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Title:  Sixes and Sevens

Author:  O Henry

October, 2001  [Etext #2851]
[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]

**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Sixes and Sevens, by O Henry**
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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 THE GHOST OF A CHANCE
XI JIMMIE PAYES 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 OVERSHOOT WHEEL
XVII NEW YORK BY CAMPFIRE 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, employes, 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 encyclopaedia 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 _omnae personae in tres partes divisae sunt_.
Namely: Brons, 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
Gull 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 encyclopaedia, 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 Incarnacion 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 Incarnacion.  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_, _senor_," 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 a
cross 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 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 cafe 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 small
est 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, reveling 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 chat 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 t
he 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 any-body 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 Fe 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 Fe 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. Pull-man'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, fa
ce-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 k
inds 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
gamed 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 cafe.  '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 cafe 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 cafe."

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, al
imony, 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 fiancees 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 88-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 rea
son.  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 -- Eur
eka! -- 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.  "Were n'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 h is 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'oeuvre_ 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 f
rom 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 paean 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 a
nswered 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 Poppaea, 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 n
ever 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 scen
e.  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 st
age."

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 f
ur.  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 haemoglobin 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, hut 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; hut 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'hote.  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 p
rices.  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 coordination
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 exami
nation.

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 cardamom 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 reestablishing 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, wr
inkled 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 pharmacopoeia?"

"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 encyclopaedia 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 encyclopaedia 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 ears 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 faraway, 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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe, and his bare toes proudly spurned the dust of the road.

Miss Phoebe, 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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe'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 cafe, 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 b
enches 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 Cafe 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 e 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 t
aking 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 re
ckon 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 thee 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 Bel
l 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 at-tempted 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, e
arned 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 coplotter 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 _cafe_.  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
shown' 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 pluri bus 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 exist
ence; 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 employes 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
thee rainy spells, eight or ten hair cuts, and the life of thee 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 Ark-right, 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 ti
me 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."





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Sixes and Sevens, by O Henry

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