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<p>The ambulance removed the unconscious agent of Cupid. William and Violet remained after the crowd had dispersed. They were true Rubberers. People who leave the scene of an accident with the ambulance have not genuine caoutchouc in the cosmogony of their necks. The delicate, fine flavour of the affair is to be had only in the aftertaste—in gloating over the spot, in gazing fixedly at the houses opposite, in hovering there in a dream more exquisite than the opium-eater’s ecstasy. William Pry and Violet Seymour were connoisseurs in casualties. They knew how to extract full enjoyment from every incident.</p>
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<p>Presently they looked at each other. Violet had a brown birthmark on her neck as large as a silver half-dollar. William fixed his eyes upon it. William Pry had inordinately bowed legs. Violet allowed her gaze to linger unswervingly upon them. Face to face they stood thus for moments, each staring at the other. Etiquette would not allow them to speak; but in the Caoutchouc City it is permitted to gaze without stint at the trees in the parks and at the physical blemishes of a fellow creature.</p>
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<p>At length with a sigh they parted. But Cupid had been the driver of the brewery wagon, and the wheel that broke a leg united two fond hearts.</p>
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<p>The next meeting of the hero and heroine was in front of a board fence near Broadway. The day had been a disappointing one. There had been no fights on the street, children had kept from under the wheels of the street cars, cripples and fat men in negligee shirts were scarce; nobody seemed to be inclined to slip on banana peels or fall down with heart disease. Even the sport from Kokomo, Ind., who claims to be a cousin of ex-Mayor Low and scatters nickels from a cab window, had not put in his appearance. There was nothing to stare at, and William Pry had premonitions of ennui.</p>
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<p>The next meeting of the hero and heroine was in front of a board fence near Broadway. The day had been a disappointing one. There had been no fights on the street, children had kept from under the wheels of the street cars, cripples and fat men in negligee shirts were scarce; nobody seemed to be inclined to slip on banana peels or fall down with heart disease. Even the sport from Kokomo, <abbr class="postal">Ind.</abbr>, who claims to be a cousin of ex-Mayor Low and scatters nickels from a cab window, had not put in his appearance. There was nothing to stare at, and William Pry had premonitions of ennui.</p>
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<p>But he saw a large crowd scrambling and pushing excitedly in front of a billboard. Sprinting for it, he knocked down an old woman and a child carrying a bottle of milk, and fought his way like a demon into the mass of spectators. Already in the inner line stood Violet Seymour with one sleeve and two gold fillings gone, a corset steel puncture and a sprained wrist, but happy. She was looking at what there was to see. A man was painting upon the fence: “Eat Bricklets—They Fill Your Face.”</p>
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<p>Violet blushed when she saw William Pry. William jabbed a lady in a black silk raglan in the ribs, kicked a boy in the shin, bit an old gentleman on the left ear and managed to crowd nearer to Violet. They stood for an hour looking at the man paint the letters. Then William’s love could be repressed no longer. He touched her on the arm.</p>
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<p>“Come with me,” he said. “I know where there is a bootblack without an Adam’s apple.”</p>
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="a-conditional-far-don" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<section id="a-conditional-pardon" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">A Conditional Pardon</h2>
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<p>The runaway couple had just returned, and she knelt at the old man’s feet and begged forgiveness.</p>
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<p>“Yes, forgive us,” cried the newly wedded husband. “Forgive me for taking her away from you, but see, I have brought her back.”</p>
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@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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</head>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="a-cosmopolite-in-a-café" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<section id="a-cosmopolite-in-a-cafe" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<h2 epub:type="title">A Cosmopolite in a Café</h2>
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<p>At midnight the café was crowded. By some chance the little table at which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two vacant chairs at it extended their arms with venal hospitality to the influx of patrons.</p>
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<p>And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for I held a theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed. We hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much luggage, but we find travellers instead of cosmopolites.</p>
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<p>At Houston street we got off and walked.</p>
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<p>“We are now on the famous Bowery,” said Rivington; “the Bowery celebrated in song and story.”</p>
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<p>We passed block after block of “gents’ ” furnishing stores—the windows full of shirts with prices attached and cuffs inside. In other windows were neckties and no shirts. People walked up and down the sidewalks.</p>
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<p>“In some ways,” said I, “this reminds me of Kokomono, Ind., during the peach-crating season.”</p>
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<p>“In some ways,” said I, “this reminds me of Kokomono, <abbr class="postal">Ind.</abbr>, during the peach-crating season.”</p>
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<p>Rivington was nettled.</p>
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<p>“Step into one of these saloons or vaudeville shows,” said he, “with a large roll of money, and see how quickly the Bowery will sustain its reputation.”</p>
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<p>“You make impossible conditions,” said I, coldly.</p>
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@ -16,12 +16,12 @@
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<p>In this mouldy old house Katy waxed plump and pert and wholesome and as beautiful and freckled as a tiger lily. She was the good fairy who was guilty of placing the damp clean towels and cracked pitchers of freshly laundered Croton in the lodgers’ rooms.</p>
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<p>You are informed (by virtue of the privileges of astronomical discovery) that the star lodger’s name was <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli. His wearing a yellow tie and paying his rent promptly distinguished him from the other lodgers. His raiment was splendid, his complexion olive, his mustache fierce, his manners a prince’s, his rings and pins as magnificent as those of a traveling dentist.</p>
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<p>He had breakfast served in his room, and he ate it in a red dressing gown with green tassels. He left the house at noon and returned at midnight. Those were mysterious hours, but there was nothing mysterious about <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dempsey’s lodgers except the things that were not mysterious. One of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kipling’s poems is addressed to “Ye who hold the unwritten clue to all save all unwritten things.” The same “readers” are invited to tackle the foregoing assertion.</p>
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<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli, being impressionable and a Latin, fell to conjugating the verb “amare,” with Katy in the objective case, though not because of antipathy. She talked it over with her mother.</p>
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<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli, being impressionable and a Latin, fell to conjugating the verb “<i xml:lang="la">amare</i>,” with Katy in the objective case, though not because of antipathy. She talked it over with her mother.</p>
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<p>“Sure, I like him,” said Katy. “He’s more politeness than twinty candidates for Alderman, and lie makes me feel like a queen whin he walks at me side. But what is he, I dinno? I’ve me suspicions. The marnin’ll coom whin he’ll throt out the picture av his baronial halls and ax to have the week’s rint hung up in the ice chist along wid all the rist of ’em.”</p>
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<p>“ ’Tis thrue,” admitted <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Dempsey, “that he seems to be a sort <span epub:type="z3998:roman">iv</span> a Dago, and too coolchured in his spache for a rale gentleman. But ye may be misjudgin’ him. Ye should niver suspect any wan of bein’ of noble descint that pays cash and pathronizes the laundry rig’lar.”</p>
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<p>“He’s the same thricks of spakin’ and blarneyin’ wid his hands,” sighed Katy, “as the Frinch nobleman at <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Toole’s that ran away wid <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Toole’s Sunday pants and left the photograph of the Bastile, his grandfather’s chat-taw, as security for tin weeks’ rint.”</p>
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<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli continued his calorific wooing. Katy continued to hesitate. One day he asked her out to dine and she felt that a dénouement was in the air. While they are on their way, with Katy in her best muslin, you must take as an entr’acte a brief peep at New York’s Bohemia.</p>
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<p>’Tonio’s restaurant is in Bohemia. The very location of it is secret. If you wish to know where it is ask the first person you meet. He will tell you in a whisper. ’Tonio discountenances custom; he keeps his house-front black and forbidding; he gives you a pretty bad dinner; he locks his door at the dining hour; but he knows spaghetti as the boardinghouse knows cold veal; and—he has deposited many dollars in a certain Banco di—something with many gold vowels in the name on its windows.</p>
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<p>’Tonio’s restaurant is in Bohemia. The very location of it is secret. If you wish to know where it is ask the first person you meet. He will tell you in a whisper. ’Tonio discountenances custom; he keeps his house-front black and forbidding; he gives you a pretty bad dinner; he locks his door at the dining hour; but he knows spaghetti as the boardinghouse knows cold veal; and—he has deposited many dollars in a certain Banco di ⸻ something with many gold vowels in the name on its windows.</p>
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<p>To this restaurant <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli conducted Katy. The house was dark and the shades were lowered; but <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Brunelli touched an electric button by the basement door, and they were admitted.</p>
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<p>Along a long, dark, narrow hallway they went and then through a shining and spotless kitchen that opened directly upon a back yard.</p>
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<p>The walls of houses hemmed three sides of the yard; a high, board fence, surrounded by cats, the other. A wash of clothes was suspended high upon a line stretched from diagonal corners. Those were property clothes, and were never taken in by ’Tonio. They were there that wits with defective pronunciation might make puns in connection with the ragout.</p>
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" epub:prefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/, se: https://standardebooks.org/vocab/1.0" xml:lang="en-US">
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<head>
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<title>A Professional Secret</title>
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<title>A Professional Secret: The Story of a Maid Made Over</title>
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<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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</head>
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@ -25,7 +25,7 @@
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<p>“My name,” said I, glibly, “is Edward Pinkhammer. I am a druggist, and my home is in Cornopolis, Kansas.”</p>
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<p>“I knew you were a druggist,” said my fellow traveler, affably. “I saw the callous spot on your right forefinger where the handle of the pestle rubs. Of course, you are a delegate to our National Convention.”</p>
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<p>“Are all these men druggists?” I asked, wonderingly.</p>
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<p>“They are. This car came through from the West. And they’re your old-time druggists, too—none of your patent tablet-and-granule pharmashootists that use slot machines instead of a prescription desk. We percolate our own paregoric and roll our own pills, and we ain’t above handling a few garden seeds in the spring, and carrying a side line of confectionery and shoes. I tell you Hampinker, I’ve got an idea to spring on this convention—new ideas is what they want. Now, you know the shelf bottles of tartar emetic and Rochelle salt Ant. et Pot. Tart. and Sod. et Pot. Tart.—one’s poison, you know, and the other’s harmless. It’s easy to mistake one label for the other. Where do druggists mostly keep ’em? Why, as far apart as possible, on different shelves. That’s wrong. I say keep ’em side by side, so when you want one you can always compare it with the other and avoid mistakes. Do you catch the idea?”</p>
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<p>“They are. This car came through from the West. And they’re your old-time druggists, too—none of your patent tablet-and-granule pharmashootists that use slot machines instead of a prescription desk. We percolate our own paregoric and roll our own pills, and we ain’t above handling a few garden seeds in the spring, and carrying a side line of confectionery and shoes. I tell you Hampinker, I’ve got an idea to spring on this convention—new ideas is what they want. Now, you know the shelf bottles of tartar emetic and Rochelle salt <abbr>Ant. et Pot. Tart.</abbr> and <abbr>Sod. et Pot. Tart.</abbr>—one’s poison, you know, and the other’s harmless. It’s easy to mistake one label for the other. Where do druggists mostly keep ’em? Why, as far apart as possible, on different shelves. That’s wrong. I say keep ’em side by side, so when you want one you can always compare it with the other and avoid mistakes. Do you catch the idea?”</p>
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<p>“It seems to me a very good one,” I said.</p>
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<p>“All right! When I spring it on the convention you back it up. We’ll make some of these Eastern orange-phosphate-and-massage-cream professors that think they’re the only lozenges in the market look like hypodermic tablets.”</p>
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<p>“If I can be of any aid,” I said, warming, “the two bottles of—er—”</p>
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@ -14,21 +14,20 @@
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<p>When a batch of <abbr>MSS.</abbr> is received the editor stuffs every one of his pockets full of them and distributes them as he goes about during the day. The office employees, the hall porter, the janitor, the elevator man, messenger boys, the waiters at the café where the editor has luncheon, the man at the newsstand where he buys his evening paper, the grocer and milkman, the guard on the 5:30 uptown elevated train, the ticket-chopper at Sixty ⸻th street, the cook and maid at his home—these are the readers who pass upon <abbr>MSS.</abbr> sent in to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone Magazine</i>. If his pockets are not entirely emptied by the time he reaches the bosom of his family the remaining ones are handed over to his wife to read after the baby goes to sleep. A few days later the editor gathers in the <abbr>MSS.</abbr> during his regular rounds and considers the verdict of his assorted readers.</p>
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<p>This system of making up a magazine has been very successful; and the circulation, paced by the advertising rates, is making a wonderful record of speed.</p>
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<p>The <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> Company also publishes books, and its imprint is to be found on several successful works—all recommended, says the editor, by the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone’s</i> army of volunteer readers. Now and then (according to talkative members of the editorial staff) the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> has allowed manuscripts to slip through its fingers on the advice of its heterogeneous readers, that afterward proved to be famous sellers when brought out by other houses.</p>
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<p>For instance (the gossips say), “The Rise and Fall of Silas Latham” was unfavourably passed upon by the elevator-man; the office-boy unanimously rejected “The Boss”; “In the Bishop’s Carriage” was contemptuously looked upon by the streetcar conductor; “The Deliverance” was turned down by a clerk in the subscription department whose wife’s mother had just begun a two-months’ visit at his home; “The Queen’s Quair” came back from the janitor with the comment: “So is the book.”</p>
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<p>For instance (the gossips say), <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">The Rise and Fall of Silas Latham</i> was unfavourably passed upon by the elevator-man; the office-boy unanimously rejected <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">The Boss</i>; <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">In the Bishop’s Carriage</i> was contemptuously looked upon by the streetcar conductor; <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">The Deliverance</i> was turned down by a clerk in the subscription department whose wife’s mother had just begun a two-months’ visit at his home; <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">The Queen’s Quair</i> came back from the janitor with the comment: “So is the book.”</p>
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<p>But nevertheless the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> adheres to its theory and system, and it will never lack volunteer readers; for each one of the widely scattered staff, from the young lady stenographer in the editorial office to the man who shovels in coal (whose adverse decision lost to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> Company the manuscript of “The Under World”), has expectations of becoming editor of the magazine some day.</p>
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<p>This method of the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> was well known to Allen Slayton when he wrote his novelette entitled “Love Is All.” Slayton had hung about the editorial offices of all the magazines so persistently that he was acquainted with the inner workings of everyone in Gotham.</p>
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<p>This method of the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> was well known to Allen Slayton when he wrote his novelette entitled <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">Love Is All</i>. Slayton had hung about the editorial offices of all the magazines so persistently that he was acquainted with the inner workings of everyone in Gotham.</p>
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<p>He knew not only that the editor of the Hearthstone handed his <abbr>MSS.</abbr> around among different types of people for reading, but that the stories of sentimental love-interest went to Miss Puffkin, the editor’s stenographer. Another of the editor’s peculiar customs was to conceal invariably the name of the writer from his readers of <abbr>MSS.</abbr> so that a glittering name might not influence the sincerity of their reports.</p>
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<p>Slayton made “Love Is All” the effort of his life. He gave it six months of the best work of his heart and brain. It was a pure love-story, fine, elevated, romantic, passionate—a prose poem that set the divine blessing of love (I am transposing from the manuscript) high above all earthly gifts and honours, and listed it in the catalogue of heaven’s choicest rewards. Slayton’s literary ambition was intense. He would have sacrificed all other worldly possessions to have gained fame in his chosen art. He would almost have cut off his right hand, or have offered himself to the knife of the appendicitis fancier to have realized his dream of seeing one of his efforts published in the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i>.</p>
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<p>Slayton finished “Love Is All,” and took it to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> in person. The office of the magazine was in a large, conglomerate building, presided under by a janitor.</p>
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<p>Slayton made <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">Love Is All</i> the effort of his life. He gave it six months of the best work of his heart and brain. It was a pure love-story, fine, elevated, romantic, passionate—a prose poem that set the divine blessing of love (I am transposing from the manuscript) high above all earthly gifts and honours, and listed it in the catalogue of heaven’s choicest rewards. Slayton’s literary ambition was intense. He would have sacrificed all other worldly possessions to have gained fame in his chosen art. He would almost have cut off his right hand, or have offered himself to the knife of the appendicitis fancier to have realized his dream of seeing one of his efforts published in the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i>.</p>
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<p>Slayton finished <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">Love Is All</i>, and took it to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> in person. The office of the magazine was in a large, conglomerate building, presided under by a janitor.</p>
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<p>As the writer stepped inside the door on his way to the elevator a potato masher flew through the hall, wrecking Slayton’s hat, and smashing the glass of the door. Closely following in the wake of the utensil flew the janitor, a bulky, unwholesome man, suspenderless and sordid, panic-stricken and breathless. A frowsy, fat woman with flying hair followed the missile. The janitor’s foot slipped on the tiled floor, he fell in a heap with an exclamation of despair. The woman pounced upon him and seized his hair. The man bellowed lustily.</p>
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<p>Her vengeance wreaked, the virago rose and stalked triumphant as Minerva, back to some cryptic domestic retreat at the rear. The janitor got to his feet, blown and humiliated.</p>
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<p>“This is married life,” he said to Slayton, with a certain bruised humour. “That’s the girl I used to lay awake of nights thinking about. Sorry about your hat, mister. Say, don’t snitch to the tenants about this, will yer? I don’t want to lose me job.”</p>
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<p>Slayton took the elevator at the end of the hall and went up to the offices of the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i>. He left the MS. of “Love Is All” with the editor, who agreed to give him an answer as to its availability at the end of a week.</p>
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<p>Slayton took the elevator at the end of the hall and went up to the offices of the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i>. He left the MS. of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">Love Is All</i> with the editor, who agreed to give him an answer as to its availability at the end of a week.</p>
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<p>Slayton formulated his great winning scheme on his way down. It struck him with one brilliant flash, and he could not refrain from admiring his own genius in conceiving the idea. That very night he set about carrying it into execution.</p>
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<p>Miss Puffkin, the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> stenographer, boarded in the same house with the author. She was an oldish, thin, exclusive, languishing, sentimental maid; and Slayton had been introduced to her some time before.</p>
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<p>The writer’s daring and self-sacrificing project was this: He knew that the editor of the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> relied strongly upon Miss Puffkin’s judgment in the manuscript of romantic and sentimental fiction. Her taste represented the immense average of mediocre women who devour novels and stories of that type. The central idea and keynote of “Love Is All” was love at first sight—the enrapturing,</p>
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<p>irresistible, soul-thrilling feeling that compels a man or a woman to recognize his or her spirit-mate as soon as heart speaks to heart. Suppose he should impress this divine truth upon Miss Puffkin personally!—would she not surely endorse her new and rapturous sensations by recommending highly to the editor of the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> the novelette “Love Is All”?</p>
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<p>Slayton thought so. And that night he took Miss Puffkin to the theatre. The next night he made vehement love to her in the dim parlour of the boardinghouse. He quoted freely from “Love Is All”; and he wound up with Miss Puffkin’s head on his shoulder, and visions of literary fame dancing in his head.</p>
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<p>The writer’s daring and self-sacrificing project was this: He knew that the editor of the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> relied strongly upon Miss Puffkin’s judgment in the manuscript of romantic and sentimental fiction. Her taste represented the immense average of mediocre women who devour novels and stories of that type. The central idea and keynote of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">Love Is All</i> was love at first sight—the enrapturing, irresistible, soul-thrilling feeling that compels a man or a woman to recognize his or her spirit-mate as soon as heart speaks to heart. Suppose he should impress this divine truth upon Miss Puffkin personally!—would she not surely endorse her new and rapturous sensations by recommending highly to the editor of the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> the novelette <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">Love Is All</i>?</p>
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<p>Slayton thought so. And that night he took Miss Puffkin to the theatre. The next night he made vehement love to her in the dim parlour of the boardinghouse. He quoted freely from <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">Love Is All</i>; and he wound up with Miss Puffkin’s head on his shoulder, and visions of literary fame dancing in his head.</p>
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<p>But Slayton did not stop at lovemaking. This, he said to himself, was the turning point of his life; and, like a true sportsman, he “went the limit.” On Thursday night he and Miss Puffkin walked over to the Big Church in the Middle of the Block and were married.</p>
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<p>Brave Slayton! Châteaubriand died in a garret, Byron courted a widow, Keats starved to death, Poe mixed his drinks, De Quincey hit the pipe, Ade lived in Chicago, James kept on doing it, Dickens wore white socks, De Maupassant wore a straitjacket, Tom Watson became a Populist, Jeremiah wept, all these authors did these things for the sake of literature, but thou didst cap them all; thou marriedst a wife for to carve for thyself a niche in the temple of fame!</p>
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<p>On Friday morning <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Slayton said she would go over to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Hearthstone</i> office, hand in one or two manuscripts that the editor had given to her to read, and resign her position as stenographer.</p>
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<p>Slayton stood, dazed. “Can you tell me,” he stammered, “whether or no Miss Puff—that is my—I mean Miss Puffkin—handed in a novelette this morning that she had been asked to read?”</p>
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<p>“Sure she did,” answered the office boy wisely. “I heard the old man say that Miss Puffkin said it was a daisy. The name of it was, ‘Married for the Mazuma, or a Working Girl’s Triumph.’ ”</p>
|
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<p>“Say, you!” said the office boy confidentially, “your name’s Slayton, ain’t it? I guess I mixed cases on you without meanin’ to do it. The boss give me some manuscript to hand around the other day and I got the ones for Miss Puffkin and the janitor mixed. I guess it’s all right, though.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And then Slayton looked closer and saw on the cover of his manuscript, under the title “Love Is All,” the janitor’s comment scribbled with a piece of charcoal:</p>
|
||||
<p>And then Slayton looked closer and saw on the cover of his manuscript, under the title <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">Love Is All</i>, the janitor’s comment scribbled with a piece of charcoal:</p>
|
||||
<p>“The ⸻ you say!”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -29,7 +29,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said Joe, reaching for the blue scalloped vegetable dish. “But I hate for you to be giving lessons. It isn’t Art. But you’re a trump and a dear to do it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard,” said Delia.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Magister praised the sky in that sketch I made in the park,” said Joe. “And Tinkle gave me permission to hang two of them in his window. I may sell one if the right kind of a moneyed idiot sees them.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m sure you will,” said Delia, sweetly. “And now let’s be thankful for Gen. Pinkney and this veal roast.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m sure you will,” said Delia, sweetly. “And now let’s be thankful for <abbr>Gen.</abbr> Pinkney and this veal roast.”</p>
|
||||
<p>During all of the next week the Larrabees had an early breakfast. Joe was enthusiastic about some morning-effect sketches he was doing in Central Park, and Delia packed him off breakfasted, coddled, praised and kissed at 7 o’clock. Art is an engaging mistress. It was most times 7 o’clock when he returned in the evening.</p>
|
||||
<p>At the end of the week Delia, sweetly proud but languid, triumphantly tossed three five-dollar bills on the 8×10 (inches) centre table of the 8×10 (feet) flat parlour.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sometimes,” she said, a little wearily, “Clementina tries me. I’m afraid she doesn’t practise enough, and I have to tell her the same things so often. And then she always dresses entirely in white, and that does get monotonous. But Gen. Pinkney is the dearest old man! I wish you could know him, Joe. He comes in sometimes when I am with Clementina at the piano—he is a widower, you know—and stands there pulling his white goatee. ‘And how are the semiquavers and the demisemiquavers progressing?’ he always asks.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -102,7 +102,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Me?” says I. “You ought to know me, Buck. I didn’t know who was buying the stock.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” says Buck. And then he goes through the inside door into the main office and looks at the gang trying to squeeze through the railing. Atterbury and his hat was gone. And Buck makes ’em a short speech.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All you lambs get in line. You’re going to get your wool back. Don’t shove so. Get in a line—a <em>line</em>—not in a pile. Lady, will you please stop bleating? Your money’s waiting for you. Here, sonny, don’t climb over that railing; your dimes are safe. Don’t cry, sis; you ain’t out a cent. Get in <em>line</em>, I say. Here, Pick, come and straighten ’em out and let ’em through and out by the other door.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Buck takes off his coat, pushes his silk hat on the back of his head, and lights up a reina victoria. He sets at the table with the boodle before him, all done up in neat packages. I gets the stockholders strung out and marches ’em, single file, through from the main room; and the reporter man passes ’em out of the side door into the hall again. As they go by, Buck takes up the stock and the Gold Bonds, paying ’em cash, dollar for dollar, the same as they paid in. The shareholders of the Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company can’t hardly believe it. They almost grabs the money out of Buck’s hands. Some of the women keep on crying, for it’s a custom of the sex to cry when they have sorrow, to weep when they have joy, and to shed tears whenever they find themselves without either.</p>
|
||||
<p>Buck takes off his coat, pushes his silk hat on the back of his head, and lights up a <i xml:lang="es">reina victoria</i>. He sets at the table with the boodle before him, all done up in neat packages. I gets the stockholders strung out and marches ’em, single file, through from the main room; and the reporter man passes ’em out of the side door into the hall again. As they go by, Buck takes up the stock and the Gold Bonds, paying ’em cash, dollar for dollar, the same as they paid in. The shareholders of the Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company can’t hardly believe it. They almost grabs the money out of Buck’s hands. Some of the women keep on crying, for it’s a custom of the sex to cry when they have sorrow, to weep when they have joy, and to shed tears whenever they find themselves without either.</p>
|
||||
<p>The old women’s fingers shake when they stuff the skads in the bosom of their rusty dresses. The factory girls just stoop over and flap their dry goods a second, and you hear the elastic go “pop” as the currency goes down in the ladies’ department of the “Old Domestic Lisle-Thread Bank.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Some of the stockholders that had been doing the Jeremiah act the loudest outside had spasms of restored confidence and wanted to leave the money invested. “Salt away that chicken feed in your duds, and skip along,” says Buck. “What business have you got investing in bonds? The teapot or the crack in the wall behind the clock for your hoard of pennies.”</p>
|
||||
<p>When the pretty girl in the red shawl cashes in Buck hands her an extra twenty.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Well, no,” says Silver; “you needn’t back Epidermis to win today. I’ve only been here a month. But I’m ready to begin; and the members of Willie Manhattan’s Sunday School class, each of whom has volunteered to contribute a portion of cuticle toward this rehabilitation, may as well send their photos to the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Evening Daily</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve been studying the town,” says Silver, “and reading the papers every day, and I know it as well as the cat in the City Hall knows an O’Sullivan. People here lie down on the floor and scream and kick when you are the least bit slow about taking money from them. Come up in my room and I’ll tell you. We’ll work the town together, Billy, for the sake of old times.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Silver takes me up in a hotel. He has a quantity of irrelevant objects lying about.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There’s more ways of getting money from these metropolitan hayseeds,” says Silver, “than there is of cooking rice in Charleston, <abbr class="postal">SC</abbr> They’ll bite at anything. The brains of most of ’em commute. The wiser they are in intelligence the less perception of cognizance they have. Why, didn’t a man the other day sell <abbr class="name">J. P.</abbr> Morgan an oil portrait of Rockefeller, <abbr>Jr.</abbr>, for Andrea del Sarto’s celebrated painting of the young Saint John!</p>
|
||||
<p>“There’s more ways of getting money from these metropolitan hayseeds,” says Silver, “than there is of cooking rice in Charleston, <abbr class="postal">SC</abbr>. They’ll bite at anything. The brains of most of ’em commute. The wiser they are in intelligence the less perception of cognizance they have. Why, didn’t a man the other day sell <abbr class="name">J. P.</abbr> Morgan an oil portrait of Rockefeller, <abbr>Jr.</abbr>, for Andrea del Sarto’s celebrated painting of the young Saint John!</p>
|
||||
<p>“You see that bundle of printed stuff in the corner, Billy? That’s gold mining stock. I started out one day to sell that, but I quit it in two hours. Why? Got arrested for blocking the street. People fought to buy it. I sold the policeman a block of it on the way to the station-house, and then I took it off the market. I don’t want people to give me their money. I want some little consideration connected with the transaction to keep my pride from being hurt. I want ’em to guess the missing letter in Chic—go, or draw to a pair of nines before they pay me a cent of money.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now there’s another little scheme that worked so easy I had to quit it. You see that bottle of blue ink on the table? I tattooed an anchor on the back of my hand and went to a bank and told ’em I was Admiral Dewey’s nephew. They offered to cash my draft on him for a thousand, but I didn’t know my uncle’s first name. It shows, though, what an easy town it is. As for burglars, they won’t go in a house now unless there’s a hot supper ready and a few college students to wait on ’em. They’re slugging citizens all over the upper part of the city and I guess, taking the town from end to end, it’s a plain case of assault and Battery.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Monty,” says I, when Silver had slacked, up, “you may have Manhattan correctly discriminated in your perorative, but I doubt it. I’ve only been in town two hours, but it don’t dawn upon me that it’s ours with a cherry in it. There ain’t enough rus in urbe about it to suit me. I’d be a good deal much better satisfied if the citizens had a straw or more in their hair, and run more to velveteen vests and buckeye watch charms. They don’t look easy to me.”</p>
|
||||
@ -40,7 +40,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Before we could answer, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan hammers on the floor with his cane and begins to walk up and down, swearing in a loud tone of voice.</p>
|
||||
<p>“They have been pounding your stocks today on the Street, Pierpont?” asks Klein, smiling.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Stocks! No!” roars <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan. “It’s that picture I sent an agent to Europe to buy. I just thought about it. He cabled me today that it ain’t to be found in all Italy. I’d pay $50,000 tomorrow for that picture—yes, $75,000. I give the agent à la carte in purchasing it. I cannot understand why the art galleries will allow a De Vinchy to—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan,” says klein; “I thought you owned all of the De Vinchy paintings.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan,” says Klein; “I thought you owned all of the De Vinchy paintings.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What is the picture like, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan?” asks Silver. “It must be as big as the side of the Flatiron Building.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m afraid your art education is on the bum, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Silver,” says Morgan. “The picture is 27 inches by 42; and it is called ‘Love’s Idle Hour.’ It represents a number of cloak models doing the two-step on the bank of a purple river. The cablegram said it might have been brought to this country. My collection will never be complete without that picture. Well, so long, gents; us financiers must keep early hours.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan and Klein went away together in a cab. Me and Silver talked about how simple and unsuspecting great people was; and Silver said what a shame it would be to try to rob a man like <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan; and I said I thought it would be rather imprudent, myself. Klein proposes a stroll after dinner; and me and him and Silver walks down toward Seventh Avenue to see the sights. Klein sees a pair of cuff links that instigate his admiration in a pawnshop window, and we all go in while he buys ’em.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The May moon shone bright upon the private boardinghouse of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Murphy. By reference to the almanac a large amount of territory will be discovered upon which its rays also fell. Spring was in its heydey, with hay fever soon to follow. The parks were green with new leaves and buyers for the Western and Southern trade. Flowers and summer-resort agents were blowing; the air and answers to Lawson were growing milder; hand-organs, fountains and pinochle were playing everywhere.</p>
|
||||
<p>The windows of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Murphy’s boardinghouse were open. A group of boarders were seated on the high stoop upon round, flat mats like German pancakes.</p>
|
||||
<p>In one of the second-floor front windows <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat went into <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> McCaskey.</p>
|
||||
<p>At nine <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey came. He carried his coat on his arm and his pipe in his teeth; and he apologised for disturbing the boarders on the steps as he selected spots of stone between them on which to set his size 9, width Ds.</p>
|
||||
<p>At nine <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey came. He carried his coat on his arm and his pipe in his teeth; and he apologised for disturbing the boarders on the steps as he selected spots of stone between them on which to set his size 9, width <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">D</i>s.</p>
|
||||
<p>As he opened the door of his room he received a surprise. Instead of the usual stove-lid or potato-masher for him to dodge, came only words.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> McCaskey reckoned that the benign May moon had softened the breast of his spouse.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I heard ye,” came the oral substitutes for kitchenware. “Ye can apollygise to riffraff of the streets for settin’ yer unhandy feet on the tails of their frocks, but ye’d walk on the neck of yer wife the length of a clothesline without so much as a ‘Kiss me fut,’ and I’m sure it’s that long from rubberin’ out the windy for ye and the victuals cold such as there’s money to buy after drinkin’ up yer wages at Gallegher’s every Saturday evenin’, and the gas man here twice today for his.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -14,13 +14,13 @@
|
||||
<p>Three hours after the presentation ceremonies Cherokee’s claim played out. He had located a pocket instead of a vein. He abandoned it and staked others one by one. Luck had kissed her hand to him. Never afterward did he turn up enough dust in Yellowhammer to pay his bar bill. But his thousand invited guests were mostly prospering, and Cherokee smiled and congratulated them.</p>
|
||||
<p>Yellowhammer was made up of men who took off their hats to a smiling loser; so they invited Cherokee to say what he wanted.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Me?” said Cherokee, “oh, grubstakes will be about the thing. I reckon I’ll prospect along up in the Mariposas. If I strike it up there I will most certainly let you all know about the facts. I never was any hand to hold out cards on my friends.”</p>
|
||||
<p>In May Cherokee packed his burro and turned its thoughtful, mouse-eoloured forehead to the north. Many citizens escorted him to the undefined limits of Yellowhammer and bestowed upon him shouts of commendation and farewells. Five pocket flasks without an air bubble between contents and cork were forced upon him; and he was bidden to consider Yellowhammer in perpetual commission for his bed, bacon and eggs, and hot water for shaving in the event that luck did not see fit to warm her hands by his campfire in the Mariposas.</p>
|
||||
<p>In May Cherokee packed his burro and turned its thoughtful, mouse-coloured forehead to the north. Many citizens escorted him to the undefined limits of Yellowhammer and bestowed upon him shouts of commendation and farewells. Five pocket flasks without an air bubble between contents and cork were forced upon him; and he was bidden to consider Yellowhammer in perpetual commission for his bed, bacon and eggs, and hot water for shaving in the event that luck did not see fit to warm her hands by his campfire in the Mariposas.</p>
|
||||
<p>The name of the father of Yellowhammer was given him by the gold hunters in accordance with their popular system of nomenclature. It was not necessary for a citizen to exhibit his baptismal certificate in order to acquire a cognomen. A man’s name was his personal property. For convenience in calling him up to the bar and in designating him among other blue-shirted bipeds, a temporary appellation, title, or epithet was conferred upon him by the public. Personal peculiarities formed the source of the majority of such informal baptisms. Many were easily dubbed geographically from the regions from which they confessed to have hailed. Some announced themselves to be “Thompsons,” and “Adamses,” and the like, with a brazenness and loudness that cast a cloud upon their titles. A few vaingloriously and shamelessly uncovered their proper and indisputable names. This was held to be unduly arrogant, and did not win popularity. One man who said he was Chesterton <abbr class="name">L. C.</abbr> Belmont, and proved it by letters, was given till sundown to leave the town. Such names as “Shorty,” “Bowlegs,” “Texas,” “Lazy Bill,” “Thirsty Rogers,” “Limping Riley,” “The Judge,” and “California Ed” were in favour. Cherokee derived his title from the fact that he claimed to have lived for a time with that tribe in the Indian Nation.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the twentieth day of December Baldy, the mail rider, brought Yellowhammer a piece of news.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What do I see in Albuquerque,” said Baldy, to the patrons of the bar, “but Cherokee all embellished and festooned up like the Czar of Turkey, and lavishin’ money in bulk. Him and me seen the elephant and the owl, and we had specimens of this seidlitz powder wine; and Cherokee he audits all the bills, <abbr class="initialism eoc">COD</abbr>. His pockets looked like a pool table’s after a fifteen-ball run.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Cherokee must have struck pay ore,” remarked California Ed. “Well, he’s white. I’m much obliged to him for his success.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Seems like Cherokee would ramble down to Yellowhammer and see his friends,” said another, slightly aggrieved. “But that’s the way. Prosperity is the finest cure there is for lost forgetfulness.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You wait,” said Baldy; “I’m comin’ to that. Cherokee strikes a three-eoot vein up in the Mariposas that assays a trip to Europe to the ton, and he closes it out to a syndicate outfit for a hundred thousand hasty dollars in cash. Then he buys himself a baby sealskin overcoat and a red sleigh, and what do you think he takes it in his head to do next?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You wait,” said Baldy; “I’m comin’ to that. Cherokee strikes a three-foot vein up in the Mariposas that assays a trip to Europe to the ton, and he closes it out to a syndicate outfit for a hundred thousand hasty dollars in cash. Then he buys himself a baby sealskin overcoat and a red sleigh, and what do you think he takes it in his head to do next?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Chuck-a-luck,” said Texas, whose ideas of recreation were the gamester’s.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come and Kiss Me, Ma Honey,” sang Shorty, who carried tintypes in his pocket and wore a red necktie while working on his claim.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bought a saloon?” suggested Thirsty Rogers.</p>
|
||||
@ -58,7 +58,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“There’s a woman that’s just took charge of the railroad eatin’ house down at Granite Junction. I hear she’s got a little boy. Maybe she might let him go.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Trinidad pulled up his mules at Granite Junction at five o’clock in the afternoon. The train had just departed with its load of fed and appeased passengers.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the steps of the eating house they found a thin and glowering boy of ten smoking a cigarette. The dining-room had been left in chaos by the peripatetic appetites. A youngish woman reclined, exhausted, in a chair. Her face wore sharp lines of worry. She had once possessed a certain style of beauty that would never wholly leave her and would never wholly return. Trinidad set forth his mission.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’d count it a mercy if you’d take Bobby for a while,” she said, wearily. “I’m on the go from morning till night, and I don’t have time to ‘tend to him. He’s learning bad habits from the men. It’ll be the only chance he’ll have to get any Christmas.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’d count it a mercy if you’d take Bobby for a while,” she said, wearily. “I’m on the go from morning till night, and I don’t have time to ’tend to him. He’s learning bad habits from the men. It’ll be the only chance he’ll have to get any Christmas.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The men went outside and conferred with Bobby. Trinidad pictured the glories of the Christmas tree and presents in lively colours.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And, moreover, my young friend,” added the Judge, “Santa Claus himself will personally distribute the offerings that will typify the gifts conveyed by the shepherds of Bethlehem to—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Aw, come off,” said the boy, squinting his small eyes. “I ain’t no kid. There ain’t any Santa Claus. It’s your folks that buys toys and sneaks ’em in when you’re asleep. And they make marks in the soot in the chimney with the tongs to look like Santa’s sleigh tracks.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -37,7 +37,9 @@
|
||||
<td>5,750.00</td>
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td><b>Total</b></td>
|
||||
<td>
|
||||
<b>Total</b>
|
||||
</td>
|
||||
<td>$5,823.00</td>
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
</table>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -38,9 +38,9 @@
|
||||
<p>And then, as suddenly as the dreadful genie arose in vapor from the copper vase of the fisherman, arose in that room the formidable shape of the New England Conscience. The terrible thing that Medora had done was revealed to her in its full enormity. She had sat in the presence of the ungodly and looked upon the wine both when it was red and effervescent.</p>
|
||||
<p>At midnight she wrote this letter:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:letter">
|
||||
<p epub:type="se:letter.dateline">“<span epub:type="z3998:recipient"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Beriah Hoskins</span>, Harmony, Vermont.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<span epub:type="z3998:salutation">Dear Sir</span>: Henceforth, consider me as dead to you forever. I have loved you too well to blight your career by bringing into it my guilty and sin-stained life. I have succumbed to the insidious wiles of this wicked world and have been drawn into the vortex of Bohemia. There is scarcely any depth of glittering iniquity that I have not sounded. It is hopeless to combat my decision. There is no rising from the depths to which I have sunk. Endeavor to forget me. I am lost forever in the fair but brutal maze of awful Bohemia. Farewell.</p>
|
||||
<p class="signature">Once Your Medora.”</p>
|
||||
<p epub:type="se:letter.dateline"><span epub:type="z3998:recipient"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Beriah Hoskins</span>, Harmony, Vermont.</p>
|
||||
<p><span epub:type="z3998:salutation">Dear Sir</span>: Henceforth, consider me as dead to you forever. I have loved you too well to blight your career by bringing into it my guilty and sin-stained life. I have succumbed to the insidious wiles of this wicked world and have been drawn into the vortex of Bohemia. There is scarcely any depth of glittering iniquity that I have not sounded. It is hopeless to combat my decision. There is no rising from the depths to which I have sunk. Endeavor to forget me. I am lost forever in the fair but brutal maze of awful Bohemia. Farewell.</p>
|
||||
<p class="signature">Once Your Medora.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>On the next day Medora formed her resolutions. Beelzebub, flung from heaven, was no more cast down. Between her and the apple blossoms of Harmony there was a fixed gulf. Flaming cherubim warded her from the gates of her lost paradise. In one evening, by the aid of Binkley and Mumm, Bohemia had gathered her into its awful midst.</p>
|
||||
<p>There remained to her but one thing—a life of brilliant, but irremediable error. Vermont was a shrine that she never would dare to approach again. But she would not sink—there were great and compelling ones in history upon whom she would model her meteoric career—Camille, Lola Montez, Royal Mary, Zaza—such a name as one of these would that of Medora Martin be to future generations.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -16,11 +16,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“What?” asked Webb, with a hopeful look in his pale-blue eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’re a prince-consort.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Go easy,” said Webb. “I never blackguarded you none.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s a title,” explained Baldy, “up among the picture-cards; but it don’t take no tricks. I’ll tell you, Webb. It’s a brand they’re got for certain animals in Europe. Say that you or me or one of them Dutch dukes marries in a royal family. Well, by and by our wife gets to be queen. Are we king? Not in a million years. At the coronation ceremonies we march between little casino and the Ninth Grand Custodian of the Royal Hall Bedchamber. The only use we are is to appear in photographs, and accept the responsibility for the heir-rpparent. That ain’t any square deal. Yes, sir, Webb, you’re a prince-eonsort; and if I was you, I’d start a interregnum or a habeus corpus or somethin’; and I’d be king if I had to turn from the bottom of the deck.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s a title,” explained Baldy, “up among the picture-cards; but it don’t take no tricks. I’ll tell you, Webb. It’s a brand they’re got for certain animals in Europe. Say that you or me or one of them Dutch dukes marries in a royal family. Well, by and by our wife gets to be queen. Are we king? Not in a million years. At the coronation ceremonies we march between little casino and the Ninth Grand Custodian of the Royal Hall Bedchamber. The only use we are is to appear in photographs, and accept the responsibility for the heir-apparent. That ain’t any square deal. Yes, sir, Webb, you’re a prince-consort; and if I was you, I’d start a interregnum or a habeas corpus or somethin’; and I’d be king if I had to turn from the bottom of the deck.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Baldy emptied his glass to the ratification of his Warwick pose.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Baldy,” said Webb, solemnly, “me and you punched cows in the same outfit for years. We been runnin’ on the same range, and ridin’ the same trails since we was boys. I wouldn’t talk about my family affairs to nobody but you. You was line-rider on the Nopalito Ranch when I married Santa McAllister. I was foreman then; but what am I now? I don’t amount to a knot in a stake rope.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“When old McAllister was the cattle king of West Texas,” continued Baldy with Satanic sweetness, “you was some tallow. You had as much to say on the ranch as he did.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I did,” admitted Webb, “up to the time he found out I was tryin’ to get my rope over Santa’s head. Then he kept me out on the range as far from the ranch-house as he could. When the old man died they commenced to call Santa the ‘cattle queen.’ I’m boss of the cattle—that’s all. She ‘tends to all the business; she handles all the money; I can’t sell even a beef-steer to a party of campers, myself. Santa’s the ‘queen’; and I’m <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Nobody.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I did,” admitted Webb, “up to the time he found out I was tryin’ to get my rope over Santa’s head. Then he kept me out on the range as far from the ranch-house as he could. When the old man died they commenced to call Santa the ‘cattle queen.’ I’m boss of the cattle—that’s all. She ’tends to all the business; she handles all the money; I can’t sell even a beef-steer to a party of campers, myself. Santa’s the ‘queen’; and I’m <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Nobody.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’d be king if I was you,” repeated Baldy Woods, the royalist. “When a man marries a queen he ought to grade up with her—on the hoof—dressed—dried—corned—any old way from the chaparral to the packing-gouse. Lots of folks thinks it’s funny, Webb, that you don’t have the say-so on the Nopalito. I ain’t reflectin’ none on Miz Yeager—she’s the finest little lady between the Rio Grande and next Christmas—but a man ought to be boss of his own camp.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The smooth, brown face of Yeager lengthened to a mask of wounded melancholy. With that expression, and his rumpled yellow hair and guileless blue eyes, he might have been likened to a schoolboy whose leadership had been usurped by a youngster of superior strength. But his active and sinewy seventy-two inches, and his girded revolvers forbade the comparison.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What was that you called me, Baldy?” he asked. “What kind of a concert was it?”</p>
|
||||
@ -31,15 +31,15 @@
|
||||
<p>The two compañeros mounted their ponies and trotted away from the little railroad settlement, where they had foregathered in the thirsty morning.</p>
|
||||
<p>At Dry Lake, where their routes diverged, they reined up for a parting cigarette. For miles they had ridden in silence save for the soft drum of the ponies’ hoofs on the matted mesquite grass, and the rattle of the chaparral against their wooden stirrups. But in Texas discourse is seldom continuous. You may fill in a mile, a meal, and a murder between your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis. So, without apology, Webb offered an addendum to the conversation that had begun ten miles away.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You remember, yourself, Baldy, that there was a time when Santa wasn’t quite so independent. You remember the days when old McAllister was keepin’ us apart, and how she used to send me the sign that she wanted to see me? Old man Mac promised to make me look like a colander if I ever come in gunshot of the ranch. You remember the sign she used to send, Baldy—the heart with a cross inside of it?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Me?” cried Baldy, with intoxicated archness. “You old sugar-stealing coyote! Don’t I remember! Why, you dad-blamed old long-horned turtle-eove, the boys in camp was all cognoscious about them hiroglyphs. The ‘gizzard-and-crossbones’ we used to call it. We used to see ’em on truck that was sent out from the ranch. They was marked in charcoal on the sacks of flour and in lead-pencil on the newspapers. I see one of ’em once chalked on the back of a new cook that old man McAllister sent out from the ranch—danged if I didn’t.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Me?” cried Baldy, with intoxicated archness. “You old sugar-stealing coyote! Don’t I remember! Why, you dad-blamed old long-horned turtle-dove, the boys in camp was all cognoscious about them hiroglyphs. The ‘gizzard-and-crossbones’ we used to call it. We used to see ’em on truck that was sent out from the ranch. They was marked in charcoal on the sacks of flour and in lead-pencil on the newspapers. I see one of ’em once chalked on the back of a new cook that old man McAllister sent out from the ranch—danged if I didn’t.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Santa’s father,” explained Webb gently, “got her to promise that she wouldn’t write to me or send me any word. That heart-and-cross sign was her scheme. Whenever she wanted to see me in particular she managed to put that mark on somethin’ at the ranch that she knew I’d see. And I never laid eyes on it but what I burnt the wind for the ranch the same night. I used to see her in that coma mott back of the little horse-corral.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“We knowed it,” chanted Baldy; “but we never let on. We was all for you. We knowed why you always kept that fast paint in camp. And when we see that gizzard-and-crossbones figured out on the truck from the ranch we knowed old Pinto was goin’ to eat up miles that night instead of grass. You remember Scurry—that educated horse-wrangler we had—the college fellow that tangle-foot drove to the range? Whenever Scurry saw that come-meet-your-honey brand on anything from the ranch, he’d wave his hand like that, and say, ‘Our friend Lee Andrews will again swim the Hell’s point tonight.’ ”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The last time Santa sent me the sign,” said Webb, “was once when she was sick. I noticed it as soon as I hit camp, and I galloped Pinto forty mile that night. She wasn’t at the coma mott. I went to the house; and old McAllister met me at the door. ‘Did you come here to get killed?’ says he; ‘I’ll disoblige you for once. I just started a Mexican to bring you. Santa wants you. Go in that room and see her. And then come out here and see me.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Santa was lyin’ in bed pretty sick. But she gives out a kind of a smile, and her hand and mine lock horns, and I sets down by the bed—mud and spurs and chaps and all. ‘I’ve heard you ridin’ across the grass for hours, Webb,’ she says. ‘I was sure you’d come. You saw the sign?’ she whispers. ‘The minute I hit camp,’ says I. ”Twas marked on the bag of potatoes and onions.’ ‘They’re always together,’ says she, soft like—‘always together in life.’ ‘They go well together,’ I says, ‘in a stew.’ ‘I mean hearts and crosses,’ says Santa. ‘Our sign—to love and to suffer—that’s what they mean.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Santa was lyin’ in bed pretty sick. But she gives out a kind of a smile, and her hand and mine lock horns, and I sets down by the bed—mud and spurs and chaps and all. ‘I’ve heard you ridin’ across the grass for hours, Webb,’ she says. ‘I was sure you’d come. You saw the sign?’ she whispers. ‘The minute I hit camp,’ says I. ‘ ’Twas marked on the bag of potatoes and onions.’ ‘They’re always together,’ says she, soft like—‘always together in life.’ ‘They go well together,’ I says, ‘in a stew.’ ‘I mean hearts and crosses,’ says Santa. ‘Our sign—to love and to suffer—that’s what they mean.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“And there was old Doc Musgrove amusin’ himself with whisky and a palm-leaf fan. And by and by Santa goes to sleep; and Doc feels her forehead; and he says to me: ‘You’re not such a bad febrifuge. But you’d better slide out now; for the diagnosis don’t call for you in regular doses. The little lady’ll be all right when she wakes up.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“I seen old McAllister outside. ‘She’s asleep,’ says I. ‘And now you can start in with your colander-work. Take your time; for I left my gun on my saddle-horn.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Old Mac laughs, and he says to me: ‘Pumpin’ lead into the best ranch-hoss in West Texas don’t seem to me good business policy. I don’t know where I could get as good a one. It’s the son-in-law idea, Webb, that makes me admire for to use you as a target. You ain’t my idea for a member of the family. But I can use you on the Nopalito if you’ll keep outside of a radius with the ranch-house in the middle of it. You go upstairs and lay down on a cot, and when you get some sleep we’ll talk it over.’ ”</p>
|
||||
<p>Baldy Woods pulled down his hat, and uncurled his leg from his saddle-eorn. Webb shortened his rein, and his pony danced, anxious to be off. The two men shook hands with Western ceremony.</p>
|
||||
<p>Baldy Woods pulled down his hat, and uncurled his leg from his saddle-horn. Webb shortened his rein, and his pony danced, anxious to be off. The two men shook hands with Western ceremony.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Adios, Baldy,” said Webb, “I’m glad I seen you and had this talk.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With a pounding rush that sounded like the rise of a covey of quail, the riders sped away toward different points of the compass. A hundred yards on his route Baldy reined in on the top of a bare knoll, and emitted a yell. He swayed on his horse; had he been on foot, the earth would have risen and conquered him; but in the saddle he was a master of equilibrium, and laughed at whisky, and despised the centre of gravity.</p>
|
||||
<p>Webb turned in his saddle at the signal.</p>
|
||||
@ -83,8 +83,9 @@
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:letter">
|
||||
<p><span epub:type="z3998:recipient"><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Yeager</span>—The Nopalito Ranch: <span epub:type="z3998:salutation">Dear Madam:</span> I am instructed by the owners of the Rancho Seco to purchase 100 head of two and three-year-old cows of the Sussex breed owned by you. If you can fill the order please deliver the cattle to the bearer; and a check will be forwarded to you at once.</p>
|
||||
<footer>
|
||||
<p epub:type="z3998:valediction">Respectfully</p>,
|
||||
<p class="signature">Webster Yeager, Manager the Rancho Seco.</p>
|
||||
<p epub:type="z3998:valediction">Respectfully,</p>
|
||||
<p class="signature">Webster Yeager,</p>
|
||||
<p>Manager the Rancho Seco.</p>
|
||||
</footer>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>Business is business, even—very scantily did it escape being written “especially”—in a kingdom.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="his-tension" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<section id="his-pension" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">His Pension</h2>
|
||||
<p>“Speaking of the $140,000,000 paid out yearly by the government in pensions,” said a prominent member of Hood’s brigade to the Post’s representative, “I am told that a man in Indiana applied for a pension last month on account of a surgical operation he had performed on him during the war. And what do you suppose that surgical operation was?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Haven’t the least idea.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -11,7 +11,11 @@
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Holding Up a Train</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p><b>Note.</b> 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 anyone to adopt it as a profession. I give the story in almost exactly his own words.</p>
|
||||
<cite><span class="signature"><abbr class="name eoc">O. H.</abbr></span></cite>
|
||||
<cite>
|
||||
<span class="signature">
|
||||
<abbr class="name eoc">O. H.</abbr>
|
||||
</span>
|
||||
</cite>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -13,8 +13,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“It’s an old feud of several years’ standing,” said the old resident, “between the editor and the Judkins family. About every two months they get to shooting at one another. Everybody in town knows about it. This is the way it started. The Judkinses live in another town, and one time a good-looking young lady of the family came here on a visit to a <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Brown. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Brown gave her a big party—a regular high-toned affair, to get the young men acquainted with her. One young fellow fell in love with her, and sent a little poem to our paper, the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Observer</i>. This is the way it read:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:poem">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
To <b>Miss Judkins</b>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
To <b>Miss Judkins</b><br/>
|
||||
(Visiting <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> <abbr class="name">T.</abbr> Montcalm Brown.)
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
@ -42,8 +41,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Then the editor himself got hold of it. He is heavily interested in our new electric light plant, and his blue pencil jumped on the line ‘While bright the gaslight shone’ in a hurry. Later on one of the printers came in and grabbed a lot of copy, and this poem was among it. You know what printers will do if you give them a chance, so here is the way the poem came out in the paper:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:poem">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
To <b>Miss Judkins</b>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
To <b>Miss Judkins</b><br/>
|
||||
(Visiting <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> <abbr class="name">T.</abbr> Montcalm Brown.)
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -12,7 +12,7 @@
|
||||
<p>It took me two weeks to find out what women carry in dress suit cases. And then I began to ask why a mattress is made in two pieces. This serious query was at first received with suspicion because it sounded like a conundrum. I was at last assured that its double form of construction was designed to make lighter the burden of woman, who makes up beds. I was so foolish as to persist, begging to know why, then, they were not made in two equal pieces; whereupon I was shunned.</p>
|
||||
<p>The third draught that I craved from the fount of knowledge was enlightenment concerning the character known as A Man About Town. He was more vague in my mind than a type should be. We must have a concrete idea of anything, even if it be an imaginary idea, before we can comprehend it. Now, I have a mental picture of John Doe that is as clear as a steel engraving. His eyes are weak blue; he wears a brown vest and a shiny black serge coat. He stands always in the sunshine chewing something; and he keeps half-shutting his pocket knife and opening it again with his thumb. And, if the Man Higher Up is ever found, take my assurance for it, he will be a large, pale man with blue wristlets showing under his cuffs, and he will be sitting to have his shoes polished within sound of a bowling alley, and there will be somewhere about him turquoises.</p>
|
||||
<p>But the canvas of my imagination, when it came to limning the Man About Town, was blank. I fancied that he had a detachable sneer (like the smile of the Cheshire cat) and attached cuffs; and that was all. Whereupon I asked a newspaper reporter about him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why,” said he, “a ‘Man About Town’ something between a ‘rounder’ and a ‘clubman.’ He isn’t exactly—well, he fits in between <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fish’s receptions and private boxing bouts. He doesn’t—well, he doesn’t belong either to the Lotus Club or to the Jerry McGeogheghan Galvanised Iron Workers’ Apprentices’ Left Hook Chowder Association. I don’t exactly know how to describe him to you. You’ll see him everywhere there’s anything doing. Yes, I suppose he’s a type. Dress clothes every evening; knows the ropes; calls every policeman and waiter in town by their first names. No; he never travels with the hydrogen derivatives. You generally see him alone or with another man.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why,” said he, “a ‘Man About Town’ is something between a ‘rounder’ and a ‘clubman.’ He isn’t exactly—well, he fits in between <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Fish’s receptions and private boxing bouts. He doesn’t—well, he doesn’t belong either to the Lotus Club or to the Jerry McGeogheghan Galvanised Iron Workers’ Apprentices’ Left Hook Chowder Association. I don’t exactly know how to describe him to you. You’ll see him everywhere there’s anything doing. Yes, I suppose he’s a type. Dress clothes every evening; knows the ropes; calls every policeman and waiter in town by their first names. No; he never travels with the hydrogen derivatives. You generally see him alone or with another man.”</p>
|
||||
<p>My friend the reporter left me, and I wandered further afield. By this time the 3126 electric lights on the Rialto were alight. People passed, but they held me not. Paphian eyes rayed upon me, and left me unscathed. Diners, heimgangers, shop-girls, confidence men, panhandlers, actors, highwaymen, millionaires and outlanders hurried, skipped, strolled, sneaked, swaggered and scurried by me; but I took no note of them. I knew them all; I had read their hearts; they had served. I wanted my Man About Town. He was a type, and to drop him would be an error—a typograph—but no! let us continue.</p>
|
||||
<p>Let us continue with a moral digression. To see a family reading the Sunday paper gratifies. The sections have been separated. Papa is earnestly scanning the page that pictures the young lady exercising before an open window, and bending—but there, there! Mamma is interested in trying to guess the missing letters in the word N_w Yo_k. The oldest girls are eagerly perusing the financial reports, for a certain young man remarked last Sunday night that he had taken a flyer in <abbr class="eoc">Q., X. & Z.</abbr> Willie, the eighteen-year-old son, who attends the New York public school, is absorbed in the weekly article describing how to make over an old skirt, for he hopes to take a prize in sewing on graduation day.</p>
|
||||
<p>Grandma is holding to the comic supplement with a two-hours’ grip; and little Tottie, the baby, is rocking along the best she can with the real estate transfers. This view is intended to be reassuring, for it is desirable that a few lines of this story be skipped. For it introduces strong drink.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="new-york-by-camp-firelight" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<section id="new-york-by-camp-fire-light" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">New York by Camp Fire Light</h2>
|
||||
<p>Away out in the Creek Nation we learned things about New York.</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -12,7 +12,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Young Gillian gave a decidedly amused laugh as he fingered the thin package of new fifty-dollar notes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s such a confoundedly awkward amount,” he explained, genially, to the lawyer. “If it had been ten thousand a fellow might wind up with a lot of fireworks and do himself credit. Even fifty dollars would have been less trouble.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You heard the reading of your uncle’s will,” continued Lawyer Tolman, professionally dry in his tones. “I do not know if you paid much attention to its details. I must remind you of one. You are required to render to us an account of the manner of expenditure of this $1,000 as soon as you have disposed of it. The will stipulates that. I trust that you will so far comply with the late <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gillian’s wishes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You may depend upon it,” said the young man.% politely, “in spite of the extra expense it will entail. I may have to engage a secretary. I was never good at accounts.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You may depend upon it,” said the young man, politely, “in spite of the extra expense it will entail. I may have to engage a secretary. I was never good at accounts.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Gillian went to his club. There he hunted out one whom he called Old Bryson.</p>
|
||||
<p>Old Bryson was calm and forty and sequestered. He was in a corner reading a book, and when he saw Gillian approaching he sighed, laid down his book and took off his glasses.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Old Bryson, wake up,” said Gillian. “I’ve a funny story to tell you.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
|
||||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
|
||||
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" epub:prefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/, se: https://standardebooks.org/vocab/1.0" xml:lang="en-US">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Reconciliation</title>
|
||||
<title>Reconciliation: A One-Act Drama</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
@ -48,7 +48,9 @@
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td epub:type="z3998:persona">He</td>
|
||||
<td><i epub:type="z3998:stage-direction">Smack. Smack!</i></td>
|
||||
<td>
|
||||
<i epub:type="z3998:stage-direction">Smack. Smack!</i>
|
||||
</td>
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td epub:type="z3998:persona">She</td>
|
||||
@ -64,7 +66,9 @@
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td epub:type="z3998:persona">Both</td>
|
||||
<td><i epub:type="z3998:stage-direction">Smack!</i></td>
|
||||
<td>
|
||||
<i epub:type="z3998:stage-direction">Smack!</i>
|
||||
</td>
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td epub:type="z3998:persona">He</td>
|
||||
@ -119,7 +123,9 @@
|
||||
<td><i epub:type="z3998:stage-direction">After reaching the sidewalk</i> I wonder if Colonel Ingersoll is right when he says suicide is no sin!</td>
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
</table>
|
||||
<p><i epub:type="z3998:stage-direction">Curtain</i></p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<i epub:type="z3998:stage-direction">Curtain</i>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -227,7 +227,9 @@
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td/>
|
||||
<td><i epub:type="z3998:stage-direction">Exit <span epub:type="z3998:persona">Miss Lore</span>.</i></td>
|
||||
<td>
|
||||
<i epub:type="z3998:stage-direction">Exit <span epub:type="z3998:persona">Miss Lore</span>.</i>
|
||||
</td>
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
</table>
|
||||
<p>Asbestos Curtain</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -39,7 +39,7 @@
|
||||
<p>But what a witch is Spring! Into the great cold city of stone and iron a message had to be sent. There was none to convey it but the little hardy courier of the fields with his rough green coat and modest air. He is a true soldier of fortune, this <i xml:lang="fr">dent-de-lion</i>—this lion’s tooth, as the French chefs call him. Flowered, he will assist at lovemaking, wreathed in my lady’s nut-brown hair; young and callow and unblossomed, he goes into the boiling pot and delivers the word of his sovereign mistress.</p>
|
||||
<p>By and by Sarah forced back her tears. The cards must be written. But, still in a faint, golden glow from her dandeleonine dream, she fingered the typewriter keys absently for a little while, with her mind and heart in the meadow lane with her young farmer. But soon she came swiftly back to the rockbound lanes of Manhattan, and the typewriter began to rattle and jump like a strikebreaker’s motor car.</p>
|
||||
<p>At 6 o’clock the waiter brought her dinner and carried away the typewritten bill of fare. When Sarah ate she set aside, with a sigh, the dish of dandelions with its crowning ovarious accompaniment. As this dark mass had been transformed from a bright and love-endorsed flower to be an ignominious vegetable, so had her summer hopes wilted and perished. Love may, as Shakespeare said, feed on itself: but Sarah could not bring herself to eat the dandelions that had graced, as ornaments, the first spiritual banquet of her heart’s true affection.</p>
|
||||
<p>At 7:30 the couple in the next room began to quarrel: the man in the room above sought for A on his flute; the gas went a little lower; three coal wagons started to unload—the only sound of which the phonograph is jealous; cats on the back fences slowly retreated toward Mukden. By these signs Sarah knew that it was time for her to read. She got out “The Cloister and the Hearth,” the best non-selling book of the month, settled her feet on her trunk, and began to wander with Gerard.</p>
|
||||
<p>At 7:30 the couple in the next room began to quarrel: the man in the room above sought for <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">A</i> on his flute; the gas went a little lower; three coal wagons started to unload—the only sound of which the phonograph is jealous; cats on the back fences slowly retreated toward Mukden. By these signs Sarah knew that it was time for her to read. She got out <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">The Cloister and the Hearth</i>, the best non-selling book of the month, settled her feet on her trunk, and began to wander with Gerard.</p>
|
||||
<p>The front door bell rang. The landlady answered it. Sarah left Gerard and Denys treed by a bear and listened. Oh, yes; you would, just as she did!</p>
|
||||
<p>And then a strong voice was heard in the hall below, and Sarah jumped for her door, leaving the book on the floor and the first round easily the bear’s. You have guessed it. She reached the top of the stairs just as her farmer came up, three at a jump, and reaped and garnered her, with nothing left for the gleaners.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why haven’t you written—oh, why?” cried Sarah.</p>
|
||||
@ -51,11 +51,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“I dropped into that Home Restaurant next door this evening,” said he. “I don’t care who knows it; I like a dish of some kind of greens at this time of the year. I ran my eye down that nice typewritten bill of fare looking for something in that line. When I got below cabbage I turned my chair over and hollered for the proprietor. He told me where you lived.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I remember,” sighed Sarah, happily. “That was dandelions below cabbage.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’d know that cranky capital <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">W</i> ’way above the line that your typewriter makes anywhere in the world,” said Franklin.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, there’s no W in dandelions,” said Sarah, in surprise.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, there’s no <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">W</i> in dandelions,” said Sarah, in surprise.</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man drew the bill of fare from his pocket, and pointed to a line.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sarah recognised the first card she had typewritten that afternoon. There was still the rayed splotch in the upper right-hand corner where a tear had fallen. But over the spot where one should have read the name of the meadow plant, the clinging memory of their golden blossoms had allowed her fingers to strike strange keys.</p>
|
||||
<p>Between the red cabbage and the stuffed green peppers was the item:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dearest Walter, with hard-boiled egg..”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<b>Dearest Walter, with hard-boiled egg</b>.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Few young couples in the Big-City-of-Bluff began their married existence with greater promise of happiness than did <abbr>Mr.</abbr> and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Claude Turpin. They felt no especial animosity toward each other; they were comfortably established in a handsome apartment house that had a name and accommodations like those of a sleeping-car; they were living as expensively as the couple on the next floor above who had twice their income; and their marriage had occurred on a wager, a ferryboat and first acquaintance, thus securing a sensational newspaper notice with their names attached to pictures of the Queen of Roumania and <abbr class="name">M.</abbr> Santos-Dumont.</p>
|
||||
<p>Turpin’s income was $200 per month. On pay day, after calculating the amounts due for rent, instalments on furniture and piano, gas, and bills owed to the florist, confectioner, milliner, tailor, wine merchant and cab company, the Turpins would find that they still had $200 left to spend. How to do this is one of the secrets of metropolitan life.</p>
|
||||
<p>The domestic life of the Turpins was a beautiful picture to see. But you couldn’t gaze upon it as you could at an oleograph of “Don’t Wake Grandma,” or “Brooklyn by Moonlight.”</p>
|
||||
<p>You had to blink when looked at it; and you heard a fizzing sound just like the machine with a “scope” at the end of it. Yes; there wasn’t much repose about the picture of the Turpins’ domestic life. It was something like “Spearing Salmon in the Columbia River,” or “Japanese Artillery in Action.”</p>
|
||||
<p>You had to blink when you looked at it; and you heard a fizzing sound just like the machine with a “scope” at the end of it. Yes; there wasn’t much repose about the picture of the Turpins’ domestic life. It was something like “Spearing Salmon in the Columbia River,” or “Japanese Artillery in Action.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Every day was just like another; as the days are in New York. In the morning Turpin would take bromo-seltzer, his pocket change from under the clock, his hat, no breakfast and his departure for the office. At noon <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Turpin would get out of bed and humour, put on a kimono, airs, and the water to boil for coffee.</p>
|
||||
<p>Turpin lunched downtown. He came home at 6 to dress for dinner. They always dined out. They strayed from the chophouse to chop-sueydom, from terrace to table d’hôte, from rathskeller to roadhouse, from café to casino, from Maria’s to the Martha Washington. Such is domestic life in the great city. Your vine is the mistletoe; your fig tree bears dates. Your household gods are Mercury and John Howard Payne. For the wedding march you now hear only “Come with the Gypsy Bride.” You rarely dine at the same place twice in succession. You tire of the food; and, besides, you want to give them time for the question of that souvenir silver sugar bowl to blow over.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Turpins were therefore happy. They made many warm and delightful friends, some of whom they remembered the next day. Their home life was an ideal one, according to the rules and regulations of the Book of Bluff.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -43,7 +43,7 @@
|
||||
<p>At 4 o’clock on the afternoon of the third day <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Seeders came in. There were no customers at the tables. At the back end of the restaurant Tildy was refilling the mustard pots and Aileen was quartering pies. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Seeders walked back to where they stood.</p>
|
||||
<p>Tildy looked up and saw him, gasped, and pressed the mustard spoon against her heart. A red hair-bow was in her hair; she wore Venus’s Eighth Avenue badge, the blue bead necklace with the swinging silver symbolic heart.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Seeders was flushed and embarrassed. He plunged one hand into his hip pocket and the other into a fresh pumpkin pie.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Miss Tildy,” said he, “I want to apologise for what I done the other evenin’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t of done it. I wouldn’t do no lady that away when I was sober. So I hope, Miss Tildy, you’ll accept my ‘pology, and believe that I wouldn’t of done it if I’d known what I was doin’ and hadn’t of been drunk.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Miss Tildy,” said he, “I want to apologise for what I done the other evenin’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t of done it. I wouldn’t do no lady that away when I was sober. So I hope, Miss Tildy, you’ll accept my ’pology, and believe that I wouldn’t of done it if I’d known what I was doin’ and hadn’t of been drunk.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With this handsome plea <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Seeders backed away, and departed, feeling that reparation had been made.</p>
|
||||
<p>But behind the convenient screen Tildy had thrown herself flat upon a table among the butter chips and the coffee cups, and was sobbing her heart out—out and back again to the grey plain wherein travel they with blunt noses and hay-coloured hair. From her knot she had torn the red hair-bow and cast it upon the floor. Seeders she despised utterly; she had but taken his kiss as that of a pioneer and prophetic prince who might have set the clocks going and the pages to running in fairyland. But the kiss had been maudlin and unmeant; the court had not stirred at the false alarm; she must forevermore remain the Sleeping Beauty.</p>
|
||||
<p>Yet not all was lost. Aileen’s arm was around her; and Tildy’s red hand groped among the butter chips till it found the warm clasp of her friend’s.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
|
||||
<p>His Highness arose and went to the young man’s bench.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I beg your pardon for addressing you,” he said, “but I perceive that you are disturbed in mind. If it may serve to mitigate the liberty I have taken I will add that I am Prince Michael, heir to the throne of the Electorate of Valleluna. I appear incognito, of course, as you may gather from my appearance. It is a fancy of mine to render aid to others whom I think worthy of it. Perhaps the matter that seems to distress you is one that would more readily yield to our mutual efforts.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man looked up brightly at the Prince. Brightly, but the perpendicular line of perplexity between his brows was not smoothed away. He laughed, and even then it did not. But he accepted the momentary diversion.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Glad to meet you, Prince,” he said, good humouredly. “Yes, I’d say you were incog. all right. Thanks for your offer of assistance—but I don’t see where your butting-in would help things any. It’s a kind of private affair, you know—but thanks all the same.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Glad to meet you, Prince,” he said, good humouredly. “Yes, I’d say you were <abbr>incog.</abbr> all right. Thanks for your offer of assistance—but I don’t see where your butting-in would help things any. It’s a kind of private affair, you know—but thanks all the same.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Prince Michael sat at the young man’s side. He was often rebuffed but never offensively. His courteous manner and words forbade that.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Clocks,” said the Prince, “are shackles on the feet of mankind. I have observed you looking persistently at that clock. Its face is that of a tyrant, its numbers are false as those on a lottery ticket; its hands are those of a bunco steerer, who makes an appointment with you to your ruin. Let me entreat you to throw off its humiliating bonds and to cease to order your affairs by that insensate monitor of brass and steel.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t usually,” said the young man. “I carry a watch except when I’ve got my radiant rags on.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“It is,” said Jeff. “I never told you about the time when me and Andy Tucker was philanthropists, did I? It was eight years ago in Arizona. Andy and me was out in the Gila mountains with a two-horse wagon prospecting for silver. We struck it, and sold out to parties in Tucson for $25,000. They paid our check at the bank in silver—a thousand dollars in a sack. We loaded it in our wagon and drove east a hundred miles before we recovered our presence of intellect. Twenty-five thousand dollars doesn’t sound like so much when you’re reading the annual report of the Pennsylvania Railroad or listening to an actor talking about his salary; but when you can raise up a wagon sheet and kick around your bootheel and hear every one of ’em ring against another it makes you feel like you was a night-and-day bank with the clock striking twelve.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The third day out we drove into one of the most specious and tidy little towns that Nature or Rand and McNally ever turned out. It was in the foothills, and mitigated with trees and flowers and about 2,000 head of cordial and dilatory inhabitants. The town seemed to be called Floresville, and Nature had not contaminated it with many railroads, fleas or Eastern tourists.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Me and Andy deposited our money to the credit of Peters and Tucker in the Esperanza Savings Bank, and got rooms at the Skyview Hotel. After supper we lit up, and sat out on the gallery and smoked. Then was when the philanthropy idea struck me. I suppose every grafter gets it sometime.</p>
|
||||
<p>“When a man swindles the public out of a certain amount he begins to get scared and wants to return part of it. And if you’ll watch close and notice the way his charity runs you’ll see that he tries to restore it to the same people he got it from. As a hydrostatical case, take, let’s say, ‘A.’ ‘A’ made his millions selling oil to poor students who sit up nights studying political economy and methods for regulating the trusts. So, back to the universities and colleges goes his conscience dollars.</p>
|
||||
<p>“When a man swindles the public out of a certain amount he begins to get scared and wants to return part of it. And if you’ll watch close and notice the way his charity runs you’ll see that he tries to restore it to the same people he got it from. As a hydrostatical case, take, let’s say, ‘A.’ ‘A’ made his millions selling oil to poor students who sit up nights studying political economy and methods for regulating the trusts. So, back to the universities and colleges goes his conscience dollars.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There’s ‘B’ got his from the common laboring man that works with his hands and tools. How’s he to get some of the remorse fund back into their overalls?</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Aha!’ says ‘B’, ‘I’ll do it in the name of Education. I’ve skinned the laboring man,’ says he to himself, ‘but, according to the old proverb, “Charity covers a multitude of skins.” ’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So he puts up eighty million dollars’ worth of libraries; and the boys with the dinner pail that builds ’em gets the benefit.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -33,8 +33,7 @@
|
||||
<span class="i1">While thinking of his dearie.”</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>Then Aglaia would run to him laughing, and call:</p>
|
||||
<p>“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.</p>
|
||||
<p>Then Aglaia would run to him laughing, and call: “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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> 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.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -43,7 +43,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“He is in there,” said the lady, pointing to a closed door. “Come. Are you sure that you do not falter or fear?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Me?” said John Hopkins. “Just give me one of those roses in the bunch you are wearing, will you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The lady gave him a red, red rose. John Hopkins kissed it, stuffed it into his vest pocket, opened the door and walked into the room. It was a handsome library, softly but brightly lighted. A young man was there, reading.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Books on etiquette is what you want to study,” said John Hopkins, abruptly. “Get up here, and I’ll give you some lessors. Be rude to a lady, will you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Books on etiquette is what you want to study,” said John Hopkins, abruptly. “Get up here, and I’ll give you some lessons. Be rude to a lady, will you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man looked mildly surprised. Then he arose languidly, dextrously caught the arms of John Hopkins and conducted him irresistibly to the front door of the house.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Beware, Ralph Branscombe,” cried the lady, who had followed, “what you do to the gallant man who has tried to protect me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young man shoved John Hopkins gently out the door and then closed it.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -30,7 +30,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’ve been on one or two false scents, doctor,” he admitted. “I know something of detectives’ methods, and I followed out a few of them, expecting to find Jolnes at the other end. The pistol being a .45-caliber, I thought surely I would find him at work on the clue in Forty-fifth Street. Then, again, I looked for the detective at the Columbia University, as the man’s being shot in the back naturally suggested hazing. But I could not find a trace of him.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“—Nor will you,” I said, emphatically.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not by ordinary methods,” said Knight. “I might walk up and down Broadway for a month without success. But you have aroused my pride, doctor; and if I fail to show you Shamrock Jolnes this day, I promise you I will never kill or rob in your city again.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nonsense, man,” I replied. “When our burglars walk into our houses and politely demand, thousands of dollars’ worth of jewels, and then dine and bang the piano an hour or two before leaving, how do you, a mere murderer, expect to come in contact with the detective that is looking for you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nonsense, man,” I replied. “When our burglars walk into our houses and politely demand thousands of dollars’ worth of jewels, and then dine and bang the piano an hour or two before leaving, how do you, a mere murderer, expect to come in contact with the detective that is looking for you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Avery Knight, sat lost in thought for a while. At length he looked up brightly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Doc,” said he, “I have it. Put on your hat, and come with me. In half an hour I guarantee that you shall stand in the presence of Shamrock Jolnes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I entered a cab with Avery Knight. I did not hear his instructions to the driver, but the vehicle set out at a smart pace up Broadway, turning presently into Fifth Avenue, and proceeding northward again. It was with a rapidly beating heart that I accompanied this wonderful and gifted assassin, whose analytical genius and superb self-confidence had prompted him to make me the tremendous promise of bringing me into the presence of a murderer and the New York detective in pursuit of him simultaneously. Even yet I could not believe it possible.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“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 <abbr class="name">J. P.</abbr> 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.”</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>“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.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“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 <abbr>w.-b.</abbr> and use it? Seems to me it’s as good as the tommyrot you write.”</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
<p>Gen. Marcellus <abbr class="name">B.</abbr> 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.</p>
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
@ -63,7 +63,7 @@
|
||||
<p>As soon as the pursuers observed where their victims had found refuge they suddenly fell back and retreated to a considerable distance.</p>
|
||||
<p>“They are waiting for reinforcements in order to attack us,” said General Ludlow.</p>
|
||||
<p>But the reporter emitted a ringing laugh, and hurled his hat triumphantly into the air.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Guess again,” he shouted, and leaned heavily upon the iron object. “Your old fancy guys or thugs, whatever you call ’em, are up to date. Dear General, this is a pump we’ve stranded upon—same as a cow in New York (hic!) see? Thas’h why the ‘nfuriated smoked guys don’t attack us—see? Sacred an’mal, the pump in N’ York, my dear General!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Guess again,” he shouted, and leaned heavily upon the iron object. “Your old fancy guys or thugs, whatever you call ’em, are up to date. Dear General, this is a pump we’ve stranded upon—same as a cow in New York (hic!) see? Thas’h why the ’nfuriated smoked guys don’t attack us—see? Sacred an’mal, the pump in N’ York, my dear General!”</p>
|
||||
<p>But further down in the shadows of Twenty-eighth Street the marauders were holding a parley.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come on, Reddy,” said one. “Let’s go frisk the old ’un. He’s been showin’ a sparkler as big as a hen egg all around Eighth Avenue for two weeks past.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not on your silhouette,” decided Reddy. “You see ’em rallyin’ round The Pump? They’re friends of Bill’s. Bill won’t stand for nothin’ of this kind in his district since he got that bid to Esopus.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -50,7 +50,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“You have been a good son to me,” continued the Governor, stirring his pipe with the handle of a penholder.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve been your son all my life,” said Billy, darkly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am often gratified,” piped the Governor, betraying a touch of complacency, “by being congratulated upon having a son with such sound and sterling qualities. Especially in this, our native town, is your name linked with mine in the talk of our citizens.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I never knew anyone to forget the vindculum,” murmured Billy, unintelligibly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I never knew anyone to forget the vinculum,” murmured Billy, unintelligibly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Whatever prestige,” pursued the parent, “I may be possessed of, by virtue of my name and services to the state, has been yours to draw upon freely. I have not hesitated to exert it in your behalf whenever opportunity offered. And you have deserved it, William. You’ve been the best of sons. And now this appointment comes to take you away from me. I have but a few years left to live. I am almost dependent upon others now, even in walking and dressing. What would I do without you, my son?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Governor’s pipe dropped to the floor. A tear trickled from his eye. His voice had risen, and crumbled to a weakling falsetto, and ceased. He was an old, old man about to be bereft of a son that cherished him.</p>
|
||||
<p>Billy rose, and laid his hand upon the Governor’s shoulder.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“They’re going to adopt me,” she told the bereft restaurateur. “They’re funny old people, but regular dears. And the swell home they have got! Say, Hinkle, there isn’t any use of talking—I’m on the à la carte to wear brown duds and goggles in a whiz wagon, or marry a duke at least. Still, I somehow hate to break out of the old cage. I’ve been cashiering so long I feel funny doing anything else. I’ll miss joshing the fellows awfully when they line up to pay for the buckwheats and. But I can’t let this chance slide. And they’re awfully good, Hinkle; I know I’ll have a swell time. You owe me nine-sixty-two and a half for the week. Cut out the half if it hurts you, Hinkle.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And they did. Miss Merriam became Miss Rosa McRamsey. And she graced the transition. Beauty is only skin-deep, but the nerves lie very near to the skin. Nerve—but just here will you oblige by perusing again the quotation with which this story begins?</p>
|
||||
<p>The McRamseys poured out money like domestic champagne to polish their adopted one. Milliners, dancing masters and private tutors got it. Miss—er—McRamsey was grateful, loving, and tried to forget Hinkle’s. To give ample credit to the adaptability of the American girl, Hinkle’s did fade from her memory and speech most of the time.</p>
|
||||
<p>Not everyone will remember when the Earl of Hitesbury came to East Seventy ⸻ Street, America. He was only a fair-to-medium earl, without debts, and he created little excitement. But you will surely remember the evening when the Daughters of Benevolence held their bazaar in the—a Hotel. For you were there, and you wrote a note to Fannie on the hotel paper, and mailed it, just to show her that—you did not? Very well; that was the evening the baby was sick, of course.</p>
|
||||
<p>Not everyone will remember when the Earl of Hitesbury came to East Seventy ⸻ Street, America. He was only a fair-to-medium earl, without debts, and he created little excitement. But you will surely remember the evening when the Daughters of Benevolence held their bazaar in the W⸺f-A⸺a Hotel. For you were there, and you wrote a note to Fannie on the hotel paper, and mailed it, just to show her that—you did not? Very well; that was the evening the baby was sick, of course.</p>
|
||||
<p>At the bazaar the McRamseys were prominent. Miss Mer—er—McRamsey was exquisitely beautiful. The Earl of Hitesbury had been very attentive to her since he dropped in to have a look at America. At the charity bazaar the affair was supposed to be going to be pulled off to a finish. An earl is as good as a duke. Better. His standing may be lower, but his outstanding accounts are also lower.</p>
|
||||
<p>Our ex-young-lady-cashier was assigned to a booth. She was expected to sell worthless articles to nobs and snobs at exorbitant prices. The proceeds of the bazaar were to be used for giving the poor children of the slums a Christmas din—Say! did you ever wonder where they get the other 364?</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss McRamsey—beautiful, palpitating, excited, charming, radiant—fluttered about in her booth. An imitation brass network, with a little arched opening, fenced her in.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
|
||||
<p>A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience. Therefore let us have the moral first and be done with it. All is not gold that glitters, but it is a wise child that keeps the stopper in his bottle of testing acid.</p>
|
||||
<p>Where Broadway skirts the corner of the square presided over by George the Veracious is the Little Rialto. Here stand the actors of that quarter, and this is their shibboleth: “ ‘Nit,’ says I to Frohman, ‘you can’t touch me for a kopeck less than two-fifty per,’ and out I walks.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Westward and southward from the Thespian glare are one or two streets where a Spanish-American colony has huddled for a little tropical warmth in the nipping North. The centre of life in this precinct is “El Refugio,” a café and restaurant that caters to the volatile exiles from the South. Up from Chili, Bolivia, Colombia, the rolling republics of Central America and the ireful islands of the Western Indies flit the cloaked and sombreroed señores, who are scattered like burning lava by the political eruptions of their several countries. Hither they come to lay counterplots, to bide their time, to solicit funds, to enlist filibusterers, to smuggle out arms and ammunitions, to play the game at long taw. In El Refugio, they find the atmosphere in which they thrive.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the restaurant of El Refugio are served compounds delightful to the palate of the man from Capricorn or Cancer. Altruism must halt the story thus long. On, diner, weary of the culinary subterfuges of the Gallic chef, hie thee to El Refugio! There only will you find a fish—bluefish, shad or pompano from the Gulf—baked after the Spanish method. Tomatoes give it color, individuality and soul; chili colorado bestows upon it zest, originality and fervor; unknown herbs furnish piquancy and mystery, and—but its crowning glory deserves a new sentence. Around it, above it, beneath it, in its vicinity—but never in it—hovers an ethereal aura, an effluvium so rarefied and delicate that only the Society for Psychical Research could note its origin. Do not say that garlic is in the fish at El Refugio. It is not otherwise than as if the spirit of Garlic, flitting past, has wafted one kiss that lingers in the parsley-crowned dish as haunting as those kisses in life, “by hopeless fancy feigned on lips that are for others.” And then, when Conchito, the waiter, brings you a plate of brown frijoles and a carafe of wine that has never stood still between Oporto and El Refugio—ah, Dios!</p>
|
||||
<p>In the restaurant of El Refugio are served compounds delightful to the palate of the man from Capricorn or Cancer. Altruism must halt the story thus long. On, diner, weary of the culinary subterfuges of the Gallic chef, hie thee to El Refugio! There only will you find a fish—bluefish, shad or pompano from the Gulf—baked after the Spanish method. Tomatoes give it color, individuality and soul; chili colorado bestows upon it zest, originality and fervor; unknown herbs furnish piquancy and mystery, and—but its crowning glory deserves a new sentence. Around it, above it, beneath it, in its vicinity—but never in it—hovers an ethereal aura, an effluvium so rarefied and delicate that only the Society for Psychical Research could note its origin. Do not say that garlic is in the fish at El Refugio. It is not otherwise than as if the spirit of Garlic, flitting past, has wafted one kiss that lingers in the parsley-crowned dish as haunting as those kisses in life, “by hopeless fancy feigned on lips that are for others.” And then, when Conchito, the waiter, brings you a plate of brown frijoles and a carafe of wine that has never stood still between Oporto and El Refugio—ah, <i xml:lang="es">Dios</i>!</p>
|
||||
<p>One day a Hamburg-American liner deposited upon Pier <abbr>No.</abbr> 55 Gen. Perrico Ximenes Villablanca Falcon, a passenger from Cartagena. The General was between a claybank and a bay in complexion, had a 42-inch waist and stood 5 feet 4 with his Du Barry heels. He had the mustache of a shooting-gallery proprietor, he wore the full dress of a Texas congressman and had the important aspect of an uninstructed delegate.</p>
|
||||
<p>Gen. Falcon had enough English under his hat to enable him to inquire his way to the street in which El Refugio stood. When he reached that neighborhood he saw a sign before a respectable redbrick house that read, “Hotel Español.” In the window was a card in Spanish, “Aqui se habla Español.” The General entered, sure of a congenial port.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the cozy office was <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien, the proprietress. She had blond—oh, unimpeachably blond hair. For the rest she was amiability, and ran largely to inches around. Gen. Falcon brushed the floor with his broad-brimmed hat, and emitted a quantity of Spanish, the syllables sounding like firecrackers gently popping their way down the string of a bunch.</p>
|
||||
@ -19,20 +19,20 @@
|
||||
<p>“I am a Colombian, madam,” said the General, proudly. “I speak the Spanish. The advisement in your window say the Spanish he is spoken here. How is that?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, you’ve been speaking it, ain’t you?” said the madam. “I’m sure I can’t.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At the Hotel Español General Falcon engaged rooms and established himself. At dusk he sauntered out upon the streets to view the wonders of this roaring city of the North. As he walked he thought of the wonderful golden hair of <abbr>Mme.</abbr> O’Brien. “It is here,” said the General to himself, no doubt in his own language, “that one shall find the most beautiful señoras in the world. I have not in my Colombia viewed among our beauties one so fair. But no! It is not for the General Falcon to think of beauty. It is my country that claims my devotion.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At the corner of Broadway and the Little Rialto the General became involved. The street cars bewildered him, and the fender of one upset him against a pushcart laden with oranges. A cab driver missed him an inch with a hub, and poured barbarous execrations upon his head. He scrambled to the sidewalk and skipped again in terror when the whistle of a peanut-roaster puffed a hot scream in his ear. “Válgame Dios! What devil’s city is this?”</p>
|
||||
<p>At the corner of Broadway and the Little Rialto the General became involved. The street cars bewildered him, and the fender of one upset him against a pushcart laden with oranges. A cab driver missed him an inch with a hub, and poured barbarous execrations upon his head. He scrambled to the sidewalk and skipped again in terror when the whistle of a peanut-roaster puffed a hot scream in his ear. “<i xml:lang="es">Válgame Dios!</i> What devil’s city is this?”</p>
|
||||
<p>As the General fluttered out of the streamers of passers like a wounded snipe he was marked simultaneously as game by two hunters. One was “Bully” McGuire, whose system of sport required the use of a strong arm and the misuse of an eight-inch piece of lead pipe. The other Nimrod of the asphalt was “Spider” Kelley, a sportsman with more refined methods.</p>
|
||||
<p>In pouncing upon their self-evident prey, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley was a shade the quicker. His elbow fended accurately the onslaught of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> McGuire.</p>
|
||||
<p>“G’wan!” he commanded harshly. “I saw it first.” McGuire slunk away, awed by superior intelligence.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Pardon me,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley, to the General, “but you got balled up in the shuffle, didn’t you? Let me assist you.” He picked up the General’s hat and brushed the dust from it.</p>
|
||||
<p>The ways of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley could not but succeed. The General, bewildered and dismayed by the resounding streets, welcomed his deliverer as a caballero with a most disinterested heart.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have a desire,” said the General, “to return to the hotel of O’Brien, in which I am stop. Caramba! señor, there is a loudness and rapidness of going and coming in the city of this Nueva York.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have a desire,” said the General, “to return to the hotel of O’Brien, in which I am stop. Caramba! señor, there is a loudness and rapidness of going and coming in the city of this <i xml:lang="es">Nueva York</i>.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley’s politeness would not suffer the distinguished Colombian to brave the dangers of the return unaccompanied. At the door of the Hotel Español they paused. A little lower down on the opposite side of the street shone the modest illuminated sign of El Refugio. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley, to whom few streets were unfamiliar, knew the place exteriorly as a “Dago joint.” All foreigners <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley classed under the two heads of “Dagoes” and Frenchmen. He proposed to the General that they repair thither and substantiate their acquaintance with a liquid foundation.</p>
|
||||
<p>An hour later found General Falcon and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley seated at a table in the conspirator’s corner of El Refugio. Bottles and glasses were between them. For the tenth time the General confided the secret of his mission to the Estados Unidos. He was here, he declared, to purchase arms—2,000 stands of Winchester rifles—for the Colombian revolutionists. He had drafts in his pocket drawn by the Cartagena Bank on its New York correspondent for $25,000. At other tables other revolutionists were shouting their political secrets to their fellow-plotters; but none was as loud as the General. He pounded the table; he hallooed for some wine; he roared to his friend that his errand was a secret one, and not to be hinted at to a living soul. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley himself was stirred to sympathetic enthusiasm. He grasped the General’s hand across the table.</p>
|
||||
<p>An hour later found General Falcon and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley seated at a table in the conspirator’s corner of El Refugio. Bottles and glasses were between them. For the tenth time the General confided the secret of his mission to the <i xml:lang="es">Estados Unidos</i>. He was here, he declared, to purchase arms—2,000 stands of Winchester rifles—for the Colombian revolutionists. He had drafts in his pocket drawn by the Cartagena Bank on its New York correspondent for $25,000. At other tables other revolutionists were shouting their political secrets to their fellow-plotters; but none was as loud as the General. He pounded the table; he hallooed for some wine; he roared to his friend that his errand was a secret one, and not to be hinted at to a living soul. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley himself was stirred to sympathetic enthusiasm. He grasped the General’s hand across the table.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Monseer,” he said, earnestly, “I don’t know where this country of yours is, but I’m for it. I guess it must be a branch of the United States, though, for the poetry guys and the schoolmarms call us Columbia, too, sometimes. It’s a lucky thing for you that you butted into me tonight. I’m the only man in New York that can get this gun deal through for you. The Secretary of War of the United States is me best friend. He’s in the city now, and I’ll see him for you tomorrow. In the meantime, monseer, you keep them drafts tight in your inside pocket. I’ll call for you tomorrow, and take you to see him. Say! that ain’t the District of Columbia you’re talking about, is it?” concluded <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley, with a sudden qualm. “You can’t capture that with no 2,000 guns—it’s been tried with more.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No, no, no!” exclaimed the General. “It is the Republic of Colombia—it is a g-r-reat republic on the top side of America of the South. Yes. Yes.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley, reassured. “Now suppose we trek along home and go by-by. I’ll write to the Secretary tonight and make a date with him. It’s a ticklish job to get guns out of New York. McClusky himself can’t do it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>They parted at the door of the Hotel Español. The General rolled his eyes at the moon and sighed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is a great country, your Nueva York,” he said. “Truly the cars in the streets devastate one, and the engine that cooks the nuts terribly makes a squeak in the ear. But, ah, Señor Kelley—the señoras with hair of much goldness, and admirable fatness—they are magnificas! Muy magnificas!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is a great country, your <i xml:lang="es">Nueva York</i>,” he said. “Truly the cars in the streets devastate one, and the engine that cooks the nuts terribly makes a squeak in the ear. But, ah, Señor Kelley—the señoras with hair of much goldness, and admirable fatness—they are <i xml:lang="es">magnificas</i>! <i xml:lang="es">Muy magnificas!</i>”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kelley went to the nearest telephone booth and called up McCrary’s café, far up on Broadway. He asked for Jimmy Dunn.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Is that Jimmy Dunn?” asked Kelley.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes,” came the answer.</p>
|
||||
@ -44,13 +44,13 @@
|
||||
<p>In due time Kelley called at the Hotel Español for the General. He found the wily warrior engaged in delectable conversation with <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The Secretary of War is waitin’ for us,” said Kelley.</p>
|
||||
<p>The General tore himself away with an effort.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ay, señor,” he said, with a sigh, “duty makes a call. But, señor, the señoras of your Estados Unidos—how beauties! For exemplification, take you la Madame O’Brien—que magnifica! She is one goddess—one Juno—what you call one ox-eyed Juno.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ay, señor,” he said, with a sigh, “duty makes a call. But, señor, the señoras of your <i xml:lang="es">Estados Unidos</i>—how beauties! For exemplification, take you la Madame O’Brien—<i xml:lang="es">que magnifica</i>! She is one goddess—one Juno—what you call one ox-eyed Juno.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Now <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley was a wit; and better men have been shriveled by the fire of their own imagination.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sure!” he said with a grin; “but you mean a peroxide Juno, don’t you?”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien heard, and lifted an auriferous head. Her businesslike eye rested for an instant upon the disappearing form of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley. Except in street cars one should never be unnecessarily rude to a lady.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the gallant Colombian and his escort arrived at the Broadway address, they were held in an anteroom for half an hour, and then admitted into a well-equipped office where a distinguished looking man, with a smooth face, wrote at a desk. General Falcon was presented to the Secretary of War of the United States, and his mission made known by his old friend, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah—Colombia!” said the Secretary, significantly, when he was made to understand; “I’m afraid there will be a little difficulty in that case. The President and I differ in our sympathies there. He prefers the established government, while I—” the secretary gave the General a mysterious but encouraging smile. “You, of course, know, General Falcon, that since the Tammany war, an act of Congress has been passed requiring all manufactured arms and ammunition exported from this country to pass through the War Department. Now, if I can do anything for you I will be glad to do so to oblige my old friend, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kelley. But it must be in absolute secrecy, as the President, as I have said, does not regard favorably the efforts of your revolutionary party in Colombia. I will have my orderly bring a list of the available arms now in the warehouse.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Secretary struck a bell, and an orderly with the letters <abbr>A.D.T.</abbr> on his cap stepped promptly into the room.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Secretary struck a bell, and an orderly with the letters <abbr>A. D. T.</abbr> on his cap stepped promptly into the room.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bring me Schedule B of the small arms inventory,” said the Secretary.</p>
|
||||
<p>The orderly quickly returned with a printed paper. The Secretary studied it closely.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I find,” he said, “that in Warehouse 9, of Government stores, there is shipment of 2,000 stands of Winchester rifles that were ordered by the Sultan of Morocco, who forgot to send the cash with his order. Our rule is that legal-tender money must be paid down at the time of purchase. My dear Kelley, your friend, General Falcon, shall have this lot of arms, if he desires it, at the manufacturer’s price. And you will forgive me, I am sure, if I curtail our interview. I am expecting the Japanese Minister and Charles Murphy every moment!”</p>
|
||||
@ -59,9 +59,9 @@
|
||||
<p>“<i xml:lang="es">Sangre de mi vida!</i>” exclaimed the General. “Impossible it is that you speak of my good friend, Señor Kelley.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come into the summer garden,” said <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien. “I want to have a talk with you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Let us suppose that an hour has elapsed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And you say,” said the General, “that for the sum of $18,000 can be purchased the furnishment of the house and the lease of one year with this garden so lovely—so resembling unto the patios of my cara Colombia?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“And you say,” said the General, “that for the sum of $18,000 can be purchased the furnishment of the house and the lease of one year with this garden so lovely—so resembling unto the patios of my care Colombia?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“And dirt cheap at that,” sighed the lady.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah, Dios!” breathed General Falcon. “What to me is war and politics? This spot is one paradise. My country it have other brave heroes to continue the fighting. What to me should be glory and the shooting of mans? Ah! no. It is here I have found one angel. Let us buy the Hotel Español and you shall be mine, and the money shall not be waste on guns.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<i xml:lang="es">Ah, Dios!</i>” breathed General Falcon. “What to me is war and politics? This spot is one paradise. My country it have other brave heroes to continue the fighting. What to me should be glory and the shooting of mans? Ah! no. It is here I have found one angel. Let us buy the Hotel Español and you shall be mine, and the money shall not be waste on guns.”</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> O’Brien rested her blond pompadour against the shoulder of the Colombian patriot.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, señor,” she sighed, happily, “ain’t you terrible!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Two days later was the time appointed for the delivery of the arms to the General. The boxes of supposed rifles were stacked in the rented warehouse, and the Secretary of War sat upon them, waiting for his friend Kelley to fetch the victim.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
25
src/epub/text/the-good-boy.xhtml
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|
||||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
|
||||
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" epub:prefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/, se: https://standardebooks.org/vocab/1.0" xml:lang="en-US">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>The Good Boy: (Mostly in Words of One Syllable)</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
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|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-good-boy" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">
|
||||
<span>The Good Boy</span>
|
||||
<span epub:type="subtitle">(Mostly in Words of One Syllable)</span>
|
||||
</h2>
|
||||
<p>James was a good boy.</p>
|
||||
<p>He would not tease his cat or his dog.</p>
|
||||
<p>He went to school.</p>
|
||||
<p>One day as he went home he saw a lady cross the street, and some rude boys tried to guy her.</p>
|
||||
<p>James took the lady by the hand and led her to a safe place.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, fie!” he said to the boys. “For shame, to talk so to the nice lady. A good, kind boy will be mild and love to help the old.”</p>
|
||||
<p>At this the boys did rail and laugh.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, boys,” said James, “do not be rude and speak so harsh. At home, I have a dear old grandma, and this kind lady may be one, too.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The lady took James by the ear and said: “You contemptible little rapscallion. I’ve a good mind to spank you until you can’t navigate. Grandmother, indeed! I’m only twenty-nine my last birthday, and I don’t feel a day over eighteen. Now, you clear out, or I’ll slap you good.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
|
||||
<p>In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our familiar curb, a cabdriver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of rain—and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.</p>
|
||||
<p>Rudolf Steiner was a true adventurer. Few were the evenings on which he did not go forth from his hall bedchamber in search of the unexpected and the egregious. The most interesting thing in life seemed to him to be what might lie just around the next corner. Sometimes his willingness to tempt fate led him into strange paths. Twice he had spent the night in a station-house; again and again he had found himself the dupe of ingenious and mercenary tricksters; his watch and money had been the price of one flattering allurement. But with undiminished ardour he picked up every glove cast before him into the merry lists of adventure.</p>
|
||||
<p>One evening Rudolf was strolling along a crosstown street in the older central part of the city. Two streams of people filled the sidewalks—the home-hurrying, and that restless contingent that abandons home for the specious welcome of the thousand-candle-power table d’hôte.</p>
|
||||
<p>The young adventurer was of pleasing presence, and moved serenely and watchfully. By daylight he was a salesman in a piano store. He wore his tie drawn through a topaz ring instead of fastened with a stick pin; and once he had written to the editor of a magazine that “Junie’s Love Test” by Miss Libbey, had been the book that had most influenced his life.</p>
|
||||
<p>The young adventurer was of pleasing presence, and moved serenely and watchfully. By daylight he was a salesman in a piano store. He wore his tie drawn through a topaz ring instead of fastened with a stick pin; and once he had written to the editor of a magazine that <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">Junie’s Love Test</i> by Miss Libbey, had been the book that had most influenced his life.</p>
|
||||
<p>During his walk a violent chattering of teeth in a glass case on the sidewalk seemed at first to draw his attention (with a qualm), to a restaurant before which it was set; but a second glance revealed the electric letters of a dentist’s sign high above the next door. A giant negro, fantastically dressed in a red embroidered coat, yellow trousers and a military cap, discreetly distributed cards to those of the passing crowd who consented to take them.</p>
|
||||
<p>This mode of dentistic advertising was a common sight to Rudolf. Usually he passed the dispenser of the dentist’s cards without reducing his store; but tonight the African slipped one into his hand so deftly that he retained it there smiling a little at the successful feat.</p>
|
||||
<p>When he had travelled a few yards further he glanced at the card indifferently. Surprised, he turned it over and looked again with interest. One side of the card was blank; on the other was written in ink three words, “The Green Door.” And then Rudolf saw, three steps in front of him, a man throw down the card the negro had given him as he passed. Rudolf picked it up. It was printed with the dentist’s name and address and the usual schedule of “plate work” and “bridge work” and “crowns,” and specious promises of “painless” operations.</p>
|
||||
@ -35,7 +35,7 @@
|
||||
<p>He dashed out the green door and down the stairs. In twenty minutes he was back again, kicking at the door with his toe for her to open it. With both arms he hugged an array of wares from the grocery and the restaurant. On the table he laid them—bread and butter, cold meats, cakes, pies, pickles, oysters, a roasted chicken, a bottle of milk and one of red-hot tea.</p>
|
||||
<p>“This is ridiculous,” said Rudolf, blusteringly, “to go without eating. You must quit making election bets of this kind. Supper is ready.” He helped her to a chair at the table and asked: “Is there a cup for the tea?” “On the shelf by the window,” she answered. When he turned again with the cup he saw her, with eyes shining rapturously, beginning upon a huge Dill pickle that she had rooted out from the paper bags with a woman’s unerring instinct. He took it from her, laughingly, and poured the cup full of milk. “Drink that first” he ordered, “and then you shall have some tea, and then a chicken wing. If you are very good you shall have a pickle tomorrow. And now, if you’ll allow me to be your guest we’ll have supper.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl’s eyes and brought back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of dainty ferocity like some starved wild animal. She seemed to regard the young man’s presence and the aid he had rendered her as a natural thing—not as though she undervalued the conventions; but as one whose great stress gave her the right to put aside the artificial for the human. But gradually, with the return of strength and comfort, came also a sense of the little conventions that belong; and she began to tell him her little story. It was one of a thousand such as the city yawns at every day—the shop girl’s story of insufficient wages, further reduced by “fines” that go to swell the store’s profits; of time lost through illness; and then of lost positions, lost hope, and—the knock of the adventurer upon the green door.</p>
|
||||
<p>But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the crisis in “Junie’s Love Test.”</p>
|
||||
<p>But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">Iliad</i> or the crisis in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book">Junie’s Love Test</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>“To think of you going through all that,” he exclaimed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It was something fierce,” said the girl, solemnly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And you have no relatives or friends in the city?”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -9,7 +9,7 @@
|
||||
<section id="the-lady-higher-up" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Lady Higher Up</h2>
|
||||
<p>New York City, they said, was deserted; and that accounted, doubtless, for the sounds carrying so far in the tranquil summer air. The breeze was south-by-southwest; the hour was midnight; the theme was a bit of feminine gossip by wireless mythology. Three hundred and sixty-five feet above the heated asphalt the tiptoeing symbolic deity on Manhattan pointed her vacillating arrow straight, for the time, in the direction of her exalted sister on Liberty Island. The lights of the great Garden were out; the benches in the Square were filled with sleepers in postures so strange that beside them the writhing figures in Dore’s illustrations of the Inferno would have straightened into tailor’s dummies. The statue of Diana on the tower of the Garden—its constancy shown by its weathercock ways, its innocence by the coating of gold that it has acquired, its devotion to style by its single, graceful flying scarf, its candour and artlessness by its habit of ever drawing the long bow, its metropolitanism by its posture of swift flight to catch a Harlem train—remained poised with its arrow pointed across the upper bay. Had that arrow sped truly and horizontally it would have passed fifty feet above the head of the heroic matron whose duty it is to offer a cast-ironical welcome to the oppressed of other lands.</p>
|
||||
<p>Seaward this lady gazed, and the furrows between steamship lines began to cut steerage rates. The translators, too, have put an extra burden upon her. “Liberty Lighting the World” (as her creator christened her) would have had a no more responsible duty, except for the size of it, than that of an electrician or a Standard Oil magnate. But to “enlighten” the world (as our learned civic guardians “Englished” it) requires abler qualities. And so poor Liberty, instead of having a sinecure as a mere illuminator, must be converted into a Chautauqua schoolma’am, with the oceans for her field instead of the placid, classic lake. With a fireless torch and an empty head must she dispel the shadows of the world and teach it its <i epub:type="grapheme">A</i>, <i epub:type="grapheme">B</i>, <i epub:type="grapheme">C</i>’s.</p>
|
||||
<p>Seaward this lady gazed, and the furrows between steamship lines began to cut steerage rates. The translators, too, have put an extra burden upon her. “Liberty Lighting the World” (as her creator christened her) would have had a no more responsible duty, except for the size of it, than that of an electrician or a Standard Oil magnate. But to “enlighten” the world (as our learned civic guardians “Englished” it) requires abler qualities. And so poor Liberty, instead of having a sinecure as a mere illuminator, must be converted into a Chautauqua schoolma’am, with the oceans for her field instead of the placid, classic lake. With a fireless torch and an empty head must she dispel the shadows of the world and teach it its A, B, C’s.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah, there, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Liberty!” called a clear, rollicking soprano voice through the still, midnight air.</p>
|
||||
<p>“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.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“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.”</p>
|
||||
@ -21,7 +21,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ’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.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’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.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“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 <abbr>Mr.</abbr> <abbr>St.</abbr> 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, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Liberty?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“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.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“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.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The golden statue veered in the changing breeze, menacing many points on the horizon with its aureate arrow.</p>
|
||||
<p>“So long, Aunt Liberty,” sweetly called Diana of the Tower. “Some night, when the wind’s right. I’ll call you up again. But—say! you haven’t got such a fierce kick coming about your job. I’ve kept a pretty good watch on the island of Manhattan since I’ve been up here. That’s a pretty sick-looking bunch of liberty chasers they dump down at your end of it; but they don’t all stay that way. Every little while up here I see guys signing checks and voting the right ticket, and encouraging the arts and taking a bath every morning, that was shoved ashore by a dock labourer born in the United States who never earned over forty dollars a month. Don’t run down your job, Aunt Liberty; you’re all right, all right.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -42,7 +42,7 @@
|
||||
<p>With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for a many-hours deep slumber, and the bloodthirsty parent waiting, armed and forewarned, Ikey felt that his rival was close, indeed, upon discomfiture.</p>
|
||||
<p>All night in the Blue Light Drug Store he waited at his duties for chance news of the tragedy, but none came.</p>
|
||||
<p>At eight o’clock in the morning the day clerk arrived and Ikey started hurriedly for <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Riddle’s to learn the outcome. And, lo! as he stepped out of the store who but Chunk McGowan sprang from a passing street car and grasped his hand—Chunk McGowan with a victor’s smile and flushed with joy.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Pulled it off,” said Chunk with Elysium in his grin. “Rosy hit the fire-escape on time to a second, and we was under the wire at the Reverend’s at 9:3O¼. She’s up at the flat—she cooked eggs this mornin’ in a blue kimono—Lord! how lucky I am! You must pace up some day, Ikey, and feed with us. I’ve got a job down near the bridge, and that’s where I’m heading for now.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Pulled it off,” said Chunk with Elysium in his grin. “Rosy hit the fire-escape on time to a second, and we was under the wire at the Reverend’s at 9:30¼. She’s up at the flat—she cooked eggs this mornin’ in a blue kimono—Lord! how lucky I am! You must pace up some day, Ikey, and feed with us. I’ve got a job down near the bridge, and that’s where I’m heading for now.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The—the—powder?” stammered Ikey.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, that stuff you gave me!” said Chunk, broadening his grin; “well, it was this way. I sat down at the supper table last night at Riddle’s, and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, ‘Chunk, if you get the girl get her on the square—don’t try any hocus-pocus with a thoroughbred like her.’ And I keeps the paper you give me in my pocket. And then my lamps fall on another party present, who, I says to myself, is failin’ in a proper affection toward his comin’ son-in-law, so I watches my chance and dumps that powder in old man Riddle’s coffee—see?”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -14,7 +14,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Chicago seemed to swoop down upon him with a breezy suggestion of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Partington, plumes and patchouli, and to disturb his rest with a soaring and beautiful song of future promise. But Raggles would awake to a sense of shivering cold and a haunting impression of ideals lost in a depressing aura of potato salad and fish.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus Chicago affected him. Perhaps there is a vagueness and inaccuracy in the description; but that is Raggles’s fault. He should have recorded his sensations in magazine poems.</p>
|
||||
<p>Pittsburg impressed him as the play of “Othello” performed in the Russian language in a railroad station by Dockstader’s minstrels. A royal and generous lady this Pittsburg, though—homely, hearty, with flushed face, washing the dishes in a silk dress and white kid slippers, and bidding Raggles sit before the roaring fireplace and drink champagne with his pigs’ feet and fried potatoes.</p>
|
||||
<p>New Orleans had simply gazed down upon him from a balcony. He could see her pensive, starry eyes and catch the flutter of her fan, and that was all. Only once he came face to face with her. It was at dawn, when she was flushing the red bricks of the banquette with a pail of water. She laughed and hummed a chansonette and filled Raggles’s shoes with ice-cold water. Allons!</p>
|
||||
<p>New Orleans had simply gazed down upon him from a balcony. He could see her pensive, starry eyes and catch the flutter of her fan, and that was all. Only once he came face to face with her. It was at dawn, when she was flushing the red bricks of the banquette with a pail of water. She laughed and hummed a chansonette and filled Raggles’s shoes with ice-cold water. <i xml:lang="fr">Allons!</i></p>
|
||||
<p>Boston construed herself to the poetic Raggles in an erratic and singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And, after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; and the cloth, becoming wet, tightened its knots and could not be removed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Indefinite and unintelligible ideas, you will say; but your disapprobation should be tempered with gratitude, for these are poets’ fancies—and suppose you had come upon them in verse!</p>
|
||||
<p>One day Raggles came and laid siege to the heart of the great city of Manhattan. She was the greatest of all; and he wanted to learn her note in the scale; to taste and appraise and classify and solve and label her and arrange her with the other cities that had given him up the secret of their individuality. And here we cease to be Raggles’s translator and become his chronicler.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -27,7 +27,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Oh, Rush,’ she says, all flushed up with esteem and gratification, ‘what do you think! Dad’s going to buy me a piano. Ain’t it grand? I never dreamed I’d ever have one.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘It’s sure joyful,’ says I. ‘I always admired the agreeable uproar of a piano. It’ll be lots of company for you. That’s mighty good of Uncle Cal to do that.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’m all undecided,’ says Marilla, ‘between a piano and an organ. A parlour organ is nice.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Either of ’em,’ says I, ‘is first-class for mitigating the lack of noise around a sheep-ranch. For my part,’ I says, ‘I shouldn’t like anything better than to ride home of an evening and listen to a few waltzes and jigs, with somebody about your size sitting on the piano-otool and rounding up the notes.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Either of ’em,’ says I, ‘is first-class for mitigating the lack of noise around a sheep-ranch. For my part,’ I says, ‘I shouldn’t like anything better than to ride home of an evening and listen to a few waltzes and jigs, with somebody about your size sitting on the piano-stool and rounding up the notes.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Oh, hush about that,’ says Marilla, ‘and go on in the house. Dad hasn’t rode out today. He’s not feeling well.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Old Cal was inside, lying on a cot. He had a pretty bad cold and cough. I stayed to supper.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Going to get Marilla a piano, I hear,’ says I to him.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -1,34 +1,36 @@
|
||||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
|
||||
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" epub:prefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/, se: https://standardebooks.org/vocab/1.0" xml:lang="en-US">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>The Prisoner of Zembla</title>
|
||||
<title>The Prisoner of Zembla: By Anthony Hoke</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
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|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-prisoner-of-zembla" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Prisoner of Zembla</h2>
|
||||
<p>So the king fell into a furious rage, so that none durst go near him for fear, and he gave out that since the Princess Ostla had disobeyed him there would be a great tourney, and to the knight who should prove himself of the greatest valor he would give the hand of the princess.</p>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">
|
||||
<span>The Prisoner of Zembla</span>
|
||||
<span epub:type="subtitle">By Anthony Hoke</span>
|
||||
</h2>
|
||||
<p>So the king fell into a furious rage, so that none durst go near him for fear, and he gave out that since the Princess Astla had disobeyed him there would be a great tourney, and to the knight who should prove himself of the greatest valor he would give the hand of the princess.</p>
|
||||
<p>And he sent forth a herald to proclaim that he would do this.</p>
|
||||
<p>And the herald went about the country making his desire known, blowing a great tin horn and riding a noble steed that pranced and gambolled; and the villagers gazed upon him and said: “Lo, that is one of them tin horn gamblers concerning which the chroniclers have told us.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And when the day came, the king sat in the grandstand, holding the gage of battle in his band, and by his side sat the Princess Ostla, looking very pale and beautiful, but with mournful eyes from which she scarce could keep the tears. And the knights which came to the tourney gazed upon the princess in wonder at her beauty, and each swore to win so that he could marry her and board with the king. Suddenly the heart of the princess gave a great bound, for she saw among the knights one of the poor students with whom she had been in love.</p>
|
||||
<p>The knights mounted and rode in a line past the grandstand, and the king stopped the poor student, who had the worst horse and the poorest caparisons of any of the knights and said:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sir Knight, prithee tell me of what that marvellous shacky and rusty-looking armor of thine is made?”</p>
|
||||
<p>And the herald went about the country making his desire known, blowing a great tin horn and riding a noble steed that pranced and gamboled; and the villagers gazed upon him with awe and said: “Lo, that is one of them tin horn gamblers concerning which the chroniclers have told us.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And when the day came, the king sat in the grand stand, holding the gage of battle in his hand, and by his side sat the Princess Astla, looking very pale and beautiful, but with mournful eyes from which she scarce could keep the tears, and the knights who came to the tourney gazed upon the princess in wonder at her beauty, and each swore to win her so that he could marry her and board with the king. Suddenly the heart of the princess gave a great bound, for she saw among the knights one of the poor students with whom she had been in love.</p>
|
||||
<p>The knights mounted and rode in a line past the grand stand, and the king stopped the poor student, who had the worst horse and the poorest caparisons of any of the knights, and said:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sir knight, prithee tell me of what that marvelous shaky and rusty-looking armor of thine is made?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, king,” said the young knight, “seeing that we are about to engage in a big fight, I would call it scrap iron, wouldn’t you?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ods Bodkins!” said the king. “The youth hath a pretty wit.”</p>
|
||||
<p>About this time the Princess Ostla, who began to feel better at the sight of her lover, slipped a piece of gum into her mouth and closed her teeth upon it, and even smiled a little and showed the beautiful pearls with which her mouth was set. Whereupon, as soon as the knights perceived this, 217 of them went over to the king’s treasurer and settled for their horse feed and went home.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It seems very hard,” said the princess, “that I cannot marry when I chews.”</p>
|
||||
<p>But two of the knights were left, one of them being the princess’ lover.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Here’s enough for a fight, anyhow,” said the king. “Come hither, O knights, will ye joust for the hand of this fair lady?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ods bodikins!” said the king. “The youth hath a pretty wit.”</p>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>The tourney lasted the whole day and at the end but two of the knights were left, one of them being the princess’s lover.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Here’s enough for a fight, anyhow,” said the king. “Come hither, oh knights, will ye joust for the hand of this lady fair?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“We joust will,” said the knights.</p>
|
||||
<p>The two knights fought for two hours, and at length the princess’ lover prevailed and stretched the other upon the ground. The victorious knight made his horse caracole before the king, and bowed low in his saddle.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the Princess Ostla’s cheeks was a rosy flush; in her eyes the light of excitement vied with the soft glow of love; her lips were parted, her lovely hair unbound, and she grasped the arms of her chair and leaned forward with heaving bosom and happy smile to hear the words of her lover.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You have foughten well, sir knight,” said the king. “And if there is any boon you crave you have but to name it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Then,” said the knight, “I will ask you this: I have bought the patent rights in your kingdom for Schneider’s celebrated monkey wrench, and I want a letter from you endorsing it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The two knights fought for two hours and at length the princess’s lover prevailed and stretched the other upon the ground. The victorious knight made his horse caracole before the king, and bowed low in his saddle.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the Princess Astla’s cheek was a rosy flush; in her eyes the light of excitement vied with the soft glow of love; her lips were parted, her lovely hair unbound, and she grasped the arms of her chair and leaned forward with heaving bosom and happy smile to hear the words of her lover.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You have fought well, sir knight,” said the king. “And if there is any boon you crave you have but to name it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Then,” said the knight, “I will ask you this: I have bought the patent rights in your kingdom for Schneider’s celebrated monkey wrench and I want a letter from you indorsing it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You shall have it,” said the king, “but I must tell you that there is not a monkey in my kingdom.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With a yell of rage the victorious knight threw himself on his horse and rode away at a furious gallop.</p>
|
||||
<p>The king was about to speak, when a horrible suspicion flashed upon him and he fell dead upon the grandstand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“My God!” he cried. “He has forgotten to take the princess with him!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The king was about to speak when a horrible suspicion flashed upon him and he fell dead upon the grand stand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“My God!” he cried, as he expired, “he has forgotten to take the princess with him.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
|
||||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
|
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" epub:prefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/, se: https://standardebooks.org/vocab/1.0" xml:lang="en-US">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>The Proem</title>
|
||||
<title>The Proem: By the Carpenter</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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|
||||
|
||||
@ -14,7 +14,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Highsmith took the train the next day for Cranberry Corners. He remained in that forsaken and inanimate village three days. He found the Boggs family and corkscrewed their history unto the third and fourth generation. He amassed the facts and the local color of Cranberry Corners. The village had not grown as rapidly as had Miss Carrington. The actor estimated that it had suffered as few actual changes since the departure of its solitary follower of Thespis as had a stage upon which “four years is supposed to have elapsed.” He absorbed Cranberry Corners and returned to the city of chameleon changes.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was in the rathskeller that Highsmith made the hit of his histrionic career. There is no need to name the place; there is but one rathskeller where you could hope to find Miss Posie Carrington after a performance of “The King’s Bathrobe.”</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a jolly small party at one of the tables that drew many eyes. Miss Carrington, petite, marvellous, bubbling, electric, fame-drunken, shall be named first. Herr Goldstein follows, sonorous, curly-haired, heavy, a trifle anxious, as some bear that had caught, somehow, a butterfly in his claws. Next, a man condemned to a newspaper, sad, courted, armed, analyzing for press agent’s dross every sentence that was poured over him, eating his à la Newburg in the silence of greatness. To conclude, a youth with parted hair, a name that is ochre to red journals and gold on the back of a supper check. These sat at a table while the musicians played, while waiters moved in the mazy performance of their duties with their backs toward all who desired their service, and all was bizarre and merry because it was nine feet below the level of the sidewalk.</p>
|
||||
<p>At 11:45 a being entered the rathskeller. The first violin perceptibly flatted a C that should have been natural; the clarionet blew a bubble instead of a grace note; Miss Carrington giggled and the youth with parted hair swallowed an olive seed.</p>
|
||||
<p>At 11:45 a being entered the rathskeller. The first violin perceptibly flatted a <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">C</i> that should have been natural; the clarionet blew a bubble instead of a grace note; Miss Carrington giggled and the youth with parted hair swallowed an olive seed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Exquisitely and irreproachably rural was the new entry. A lank, disconcerted, hesitating young man it was, flaxen-haired, gaping of mouth, awkward, stricken to misery by the lights and company. His clothing was butternut, with bright blue tie, showing four inches of bony wrist and white-socked ankle. He upset a chair, sat in another one, curled a foot around a table leg and cringed at the approach of a waiter.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You may fetch me a glass of lager beer,” he said, in response to the discreet questioning of the servitor.</p>
|
||||
<p>The eyes of the rathskeller were upon him. He was as fresh as a collard and as ingenuous as a hay rake. He let his eye rove about the place as one who regards, big-eyed, hogs in the potato patch. His gaze rested at length upon Miss Carrington. He rose and went to her table with a lateral, shining smile and a blush of pleased trepidation.</p>
|
||||
@ -22,7 +22,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Liza Perry ’lowed I might see ye in the city while I was here. You know ’Liza married Benny Stanfield, and she says—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah, say!” interrupted Miss Carrington, brightly, “Lize Perry is never married—what! Oh, the freckles of her!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Married in June,” grinned the gossip, “and livin’ in the old Tatum Place. Ham Riley perfessed religion; old <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blithers sold her place to Cap’n Spooner; the youngest Waters girl run away with a music teacher; the courthouse burned up last March; your uncle Wiley was elected constable; Matilda Hoskins died from runnin’ a needle in her hand, and Tom Beedle is courtin’ Sallie Lathrop—they say he don’t miss a night but what he’s settin’ on their porch.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The walleyed thing!” exclaimed Miss Carrington, with asperity. “Why, Tom Beedle once—say, you folks, excuse me a while—this is an old friend of mine—<abbr>Mr.</abbr>—what was it? Yes, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Summers—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Goldstein, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ricketts, <abbr>Mr.</abbr>— Oh, what’s yours? ‘Johnny’ ’ll do—come on over here and tell me some more.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The walleyed thing!” exclaimed Miss Carrington, with asperity. “Why, Tom Beedle once—say, you folks, excuse me a while—this is an old friend of mine—<abbr>Mr.</abbr>—what was it? Yes, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Summers—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Goldstein, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ricketts, <abbr>Mr.</abbr>— Oh, what’s yours? ‘Johnny’ ’ll do—come on over here and tell me some more.”</p>
|
||||
<p>She swept him to an isolated table in a corner. Herr Goldstein shrugged his fat shoulders and beckoned to the waiter. The newspaper man brightened a little and mentioned absinthe. The youth with parted hair was plunged into melancholy. The guests of the rathskeller laughed, clinked glasses and enjoyed the comedy that Posie Carrington was treating them to after her regular performance. A few cynical ones whispered “press agent” ’ and smiled wisely.</p>
|
||||
<p>Posie Carrington laid her dimpled and desirable chin upon her hands, and forgot her audience—a faculty that had won her laurels for her.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t seem to recollect any Bill Summers,” she said, thoughtfully gazing straight into the innocent blue eyes of the rustic young man. “But I know the Summerses, all right. I guess there ain’t many changes in the old town. You see any of my folks lately?”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Red Roses of Tonia</h2>
|
||||
<p>A trestle burned down on the International Railroad. The southbound from San Antonio was cut off for the next forty-eight hours. On that train was Tonia Weaver’s Easter hat.</p>
|
||||
<p>Espirition, the Mexican, who had been sent forty miles in a buckboard from the Espinosa Ranch to fetch it, returned with a shrugging shoulder and hands empty except for a cigarette. At the small station, Nopal, he had learned of the delayed train and, having no commands to wait, turned his ponies toward the ranch again.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, if one supposes that Easter, the Goddess of Spring, cares any more for the after-church parade on Fifth Avenue than she does for her loyal outfit of subjects that assemble at the meetinghouse at Cactus, Tex., a mistake has been made. The wives and daughters of the ranchmen of the Frio country put forth Easter blossoms of new hats and gowns as faithfully as is done anywhere, and the Southwest is, for one day, a mingling of prickly pear, Paris, and paradise. And now it was Good Friday, and Tonia Weaver’s Easter hat blushed unseen in the desert air of an impotent express car, beyond the burned trestle. On Saturday noon the Rogers girls, from the Shoestring Ranch, and Ella Reeves, from the Anchor-O, and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bennet and Ida, from Green Valley, would convene at the Espinosa and pick up Tonia. With their Easter hats and frocks carefully wrapped and bundled against the dust, the fair aggregation would then merrily jog the ten miles to Cactus, where on the morrow they would array themselves, subjugate man, do homage to Easter, and cause jealous agitation among the lilies of the field.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, if one supposes that Easter, the Goddess of Spring, cares any more for the after-church parade on Fifth Avenue than she does for her loyal outfit of subjects that assemble at the meetinghouse at Cactus, <abbr class="postal">Tex.</abbr>, a mistake has been made. The wives and daughters of the ranchmen of the Frio country put forth Easter blossoms of new hats and gowns as faithfully as is done anywhere, and the Southwest is, for one day, a mingling of prickly pear, Paris, and paradise. And now it was Good Friday, and Tonia Weaver’s Easter hat blushed unseen in the desert air of an impotent express car, beyond the burned trestle. On Saturday noon the Rogers girls, from the Shoestring Ranch, and Ella Reeves, from the Anchor-O, and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bennet and Ida, from Green Valley, would convene at the Espinosa and pick up Tonia. With their Easter hats and frocks carefully wrapped and bundled against the dust, the fair aggregation would then merrily jog the ten miles to Cactus, where on the morrow they would array themselves, subjugate man, do homage to Easter, and cause jealous agitation among the lilies of the field.</p>
|
||||
<p>Tonia sat on the steps of the Espinosa ranch house flicking gloomily with a quirt at a tuft of curly mesquite. She displayed a frown and a contumelious lip, and endeavored to radiate an aura of disagreeableness and tragedy.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I hate railroads,” she announced positively. “And men. Men pretend to run them. Can you give any excuse why a trestle should burn? Ida Bennet’s hat is to be trimmed with violets. I shall not go one step toward Cactus without a new hat. If I were a man I would get one.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Two men listened uneasily to this disparagement of their kind. One was Wells Pearson, foreman of the Mucho Calor cattle ranch. The other was Thompson Burrows, the prosperous sheepman from the Quintana Valley. Both thought Tonia Weaver adorable, especially when she railed at railroads and menaced men. Either would have given up his epidermis to make for her an Easter hat more cheerfully than the ostrich gives up his tip or the aigrette lays down its life. Neither possessed the ingenuity to conceive a means of supplying the sad deficiency against the coming Sabbath. Pearson’s deep brown face and sunburned light hair gave him the appearance of a schoolboy seized by one of youth’s profound and insolvable melancholies. Tonia’s plight grieved him through and through. Thompson Burrows was the more skilled and pliable. He hailed from somewhere in the East originally; and he wore neckties and shoes, and was made dumb by woman’s presence.</p>
|
||||
@ -39,12 +39,12 @@
|
||||
<p>“I’m mighty sorry, daughter, that you didn’t get your hat,” said her mother.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, don’t worry, mother,” said Tonia, coolly. “I’ll have a new hat, all right, in time tomorrow.”</p>
|
||||
<hr/>
|
||||
<p>When Burrows reached the end of the strip of prairie he pulled his sorrel to the right and let him pick his way daintily across a sacuista flat through which ran the ragged, dry bed of an arroyo. Then up a gravelly hill, matted with bush, the hoarse scrambled, and at length emerged, with a snort of satisfaction into a stretch of high, level prairie, grassy and dotted with the lighter green of mesquites in their fresh spring foliage. Always to the right Burrows bore, until in a little while he struck the old Indian trail that followed the Nueces southward, and that passed, twenty-eight miles to the southeast, through Lone Elm.</p>
|
||||
<p>When Burrows reached the end of the strip of prairie he pulled his sorrel to the right and let him pick his way daintily across a sacuista flat through which ran the ragged, dry bed of an arroyo. Then up a gravelly hill, matted with bush, the horse scrambled, and at length emerged, with a snort of satisfaction, into a stretch of high, level prairie, grassy and dotted with the lighter green of mesquites in their fresh spring foliage. Always to the right Burrows bore, until in a little while he struck the old Indian trail that followed the Nueces southward, and that passed, twenty-eight miles to the southeast, through Lone Elm.</p>
|
||||
<p>Here Burrows urged the sorrel into a steady lope. As he settled himself in the saddle for a long ride he heard the drumming of hoofs, the hollow “thwack” of chaparral against wooden stirrups, the whoop of a Comanche; and Wells Pearson burst out of the brush at the right of the trail like a precocious yellow chick from a dark green Easter egg.</p>
|
||||
<p>Except in the presence of awing femininity melancholy found no place in Pearson’s bosom. In Tonia’s presence his voice was as soft as a summer bullfrog’s in his reedy nest. Now, at his gleesome yawp, rabbits, a mile away, ducked their ears, and sensitive plants closed their fearful fronds.</p>
|
||||
<p>Except in the presence of awing femininity, melancholy found no place in Pearson’s bosom. In Tonia’s presence his voice was as soft as a summer bullfrog’s in his reedy nest. Now, at his gleesome yawp, rabbits, a mile away, ducked their ears, and sensitive plants closed their fearful fronds.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Moved your lambing camp pretty far from the ranch, haven’t you, neighbor?” asked Pearson, as Road Runner fell in at the sorrel’s side.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Twenty-eight miles,” said Burrows, looking a little grim. Pearson’s laugh woke an owl one hour too early in his water-elm on the river bank, half a mile away.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right for you, sheepman. I like an open game, myself. We’re two locoed he-milliners hat-hunting in the wilderness. I notify you. Burr, to mind your corrals. We’ve got an even start, and the one that gets the headgear will stand some higher at the Espinosa.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“All right for you, sheepman. I like an open game, myself. We’re two locoed he-milliners hat-hunting in the wilderness. I notify you, Burr, to mind your corrals. We’ve got an even start, and the one that gets the headgear will stand some higher at the Espinosa.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ve got a good pony,” said Burrows, eyeing Road Runner’s barrel-like body and tapering legs that moved as regularly as the pistonrod of an engine. “It’s a race, of course; but you’re too much of a horseman to whoop it up this soon. Say we travel together till we get to the home stretch.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m your company,” agreed Pearson, “and I admire your sense. If there’s hats at Lone Elm, one of ’em shall set on Miss Tonia’s brow tomorrow, and you won’t be at the crowning. I ain’t bragging, Burr, but that sorrel of yours is weak in the forelegs.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“My horse against yours,” offered Burrows, “that Miss Tonia wears the hat I take her to Cactus tomorrow.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I ain’t seen my son before,” she continued, “in eight years. One of my nephews, Elkanah Price, he’s a conductor on one of them railroads and he got me a pass to come out here. I can stay a whole week on it, and then it’ll take me back again. Jest think, now, that little boy of mine has got to be a officer—a city marshal of a whole town! That’s somethin’ like a constable, ain’t it? I never knowed he was a officer; he didn’t say nothin’ about it in his letters. I reckon he thought his old mother’d be skeered about the danger he was in. But, laws! I never was much of a hand to git skeered. ’Tain’t no use. I heard them guns a-shootin’ while I was gettin’ off them cars, and I see smoke a-comin’ out of the depot, but I jest walked right along. Then I see son’s face lookin’ out through the window. I knowed him at oncet. He met me at the door, and squeezes me ’most to death. And there you was, sir, a-lyin’ there jest like you was dead, and I ’lowed we’d see what might be done to help sot you up.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I think I’ll sit up now,” said the concussion patient. “I’m feeling pretty fair by this time.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He sat, somewhat weakly yet, leaning against the wall. He was a rugged man, big-boned and straight. His eyes, steady and keen, seemed to linger upon the face of the man standing so still above him. His look wandered often from the face he studied to the marshal’s badge upon the other’s breast.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes, yes, you’ll be all right,” said the old woman, patting his arm, “if you don’t get to cuttin’ up agin, and havin’ folks shooting at you. Son told me about you, sir, while you was layin’ senseless on the floor. Don’t you take it as meddlesome fer an old woman with a son as big as you to talk about it. And you mustn’t hold no grudge ag’in’ my son for havin’ to shoot at ye. A officer has got to take up for the law—it’s his duty—and them that acts bad and lives wrong has to suffer. Don’t blame my son any, sir—’tain’t his fault. He’s always been a good boy—good when he was growin’ up, and kind and ‘bedient and well-behaved. Won’t you let me advise you, sir, not to do so no more? Be a good man, and leave liquor alone and live peaceably and goodly. Keep away from bad company and work honest and sleep sweet.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes, yes, you’ll be all right,” said the old woman, patting his arm, “if you don’t get to cuttin’ up agin, and havin’ folks shooting at you. Son told me about you, sir, while you was layin’ senseless on the floor. Don’t you take it as meddlesome fer an old woman with a son as big as you to talk about it. And you mustn’t hold no grudge ag’in’ my son for havin’ to shoot at ye. A officer has got to take up for the law—it’s his duty—and them that acts bad and lives wrong has to suffer. Don’t blame my son any, sir—’tain’t his fault. He’s always been a good boy—good when he was growin’ up, and kind and ’bedient and well-behaved. Won’t you let me advise you, sir, not to do so no more? Be a good man, and leave liquor alone and live peaceably and goodly. Keep away from bad company and work honest and sleep sweet.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The black-mitted hand of the old pleader gently touched the breast of the man she addressed. Very earnest and candid her old, worn face looked. In her rusty black dress and antique bonnet she sat, near the close of a long life, and epitomised the experience of the world. Still the man to whom she spoke gazed above her head, contemplating the silent son of the old mother.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What does the marshal say?” he asked. “Does he believe the advice is good? Suppose the marshal speaks up and says if the talk’s all right?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The tall man moved uneasily. He fingered the badge on his breast for a moment, and then he put an arm around the old woman and drew her close to him. She smiled the unchanging mother smile of threescore years, and patted his big brown hand with her crooked, mittened fingers while her son spake.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -132,13 +132,23 @@
|
||||
<p>Returning a fortnight later, Thacker dropped off a very rocky Pullman at Toombs City. He found the January number of the magazine made up and the forms closed.</p>
|
||||
<p>The vacant space that had been yawning for type was filled by an article that was headed thus:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p><b>Second Message to Congress</b></p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<b>Second Message to Congress</b>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p>Written for</p>
|
||||
<p><b>The Rose of Dixie</b></p>
|
||||
<p><b>by</b></p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<b>The Rose of Dixie</b>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<b>by</b>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p>A Member of the Well-known</p>
|
||||
<p><b>Bulloch Family, of Georgia</b></p>
|
||||
<p><b><abbr class="name">T.</abbr> Roosevelt</b></p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<b>Bulloch Family, of Georgia</b>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<b><abbr class="name">T.</abbr> Roosevelt</b>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -34,14 +34,14 @@
|
||||
<p>“Besides myself,” said Bridger, “there are only two Americans on Ratona—Bob Reeves and Henry Morgan.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The man I want sells coconuts,” suggested Plunkett.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You see that coconut walk extending up to the point?” said the consul, waving his hand toward the open door. “That belongs to Bob Reeves. Henry Morgan owns half the trees to loo’ard on the island.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“One, month ago,” said the sheriff, “Wade Williams wrote a confidential letter to a man in Chatham county, telling him where he was and how he was getting along. The letter was lost; and the person that found it gave it away. They sent me after him, and I’ve got the papers. I reckon he’s one of your coconut men for certain.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“One month ago,” said the sheriff, “Wade Williams wrote a confidential letter to a man in Chatham county, telling him where he was and how he was getting along. The letter was lost; and the person that found it gave it away. They sent me after him, and I’ve got the papers. I reckon he’s one of your coconut men for certain.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You’ve got his picture, of course,” said Bridger. “It might be Reeves or Morgan, but I’d hate to think it. They’re both as fine fellows as you’d meet in an all-day auto ride.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” doubtfully answered Plunkett; “there wasn’t any picture of Williams to be had. And I never saw him myself. I’ve been sheriff only a year. But I’ve got a pretty accurate description of him. About 5 feet 11; dark-hair and eyes; nose inclined to be Roman; heavy about the shoulders; strong, white teeth, with none missing; laughs a good deal, talkative; drinks considerably but never to intoxication; looks you square in the eye when talking; age thirty-five. Which one of your men does that description fit?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The consul grinned broadly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ll tell you what you do,” he said, laying down his rifle and slipping on his dingy black alpaca coat. “You come along, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Plunkett, and I’ll take you up to see the boys. If you can tell which one of ’em your description fits better than it does the other you have the advantage of me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Bridger conducted the sheriff out and along the hard beach close to which the tiny houses of the village were distributed. Immediately back of the town rose sudden, small, thickly wooded hills. Up one of these, by means of steps cut in the hard clay, the consul led Plunkett. On the very verge of an eminence was perched a two-room wooden cottage with a thatched roof. A Carib woman was washing clothes outside. The consul ushered the sheriff to the door of the room that overlooked the harbour.</p>
|
||||
<p>Two men were in the room, about to sit down, in their shirt sleeves, to a table spread for dinner. They bore little resemblance one to the other in detail; but the general description given by Plunkett could have been justly applied to either. In height, colour of hair, shape of nose, build and manners each of them tallied with it. They were fair types of jovial, ready-witted, broad-gauged Americans who had gravitated together for companionship in an alien land.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hello, Bridger” they called in unison at sight Of the consul. “Come and have dinner with us!” And then they noticed Plunkett at his heels, and came forward with hospitable curiosity.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hello, Bridger” they called in unison at sight of the consul. “Come and have dinner with us!” And then they noticed Plunkett at his heels, and came forward with hospitable curiosity.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Gentlemen,” said the consul, his voice taking on unaccustomed formality, “this is <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Plunkett. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Plunkett—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Reeves and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Morgan.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The coconut barons greeted the newcomer joyously. Reeves seemed about an inch taller than Morgan, but his laugh was not quite as loud. Morgan’s eyes were deep brown; Reeves’s were black. Reeves was the host and busied himself with fetching other chairs and calling to the Carib woman for supplemental table ware. It was explained that Morgan lived in a bamboo shack to “loo’ard,” but that every day the two friends dined together. Plunkett stood still during the preparations, looking about mildly with his pale-blue eyes. Bridger looked apologetic and uneasy.</p>
|
||||
<p>At length two other covers were laid and the company was assigned to places. Reeves and Morgan stood side by side across the table from the visitors. Reeves nodded genially as a signal for all to seat themselves. And then suddenly Plunkett raised his hand with a gesture of authority. He was looking straight between Reeves and Morgan.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -19,58 +19,58 @@
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>As mathematics are—or is: thanks, old subscriber!—the only just rule by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the great goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. Figures—unassailable sums in addition—shall be set over against whatever opposing element there may be.</p>
|
||||
<p>A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry, would say: “Ahem! young gentlemen, if we assume that <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">X</i> plus—that is, that life is real—then things (all of which life includes) are real. Anything that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider the proposition that ‘things are not what they seem,’ why—”</p>
|
||||
<p>But this is heresy, and not poesy. We woo the sweet nymph Algebra; we would conduct you into the presence of the elusive, seductive, pursued, satisfying, mysterious <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">X</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>Not long before the beginning of this century, Septimus Kinsolving, an old New Yorker, invented an idea. He originated the discovery that bread is made from flour and not from wheat futures. Perceiving that the flour crop was short, and that the Stock Exchange was having no perceptible effect on the growing wheat, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving cornered the flour market.</p>
|
||||
<p>The result was that when you or my landlady (before the war she never had to turn her hand to anything; Southerners accommodated) bought a five-cent loaf of bread you laid down an additional two cents, which went to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving as a testimonial to his perspicacity.</p>
|
||||
<p>A second result was that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving quit the game with $2,000,000 prof—er—rake-off.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving’s son Dan was at college when the mathematical experiment in breadstuffs was made. Dan came home during vacation, and found the old gentleman in a red dressing-gown reading “Little Dorrit” on the porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington Square. He had retired from business with enough extra two-cent pieces from bread buyers to reach, if laid side by side, fifteen times around the earth and lap as far as the public debt of Paraguay.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried over to Greenwich Village to see his old high-school friend, Kenwitz. Dan had always admired Kenwitz. Kenwitz was pale, curly-haired, intense, serious, mathematical, studious, altruistic, socialistic, and the natural foe of oligarchies. Kenwitz had foregone college, and was learning watch-making in his father’s jewelry store. Dan was smiling, jovial, easy-tempered and tolerant alike of kings and ragpickers. The two foregathered joyously, being opposites. And then Dan went back to college, and Kenwitz to his mainsprings—and to his private library in the rear of the jewelry shop.</p>
|
||||
<p>Four years later Dan came back to Washington Square with the accumulations of <abbr class="initialism">BA</abbr> and two years of Europe thick upon him. He took a filial look at Septimus Kinsolving’s elaborate tombstone in Greenwood and a tedious excursion through typewritten documents with the family lawyer; and then, feeling himself a lonely and hopeless millionaire, hurried down to the old jewelry store across Sixth Avenue.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from his eye, routed out his parent from a dingy rear room, and abandoned the interior of watches for outdoors. He went with Dan, and they sat on a bench in Washington Square. Dan had not changed much; he was stalwart, and had a dignity that was inclined to relax into a grin. Kenwitz was more serious, more intense, more learned, philosophical and socialistic.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know about it now,” said Dan, finally. “I pumped it out of the eminent legal lights that turned over to me poor old dad’s collections of bonds and boodle. It amounts to $2,000,000, Ken. And I am told that he squeezed it out of the chaps that pay their pennies for loaves of bread at little bakeries around the corner. You’ve studied economics, Dan, and you know all about monopolies, and the masses, and octopuses, and the rights of laboring people. I never thought about those things before. Football and trying to be white to my fellow-man were about the extent of my college curriculum.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But since I came back and found out how dad made his money I’ve been thinking. I’d like awfully well to pay back those chaps who had to give up too much money for bread. I know it would buck the line of my income for a good many yards; but I’d like to make it square with ’em. Is there anyway it can be done, old Ways and Means?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz’s big black eyes glowed fierily. His thin, intellectual face took on almost a sardonic cast. He caught Dan’s arm with the grip of a friend and a judge.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You can’t do it!” he said, emphatically. “One of the chief punishments of you men of ill-gotten wealth is that when you do repent you find that you have lost the power to make reparation or restitution. I admire your good intentions, Dan, but you can’t do anything. Those people were robbed of their precious pennies. It’s too late to remedy the evil. You can’t pay them back.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Of course,” said Dan, lighting his pipe, “we couldn’t hunt up every one of the duffers and hand ’em back the right change. There’s an awful lot of ’em buying bread all the time. Funny taste they have—I never cared for bread especially, except for a toasted cracker with the Roquefort. But we might find a few of ’em and chuck some of dad’s cash back where it came from. I’d feel better if I could. It seems tough for people to be held up for a soggy thing like bread. One wouldn’t mind standing a rise in broiled lobsters or deviled crabs. Get to work and think, Ken. I want to pay back all of that money I can.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“There are plenty of charities,” said Kenwitz, mechanically.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Easy enough,” said Dan, in a cloud of smoke. “I suppose I could give the city a park, or endow an asparagus bed in a hospital. But I don’t want Paul to get away with the proceeds of the gold brick we sold Peter. It’s the bread shorts I want to cover, Ken.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The thin fingers of Kenwitz moved rapidly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do you know how much money it would take to pay back the losses of consumers during that corner in flour?” he asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I do not.” said Dan, stoutly. “My lawyer tells me that I have two millions.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“If you had a hundred millions,” said Kenwitz, vehemently, “you couldn’t repair a thousandth part of the damage that has been done. You cannot conceive of the accumulated evils produced by misapplied wealth. Each penny that was wrung from the lean purses of the poor reacted a thousandfold to their harm. You do not understand. You do not see how hopeless is your desire to make restitution. Not in a single instance can it be done.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Back up, philosopher!” said Dan. “The penny has no sorrow that the dollar cannot heal.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not in one instance,” repeated Kenwitz. “I will give you one, and let us see. Thomas Boyne had a little bakery over there in Varick Street. He sold bread to the poorest people. When the price of flour went up he had to raise the price of bread. His customers were too poor to pay it, Boyne’s business failed and he lost his $1,000 capital—all he had in the world.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Dan Kinsolving struck the park bench a mighty blow with his fist.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I accept the instance,” he cried. “Take me to Boyne. I will repay his thousand dollars and buy him a new bakery.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Write your check,” said Kenwitz, without moving, “and then begin to write checks in payment of the train of consequences. Draw the next one for $50,000. Boyne went insane after his failure and set fire to the building from which he was about to be evicted. The loss amounted to that much. Boyne died in an asylum.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Stick to the instance,” said Dan. “I haven’t noticed any insurance companies on my charity list.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Draw your next check for $100,000,” went on Kenwitz. “Boyne’s son fell into bad ways after the bakery closed, and was accused of murder. He was acquitted last week after a three years’ legal battle, and the state draws upon taxpayers for that much expense.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Back to the bakery!” exclaimed Dan, impatiently. “The Government doesn’t need to stand in the bread line.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The last item of the instance is—come and I will show you,” said Kenwitz, rising.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Socialistic watchmaker was happy. He was a millionaire-baiter by nature and a pessimist by trade. Kenwitz would assure you in one breath that money was but evil and corruption, and that your brand-new watch needed cleaning and a new ratchet-wheel.</p>
|
||||
<p>He conducted Kinsolving southward out of the square and into ragged, poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of a squalid brick tenement he led the penitent offspring of the Octopus. He knocked on a door, and a clear voice called to them to enter.</p>
|
||||
<p>In that almost bare room a young woman sat sewing at a machine. She nodded to Kenwitz as to a familiar acquaintance. One little stream of sunlight through the dingy window burnished her heavy hair to the color of an ancient Tuscan’s shield. She flashed a rippling smile at Kenwitz and a look of somewhat flustered inquiry.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kinsolving stood regarding her clear and pathetic beauty in heart-throbbing silence. Thus they came into the presence of the last item of the Instance.</p>
|
||||
<p>“How many this week, Miss Mary?” asked the watchmaker. A mountain of coarse gray shirts lay upon the floor.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nearly thirty dozen,” said the young woman cheerfully. “I’ve made almost $4. I’m improving, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kenwitz. I hardly know what to do with so much money.” Her eyes turned, brightly soft, in the direction of Dan. A little pink spot came out on her round, pale cheek.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz chuckled like a diabolic raven.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Miss Boyne,” he said, “let me present <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving, the son of the man who put bread up five years ago. He thinks he would like to do something to aid those who where inconvenienced by that act.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The smile left the young woman’s face. She rose and pointed her forefinger toward the door. This time she looked Kinsolving straight in the eye, but it was not a look that gave delight.</p>
|
||||
<p>The two men went down Varick Street. Kenwitz, letting all his pessimism and rancor and hatred of the Octopus come to the surface, gibed at the moneyed side of his friend in an acrid torrent of words. Dan appeared to be listening, and then turned to Kenwitz and shook hands with him warmly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m obliged to you, Ken, old man,” he said, vaguely—“a thousand times obliged.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mein Gott! you are crazy!” cried the watchmaker, dropping his spectacles for the first time in years.</p>
|
||||
<p>Two months afterward Kenwitz went into a large bakery on lower Broadway with a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses that he had mended for the proprietor.</p>
|
||||
<p>A lady was giving an order to a clerk as Kenwitz passed her.</p>
|
||||
<p>“These loaves are ten cents,” said the clerk.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I always get them at eight cents uptown,” said the lady. “You need not fill the order. I will drive by there on my way home.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The voice was familiar. The watchmaker paused.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kenwitz!” cried the lady, heartily. “How do you do?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic and economic comprehension on her wonderful fur boa and the carriage waiting outside.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, Miss Boyne!” he began.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Kinsolving,” she corrected. “Dan and I were married a month ago.”</p>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>As mathematics are—or is: thanks, old subscriber!—the only just rule by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the great goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. Figures—unassailable sums in addition—shall be set over against whatever opposing element there may be.</p>
|
||||
<p>A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry, would say: “Ahem! young gentlemen, if we assume that <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">X</i> plus—that is, that life is real—then things (all of which life includes) are real. Anything that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider the proposition that ‘things are not what they seem,’ why—”</p>
|
||||
<p>But this is heresy, and not poesy. We woo the sweet nymph Algebra; we would conduct you into the presence of the elusive, seductive, pursued, satisfying, mysterious <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">X</i>.</p>
|
||||
<p>Not long before the beginning of this century, Septimus Kinsolving, an old New Yorker, invented an idea. He originated the discovery that bread is made from flour and not from wheat futures. Perceiving that the flour crop was short, and that the Stock Exchange was having no perceptible effect on the growing wheat, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving cornered the flour market.</p>
|
||||
<p>The result was that when you or my landlady (before the war she never had to turn her hand to anything; Southerners accommodated) bought a five-cent loaf of bread you laid down an additional two cents, which went to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving as a testimonial to his perspicacity.</p>
|
||||
<p>A second result was that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving quit the game with $2,000,000 prof—er—rake-off.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving’s son Dan was at college when the mathematical experiment in breadstuffs was made. Dan came home during vacation, and found the old gentleman in a red dressing-gown reading “Little Dorrit” on the porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington Square. He had retired from business with enough extra two-cent pieces from bread buyers to reach, if laid side by side, fifteen times around the earth and lap as far as the public debt of Paraguay.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried over to Greenwich Village to see his old high-school friend, Kenwitz. Dan had always admired Kenwitz. Kenwitz was pale, curly-haired, intense, serious, mathematical, studious, altruistic, socialistic, and the natural foe of oligarchies. Kenwitz had foregone college, and was learning watch-making in his father’s jewelry store. Dan was smiling, jovial, easy-tempered and tolerant alike of kings and ragpickers. The two foregathered joyously, being opposites. And then Dan went back to college, and Kenwitz to his mainsprings—and to his private library in the rear of the jewelry shop.</p>
|
||||
<p>Four years later Dan came back to Washington Square with the accumulations of <abbr class="initialism">BA</abbr> and two years of Europe thick upon him. He took a filial look at Septimus Kinsolving’s elaborate tombstone in Greenwood and a tedious excursion through typewritten documents with the family lawyer; and then, feeling himself a lonely and hopeless millionaire, hurried down to the old jewelry store across Sixth Avenue.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from his eye, routed out his parent from a dingy rear room, and abandoned the interior of watches for outdoors. He went with Dan, and they sat on a bench in Washington Square. Dan had not changed much; he was stalwart, and had a dignity that was inclined to relax into a grin. Kenwitz was more serious, more intense, more learned, philosophical and socialistic.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I know about it now,” said Dan, finally. “I pumped it out of the eminent legal lights that turned over to me poor old dad’s collections of bonds and boodle. It amounts to $2,000,000, Ken. And I am told that he squeezed it out of the chaps that pay their pennies for loaves of bread at little bakeries around the corner. You’ve studied economics, Dan, and you know all about monopolies, and the masses, and octopuses, and the rights of laboring people. I never thought about those things before. Football and trying to be white to my fellow-man were about the extent of my college curriculum.</p>
|
||||
<p>“But since I came back and found out how dad made his money I’ve been thinking. I’d like awfully well to pay back those chaps who had to give up too much money for bread. I know it would buck the line of my income for a good many yards; but I’d like to make it square with ’em. Is there anyway it can be done, old Ways and Means?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz’s big black eyes glowed fierily. His thin, intellectual face took on almost a sardonic cast. He caught Dan’s arm with the grip of a friend and a judge.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You can’t do it!” he said, emphatically. “One of the chief punishments of you men of ill-gotten wealth is that when you do repent you find that you have lost the power to make reparation or restitution. I admire your good intentions, Dan, but you can’t do anything. Those people were robbed of their precious pennies. It’s too late to remedy the evil. You can’t pay them back.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Of course,” said Dan, lighting his pipe, “we couldn’t hunt up every one of the duffers and hand ’em back the right change. There’s an awful lot of ’em buying bread all the time. Funny taste they have—I never cared for bread especially, except for a toasted cracker with the Roquefort. But we might find a few of ’em and chuck some of dad’s cash back where it came from. I’d feel better if I could. It seems tough for people to be held up for a soggy thing like bread. One wouldn’t mind standing a rise in broiled lobsters or deviled crabs. Get to work and think, Ken. I want to pay back all of that money I can.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“There are plenty of charities,” said Kenwitz, mechanically.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Easy enough,” said Dan, in a cloud of smoke. “I suppose I could give the city a park, or endow an asparagus bed in a hospital. But I don’t want Paul to get away with the proceeds of the gold brick we sold Peter. It’s the bread shorts I want to cover, Ken.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The thin fingers of Kenwitz moved rapidly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do you know how much money it would take to pay back the losses of consumers during that corner in flour?” he asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I do not.” said Dan, stoutly. “My lawyer tells me that I have two millions.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“If you had a hundred millions,” said Kenwitz, vehemently, “you couldn’t repair a thousandth part of the damage that has been done. You cannot conceive of the accumulated evils produced by misapplied wealth. Each penny that was wrung from the lean purses of the poor reacted a thousandfold to their harm. You do not understand. You do not see how hopeless is your desire to make restitution. Not in a single instance can it be done.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Back up, philosopher!” said Dan. “The penny has no sorrow that the dollar cannot heal.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not in one instance,” repeated Kenwitz. “I will give you one, and let us see. Thomas Boyne had a little bakery over there in Varick Street. He sold bread to the poorest people. When the price of flour went up he had to raise the price of bread. His customers were too poor to pay it, Boyne’s business failed and he lost his $1,000 capital—all he had in the world.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Dan Kinsolving struck the park bench a mighty blow with his fist.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I accept the instance,” he cried. “Take me to Boyne. I will repay his thousand dollars and buy him a new bakery.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Write your check,” said Kenwitz, without moving, “and then begin to write checks in payment of the train of consequences. Draw the next one for $50,000. Boyne went insane after his failure and set fire to the building from which he was about to be evicted. The loss amounted to that much. Boyne died in an asylum.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Stick to the instance,” said Dan. “I haven’t noticed any insurance companies on my charity list.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Draw your next check for $100,000,” went on Kenwitz. “Boyne’s son fell into bad ways after the bakery closed, and was accused of murder. He was acquitted last week after a three years’ legal battle, and the state draws upon taxpayers for that much expense.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Back to the bakery!” exclaimed Dan, impatiently. “The Government doesn’t need to stand in the bread line.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The last item of the instance is—come and I will show you,” said Kenwitz, rising.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Socialistic watchmaker was happy. He was a millionaire-baiter by nature and a pessimist by trade. Kenwitz would assure you in one breath that money was but evil and corruption, and that your brand-new watch needed cleaning and a new ratchet-wheel.</p>
|
||||
<p>He conducted Kinsolving southward out of the square and into ragged, poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of a squalid brick tenement he led the penitent offspring of the Octopus. He knocked on a door, and a clear voice called to them to enter.</p>
|
||||
<p>In that almost bare room a young woman sat sewing at a machine. She nodded to Kenwitz as to a familiar acquaintance. One little stream of sunlight through the dingy window burnished her heavy hair to the color of an ancient Tuscan’s shield. She flashed a rippling smile at Kenwitz and a look of somewhat flustered inquiry.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kinsolving stood regarding her clear and pathetic beauty in heart-throbbing silence. Thus they came into the presence of the last item of the Instance.</p>
|
||||
<p>“How many this week, Miss Mary?” asked the watchmaker. A mountain of coarse gray shirts lay upon the floor.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nearly thirty dozen,” said the young woman cheerfully. “I’ve made almost $4. I’m improving, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kenwitz. I hardly know what to do with so much money.” Her eyes turned, brightly soft, in the direction of Dan. A little pink spot came out on her round, pale cheek.</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz chuckled like a diabolic raven.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Miss Boyne,” he said, “let me present <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinsolving, the son of the man who put bread up five years ago. He thinks he would like to do something to aid those who where inconvenienced by that act.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The smile left the young woman’s face. She rose and pointed her forefinger toward the door. This time she looked Kinsolving straight in the eye, but it was not a look that gave delight.</p>
|
||||
<p>The two men went down Varick Street. Kenwitz, letting all his pessimism and rancor and hatred of the Octopus come to the surface, gibed at the moneyed side of his friend in an acrid torrent of words. Dan appeared to be listening, and then turned to Kenwitz and shook hands with him warmly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m obliged to you, Ken, old man,” he said, vaguely—“a thousand times obliged.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mein Gott! you are crazy!” cried the watchmaker, dropping his spectacles for the first time in years.</p>
|
||||
<p>Two months afterward Kenwitz went into a large bakery on lower Broadway with a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses that he had mended for the proprietor.</p>
|
||||
<p>A lady was giving an order to a clerk as Kenwitz passed her.</p>
|
||||
<p>“These loaves are ten cents,” said the clerk.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I always get them at eight cents uptown,” said the lady. “You need not fill the order. I will drive by there on my way home.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The voice was familiar. The watchmaker paused.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kenwitz!” cried the lady, heartily. “How do you do?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic and economic comprehension on her wonderful fur boa and the carriage waiting outside.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, Miss Boyne!” he began.</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Kinsolving,” she corrected. “Dan and I were married a month ago.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“What talk is this?” I asked. “Your financial digression is merely a subterfuge. Why were you marching in the ranks of the Confederate Veterans?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Because, my lad,” answered O’Keefe, “the Confederate Government in its might and power interposed to protect and defend Barnard O’Keefe against immediate and dangerous assassination at the hands of a bloodthirsty foreign country after the Unites States of America had overruled his appeal for protection, and had instructed Private Secretary Cortelyou to reduce his estimate of the Republican majority for 1905 by one vote.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Come, Barney,” said I, “the Confederate States of America has been out of existence nearly forty years. You do not look older yourself. When was it that the deceased government exerted its foreign policy in your behalf?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Four months ago,” said O’Keefe, promptly. “The infamous foreign power I alluded to is still staggering from the official blow dealt it by <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Davis’s contraband aggregation of states. That’s why you see me cake-walking with the ex-rebs to the illegitimate tune about ‘simmon-seeds and cotton. I vote for the Great Father in Washington, but I am not going back on Mars’ Jeff. You say the Confederacy has been dead forty years? Well, if it hadn’t been for it, I’d have been breathing today with soul so dead I couldn’t have whispered a single cuss-word about my native land. The O’Keefes are not overburdened with ingratitude.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Four months ago,” said O’Keefe, promptly. “The infamous foreign power I alluded to is still staggering from the official blow dealt it by <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Davis’s contraband aggregation of states. That’s why you see me cake-walking with the ex-rebs to the illegitimate tune about ’simmon-seeds and cotton. I vote for the Great Father in Washington, but I am not going back on Mars’ Jeff. You say the Confederacy has been dead forty years? Well, if it hadn’t been for it, I’d have been breathing today with soul so dead I couldn’t have whispered a single cuss-word about my native land. The O’Keefes are not overburdened with ingratitude.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I must have looked bewildered. “The war was over,” I said vacantly, “in—”</p>
|
||||
<p>O’Keefe laughed loudly, scattering my thoughts.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ask old Doc Millikin if the war is over!” he shouted, hugely diverted. “Oh, no! Doc hasn’t surrendered yet. And the Confederate States! Well, I just told you they bucked officially and solidly and nationally against a foreign government four months ago and kept me from being shot. Old Jeff’s country stepped in and brought me off under its wing while Roosevelt was having a gunboat painted and waiting for the National Campaign Committee to look up whether I had ever scratched the ticket.”</p>
|
||||
@ -31,7 +31,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You’re a blame Yankee, ain’t you?’ asked Doc, going on mixing up his Portland cement.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’m from the North,’ says I, ‘but I’m a plain man, and don’t care for mural decorations. When you get the Isthmus all asphalted over with that boll-weevil prescription, would you mind giving me a dose of painkiller, or a little strychnine on toast to ease up this feeling of unhealthiness that I have got?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘They was all sassy, just like you,’ says old Doc, ‘but we lowered their temperature considerable. Yes, sir, I reckon we sent a good many of ye over to old <i xml:lang="la">mortuis nisi bonum</i>. Look at Antietam and Bull Run and Seven Pines and around Nashville! There never was a battle where we didn’t lick ye unless you was ten to our one. I knew you were a blame Yankee the minute I laid eyes on you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Don’t reopen the chasm, Doc,’ I begs him. ‘Any Yankeeness I may have is geographical; and, as far as I am concerned, a Southerner is as good as a Filipino any day. I’m feeling to bad too argue. Let’s have secession without misrepresentation, if you say so; but what I need is more laudanum and less Lundy’s Lane. If you’re mixing that compound gefloxide of gefloxicum for me, please fill my ears with it before you get around to the battle of Gettysburg, for there is a subject full of talk.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Don’t reopen the chasm, Doc,’ I begs him. ‘Any Yankeeness I may have is geographical; and, as far as I am concerned, a Southerner is as good as a Filipino any day. I’m feeling too bad too argue. Let’s have secession without misrepresentation, if you say so; but what I need is more laudanum and less Lundy’s Lane. If you’re mixing that compound gefloxide of gefloxicum for me, please fill my ears with it before you get around to the battle of Gettysburg, for there is a subject full of talk.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“By this time Doc Millikin had thrown up a line of fortifications on square pieces of paper; and he says to me: ‘Yank, take one of these powders every two hours. They won’t kill you. I’ll be around again about sundown to see if you’re alive.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Old Doc’s powders knocked the chagres. I stayed in San Juan, and got to knowing him better. He was from Mississippi, and the red-hottest Southerner that ever smelled mint. He made Stonewall Jackson and <abbr class="name">R. E.</abbr> Lee look like Abolitionists. He had a family somewhere down near Yazoo City; but he stayed away from the States on account of an uncontrollable liking he had for the absence of a Yankee government. Him and me got as thick personally as the Emperor of Russia and the dove of peace, but sectionally we didn’t amalgamate.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Twas a beautiful system of medical practice introduced by old Doc into that isthmus of land. He’d take that bracket-saw and the mild chloride and his hypodermic, and treat anything from yellow fever to a personal friend.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -45,7 +45,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The dog had bound a leg each of Jim and the chair together, and had sunk into a comatose slumber. Jim stumbled, and the leash was slightly wrenched. The shrieks of the awakened beast rang for a block around.</p>
|
||||
<p>“If that’s your dog,” said Jim, when they were on the street again, “what’s to hinder you from running that habeas corpus you’ve got around his neck over a limb and walking off and forgetting him?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’d never dare to,” said the dogman, awed at the bold proposition. “He sleeps in the bed, I sleep on a lounge. He runs howling to Marcella if I look at him. Some night, Jim, I’m going to get even with that dog. I’ve made up my mind to do it. I’m going to creep over with a knife and cut a hole in his mosquito bar so they can get in to him. See if I don’t do it!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You ain’t yourself, Sam Telfair. You ain’t what you was once. I don’t know about these cities and flats over here. With my own eyes I seen you stand off both the Tillotson boys in Prairie View with the brass faucet out of a molasses barrel. And I seen you rope and tie the wildest steer on Little Powder in 39 1–2.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You ain’t yourself, Sam Telfair. You ain’t what you was once. I don’t know about these cities and flats over here. With my own eyes I seen you stand off both the Tillotson boys in Prairie View with the brass faucet out of a molasses barrel. And I seen you rope and tie the wildest steer on Little Powder in 39½.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I did, didn’t I?” said the other, with a temporary gleam in his eye. “But that was before I was dogmatized.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Does Misses Telfair—” began Jim.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hush!” said the dogman. “Here’s another café.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -9,7 +9,7 @@
|
||||
<section id="vanity-and-some-sables" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Vanity and Some Sables</h2>
|
||||
<p>When “Kid” Brady was sent to the rope by Molly McKeever’s blue-black eyes he withdrew from the Stovepipe Gang. So much for the power of a colleen’s blanderin’ tongue and stubborn true-heartedness. If you are a man who read this, may such an influence be sent you before 2 o’clock tomorrow; if you are a woman, may your Pomeranian greet you this morning with a cold nose—a sign of doghealth and your happiness.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Stovepipe Gang borrowed its name from a sub-district of the city called the “Stovepipe,” which is a narrow and natural extension of the familiar district known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” The “Stovepipe” strip of town runs along Eleventh and Twelfth avenues on the river, and bends a hard and sooty elbow around little, lost homeless DeWitt Clinton park. Consider that a stovepipe is an important factor in any kitchen and the situation is analyzed. The chefs in “Hell’s Kitchen” are many, and the “Stovepipe” gang, wears the cordon blue.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Stovepipe Gang borrowed its name from a sub-district of the city called the “Stovepipe,” which is a narrow and natural extension of the familiar district known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” The “Stovepipe” strip of town runs along Eleventh and Twelfth avenues on the river, and bends a hard and sooty elbow around little, lost homeless DeWitt Clinton park. Consider that a stovepipe is an important factor in any kitchen and the situation is analyzed. The chefs in “Hell’s Kitchen” are many, and the “Stovepipe” gang wears the cordon blue.</p>
|
||||
<p>The members of this unchartered but widely known brotherhood appeared to pass their time on street corners arrayed like the lilies of the conservatory and busy with nail files and penknives. Thus displayed as a guarantee of good faith, they carried on an innocuous conversation in a 200-word vocabulary, to the casual observer as innocent and immaterial as that heard in clubs seven blocks to the east.</p>
|
||||
<p>But off exhibition the “Stovepipes” were not mere street corner ornaments addicted to posing and manicuring. Their serious occupation was the separating of citizens from their coin and valuables. Preferably this was done by weird and singular tricks without noise or bloodshed; but whenever the citizen honored by their attentions refused to impoverish himself gracefully his objections came to be spread finally upon some police station blotter or hospital register.</p>
|
||||
<p>The police held the “Stovepipe” gang in perpetual suspicion and respect. As the nightingale’s liquid note is heard in the deepest shadows, so along the “Stovepipe’s” dark and narrow confines the whistle for reserves punctures the dull ear of night. Whenever there was smoke in the “stovepipe” the tasselled men in blue knew there was fire in “Hell’s Kitchen.”</p>
|
||||
@ -47,7 +47,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“He’s workin’, all right,” said the red sweater, “but—say, sport, are you trailin’ anything in the fur line? A job in a plumbin’ shop don’ match wid dem skins de Kid’s girl’s got on.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ransom overtook the strolling couple on an empty street near the river bank. He touched the Kid’s arm from behind.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Let me see you a moment, Brady,” he said, quietly. His eye rested for a second on the long fur scarf thrown stylishly back over Molly’s left shoulder. The Kid, with his old-time police hating frown on his face, stepped a yard or two aside with the detective.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Did you go to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Hethcote’s on West 7—th street yesterday to fix a leaky water pipe?” asked Ransom.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Did you go to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Hethcote’s on West 7th street yesterday to fix a leaky water pipe?” asked Ransom.</p>
|
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<p>“I did,” said the Kid. “What of it?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The lady’s $1,000 set of Russian sables went out of the house about the same time you did. The description fits the ones this lady has on.”</p>
|
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<p>“To h—Harlem with you,” cried the Kid, angrily. “You know I’ve cut out that sort of thing, Ransom. I bought them sables yesterday at—”</p>
|
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|
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@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
|
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<p>“It <em>is</em> interesting to watch them,” he replied, postulating her mood. “It is the wonderful drama of life. Some are going to supper and some to—er—other places. One wonders what their histories are.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I do not,” said the girl; “I am not so inquisitive. I come here to sit because here, only, can I be near the great, common, throbbing heart of humanity. My part in life is cast where its beats are never felt. Can you surmise why I spoke to you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr>—?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Parkenstacker,” supplied the young man. Then he looked eager and hopeful.</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” said the girl, holding up a slender finger, and smiling slightly. “You would recognize it immediately. It is impossible to keep one’s name out of print. Or even one’s portrait. This veil and this hat of my maid furnish me with an incog. You should have seen the chauffeur stare at it when he thought I did not see. Candidly, there are five or six names that belong in the holy of holies, and mine, by the accident of birth, is one of them. I spoke to you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Stackenpot—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” said the girl, holding up a slender finger, and smiling slightly. “You would recognize it immediately. It is impossible to keep one’s name out of print. Or even one’s portrait. This veil and this hat of my maid furnish me with an <abbr class="eoc">incog.</abbr> You should have seen the chauffeur stare at it when he thought I did not see. Candidly, there are five or six names that belong in the holy of holies, and mine, by the accident of birth, is one of them. I spoke to you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Stackenpot—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Parkenstacker,” corrected the young man, modestly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“—<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Parkenstacker, because I wanted to talk, for once, with a natural man—one unspoiled by the despicable gloss of wealth and supposed social superiority. Oh! you do not know how weary I am of it—money, money, money! And of the men who surround me, dancing like little marionettes all cut by the same pattern. I am sick of pleasure, of jewels, of travel, of society, of luxuries of all kinds.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I always had an idea,” ventured the young man, hesitatingly, “that money must be a pretty good thing.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
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