“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?”
+“Fancy her telling everywhere,” recapitulated Mrs. Kinsolving, “that she saw a ghost in the apartment she occupied here—our choicest guestroom—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.
+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 peepshow. 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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/holding-up-a-train.xhtml b/src/epub/text/holding-up-a-train.xhtml index 272d7a2..f43ff10 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/holding-up-a-train.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/holding-up-a-train.xhtml @@ -10,30 +10,30 @@-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.
+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 “holdup,” 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.
+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 holdup was in being swindled by unscrupulous people while spending the money I got. The danger wasn’t anything to speak of, and we didn’t mind the trouble.
One man has come pretty near robbing a train by himself; two have succeeded a few times; three can do it if they are hustlers, but five is about the right number. The time to do it and the place depend upon several things.
-The first “stick-up” I was ever in happened in 1890. Maybe the way I got into it will explain how most train robbers start in the business. Five out of six Western outlaws are just cowboys out of a job and gone wrong. The sixth is a tough from the East who dresses up like a bad man and plays some low-down trick that gives the boys a bad name. Wire fences and “nesters” made five of them; a bad heart made the sixth.
-Jim S–––– and I were working on the 101 Ranch in Colorado. The nesters had the cowman on the go. They had taken up the land and elected officers who were hard to get along with. Jim and I rode into La Junta one day, going south from a round-up. We were having a little fun without malice toward anybody when a farmer administration cut in and tried to harvest us. Jim shot a deputy marshal, and I kind of corroborated his side of the argument. We skirmished up and down the main street, the boomers having bad luck all the time. After a while we leaned forward and shoved for the ranch down on the Ceriso. We were riding a couple of horses that couldn’t fly, but they could catch birds.
+The first “stickup” I was ever in happened in 1890. Maybe the way I got into it will explain how most train robbers start in the business. Five out of six Western outlaws are just cowboys out of a job and gone wrong. The sixth is a tough from the East who dresses up like a bad man and plays some low-down trick that gives the boys a bad name. Wire fences and “nesters” made five of them; a bad heart made the sixth.
+Jim S–––– and I were working on the 101 Ranch in Colorado. The nesters had the cowman on the go. They had taken up the land and elected officers who were hard to get along with. Jim and I rode into La Junta one day, going south from a roundup. We were having a little fun without malice toward anybody when a farmer administration cut in and tried to harvest us. Jim shot a deputy marshal, and I kind of corroborated his side of the argument. We skirmished up and down the main street, the boomers having bad luck all the time. After a while we leaned forward and shoved for the ranch down on the Ceriso. We were riding a couple of horses that couldn’t fly, but they could catch birds.
A few days after that, a gang of the La Junta boomers came to the ranch and wanted us to go back with them. Naturally, we declined. We had the house on them, and before we were done refusing, that old ‘dobe was plumb full of lead. When dark came we fagged ’em a batch of bullets and shoved out the back door for the rocks. They sure smoked us as we went. We had to drift, which we did, and rounded up down in Oklahoma.
Well, there wasn’t anything we could get there, and, being mighty hard up, we decided to transact a little business with the railroads. Jim and I joined forces with Tom and Ike Moore—two brothers who had plenty of sand they were willing to convert into dust. I can call their names, for both of them are dead. Tom was shot while robbing a bank in Arkansas; Ike was killed during the more dangerous pastime of attending a dance in the Creek Nation.
-We selected a place on the Santa Fé where there was a bridge across a deep creek surrounded by heavy timber. All passenger trains took water at the tank close to one end of the bridge. It was a quiet place, the nearest house being five miles away. The day before it happened, we rested our horses and “made medicine” as to how we should get about it. Our plans were not at all elaborate, as none of us had ever engaged in a hold-up before.
+We selected a place on the Santa Fé where there was a bridge across a deep creek surrounded by heavy timber. All passenger trains took water at the tank close to one end of the bridge. It was a quiet place, the nearest house being five miles away. The day before it happened, we rested our horses and “made medicine” as to how we should get about it. Our plans were not at all elaborate, as none of us had ever engaged in a holdup before.
The Santa Fé flyer was due at the tank at 11:15 p.m. At eleven, Tom and I lay down on one side of the track, and Jim and Ike took the other. As the train rolled up, the headlight flashing far down the track and the steam hissing from the engine, I turned weak all over. I would have worked a whole year on the ranch for nothing to have been out of that affair right then. Some of the nerviest men in the business have told me that they felt the same way the first time.
The engine had hardly stopped when I jumped on the running-board on one side, while Jim mounted the other. As soon as the engineer and fireman saw our guns they threw up their hands without being told, and begged us not to shoot, saying they would do anything we wanted them to.
“Hit the ground,” I ordered, and they both jumped off. We drove them before us down the side of the train. While this was happening, Tom and Ike had been blazing away, one on each side of the train, yelling like Apaches, so as to keep the passengers herded in the cars. Some fellow stuck a little twenty-two calibre out one of the coach windows and fired it straight up in the air. I let drive and smashed the glass just over his head. That settled everything like resistance from that direction.
By this time all my nervousness was gone. I felt a kind of pleasant excitement as if I were at a dance or a frolic of some sort. The lights were all out in the coaches, and, as Tom and Ike gradually quit firing and yelling, it got to be almost as still as a graveyard. I remember hearing a little bird chirping in a bush at the side of the track, as if it were complaining at being waked up.
-I made the fireman get a lantern, and then I went to the express car and yelled to the messenger to open up or get perforated. He slid the door back and stood in it with his hands up. “Jump overboard, son,” I said, and he hit the dirt like a lump of lead. There were two safes in the car—a big one and a little one. By the way, I first located the messenger’s arsenal—a double-barrelled shot-gun with buckshot cartridges and a thirty-eight in a drawer. I drew the cartridges from the shot-gun, pocketed the pistol, and called the messenger inside. I shoved my gun against his nose and put him to work. He couldn’t open the big safe, but he did the little one. There was only nine hundred dollars in it. That was mighty small winnings for our trouble, so we decided to go through the passengers. We took our prisoners to the smoking-car, and from there sent the engineer through the train to light up the coaches. Beginning with the first one, we placed a man at each door and ordered the passengers to stand between the seats with their hands up.
+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 shotgun with buckshot cartridges and a thirty-eight in a drawer. I drew the cartridges from the shotgun, pocketed the pistol, and called the messenger inside. I shoved my gun against his nose and put him to work. He couldn’t open the big safe, but he did the little one. There was only nine hundred dollars in it. That was mighty small winnings for our trouble, so we decided to go through the passengers. We took our prisoners to the smoking-car, and from there sent the engineer through the train to light up the coaches. Beginning with the first one, we placed a man at each door and ordered the passengers to stand between the seats with their hands up.
If you want to find out what cowards the majority of men are, all you have to do is rob a passenger train. I don’t mean because they don’t resist—I’ll tell you later on why they can’t do that—but it makes a man feel sorry for them the way they lose their heads. Big, burly drummers and farmers and ex-soldiers and high-collared dudes and sports that, a few moments before, were filling the car with noise and bragging, get so scared that their ears flop.
There were very few people in the day coaches at that time of night, so we made a slim haul until we got to the sleeper. The Pullman conductor met me at one door while Jim was going round to the other one. He very politely informed me that I could not go into that car, as it did not belong to the railroad company, and, besides, the passengers had already been greatly disturbed by the shouting and firing. Never in all my life have I met with a finer instance of official dignity and reliance upon the power of Mr. Pullman’s great name. I jabbed my six-shooter so hard against Mr. Conductor’s front that I afterward found one of his vest buttons so firmly wedged in the end of the barrel that I had to shoot it out. He just shut up like a weak-springed knife and rolled down the car steps.
I opened the door of the sleeper and stepped inside. A big, fat old man came wabbling up to me, puffing and blowing. He had one coat-sleeve on and was trying to put his vest on over that. I don’t know who he thought I was.
“Young man, young man,” says he, “you must keep cool and not get excited. Above everything, keep cool.”
“I can’t,” says I. “Excitement’s just eating me up.” And then I let out a yell and turned loose my forty-five through the skylight.
-That old man tried to dive into one of the lower berths, but a screech came out of it and a bare foot that took him in the bread-basket and landed him on the floor. I saw Jim coming in the other door, and I hollered for everybody to climb out and line up.
+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 breadbasket 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.
@@ -48,36 +48,36 @@ Mammy and Daddy told me so. -I made him keep on playing it all the time we were in the car. Now and then he’d get weak and off the key, and I’d turn my gun on him and ask what was the matter with that little gal, and whether he had any intention of going back on her, which would make him start up again like sixty. I think that old boy standing there in his silk hat and bare feet, playing his little French harp, was the funniest sight I ever saw. One little red-headed woman in the line broke out laughing at him. You could have heard her in the next car.
-Then Jim held them steady while I searched the berths. I grappled around in those beds and filled a pillow-case with the strangest assortment of stuff you ever saw. Now and then I’d come across a little pop-gun pistol, just about right for plugging teeth with, which I’d throw out the window. When I finished with the collection, I dumped the pillow-case load in the middle of the aisle. There were a good many watches, bracelets, rings, and pocket-books, with a sprinkling of false teeth, whiskey flasks, face-powder boxes, chocolate caramels, and heads of hair of various colours and lengths. There were also about a dozen ladies’ stockings into which jewellery, watches, and rolls of bills had been stuffed and then wadded up tight and stuck under the mattresses. I offered to return what I called the “scalps,” saying that we were not Indians on the war-path, but none of the ladies seemed to know to whom the hair belonged.
+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 redheaded 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 pillowcase with the strangest assortment of stuff you ever saw. Now and then I’d come across a little popgun pistol, just about right for plugging teeth with, which I’d throw out the window. When I finished with the collection, I dumped the pillowcase load in the middle of the aisle. There were a good many watches, bracelets, rings, and pocketbooks, with a sprinkling of false teeth, whiskey flasks, face-powder boxes, chocolate caramels, and heads of hair of various colours and lengths. There were also about a dozen ladies’ stockings into which jewellery, watches, and rolls of bills had been stuffed and then wadded up tight and stuck under the mattresses. I offered to return what I called the “scalps,” saying that we were not Indians on the warpath, 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.”
+Now, as this was our first holdup, 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.
+“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 pocketbook that we afterward found to contain six hundred dollars, a 32-calibre revolver; and the only thing of the lot that could have been a lady’s personal property was a silver bracelet worth about fifty cents.
I said: “Madame, here’s your property,” and handed her the bracelet. “Now,” I went on, “how can you expect us to act square with you when you try to deceive us in this manner? I’m surprised at such conduct.”
The young woman flushed up as if she had been caught doing something dishonest. Some other woman down the line called out: “The mean thing!” I never knew whether she meant the other lady or me.
When we finished our job we ordered everybody back to bed, told ’em good night very politely at the door, and left. We rode forty miles before daylight and then divided the stuff. Each one of us got $1,752.85 in money. We lumped the jewellery around. Then we scattered, each man for himself.
That was my first train robbery, and it was about as easily done as any of the ones that followed. But that was the last and only time I ever went through the passengers. I don’t like that part of the business. Afterward I stuck strictly to the express car. During the next eight years I handled a good deal of money.
The best haul I made was just seven years after the first one. We found out about a train that was going to bring out a lot of money to pay off the soldiers at a Government post. We stuck that train up in broad daylight. Five of us lay in the sand hills near a little station. Ten soldiers were guarding the money on the train, but they might just as well have been at home on a furlough. We didn’t even allow them to stick their heads out the windows to see the fun. We had no trouble at all in getting the money, which was all in gold. Of course, a big howl was raised at the time about the robbery. It was Government stuff, and the Government got sarcastic and wanted to know what the convoy of soldiers went along for. The only excuse given was that nobody was expecting an attack among those bare sand hills in daytime. I don’t know what the Government thought about the excuse, but I know that it was a good one. The surprise—that is the keynote of the train-robbing business. The papers published all kinds of stories about the loss, finally agreeing that it was between nine thousand and ten thousand dollars. The Government sawed wood. Here are the correct figures, printed for the first time—forty-eight thousand dollars. If anybody will take the trouble to look over Uncle Sam’s private accounts for that little debit to profit and loss, he will find that I am right to a cent.
-By that time we were expert enough to know what to do. We rode due west twenty miles, making a trail that a Broadway policeman could have followed, and then we doubled back, hiding our tracks. On the second night after the hold-up, while posses were scouring the country in every direction, Jim and I were eating supper in the second story of a friend’s house in the town where the alarm started from. Our friend pointed out to us, in an office across the street, a printing press at work striking off handbills offering a reward for our capture.
+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 holdup, 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.
+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 holdup 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 getaway—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.
+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 holdup, 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 holdup.
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.
+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 getaway.
My opinion is that those deputies would have put up a stiff fight at Pryor Creek, where they were expecting trouble, but they were taken by surprise and “locoed” at Adair, just as the Daltons, who knew their business, expected they would.
I don’t think I ought to close without giving some deductions from my experience of eight years “on the dodge.” It doesn’t pay to rob trains. Leaving out the question of right and morals, which I don’t think I ought to tackle, there is very little to envy in the life of an outlaw. After a while money ceases to have any value in his eyes. He gets to looking upon the railroads and express companies as his bankers, and his six-shooter as a cheque book good for any amount. He throws away money right and left. Most of the time he is on the jump, riding day and night, and he lives so hard between times that he doesn’t enjoy the taste of high life when he gets it. He knows that his time is bound to come to lose his life or liberty, and that the accuracy of his aim, the speed of his horse, and the fidelity of his “sider,” are all that postpone the inevitable.
It isn’t that he loses any sleep over danger from the officers of the law. In all my experience I never knew officers to attack a band of outlaws unless they outnumbered them at least three to one.
-But the outlaw carries one thought constantly in his mind—and that is what makes him so sore against life, more than anything else—he knows where the marshals get their recruits of deputies. He knows that the majority of these upholders of the law were once lawbreakers, horse thieves, rustlers, highwaymen, and outlaws like himself, and that they gained their positions and immunity by turning state’s evidence, by turning traitor and delivering up their comrades to imprisonment and death. He knows that some day—unless he is shot first—his Judas will set to work, the trap will be laid, and he will be the surprised instead of a surpriser at a stick-up.
+But the outlaw carries one thought constantly in his mind—and that is what makes him so sore against life, more than anything else—he knows where the marshals get their recruits of deputies. He knows that the majority of these upholders of the law were once lawbreakers, horse thieves, rustlers, highwaymen, and outlaws like himself, and that they gained their positions and immunity by turning state’s evidence, by turning traitor and delivering up their comrades to imprisonment and death. He knows that some day—unless he is shot first—his Judas will set to work, the trap will be laid, and he will be the surprised instead of a surpriser at a stickup.
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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/jimmy-hayes-and-muriel.xhtml b/src/epub/text/jimmy-hayes-and-muriel.xhtml index 5a8f9f6..3839d83 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/jimmy-hayes-and-muriel.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/jimmy-hayes-and-muriel.xhtml @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@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.
+Supper was over, and there had fallen upon the camp the silence that accompanies the rolling of cornhusk 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.
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@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.
+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, sunburned 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.”
@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@Jimmy Hayes became a favourite in the ranger camp. He had an endless store of good-nature, and a mild, perennial quality of humour that is well adapted to camp life. He was never without his horned frog. In the bosom of his shirt during rides, on his knee or shoulder in camp, under his blankets at night, the ugly little beast never left him.
Jimmy was a humourist of a type that prevails in the rural South and West. Unskilled in originating methods of amusing or in witty conceptions, he had hit upon a comical idea and clung to it reverently. It had seemed to Jimmy a very funny thing to have about his person, with which to amuse his friends, a tame horned frog with a red ribbon around its neck. As it was a happy idea, why not perpetuate it?
The sentiments existing between Jimmy and the frog cannot be exactly determined. The capability of the horned frog for lasting affection is a subject upon which we have had no symposiums. It is easier to guess Jimmy’s feelings. Muriel was his chef d’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.
+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 cowpuncher,” he said; he was inexperienced in ranger methods of warfare. Therefore the rangers speculated apart and solemnly as to how he would stand fire. For, let it be known, the honour and pride of each ranger company is the individual bravery of its members.
For two months the border was quiet. The rangers lolled, listless, in camp. And then—bringing joy to the rusting guardians of the frontier—Sebastiano Saldar, an eminent Mexican desperado and cattle-thief, crossed the Rio Grande with his gang and began to lay waste the Texas side. There were indications that Jimmy Hayes would soon have the opportunity to show his mettle. The rangers patrolled with alacrity, but Saldar’s men were mounted like Lochinvar, and were hard to catch.
One evening, about sundown, the rangers halted for supper after a long ride. Their horses stood panting, with their saddles on. The men were frying bacon and boiling coffee. Suddenly, out of the brush, Sebastiano Saldar and his gang dashed upon them with blazing six-shooters and high-voiced yells. It was a neat surprise. The rangers swore in annoyed tones, and got their Winchesters busy; but the attack was only a spectacular dash of the purest Mexican type. After the florid demonstration the raiders galloped away, yelling, down the river. The rangers mounted and pursued; but in less than two miles the fagged ponies laboured so that Lieutenant Manning gave the word to abandon the chase and return to the camp.
Then it was discovered that Jimmy Hayes was missing. Some one remembered having seen him run for his pony when the attack began, but no one had set eyes on him since. Morning came, but no Jimmy. They searched the country around, on the theory that he had been killed or wounded, but without success. Then they followed after Saldar’s gang, but it seemed to have disappeared. Manning concluded that the wily Mexican had recrossed the river after his theatric farewell. And, indeed, no further depredations from him were reported.
@@ -46,7 +46,7 @@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!”
+“Some cowpuncher,” 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.
“ ‘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.’
+“ ‘Oh, there won’t be any trouble, Mr. Summers,’ says the lawyer. ‘I’ll acquaint Judge Simmons with the facts today; 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.’
+“ ‘Tut, tut,’ says the lawyer man. ‘Law must take its course. Come back day after tomorrow 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.’
@@ -47,14 +47,14 @@“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 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 today. 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.
+“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 latticework 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.
+“That’s the kind of a man he was. He was homelike, 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 latticework, 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.
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@“ ‘Why’n’t you telegraph to San Antone,’ he asks, ‘and have the bunch arrested there?’
“ ‘Oh, well,’ says I, ‘I always did admire telegraphy; but astronomy was what I had took up just then.’ That capitalist sure knew how to gesticulate with his hands.
“Luke got madder and madder. He investigates and finds in the depot a card one of the men had dropped that gives the address of some hombre called Scudder in New York City.
-“ ‘Bud,’ says Luke, ‘I’m going after that bunch. I’m going there and get the man or boy, as you say he was, and bring him back. I’m sheriff of Mojada County, and I shall keep law and order in its precincts while I’m able to draw a gun. And I want you to go with me. No Eastern Yankee can shoot up a respectable and well-known citizen of Bildad, ‘specially with a thirty-two calibre, and escape the law. Pedro Johnson,’ says Luke, ‘is one of our most prominent citizens and business men. I’ll appoint Sam Bell acting sheriff with penitentiary powers while I’m away, and you and me will take the six forty-five northbound to-morrow evening and follow up this trail.’
+“ ‘Bud,’ says Luke, ‘I’m going after that bunch. I’m going there and get the man or boy, as you say he was, and bring him back. I’m sheriff of Mojada County, and I shall keep law and order in its precincts while I’m able to draw a gun. And I want you to go with me. No Eastern Yankee can shoot up a respectable and well-known citizen of Bildad, ‘specially with a thirty-two calibre, and escape the law. Pedro Johnson,’ says Luke, ‘is one of our most prominent citizens and business men. I’ll appoint Sam Bell acting sheriff with penitentiary powers while I’m away, and you and me will take the six forty-five northbound tomorrow 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.’
@@ -78,7 +78,7 @@“ ‘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.
+“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 timetables 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.’
diff --git a/src/epub/text/let-me-feel-your-pulse.xhtml b/src/epub/text/let-me-feel-your-pulse.xhtml index c768547..ec10437 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/let-me-feel-your-pulse.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/let-me-feel-your-pulse.xhtml @@ -17,7 +17,7 @@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.
+Then he grasped my hand. I thought I was doomed and he was saying goodbye. 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.”
@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@“All of them,” he answered cheerfully. “But their progress may be arrested. With care and proper continuous treatment you may live to be eighty-five or ninety.”
I began to think of the doctor’s bill. “Eighty-five would be sufficient, I am sure,” was my comment. I paid him ten dollars more on account.
“The first thing to do,” he said, with renewed animation, “is to find a sanitarium where you will get a complete rest for a while, and allow your nerves to get into a better condition. I myself will go with you and select a suitable one.”
-So he took me to a mad-house in the Catskills. It was on a bare mountain frequented only by infrequent frequenters. You could see nothing but stones and boulders, some patches of snow, and scattered pine trees. The young physician in charge was most agreeable. He gave me a stimulant without applying a compress to the arm. It was luncheon time, and we were invited to partake. There were about twenty inmates at little tables in the dining room. The young physician in charge came to our table and said: “It is a custom with our guests not to regard themselves as patients, but merely as tired ladies and gentlemen taking a rest. Whatever slight maladies they may have are never alluded to in conversation.”
+So he took me to a madhouse in the Catskills. It was on a bare mountain frequented only by infrequent frequenters. You could see nothing but stones and boulders, some patches of snow, and scattered pine trees. The young physician in charge was most agreeable. He gave me a stimulant without applying a compress to the arm. It was luncheon time, and we were invited to partake. There were about twenty inmates at little tables in the dining room. The young physician in charge came to our table and said: “It is a custom with our guests not to regard themselves as patients, but merely as tired ladies and gentlemen taking a rest. Whatever slight maladies they may have are never alluded to in conversation.”
My doctor called loudly to a waitress to bring some phosphoglycerate of lime hash, dog-bread, bromo-seltzer pancakes, and nux vomica tea for my repast. Then a sound arose like a sudden wind storm among pine trees. It was produced by every guest in the room whispering loudly, “Neurasthenia!”—except one man with a nose, whom I distinctly heard say, “Chronic alcoholism.” I hope to meet him again. The physician in charge turned and walked away.
An hour or so after luncheon he conducted us to the workshop—say fifty yards from the house. Thither the guests had been conducted by the physician in charge’s understudy and sponge-holder—a man with feet and a blue sweater. He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face; but the Armour Packing Company would have been delighted with his hands.
“Here,” said the physician in charge, “our guests find relaxation from past mental worries by devoting themselves to physical labour—recreation, in reality.”
@@ -51,10 +51,10 @@“Would a mermaid—” I began; but he slipped on his professional manner.
“I myself,” he said, “will take you to the Hotel Bonair off the coast of Long Island and see that you get in good shape. It is a quiet, comfortable resort where you will soon recuperate.”
The Hotel Bonair proved to be a nine-hundred-room fashionable hostelry on an island off the main shore. Everybody who did not dress for dinner was shoved into a side dining-room and given only a terrapin and champagne table d’hôte. The bay was a great stamping ground for wealthy yachtsmen. The Corsair anchored there the day we arrived. I saw Mr. Morgan standing on deck eating a cheese sandwich and gazing longingly at the hotel. Still, it was a very inexpensive place. Nobody could afford to pay their prices. When you went away you simply left your baggage, stole a skiff, and beat it for the mainland in the night.
-When I had been there one day I got a pad of monogrammed telegraph blanks at the clerk’s desk and began to wire to all my friends for get-away money. My doctor and I played one game of croquet on the golf links and went to sleep on the lawn.
+When 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 getaway money. My doctor and I played one game of croquet on the golf links and went to sleep on the lawn.
When we got back to town a thought seemed to occur to him suddenly. “By the way,” he asked, “how do you feel?”
“Relieved of very much,” I replied.
-Now a consulting physician is different. He isn’t exactly sure whether he is to be paid or not, and this uncertainty insures you either the most careful or the most careless attention. My doctor took me to see a consulting physician. He made a poor guess and gave me careful attention. I liked him immensely. He put me through some coördination exercises.
+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.
@@ -84,13 +84,13 @@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.
+A rabbit came bounding across the hill between us and the house. I threw down my suitcase 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!”
+Suddenly some belated little bird alighted upon the windowsill, 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.”
@@ -108,8 +108,8 @@“Doctor, I have cirrhosis of the heart, indurated arteries, neurasthenia, neuritis, acute indigestion, and convalescence. I am going to live on a strict diet. I shall also take a tepid bath at night and a cold one in the morning. I shall endeavour to be cheerful, and fix my mind on pleasant subjects. In the way of drugs I intend to take a phosphorous pill three times a day, preferably after meals, and a tonic composed of the tinctures of gentian, cinchona, calisaya, and cardamon compound. Into each teaspoonful of this I shall mix tincture of nux vomica, beginning with one drop and increasing it a drop each day until the maximum dose is reached. I shall drop this with a medicine-dropper, which can be procured at a trifling cost at any pharmacy. Good morning.”
I took my hat and walked out. After I had closed the door I remembered something that I had forgotten to say. I opened it again. The doctor had not moved from where he had been sitting, but he gave a slightly nervous start when he saw me again.
“I forgot to mention,” said I, “that I shall also take absolute rest and exercise.”
-After this consultation I felt much better. The reëstablishing in my mind of the fact that I was hopelessly ill gave me so much satisfaction that I almost became gloomy again. There is nothing more alarming to a neurasthenic than to feel himself growing well and cheerful.
-John looked after me carefully. After I had evinced so much interest in his White Orpington chicken he tried his best to divert my mind, and was particular to lock his hen house of nights. Gradually the tonic mountain air, the wholesome food, and the daily walks among the hills so alleviated my malady that I became utterly wretched and despondent. I heard of a country doctor who lived in the mountains nearby. I went to see him and told him the whole story. He was a gray-bearded man with clear, blue, wrinkled eyes, in a home-made suit of gray jeans.
+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, wrinkled eyes, in a homemade 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?”
diff --git a/src/epub/text/makes-the-whole-world-kin.xhtml b/src/epub/text/makes-the-whole-world-kin.xhtml index 6d76373..95652f0 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/makes-the-whole-world-kin.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/makes-the-whole-world-kin.xhtml @@ -16,7 +16,7 @@The other well-known type is the burglar who wears a collar. He is always referred to as a Raffles in real life. He is invariably a gentleman by daylight, breakfasting in a dress suit, and posing as a paperhanger, while after dark he plies his nefarious occupation of burglary. His mother is an extremely wealthy and respected resident of Ocean Grove, and when he is conducted to his cell he asks at once for a nail file and the Police Gazette. He always has a wife in every State in the Union and fiancées in all the Territories, and the newspapers print his matrimonial gallery out of their stock of cuts of the ladies who were cured by only one bottle after having been given up by five doctors, experiencing great relief after the first dose.
The burglar wore a blue sweater. He was neither a Raffles nor one of the chefs from Hell’s Kitchen. The police would have been baffled had they attempted to classify him. They have not yet heard of the respectable, unassuming burglar who is neither above nor below his station.
This burglar of the third class began to prowl. He wore no masks, dark lanterns, or gum shoes. He carried a 38-calibre revolver in his pocket, and he chewed peppermint gum thoughtfully.
-The furniture of the house was swathed in its summer dust protectors. The silver was far away in safe-deposit vaults. The burglar expected no remarkable “haul.” His objective point was that dimly lighted room where the master of the house should be sleeping heavily after whatever solace he had sought to lighten the burden of his loneliness. A “touch” might be made there to the extent of legitimate, fair professional profits—loose money, a watch, a jewelled stick-pin—nothing exorbitant or beyond reason. He had seen the window left open and had taken the chance.
+The 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 stickpin—nothing exorbitant or beyond reason. He had seen the window left open and had taken the chance.
The burglar softly opened the door of the lighted room. The gas was turned low. A man lay in the bed asleep. On the dresser lay many things in confusion—a crumpled roll of bills, a watch, keys, three poker chips, crushed cigars, a pink silk hair bow, and an unopened bottle of bromo-seltzer for a bulwark in the morning.
The burglar took three steps toward the dresser. The man in the bed suddenly uttered a squeaky groan and opened his eyes. His right hand slid under his pillow, but remained there.
“Lay still,” said the burglar in conversational tone. Burglars of the third type do not hiss. The citizen in the bed looked at the round end of the burglar’s pistol and lay still.
@@ -40,10 +40,10 @@“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.”
+“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 halfway 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.”
+“Me, too,” said the citizen. “I can tell when a streak of humidity the size of a tablecloth 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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/new-york-by-camp-fire-light.xhtml b/src/epub/text/new-york-by-camp-fire-light.xhtml index 2ae85ec..38884ed 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/new-york-by-camp-fire-light.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/new-york-by-camp-fire-light.xhtml @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ -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.
@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@“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.”
+“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 roundups, 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.
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@“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.
+“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 Peas 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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/october-and-june.xhtml b/src/epub/text/october-and-june.xhtml index d09cf4a..7f2034b 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/october-and-june.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/october-and-june.xhtml @@ -9,7 +9,7 @@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.
+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 reread the fatal paragraph that had destroyed his hope.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-adventures-of-shamrock-jolnes.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-adventures-of-shamrock-jolnes.xhtml index be7a800..4571ee5 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-adventures-of-shamrock-jolnes.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-adventures-of-shamrock-jolnes.xhtml @@ -26,7 +26,7 @@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.
“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.
+Halfway 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.
@@ -34,18 +34,18 @@“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.”
+“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. Today they are quoted at forty-two. Rheingelder ate eggs yesterday, and today 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.”
+“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 tonight.”
“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.”
+“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 tonight, 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.
@@ -65,7 +65,7 @@“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?”
+“Adopted!” I broke in. “I give you every credit; but how did you know he was leaving for the South tonight?”
“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.”
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-champion-of-the-weather.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-champion-of-the-weather.xhtml index a335013..874f3db 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-champion-of-the-weather.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-champion-of-the-weather.xhtml @@ -15,14 +15,14 @@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.
+“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 powwow.
“I’d been saving up for a year to give this New York a whirl. I knew a man named Summers that lived there, but I couldn’t find him; so I played a lone hand at enjoying the intoxicating pleasures of the corn-fed metropolis.
“For a while I was so frivolous and locoed by the electric lights and the noises of the phonographs and the second-story railroads that I forgot one of the crying needs of my Western system of natural requirements. I never was no hand to deny myself the pleasures of sociable vocal intercourse with friends and strangers. Out in the Territories when I meet a man I never saw before, inside of nine minutes I know his income, religion, size of collar, and his wife’s temper, and how much he pays for clothes, alimony, and chewing tobacco. It’s a gift with me not to be penurious with my conversation.
“But this here New York was inaugurated on the idea of abstemiousness in regard to the parts of speech. At the end of three weeks nobody in the city had fired even a blank syllable in my direction except the waiter in the grub emporium where I fed. And as his outpourings of syntax wasn’t nothing but plagiarisms from the bill of fare, he never satisfied my yearnings, which was to have somebody hit. If I stood next to a man at a bar he’d edge off and give a Baldwin-Ziegler look as if he suspected me of having the North Pole concealed on my person. I began to wish that I’d gone to Abilene or Waco for my paseado; for the mayor of them places will drink with you, and the first citizen you meet will tell you his middle name and ask you to take a chance in a raffle for a music box.
“Well, one day when I was particular hankering for to be gregarious with something more loquacious than a lamp post, a fellow in a caffy says to me, says he:
“ ‘Nice day!’
“He was a kind of a manager of the place, and I reckon he’d seen me in there a good many times. He had a face like a fish and an eye like Judas, but I got up and put one arm around his neck.
-“ ‘Pardner,’ I says, ‘sure it’s a nice day. You’re the first gentleman in all New York to observe that the intricacies of human speech might not be altogether wasted on William Kingsbury. But don’t you think,’ says I, ‘that ’twas a little cool early in the morning; and ain’t there a feeling of rain in the air to-night? But along about noon it sure was gallupsious weather. How’s all up to the house? You doing right well with the caffy, now?’
+“ ‘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 tonight? 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.’
@@ -32,8 +32,8 @@“ ‘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.’
+“ ‘Particulars, you mealymouthed snoozer,’ I says—‘let’s have the specifications—expatiate—fill in the outlines. When you start anything with me in shorthand 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 upstate.’
“ ‘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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-church-with-an-overshot-wheel.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-church-with-an-overshot-wheel.xhtml index 4561a3c..515e0b0 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-church-with-an-overshot-wheel.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-church-with-an-overshot-wheel.xhtml @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@Lakelands is not to be found in the catalogues of fashionable summer resorts. It lies on a low spur of the Cumberland range of mountains on a little tributary of the Clinch River. Lakelands proper is a contented village of two dozen houses situated on a forlorn, narrow-gauge railroad line. You wonder whether the railroad lost itself in the pine woods and ran into Lakelands from fright and loneliness, or whether Lakelands got lost and huddled itself along the railroad to wait for the cars to carry it home.
You wonder again why it was named Lakelands. There are no lakes, and the lands about are too poor to be worth mentioning.
-Half a mile from the village stands the Eagle House, a big, roomy old mansion run by Josiah Rankin for the accommodation of visitors who desire the mountain air at inexpensive rates. The Eagle House is delightfully mismanaged. It is full of ancient instead of modern improvements, and it is altogether as comfortably neglected and pleasingly disarranged as your own home. But you are furnished with clean rooms and good and abundant fare: yourself and the piny woods must do the rest. Nature has provided a mineral spring, grape-vine swings, and croquet—even the wickets are wooden. You have Art to thank only for the fiddle-and-guitar music twice a week at the hop in the rustic pavilion.
+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, grapevine 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.
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@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.
+“Dada, come take Dums home;” and the miller would swing her to his shoulder and march over to supper, singing the miller’s song. Every evening this would take place.
One day, only a week after her fourth birthday, Aglaia disappeared. When last seen she was plucking wild flowers by the side of the road in front of the cottage. A little while later her mother went out to see that she did not stray too far away, and she was already gone.
Of course every effort was made to find her. The neighbours gathered and searched the woods and the mountains for miles around. They dragged every foot of the mill race and the creek for a long distance below the dam. Never a trace of her did they find. A night or two before there had been a family of wanderers camped in a grove near by. It was conjectured that they might have stolen the child; but when their wagon was overtaken and searched she could not be found.
The miller remained at the mill for nearly two years; and then his hope of finding her died out. He and his wife moved to the Northwest. In a few years he was the owner of a modern mill in one of the important milling cities in that region. Mrs. Strong never recovered from the shock caused by the loss of Aglaia, and two years after they moved away the miller was left to bear his sorrow alone.
@@ -53,7 +53,7 @@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.”
+“Oh, Father Abram,” she said, “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know until today 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!”
@@ -101,7 +101,7 @@ 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!”
+—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: “Dada, 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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-day-we-celebrate.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-day-we-celebrate.xhtml index 5cb72fc..c56276c 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-day-we-celebrate.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-day-we-celebrate.xhtml @@ -8,7 +8,7 @@“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.”
+“In the tropics” (“Hop-along” Bibb, the bird fancier, was saying to me) “the seasons, months, fortnights, weekends, 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.”
@@ -17,20 +17,20 @@“We were, as it were, stranded on that section of the Spanish main with no money to speak of and no friends that should be talked about either. We had stoked and second-cooked ourselves down there on a fruit steamer from New Orleans to try our luck, which was discharged, after we got there, for lack of evidence. There was no work suitable to our instincts; so me and Liverpool began to subsist on the red rum of the country and such fruit as we could reap where we had not sown. It was an alluvial town, called Soledad, where there was no harbour or future or recourse. Between steamers the town slept and drank rum. It only woke up when there were bananas to ship. It was like a man sleeping through dinner until the dessert.
“When me and Liverpool got so low down that the American consul wouldn’t speak to us we knew we’d struck bed rock.
“We boarded with a snuff-brown lady named Chica, who kept a rum-shop and a ladies’ and gents’ restaurant in a street called the calle de los Forty-seven Inconsolable Saints. When our credit played out there, Liverpool, whose stomach overshadowed his sensations of noblesse oblige, married Chica. This kept us in rice and fried plantain for a month; and then Chica pounded Liverpool one morning sadly and earnestly for fifteen minutes with a casserole handed down from the stone age, and we knew that we had out-welcomed our liver. That night we signed an engagement with Don Jaime McSpinosa, a hybrid banana fancier of the place, to work on his fruit preserves nine miles out of town. We had to do it or be reduced to sea water and broken doses of feed and slumber.
-“Now, speaking of Liverpool Sam, I don’t malign or inexculpate him to you any more than I would to his face. But in my opinion, when an Englishman gets as low as he can he’s got to dodge so that the dregs of other nations don’t drop ballast on him out of their balloons. And if he’s a Liverpool Englishman, why, fire-damp is what he’s got to look out for. Being a natural American, that’s my personal view. But Liverpool and me had much in common. We were without decorous clothes or ways and means of existence; and, as the saying goes, misery certainly does enjoy the society of accomplices.
+“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, firedamp is what he’s got to look out for. Being a natural American, that’s my personal view. But Liverpool and me had much in common. We were without decorous clothes or ways and means of existence; and, as the saying goes, misery certainly does enjoy the society of accomplices.
“Our job on old McSpinosa’s plantation was chopping down banana stalks and loading the bunches of fruit on the backs of horses. Then a native dressed up in an alligator hide belt, a machete, and a pair of AA sheeting pajamas, drives ’em over to the coast and piles ’em up on the beach.
“You ever been in a banana grove? It’s as solemn as a rathskeller at seven a.m. It’s like being lost behind the scenes at one of these mushroom musical shows. You can’t see the sky for the foliage above you; and the ground is knee deep in rotten leaves; and it’s so still that you can hear the stalks growing again after you chop ’em down.
-“At night me and Liverpool herded in a lot of grass huts on the edge of a lagoon with the red, yellow, and black employés of Don Jaime. There we lay fighting mosquitoes and listening to the monkeys squalling and the alligators grunting and splashing in the lagoon until daylight with only snatches of sleep between times.
+“At night me and Liverpool herded in a lot of grass huts on the edge of a lagoon with the red, yellow, and black employees of Don Jaime. There we lay fighting mosquitoes and listening to the monkeys squalling and the alligators grunting and splashing in the lagoon until daylight with only snatches of sleep between times.
“We soon lost all idea of what time of the year it was. It’s just about eighty degrees there in December and June and on Fridays and at midnight and election day and any other old time. Sometimes it rains more than at others, and that’s all the difference you notice. A man is liable to live along there without noticing any fugiting of tempus until some day the undertaker calls in for him just when he’s beginning to think about cutting out the gang and saving up a little to invest in real estate.
-“I don’t know how long we worked for Don Jaime; but it was through two or three rainy spells, eight or ten hair cuts, and the life of three pairs of sail-cloth trousers. All the money we earned went for rum and tobacco; but we ate, and that was something.
+“I don’t know how long we worked for Don Jaime; but it was through two or three rainy spells, eight or ten hair cuts, and the life of three pairs of sailcloth trousers. All the money we earned went for rum and tobacco; but we ate, and that was something.
“All of a sudden one day me and Liverpool find the trade of committing surgical operations on banana stalks turning to aloes and quinine in our mouths. It’s a seizure that often comes upon white men in Latin and geographical countries. We wanted to be addressed again in language and see the smoke of a steamer and read the real estate transfers and gents’ outfitting ads in an old newspaper. Even Soledad seemed like a centre of civilization to us, so that evening we put our thumbs on our nose at Don Jaime’s fruit stand and shook his grass burrs off our feet.
“It was only twelve miles to Soledad, but it took me and Liverpool two days to get there. It was banana grove nearly all the way; and we got twisted time and again. It was like paging the palm room of a New York hotel for a man named Smith.
“When we saw the houses of Soledad between the trees all my disinclination toward this Liverpool Sam rose up in me. I stood him while we were two white men against the banana brindles; but now, when there were prospects of my exchanging even cuss words with an American citizen, I put him back in his proper place. And he was a sight, too, with his rum-painted nose and his red whiskers and elephant feet with leather sandals strapped to them. I suppose I looked about the same.
“ ‘It looks to me,’ says I, ‘like Great Britain ought to be made to keep such gin-swilling, scurvy, unbecoming mud larks as you at home instead of sending ’em over here to degrade and taint foreign lands. We kicked you out of America once and we ought to put on rubber boots and do it again.’
“ ‘Oh, you go to ‘ell,’ says Liverpool, which was about all the repartee he ever had.
“Well, Soledad, looked fine to me after Don Jaime ‘s plantation. Liverpool and me walked into it side by side, from force of habit, past the calabosa and the Hotel Grande, down across the plaza toward Chica’s hut, where we hoped that Liverpool, being a husband of hers, might work his luck for a meal.
-“As we passed the two-story little frame house occupied by the American Club, we noticed that the balcony had been decorated all around with wreaths of evergreens and flowers, and the flag was flying from the pole on the roof. Stanzey, the consul, and Arkright, a gold-mine owner, were smoking on the balcony. Me and Liverpool waved our dirty hands toward ’em and smiled real society smiles; but they turned their backs to us and went on talking. And we had played whist once with the two of ’em up to the time when Liverpool held all thirteen trumps for four hands in succession. It was some holiday, we knew; but we didn’t know the day nor the year.
-“A little further along we saw a reverend man named Pendergast, who had come to Soledad to build a church, standing under a cocoanut palm with his little black alpaca coat and green umbrella.
+“As we passed the two-story little frame house occupied by the American Club, we noticed that the balcony had been decorated all around with wreaths of evergreens and flowers, and the flag was flying from the pole on the roof. Stanzey, the consul, and Arkright, a goldmine owner, were smoking on the balcony. Me and Liverpool waved our dirty hands toward ’em and smiled real society smiles; but they turned their backs to us and went on talking. And we had played whist once with the two of ’em up to the time when Liverpool held all thirteen trumps for four hands in succession. It was some holiday, we knew; but we didn’t know the day nor the year.
+“A little further along we saw a reverend man named Pendergast, who had come to Soledad to build a church, standing under a coconut 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.’
@@ -43,7 +43,7 @@“ ‘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.
+“So we pull up in a rum shop and get a quart of it and go down on the beach under a coconut 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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-diamond-of-kali.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-diamond-of-kali.xhtml index fb760fe..326c3af 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-diamond-of-kali.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-diamond-of-kali.xhtml @@ -11,11 +11,11 @@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.
+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 wastebasket 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.
+Gen. Marcellus B. Ludlow lives in one of those decaying but venerated old redbrick mansions in the West Twenties. The General is a member of an old New York family that does not advertise. He is a globetrotter 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.
@@ -49,7 +49,7 @@“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:
+The hour was late. As their feet struck the sidewalk 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—”
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-door-of-unrest.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-door-of-unrest.xhtml index 1687fe3..bd3e91d 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-door-of-unrest.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-door-of-unrest.xhtml @@ -9,7 +9,7 @@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.
+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 homecoming cowbells 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?”
@@ -21,13 +21,13 @@“There is a man come to Paris in this year 1643 who pretends to have lived these sixteen hundred years. He says of himself that he was a shoemaker in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion; that his name is Michob Ader; and that when Jesus, the Christian Messias, was condemned by Pontius Pilate, the Roman president, he paused to rest while bearing his cross to the place of crucifixion before the door of Michob Ader. The shoemaker struck Jesus with his fist, saying: ‘Go; why tarriest thou?’ The Messias answered him: ‘I indeed am going; but thou shalt tarry until I come’; thereby condemning him to live until the day of judgment. He lives forever, but at the end of every hundred years he falls into a fit or trance, on recovering from which he finds himself in the same state of youth in which he was when Jesus suffered, being then about thirty years of age.
“Such is the story of the Wandering Jew, as told by Michob Ader, who relates—” Here the printing ended.
I must have muttered aloud something to myself about the Wandering Jew, for the old man spake up, bitterly and loudly.
-“ ’Tis a lie,” said he, “like nine tenths of what ye call history. ’Tis a Gentile I am, and no Jew. I am after footing it out of Jerusalem, my son; but if that makes me a Jew, then everything that comes out of a bottle is babies’ milk. Ye have my name on the card ye hold; and ye have read the bit of paper they call the Turkish Spy that printed the news when I stepped into their office on the 12th day of June, in the year 1643, just as I have called upon ye to-day.”
+“ ’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 today.”
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.”
+“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 downhearted.”
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?’
+“ ’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 character. 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 frostbite, 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?’
@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@“ ‘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 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 songbook 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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-duplicity-of-hargraves.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-duplicity-of-hargraves.xhtml index ea04e08..3ca692f 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-duplicity-of-hargraves.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-duplicity-of-hargraves.xhtml @@ -11,11 +11,11 @@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.
+Such clothes were surely never made within fifty years. The major was tall, but whenever he made that wonderful, archaic genuflection 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.”
+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 antebellum 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.
+At the theatre Hargraves was known as an all-round dialect comedian, having a large repertoire of German, Irish, Swede, and blackface 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.
@@ -31,9 +31,9 @@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.”
+“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 tonight.”
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.”
+“Perhaps it was injudicious,” he said mildly, “but the sum was so merely nominal that I bought tickets to the theatre tonight. It’s a new war drama, Lydia. I thought you would be pleased to witness its first production in Washington. I am told that the South has very fair treatment in the play. I confess I should like to see the performance myself.”
Miss Lydia threw up her hands in silent despair.
Still, as the tickets were bought, they might as well be used. So that evening, as they sat in the theatre listening to the lively overture, even Miss Lydia was minded to relegate their troubles, for the hour, to second place. The major, in spotless linen, with his extraordinary coat showing only where it was closely buttoned, and his white hair smoothly roached, looked really fine and distinguished. The curtain went up on the first act of “A Magnolia Flower,” revealing a typical Southern plantation scene. Major Talbot betrayed some interest.
“Oh, see!” exclaimed Miss Lydia, nudging his arm, and pointing to her programme.
@@ -57,7 +57,7 @@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.
+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 today. 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.”
@@ -77,7 +77,7 @@“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.
+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 downtown 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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-greater-coney.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-greater-coney.xhtml index fc8e865..1d9d10d 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-greater-coney.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-greater-coney.xhtml @@ -11,13 +11,13 @@“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.
+“ ’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’ semiannual 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.
+“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 Hindu 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 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 redheaded 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?’
@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@“ ‘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.’
+“”Tis a storyteller 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?’
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-lady-higher-up.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-lady-higher-up.xhtml index ae70f1e..d92e0de 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-lady-higher-up.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-lady-higher-up.xhtml @@ -13,12 +13,12 @@“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.”
+“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 lightheaded and giddy ye’d know that I was made by a Dago and presented to the American people on behalf of the French Government for the purpose of welcomin’ Irish immigrants into the Dutch city of New York. ’Tis that I’ve been doing night and day since I was erected. Ye must know, Miss Diana, that ’tis with statues the same as with people—’tis not their makers nor the purposes for which they were created that influence the operations of their tongues at all—it’s the associations with which they become associated, I’m telling ye.”
“You’re dead right,” agreed Diana. “I notice it on myself. If any of the old guys from Olympus were to come along and hand me any hot air in the ancient Greek I couldn’t tell it from a conversation between a Coney Island car conductor and a five-cent fare.”
“I’m right glad ye’ve made up your mind to be sociable, Miss Diana,” said Mrs. Liberty. “ ’Tis a lonesome life I have down here. Is there anything doin’ up in the city, Miss Diana, dear?”
“Oh, la, la, la!—no,” said Diana. “Notice that ‘la, la, la,’ Aunt Liberty? Got that from ‘Paris by Night’ on the roof garden under me. You’ll hear that ‘la, la, la’ at the Café McCann now, along with ‘garsong.’ The bohemian crowd there have become tired of ‘garsong’ since O’Rafferty, the head waiter, punched three of them for calling him it. Oh, no; the town’s strickly on the bum these nights. Everybody’s away. Saw a downtown merchant on a roof garden this evening with his stenographer. Show was so dull he went to sleep. A waiter biting on a dime tip to see if it was good half woke him up. He looks around and sees his little pothooks perpetrator. ‘H’m!’ says he, ‘will you take a letter, Miss De St. Montmorency?’ ‘Sure, in a minute,’ says she, ‘if you’ll make it an X.’
“That was the best thing happened on the roof. So you see how dull it is. La, la, la!”
-“ ’Tis fine ye have it up there in society, Miss Diana. Ye have the cat show and the horse show and the military tournaments where the privates look grand as generals and the generals try to look grand as floor-walkers. And ye have the Sportsmen’s Show, where the girl that measures 36, 19, 45 cooks breakfast food in a birch-bark wigwam on the banks of the Grand Canal of Venice conducted by one of the Vanderbilts, Bernard McFadden, and the Reverends Dowie and Duss. And ye have the French ball, where the original Cohens and the Robert Emmet-Sangerbund Society dance the Highland fling one with another. And ye have the grand O’Ryan ball, which is the most beautiful pageant in the world, where the French students vie with the Tyrolean warblers in doin’ the cake walk. Ye have the best job for a statue in the whole town, Miss Diana.
+“ ’Tis 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 floorwalkers. And ye have the Sportsmen’s Show, where the girl that measures 36, 19, 45 cooks breakfast food in a birch-bark wigwam on the banks of the Grand Canal of Venice conducted by one of the Vanderbilts, Bernard McFadden, and the Reverends Dowie and Duss. And ye have the French ball, where the original Cohens and the Robert Emmet-Sangerbund Society dance the Highland fling one with another. And ye have the grand O’Ryan ball, which is the most beautiful pageant in the world, where the French students vie with the Tyrolean warblers in doin’ the cake walk. Ye have the best job for a statue in the whole town, Miss Diana.
“ ’Tis weary work,” sighed the island statue, “disseminatin’ the science of liberty in New York Bay. Sometimes when I take a peep down at Ellis Island and see the gang of immigrants I’m supposed to light up, ’tis tempted I am to blow out the gas and let the coroner write out their naturalization papers.”
“Say, it’s a shame, ain’t it, to give you the worst end of it?” came the sympathetic antiphony of the steeplechase goddess. “It must be awfully lonesome down there with so much water around you. I don’t see how you ever keep your hair in curl. And that Mother Hubbard you are wearing went out ten years ago. I think those sculptor guys ought to be held for damages for putting iron or marble clothes on a lady. That’s where Mr. St. Gaudens was wise. I’m always a little ahead of the styles; but they’re coming my way pretty fast. Excuse my back a moment—I caught a puff of wind from the north—shouldn’t wonder if things had loosened up in Esopus. There, now! it’s in the West—I should think that gold plank would have calmed the air out in that direction. What were you saying, Mrs. Liberty?”
“A fine chat I’ve had with ye, Miss Diana, ma’am, but I see one of them European steamers a-sailin’ up the Narrows, and I must be attendin’ to me duties. ’Tis me job to extend aloft the torch of Liberty to welcome all them that survive the kicks that the steerage stewards give ’em while landin.’ Sure ’tis a great country ye can come to for $8.50, and the doctor waitin’ to send ye back home free if he sees yer eyes red from cryin’ for it.”
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-last-of-the-troubadours.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-last-of-the-troubadours.xhtml index 2ae9ceb..d4869e7 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-last-of-the-troubadours.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-last-of-the-troubadours.xhtml @@ -9,7 +9,7 @@Inexorably Sam Galloway saddled his pony. He was going away from the Rancho Altito at the end of a three-months’ visit. It is not to be expected that a guest should put up with wheat coffee and biscuits yellow-streaked with saleratus for longer than that. Nick Napoleon, the big Negro man cook, had never been able to make good biscuits. Once before, when Nick was cooking at the Willow Ranch, Sam had been forced to fly from his cuisine, after only a six-weeks’ sojourn.
-On Sam’s face was an expression of sorrow, deepened with regret and slightly tempered by the patient forgiveness of a connoisseur who cannot be understood. But very firmly and inexorably he buckled his saddle-cinches, looped his stake-rope and hung it to his saddle-horn, tied his slicker and coat on the cantle, and looped his quirt on his right wrist. The Merrydews (householders of the Rancho Altito), men, women, children, and servants, vassals, visitors, employés, dogs, and casual callers were grouped in the “gallery” of the ranch house, all with faces set to the tune of melancholy and grief. For, as the coming of Sam Galloway to any ranch, camp, or cabin between the rivers Frio or Bravo del Norte aroused joy, so his departure caused mourning and distress.
+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, employees, 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.
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@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.
+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; mockingbirds at morn and eve competed with but scarce equalled the sweet melodies of his lyre; a perfumed stillness seemed to fill all his world. While old man Ellison was pottering among his flocks of sheep on his mile-an-hour pony, and while the Kiowa took his siesta in the burning sunshine at the end of the kitchen, Sam would lie on his cot thinking what a happy world he lived in, and how kind it is to the ones whose mission in life it is to give entertainment and pleasure. Here he had food and lodging as good as he had ever longed for; absolute immunity from care or exertion or strife; an endless welcome, and a host whose delight at the sixteenth repetition of a song or a story was as keen as at its initial giving. Was there ever a troubadour of old who struck upon as royal a castle in his wanderings? While he lay thus, meditating upon his blessings, little brown cottontails would shyly frolic through the yard; a covey of white-topknotted blue quail would run past, in single file, twenty yards away; a paisano bird, out hunting for tarantulas, would hop upon the fence and salute him with sweeping flourishes of its long tail. In the eighty-acre horse pasture the pony with the Dantesque face grew fat and almost smiling. The troubadour was at the end of his wanderings.
Old man Ellison was his own vaciero. That means that he supplied his sheep camps with wood, water, and rations by his own labours instead of hiring a vaciero. On small ranches it is often done.
One morning he started for the camp of Incarnación Felipe de la Cruz y Monte Piedras (one of his sheep herders) with the week’s usual rations of brown beans, coffee, meal, and sugar. Two miles away on the trail from old Fort Ewing he met, face to face, a terrible being called King James, mounted on a fiery, prancing, Kentucky-bred horse.
King James’s real name was James King; but people reversed it because it seemed to fit him better, and also because it seemed to please his majesty. King James was the biggest cattleman between the Alamo plaza in San Antone and Bill Hopper’s saloon in Brownsville. Also he was the loudest and most offensive bully and braggart and bad man in southwest Texas. And he always made good whenever he bragged; and the more noise he made the more dangerous he was. In the story papers it is always the quiet, mild-mannered man with light blue eyes and a low voice who turns out to be really dangerous; but in real life and in this story such is not the case. Give me my choice between assaulting a large, loudmouthed rough-houser and an inoffensive stranger with blue eyes sitting quietly in a corner, and you will see something doing in the corner every time.
@@ -37,28 +37,28 @@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.
+King James patted the breech of his shotgun warningly.
Old man Ellison rode on to the camp of Incarnación. He sighed many times, and the wrinkles in his face grew deeper. Rumours that the old order was about to change had reached him before. The end of Free Grass was in sight. Other troubles, too, had been accumulating upon his shoulders. His flocks were decreasing instead of growing; the price of wool was declining at every clip; even Bradshaw, the storekeeper at Frio City, at whose store he bought his ranch supplies, was dunning him for his last six months’ bill and threatening to cut him off. And so this last greatest calamity suddenly dealt out to him by the terrible King James was a crusher.
When the old man got back to the ranch at sunset he found Sam Galloway lying on his cot, propped against a roll of blankets and wool sacks, fingering his guitar.
-“Hello, Uncle Ben,” the troubadour called, cheerfully. “You rolled in early this evening. I been trying a new twist on the Spanish Fandango to-day. I just about got it. Here’s how she goes—listen.”
+“Hello, Uncle Ben,” the troubadour called, cheerfully. “You rolled in early this evening. I been trying a new twist on the Spanish Fandango today. I just about got it. Here’s how she goes—listen.”
“That’s fine, that’s mighty fine,” said old man Ellison, sitting on the kitchen step and rubbing his white, Scotch-terrier whiskers. “I reckon you’ve got all the musicians beat east and west, Sam, as far as the roads are cut out.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Sam, reflectively. “But I certainly do get there on variations. I guess I can handle anything in five flats about as well as any of ’em. But you look kind of fagged out, Uncle Ben—ain’t you feeling right well this evening?”
“Little tired; that’s all, Sam. If you ain’t played yourself out, let’s have that Mexican piece that starts off with: ‘Huile, huile, palomita.’ It seems that that song always kind of soothes and comforts me after I’ve been riding far or anything bothers me.”
“Why, seguramente, señor,” said Sam. “I’ll hit her up for you as often as you like. And before I forget about it, Uncle Ben, you want to jerk Bradshaw up about them last hams he sent us. They’re just a little bit strong.”
A man sixty-five years old, living on a sheep ranch and beset by a complication of disasters, cannot successfully and continuously dissemble. Moreover, a troubadour has eyes quick to see unhappiness in others around him—because it disturbs his own ease. So, on the next day, Sam again questioned the old man about his air of sadness and abstraction. Then old man Ellison told him the story of King James’s threats and orders and that pale melancholy and red ruin appeared to have marked him for their own. The troubadour took the news thoughtfully. He had heard much about King James.
On the third day of the seven days of grace allowed him by the autocrat of the range, old man Ellison drove his buckboard to Frio City to fetch some necessary supplies for the ranch. Bradshaw was hard but not implacable. He divided the old man’s order by two, and let him have a little more time. One article secured was a new, fine ham for the pleasure of the troubadour.
-Five miles out of Frio City on his way home the old man met King James riding into town. His majesty could never look anything but fierce and menacing, but to-day his slits of eyes appeared to be a little wider than they usually were.
+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 today his slits of eyes appeared to be a little wider than they usually were.
“Good day,” said the king, gruffly. “I’ve been wanting to see you. I hear it said by a cowman from Sandy yesterday that you was from Jackson County, Mississippi, originally. I want to know if that’s a fact.”
“Born there,” said old man Ellison, “and raised there till I was twenty-one.”
“This man says,” went on King James, “that he thinks you was related to the Jackson County Reeveses. Was he right?”
“Aunt Caroline Reeves,” said the old man, “was my half-sister.”
“She was my aunt,” said King James. “I run away from home when I was sixteen. Now, let’s re-talk over some things that we discussed a few days ago. They call me a bad man; and they’re only half right. There’s plenty of room in my pasture for your bunch of sheep and their increase for a long time to come. Aunt Caroline used to cut out sheep in cake dough and bake ’em for me. You keep your sheep where they are, and use all the range you want. How’s your finances?”
The old man related his woes in detail, dignifiedly, with restraint and candour.
-“She used to smuggle extra grub into my school basket—I’m speaking of Aunt Caroline,” said King James. “I’m going over to Frio City to-day, and I’ll ride back by your ranch to-morrow. I’ll draw $2,000 out of the bank there and bring it over to you; and I’ll tell Bradshaw to let you have everything you want on credit. You are bound to have heard the old saying at home, that the Jackson County Reeveses and Kings would stick closer by each other than chestnut burrs. Well, I’m a King yet whenever I run across a Reeves. So you look out for me along about sundown to-morrow, and don’t worry about nothing. Shouldn’t wonder if the dry spell don’t kill out the young grass.”
+“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 today, and I’ll ride back by your ranch tomorrow. I’ll draw $2,000 out of the bank there and bring it over to you; and I’ll tell Bradshaw to let you have everything you want on credit. You are bound to have heard the old saying at home, that the Jackson County Reeveses and Kings would stick closer by each other than chestnut burrs. Well, I’m a King yet whenever I run across a Reeves. So you look out for me along about sundown tomorrow, 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.”
+“Sam, he catch pony,” said he, “and say he ride to Frio City. What for no can damn sabe. Say he come back tonight. 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.”
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-pride-of-the-cities.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-pride-of-the-cities.xhtml index 4974720..a4bb0bf 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-pride-of-the-cities.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-pride-of-the-cities.xhtml @@ -12,8 +12,8 @@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, 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, daredevil, 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 newfound 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?”
@@ -36,15 +36,15 @@“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—”
+“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 shotgun 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—”
+“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 courthouse 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.
+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 preeminence 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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-sleuths.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-sleuths.xhtml index 5f169d1..35f00ba 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-sleuths.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-sleuths.xhtml @@ -26,7 +26,7 @@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.”
+“My sister,” said he, “is a poor, hardworking, 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.”
@@ -54,7 +54,7 @@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.
+Shamrock Jolnes had a faraway 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.”
diff --git a/src/epub/text/transformation-of-martin-burney.xhtml b/src/epub/text/transformation-of-martin-burney.xhtml index 75714f7..6d7fd6f 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/transformation-of-martin-burney.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/transformation-of-martin-burney.xhtml @@ -9,7 +9,7 @@In behalf of Sir Walter’s soothing plant let us look into the case of Martin Burney.
-They were constructing the Speedway along the west bank of the Harlem River. The grub-boat of Dennis Corrigan, sub-contractor, was moored to a tree on the bank. Twenty-two men belonging to the little green island toiled there at the sinew-cracking labour. One among them, who wrought in the kitchen of the grub-boat was of the race of the Goths. Over them all stood the exorbitant Corrigan, harrying them like the captain of a galley crew. He paid them so little that most of the gang, work as they might, earned little more than food and tobacco; many of them were in debt to him. Corrigan boarded them all in the grub-boat, and gave them good grub, for he got it back in work.
+They were constructing the Speedway along the west bank of the Harlem River. The grub-boat of Dennis Corrigan, subcontractor, was moored to a tree on the bank. Twenty-two men belonging to the little green island toiled there at the sinew-cracking labour. One among them, who wrought in the kitchen of the grub-boat was of the race of the Goths. Over them all stood the exorbitant Corrigan, harrying them like the captain of a galley crew. He paid them so little that most of the gang, work as they might, earned little more than food and tobacco; many of them were in debt to him. Corrigan boarded them all in the grub-boat, and gave them good grub, for he got it back in work.
Martin Burney was furthest behind of all. He was a little man, all muscles and hands and feet, with a gray-red, stubbly beard. He was too light for the work, which would have glutted the capacity of a steam shovel.
The work was hard. Besides that, the banks of the river were humming with mosquitoes. As a child in a dark room fixes his regard on the pale light of a comforting window, these toilers watched the sun that brought around the one hour of the day that tasted less bitter. After the sundown supper they would huddle together on the river bank, and send the mosquitoes whining and eddying back from the malignant puffs of twenty-three reeking pipes. Thus socially banded against the foe, they wrenched out of the hour a few well-smoked drops from the cup of joy.
Each week Burney grew deeper in debt. Corrigan kept a small stock of goods on the boat, which he sold to the men at prices that brought him no loss. Burney was a good customer at the tobacco counter. One sack when he went to work in the morning and one when he came in at night, so much was his account swelled daily. Burney was something of a smoker. Yet it was not true that he ate his meals with a pipe in his mouth, which had been said of him. The little man was not discontented. He had plenty to eat, plenty of tobacco, and a tyrant to curse; so why should not he, an Irishman, be well satisfied?
@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@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?
+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 hardhearted 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?”
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@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.”
+“All aright,” 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.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/ulysses-and-the-dogman.xhtml b/src/epub/text/ulysses-and-the-dogman.xhtml index 18fc549..a1253b5 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/ulysses-and-the-dogman.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/ulysses-and-the-dogman.xhtml @@ -17,14 +17,14 @@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.
+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 cozy 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.
+Their hands clasped in the brief, tight greeting of the West that is death to the handshake 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?”
@@ -54,7 +54,7 @@“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’d like Prairie View now,” said Jim. “The boys from the roundups 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?”
@@ -73,7 +73,7 @@“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.
+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, bowlegged 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.
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.
+Miss Martha was forty, her bankbook 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.
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@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.
+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 daydreams, 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.
@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@“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.”
+“Blumberger’s been buying the bread here. Well, today—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.