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[Roads] Fixup chapter headers
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-1" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>ROADS OF DESTINY</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">ROADS OF DESTINY</h2>
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<blockquote class="med">
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<p class="noindent">I go to seek on many roads<br/> <span class="ind2">What is to be.</span><br/> True heart and strong, with love to light—<br/> Will they not bear me in the fight<br/> To order, shun or wield or mould<br/> <span class="ind2">My Destiny?</span></p>
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<p class="ind5"><i>Unpublished Poems of David Mignot</i>.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-10" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>A RETRIEVED REFORMATION</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">A RETRIEVED REFORMATION</h2>
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<p>A guard came to the prison shoe-shop, where Jimmy Valentine was assiduously stitching uppers, and escorted him to the front office. There the warden handed Jimmy his pardon, which had been signed that morning by the governor. Jimmy took it in a tired kind of way. He had served nearly ten months of a four year sentence. He had expected to stay only about three months, at the longest. When a man with as many friends on the outside as Jimmy Valentine had is received in the “stir” it is hardly worth while to cut his hair.</p>
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<p>“Now, Valentine,” said the warden, “you’ll go out in the morning. Brace up, and make a man of yourself. You’re not a bad fellow at heart. Stop cracking safes, and live straight.”</p>
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<p>“Me?” said Jimmy, in surprise. “Why, I never cracked a safe in my life.”</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-11" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>CHERCHEZ LA FEMME</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">CHERCHEZ LA FEMME</h2>
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<p>Robbins, reporter for the <i>Picayune</i>, and Dumars, of <i>L’Abeille</i>—the old French newspaper that has buzzed for nearly a century—were good friends, well proven by years of ups and downs together. They were seated where they had a habit of meeting—in the little, Creole-haunted café of Madame Tibault, in Dumaine Street. If you know the place, you will experience a thrill of pleasure in recalling it to mind. It is small and dark, with six little polished tables, at which you may sit and drink the best coffee in New Orleans, and concoctions of absinthe equal to Sazerac’s best. Madame Tibault, fat and indulgent, presides at the desk, and takes your money. Nicolette and Mémé, madame’s nieces, in charming bib aprons, bring the desirable beverages.</p>
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<p>Dumars, with true Creole luxury, was sipping his absinthe, with half-closed eyes, in a swirl of cigarette smoke. Robbins was looking over the morning <i>Pic.</i>, detecting, as young reporters will, the gross blunders in the makeup, and the envious blue-pencilling his own stuff had received. This item, in the advertising columns, caught his eye, and with an exclamation of sudden interest he read it aloud to his friend.</p>
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<blockquote>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-12" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>FRIENDS IN SAN ROSARIO</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">FRIENDS IN SAN ROSARIO</h2>
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<p>The westbound train stopped at San Rosario on time at 8.20 <span class="smallcaps"><abbr class="time">a.m.</abbr></span> A man with a thick black-leather wallet under his arm left the train and walked rapidly up the main street of the town. There were other passengers who also got off at San Rosario, but they either slouched limberly over to the railroad eating-house or the Silver Dollar saloon, or joined the groups of idlers about the station.</p>
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<p>Indecision had no part in the movements of the man with the wallet. He was short in stature, but strongly built, with very light, closely-trimmed hair, smooth, determined face, and aggressive, gold-rimmed nose glasses. He was well dressed in the prevailing Eastern style. His air denoted a quiet but conscious reserve force, if not actual authority.</p>
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<p>After walking a distance of three squares he came to the centre of the town’s business area. Here another street of importance crossed the main one, forming the hub of San Rosario’s life and commerce. Upon one corner stood the post-office. Upon another Rubensky’s Clothing Emporium. The other two diagonally opposing corners were occupied by the town’s two banks, the First National and the Stockmen’s National. Into the First National Bank of San Rosario the newcomer walked, never slowing his brisk step until he stood at the cashier’s window. The bank opened for business at nine, and the working force was already assembled, each member preparing his department for the day’s business. The cashier was examining the mail when he noticed the stranger standing at his window.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-13" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE FOURTH IN SALVADOR</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">THE FOURTH IN SALVADOR</h2>
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<p>On a summer’s day, while the city was rocking with the din and red uproar of patriotism, Billy Casparis told me this story.</p>
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<p>In his way, Billy is Ulysses, Jr. Like Satan, he comes from going to and fro upon the earth and walking up and down in it. Tomorrow morning while you are cracking your breakfast egg he may be off with his little alligator grip to boom a town site in the middle of Lake Okeechobee or to trade horses with the Patagonians.</p>
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<p>We sat at a little, round table, and between us were glasses holding big lumps of ice, and above us leaned an artificial palm. And because our scene was set with the properties of the one they recalled to his mind, Billy was stirred to narrative.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-14" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE EMANCIPATION OF BILLY</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">THE EMANCIPATION OF BILLY</h2>
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<p>In the old, old, square-porticoed mansion, with the wry window-shutters and the paint peeling off in discoloured flakes, lived one of the last of the war governors.</p>
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<p>The South has forgotten the enmity of the great conflict, but it refuses to abandon its old traditions and idols. In “Governor” Pemberton, as he was still fondly called, the inhabitants of Elmville saw the relic of their state’s ancient greatness and glory. In his day he had been a man large in the eye of his country. His state had pressed upon him every honour within its gift. And now when he was old, and enjoying a richly merited repose outside the swift current of public affairs, his townsmen loved to do him reverence for the sake of the past.</p>
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<p>The Governor’s decaying “mansion” stood upon the main street of Elmville within a few feet of its rickety paling-fence. Every morning the Governor would descend the steps with extreme care and deliberation—on account of his rheumatism—and then the click of his gold-headed cane would be heard as he slowly proceeded up the rugged brick sidewalk. He was now nearly seventy-eight, but he had grown old gracefully and beautifully. His rather long, smooth hair and flowing, parted whiskers were snow-white. His full-skirted frock-croak was always buttoned snugly about his tall, spare figure. He wore a high, well-kept silk hat—known as a “plug” in Elmville—and nearly always gloves. His manners were punctilious, and somewhat overcharged with courtesy.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-15" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE ENCHANTED KISS</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">THE ENCHANTED KISS</h2>
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<p>But a clerk in the Cut-rate Drug Store was Samuel Tansey, yet his slender frame was a pad that enfolded the passion of Romeo, the gloom of Laura, the romance of D’Artagnan, and the desperate inspiration of Melnotte. Pity, then, that he had been denied expression, that he was doomed to the burden of utter timidity and diffidence, that Fate had set him tongue-tied and scarlet before the muslin-clad angels whom he adored and vainly longed to rescue, clasp, comfort, and subdue.</p>
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<p>The clock’s hands were pointing close upon the hour of ten while Tansey was playing billiards with a number of his friends. On alternate evenings he was released from duty at the store after seven o’clock. Even among his fellow-men Tansey was timorous and constrained. In his imagination he had done valiant deeds and performed acts of distinguished gallantry; but in fact he was a sallow youth of twenty-three, with an overmodest demeanour and scant vocabulary.</p>
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<p>When the clock struck ten, Tansey hastily laid down his cue and struck sharply upon the showcase with a coin for the attendant to come and receive the pay for his score.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-16" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>A DEPARTMENTAL CASE</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">A DEPARTMENTAL CASE</h2>
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<p>In Texas you may travel a thousand miles in a straight line. If your course is a crooked one, it is likely that both the distance and your rate of speed may be vastly increased. Clouds there sail serenely against the wind. The whip-poor-will delivers its disconsolate cry with the notes exactly reversed from those of his Northern brother. Given a drought and a subsequently lively rain, and lo! from a glazed and stony soil will spring in a single night blossomed lilies, miraculously fair. Tom Green County was once the standard of measurement. I have forgotten how many New Jerseys and Rhode Islands it was that could have been stowed away and lost in its chaparral. But the legislative axe has slashed Tom Green into a handful of counties hardly larger than European kingdoms. The legislature convenes at Austin, near the centre of the state; and, while the representative from the Rio Grande country is gathering his palm-leaf fan and his linen duster to set out for the capital, the Panhandle solon winds his muffler above his well-buttoned overcoat and kicks the snow from his well-greased boots ready for the same journey. All this merely to hint that the big ex-republic of the Southwest forms a sizable star on the flag, and to prepare for the corollary that things sometimes happen there uncut to pattern and unfettered by metes and bounds.</p>
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<p>The Commissioner of Insurance, Statistics, and History of the State of Texas was an official of no very great or very small importance. The past tense is used, for now he is Commissioner of Insurance alone. Statistics and history are no longer proper nouns in the government records.</p>
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<p>In the year 188––, the governor appointed Luke Coonrod Standifer to be the head of this department. Standifer was then fifty-five years of age, and a Texan to the core. His father had been one of the state’s earliest settlers and pioneers. Standifer himself had served the commonwealth as Indian fighter, soldier, ranger, and legislator. Much learning he did not claim, but he had drank pretty deep of the spring of experience.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-17" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE RENAISSANCE AT CHARLEROI</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">THE RENAISSANCE AT CHARLEROI</h2>
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<p>Grandemont Charles was a little Creole gentleman, aged thirty-four, with a bald spot on the top of his head and the manners of a prince. By day he was a clerk in a cotton broker’s office in one of those cold, rancid mountains of oozy brick, down near the levee in New Orleans. By night, in his three-story-high <i>chambre garnier</i> in the old French Quarter he was again the last male descendant of the Charles family, that noble house that had lorded it in France, and had pushed its way smiling, rapiered, and courtly into Louisiana’s early and brilliant days. Of late years the Charleses had subsided into the more republican but scarcely less royally carried magnificence and ease of plantation life along the Mississippi. Perhaps Grandemont was even Marquis de Brassé. There was that title in the family. But a Marquis on seventy-five dollars per month! <i>Vraiment!</i> Still, it has been done on less.</p>
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<p>Grandemont had saved out of his salary the sum of six hundred dollars. Enough, you would say, for any man to marry on. So, after a silence of two years on that subject, he reopened that most hazardous question to <abbr>Mlle.</abbr> Adèle Fauquier, riding down to Meade d’Or, her father’s plantation. Her answer was the same that it had been any time during the last ten years: “First find my brother, Monsieur Charles.”</p>
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<p>This time he had stood before her, perhaps discouraged by a love so long and hopeless, being dependent upon a contingency so unreasonable, and demanded to be told in simple words whether she loved him or no.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-18" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>ON BEHALF OF THE MANAGEMENT</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">ON BEHALF OF THE MANAGEMENT</h2>
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<p>This is the story of the man manager, and how he held his own until the very last paragraph.</p>
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<p>I had it from Sully Magoon, <i>viva voce</i>. The words are indeed his; and if they do not constitute truthful fiction my memory should be taxed with the blame.</p>
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<p>It is not deemed amiss to point out, in the beginning, the stress that is laid upon the masculinity of the manager. For, according to Sully, the term when applied to the feminine division of mankind has precisely an opposite meaning. The woman manager (he says) economizes, saves, oppresses her household with bargains and contrivances, and looks sourly upon any pence that are cast to the fiddler for even a single jig-step on life’s arid march. Wherefore her men-folk call her blessed, and praise her; and then sneak out the backdoor to see the Gilhooly Sisters do a buck-and-wing dance.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-19" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>WHISTLING DICK’S CHRISTMAS STOCKING</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">WHISTLING DICK’S CHRISTMAS STOCKING</h2>
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<p>It was with much caution that Whistling Dick slid back the door of the boxcar, for Article 5716, City Ordinances, authorized (perhaps unconstitutionally) arrest on suspicion, and he was familiar of old with this ordinance. So, before climbing out, he surveyed the field with all the care of a good general.</p>
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<p>He saw no change since his last visit to this big, alms-giving, long-suffering city of the South, the cold weather paradise of the tramps. The levee where his freight-car stood was pimpled with dark bulks of merchandise. The breeze reeked with the well-remembered, sickening smell of the old tarpaulins that covered bales and barrels. The dun river slipped along among the shipping with an oily gurgle. Far down toward Chalmette he could see the great bend in the stream, outlined by the row of electric lights. Across the river Algiers lay, a long, irregular blot, made darker by the dawn which lightened the sky beyond. An industrious tug or two, coming for some early sailing ship, gave a few appalling toots, that seemed to be the signal for breaking day. The Italian luggers were creeping nearer their landing, laden with early vegetables and shellfish. A vague roar, subterranean in quality, from dray wheels and street cars, began to make itself heard and felt; and the ferryboats, the Mary Anns of water craft, stirred sullenly to their menial morning tasks.</p>
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<p>Whistling Dick’s red head popped suddenly back into the car. A sight too imposing and magnificent for his gaze had been added to the scene. A vast, incomparable policeman rounded a pile of rice sacks and stood within twenty yards of the car. The daily miracle of the dawn, now being performed above Algiers, received the flattering attention of this specimen of municipal official splendour. He gazed with unbiased dignity at the faintly glowing colours until, at last, he turned to them his broad back, as if convinced that legal interference was not needed, and the sunrise might proceed unchecked. So he turned his face to the rice bags, and, drawing a flat flask from an inside pocket, he placed it to his lips and regarded the firmament.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-2" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE GUARDIAN OF THE ACCOLADE</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">THE GUARDIAN OF THE ACCOLADE</h2>
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<p>Not the least important of the force of the Weymouth Bank was Uncle Bushrod. Sixty years had Uncle Bushrod given of faithful service to the house of Weymouth as chattel, servitor, and friend. Of the colour of the mahogany bank furniture was Uncle Bushrod—thus dark was he externally; white as the uninked pages of the bank ledgers was his soul. Eminently pleasing to Uncle Bushrod would the comparison have been; for to him the only institution in existence worth considering was the Weymouth Bank, of which he was something between porter and generalissimo-in-charge.</p>
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<p>Weymouth lay, dreamy and umbrageous, among the low foothills along the brow of a Southern valley. Three banks there were in Weymouthville. Two were hopeless, misguided enterprises, lacking the presence and prestige of a Weymouth to give them glory. The third was The Bank, managed by the Weymouths—and Uncle Bushrod. In the old Weymouth homestead—the red brick, white-porticoed mansion, the first to your right as you crossed Elder Creek, coming into town—lived <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Robert Weymouth (the president of the bank), his widowed daughter, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Vesey—called “Miss Letty” by everyone—and her two children, Nan and Guy. There, also in a cottage on the grounds, resided Uncle Bushrod and Aunt Malindy, his wife. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> William Weymouth (the cashier of the bank) lived in a modern, fine house on the principal avenue.</p>
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<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Robert was a large, stout man, sixty-two years of age, with a smooth, plump face, long iron-gray hair and fiery blue eyes. He was high-tempered, kind, and generous, with a youthful smile and a formidable, stern voice that did not always mean what it sounded like. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> William was a milder man, correct in deportment and absorbed in business. The Weymouths formed The Family of Weymouthville, and were looked up to, as was their right of heritage.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-20" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE HALBERDIER OF THE LITTLE RHEINSCHLOSS</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">THE HALBERDIER OF THE LITTLE RHEINSCHLOSS</h2>
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<p>I go sometimes into the <i>Bierhalle</i> and restaurant called Old Munich. Not long ago it was a resort of interesting Bohemians, but now only artists and musicians and literary folk frequent it. But the Pilsner is yet good, and I take some diversion from the conversation of Waiter <abbr>No.</abbr> 18.</p>
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<p>For many years the customers of Old Munich have accepted the place as a faithful copy from the ancient German town. The big hall with its smoky rafters, rows of imported steins, portrait of Goethe, and verses painted on the walls—translated into German from the original of the Cincinnati poets—seems atmospherically correct when viewed through the bottom of a glass.</p>
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<p>But not long ago the proprietors added the room above, called it the Little Rheinschloss, and built in a stairway. Up there was an imitation stone parapet, ivy-covered, and the walls were painted to represent depth and distance, with the Rhine winding at the base of the vineyarded slopes, and the castle of Ehrenbreitstein looming directly opposite the entrance. Of course there were tables and chairs; and you could have beer and food brought you, as you naturally would on the top of a castle on the Rhine.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-21" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>TWO RENEGADES</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">TWO RENEGADES</h2>
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<p>In the Gate City of the South the Confederate Veterans were reuniting; and I stood to see them march, beneath the tangled flags of the great conflict, to the hall of their oratory and commemoration.</p>
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<p>While the irregular and halting line was passing I made onslaught upon it and dragged from the ranks my friend Barnard O’Keefe, who had no right to be there. For he was a Northerner born and bred; and what should he be doing hallooing for the Stars and Bars among those gray and moribund veterans? And why should he be trudging, with his shining, martial, humorous, broad face, among those warriors of a previous and alien generation?</p>
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<p>I say I dragged him forth, and held him till the last hickory leg and waving goatee had stumbled past. And then I hustled him out of the crowd into a cool interior; for the Gate City was stirred that day, and the hand-organs wisely eliminated “Marching Through Georgia” from their repertories.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-22" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE LONESOME ROAD</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">THE LONESOME ROAD</h2>
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<p>Brown as a coffee-berry, rugged, pistoled, spurred, wary, indefeasible, I saw my old friend, Deputy-Marshal Buck Caperton, stumble, with jingling rowels, into a chair in the marshal’s outer office.</p>
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<p>And because the courthouse was almost deserted at that hour, and because Buck would sometimes relate to me things that were out of print, I followed him in and tricked him into talk through knowledge of a weakness he had. For, cigarettes rolled with sweet corn husk were as honey to Buck’s palate; and though he could finger the trigger of a forty-five with skill and suddenness, he never could learn to roll a cigarette.</p>
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<p>It was through no fault of mine (for I rolled the cigarettes tight and smooth), but the upshot of some whim of his own, that instead of to an Odyssey of the chaparral, I listened to—a dissertation upon matrimony! This from Buck Caperton! But I maintain that the cigarettes were impeccable, and crave absolution for myself.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-3" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE DISCOUNTERS OF MONEY</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">THE DISCOUNTERS OF MONEY</h2>
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<p>The spectacle of the money-caliphs of the present day going about Bagdad-on-the-Subway trying to relieve the wants of the people is enough to make the great Al Raschid turn Haroun in his grave. If not so, then the assertion should do so, the real caliph having been a wit and a scholar and therefore a hater of puns.</p>
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<p>How properly to alleviate the troubles of the poor is one of the greatest troubles of the rich. But one thing agreed upon by all professional philanthropists is that you must never hand over any cash to your subject. The poor are notoriously temperamental; and when they get money they exhibit a strong tendency to spend it for stuffed olives and enlarged crayon portraits instead of giving it to the instalment man.</p>
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<p>And still, old Haroun had some advantages as an eleemosynarian. He took around with him on his rambles his vizier, Giafar (a vizier is a composite of a chauffeur, a secretary of state, and a night-and-day bank), and old Uncle Mesrour, his executioner, who toted a snickersnee. With this entourage a caliphing tour could hardly fail to be successful. Have you noticed lately any newspaper articles headed, “What Shall We Do With Our Ex-Presidents?” Well, now, suppose that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Carnegie could engage <i>him</i> and Joe Gans to go about assisting in the distribution of free libraries? Do you suppose any town would have had the hardihood to refuse one? That caliphalous combination would cause two libraries to grow where there had been only one set of E. P. Roe’s works before.</p>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-4" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>THE ENCHANTED PROFILE</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">THE ENCHANTED PROFILE</h2>
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<p>There are few Caliphesses. Women are Scheherazades by birth, predilection, instinct, and arrangement of the vocal cords. The thousand and one stories are being told every day by hundreds of thousands of viziers’ daughters to their respective sultans. But the bowstring will get some of ’em yet if they don’t watch out.</p>
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<p>I heard a story, though, of one lady Caliph. It isn’t precisely an Arabian Nights story, because it brings in Cinderella, who flourished her dishrag in another epoch and country. So, if you don’t mind the mixed dates (which seem to give it an Eastern flavour, after all), we’ll get along.</p>
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<p>In New York there is an old, old hotel. You have seen woodcuts of it in the magazines. It was built—let’s see—at a time when there was nothing above Fourteenth Street except the old Indian trail to Boston and Hammerstein’s office. Soon the old hostelry will be torn down. And, as the stout walls are riven apart and the bricks go roaring down the chutes, crowds of citizens will gather at the nearest corners and weep over the destruction of a dear old landmark. Civic pride is strongest in New Bagdad; and the wettest weeper and the loudest howler against the iconoclasts will be the man (originally from Terre Haute) whose fond memories of the old hotel are limited to his having been kicked out from its free-lunch counter in 1873.</p>
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|
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@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
|
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</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-5" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>“NEXT TO READING MATTER”</h2>
|
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<h2 epub:type="title">“NEXT TO READING MATTER”</h2>
|
||||
<p>He compelled my interest as he stepped from the ferry at Desbrosses Street. He had the air of being familiar with hemispheres and worlds, and of entering New York as the lord of a demesne who revisited it in after years of absence. But I thought that, with all his air, he had never before set foot on the slippery cobblestones of the City of Too Many Caliphs.</p>
|
||||
<p>He wore loose clothes of a strange bluish drab colour, and a conservative, round Panama hat without the cock-a-loop indentations and cants with which Northern fanciers disfigure the tropic headgear. Moreover, he was the homeliest man I have ever seen. His ugliness was less repellent than startling—arising from a sort of Lincolnian ruggedness and irregularity of feature that spellbound you with wonder and dismay. So may have looked afrites or the shapes metamorphosed from the vapour of the fisherman’s vase. As he afterward told me, his name was Judson Tate; and he may as well be called so at once. He wore his green silk tie through a topaz ring; and he carried a cane made of the vertebrae of a shark.</p>
|
||||
<p>Judson Tate accosted me with some large and casual inquiries about the city’s streets and hotels, in the manner of one who had but for the moment forgotten the trifling details. I could think of no reason for disparaging my own quiet hotel in the downtown district; so the mid-morning of the night found us already victualed and drinked (at my expense), and ready to be chaired and tobaccoed in a quiet corner of the lobby.</p>
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|
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@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-6" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>ART AND THE BRONCO</h2>
|
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<h2 epub:type="title">ART AND THE BRONCO</h2>
|
||||
<p>Out of the wilderness had come a painter. Genius, whose coronations alone are democratic, had woven a chaplet of chaparral for the brow of Lonny Briscoe. Art, whose divine expression flows impartially from the fingertips of a cowboy or a dilettante emperor, had chosen for a medium the Boy Artist of the San Saba. The outcome, seven feet by twelve of besmeared canvas, stood, gilt-framed, in the lobby of the Capitol.</p>
|
||||
<p>The legislature was in session; the capital city of that great Western state was enjoying the season of activity and profit that the congregation of the solons bestowed. The boardinghouses were corralling the easy dollars of the gamesome lawmakers. The greatest state in the West, an empire in area and resources, had arisen and repudiated the old libel or barbarism, lawbreaking, and bloodshed. Order reigned within her borders. Life and property were as safe there, sir, as anywhere among the corrupt cities of the effete East. Pillow-shams, churches, strawberry feasts and <i>habeas corpus</i> flourished. With impunity might the tenderfoot ventilate his “stovepipe” or his theories of culture. The arts and sciences received nurture and subsidy. And, therefore, it behooved the legislature of this great state to make appropriation for the purchase of Lonny Briscoe’s immortal painting.</p>
|
||||
<p>Rarely has the San Saba country contributed to the spread of the fine arts. Its sons have excelled in the solider graces, in the throw of the lariat, the manipulation of the esteemed .45, the intrepidity of the one-card draw, and the nocturnal stimulation of towns from undue lethargy; but, hitherto, it had not been famed as a stronghold of aesthetics. Lonny Briscoe’s brush had removed that disability. Here, among the limestone rocks, the succulent cactus, and the drought-parched grass of that arid valley, had been born the Boy Artist. Why he came to woo art is beyond postulation. Beyond doubt, some spore of the afflatus must have sprung up within him in spite of the desert soil of San Saba. The tricksy spirit of creation must have incited him to attempted expression and then have sat hilarious among the white-hot sands of the valley, watching its mischievous work. For Lonny’s picture, viewed as a thing of art, was something to have driven away dull care from the bosoms of the critics.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-7" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>PHŒBE</h2>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">PHŒBE</h2>
|
||||
<p>“You are a man of many novel adventures and varied enterprises,” I said to Captain Patricio Maloné. “Do you believe that the possible element of good luck or bad luck—if there is such a thing as luck—has influenced your career or persisted for or against you to such an extent that you were forced to attribute results to the operation of the aforesaid good luck or bad luck?”</p>
|
||||
<p>This question (of almost the dull insolence of legal phraseology) was put while we sat in Rousselin’s little red-tiled café near Congo Square in New Orleans.</p>
|
||||
<p>Brown-faced, white-hatted, finger-ringed captains of adventure came often to Rousselin’s for the cognac. They came from sea and land, and were chary of relating the things they had seen—not because they were more wonderful than the fantasies of the Ananiases of print, but because they were so different. And I was a perpetual wedding-guest, always striving to cast my buttonhole over the finger of one of these mariners of fortune. This Captain Maloné was a Hiberno-Iberian creole who had gone to and fro in the earth and walked up and down in it. He looked like any other well-dressed man of thirty-five whom you might meet, except that he was hopelessly weather-tanned, and wore on his chain an ancient ivory-and-gold Peruvian charm against evil, which has nothing at all to do with this story.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-8" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>A DOUBLE-DYED DECEIVER</h2>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A DOUBLE-DYED DECEIVER</h2>
|
||||
<p>The trouble began in Laredo. It was the Llano Kid’s fault, for he should have confined his habit of manslaughter to Mexicans. But the Kid was past twenty; and to have only Mexicans to one’s credit at twenty is to blush unseen on the Rio Grande border.</p>
|
||||
<p>It happened in old Justo Valdos’s gambling house. There was a poker game at which sat players who were not all friends, as happens often where men ride in from afar to shoot Folly as she gallops. There was a row over so small a matter as a pair of queens; and when the smoke had cleared away it was found that the Kid had committed an indiscretion, and his adversary had been guilty of a blunder. For, the unfortunate combatant, instead of being a Greaser, was a high-blooded youth from the cow ranches, of about the Kid’s own age and possessed of friends and champions. His blunder in missing the Kid’s right ear only a sixteenth of an inch when he pulled his gun did not lessen the indiscretion of the better marksman.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Kid, not being equipped with a retinue, nor bountifully supplied with personal admirers and supporters—on account of a rather umbrageous reputation, even for the border—considered it not incompatible with his indisputable gameness to perform that judicious tractional act known as “pulling his freight.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-9" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE PASSING OF BLACK EAGLE</h2>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">THE PASSING OF BLACK EAGLE</h2>
|
||||
<p>For some months of a certain year a grim bandit infested the Texas border along the Rio Grande. Peculiarly striking to the optic nerve was this notorious marauder. His personality secured him the title of “Black Eagle, the Terror of the Border.” Many fearsome tales are on record concerning the doings of him and his followers. Suddenly, in the space of a single minute, Black Eagle vanished from earth. He was never heard of again. His own band never even guessed the mystery of his disappearance. The border ranches and settlements feared he would come again to ride and ravage the mesquite flats. He never will. It is to disclose the fate of Black Eagle that this narrative is written.</p>
|
||||
<p>The initial movement of the story is furnished by the foot of a bartender in <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis. His discerning eye fell upon the form of Chicken Ruggles as he pecked with avidity at the free lunch. Chicken was a “hobo.” He had a long nose like the bill of a fowl, an inordinate appetite for poultry, and a habit of gratifying it without expense, which accounts for the name given him by his fellow vagrants.</p>
|
||||
<p>Physicians agree that the partaking of liquids at meal times is not a healthy practice. The hygiene of the saloon promulgates the opposite. Chicken had neglected to purchase a drink to accompany his meal. The bartender rounded the counter, caught the injudicious diner by the ear with a lemon squeezer, led him to the door and kicked him into the street.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
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