I stood on the rear
+platform.
+
+About the middle of the car there sat an elderly man with a short, gray
+beard, who looked to be the typical, well-dressed New Yorker. At
+successive corners other ladies climbed aboard, and soon three or four
+of them were standing over the man, clinging to straps and glaring
+meaningly at the man who occupied the coveted seat. But he resolutely
+retained his place.
+
+“We New Yorkers,” I remarked to Jolnes, “have about lost our manners,
+as far as the exercise of them in public goes.”
+
+“Perhaps so,” said Jolnes, lightly; “but the man you evidently refer to
+happens to be a very chivalrous and courteous gentleman from Old
+Virginia. He is spending a few days in New York with his wife and two
+daughters, and he leaves for the South to-night.”
+
+“You know him, then?” I said, in amazement.
+
+“I never saw him before we stepped on the car,” declared the detective,
+smilingly.
+
+“By the gold tooth of the Witch of Endor!” I cried, “if you can
+construe all that from his appearance you are dealing in nothing else
+than black art.”
+
+“The habit of observation—nothing more,” said Jolnes. “If the old
+gentleman gets off the car before we do, I think I can demonstrate to
+you the accuracy of my deduction.”
+
+Three blocks farther along the gentleman rose to leave the car. Jolnes
+addressed him at the door:
+
+“Pardon me, sir, but are you not Colonel Hunter, of Norfolk, Virginia?”
+
+“No, suh,” was the extremely courteous answer. “My name, suh, is
+Ellison—Major Winfield R. Ellison, from Fairfax County, in the same
+state. I know a good many people, suh, in Norfolk—the Goodriches, the
+Tollivers, and the Crabtrees, suh, but I never had the pleasure of
+meeting yo’ friend, Colonel Hunter. I am happy to say, suh, that I am
+going back to Virginia to-night, after having spent a week in yo’ city
+with my wife and three daughters. I shall be in Norfolk in about ten
+days, and if you will give me yo’ name, suh, I will take pleasure in
+looking up Colonel Hunter and telling him that you inquired after him,
+suh.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Jolnes; “tell him that Reynolds sent his regards, if
+you will be so kind.”
+
+I glanced at the great New York detective and saw that a look of
+intense chagrin had come upon his clear-cut features. Failure in the
+slightest point always galled Shamrock Jolnes.
+
+“Did you say your _three_ daughters?” he asked of the Virginia
+gentleman.
+
+“Yes, suh, my three daughters, all as fine girls as there are in
+Fairfax County,” was the answer.
+
+With that Major Ellison stopped the car and began to descend the step.
+
+Shamrock Jolnes clutched his arm.
+
+“One moment, sir,” he begged, in an urbane voice in which I alone
+detected the anxiety—“am I not right in believing that one of the young
+ladies is an _adopted_ daughter?”
+
+“You are, suh,” admitted the major, from the ground, “but how the devil
+you knew it, suh, is mo’ than I can tell.”
+
+“And mo’ than I can tell, too,” I said, as the car went on.
+
+Jolnes was restored to his calm, observant serenity by having wrested
+victory from his apparent failure; so after we got off the car he
+invited me into a café, promising to reveal the process of his latest
+wonderful feat.
+
+“In the first place,” he began after we were comfortably seated, “I
+knew the gentleman was no New Yorker because he was flushed and uneasy
+and restless on account of the ladies that were standing, although he
+did not rise and give them his seat. I decided from his appearance that
+he was a Southerner rather than a Westerner.
+
+“Next I began to figure out his reason for not relinquishing his seat
+to a lady when he evidently felt strongly, but not overpoweringly,
+impelled to do so. I very quickly decided upon that. I noticed that one
+of his eyes had received a severe jab in one corner, which was red and
+inflamed, and that all over his face were tiny round marks about the
+size of the end of an uncut lead pencil. Also upon both of his patent
+leather shoes were a number of deep imprints shaped like ovals cut off
+square at one end.
+
+“Now, there is only one district in New York City where a man is bound
+to receive scars and wounds and indentations of that sort—and that is
+along the sidewalks of Twenty-third Street and a portion of Sixth
+Avenue south of there. I knew from the imprints of trampling French
+heels on his feet and the marks of countless jabs in the face from
+umbrellas and parasols carried by women in the shopping district that
+he had been in conflict with the amazonian troops. And as he was a man
+of intelligent appearance, I knew he would not have braved such dangers
+unless he had been dragged thither by his own women folk. Therefore,
+when he got on the car his anger at the treatment he had received was
+sufficient to make him keep his seat in spite of his traditions of
+Southern chivalry.”
+
+“That is all very well,” I said, “but why did you insist upon
+daughters—and especially two daughters? Why couldn’t a wife alone have
+taken him shopping?”
+
+“There had to be daughters,” said Jolnes, calmly. “If he had only a
+wife, and she near his own age, he could have bluffed her into going
+alone. If he had a young wife she would prefer to go alone. So there
+you are.”
+
+“I’ll admit that,” I said; “but, now, why two daughters? And how, in
+the name of all the prophets, did you guess that one was adopted when
+he told you he had three?”
+
+“Don’t say guess,” said Jolnes, with a touch of pride in his air;
+“there is no such word in the lexicon of ratiocination. In Major
+Ellison’s buttonhole there was a carnation and a rosebud backed by a
+geranium leaf. No woman ever combined a carnation and a rosebud into a
+boutonniere. Close your eyes, Whatsup, and give the logic of your
+imagination a chance. Cannot you see the lovely Adele fastening the
+carnation to the lapel so that papa may be gay upon the street? And
+then the romping Edith May dancing up with sisterly jealousy to add her
+rosebud to the adornment?”
+
+“And then,” I cried, beginning to feel enthusiasm, “when he declared
+that he had three daughters—”
+
+“I could see,” said Jolnes, “one in the background who added no flower;
+and I knew that she must be—”
+
+“Adopted!” I broke in. “I give you every credit; but how did you know
+he was leaving for the South to-night?”
+
+“In his breast pocket,” said the great detective, “something large and
+oval made a protuberance. Good liquor is scarce on trains, and it is a
+long journey from New York to Fairfax County.”
+
+“Again, I must bow to you,” I said. “And tell me this, so that my last
+shred of doubt will be cleared away; why did you decide that he was
+from Virginia?”
+
+“It was very faint, I admit,” answered Shamrock Jolnes, “but no trained
+observer could have failed to detect the odour of mint in the car.”
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+THE LADY HIGHER UP
+
+
+New York City, they said, was deserted; and that accounted, doubtless,
+for the sounds carrying so far in the tranquil summer air. The breeze
+was south-by-southwest; the hour was midnight; the theme was a bit of
+feminine gossip by wireless mythology. Three hundred and sixty-five
+feet above the heated asphalt the tiptoeing symbolic deity on Manhattan
+pointed her vacillating arrow straight, for the time, in the direction
+of her exalted sister on Liberty Island. The lights of the great Garden
+were out; the benches in the Square were filled with sleepers in
+postures so strange that beside them the writhing figures in Dore’s
+illustrations of the Inferno would have straightened into tailor’s
+dummies. The statue of Diana on the tower of the Garden—its constancy
+shown by its weathercock ways, its innocence by the coating of gold
+that it has acquired, its devotion to style by its single, graceful
+flying scarf, its candour and artlessness by its habit of ever drawing
+the long bow, its metropolitanism by its posture of swift flight to
+catch a Harlem train—remained poised with its arrow pointed across the
+upper bay. Had that arrow sped truly and horizontally it would have
+passed fifty feet above the head of the heroic matron whose duty it is
+to offer a cast-ironical welcome to the oppressed of other lands.
+
+Seaward this lady gazed, and the furrows between steamship lines began
+to cut steerage rates. The translators, too, have put an extra burden
+upon her. “Liberty Lighting the World” (as her creator christened her)
+would have had a no more responsible duty, except for the size of it,
+than that of an electrician or a Standard Oil magnate. But to
+“enlighten” the world (as our learned civic guardians “Englished” it)
+requires abler qualities. And so poor Liberty, instead of having a
+sinecure as a mere illuminator, must be converted into a Chautauqua
+schoolma’am, with the oceans for her field instead of the placid,
+classic lake. With a fireless torch and an empty head must she dispel
+the shadows of the world and teach it its A, B, C’s.
+
+“Ah, there, Mrs. Liberty!” called a clear, rollicking soprano voice
+through the still, midnight air.
+
+“Is that you, Miss Diana? Excuse my not turning my head. I’m not as
+flighty and whirly-whirly as some. And ’tis so hoarse I am I can hardly
+talk on account of the peanut-hulls left on the stairs in me throat by
+that last boatload of tourists from Marietta, Ohio. ’Tis after being a
+fine evening, miss.”
+
+“If you don’t mind my asking,” came the bell-like tones of the golden
+statue, “I’d like to know where you got that City Hall brogue. I didn’t
+know that Liberty was necessarily Irish.”
+
+“If ye’d studied the history of art in its foreign complications ye’d
+not need to ask,” replied the offshore statue. “If ye wasn’t so
+light-headed and giddy ye’d know that I was made by a Dago and
+presented to the American people on behalf of the French Government for
+the purpose of welcomin’ Irish immigrants into the Dutch city of New
+York. ’Tis that I’ve been doing night and day since I was erected. Ye
+must know, Miss Diana, that ’tis with statues the same as with
+people—’tis not their makers nor the purposes for which they were
+created that influence the operations of their tongues at all—it’s the
+associations with which they become associated, I’m telling ye.”
+
+“You’re dead right,” agreed Diana. “I notice it on myself. If any of
+the old guys from Olympus were to come along and hand me any hot air in
+the ancient Greek I couldn’t tell it from a conversation between a
+Coney Island car conductor and a five-cent fare.”
+
+“I’m right glad ye’ve made up your mind to be sociable, Miss Diana,”
+said Mrs. Liberty. “’Tis a lonesome life I have down here. Is there
+anything doin’ up in the city, Miss Diana, dear?”
+
+“Oh, la, la, la!—no,” said Diana. “Notice that ‘la, la, la,’ Aunt
+Liberty? Got that from ‘Paris by Night’ on the roof garden under me.
+You’ll hear that ‘la, la, la’ at the Café McCann now, along with
+‘garsong.’ The bohemian crowd there have become tired of ‘garsong’
+since O’Rafferty, the head waiter, punched three of them for calling
+him it. Oh, no; the town’s strickly on the bum these nights.
+Everybody’s away. Saw a downtown merchant on a roof garden this evening
+with his stenographer. Show was so dull he went to sleep. A waiter
+biting on a dime tip to see if it was good half woke him up. He looks
+around and sees his little pothooks perpetrator. ‘H’m!’ says he, ‘will
+you take a letter, Miss De St. Montmorency?’ ‘Sure, in a minute,’ says
+she, ‘if you’ll make it an X.’
+
+“That was the best thing happened on the roof. So you see how dull it
+is. La, la, la!”
+
+“’Tis fine ye have it up there in society, Miss Diana. Ye have the cat
+show and the horse show and the military tournaments where the privates
+look grand as generals and the generals try to look grand as
+floor-walkers. And ye have the Sportsmen’s Show, where the girl that
+measures 36, 19, 45 cooks breakfast food in a birch-bark wigwam on the
+banks of the Grand Canal of Venice conducted by one of the Vanderbilts,
+Bernard McFadden, and the Reverends Dowie and Duss. And ye have the
+French ball, where the original Cohens and the Robert Emmet-Sangerbund
+Society dance the Highland fling one with another. And ye have the
+grand O’Ryan ball, which is the most beautiful pageant in the world,
+where the French students vie with the Tyrolean warblers in doin’ the
+cake walk. Ye have the best job for a statue in the whole town, Miss
+Diana.
+
+“’Tis weary work,” sighed the island statue, “disseminatin’ the science
+of liberty in New York Bay. Sometimes when I take a peep down at Ellis
+Island and see the gang of immigrants I’m supposed to light up, ’tis
+tempted I am to blow out the gas and let the coroner write out their
+naturalization papers.”
+
+“Say, it’s a shame, ain’t it, to give you the worst end of it?” came
+the sympathetic antiphony of the steeplechase goddess. “It must be
+awfully lonesome down there with so much water around you. I don’t see
+how you ever keep your hair in curl. And that Mother Hubbard you are
+wearing went out ten years ago. I think those sculptor guys ought to be
+held for damages for putting iron or marble clothes on a lady. That’s
+where Mr. St. Gaudens was wise. I’m always a little ahead of the
+styles; but they’re coming my way pretty fast. Excuse my back a
+moment—I caught a puff of wind from the north—shouldn’t wonder if
+things had loosened up in Esopus. There, now! it’s in the West—I should
+think that gold plank would have calmed the air out in that direction.
+What were you saying, Mrs. Liberty?”
+
+“A fine chat I’ve had with ye, Miss Diana, ma’am, but I see one of them
+European steamers a-sailin’ up the Narrows, and I must be attendin’ to
+me duties. ’Tis me job to extend aloft the torch of Liberty to welcome
+all them that survive the kicks that the steerage stewards give ’em
+while landin.’ Sure ’tis a great country ye can come to for $8.50, and
+the doctor waitin’ to send ye back home free if he sees yer eyes red
+from cryin’ for it.”
+
+The golden statue veered in the changing breeze, menacing many points
+on the horizon with its aureate arrow.
+
+“So long, Aunt Liberty,” sweetly called Diana of the Tower. “Some
+night, when the wind’s right. I’ll call you up again. But—say! you
+haven’t got such a fierce kick coming about your job. I’ve kept a
+pretty good watch on the island of Manhattan since I’ve been up here.
+That’s a pretty sick-looking bunch of liberty chasers they dump down at
+your end of it; but they don’t all stay that way. Every little while up
+here I see guys signing checks and voting the right ticket, and
+encouraging the arts and taking a bath every morning, that was shoved
+ashore by a dock labourer born in the United States who never earned
+over forty dollars a month. Don’t run down your job, Aunt Liberty;
+you’re all right, all right.”
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+THE GREATER CONEY
+
+
+“Next Sunday,” said Dennis Carnahan, “I’ll be after going down to see
+the new Coney Island that’s risen like a phoenix bird from the ashes of
+the old resort. I’m going with Norah Flynn, and we’ll fall victims to
+all the dry goods deceptions, from the red-flannel eruption of Mount
+Vesuvius to the pink silk ribbons on the race-suicide problems in the
+incubator kiosk.
+
+“Was I there before? I was. I was there last Tuesday. Did I see the
+sights? I did not.
+
+“Last Monday I amalgamated myself with the Bricklayers’ Union, and in
+accordance with the rules I was ordered to quit work the same day on
+account of a sympathy strike with the Lady Salmon Canners’ Lodge No.2,
+of Tacoma, Washington.
+
+“’Twas disturbed I was in mind and proclivities by losing me job, bein’
+already harassed in me soul on account of havin’ quarrelled with Norah
+Flynn a week before by reason of hard words spoken at the Dairymen and
+Street-Sprinkler Drivers’ semi-annual ball, caused by jealousy and
+prickly heat and that divil, Andy Coghlin.
+
+“So, I says, it will be Coney for Tuesday; and if the chutes and the
+short change and the green-corn silk between the teeth don’t create
+diversions and get me feeling better, then I don’t know at all.
+
+“Ye will have heard that Coney has received moral reconstruction. The
+old Bowery, where they used to take your tintype by force and give ye
+knockout drops before having your palm read, is now called the Wall
+Street of the island. The wienerwurst stands are required by law to
+keep a news ticker in ’em; and the doughnuts are examined every four
+years by a retired steamboat inspector. The nigger man’s head that was
+used by the old patrons to throw baseballs at is now illegal; and, by
+order of the Police Commissioner the image of a man drivin’ an
+automobile has been substituted. I hear that the old immoral amusements
+have been suppressed. People who used to go down from New York to sit
+in the sand and dabble in the surf now give up their quarters to
+squeeze through turnstiles and see imitations of city fires and floods
+painted on canvas. The reprehensible and degradin’ resorts that
+disgraced old Coney are said to be wiped out. The wipin’-out process
+consists of raisin’ the price from 10 cents to 25 cents, and hirin’ a
+blonde named Maudie to sell tickets instead of Micky, the Bowery Bite.
+That’s what they say—I don’t know.
+
+“But to Coney I goes a-Tuesday. I gets off the ‘L’ and starts for the
+glitterin’ show. ’Twas a fine sight. The Babylonian towers and the
+Hindoo roof gardens was blazin’ with thousands of electric lights, and
+the streets was thick with people. ’Tis a true thing they say that
+Coney levels all rank. I see millionaires eatin’ popcorn and trampin’
+along with the crowd; and I see eight-dollar-a-week clothin’-store
+clerks in red automobiles fightin’ one another for who’d squeeze the
+horn when they come to a corner.
+
+“‘I made a mistake,’ I says to myself. ’Twas not Coney I needed. When a
+man’s sad ’tis not scenes of hilarity he wants. ’Twould be far better
+for him to meditate in a graveyard or to attend services at the
+Paradise Roof Gardens. ’Tis no consolation when a man’s lost his
+sweetheart to order hot corn and have the waiter bring him the powdered
+sugar cruet instead of salt and then conceal himself, or to have
+Zozookum, the gipsy palmist, tell him that he has three children and to
+look out for another serious calamity; price twenty-five cents.
+
+“I walked far away down on the beach, to the ruins of an old pavilion
+near one corner of this new private park, Dreamland. A year ago that
+old pavilion was standin’ up straight and the old-style waiters was
+slammin’ a week’s supply of clam chowder down in front of you for a
+nickel and callin’ you ‘cully’ friendly, and vice was rampant, and you
+got back to New York with enough change to take a car at the bridge.
+Now they tell me that they serve Welsh rabbits on Surf Avenue, and you
+get the right change back in the movin’-picture joints.
+
+“I sat down at one side of the old pavilion and looked at the surf
+spreadin’ itself on the beach, and thought about the time me and Norah
+Flynn sat on that spot last summer. ’Twas before reform struck the
+island; and we was happy. We had tintypes and chowder in the ribald
+dives, and the Egyptian Sorceress of the Nile told Norah out of her
+hand, while I was waitin’ in the door, that ’twould be the luck of her
+to marry a red-headed gossoon with two crooked legs, and I was
+overrunnin’ with joy on account of the allusion. And ’twas there that
+Norah Flynn put her two hands in mine a year before and we talked of
+flats and the things she could cook and the love business that goes
+with such episodes. And that was Coney as we loved it, and as the hand
+of Satan was upon it, friendly and noisy and your money’s worth, with
+no fence around the ocean and not too many electric lights to show the
+sleeve of a black serge coat against a white shirtwaist.
+
+“I sat with my back to the parks where they had the moon and the dreams
+and the steeples corralled, and longed for the old Coney. There wasn’t
+many people on the beach. Lots of them was feedin’ pennies into the
+slot machines to see the ‘Interrupted Courtship’ in the movin’
+pictures; and a good many was takin’ the sea air in the Canals of
+Venice and some was breathin’ the smoke of the sea battle by actual
+warships in a tank filled with real water. A few was down on the sands
+enjoyin’ the moonlight and the water. And the heart of me was heavy for
+the new morals of the old island, while the bands behind me played and
+the sea pounded on the bass drum in front.
+
+“And directly I got up and walked along the old pavilion, and there on
+the other side of, half in the dark, was a slip of a girl sittin’ on
+the tumble-down timbers, and unless I’m a liar she was cryin’ by
+herself there, all alone.
+
+“‘Is it trouble you are in, now, Miss,’ says I; ‘and what’s to be done
+about it?’
+
+“‘’Tis none of your business at all, Denny Carnahan,’ says she, sittin’
+up straight. And it was the voice of no other than Norah Flynn.
+
+“‘Then it’s not,’ says I, ‘and we’re after having a pleasant evening,
+Miss Flynn. Have ye seen the sights of this new Coney Island, then? I
+presume ye have come here for that purpose,’ says I.
+
+“‘I have,’ says she. ‘Me mother and Uncle Tim they are waiting beyond.
+’Tis an elegant evening I’ve had. I’ve seen all the attractions that
+be.’
+
+“‘Right ye are,’ says I to Norah; and I don’t know when I’ve been that
+amused. After disportin’ me-self among the most laughable moral
+improvements of the revised shell games I took meself to the shore for
+the benefit of the cool air. ‘And did ye observe the Durbar, Miss
+Flynn?’
+
+“‘I did,’ says she, reflectin’; ‘but ’tis not safe, I’m thinkin’, to
+ride down them slantin’ things into the water.’
+
+“‘How did ye fancy the shoot the chutes?’ I asks.
+
+“‘True, then, I’m afraid of guns,’ says Norah. ‘They make such noise in
+my ears. But Uncle Tim, he shot them, he did, and won cigars. ’Tis a
+fine time we had this day, Mr. Carnahan.’
+
+“‘I’m glad you’ve enjoyed yerself,’ I says. ‘I suppose you’ve had a
+roarin’ fine time seein’ the sights. And how did the incubators and the
+helter-skelter and the midgets suit the taste of ye?’
+
+“‘I—I wasn’t hungry,’ says Norah, faint. ‘But mother ate a quantity of
+all of ’em. I’m that pleased with the fine things in the new Coney
+Island,’ says she, ‘that it’s the happiest day I’ve seen in a long
+time, at all.’
+
+“‘Did you see Venice?’ says I.
+
+“‘We did,’ says she. ‘She was a beauty. She was all dressed in red, she
+was, with—’
+
+“I listened no more to Norah Flynn. I stepped up and I gathered her in
+my arms.
+
+“‘’Tis a story-teller ye are, Norah Flynn’, says I. ‘Ye’ve seen no more
+of the greater Coney Island than I have meself. Come, now, tell the
+truth—ye came to sit by the old pavilion by the waves where you sat
+last summer and made Dennis Carnahan a happy man. Speak up, and tell
+the truth.’
+
+“Norah stuck her nose against me vest.
+
+“‘I despise it, Denny,’ she says, half cryin’. ‘Mother and Uncle Tim
+went to see the shows, but I came down here to think of you. I couldn’t
+bear the lights and the crowd. Are you forgivin’ me, Denny, for the
+words we had?’
+
+“‘’Twas me fault,’ says I. ‘I came here for the same reason meself.
+Look at the lights, Norah,’ I says, turning my back to the sea—‘ain’t
+they pretty?’
+
+“‘They are,’ says Norah, with her eyes shinin’; ‘and do ye hear the
+bands playin’? Oh, Denny, I think I’d like to see it all.’
+
+“‘The old Coney is gone, darlin’,’ I says to her. ‘Everything moves.
+When a man’s glad it’s not scenes of sadness he wants. ’Tis a greater
+Coney we have here, but we couldn’t see it till we got in the humour
+for it. Next Sunday, Norah darlin’, we’ll see the new place from end to
+end.”
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+LAW AND ORDER
+
+
+I found myself in Texas recently, revisiting old places and vistas. At
+a sheep ranch where I had sojourned many years ago, I stopped for a
+week. And, as all visitors do, I heartily plunged into the business at
+hand, which happened to be that of dipping the sheep.
+
+Now, this process is so different from ordinary human baptism that it
+deserves a word of itself. A vast iron cauldron with half the fires of
+Avernus beneath it is partly filled with water that soon boils
+furiously. Into that is cast concentrated lye, lime, and sulphur, which
+is allowed to stew and fume until the witches’ broth is strong enough
+to scorch the third arm of Palladino herself.
+
+Then this concentrated brew is mixed in a long, deep vat with cubic
+gallons of hot water, and the sheep are caught by their hind legs and
+flung into the compound. After being thoroughly ducked by means of a
+forked pole in the hands of a gentleman detailed for that purpose, they
+are allowed to clamber up an incline into a corral and dry or die, as
+the state of their constitutions may decree. If you ever caught an
+able-bodied, two-year-old mutton by the hind legs and felt the 750
+volts of kicking that he can send though your arm seventeen times
+before you can hurl him into the vat, you will, of course, hope that he
+may die instead of dry.
+
+But this is merely to explain why Bud Oakley and I gladly stretched
+ourselves on the bank of the nearby _charco_ after the dipping, glad
+for the welcome inanition and pure contact with the earth after our
+muscle-racking labours. The flock was a small one, and we finished at
+three in the afternoon; so Bud brought from the _morral_ on his saddle
+horn, coffee and a coffeepot and a big hunk of bread and some side
+bacon. Mr. Mills, the ranch owner and my old friend, rode away to the
+ranch with his force of Mexican _trabajadores_.
+
+While the bacon was frizzling nicely, there was the sound of horses’
+hoofs behind us. Bud’s six-shooter lay in its scabbard ten feet away
+from his hand. He paid not the slightest heed to the approaching
+horseman. This attitude of a Texas ranchman was so different from the
+old-time custom that I marvelled. Instinctively I turned to inspect the
+possible foe that menaced us in the rear. I saw a horseman dressed in
+black, who might have been a lawyer or a parson or an undertaker,
+trotting peaceably along the road by the _arroyo_.
+
+Bud noticed my precautionary movement and smiled sarcastically and
+sorrowfully.
+
+“You’ve been away too long,” said he. “You don’t need to look around
+any more when anybody gallops up behind you in this state, unless
+something hits you in the back; and even then it’s liable to be only a
+bunch of tracts or a petition to sign against the trusts. I never
+looked at that _hombre_ that rode by; but I’ll bet a quart of sheep dip
+that he’s some double-dyed son of a popgun out rounding up prohibition
+votes.”
+
+“Times have changed, Bud,” said I, oracularly. “Law and order is the
+rule now in the South and the Southwest.”
+
+I caught a cold gleam from Bud’s pale blue eyes.
+
+“Not that I—” I began, hastily.
+
+“Of course you don’t,” said Bud warmly. “You know better. You’ve lived
+here before. Law and order, you say? Twenty years ago we had ’em here.
+We only had two or three laws, such as against murder before witnesses,
+and being caught stealing horses, and voting the Republican ticket. But
+how is it now? All we get is orders; and the laws go out of the state.
+Them legislators set up there at Austin and don’t do nothing but make
+laws against kerosene oil and schoolbooks being brought into the state.
+I reckon they was afraid some man would go home some evening after work
+and light up and get an education and go to work and make laws to
+repeal aforesaid laws. Me, I’m for the old days when law and order
+meant what they said. A law was a law, and a order was a order.”
+
+“But—” I began.
+
+“I was going on,” continued Bud, “while this coffee is boiling, to
+describe to you a case of genuine law and order that I knew of once in
+the times when cases was decided in the chambers of a six-shooter
+instead of a supreme court.
+
+“You’ve heard of old Ben Kirkman, the cattle king? His ranch run from
+the Nueces to the Rio Grande. In them days, as you know, there was
+cattle barons and cattle kings. The difference was this: when a
+cattleman went to San Antone and bought beer for the newspaper
+reporters and only give them the number of cattle he actually owned,
+they wrote him up for a baron. When he bought ’em champagne wine and
+added in the amount of cattle he had stole, they called him a king.
+
+“Luke Summers was one of his range bosses. And down to the king’s ranch
+comes one day a bunch of these Oriental people from New York or Kansas
+City or thereabouts. Luke was detailed with a squad to ride about with
+’em, and see that the rattlesnakes got fair warning when they was
+coming, and drive the deer out of their way. Among the bunch was a
+black-eyed girl that wore a number two shoe. That’s all I noticed about
+her. But Luke must have seen more, for he married her one day before
+the _caballard_ started back, and went over on Canada Verde and set up
+a ranch of his own. I’m skipping over the sentimental stuff on purpose,
+because I never saw or wanted to see any of it. And Luke takes me along
+with him because we was old friends and I handled cattle to suit him.
+
+“I’m skipping over much what followed, because I never saw or wanted to
+see any of it—but three years afterward there was a boy kid stumbling
+and blubbering around the galleries and floors of Luke’s ranch. I never
+had no use for kids; but it seems they did. And I’m skipping over much
+what followed until one day out to the ranch drives in hacks and
+buckboards a lot of Mrs. Summers’s friends from the East—a sister or so
+and two or three men. One looked like an uncle to somebody; and one
+looked like nothing; and the other one had on corkscrew pants and spoke
+in a tone of voice. I never liked a man who spoke in a tone of voice.
+
+“I’m skipping over much what followed; but one afternoon when I rides
+up to the ranch house to get some orders about a drove of beeves that
+was to be shipped, I hears something like a popgun go off. I waits at
+the hitching rack, not wishing to intrude on private affairs. In a
+little while Luke comes out and gives some orders to some of his
+Mexican hands, and they go and hitch up sundry and divers vehicles; and
+mighty soon out comes one of the sisters or so and some of the two or
+three men. But two of the two or three men carries between ’em the
+corkscrew man who spoke in a tone of voice, and lays him flat down in
+one of the wagons. And they all might have been seen wending their way
+away.
+
+“‘Bud,’ says Luke to me, ‘I want you to fix up a little and go up to
+San Antone with me.’
+
+“‘Let me get on my Mexican spurs,’ says I, ‘and I’m your company.’
+
+“One of the sisters or so seems to have stayed at the ranch with Mrs.
+Summers and the kid. We rides to Encinal and catches the International,
+and hits San Antone in the morning. After breakfast Luke steers me
+straight to the office of a lawyer. They go in a room and talk and then
+come out.
+
+“‘Oh, there won’t be any trouble, Mr. Summers,’ says the lawyer. ‘I’ll
+acquaint Judge Simmons with the facts to-day; and the matter will be
+put through as promptly as possible. Law and order reigns in this state
+as swift and sure as any in the country.’
+
+“‘I’ll wait for the decree if it won’t take over half an hour,’ says
+Luke.
+
+“‘Tut, tut,’ says the lawyer man. ‘Law must take its course. Come back
+day after to-morrow at half-past nine.’
+
+“At that time me and Luke shows up, and the lawyer hands him a folded
+document. And Luke writes him out a check.
+
+“On the sidewalk Luke holds up the paper to me and puts a finger the
+size of a kitchen door latch on it and says:
+
+“‘Decree of ab-so-lute divorce with cus-to-dy of the child.’
+
+“‘Skipping over much what has happened of which I know nothing,’ says
+I, ‘it looks to me like a split. Couldn’t the lawyer man have made it a
+strike for you?’
+
+“‘Bud,’ says he, in a pained style, ‘that child is the one thing I have
+to live for. _She_ may go; but the boy is mine!—think of it—I have
+cus-to-dy of the child.’
+
+“‘All right,’ says I. ‘If it’s the law, let’s abide by it. But I
+think,’ says I, ‘that Judge Simmons might have used exemplary clemency,
+or whatever is the legal term, in our case.’
+
+“You see, I wasn’t inveigled much into the desirableness of having
+infants around a ranch, except the kind that feed themselves and sell
+for so much on the hoof when they grow up. But Luke was struck with
+that sort of parental foolishness that I never could understand. All
+the way riding from the station back to the ranch, he kept pulling that
+decree out of his pocket and laying his finger on the back of it and
+reading off to me the sum and substance of it. ‘Cus-to-dy of the child,
+Bud,’ says he. ‘Don’t forget it—cus-to-dy of the child.’
+
+“But when we hits the ranch we finds our decree of court obviated,
+_nolle prossed_, and remanded for trial. Mrs. Summers and the kid was
+gone. They tell us that an hour after me and Luke had started for San
+Antone she had a team hitched and lit out for the nearest station with
+her trunks and the youngster.
+
+“Luke takes out his decree once more and reads off its emoluments.
+
+“‘It ain’t possible, Bud,’ says he, ‘for this to be. It’s contrary to
+law and order. It’s wrote as plain as day here—“Cus-to-dy of the
+child.”’
+
+“‘There is what you might call a human leaning,’ says I, ‘toward
+smashing ’em both—not to mention the child.’
+
+“‘Judge Simmons,’ goes on Luke, ‘is a incorporated officer of the law.
+She can’t take the boy away. He belongs to me by statutes passed and
+approved by the state of Texas.’
+
+“‘And he’s removed from the jurisdiction of mundane mandamuses,’ says
+I, ‘by the unearthly statutes of female partiality. Let us praise the
+Lord and be thankful for whatever small mercies—’ I begins; but I see
+Luke don’t listen to me. Tired as he was, he calls for a fresh horse
+and starts back again for the station.
+
+“He come back two weeks afterward, not saying much.
+
+“‘We can’t get the trail,’ says he; ‘but we’ve done all the
+telegraphing that the wires’ll stand, and we’ve got these city rangers
+they call detectives on the lookout. In the meantime, Bud,’ says he,
+‘we’ll round up them cows on Brush Creek, and wait for the law to take
+its course.’”
+
+“And after that we never alluded to allusions, as you might say.
+
+“Skipping over much what happened in the next twelve years, Luke was
+made sheriff of Mojada County. He made me his office deputy. Now, don’t
+get in your mind no wrong apparitions of a office deputy doing sums in
+a book or mashing letters in a cider press. In them days his job was to
+watch the back windows so nobody didn’t plug the sheriff in the rear
+while he was adding up mileage at his desk in front. And in them days I
+had qualifications for the job. And there was law and order in Mojada
+County, and schoolbooks, and all the whiskey you wanted, and the
+Government built its own battleships instead of collecting nickels from
+the school children to do it with. And, as I say, there was law and
+order instead of enactments and restrictions such as disfigure our
+umpire state to-day. We had our office at Bildad, the county seat, from
+which we emerged forth on necessary occasions to soothe whatever
+fracases and unrest that might occur in our jurisdiction.
+
+“Skipping over much what happened while me and Luke was sheriff, I want
+to give you an idea of how the law was respected in them days. Luke was
+what you would call one of the most conscious men in the world. He
+never knew much book law, but he had the inner emoluments of justice
+and mercy inculcated into his system. If a respectable citizen shot a
+Mexican or held up a train and cleaned out the safe in the express car,
+and Luke ever got hold of him, he’d give the guilty party such a
+reprimand and a cussin’ out that he’d probable never do it again. But
+once let somebody steal a horse (unless it was a Spanish pony), or cut
+a wire fence, or otherwise impair the peace and indignity of Mojada
+County, Luke and me would be on ’em with habeas corpuses and smokeless
+powder and all the modern inventions of equity and etiquette.
+
+“We certainly had our county on a basis of lawfulness. I’ve known
+persons of Eastern classification with little spotted caps and
+buttoned-up shoes to get off the train at Bildad and eat sandwiches at
+the railroad station without being shot at or even roped and drug about
+by the citizens of the town.
+
+“Luke had his own ideas of legality and justice. He was kind of
+training me to succeed him when he went out of office. He was always
+looking ahead to the time when he’d quit sheriffing. What he wanted to
+do was to build a yellow house with lattice-work under the porch and
+have hens scratching in the yard. The one main thing in his mind seemed
+to be the yard.
+
+“‘Bud,’ he says to me, ‘by instinct and sentiment I’m a contractor. I
+want to be a contractor. That’s what I’ll be when I get out of office.’
+
+“‘What kind of a contractor?’ says I. ‘It sounds like a kind of a
+business to me. You ain’t going to haul cement or establish branches or
+work on a railroad, are you?’
+
+“‘You don’t understand,’ says Luke. ‘I’m tired of space and horizons
+and territory and distances and things like that. What I want is
+reasonable contraction. I want a yard with a fence around it that you
+can go out and set on after supper and listen to whip-poor-wills,’ says
+Luke.
+
+“That’s the kind of a man he was. He was home-like, although he’d had
+bad luck in such investments. But he never talked about them times on
+the ranch. It seemed like he’d forgotten about it. I wondered how, with
+his ideas of yards and chickens and notions of lattice-work, he’d
+seemed to have got out of his mind that kid of his that had been taken
+away from him, unlawful, in spite of his decree of court. But he wasn’t
+a man you could ask about such things as he didn’t refer to in his own
+conversation.
+
+“I reckon he’d put all his emotions and ideas into being sheriff. I’ve
+read in books about men that was disappointed in these poetic and
+fine-haired and high-collared affairs with ladies renouncing truck of
+that kind and wrapping themselves up into some occupation like painting
+pictures, or herding sheep, or science, or teaching school—something to
+make ’em forget. Well, I guess that was the way with Luke. But, as he
+couldn’t paint pictures, he took it out in rounding up horse thieves
+and in making Mojada County a safe place to sleep in if you was well
+armed and not afraid of requisitions or tarantulas.
+
+“One day there passes through Bildad a bunch of these money investors
+from the East, and they stopped off there, Bildad being the dinner
+station on the I. & G. N. They was just coming back from Mexico looking
+after mines and such. There was five of ’em—four solid parties, with
+gold watch chains, that would grade up over two hundred pounds on the
+hoof, and one kid about seventeen or eighteen.
+
+“This youngster had on one of them cowboy suits such as tenderfoots
+bring West with ’em; and you could see he was aching to wing a couple
+of Indians or bag a grizzly or two with the little pearl-handled gun he
+had buckled around his waist.
+
+“I walked down to the depot to keep an eye on the outfit and see that
+they didn’t locate any land or scare the cow ponies hitched in front of
+Murchison’s store or act otherwise unseemly. Luke was away after a gang
+of cattle thieves down on the Frio, and I always looked after the law
+and order when he wasn’t there.
+
+“After dinner this boy comes out of the dining-room while the train was
+waiting, and prances up and down the platform ready to shoot all
+antelope, lions, or private citizens that might endeavour to molest or
+come too near him. He was a good-looking kid; only he was like all them
+tenderfoots—he didn’t know a law-and-order town when he saw it.
+
+“By and by along comes Pedro Johnson, the proprietor of the Crystal
+Palace _chili-con-carne_ stand in Bildad. Pedro was a man who liked to
+amuse himself; so he kind of herd rides this youngster, laughing at
+him, tickled to death. I was too far away to hear, but the kid seems to
+mention some remarks to Pedro, and Pedro goes up and slaps him about
+nine feet away, and laughs harder than ever. And then the boy gets up
+quicker than he fell and jerks out his little pearl-handle, and—bing!
+bing! bing! Pedro gets it three times in special and treasured portions
+of his carcass. I saw the dust fly off his clothes every time the
+bullets hit. Sometimes them little thirty-twos cause worry at close
+range.
+
+“The engine bell was ringing, and the train starting off slow. I goes
+up to the kid and places him under arrest, and takes away his gun. But
+the first thing I knew that _caballard_ of capitalists makes a break
+for the train. One of ’em hesitates in front of me for a second, and
+kind of smiles and shoves his hand up against my chin, and I sort of
+laid down on the platform and took a nap. I never was afraid of guns;
+but I don’t want any person except a barber to take liberties like that
+with my face again. When I woke up, the whole outfit—train, boy, and
+all—was gone. I asked about Pedro, and they told me the doctor said he
+would recover provided his wounds didn’t turn out to be fatal.
+
+“When Luke got back three days later, and I told him about it, he was
+mad all over.
+
+“‘Why’n’t you telegraph to San Antone,’ he asks, ‘and have the bunch
+arrested there?’
+
+“‘Oh, well,’ says I, ‘I always did admire telegraphy; but astronomy was
+what I had took up just then.’ That capitalist sure knew how to
+gesticulate with his hands.
+
+“Luke got madder and madder. He investigates and finds in the depot a
+card one of the men had dropped that gives the address of some _hombre_
+called Scudder in New York City.
+
+“‘Bud,’ says Luke, ‘I’m going after that bunch. I’m going there and get
+the man or boy, as you say he was, and bring him back. I’m sheriff of
+Mojada County, and I shall keep law and order in its precincts while
+I’m able to draw a gun. And I want you to go with me. No Eastern Yankee
+can shoot up a respectable and well-known citizen of Bildad, ’specially
+with a thirty-two calibre, and escape the law. Pedro Johnson,’ says
+Luke, ‘is one of our most prominent citizens and business men. I’ll
+appoint Sam Bell acting sheriff with penitentiary powers while I’m
+away, and you and me will take the six forty-five northbound to-morrow
+evening and follow up this trail.’
+
+“‘I’m your company,’ says I. ‘I never see this New York, but I’d like
+to. But, Luke,’ says I, ‘don’t you have to have a dispensation or a
+habeas corpus or something from the state, when you reach out that far
+for rich men and malefactors?’
+
+“‘Did I have a requisition,’ says Luke, ‘when I went over into the
+Brazos bottoms and brought back Bill Grimes and two more for holding up
+the International? Did me and you have a search warrant or a posse
+comitatus when we rounded up them six Mexican cow thieves down in
+Hidalgo? It’s my business to keep order in Mojada County.’
+
+“‘And it’s my business as office deputy,’ says I, ‘to see that business
+is carried on according to law. Between us both we ought to keep things
+pretty well cleaned up.’
+
+“So, the next day, Luke packs a blanket and some collars and his
+mileage book in a haversack, and him and me hits the breeze for New
+York. It was a powerful long ride. The seats in the cars was too short
+for six-footers like us to sleep comfortable on; and the conductor had
+to keep us from getting off at every town that had five-story houses in
+it. But we got there finally; and we seemed to see right away that he
+was right about it.
+
+“‘Luke,’ says I, ‘as office deputy and from a law standpoint, it don’t
+look to me like this place is properly and legally in the jurisdiction
+of Mojada County, Texas.’
+
+“‘From the standpoint of order,’ says he, ‘it’s amenable to answer for
+its sins to the properly appointed authorities from Bildad to
+Jerusalem.’
+
+“‘Amen,’ says I. ‘But let’s turn our trick sudden, and ride. I don’t
+like the looks of this place.’
+
+“‘Think of Pedro Johnson,’ says Luke, ‘a friend of mine and yours shot
+down by one of these gilded abolitionists at his very door!’
+
+“‘It was at the door of the freight depot,’ says I. ‘But the law will
+not be balked at a quibble like that.’
+
+“We put up at one of them big hotels on Broadway. The next morning I
+goes down about two miles of stairsteps to the bottom and hunts for
+Luke. It ain’t no use. It looks like San Jacinto day in San Antone.
+There’s a thousand folks milling around in a kind of a roofed-over
+plaza with marble pavements and trees growing right out of ’em, and I
+see no more chance of finding Luke than if we was hunting each other in
+the big pear flat down below Old Fort Ewell. But soon Luke and me runs
+together in one of the turns of them marble alleys.
+
+“‘It ain’t no use, Bud,’ says he. ‘I can’t find no place to eat at.
+I’ve been looking for restaurant signs and smelling for ham all over
+the camp. But I’m used to going hungry when I have to. Now,’ says he,
+‘I’m going out and get a hack and ride down to the address on this
+Scudder card. You stay here and try to hustle some grub. But I doubt if
+you’ll find it. I wish we’d brought along some cornmeal and bacon and
+beans. I’ll be back when I see this Scudder, if the trail ain’t wiped
+out.’
+
+“So I starts foraging for breakfast. For the honour of old Mojada
+County I didn’t want to seem green to them abolitionists, so every time
+I turned a corner in them marble halls I went up to the first desk or
+counter I see and looks around for grub. If I didn’t see what I wanted
+I asked for something else. In about half an hour I had a dozen cigars,
+five story magazines, and seven or eight railroad time-tables in my
+pockets, and never a smell of coffee or bacon to point out the trail.
+
+“Once a lady sitting at a table and playing a game kind of like pushpin
+told me to go into a closet that she called Number 3. I went in and
+shut the door, and the blamed thing lit itself up. I set down on a
+stool before a shelf and waited. Thinks I, ‘This is a private
+dining-room.’ But no waiter never came. When I got to sweating good and
+hard, I goes out again.
+
+“‘Did you get what you wanted?’ says she.
+
+“‘No, ma’am,’ says I. ‘Not a bite.’
+
+“‘Then there’s no charge,’ says she.
+
+“‘Thanky, ma’am,’ says I, and I takes up the trail again.
+
+“By and by I thinks I’ll shed etiquette; and I picks up one of them
+boys with blue clothes and yellow buttons in front, and he leads me to
+what he calls the caffay breakfast room. And the first thing I lays my
+eyes on when I go in is that boy that had shot Pedro Johnson. He was
+setting all alone at a little table, hitting a egg with a spoon like he
+was afraid he’d break it.
+
+“I takes the chair across the table from him; and he looks insulted and
+makes a move like he was going to get up.
+
+“‘Keep still, son,’ says I. ‘You’re apprehended, arrested, and in
+charge of the Texas authorities. Go on and hammer that egg some more if
+it’s the inside of it you want. Now, what did you shoot Mr. Johnson, of
+Bildad, for?’
+
+“And may I ask who you are?’ says he.
+
+“‘You may,’ says I. ‘Go ahead.’
+
+“‘I suppose you’re on,’ says this kid, without batting his eyes. ‘But
+what are you eating? Here, waiter!’ he calls out, raising his finger.
+‘Take this gentleman’s order.
+
+“‘A beefsteak,’ says I, ‘and some fried eggs and a can of peaches and a
+quart of coffee will about suffice.’
+
+“We talk awhile about the sundries of life and then he says:
+
+“‘What are you going to do about that shooting? I had a right to shoot
+that man,’ says he. ‘He called me names that I couldn’t overlook, and
+then he struck me. He carried a gun, too. What else could I do?’
+
+“‘We’ll have to take you back to Texas,’ says I.
+
+“‘I’d like to go back,’ says the boy, with a kind of a grin—‘if it
+wasn’t on an occasion of this kind. It’s the life I like. I’ve always
+wanted to ride and shoot and live in the open air ever since I can
+remember.’
+
+“‘Who was this gang of stout parties you took this trip with?’ I asks.
+
+“‘My stepfather,’ says he, ‘and some business partners of his in some
+Mexican mining and land schemes.’
+
+“‘I saw you shoot Pedro Johnson,’ says I, ‘and I took that little
+popgun away from you that you did it with. And when I did so I noticed
+three or four little scars in a row over your right eyebrow. You’ve
+been in rookus before, haven’t you?’
+
+“‘I’ve had these scars ever since I can remember,’ says he. ‘I don’t
+know how they came there.’
+
+“‘Was you ever in Texas before?’ says I.
+
+“‘Not that I remember of,’ says he. ‘But I thought I had when we struck
+the prairie country. But I guess I hadn’t.’
+
+“‘Have you got a mother?’ I asks.
+
+“‘She died five years ago,’ says he.
+
+“Skipping over the most of what followed—when Luke came back I turned
+the kid over to him. He had seen Scudder and told him what he wanted;
+and it seems that Scudder got active with one of these telephones as
+soon as he left. For in about an hour afterward there comes to our
+hotel some of these city rangers in everyday clothes that they call
+detectives, and marches the whole outfit of us to what they call a
+magistrate’s court. They accuse Luke of attempted kidnapping, and ask
+him what he has to say.
+
+“‘This snipe,’ says Luke to the judge, ‘shot and wilfully punctured
+with malice and forethought one of the most respected and prominent
+citizens of the town of Bildad, Texas, Your Honor. And in so doing laid
+himself liable to the penitence of law and order. And I hereby make
+claim and demand restitution of the State of New York City for the said
+alleged criminal; and I know he done it.’
+
+“‘Have you the usual and necessary requisition papers from the governor
+of your state?’ asks the judge.
+
+“‘My usual papers,’ says Luke, ‘was taken away from me at the hotel by
+these gentlemen who represent law and order in your city. They was two
+Colt’s .45’s that I’ve packed for nine years; and if I don’t get ’em
+back, there’ll be more trouble. You can ask anybody in Mojada County
+about Luke Summers. I don’t usually need any other kind of papers for
+what I do.’
+
+“I see the judge looks mad, so I steps up and says:
+
+“‘Your Honor, the aforesaid defendant, Mr. Luke Summers, sheriff of
+Mojada County, Texas, is as fine a man as ever threw a rope or upheld
+the statutes and codicils of the greatest state in the Union. But he—’
+
+“The judge hits his table with a wooden hammer and asks who I am.
+
+“Bud Oakley,’ says I. ‘Office deputy of the sheriff’s office of Mojada
+County, Texas. Representing,’ says I, ‘the Law. Luke Summers,’ I goes
+on, ‘represents Order. And if Your Honor will give me about ten minutes
+in private talk, I’ll explain the whole thing to you, and show you the
+equitable and legal requisition papers which I carry in my pocket.’
+
+“The judge kind of half smiles and says he will talk with me in his
+private room. In there I put the whole thing up to him in such language
+as I had, and when we goes outside, he announces the verdict that the
+young man is delivered into the hands of the Texas authorities; and
+calls the next case.
+
+“Skipping over much of what happened on the way back, I’ll tell you how
+the thing wound up in Bildad.
+
+“When we got the prisoner in the sheriff’s office, I says to Luke:
+
+“‘You, remember that kid of yours—that two-year old that they stole
+away from you when the bust-up come?’
+
+“Luke looks black and angry. He’d never let anybody talk to him about
+that business, and he never mentioned it himself.
+
+“‘Toe the mark,’ says I. ‘Do you remember when he was toddling around
+on the porch and fell down on a pair of Mexican spurs and cut four
+little holes over his right eye? Look at the prisoner,’ says I, ‘look
+at his nose and the shape of his head and—why, you old fool, don’t you
+know your own son?—I knew him,’ says I, ‘when he perforated Mr. Johnson
+at the depot.’
+
+“Luke comes over to me shaking all over. I never saw him lose his nerve
+before.
+
+“‘Bud,’ says he. ‘I’ve never had that boy out of my mind one day or one
+night since he was took away. But I never let on. But can we hold him?—
+Can we make him stay?— I’ll make the best man of him that ever put his
+foot in a stirrup. Wait a minute,’ says he, all excited and out of his
+mind—‘I’ve got some-thing here in my desk—I reckon it’ll hold legal
+yet—I’ve looked at it a thousand times—“Cus-to-dy of the child,”’ says
+Luke—‘“Cus-to-dy of the child.” We can hold him on that, can’t we?
+Le’me see if I can find that decree.’
+
+“Luke begins to tear his desk to pieces.
+
+“‘Hold on,’ says I. ‘You are Order and I’m Law. You needn’t look for
+that paper, Luke. It ain’t a decree any more. It’s requisition papers.
+It’s on file in that Magistrate’s office in New York. I took it along
+when we went, because I was office deputy and knew the law.’
+
+“‘I’ve got him back,’ says Luke. ‘He’s mine again. I never thought—’
+
+“‘Wait a minute,’ says I. ‘We’ve got to have law and order. You and me
+have got to preserve ’em both in Mojada County according to our oath
+and conscience. The kid shot Pedro Johnson, one of Bildad’s most
+prominent and—’
+
+“‘Oh, hell!’ says Luke. ‘That don’t amount to anything. That fellow was
+half Mexican, anyhow.’”
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+TRANSFORMATION OF MARTIN BURNEY
+
+
+In behalf of Sir Walter’s soothing plant let us look into the case of
+Martin Burney.
+
+They were constructing the Speedway along the west bank of the Harlem
+River. The grub-boat of Dennis Corrigan, sub-contractor, was moored to
+a tree on the bank. Twenty-two men belonging to the little green island
+toiled there at the sinew-cracking labour. One among them, who wrought
+in the kitchen of the grub-boat was of the race of the Goths. Over them
+all stood the exorbitant Corrigan, harrying them like the captain of a
+galley crew. He paid them so little that most of the gang, work as they
+might, earned little more than food and tobacco; many of them were in
+debt to him. Corrigan boarded them all in the grub-boat, and gave them
+good grub, for he got it back in work.
+
+Martin Burney was furthest behind of all. He was a little man, all
+muscles and hands and feet, with a gray-red, stubbly beard. He was too
+light for the work, which would have glutted the capacity of a steam
+shovel.
+
+The work was hard. Besides that, the banks of the river were humming
+with mosquitoes. As a child in a dark room fixes his regard on the pale
+light of a comforting window, these toilers watched the sun that
+brought around the one hour of the day that tasted less bitter. After
+the sundown supper they would huddle together on the river bank, and
+send the mosquitoes whining and eddying back from the malignant puffs
+of twenty-three reeking pipes. Thus socially banded against the foe,
+they wrenched out of the hour a few well-smoked drops from the cup of
+joy.
+
+Each week Burney grew deeper in debt. Corrigan kept a small stock of
+goods on the boat, which he sold to the men at prices that brought him
+no loss. Burney was a good customer at the tobacco counter. One sack
+when he went to work in the morning and one when he came in at night,
+so much was his account swelled daily. Burney was something of a
+smoker. Yet it was not true that he ate his meals with a pipe in his
+mouth, which had been said of him. The little man was not discontented.
+He had plenty to eat, plenty of tobacco, and a tyrant to curse; so why
+should not he, an Irishman, be well satisfied?
+
+One morning as he was starting with the others for work he stopped at
+the pine counter for his usual sack of tobacco.
+
+“There’s no more for ye,” said Corrigan. “Your account’s closed. Ye are
+a losing investment. No, not even tobaccy, my son. No more tobaccy on
+account. If ye want to work on and eat, do so, but the smoke of ye has
+all ascended. ’Tis my advice that ye hunt a new job.”
+
+“I have no tobaccy to smoke in my pipe this day, Mr. Corrigan,” said
+Burney, not quite understanding that such a thing could happen to him.
+
+“Earn it,” said Corrigan, “and then buy it.”
+
+Burney stayed on. He knew of no other job. At first he did not realize
+that tobacco had got to be his father and mother, his confessor and
+sweetheart, and wife and child.
+
+For three days he managed to fill his pipe from the other men’s sacks,
+and then they shut him off, one and all. They told him, rough but
+friendly, that of all things in the world tobacco must be quickest
+forthcoming to a fellow-man desiring it, but that beyond the immediate
+temporary need requisition upon the store of a comrade is pressed with
+great danger to friendship.
+
+Then the blackness of the pit arose and filled the heart of Burney.
+Sucking the corpse of his deceased dudheen, he staggered through his
+duties with his barrowful of stones and dirt, feeling for the first
+time that the curse of Adam was upon him. Other men bereft of a
+pleasure might have recourse to other delights, but Burney had only two
+comforts in life. One was his pipe, the other was an ecstatic hope that
+there would be no Speedways to build on the other side of Jordan.
+
+At meal times he would let the other men go first into the grub-boat,
+and then he would go down on his hands and knees, grovelling fiercely
+upon the ground where they had been sitting, trying to find some stray
+crumbs of tobacco. Once he sneaked down the river bank and filled his
+pipe with dead willow leaves. At the first whiff of the smoke he spat
+in the direction of the boat and put the finest curse he knew on
+Corrigan—one that began with the first Corrigans born on earth and
+ended with the Corrigans that shall hear the trumpet of Gabriel blow.
+He began to hate Corrigan with all his shaking nerves and soul. Even
+murder occurred to him in a vague sort of way. Five days he went
+without the taste of tobacco—he who had smoked all day and thought the
+night misspent in which he had not awakened for a pipeful or two under
+the bedclothes.
+
+One day a man stopped at the boat to say that there was work to be had
+in the Bronx Park, where a large number of labourers were required in
+making some improvements.
+
+After dinner Burney walked thirty yards down the river bank away from
+the maddening smell of the others’ pipes. He sat down upon a stone. He
+was thinking he would set out for the Bronx. At least he could earn
+tobacco there. What if the books did say he owed Corrigan? Any man’s
+work was worth his keep. But then he hated to go without getting even
+with the hard-hearted screw who had put his pipe out. Was there any way
+to do it?
+
+Softly stepping among the clods came Tony, he of the race of Goths, who
+worked in the kitchen. He grinned at Burney’s elbow, and that unhappy
+man, full of race animosity and holding urbanity in contempt, growled
+at him: “What d’ye want, ye—Dago?”
+
+Tony also contained a grievance—and a plot. He, too, was a Corrigan
+hater, and had been primed to see it in others.
+
+“How you like-a Mr. Corrigan?” he asked. “You think-a him a nice-a
+man?”
+
+“To hell with ’m,” he said. “May his liver turn to water, and the bones
+of him crack in the cold of his heart. May dog fennel grow upon his
+ancestors’ graves, and the grandsons of his children be born without
+eyes. May whiskey turn to clabber in his mouth, and every time he
+sneezes may he blister the soles of his feet. And the smoke of his
+pipe—may it make his eyes water, and the drops fall on the grass that
+his cows eat and poison the butter that he spreads on his bread.”
+
+Though Tony remained a stranger to the beauties of this imagery, he
+gathered from it the conviction that it was sufficiently anti-Corrigan
+in its tendency. So, with the confidence of a fellow-conspirator, he
+sat by Burney upon the stone and unfolded his plot.
+
+It was very simple in design. Every day after dinner it was Corrigan’s
+habit to sleep for an hour in his bunk. At such times it was the duty
+of the cook and his helper, Tony, to leave the boat so that no noise
+might disturb the autocrat. The cook always spent this hour in walking
+exercise. Tony’s plan was this: After Corrigan should be asleep he
+(Tony) and Burney would cut the mooring ropes that held the boat to the
+shore. Tony lacked the nerve to do the deed alone. Then the awkward
+boat would swing out into a swift current and surely overturn against a
+rock there was below.
+
+“Come on and do it,” said Burney. “If the back of ye aches from the
+lick he gave ye as the pit of me stomach does for the taste of a bit of
+smoke, we can’t cut the ropes too quick.”
+
+“All a-right,” said Tony. “But better wait ’bout-a ten minute more.
+Give-a Corrigan plenty time get good-a sleep.”
+
+They waited, sitting upon the stone. The rest of the men were at work
+out of sight around a bend in the road. Everything would have gone
+well—except, perhaps, with Corrigan, had not Tony been moved to
+decorate the plot with its conventional accompaniment. He was of
+dramatic blood, and perhaps he intuitively divined the appendage to
+villainous machinations as prescribed by the stage. He pulled from his
+shirt bosom a long, black, beautiful, venomous cigar, and handed it to
+Burney.
+
+“You like-a smoke while we wait?” he asked.
+
+Burney clutched it and snapped off the end as a terrier bites at a rat.
+He laid it to his lips like a long-lost sweetheart. When the smoke
+began to draw he gave a long, deep sigh, and the bristles of his
+gray-red moustache curled down over the cigar like the talons of an
+eagle. Slowly the red faded from the whites of his eyes. He fixed his
+gaze dreamily upon the hills across the river. The minutes came and
+went.
+
+“’Bout time to go now,” said Tony. “That damn-a Corrigan he be in the
+reever very quick.”
+
+Burney started out of his trance with a grunt. He turned his head and
+gazed with a surprised and pained severity at his accomplice. He took
+the cigar partly from his mouth, but sucked it back again immediately,
+chewed it lovingly once or twice, and spoke, in virulent puffs, from
+the corner of his mouth:
+
+“What is it, ye yaller haythen? Would ye lay contrivances against the
+enlightened races of the earth, ye instigator of illegal crimes? Would
+ye seek to persuade Martin Burney into the dirty tricks of an indecent
+Dago? Would ye be for murderin’ your benefactor, the good man that
+gives ye food and work? Take that, ye punkin-coloured assassin!”
+
+The torrent of Burney’s indignation carried with it bodily assault. The
+toe of his shoe sent the would-be cutter of ropes tumbling from his
+seat.
+
+Tony arose and fled. His vendetta he again relegated to the files of
+things that might have been. Beyond the boat he fled and away-away; he
+was afraid to remain.
+
+Burney, with expanded chest, watched his late co-plotter disappear.
+Then he, too, departed, setting his face in the direction of the Bronx.
+
+In his wake was a rank and pernicious trail of noisome smoke that
+brought peace to his heart and drove the birds from the roadside into
+the deepest thickets.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+THE CALIPH AND THE CAD
+
+
+Surely there is no pastime more diverting than that of mingling,
+incognito, with persons of wealth and station. Where else but in those
+circles can one see life in its primitive, crude state unhampered by
+the conventions that bind the dwellers in a lower sphere?
+
+There was a certain Caliph of Bagdad who was accustomed to go down
+among the poor and lowly for the solace obtained from the relation of
+their tales and histories. Is it not strange that the humble and
+poverty-stricken have not availed themselves of the pleasure they might
+glean by donning diamonds and silks and playing Caliph among the haunts
+of the upper world?
+
+There was one who saw the possibilities of thus turning the tables on
+Haroun al Raschid. His name was Corny Brannigan, and he was a truck
+driver for a Canal Street importing firm. And if you read further you
+will learn how he turned upper Broadway into Bagdad and learned
+something about himself that he did not know before.
+
+Many people would have called Corny a snob—preferably by means of a
+telephone. His chief interest in life, his chosen amusement, and his
+sole diversion after working hours, was to place himself in
+juxtaposition—since he could not hope to mingle—with people of fashion
+and means.
+
+Every evening after Corny had put up his team and dined at a
+lunch-counter that made immediateness a specialty, he would clothe
+himself in evening raiment as correct as any you will see in the palm
+rooms. Then he would betake himself to that ravishing, radiant roadway
+devoted to Thespis, Thais, and Bacchus.
+
+For a time he would stroll about the lobbies of the best hotels, his
+soul steeped in blissful content. Beautiful women, cooing like doves,
+but feathered like birds of Paradise, flicked him with their robes as
+they passed. Courtly gentlemen attended them, gallant and assiduous.
+And Corny’s heart within him swelled like Sir Lancelot’s, for the
+mirror spoke to him as he passed and said: “Corny, lad, there’s not a
+guy among ’em that looks a bit the sweller than yerself. And you
+drivin’ of a truck and them swearin’ off their taxes and playin’ the
+red in art galleries with the best in the land!”
+
+And the mirrors spake the truth. Mr. Corny Brannigan had acquired the
+outward polish, if nothing more. Long and keen observation of polite
+society had gained for him its manner, its genteel air, and—most
+difficult of acquirement—its repose and ease.
+
+Now and then in the hotels Corny had managed conversation and temporary
+acquaintance with substantial, if not distinguished, guests. With many
+of these he had exchanged cards, and the ones he received he carefully
+treasured for his own use later. Leaving the hotel lobbies, Corny would
+stroll leisurely about, lingering at the theatre entrance, dropping
+into the fashionable restaurants as if seeking some friend. He rarely
+patronized any of these places; he was no bee come to suck honey, but a
+butterfly flashing his wings among the flowers whose calyces held no
+sweets for him. His wages were not large enough to furnish him with
+more than the outside garb of the gentleman. To have been one of the
+beings he so cunningly imitated, Corny Brannigan would have given his
+right hand.
+
+One night Corny had an adventure. After absorbing the delights of an
+hour’s lounging in the principal hotels along Broadway, he passed up
+into the stronghold of Thespis. Cab drivers hailed him as a likely
+fare, to his prideful content. Languishing eyes were turned upon him as
+a hopeful source of lobsters and the delectable, ascendant globules of
+effervescence. These overtures and unconscious compliments Corny
+swallowed as manna, and hoped Bill, the off horse, would be less lame
+in the left forefoot in the morning.
+
+Beneath a cluster of milky globes of electric light Corny paused to
+admire the sheen of his low-cut patent leather shoes. The building
+occupying the angle was a pretentious _café_. Out of this came a
+couple, a lady in a white, cobwebby evening gown, with a lace wrap like
+a wreath of mist thrown over it, and a man, tall, faultless,
+assured—too assured. They moved to the edge of the sidewalk and halted.
+Corny’s eye, ever alert for “pointers” in “swell” behaviour, took them
+in with a sidelong glance.
+
+“The carriage is not here,” said the lady. “You ordered it to wait?”
+
+“I ordered it for nine-thirty,” said the man. “It should be here now.”
+
+A familiar note in the lady’s voice drew a more especial attention from
+Corny. It was pitched in a key well known to him. The soft electric
+shone upon her face. Sisters of sorrow have no quarters fixed for them.
+In the index to the book of breaking hearts you will find that Broadway
+follows very soon after the Bowery. This lady’s face was sad, and her
+voice was attuned with it. They waited, as if for the carriage. Corny
+waited too, for it was out of doors, and he was never tired of
+accumulating and profiting by knowledge of gentlemanly conduct.
+
+“Jack,” said the lady, “don’t be angry. I’ve done everything I could to
+please you this evening. Why do you act so?”
+
+“Oh, you’re an angel,” said the man. “Depend upon woman to throw the
+blame upon a man.”
+
+“I’m not blaming you. I’m only trying to make you happy.”
+
+“You go about it in a very peculiar way.”
+
+“You have been cross with me all the evening without any cause.”
+
+“Oh, there isn’t any cause except—you make me tired.”
+
+Corny took out his card case and looked over his collection. He
+selected one that read: “Mr. R. Lionel Whyte-Melville, Bloomsbury
+Square, London.” This card he had inveigled from a tourist at the King
+Edward Hotel. Corny stepped up to the man and presented it with a
+correctly formal air.
+
+“May I ask why I am selected for the honour?” asked the lady’s escort.
+
+Now, Mr. Corny Brannigan had a very wise habit of saying little during
+his imitations of the Caliph of Bagdad. The advice of Lord
+Chesterfield: “Wear a black coat and hold your tongue,” he believed in
+without having heard. But now speech was demanded and required of him.
+
+“No gent,” said Corny, “would talk to a lady like you done. Fie upon
+you, Willie! Even if she happens to be your wife you ought to have more
+respect for your clothes than to chin her back that way. Maybe it ain’t
+my butt-in, but it goes, anyhow—you strike me as bein’ a whole lot to
+the wrong.”
+
+The lady’s escort indulged in more elegantly expressed but fetching
+repartee. Corny, eschewing his truck driver’s vocabulary, retorted as
+nearly as he could in polite phrases. Then diplomatic relations were
+severed; there was a brief but lively set-to with other than oral
+weapons, from which Corny came forth easily victor.
+
+A carriage dashed up, driven by a tardy and solicitous coachman.
+
+“Will you kindly open the door for me?” asked the lady. Corny assisted
+her to enter, and took off his hat. The escort was beginning to
+scramble up from the sidewalk.
+
+“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” said Corny, “if he’s your man.”
+
+“He’s no man of mine,” said the lady. “Perhaps he—but there’s no chance
+of his being now. Drive home, Michael. If you care to take this—with my
+thanks.”
+
+Three red roses were thrust out through the carriage window into
+Corny’s hand. He took them, and the hand for an instant; and then the
+carriage sped away.
+
+Corny gathered his foe’s hat and began to brush the dust from his
+clothes.
+
+“Come along,” said Corny, taking the other man by the arm.
+
+His late opponent was yet a little dazed by the hard knocks he had
+received. Corny led him carefully into a saloon three doors away.
+
+“The drinks for us,” said Corny, “me and my friend.”
+
+“You’re a queer feller,” said the lady’s late escort—“lick a man and
+then want to set ’em up.”
+
+“You’re my best friend,” said Corny exultantly. “You don’t understand?
+Well, listen. You just put me wise to somethin’. I been playin’ gent a
+long time, thinkin’ it was just the glad rags I had and nothin’ else.
+Say—you’re a swell, ain’t you? Well, you trot in that class, I guess. I
+don’t; but I found out one thing—I’m a gentleman, by—and I know it now.
+What’ll you have to drink?”
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+THE DIAMOND OF KALI
+
+
+The original news item concerning the diamond of the goddess Kali was
+handed in to the city editor. He smiled and held it for a moment above
+the wastebasket. Then he laid it back on his desk and said: “Try the
+Sunday people; they might work something out of it.”
+
+The Sunday editor glanced the item over and said: “H’m!” Afterward he
+sent for a reporter and expanded his comment.
+
+“You might see General Ludlow,” he said, “and make a story out of this
+if you can. Diamond stories are a drug; but this one is big enough to
+be found by a scrubwoman wrapped up in a piece of newspaper and tucked
+under the corner of the hall linoleum. Find out first if the General
+has a daughter who intends to go on the stage. If not, you can go ahead
+with the story. Run cuts of the Kohinoor and J. P. Morgan’s collection,
+and work in pictures of the Kimberley mines and Barney Barnato. Fill in
+with a tabulated comparison of the values of diamonds, radium, and veal
+cutlets since the meat strike; and let it run to a half page.”
+
+On the following day the reporter turned in his story. The Sunday
+editor let his eye sprint along its lines. “H’m!” he said again. This
+time the copy went into the waste-basket with scarcely a flutter.
+
+The reporter stiffened a little around the lips; but he was whistling
+softly and contentedly between his teeth when I went over to talk with
+him about it an hour later.
+
+“I don’t blame the ‘old man’,” said he, magnanimously, “for cutting it
+out. It did sound like funny business; but it happened exactly as I
+wrote it. Say, why don’t you fish that story out of the w.-b. and use
+it? Seems to me it’s as good as the tommyrot you write.”
+
+I accepted the tip, and if you read further you will learn the facts
+about the diamond of the goddess Kali as vouched for by one of the most
+reliable reporters on the staff.
+
+Gen. Marcellus B. Ludlow lives in one of those decaying but venerated
+old red-brick mansions in the West Twenties. The General is a member of
+an old New York family that does not advertise. He is a globe-trotter
+by birth, a gentleman by predilection, a millionaire by the mercy of
+Heaven, and a connoisseur of precious stones by occupation.
+
+The reporter was admitted promptly when he made himself known at the
+General’s residence at about eight thirty on the evening that he
+received the assignment. In the magnificent library he was greeted by
+the distinguished traveller and connoisseur, a tall, erect gentleman in
+the early fifties, with a nearly white moustache, and a bearing so
+soldierly that one perceived in him scarcely a trace of the National
+Guardsman. His weather-beaten countenance lit up with a charming smile
+of interest when the reporter made known his errand.
+
+“Ah, you have heard of my latest find. I shall be glad to show you what
+I conceive to be one of the six most valuable blue diamonds in
+existence.”
+
+The General opened a small safe in a corner of the library and brought
+forth a plush-covered box. Opening this, he exposed to the reporter’s
+bewildered gaze a huge and brilliant diamond—nearly as large as a
+hailstone.
+
+“This stone,” said the General, “is something more than a mere jewel.
+It once formed the central eye of the three-eyed goddess Kali, who is
+worshipped by one of the fiercest and most fanatical tribes of India.
+If you will arrange yourself comfortably I will give you a brief
+history of it for your paper.”
+
+General Ludlow brought a decanter of whiskey and glasses from a
+cabinet, and set a comfortable armchair for the lucky scribe.
+
+“The Phansigars, or Thugs, of India,” began the General, “are the most
+dangerous and dreaded of the tribes of North India. They are extremists
+in religion, and worship the horrid goddess Kali in the form of images.
+Their rites are interesting and bloody. The robbing and murdering of
+travellers are taught as a worthy and obligatory deed by their strange
+religious code. Their worship of the three-eyed goddess Kali is
+conducted so secretly that no traveller has ever heretofore had the
+honour of witnessing the ceremonies. That distinction was reserved for
+myself.
+
+“While at Sakaranpur, between Delhi and Khelat, I used to explore the
+jungle in every direction in the hope of learning something new about
+these mysterious Phansigars.
+
+“One evening at twilight I was making my way through a teakwood forest,
+when I came upon a deep circular depression in an open space, in the
+centre of which was a rude stone temple. I was sure that this was one
+of the temples of the Thugs, so I concealed myself in the undergrowth
+to watch.
+
+“When the moon rose the depression in the clearing was suddenly filled
+with hundreds of shadowy, swiftly gliding forms. Then a door opened in
+the temple, exposing a brightly illuminated image of the goddess Kali,
+before which a white-robed priest began a barbarous incantation, while
+the tribe of worshippers prostrated themselves upon the earth.
+
+“But what interested me most was the central eye of the huge wooden
+idol. I could see by its flashing brilliancy that it was an immense
+diamond of the purest water.
+
+“After the rites were concluded the Thugs slipped away into the forest
+as silently as they had come. The priest stood for a few minutes in the
+door of the temple enjoying the cool of the night before closing his
+rather warm quarters. Suddenly a dark, lithe shadow slipped down into
+the hollow, leaped upon the priest; and struck him down with a
+glittering knife. Then the murderer sprang at the image of the goddess
+like a cat and pried out the glowing central eye of Kali with his
+weapon. Straight toward me he ran with his royal prize. When he was
+within two paces I rose to my feet and struck him with all my force
+between the eyes. He rolled over senseless and the magnificent jewel
+fell from his hand. That is the splendid blue diamond you have just
+seen—a stone worthy of a monarch’s crown.”
+
+“That’s a corking story,” said the reporter. “That decanter is exactly
+like the one that John W. Gates always sets out during an interview.”
+
+“Pardon me,” said General Ludlow, “for forgetting hospitality in the
+excitement of my narrative. Help yourself.”
+
+“Here’s looking at you,” said the reporter.
+
+“What I am afraid of now,” said the General, lowering his voice, “is
+that I may be robbed of the diamond. The jewel that formed an eye of
+their goddess is their most sacred symbol. Somehow the tribe suspected
+me of having it; and members of the band have followed me half around
+the earth. They are the most cunning and cruel fanatics in the world,
+and their religious vows would compel them to assassinate the
+unbeliever who has desecrated their sacred treasure.
+
+“Once in Lucknow three of their agents, disguised as servants in a
+hotel, endeavoured to strangle me with a twisted cloth. Again, in
+London, two Thugs, made up as street musicians, climbed into my window
+at night and attacked me. They have even tracked me to this country. My
+life is never safe. A month ago, while I was at a hotel in the
+Berkshires, three of them sprang upon me from the roadside weeds. I
+saved myself then by my knowledge of their customs.”
+
+“How was that, General?” asked the reporter.
+
+“There was a cow grazing near by,” said General Ludlow, “a gentle
+Jersey cow. I ran to her side and stood. The three Thugs ceased their
+attack, knelt and struck the ground thrice with their foreheads. Then,
+after many respectful salaams, they departed.”
+
+“Afraid the cow would hook?” asked the reporter.
+
+“No; the cow is a sacred animal to the Phansigars. Next to their
+goddess they worship the cow. They have never been known to commit any
+deed of violence in the presence of the animal they reverence.”
+
+“It’s a mighty interesting story,” said the reporter. “If you don’t
+mind I’ll take another drink, and then a few notes.”
+
+“I will join you,” said General Ludlow, with a courteous wave of his
+hand.
+
+“If I were you,” advised the reporter, “I’d take that sparkler to
+Texas. Get on a cow ranch there, and the Pharisees—”
+
+“Phansigars,” corrected the General.
+
+“Oh, yes; the fancy guys would run up against a long horn every time
+they made a break.”
+
+General Ludlow closed the diamond case and thrust it into his bosom.
+
+“The spies of the tribe have found me out in New York,” he said,
+straightening his tall figure. “I’m familiar with the East Indian cast
+of countenance, and I know that my every movement is watched. They will
+undoubtedly attempt to rob and murder me here.”
+
+“Here?” exclaimed the reporter, seizing the decanter and pouring out a
+liberal amount of its contents.
+
+“At any moment,” said the General. “But as a soldier and a connoisseur
+I shall sell my life and my diamond as dearly as I can.”
+
+At this point of the reporter’s story there is a certain vagueness, but
+it can be gathered that there was a loud crashing noise at the rear of
+the house they were in. General Ludlow buttoned his coat closely and
+sprang for the door. But the reporter clutched him firmly with one
+hand, while he held the decanter with the other.
+
+“Tell me before we fly,” he urged, in a voice thick with some inward
+turmoil, “do any of your daughters contemplate going on the stage?”
+
+“I have no daughters—fly for your life—the Phansigars are upon us!”
+cried the General.
+
+The two men dashed out of the front door of the house.
+
+The hour was late. As their feet struck the side-walk strange men of
+dark and forbidding appearance seemed to rise up out of the earth and
+encompass them. One with Asiatic features pressed close to the General
+and droned in a terrible voice:
+
+“Buy cast clo’!”
+
+Another, dark-whiskered and sinister, sped lithely to his side and
+began in a whining voice:
+
+“Say, mister, have yer got a dime fer a poor feller what—”
+
+They hurried on, but only into the arms of a black-eyed, dusky-browed
+being, who held out his hat under their noses, while a confederate of
+Oriental hue turned the handle of a street organ near by.
+
+Twenty steps farther on General Ludlow and the reporter found
+themselves in the midst of half a dozen villainous-looking men with
+high-turned coat collars and faces bristling with unshaven beards.
+
+“Run for it!” hissed the General. “They have discovered the possessor
+of the diamond of the goddess Kali.”
+
+The two men took to their heels. The avengers of the goddess pursued.
+
+“Oh, Lordy!” groaned the reporter, “there isn’t a cow this side of
+Brooklyn. We’re lost!”
+
+When near the corner they both fell over an iron object that rose from
+the sidewalk close to the gutter. Clinging to it desperately, they
+awaited their fate.
+
+“If I only had a cow!” moaned the reporter—“or another nip from that
+decanter, General!”
+
+As soon as the pursuers observed where their victims had found refuge
+they suddenly fell back and retreated to a considerable distance.
+
+“They are waiting for reinforcements in order to attack us,” said
+General Ludlow.
+
+But the reporter emitted a ringing laugh, and hurled his hat
+triumphantly into the air.
+
+“Guess again,” he shouted, and leaned heavily upon the iron object.
+“Your old fancy guys or thugs, whatever you call ’em, are up to date.
+Dear General, this is a pump we’ve stranded upon—same as a cow in New
+York (hic!) see? Thas’h why the ’nfuriated smoked guys don’t attack
+us—see? Sacred an’mal, the pump in N’ York, my dear General!”
+
+But further down in the shadows of Twenty-eighth Street the marauders
+were holding a parley.
+
+“Come on, Reddy,” said one. “Let’s go frisk the old ’un. He’s been
+showin’ a sparkler as big as a hen egg all around Eighth Avenue for two
+weeks past.”
+
+“Not on your silhouette,” decided Reddy. “You see ’em rallyin’ round
+The Pump? They’re friends of Bill’s. Bill won’t stand for nothin’ of
+this kind in his district since he got that bid to Esopus.”
+
+This exhausts the facts concerning the Kali diamond. But it is deemed
+not inconsequent to close with the following brief (paid) item that
+appeared two days later in a morning paper.
+
+“It is rumored that a niece of Gen. Marcellus B. Ludlow, of New York
+City, will appear on the stage next season.
+
+“Her diamonds are said to be extremely valuable and of much historic
+interest.”
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+THE DAY WE CELEBRATE
+
+
+“In the tropics” (“Hop-along” Bibb, the bird fancier, was saying to me)
+“the seasons, months, fortnights, week-ends, holidays, dog-days,
+Sundays, and yesterdays get so jumbled together in the shuffle that you
+never know when a year has gone by until you’re in the middle of the
+next one.”
+
+“Hop-along” Bibb kept his bird store on lower Fourth Avenue. He was an
+ex-seaman and beachcomber who made regular voyages to southern ports
+and imported personally conducted invoices of talking parrots and
+dialectic paroquets. He had a stiff knee, neck, and nerve. I had gone
+to him to buy a parrot to present, at Christmas, to my Aunt Joanna.
+
+“This one,” said I, disregarding his homily on the subdivisions of
+time—“this one that seems all red, white, and blue—to what genus of
+beasts does he belong? He appeals at once to my patriotism and to my
+love of discord in colour schemes.”
+
+“That’s a cockatoo from Ecuador,” said Bibb. “All he has been taught to
+say is ‘Merry Christmas.’ A seasonable bird. He’s only seven dollars;
+and I’ll bet many a human has stuck you for more money by making the
+same speech to you.”
+
+And then Bibb laughed suddenly and loudly.
+
+“That bird,” he explained, “reminds me. He’s got his dates mixed. He
+ought to be saying ‘_E pluribus unum_,’ to match his feathers, instead
+of trying to work the Santa Claus graft. It reminds me of the time me
+and Liverpool Sam got our ideas of things tangled up on the coast of
+Costa Rica on account of the weather and other phenomena to be met with
+in the tropics.
+
+“We were, as it were, stranded on that section of the Spanish main with
+no money to speak of and no friends that should be talked about either.
+We had stoked and second-cooked ourselves down there on a fruit steamer
+from New Orleans to try our luck, which was discharged, after we got
+there, for lack of evidence. There was no work suitable to our
+instincts; so me and Liverpool began to subsist on the red rum of the
+country and such fruit as we could reap where we had not sown. It was
+an alluvial town, called Soledad, where there was no harbour or future
+or recourse. Between steamers the town slept and drank rum. It only
+woke up when there were bananas to ship. It was like a man sleeping
+through dinner until the dessert.
+
+“When me and Liverpool got so low down that the American consul
+wouldn’t speak to us we knew we’d struck bed rock.
+
+“We boarded with a snuff-brown lady named Chica, who kept a rum-shop
+and a ladies’ and gents’ restaurant in a street called the _calle de
+los_ Forty-seven Inconsolable Saints. When our credit played out there,
+Liverpool, whose stomach overshadowed his sensations of _noblesse
+oblige_, married Chica. This kept us in rice and fried plantain for a
+month; and then Chica pounded Liverpool one morning sadly and earnestly
+for fifteen minutes with a casserole handed down from the stone age,
+and we knew that we had out-welcomed our liver. That night we signed an
+engagement with Don Jaime McSpinosa, a hybrid banana fancier of the
+place, to work on his fruit preserves nine miles out of town. We had to
+do it or be reduced to sea water and broken doses of feed and slumber.
+
+“Now, speaking of Liverpool Sam, I don’t malign or inexculpate him to
+you any more than I would to his face. But in my opinion, when an
+Englishman gets as low as he can he’s got to dodge so that the dregs of
+other nations don’t drop ballast on him out of their balloons. And if
+he’s a Liverpool Englishman, why, fire-damp is what he’s got to look
+out for. Being a natural American, that’s my personal view. But
+Liverpool and me had much in common. We were without decorous clothes
+or ways and means of existence; and, as the saying goes, misery
+certainly does enjoy the society of accomplices.
+
+“Our job on old McSpinosa’s plantation was chopping down banana stalks
+and loading the bunches of fruit on the backs of horses. Then a native
+dressed up in an alligator hide belt, a machete, and a pair of AA
+sheeting pajamas, drives ’em over to the coast and piles ’em up on the
+beach.
+
+“You ever been in a banana grove? It’s as solemn as a rathskeller at
+seven a. m. It’s like being lost behind the scenes at one of these
+mushroom musical shows. You can’t see the sky for the foliage above
+you; and the ground is knee deep in rotten leaves; and it’s so still
+that you can hear the stalks growing again after you chop ’em down.
+
+“At night me and Liverpool herded in a lot of grass huts on the edge of
+a lagoon with the red, yellow, and black employés of Don Jaime. There
+we lay fighting mosquitoes and listening to the monkeys squalling and
+the alligators grunting and splashing in the lagoon until daylight with
+only snatches of sleep between times.
+
+“We soon lost all idea of what time of the year it was. It’s just about
+eighty degrees there in December and June and on Fridays and at
+midnight and election day and any other old time. Sometimes it rains
+more than at others, and that’s all the difference you notice. A man is
+liable to live along there without noticing any fugiting of tempus
+until some day the undertaker calls in for him just when he’s beginning
+to think about cutting out the gang and saving up a little to invest in
+real estate.
+
+“I don’t know how long we worked for Don Jaime; but it was through two
+or three rainy spells, eight or ten hair cuts, and the life of three
+pairs of sail-cloth trousers. All the money we earned went for rum and
+tobacco; but we ate, and that was something.
+
+“All of a sudden one day me and Liverpool find the trade of committing
+surgical operations on banana stalks turning to aloes and quinine in
+our mouths. It’s a seizure that often comes upon white men in Latin and
+geographical countries. We wanted to be addressed again in language and
+see the smoke of a steamer and read the real estate transfers and
+gents’ outfitting ads in an old newspaper. Even Soledad seemed like a
+centre of civilization to us, so that evening we put our thumbs on our
+nose at Don Jaime’s fruit stand and shook his grass burrs off our feet.
+
+“It was only twelve miles to Soledad, but it took me and Liverpool two
+days to get there. It was banana grove nearly all the way; and we got
+twisted time and again. It was like paging the palm room of a New York
+hotel for a man named Smith.
+
+“When we saw the houses of Soledad between the trees all my
+disinclination toward this Liverpool Sam rose up in me. I stood him
+while we were two white men against the banana brindles; but now, when
+there were prospects of my exchanging even cuss words with an American
+citizen, I put him back in his proper place. And he was a sight, too,
+with his rum-painted nose and his red whiskers and elephant feet with
+leather sandals strapped to them. I suppose I looked about the same.
+
+“‘It looks to me,’ says I, ‘like Great Britain ought to be made to keep
+such gin-swilling, scurvy, unbecoming mud larks as you at home instead
+of sending ’em over here to degrade and taint foreign lands. We kicked
+you out of America once and we ought to put on rubber boots and do it
+again.’
+
+“‘Oh, you go to ’ell,’ says Liverpool, which was about all the repartee
+he ever had.
+
+“Well, Soledad, looked fine to me after Don Jaime’s plantation.
+Liverpool and me walked into it side by side, from force of habit, past
+the calabosa and the Hotel Grande, down across the plaza toward Chica’s
+hut, where we hoped that Liverpool, being a husband of hers, might work
+his luck for a meal.
+
+“As we passed the two-story little frame house occupied by the American
+Club, we noticed that the balcony had been decorated all around with
+wreaths of evergreens and flowers, and the flag was flying from the
+pole on the roof. Stanzey, the consul, and Arkright, a gold-mine owner,
+were smoking on the balcony. Me and Liverpool waved our dirty hands
+toward ’em and smiled real society smiles; but they turned their backs
+to us and went on talking. And we had played whist once with the two of
+’em up to the time when Liverpool held all thirteen trumps for four
+hands in succession. It was some holiday, we knew; but we didn’t know
+the day nor the year.
+
+“A little further along we saw a reverend man named Pendergast, who had
+come to Soledad to build a church, standing under a cocoanut palm with
+his little black alpaca coat and green umbrella.
+
+“‘Boys, boys!’ says he, through his blue spectacles, ‘is it as bad as
+this? Are you so far reduced?’
+
+“‘We’re reduced,’ says I, ‘to very vulgar fractions.’
+
+“‘It is indeed sad,’ says Pendergast, ‘to see my countrymen in such
+circumstances.’
+
+“‘Cut ’arf of that out, old party,’ says Liverpool. ‘Cawn’t you tell a
+member of the British upper classes when you see one?’
+
+“‘Shut up,’ I told Liverpool. ‘You’re on foreign soil now, or that
+portion of it that’s not on you.’
+
+“‘And on this day, too!’ goes on Pendergast, grievous—‘on this most
+glorious day of the year when we should all be celebrating the dawn of
+Christian civilization and the downfall of the wicked.’
+
+“‘I did notice bunting and bouquets decorating the town, reverend,’
+says I, ‘but I didn’t know what it was for. We’ve been so long out of
+touch with calendars that we didn’t know whether it was summer time or
+Saturday afternoon.’
+
+“‘Here is two dollars,’ says Pendergast digging up two Chili silver
+wheels and handing ’em to me. ‘Go, my men, and observe the rest of the
+day in a befitting manner.’
+
+“Me and Liverpool thanked him kindly, and walked away.
+
+“‘Shall we eat?’ I asks.
+
+“‘Oh, ’ell!’ says Liverpool. ‘What’s money for?’
+
+“‘Very well, then,’ I says, ‘since you insist upon it, we’ll drink.’
+
+“So we pull up in a rum shop and get a quart of it and go down on the
+beach under a cocoanut tree and celebrate.
+
+“Not having eaten anything but oranges in two days, the rum has
+immediate effect; and once more I conjure up great repugnance toward
+the British nation.
+
+“‘Stand up here,’ I says to Liverpool, ‘you scum of a despot limited
+monarchy, and have another dose of Bunker Hill. That good man, Mr.
+Pendergast,’ says I, ‘said we were to observe the day in a befitting
+manner, and I’m not going to see his money misapplied.’
+
+“‘Oh, you go to ’ell!’ says Liverpool, and I started in with a fine
+left-hander on his right eye.
+
+“Liverpool had been a fighter once, but dissipation and bad company had
+taken the nerve out of him. In ten minutes I had him lying on the sand
+waving the white flag.
+
+“‘Get up,’ says I, kicking him in the ribs, ‘and come along with me.’
+
+“Liverpool got up and followed behind me because it was his habit,
+wiping the red off his face and nose. I led him to Reverend
+Pendergast’s shack and called him out.
+
+“‘Look at this, sir,’ says I—‘look at this thing that was once a proud
+Britisher. You gave us two dollars and told us to celebrate the day.
+The star-spangled banner still waves. Hurrah for the stars and eagles!’
+
+“‘Dear me,’ says Pendergast, holding up his hands. ‘Fighting on this
+day of all days! On Christmas day, when peace on—’
+
+“‘Christmas, hell!’ says I. ‘I thought it was the Fourth of July.’”
+
+“Merry Christmas!” said the red, white, and blue cockatoo.
+
+“Take him for six dollars,” said Hop-along Bibb. “He’s got his dates
+and colours mixed.”
+
+
+
+
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