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<title>Chapter 7</title>
<title>A Midsummer Masquerade</title>
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<section id="chapter-7" epub:type="chapter">
<h2>A MIDSUMMER MASQUERADE</h2>
<p>“Satan,” said Jeff Peters, “is a hard boss to work for. When other people are having their vacation is when he keeps you the busiest. As old Dr. Watts or St. Paul or some other diagnostician says: ‘He always finds somebody for idle hands to do.’</p>
<section id="a-midsummer-masquerade" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
<h2 epub:type="title">A Midsummer Masquerade</h2>
<p>“Satan,” said Jeff Peters, “is a hard boss to work for. When other people are having their vacation is when he keeps you the busiest. As old <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Watts or <abbr>St.</abbr> Paul or some other diagnostician says: ‘He always finds somebody for idle hands to do.’</p>
<p>“I remember one summer when me and my partner, Andy Tucker, tried to take a layoff from our professional and business duties; but it seems that our work followed us wherever we went.</p>
<p>“Now, with a preacher it’s different. He can throw off his responsibilities and enjoy himself. On the 31st of May he wraps mosquito netting and tin foil around the pulpit, grabs his niblick, breviary and fishing pole and hikes for Lake Como or Atlantic City according to the size of the loudness with which he has been called by his congregation. And, sir, for three months he don’t have to think about business except to hunt around in Deuteronomy and Proverbs and Timothy to find texts to cover and exculpate such little midsummer penances as dropping a couple of looey door on rouge or teaching a Presbyterian widow to swim.</p>
<p>“But I was going to tell you about mine and Andy’s summer vacation that wasn’t one.</p>
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<p>“We was directed to a kind of private hotel called Woodchuck Inn, and thither me and Andy bent and almost broke our footsteps over the rocks and stumps. The Inn set back from the road in a big grove of trees, and it looked fine with its broad porches and a lot of women in white dresses rocking in the shade. The rest of Crow Knob was a post office and some scenery set an angle of forty-five degrees and a welkin.</p>
<p>“Well, sir, when we got to the gate who do you suppose comes down the walk to greet us? Old Smoke-’em-out Smithers, who used to be the best open air painless dentist and electric liver pad faker in the Southwest.</p>
<p>“Old Smoke-’em-out is dressed clerico-rural, and has the mingled air of a landlord and a claim jumper. Which aspect he corroborates by telling us that he is the host and perpetrator of Woodchuck Inn. I introduces Andy, and we talk about a few volatile topics, such as will go around at meetings of boards of directors and old associates like us three were. Old Smoke-’em-out leads us into a kind of summer house in the yard near the gate and took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with his mighty right.</p>
<p>“ ‘Gents,’ says he, ‘I’m glad to see you. Maybe you can help me out of a scrape. I’m getting a bit old for street work, so I leased this dogdays emporium so the good things would come to me. Two weeks before the season opened I gets a letter signed Lieut. Peary and one from the Duke of Marlborough, each wanting to engage board for part of the summer.</p>
<p>“ ‘Gents,’ says he, ‘I’m glad to see you. Maybe you can help me out of a scrape. I’m getting a bit old for street work, so I leased this dogdays emporium so the good things would come to me. Two weeks before the season opened I gets a letter signed <abbr>Lieut.</abbr> Peary and one from the Duke of Marlborough, each wanting to engage board for part of the summer.</p>
<p>“ ‘Well, sir, you gents know what a big thing for an obscure hustlery it would be to have for guests two gentlemen whose names are famous from long association with icebergs and the Coburgs. So I prints a lot of handbills announcing that Woodchuck Inn would shelter these distinguished boarders during the summer, except in places where it leaked, and I sends ’em out to towns around as far as Knoxville and Charlotte and Fish Dam and Bowling Green.</p>
<p>“ ‘And now look up there on the porch, gents,’ says Smoke-’em-out, ‘at them disconsolate specimens of their fair sex waiting for the arrival of the Duke and the Lieutenant. The house is packed from rafters to cellar with hero worshippers.</p>
<p>“ ‘There’s four normal school teachers and two abnormal; there’s three high school graduates between 37 and 42; there’s two literary old maids and one that can write; there’s a couple of society women and a lady from Haw River. Two elocutionists are bunking in the corn crib, and I’ve put cots in the hay loft for the cook and the society editress of the Chattanooga <i>Opera Glass</i>. You see how names draw, gents.’</p>
<p>“ ‘There’s four normal school teachers and two abnormal; there’s three high school graduates between 37 and 42; there’s two literary old maids and one that can write; there’s a couple of society women and a lady from Haw River. Two elocutionists are bunking in the corn crib, and I’ve put cots in the hay loft for the cook and the society editress of the Chattanooga <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Opera Glass</i>. You see how names draw, gents.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘how is it that you seem to be biting your thumbs at good luck? You didn’t use to be that way.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I ain’t through,’ says Smoke-’em-out. ‘Yesterday was the day for the advent of the auspicious personages. I goes down to the depot to welcome ’em. Two apparently animate substances gets off the train, both carrying bags full of croquet mallets and these magic lanterns with pushbuttons.</p>
<p>“I compares these integers with the original signatures to the letters⁠—and, well, gents, I reckon the mistake was due to my poor eyesight. Instead of being the Lieutenant, the daisy chain and wild verbena explorer was none other than Levi T. Peevy, a soda water clerk from Asheville. And the Duke of Marlborough turned out to be Theo. Drake of Murfreesborough, a bookkeeper in a grocery. What did I do? I kicked ’em both back on the train and watched ’em depart for the lowlands, the low.</p>
@ -33,16 +33,16 @@
<p>“A light breaks out on Smoke-’em-out’s face.</p>
<p>“ ‘Can you do it, gents?’ he asks. ‘Could ye do it? Could ye play the polar man and the little duke for the nice ladies? Will ye do it?’</p>
<p>“I see that Andy is superimposed with his old hankering for the oral and polyglot system of buncoing. That man had a vocabulary of about 10,000 words and synonyms, which arrayed themselves into contraband sophistries and parables when they came out.</p>
<p>“ ‘Listen,’ says Andy to old Smoke-’em-out. ‘Can we do it? You behold before you, Mr. Smithers, two of the finest equipped men on earth for inveigling the proletariat, whether by word of mouth, sleight-of-hand or swiftness of foot. Dukes come and go, explorers go and get lost, but me and Jeff Peters,’ says Andy, ‘go after the come-ons forever. If you say so, we’re the two illustrious guests you were expecting. And you’ll find,’ says Andy, ‘that we’ll give you the true local color of the title rôles from the aurora borealis to the ducal portcullis.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Listen,’ says Andy to old Smoke-’em-out. ‘Can we do it? You behold before you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Smithers, two of the finest equipped men on earth for inveigling the proletariat, whether by word of mouth, sleight-of-hand or swiftness of foot. Dukes come and go, explorers go and get lost, but me and Jeff Peters,’ says Andy, ‘go after the come-ons forever. If you say so, we’re the two illustrious guests you were expecting. And you’ll find,’ says Andy, ‘that we’ll give you the true local color of the title rôles from the aurora borealis to the ducal portcullis.’</p>
<p>“Old Smoke-’em-out is delighted. He takes me and Andy up to the inn by an arm apiece, telling us on the way that the finest fruits of the can and luxuries of the fast freights should be ours without price as long as we would stay.</p>
<p>“On the porch Smoke-’em-out says: ‘Ladies, I have the honor to introduce His Gracefulness the Duke of Marlborough and the famous inventor of the North Pole, Lieut. Peary.’</p>
<p>“On the porch Smoke-’em-out says: ‘Ladies, I have the honor to introduce His Gracefulness the Duke of Marlborough and the famous inventor of the North Pole, <abbr>Lieut.</abbr> Peary.’</p>
<p>“The skirts all flutter and the rocking chairs squeak as me and Andy bows and then goes on in with old Smoke-’em-out to register. And then we washed up and turned our cuffs, and the landlord took us to the rooms he’d been saving for us and got out a demijohn of North Carolina real mountain dew.</p>
<p>“I expected trouble when Andy began to drink. He has the artistic metempsychosis which is half drunk when sober and looks down on airships when stimulated.</p>
<p>“After lingering with the demijohn me and Andy goes out on the porch, where the ladies are to begin to earn our keep. We sit in two special chairs and then the schoolma’ams and literaterrers hunched their rockers close around us.</p>
<p>“One lady says to me: ‘How did that last venture of yours turn out, sir?’</p>
<p>“Now, I’d clean forgot to have an understanding with Andy which I was to be, the duke or the lieutenant. And I couldn’t tell from her question whether she was referring to Arctic or matrimonial expeditions. So I gave an answer that would cover both cases.</p>
<p>“ ‘Well, ma’am,’ says I, ‘it was a freeze out⁠—right smart of a freeze out, ma’am.’</p>
<p>“And then the flood gates of Andy’s perorations was opened and I knew which one of the renowned ostensible guests I was supposed to be. I wasn’t either. Andy was both. And still furthermore it seemed that he was trying to be the mouthpiece of the whole British nobility and of Arctic exploration from Sir John Franklin down. It was the union of corn whiskey and the conscientious fictional form that Mr. W. D. Howletts admires so much.</p>
<p>“And then the flood gates of Andy’s perorations was opened and I knew which one of the renowned ostensible guests I was supposed to be. I wasn’t either. Andy was both. And still furthermore it seemed that he was trying to be the mouthpiece of the whole British nobility and of Arctic exploration from Sir John Franklin down. It was the union of corn whiskey and the conscientious fictional form that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> W. D. Howletts admires so much.</p>
<p>“ ‘Ladies,’ says Andy, smiling semicircularly, ‘I am truly glad to visit America. I do not consider the magna charta,’ says he, ‘or gas balloons or snow-shoes in any way a detriment to the beauty and charm of your American women, skyscrapers or the architecture of your icebergs. The next time,’ says Andy, ‘that I go after the North Pole all the Vanderbilts in Greenland won’t be able to turn me out in the cold⁠—I mean make it hot for me.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Tell us about one of your trips, Lieutenant,’ says one of the normals.</p>
<p>“ ‘Sure,’ says Andy, getting the decision over a hiccup. ‘It was in the spring of last year that I sailed the Castle of Blenheim up to latitude 87 degrees Fahrenheit and beat the record. Ladies,’ says Andy, ‘it was a sad sight to see a Duke allied by a civil and liturgical chattel mortgage to one of your first families lost in a region of semiannual days.’ And then he goes on, ‘At four bells we sighted Westminster Abbey, but there was not a drop to eat. At noon we threw out five sandbags, and the ship rose fifteen knots higher. At midnight,’ continues Andy, ‘the restaurants closed. Sitting on a cake of ice we ate seven hot dogs. All around us was snow and ice. Six times a night the boatswain rose up and tore a leaf off the calendar, so we could keep time with the barometer. At 12,’ says Andy, with a lot of anguish on his face, ‘three huge polar bears sprang down the hatchway, into the cabin. And then⁠—’</p>

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<title>Chapter 12</title>
<title>A Tempered Wind</title>
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<h2>A TEMPERED WIND</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">A Tempered Wind</h2>
<p>The first time my optical nerves was disturbed by the sight of Buckingham Skinner was in Kansas City. I was standing on a corner when I see Buck stick his straw-colored head out of a third-story window of a business block and holler, “Whoa, there! Whoa!” like you would in endeavoring to assuage a team of runaway mules.</p>
<p>I looked around; but all the animals I see in sight is a policeman, having his shoes shined, and a couple of delivery wagons hitched to posts. Then in a minute downstairs tumbles this Buckingham Skinner, and runs to the corner, and stands and gazes down the other street at the imaginary dust kicked up by the fabulous hoofs of the fictitious team of chimerical quadrupeds. And then B. Skinner goes back up to the third-story room again, and I see that the lettering on the window is “The Farmers’ Friend Loan Company.”</p>
<p>By and by Straw-top comes down again, and I crossed the street to meet him, for I had my ideas. Yes, sir, when I got close I could see where he overdone it. He was Reub all right as far as his blue jeans and cowhide boots went, but he had a matinee actor’s hands, and the rye straw stuck over his ear looked like it belonged to the property man of the Old Homestead Co. Curiosity to know what his graft was got the best of me.</p>
<p>By and by Straw-top comes down again, and I crossed the street to meet him, for I had my ideas. Yes, sir, when I got close I could see where he overdone it. He was Reub all right as far as his blue jeans and cowhide boots went, but he had a matinee actor’s hands, and the rye straw stuck over his ear looked like it belonged to the property man of the Old Homestead <abbr>Co.</abbr> Curiosity to know what his graft was got the best of me.</p>
<p>“Was that your team broke away and run just now?” I asks him, polite. “I tried to stop ’em,” says I, “but I couldn’t. I guess they’re half way back to the farm by now.”</p>
<p>“Gosh blame them darned mules,” says Straw-top, in a voice so good that I nearly apologized; “they’re a’lus bustin’ loose.” And then he looks at me close, and then he takes off his hayseed hat, and says, in a different voice: “I’d like to shake hands with Parleyvoo Pickens, the greatest street man in the West, barring only Montague Silver, which you can no more than allow.”</p>
<p>I let him shake hands with me.</p>
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<p>“Pocket money,” says he; “that’s all. I am temporarily unfinanced. This little coup de rye straw is good for forty dollars in a town of this size. How do I work it? Why, I involve myself, as you perceive, in the loathsome apparel of the rural dub. Thus embalmed I am Jonas Stubblefield⁠—a name impossible to improve upon. I repair noisily to the office of some loan company conveniently located in the third-floor, front. There I lay my hat and yarn gloves on the floor and ask to mortgage my farm for $2,000 to pay for my sister’s musical education in Europe. Loans like that always suit the loan companies. It’s ten to one that when the note falls due the foreclosure will be leading the semiquavers by a couple of lengths.</p>
<p>“Well, sir, I reach in my pocket for the abstract of title; but I suddenly hear my team running away. I run to the window and emit the word⁠—or exclamation, which-ever it may be⁠—viz, ‘Whoa!’ Then I rush down-stairs and down the street, returning in a few minutes. ‘Dang them mules,’ I says; ‘they done run away and busted the doubletree and two traces. Now I got to hoof it home, for I never brought no money along. Reckon we’ll talk about that loan some other time, gen’lemen.’</p>
<p>“Then I spreads out my tarpaulin, like the Israelites, and waits for the manna to drop.</p>
<p>“ ‘Why, no, Mr. Stubblefield,’ says the lobster-colored party in the specs and dotted pique vest; ‘oblige us by accepting this ten-dollar bill until to-morrow. Get your harness repaired and call in at ten. We’ll be pleased to accommodate you in the matter of this loan.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Why, no, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Stubblefield,’ says the lobster-colored party in the specs and dotted pique vest; ‘oblige us by accepting this ten-dollar bill until to-morrow. Get your harness repaired and call in at ten. We’ll be pleased to accommodate you in the matter of this loan.’</p>
<p>“It’s a slight thing,” says Buckingham Skinner, modest, “but, as I said, only for temporary loose change.”</p>
<p>“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” says I, in respect for his mortification; “in case of an emergency. Of course, it’s small compared to organizing a trust or bridge whist, but even the Chicago University had to be started in a small way.”</p>
<p>“What’s your graft these days?” Buckingham Skinner asks me.</p>
<p>“The legitimate,” says I. “I’m handling rhinestones and Dr. Oleum Sinapi’s Electric Headache Battery and the Swiss Warbler’s Bird Call, a small lot of the new queer ones and twos, and the Bonanza Budget, consisting of a rolled-gold wedding and engagement ring, six Egyptian lily bulbs, a combination pickle fork and nail-clipper, and fifty engraved visiting cards⁠—no two names alike⁠—all for the sum of 38 cents.”</p>
<p>“Two months ago,” says Buckingham Skinner, “I was doing well down in Texas with a patent instantaneous fire kindler, made of compressed wood ashes and benzine. I sold loads of ’em in towns where they like to burn niggers quick, without having to ask somebody for a light. And just when I was doing the best they strikes oil down there and puts me out of business. ‘Your machine’s too slow, now, pardner,’ they tells me. ‘We can have a coon in hell with this here petroleum before your old flint-and-tinder truck can get him warm enough to perfess religion.’ And so I gives up the kindler and drifts up here to K.C. This little curtain-raiser you seen me doing, Mr. Pickens, with the simulated farm and the hypothetical teams, ain’t in my line at all, and I’m ashamed you found me working it.”</p>
<p>“The legitimate,” says I. “I’m handling rhinestones and <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Oleum Sinapi’s Electric Headache Battery and the Swiss Warbler’s Bird Call, a small lot of the new queer ones and twos, and the Bonanza Budget, consisting of a rolled-gold wedding and engagement ring, six Egyptian lily bulbs, a combination pickle fork and nail-clipper, and fifty engraved visiting cards⁠—no two names alike⁠—all for the sum of 38 cents.”</p>
<p>“Two months ago,” says Buckingham Skinner, “I was doing well down in Texas with a patent instantaneous fire kindler, made of compressed wood ashes and benzine. I sold loads of ’em in towns where they like to burn niggers quick, without having to ask somebody for a light. And just when I was doing the best they strikes oil down there and puts me out of business. ‘Your machine’s too slow, now, pardner,’ they tells me. ‘We can have a coon in hell with this here petroleum before your old flint-and-tinder truck can get him warm enough to perfess religion.’ And so I gives up the kindler and drifts up here to K.C. This little curtain-raiser you seen me doing, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Pickens, with the simulated farm and the hypothetical teams, ain’t in my line at all, and I’m ashamed you found me working it.”</p>
<p>“No man,” says I, kindly, “need to be ashamed of putting the skibunk on a loan corporation for even so small a sum as ten dollars, when he is financially abashed. Still, it wasn’t quite the proper thing. It’s too much like borrowing money without paying it back.”</p>
<p>I liked Buckingham Skinner from the start, for as good a man as ever stood over the axles and breathed gasoline smoke. And pretty soon we gets thick, and I let him in on a scheme I’d had in mind for some time, and offers to go partners.</p>
<p>“Anything,” says Buck, “that is not actually dishonest will find me willing and ready. Let us perforate into the inwardness of your proposition. I feel degraded when I am forced to wear property straw in my hair and assume a bucolic air for the small sum of ten dollars. Actually, Mr. Pickens, it makes me feel like the Ophelia of the Great Occidental All-Star One-Night Consolidated Theatrical Aggregation.”</p>
<p>“Anything,” says Buck, “that is not actually dishonest will find me willing and ready. Let us perforate into the inwardness of your proposition. I feel degraded when I am forced to wear property straw in my hair and assume a bucolic air for the small sum of ten dollars. Actually, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Pickens, it makes me feel like the Ophelia of the Great Occidental All-Star One-Night Consolidated Theatrical Aggregation.”</p>
<p>This scheme of mine was one that suited my proclivities. By nature I am some sentimental, and have always felt gentle toward the mollifying elements of existence. I am disposed to be lenient with the arts and sciences; and I find time to instigate a cordiality for the more human works of nature, such as romance and the atmosphere and grass and poetry and the Seasons. I never skin a sucker without admiring the prismatic beauty of his scales. I never sell a little auriferous beauty to the man with the hoe without noticing the beautiful harmony there is between gold and green. And that’s why I liked this scheme; it was so full of outdoor air and landscapes and easy money.</p>
<p>We had to have a young lady assistant to help us work this graft; and I asked Buck if he knew of one to fill the bill.</p>
<p>“One,” says I, “that is cool and wise and strictly business from her pompadour to her Oxfords. No ex-toe-dancers or gum-chewers or crayon portrait canvassers for this.”</p>
@ -39,7 +39,7 @@
<p>One evening Buck and Miss Malloy drives up like blazes in a buggy to a farmer’s door. She is pale but affectionate, clinging to his arm⁠—always clinging to his arm. Any one can see that she is a peach and of the cling variety. They claim they are eloping for to be married on account of cruel parents. They ask where they can find a preacher. Farmer says, “B’gum there ain’t any preacher nigher than Reverend Abels, four miles over on Caney Creek.” Farmeress wipes her hand on her apron and rubbers through her specs.</p>
<p>Then, lo and look ye! Up the road from the other way jogs Parleyvoo Pickens in a gig, dressed in black, white necktie, long face, sniffing his nose, emitting a spurious kind of noise resembling the long meter doxology.</p>
<p>“B’jinks!” says farmer, “if thar ain’t a preacher now!”</p>
<p>It transpires that I am Rev. Abijah Green, travelling over to Little Bethel school-house for to preach next Sunday.</p>
<p>It transpires that I am <abbr>Rev.</abbr> Abijah Green, travelling over to Little Bethel school-house for to preach next Sunday.</p>
<p>The young folks will have it they must be married, for pa is pursuing them with the plow mules and the buckboard. So the Reverend Green, after hesitating, marries ’em in the farmer’s parlor. And farmer grins, and has in cider, and says “B’gum!” and farmeress sniffles a bit and pats the bride on the shoulder. And Parleyvoo Pickens, the wrong reverend, writes out a marriage certificate, and farmer and farmeress sign it as witnesses. And the parties of the first, second and third part gets in their vehicles and rides away. Oh, that was an idyllic graft! True love and the lowing kine and the sun shining on the red barns⁠—it certainly had all other impostures I know about beat to a batter.</p>
<p>I suppose I happened along in time to marry Buck and Miss Malloy at about twenty farm-houses. I hated to think how the romance was going to fade later on when all them marriage certificates turned up in banks where we’d discounted ’em, and the farmers had to pay them notes of hand they’d signed, running from $300 to $500.</p>
<p>On the 15th day of May us three divided about $6,000. Miss Malloy nearly cried with joy. You don’t often see a tenderhearted girl or one that is bent on doing right.</p>
@ -54,8 +54,8 @@
<p>But old Badville-near-Coney is the ideal burg for a refined piece of piracy if you can pay the bunco duty. Imported grafts come pretty high. The custom-house officers that look after it carry clubs, and it’s hard to smuggle in even a bib-and-tucker swindle to work Brooklyn with unless you can pay the toll. But now, me and Buck, having capital, descends upon New York to try and trade the metropolitan backwoodsmen a few glass beads for real estate just as the Vans did a hundred or two years ago.</p>
<p>At an East Side hotel we gets acquainted with Romulus G. Atterbury, a man with the finest head for financial operations I ever saw. It was all bald and glossy except for gray side whiskers. Seeing that head behind an office railing, and you’d deposit a million with it without a receipt. This Atterbury was well dressed, though he ate seldom; and the synopsis of his talk would make the conversation of a siren sound like a cab driver’s kick. He said he used to be a member of the Stock Exchange, but some of the big capitalists got jealous and formed a ring that forced him to sell his seat.</p>
<p>Atterbury got to liking me and Buck and he begun to throw on the canvas for us some of the schemes that had caused his hair to evacuate. He had one scheme for starting a National bank on $45 that made the Mississippi Bubble look as solid as a glass marble. He talked this to us for three days, and when his throat was good and sore we told him about the roll we had. Atterbury borrowed a quarter from us and went out and got a box of throat lozenges and started all over again. This time he talked bigger things, and he got us to see ’em as he did. The scheme he laid out looked like a sure winner, and he talked me and Buck into putting our capital against his burnished dome of thought. It looked all right for a kid-gloved graft. It seemed to be just about an inch and a half outside of the reach of the police, and as money-making as a mint. It was just what me and Buck wanted⁠—a regular business at a permanent stand, with an open air spieling with tonsilitis on the street corners every evening.</p>
<p>So, in six weeks you see a handsome furnished set of offices down in the Wall Street neighborhood, with “The Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company” in gilt letters on the door. And you see in his private room, with the door open, the secretary and treasurer, Mr. Buckingham Skinner, costumed like the lilies of the conservatory, with his high silk hat close to his hand. Nobody yet ever saw Buck outside of an instantaneous reach for his hat.</p>
<p>And you might perceive the president and general manager, Mr. R. G. Atterbury, with his priceless polished poll, busy in the main office room dictating letters to a shorthand countess, who has got pomp and a pompadour that is no less than a guarantee to investors.</p>
<p>So, in six weeks you see a handsome furnished set of offices down in the Wall Street neighborhood, with “The Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company” in gilt letters on the door. And you see in his private room, with the door open, the secretary and treasurer, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Buckingham Skinner, costumed like the lilies of the conservatory, with his high silk hat close to his hand. Nobody yet ever saw Buck outside of an instantaneous reach for his hat.</p>
<p>And you might perceive the president and general manager, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> R. G. Atterbury, with his priceless polished poll, busy in the main office room dictating letters to a shorthand countess, who has got pomp and a pompadour that is no less than a guarantee to investors.</p>
<p>There is a bookkeeper and an assistant, and a general atmosphere of varnish and culpability.</p>
<p>At another desk the eye is relieved by the sight of an ordinary man, attired with unscrupulous plainness, sitting with his feet up, eating apples, with his obnoxious hat on the back of his head. That man is no other than Colonel Tecumseh (once “Parleyvoo”) Pickens, the vice-president of the company.</p>
<p>“No recherché rags for me,” I says to Atterbury, when we was organizing the stage properties of the robbery. “I’m a plain man,” says I, “and I do not use pajamas, French, or military hair-brushes. Cast me for the role of the rhinestone-in-the-rough or I don’t go on exhibition. If you can use me in my natural, though displeasing form, do so.”</p>
@ -101,7 +101,7 @@
<p>And then Buck turns to me and says: “I don’t care what Atterbury thinks. He only put in brains, and if he gets his capital out he’s lucky. But what do you say, Pick?”</p>
<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 <i>line</i>⁠—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 <i>line</i>, I say. Here, Pick, come and straighten ’em out and let ’em through and out by the other door.”</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>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 tea-pot or the crack in the wall behind the clock for your hoard of pennies.”</p>
@ -110,7 +110,7 @@
<p>When they was all paid off and gone, Buck calls the newspaper reporter and shoves the rest of the money over to him.</p>
<p>“You begun this,” says Buck; “now finish it. Over there are the books, showing every share and bond issued. Here’s the money to cover, except what we’ve spent to live on. You’ll have to act as receiver. I guess you’ll do the square thing on account of your paper. This is the best way we know how to settle it. Me and our substantial but apple-weary vice-president are going to follow the example of our revered president, and skip. Now, have you got enough news for to-day, or do you want to interview us on etiquette and the best way to make over an old taffeta skirt?”</p>
<p>“News!” says the newspaper man, taking his pipe out; “do you think I could use this? I don’t want to lose my job. Suppose I go around to the office and tell ’em this happened. What’ll the managing editor say? He’ll just hand me a pass to Bellevue and tell me to come back when I get cured. I might turn in a story about a sea serpent wiggling up Broadway, but I haven’t got the nerve to try ’em with a pipe like this. A get-rich-quick scheme⁠—excuse me⁠—gang giving back the boodle! Oh, no. I’m not on the comic supplement.”</p>
<p>“You can’t understand it, of course,” says Buck, with his hand on the door knob. “Me and Pick ain’t Wall Streeters like you know ’em. We never allowed to swindle sick old women and working girls and take nickels off of kids. In the lines of graft we’ve worked we took money from the people the Lord made to be buncoed⁠—sports and rounders and smart Alecks and street crowds, that always have a few dollars to throw away, and farmers that wouldn’t ever be happy if the grafters didn’t come around and play with ’em when they sold their crops. We never cared to fish for the kind of suckers that bite here. No, sir. We got too much respect for the profession and for ourselves. Good-by to you, Mr. Receiver.”</p>
<p>“You can’t understand it, of course,” says Buck, with his hand on the door knob. “Me and Pick ain’t Wall Streeters like you know ’em. We never allowed to swindle sick old women and working girls and take nickels off of kids. In the lines of graft we’ve worked we took money from the people the Lord made to be buncoed⁠—sports and rounders and smart Alecks and street crowds, that always have a few dollars to throw away, and farmers that wouldn’t ever be happy if the grafters didn’t come around and play with ’em when they sold their crops. We never cared to fish for the kind of suckers that bite here. No, sir. We got too much respect for the profession and for ourselves. Good-by to you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Receiver.”</p>
<p>“Here!” says the journalist reporter; “wait a minute. There’s a broker I know on the next floor. Wait till I put this truck in his safe. I want you fellows to take a drink on me before you go.”</p>
<p>“On you?” says Buck, winking solemn. “Don’t you go and try to make ’em believe at the office you said that. Thanks. We can’t spare the time, I reckon. So long.”</p>
<p>And me and Buck slides out the door; and that’s the way the Golconda Company went into involuntary liquefaction.</p>

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<h2>HOSTAGES TO MOMUS</h2>
<h4>I<br/> </h4>
<p>I never got inside of the legitimate line of graft but once. But, one time, as I say, I reversed the decision of the revised statutes and undertook a thing that I’d have to apologize for even under the New Jersey trust laws.</p>
<p>Me and Caligula Polk, of Muskogee in the Creek Nation, was down in the Mexican State of Tamaulipas running a peripatetic lottery and monte game. Now, selling lottery tickets is a government graft in Mexico, just like selling forty-eight cents’ worth of postage-stamps for forty-nine cents is over here. So Uncle Porfirio he instructs the <i>rurales</i> to attend to our case.</p>
<p><i>Rurales</i>? They’re a sort of country police; but don’t draw any mental crayon portraits of the worthy constables with a tin star and a gray goatee. The <i>rurales</i>⁠—well, if we’d mount our Supreme Court on broncos, arm ’em with Winchesters, and start ’em out after John Doe <i>et al</i>. we’d have about the same thing.</p>
<p>When the <i>rurales</i> started for us we started for the States. They chased us as far as Matamoras. We hid in a brickyard; and that night we swum the Rio Grande, Caligula with a brick in each hand, absent-minded, which he drops upon the soil of Texas, forgetting he had ’em.</p>
<p>From there we emigrated to San Antone, and then over to New Orleans, where we took a rest. And in that town of cotton bales and other adjuncts to female beauty we made the acquaintance of drinks invented by the Creoles during the period of Louey Cans, in which they are still served at the side doors. The most I can remember of this town is that me and Caligula and a Frenchman named McCarty⁠—wait a minute; Adolph McCarty⁠—was trying to make the French Quarter pay up the back trading-stamps due on the Louisiana Purchase, when somebody hollers that the johndarms are coming. I have an insufficient recollection of buying two yellow tickets through a window; and I seemed to see a man swing a lantern and say “All aboard!” I remembered no more, except that the train butcher was covering me and Caligula up with Augusta J. Evans’s works and figs.</p>
<p>When we become revised, we find that we have collided up against the State of Georgia at a spot hitherto unaccounted for in time tables except by an asterisk, which means that trains stop every other Thursday on signal by tearing up a rail. We was waked up in a yellow pine hotel by the noise of flowers and the smell of birds. Yes, sir, for the wind was banging sunflowers as big as buggy wheels against the weatherboarding and the chicken coop was right under the window. Me and Caligula dressed and went down-stairs. The landlord was shelling peas on the front porch. He was six feet of chills and fever, and Hongkong in complexion though in other respects he seemed amenable in the exercise of his sentiments and features.</p>
<p>Caligula, who is a spokesman by birth, and a small man, though red-haired and impatient of painfulness of any kind, speaks up.</p>
<p>“Pardner,” says he, “good-morning, and be darned to you. Would you mind telling us why we are at? We know the reason we are where, but can’t exactly figure out on account of at what place.”</p>
<p>“Well, gentlemen,” says the landlord, “I reckoned you-all would be inquiring this morning. You-all dropped off of the nine-thirty train here last night; and you was right tight. Yes, you was right smart in liquor. I can inform you that you are now in the town of Mountain Valley, in the State of Georgia.”</p>
<p>“On top of that,” says Caligula, “don’t say that we can’t have anything to eat.”</p>
<p>“Sit down, gentlemen,” says the landlord, “and in twenty minutes I’ll call you to the best breakfast you can get anywhere in town.”</p>
<p>That breakfast turned out to be composed of fried bacon and a yellowish edifice that proved up something between pound cake and flexible sandstone. The landlord calls it corn pone; and then he sets out a dish of the exaggerated breakfast food known as hominy; and so me and Caligula makes the acquaintance of the celebrated food that enabled every Johnny Reb to lick one and two-thirds Yankees for nearly four years at a stretch.</p>
<p>“The wonder to me is,” says Caligula, “that Uncle Robert Lee’s boys didn’t chase the Grant and Sherman outfit clear up into Hudson’s Bay. It would have made me that mad to eat this truck they call mahogany!”</p>
<p>“Hog and hominy,” I explains, “is the staple food of this section.”</p>
<p>“Then,” says Caligula, “they ought to keep it where it belongs. I thought this was a hotel and not a stable. Now, if we was in Muskogee at the St. Lucifer House, I’d show you some breakfast grub. Antelope steaks and fried liver to begin on, and venison cutlets with <i>chili con carne</i> and pineapple fritters, and then some sardines and mixed pickles; and top it off with a can of yellow clings and a bottle of beer. You won’t find a layout like that on the bill of affairs of any of your Eastern restauraws.”</p>
<p>“Too lavish,” says I. “I’ve traveled, and I’m unprejudiced. There’ll never be a perfect breakfast eaten until some man grows arms long enough to stretch down to New Orleans for his coffee and over to Norfolk for his rolls, and reaches up to Vermont and digs a slice of butter out of a spring-house, and then turns over a beehive close to a white clover patch out in Indiana for the rest. Then he’d come pretty close to making a meal on the amber that the gods eat on Mount Olympia.”</p>
<p>“Too ephemeral,” says Caligula. “I’d want ham and eggs, or rabbit stew, anyhow, for a chaser. What do you consider the most edifying and casual in the way of a dinner?”</p>
<p>“I’ve been infatuated from time to time,” I answers, “with fancy ramifications of grub such as terrapins, lobsters, reed birds, jambolaya, and canvas-covered ducks; but after all there’s nothing less displeasing to me than a beefsteak smothered in mushrooms on a balcony in sound of the Broadway streetcars, with a hand-organ playing down below, and the boys hollering extras about the latest suicide. For the wine, give me a reasonable Ponty Cany. And that’s all, except a <i>demi-tasse</i>.”</p>
<p>“Well,” says Caligula, “I reckon in New York you get to be a conniseer; and when you go around with the <i>demi-tasse</i> you are naturally bound to buy ’em stylish grub.”</p>
<p>“It’s a great town for epicures,” says I. “You’d soon fall into their ways if you was there.”</p>
<p>“I’ve heard it was,” says Caligula. “But I reckon I wouldn’t. I can polish my fingernails all they need myself.”</p>
<h4>II<br/> </h4>
<p>After breakfast we went out on the front porch, lighted up two of the landlord’s <i>flor de upas</i> perfectos, and took a look at Georgia.</p>
<p>The installment of scenery visible to the eye looked mighty poor. As far as we could see was red hills all washed down with gullies and scattered over with patches of piny woods. Blackberry bushes was all that kept the rail fences from falling down. About fifteen miles over to the north was a little range of well-timbered mountains.</p>
<p>That town of Mountain Valley wasn’t going. About a dozen people permeated along the sidewalks; but what you saw mostly was rain-barrels and roosters, and boys poking around with sticks in piles of ashes made by burning the scenery of Uncle Tom shows.</p>
<p>And just then there passes down on the other side of the street a high man in a long black coat and a beaver hat. All the people in sight bowed, and some crossed the street to shake hands with him; folks came out of stores and houses to holler at him; women leaned out of windows and smiled; and all the kids stopped playing to look at him. Our landlord stepped out on the porch and bent himself double like a carpenter’s rule, and sung out, “Good-morning, Colonel,” when he was a dozen yards gone by.</p>
<p>“And is that Alexander, pa?” says Caligula to the landlord; “and why is he called great?”</p>
<p>“That, gentlemen,” says the landlord, “is no less than Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham, the president of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad, mayor of Mountain Valley, and chairman of the Perry County board of immigration and public improvements.”</p>
<p>“Been away a good many years, hasn’t he?” I asked.</p>
<p>“No, sir; Colonel Rockingham is going down to the post-office for his mail. His fellow-citizens take pleasure in greeting him thus every morning. The colonel is our most prominent citizen. Besides the height of the stock of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad, he owns a thousand acres of that land across the creek. Mountain Valley delights, sir, to honor a citizen of such worth and public spirit.”</p>
<p>For an hour that afternoon Caligula sat on the back of his neck on the porch and studied a newspaper, which was unusual in a man who despised print. When he was through he took me to the end of the porch among the sunlight and drying dish-towels. I knew that Caligula had invented a new graft. For he chewed the ends of his mustache and ran the left catch of his suspenders up and down, which was his way.</p>
<p>“What is it now?” I asks. “Just so it ain’t floating mining stocks or raising Pennsylvania pinks, we’ll talk it over.”</p>
<p>“Pennsylvania pinks? Oh, that refers to a coin-raising scheme of the Keystoners. They burn the soles of old women’s feet to make them tell where their money’s hid.”</p>
<p>Caligula’s words in business was always few and bitter.</p>
<p>“You see them mountains,” said he, pointing. “And you seen that colonel man that owns railroads and cuts more ice when he goes to the post-office than Roosevelt does when he cleans ’em out. What we’re going to do is to kidnap the latter into the former, and inflict a ransom of ten thousand dollars.”</p>
<p>“Illegality,” says I, shaking my head.</p>
<p>“I knew you’d say that,” says Caligula. “At first sight it does seem to jar peace and dignity. But it don’t. I got the idea out of that newspaper. Would you commit aspersions on a equitable graft that the United States itself has condoned and indorsed and ratified?”</p>
<p>“Kidnapping,” says I, “is an immoral function in the derogatory list of the statutes. If the United States upholds it, it must be a recent enactment of ethics, along with race suicide and rural delivery.”</p>
<p>“Listen,” says Caligula, “and I’ll explain the case set down in the papers. Here was a Greek citizen named Burdick Harris,” says he, “captured for a graft by Africans; and the United States sends two gunboats to the State of Tangiers and makes the King of Morocco give up seventy thousand dollars to Raisuli.”</p>
<p>“Go slow,” says I. “That sounds too international to take in all at once. It’s like ‘thimble, thimble, who’s got the naturalization papers?’ ”</p>
<p>“ ’Twas press despatches from Constantinople,” says Caligula. “You’ll see, six months from now. They’ll be confirmed by the monthly magazines; and then it won’t be long till you’ll notice ’em alongside the photos of the Mount Pelee eruption photos in the while-you-get-your-hair-cut weeklies. It’s all right, Pick. This African man Raisuli hides Burdick Harris up in the mountains, and advertises his price to the governments of different nations. Now, you wouldn’t think for a minute,” goes on Caligula, “that John Hay would have chipped in and helped this graft along if it wasn’t a square game, would you?”</p>
<p>“Why, no,” says I. “I’ve always stood right in with Bryan’s policies, and I couldn’t consciously say a word against the Republican administration just now. But if Harris was a Greek, on what system of international protocols did Hay interfere?”</p>
<p>“It ain’t exactly set forth in the papers,” says Caligula. “I suppose it’s a matter of sentiment. You know he wrote this poem, ‘Little Breeches’; and them Greeks wear little or none. But anyhow, John Hay sends the Brooklyn and the Olympia over, and they cover Africa with thirty-inch guns. And then Hay cables after the health of the <i>persona grata</i>. ‘And how are they this morning?’ he wires. ‘Is Burdick Harris alive yet, or Mr. Raisuli dead?’ And the King of Morocco sends up the seventy thousand dollars, and they turn Burdick Harris loose. And there’s not half the hard feelings among the nations about this little kidnapping matter as there was about the peace congress. And Burdick Harris says to the reporters, in the Greek language, that he’s often heard about the United States, and he admires Roosevelt next to Raisuli, who is one of the whitest and most gentlemanly kidnappers that he ever worked alongside of. So you see, Pick,” winds up Caligula, “we’ve got the law of nations on our side. We’ll cut this colonel man out of the herd, and corral him in them little mountains, and stick up his heirs and assigns for ten thousand dollars.”</p>
<p>“Well, you seldom little red-headed territorial terror,” I answers, “you can’t bluff your uncle Tecumseh Pickens! I’ll be your company in this graft. But I misdoubt if you’ve absorbed the inwardness of this Burdick Harris case, Calig; and if on any morning we get a telegram from the Secretary of State asking about the health of the scheme, I propose to acquire the most propinquitous and celeritous mule in this section and gallop diplomatically over into the neighboring and peaceful nation of Alabama.”</p>
<h4>III<br/> </h4>
<p>Me and Caligula spent the next three days investigating the bunch of mountains into which we proposed to kidnap Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham. We finally selected an upright slice of topography covered with bushes and trees that you could only reach by a secret path that we cut out up the side of it. And the only way to reach the mountain was to follow up the bend of a branch that wound among the elevations.</p>
<p>Then I took in hand an important subdivision of the proceedings. I went up to Atlanta on the train and laid in a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar supply of the most gratifying and efficient lines of grub that money could buy. I always was an admirer of viands in their more palliative and revised stages. Hog and hominy are not only inartistic to my stomach, but they give indigestion to my moral sentiments. And I thought of Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham, president of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad, and how he would miss the luxury of his home fare as is so famous among wealthy Southerners. So I sunk half of mine and Caligula’s capital in as elegant a layout of fresh and canned provisions as Burdick Harris or any other professional kidnappee ever saw in a camp.</p>
<p>I put another hundred in a couple of cases of Bordeaux, two quarts of cognac, two hundred Havana regalias with gold bands, and a camp stove and stools and folding cots. I wanted Colonel Rockingham to be comfortable; and I hoped after he gave up the ten thousand dollars he would give me and Caligula as good a name for gentlemen and entertainers as the Greek man did the friend of his that made the United States his bill collector against Africa.</p>
<p>When the goods came down from Atlanta, we hired a wagon, moved them up on the little mountain, and established camp. And then we laid for the colonel.</p>
<p>We caught him one morning about two miles out from Mountain Valley, on his way to look after some of his burnt umber farm land. He was an elegant old gentleman, as thin and tall as a trout rod, with frazzled shirt-cuffs and specs on a black string. We explained to him, brief and easy, what we wanted; and Caligula showed him, careless, the handle of his forty-five under his coat.</p>
<p>“What?” says Colonel Rockingham. “Bandits in Perry County, Georgia! I shall see that the board of immigration and public improvements hears of this!”</p>
<p>“Be so unfoolhardy as to climb into that buggy,” says Caligula, “by order of the board of perforation and public depravity. This is a business meeting, and we’re anxious to adjourn <i>sine qua non</i>.”</p>
<p>We drove Colonel Rockingham over the mountain and up the side of it as far as the buggy could go. Then we tied the horse, and took our prisoner on foot up to the camp.</p>
<p>“Now, colonel,” I says to him, “we’re after the ransom, me and my partner; and no harm will come to you if the King of Mor⁠—if your friends send up the dust. In the mean time we are gentlemen the same as you. And if you give us your word not to try to escape, the freedom of the camp is yours.”</p>
<p>“I give you my word,” says the colonel.</p>
<p>“All right,” says I; “and now it’s eleven o’clock, and me and Mr. Polk will proceed to inculcate the occasion with a few well-timed trivialities in the way of grub.”</p>
<p>“Thank you,” says the colonel; “I believe I could relish a slice of bacon and a plate of hominy.”</p>
<p>“But you won’t,” says I emphatic. “Not in this camp. We soar in higher regions than them occupied by your celebrated but repulsive dish.”</p>
<p>While the colonel read his paper, me and Caligula took off our coats and went in for a little luncheon <i>de luxe</i> just to show him. Caligula was a fine cook of the Western brand. He could toast a buffalo or fricassee a couple of steers as easy as a woman could make a cup of tea. He was gifted in the way of knocking together edibles when haste and muscle and quantity was to be considered. He held the record west of the Arkansas River for frying pancakes with his left hand, broiling venison cutlets with his right, and skinning a rabbit with his teeth at the same time. But I could do things <i>en casserole</i> and <i>à la creole</i>, and handle the oil and tobasco as gently and nicely as a French <i>chef</i>.</p>
<p>So at twelve o’clock we had a hot lunch ready that looked like a banquet on a Mississippi River steamboat. We spread it on the tops of two or three big boxes, opened two quarts of the red wine, set the olives and a canned oyster cocktail and a ready-made Martini by the colonel’s plate, and called him to grub.</p>
<p>Colonel Rockingham drew up his campstool, wiped off his specs, and looked at the things on the table. Then I thought he was swearing; and I felt mean because I hadn’t taken more pains with the victuals. But he wasn’t; he was asking a blessing; and me and Caligula hung our heads, and I saw a tear drop from the colonel’s eye into his cocktail.</p>
<p>I never saw a man eat with so much earnestness and application⁠—not hastily, like a grammarian, or one of the canal, but slow and appreciative, like a anaconda, or a real <i>vive bonjour</i>.</p>
<p>In an hour and a half the colonel leaned back. I brought him a pony of brandy and his black coffee, and set the box of Havana regalias on the table.</p>
<p>“Gentlemen,” says he, blowing out the smoke and trying to breathe it back again, “when we view the eternal hills and the smiling and beneficent landscape, and reflect upon the goodness of the Creator who⁠—”</p>
<p>“Excuse me, colonel,” says I, “but there’s some business to attend to now”; and I brought out paper and pen and ink and laid ’em before him. “Who do you want to send to for the money?” I asks.</p>
<p>“I reckon,” says he, after thinking a bit, “to the vice-president of our railroad, at the general offices of the Company in Edenville.”</p>
<p>“How far is it to Edenville from here?” I asked.</p>
<p>“About ten miles,” says he.</p>
<p>Then I dictated these lines, and Colonel Rockingham wrote them out:<br/></p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote class="med">
<p>I am kidnapped and held a prisoner by two desperate outlaws in a place which is useless to attempt to find. They demand ten thousand dollars at once for my release. The amount must be raised immediately, and these directions followed. Come alone with the money to Stony Creek, which runs out of Blacktop Mountains. Follow the bed of the creek till you come to a big flat rock on the left bank, on which is marked a cross in red chalk. Stand on the rock and wave a white flag. A guide will come to you and conduct you to where I am held. Lose no time.<br/></p>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p>After the colonel had finished this, he asked permission to take on a postscript about how he was being treated, so the railroad wouldn’t feel uneasy in its bosom about him. We agreed to that. He wrote down that he had just had lunch with the two desperate ruffians; and then he set down the whole bill of fare, from cocktails to coffee. He wound up with the remark that dinner would be ready about six, and would probably be a more licentious and intemperate affair than lunch.</p>
<p>Me and Caligula read it, and decided to let it go; for we, being cooks, were amenable to praise, though it sounded out of place on a sight draft for ten thousand dollars.</p>
<p>I took the letter over to the Mountain Valley road and watched for a messenger. By and by a colored equestrian came along on horseback, riding toward Edenville. I gave him a dollar to take the letter to the railroad offices; and then I went back to camp.</p>
<h4>IV<br/> </h4>
<p>About four o’clock in the afternoon, Caligula, who was acting as lookout, calls to me:</p>
<p>“I have to report a white shirt signalling on the starboard bow, sir.”</p>
<p>I went down the mountain and brought back a fat, red man in an alpaca coat and no collar.</p>
<p>“Gentlemen,” says Colonel Rockingham, “allow me to introduce my brother, Captain Duval C. Rockingham, vice-president of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad.”</p>
<p>“Otherwise the King of Morocco,” says I. “I reckon you don’t mind my counting the ransom, just as a business formality.”</p>
<p>“Well, no, not exactly,” says the fat man, “not when it comes. I turned that matter over to our second vice-president. I was anxious after Brother Jackson’s safetiness. I reckon he’ll be along right soon. What does that lobster salad you mentioned taste like, Brother Jackson?”</p>
<p>“Mr. Vice-President,” says I, “you’ll oblige us by remaining here till the second V. P. arrives. This is a private rehearsal, and we don’t want any roadside speculators selling tickets.”</p>
<p>In half an hour Caligula sings out again:</p>
<p>“Sail ho! Looks like an apron on a broomstick.”</p>
<p>I perambulated down the cliff again, and escorted up a man six foot three, with a sandy beard and no other dimension that you could notice. Thinks I to myself, if he’s got ten thousand dollars on his person it’s in one bill and folded lengthwise.</p>
<p>“Mr. Patterson G. Coble, our second vice-president,” announces the colonel.</p>
<p>“Glad to know you, gentlemen,” says this Coble. “I came up to disseminate the tidings that Major Tallahassee Tucker, our general passenger agent, is now negotiating a peachcrate full of our railroad bonds with the Perry County Bank for a loan. My dear Colonel Rockingham, was that chicken gumbo or cracked goobers on the bill of fare in your note? Me and the conductor of fifty-six was having a dispute about it.”</p>
<p>“Another white wings on the rocks!” hollers Caligula. “If I see any more I’ll fire on ’em and swear they was torpedo-boats!”</p>
<p>The guide goes down again, and convoys into the lair a person in blue overalls carrying an amount of inebriety and a lantern. I am so sure that this is Major Tucker that I don’t even ask him until we are up above; and then I discover that it is Uncle Timothy, the yard switchman at Edenville, who is sent ahead to flag our understandings with the gossip that Judge Pendergast, the railroad’s attorney, is in the process of mortgaging Colonel Rockingham’s farming lands to make up the ransom.</p>
<p>While he is talking, two men crawl from under the bushes into camp, and Caligula, with no white flag to disinter him from his plain duty, draws his gun. But again Colonel Rockingham intervenes and introduces Mr. Jones and Mr. Batts, engineer and fireman of train number forty-two.</p>
<p>“Excuse us,” says Batts, “but me and Jim have hunted squirrels all over this mounting, and we don’t need no white flag. Was that straight, colonel, about the plum pudding and pineapples and real store cigars?”</p>
<p>“Towel on a fishing-pole in the offing!” howls Caligula. “Suppose it’s the firing line of the freight conductors and brakeman.”</p>
<p>“My last trip down,” says I, wiping off my face. “If the S. &amp; E. T. wants to run an excursion up here just because we kidnapped their president, let ’em. We’ll put out our sign. ‘The Kidnapper’s Cafe and Trainmen’s Home.’ ”</p>
<p>This time I caught Major Tallahassee Tucker by his own confession, and I felt easier. I asked him into the creek, so I could drown him if he happened to be a track-walker or caboose porter. All the way up the mountain he driveled to me about asparagus on toast, a thing that his intelligence in life had skipped.</p>
<p>Up above I got his mind segregated from food and asked if he had raised the ransom.</p>
<p>“My dear sir,” says he, “I succeeded in negotiating a loan on thirty thousand dollars’ worth of the bonds of our railroad, and⁠—”</p>
<p>“Never mind just now, major,” says I. “It’s all right, then. Wait till after dinner, and we’ll settle the business. All of you gentlemen,” I continues to the crowd, “are invited to stay to dinner. We have mutually trusted one another, and the white flag is supposed to wave over the proceedings.”</p>
<p>“The correct idea,” says Caligula, who was standing by me. “Two baggage-masters and a ticket-agent dropped out of a tree while you was below the last time. Did the major man bring the money?”</p>
<p>“He says,” I answered, “that he succeeded in negotiating the loan.”</p>
<p>If any cooks ever earned ten thousand dollars in twelve hours, me and Caligula did that day. At six o’clock we spread the top of the mountain with as fine a dinner as the personnel of any railroad ever engulfed. We opened all the wine, and we concocted entrées and <i>pièces de resistance</i>, and stirred up little savory <i>chef de cuisines</i> and organized a mass of grub such as has been seldom instigated out of canned and bottled goods. The railroad gathered around it, and the wassail and diversions was intense.</p>
<p>After the feast me and Caligula, in the line of business, takes Major Tucker to one side and talks ransom. The major pulls out an agglomeration of currency about the size of the price of a town lot in the suburbs of Rabbitville, Arizona, and makes this outcry.</p>
<p>“Gentlemen,” says he, “the stock of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville railroad has depreciated some. The best I could do with thirty thousand dollars’ worth of the bonds was to secure a loan of eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents. On the farming lands of Colonel Rockingham, Judge Pendergast was able to obtain, on a ninth mortgage, the sum of fifty dollars. You will find the amount, one hundred and thirty-seven fifty, correct.”</p>
<p>“A railroad president,” said I, looking this Tucker in the eye, “and the owner of a thousand acres of land; and yet⁠—”</p>
<p>“Gentlemen,” says Tucker, “The railroad is ten miles long. There don’t any train run on it except when the crew goes out in the pines and gathers enough lightwood knots to get up steam. A long time ago, when times was good, the net earnings used to run as high as eighteen dollars a week. Colonel Rockingham’s land has been sold for taxes thirteen times. There hasn’t been a peach crop in this part of Georgia for two years. The wet spring killed the watermelons. Nobody around here has money enough to buy fertilizer; and land is so poor the corn crop failed and there wasn’t enough grass to support the rabbits. All the people have had to eat in this section for over a year is hog and hominy, and⁠—”</p>
<p>“Pick,” interrupts Caligula, mussing up his red hair, “what are you going to do with that chicken-feed?”</p>
<p>I hands the money back to Major Tucker; and then I goes over to Colonel Rockingham and slaps him on the back.</p>
<p>“Colonel,” says I, “I hope you’ve enjoyed our little joke. We don’t want to carry it too far. Kidnappers! Well, wouldn’t it tickle your uncle? My name’s Rhinegelder, and I’m a nephew of Chauncey Depew. My friend’s a second cousin of the editor of <i>Puck</i>. So you can see. We are down South enjoying ourselves in our humorous way. Now, there’s two quarts of cognac to open yet, and then the joke’s over.”</p>
<p>What’s the use to go into details? One or two will be enough. I remember Major Tallahassee Tucker playing on a jew’s-harp, and Caligula waltzing with his head on the watch pocket of a tall baggage-master. I hesitate to refer to the cake-walk done by me and Mr. Patterson G. Coble with Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham between us.</p>
<p>And even on the next morning, when you wouldn’t think it possible, there was a consolation for me and Caligula. We knew that Raisuli himself never made half the hit with Burdick Harris that we did with the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad.</p>
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<h2>CONSCIENCE IN ART</h2>
<section id="conscience-in-art" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
<h2 epub:type="title">Conscience in Art</h2>
<p>“I never could hold my partner, Andy Tucker, down to legitimate ethics of pure swindling,” said Jeff Peters to me one day.</p>
<p>“Andy had too much imagination to be honest. He used to devise schemes of money-getting so fraudulent and high-financial that they wouldn’t have been allowed in the bylaws of a railroad rebate system.</p>
<p>“Myself, I never believed in taking any man’s dollars unless I gave him something for it⁠—something in the way of rolled gold jewelry, garden seeds, lumbago lotion, stock certificates, stove polish or a crack on the head to show for his money. I guess I must have had New England ancestors away back and inherited some of their stanch and rugged fear of the police.</p>
@ -18,7 +18,29 @@
<p>“ ‘I was thinking,’ says Andy, ‘of a little hunt without horn, hound or camera among the great herd of the Midas Americanus, commonly known as the Pittsburg millionaires.’</p>
<p>“ ‘In New York?’ I asks.</p>
<p>“ ‘No, sir,’ says Andy, ‘in Pittsburg. That’s their habitat. They don’t like New York. They go there now and then just because it’s expected of ’em.’</p>
<p>“ ‘A Pittsburg millionaire in New York is like a fly in a cup of hot coffee⁠—he attracts attention and comment, but he don’t enjoy it. New York ridicules him for “blowing” so much money in that town of sneaks and snobs, and sneers. The truth is, he don’t spend anything while he is there. I saw a memorandum of expenses for a ten days trip to Bunkum Town made by a Pittsburg man worth $15,000,000 once. Here’s the way he set it down:<br/></p>
<p>“ ‘A Pittsburg millionaire in New York is like a fly in a cup of hot coffee⁠—he attracts attention and comment, but he don’t enjoy it. New York ridicules him for “blowing” so much money in that town of sneaks and snobs, and sneers. The truth is, he don’t spend anything while he is there. I saw a memorandum of expenses for a ten days trip to Bunkum Town made by a Pittsburg man worth $15,000,000 once. Here’s the way he set it down:</p>
<table>
<tr>
<td><abbr>R. R.</abbr> fare to and from</td>
<td>$21.00</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Cab fare to and from hotel</td>
<td>2.00</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Hotel bill @ $5 per day</td>
<td>50.00</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Tips</td>
<td>5,750.00</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Total</td>
<td>$5,823.00</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>“ ‘That’s the voice of New York,’ goes on Andy. ‘The town’s nothing but a head waiter. If you tip it too much it’ll go and stand by the door and make fun of you to the hat check boy. When a Pittsburger wants to spend money and have a good time he stays at home. That’s where we’ll go to catch him.’</p>
<p>“Well, to make a dense story more condensed, me and Andy cached our paris green and antipyrine powders and albums in a friend’s cellar, and took the trail to Pittsburg. Andy didn’t have any especial prospectus of chicanery and violence drawn up, but he always had plenty of confidence that his immoral nature would rise to any occasion that presented itself.</p>
<p>“As a concession to my ideas of self-preservation and rectitude he promised that if I should take an active and incriminating part in any little business venture that we might work up there should be something actual and cognizant to the senses of touch, sight, taste or smell to transfer to the victim for the money so my conscience might rest easy. After that I felt better and entered more cheerfully into the foul play.</p>
@ -35,7 +57,7 @@
<p>“ ‘All right,’ says I. ‘Preliminary canter satisfactory. But, kay vooly, voo? What good is the art junk to us? And the oil?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Now, that man,’ says Andy, sitting thoughtfully on the bed, ‘ain’t what you would call an ordinary scutt. When he was showing me his cabinet of art curios his face lighted up like the door of a coke oven. He says that if some of his big deals go through he’ll make J. P. Morgan’s collection of sweatshop tapestry and Augusta, Me., beadwork look like the contents of an ostrich’s craw thrown on a screen by a magic lantern.</p>
<p>“ ‘And then he showed me a little carving,’ went on Andy, ‘that anybody could see was a wonderful thing. It was something like 2,000 years old, he said. It was a lotus flower with a woman’s face in it carved out of a solid piece of ivory.</p>
<p>“Scudder looks it up in a catalogue and describes it. An Egyptian carver named Khafra made two of ’em for King Rameses II. about the year B.C. The other one can’t be found. The junkshops and antique bugs have rubbered all Europe for it, but it seems to be out of stock. Scudder paid $2,000 for the one he has.’</p>
<p>“Scudder looks it up in a catalogue and describes it. An Egyptian carver named Khafra made two of ’em for King Rameses <span epub:type="z3998:roman">II</span> about the year <abbr class="era">BC</abbr>. The other one can’t be found. The junkshops and antique bugs have rubbered all Europe for it, but it seems to be out of stock. Scudder paid $2,000 for the one he has.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh, well,’ says I, ‘this sounds like the purling of a rill to me. I thought we came here to teach the millionaires business, instead of learning art from ’em?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Be patient,’ says Andy, kindly. ‘Maybe we will see a rift in the smoke ere long.’</p>
<p>“All the next morning Andy was out. I didn’t see him until about noon. He came to the hotel and called me into his room across the hall. He pulled a roundish bundle about as big as a goose egg out of his pocket and unwrapped it. It was an ivory carving just as he had described the millionaire’s to me.</p>
@ -44,13 +66,13 @@
<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ goes on Andy, ‘this is the exact counterpart of Scudder’s carving. It’s absolutely a dead ringer for it. He’ll pay $2,000 for it as quick as he’d tuck a napkin under his chin. And why shouldn’t it be the genuine other one, anyhow, that the old gypsy whittled out?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Why not, indeed?’ says I. ‘And how shall we go about compelling him to make a voluntary purchase of it?’</p>
<p>“Andy had his plan all ready, and I’ll tell you how we carried it out.</p>
<p>“I got a pair of blue spectacles, put on my black frock coat, rumpled my hair up and became Prof. Pickleman. I went to another hotel, registered, and sent a telegram to Scudder to come to see me at once on important art business. The elevator dumped him on me in less than an hour. He was a foggy man with a clarion voice, smelling of Connecticut wrappers and naphtha.</p>
<p>“I got a pair of blue spectacles, put on my black frock coat, rumpled my hair up and became <abbr>Prof.</abbr> Pickleman. I went to another hotel, registered, and sent a telegram to Scudder to come to see me at once on important art business. The elevator dumped him on me in less than an hour. He was a foggy man with a clarion voice, smelling of Connecticut wrappers and naphtha.</p>
<p>“ ‘Hello, Profess!’ he shouts. ‘How’s your conduct?’</p>
<p>“I rumpled my hair some more and gave him a blue glass stare.</p>
<p>“ ‘Sir,’ says I, ‘are you Cornelius T. Scudder? Of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania?’</p>
<p>“ ‘I am,’ says he. ‘Come out and have a drink.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I’ve neither the time nor the desire,’ says I, ‘for such harmful and deleterious amusements. I have come from New York,’ says I, ‘on a matter of busi⁠—on a matter of art.</p>
<p>“ ‘I learned there that you are the owner of an Egyptian ivory carving of the time of Rameses II., representing the head of Queen Isis in a lotus flower. There were only two of such carvings made. One has been lost for many years. I recently discovered and purchased the other in a pawn⁠—in an obscure museum in Vienna. I wish to purchase yours. Name your price.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I learned there that you are the owner of an Egyptian ivory carving of the time of Rameses <span epub:type="z3998:roman">II</span>., representing the head of Queen Isis in a lotus flower. There were only two of such carvings made. One has been lost for many years. I recently discovered and purchased the other in a pawn⁠—in an obscure museum in Vienna. I wish to purchase yours. Name your price.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Well, the great ice jams, Profess!’ says Scudder. ‘Have you found the other one? Me sell? No. I don’t guess Cornelius Scudder needs to sell anything that he wants to keep. Have you got the carving with you, Profess?’</p>
<p>“I shows it to Scudder. He examines it careful all over.</p>
<p>“ ‘It’s the article,’ says he. ‘It’s a duplicate of mine, every line and curve of it. Tell you what I’ll do,’ he says. ‘I won’t sell, but I’ll buy. Give you $2,500 for yours.’</p>

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<h2 epub:type="title">Hostages to Momus</h2>
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<h3 epub:type="z3998:roman">I</h3>
<p>I never got inside of the legitimate line of graft but once. But, one time, as I say, I reversed the decision of the revised statutes and undertook a thing that I’d have to apologize for even under the New Jersey trust laws.</p>
<p>Me and Caligula Polk, of Muskogee in the Creek Nation, was down in the Mexican State of Tamaulipas running a peripatetic lottery and monte game. Now, selling lottery tickets is a government graft in Mexico, just like selling forty-eight cents’ worth of postage-stamps for forty-nine cents is over here. So Uncle Porfirio he instructs the rurales to attend to our case.</p>
<p>Rurales? They’re a sort of country police; but don’t draw any mental crayon portraits of the worthy constables with a tin star and a gray goatee. The rurales⁠—well, if we’d mount our Supreme Court on broncos, arm ’em with Winchesters, and start ’em out after John Doe et al. we’d have about the same thing.</p>
<p>When the rurales started for us we started for the States. They chased us as far as Matamoras. We hid in a brickyard; and that night we swum the Rio Grande, Caligula with a brick in each hand, absent-minded, which he drops upon the soil of Texas, forgetting he had ’em.</p>
<p>From there we emigrated to San Antone, and then over to New Orleans, where we took a rest. And in that town of cotton bales and other adjuncts to female beauty we made the acquaintance of drinks invented by the Creoles during the period of Louey Cans, in which they are still served at the side doors. The most I can remember of this town is that me and Caligula and a Frenchman named McCarty⁠—wait a minute; Adolph McCarty⁠—was trying to make the French Quarter pay up the back trading-stamps due on the Louisiana Purchase, when somebody hollers that the johndarms are coming. I have an insufficient recollection of buying two yellow tickets through a window; and I seemed to see a man swing a lantern and say “All aboard!” I remembered no more, except that the train butcher was covering me and Caligula up with Augusta J. Evans’s works and figs.</p>
<p>When we become revised, we find that we have collided up against the State of Georgia at a spot hitherto unaccounted for in time tables except by an asterisk, which means that trains stop every other Thursday on signal by tearing up a rail. We was waked up in a yellow pine hotel by the noise of flowers and the smell of birds. Yes, sir, for the wind was banging sunflowers as big as buggy wheels against the weatherboarding and the chicken coop was right under the window. Me and Caligula dressed and went down-stairs. The landlord was shelling peas on the front porch. He was six feet of chills and fever, and Hongkong in complexion though in other respects he seemed amenable in the exercise of his sentiments and features.</p>
<p>Caligula, who is a spokesman by birth, and a small man, though red-haired and impatient of painfulness of any kind, speaks up.</p>
<p>“Pardner,” says he, “good-morning, and be darned to you. Would you mind telling us why we are at? We know the reason we are where, but can’t exactly figure out on account of at what place.”</p>
<p>“Well, gentlemen,” says the landlord, “I reckoned you-all would be inquiring this morning. You-all dropped off of the nine-thirty train here last night; and you was right tight. Yes, you was right smart in liquor. I can inform you that you are now in the town of Mountain Valley, in the State of Georgia.”</p>
<p>“On top of that,” says Caligula, “don’t say that we can’t have anything to eat.”</p>
<p>“Sit down, gentlemen,” says the landlord, “and in twenty minutes I’ll call you to the best breakfast you can get anywhere in town.”</p>
<p>That breakfast turned out to be composed of fried bacon and a yellowish edifice that proved up something between pound cake and flexible sandstone. The landlord calls it corn pone; and then he sets out a dish of the exaggerated breakfast food known as hominy; and so me and Caligula makes the acquaintance of the celebrated food that enabled every Johnny Reb to lick one and two-thirds Yankees for nearly four years at a stretch.</p>
<p>“The wonder to me is,” says Caligula, “that Uncle Robert Lee’s boys didn’t chase the Grant and Sherman outfit clear up into Hudson’s Bay. It would have made me that mad to eat this truck they call mahogany!”</p>
<p>“Hog and hominy,” I explains, “is the staple food of this section.”</p>
<p>“Then,” says Caligula, “they ought to keep it where it belongs. I thought this was a hotel and not a stable. Now, if we was in Muskogee at the <abbr>St.</abbr> Lucifer House, I’d show you some breakfast grub. Antelope steaks and fried liver to begin on, and venison cutlets with chili con carne and pineapple fritters, and then some sardines and mixed pickles; and top it off with a can of yellow clings and a bottle of beer. You won’t find a layout like that on the bill of affairs of any of your Eastern restauraws.”</p>
<p>“Too lavish,” says I. “I’ve traveled, and I’m unprejudiced. There’ll never be a perfect breakfast eaten until some man grows arms long enough to stretch down to New Orleans for his coffee and over to Norfolk for his rolls, and reaches up to Vermont and digs a slice of butter out of a spring-house, and then turns over a beehive close to a white clover patch out in Indiana for the rest. Then he’d come pretty close to making a meal on the amber that the gods eat on Mount Olympia.”</p>
<p>“Too ephemeral,” says Caligula. “I’d want ham and eggs, or rabbit stew, anyhow, for a chaser. What do you consider the most edifying and casual in the way of a dinner?”</p>
<p>“I’ve been infatuated from time to time,” I answers, “with fancy ramifications of grub such as terrapins, lobsters, reed birds, jambolaya, and canvas-covered ducks; but after all there’s nothing less displeasing to me than a beefsteak smothered in mushrooms on a balcony in sound of the Broadway streetcars, with a hand-organ playing down below, and the boys hollering extras about the latest suicide. For the wine, give me a reasonable Ponty Cany. And that’s all, except a demi-tasse.”</p>
<p>“Well,” says Caligula, “I reckon in New York you get to be a conniseer; and when you go around with the demi-tasse you are naturally bound to buy ’em stylish grub.”</p>
<p>“It’s a great town for epicures,” says I. “You’d soon fall into their ways if you was there.”</p>
<p>“I’ve heard it was,” says Caligula. “But I reckon I wouldn’t. I can polish my fingernails all they need myself.”</p>
</section>
<section id="hostages-to-momus-2" epub:type="chapter">
<h3 epub:type="z3998:roman">II</h3>
<p>After breakfast we went out on the front porch, lighted up two of the landlord’s <i xml:lang="es">flor de upas</i> perfectos, and took a look at Georgia.</p>
<p>The installment of scenery visible to the eye looked mighty poor. As far as we could see was red hills all washed down with gullies and scattered over with patches of piny woods. Blackberry bushes was all that kept the rail fences from falling down. About fifteen miles over to the north was a little range of well-timbered mountains.</p>
<p>That town of Mountain Valley wasn’t going. About a dozen people permeated along the sidewalks; but what you saw mostly was rain-barrels and roosters, and boys poking around with sticks in piles of ashes made by burning the scenery of Uncle Tom shows.</p>
<p>And just then there passes down on the other side of the street a high man in a long black coat and a beaver hat. All the people in sight bowed, and some crossed the street to shake hands with him; folks came out of stores and houses to holler at him; women leaned out of windows and smiled; and all the kids stopped playing to look at him. Our landlord stepped out on the porch and bent himself double like a carpenter’s rule, and sung out, “Good-morning, Colonel,” when he was a dozen yards gone by.</p>
<p>“And is that Alexander, pa?” says Caligula to the landlord; “and why is he called great?”</p>
<p>“That, gentlemen,” says the landlord, “is no less than Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham, the president of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad, mayor of Mountain Valley, and chairman of the Perry County board of immigration and public improvements.”</p>
<p>“Been away a good many years, hasn’t he?” I asked.</p>
<p>“No, sir; Colonel Rockingham is going down to the post-office for his mail. His fellow-citizens take pleasure in greeting him thus every morning. The colonel is our most prominent citizen. Besides the height of the stock of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad, he owns a thousand acres of that land across the creek. Mountain Valley delights, sir, to honor a citizen of such worth and public spirit.”</p>
<p>For an hour that afternoon Caligula sat on the back of his neck on the porch and studied a newspaper, which was unusual in a man who despised print. When he was through he took me to the end of the porch among the sunlight and drying dish-towels. I knew that Caligula had invented a new graft. For he chewed the ends of his mustache and ran the left catch of his suspenders up and down, which was his way.</p>
<p>“What is it now?” I asks. “Just so it ain’t floating mining stocks or raising Pennsylvania pinks, we’ll talk it over.”</p>
<p>“Pennsylvania pinks? Oh, that refers to a coin-raising scheme of the Keystoners. They burn the soles of old women’s feet to make them tell where their money’s hid.”</p>
<p>Caligula’s words in business was always few and bitter.</p>
<p>“You see them mountains,” said he, pointing. “And you seen that colonel man that owns railroads and cuts more ice when he goes to the post-office than Roosevelt does when he cleans ’em out. What we’re going to do is to kidnap the latter into the former, and inflict a ransom of ten thousand dollars.”</p>
<p>“Illegality,” says I, shaking my head.</p>
<p>“I knew you’d say that,” says Caligula. “At first sight it does seem to jar peace and dignity. But it don’t. I got the idea out of that newspaper. Would you commit aspersions on a equitable graft that the United States itself has condoned and indorsed and ratified?”</p>
<p>“Kidnapping,” says I, “is an immoral function in the derogatory list of the statutes. If the United States upholds it, it must be a recent enactment of ethics, along with race suicide and rural delivery.”</p>
<p>“Listen,” says Caligula, “and I’ll explain the case set down in the papers. Here was a Greek citizen named Burdick Harris,” says he, “captured for a graft by Africans; and the United States sends two gunboats to the State of Tangiers and makes the King of Morocco give up seventy thousand dollars to Raisuli.”</p>
<p>“Go slow,” says I. “That sounds too international to take in all at once. It’s like ‘thimble, thimble, who’s got the naturalization papers?’ ”</p>
<p>“ ’Twas press despatches from Constantinople,” says Caligula. “You’ll see, six months from now. They’ll be confirmed by the monthly magazines; and then it won’t be long till you’ll notice ’em alongside the photos of the Mount Pelee eruption photos in the while-you-get-your-hair-cut weeklies. It’s all right, Pick. This African man Raisuli hides Burdick Harris up in the mountains, and advertises his price to the governments of different nations. Now, you wouldn’t think for a minute,” goes on Caligula, “that John Hay would have chipped in and helped this graft along if it wasn’t a square game, would you?”</p>
<p>“Why, no,” says I. “I’ve always stood right in with Bryan’s policies, and I couldn’t consciously say a word against the Republican administration just now. But if Harris was a Greek, on what system of international protocols did Hay interfere?”</p>
<p>“It ain’t exactly set forth in the papers,” says Caligula. “I suppose it’s a matter of sentiment. You know he wrote this poem, ‘Little Breeches’; and them Greeks wear little or none. But anyhow, John Hay sends the Brooklyn and the Olympia over, and they cover Africa with thirty-inch guns. And then Hay cables after the health of the persona grata. ‘And how are they this morning?’ he wires. ‘Is Burdick Harris alive yet, or <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Raisuli dead?’ And the King of Morocco sends up the seventy thousand dollars, and they turn Burdick Harris loose. And there’s not half the hard feelings among the nations about this little kidnapping matter as there was about the peace congress. And Burdick Harris says to the reporters, in the Greek language, that he’s often heard about the United States, and he admires Roosevelt next to Raisuli, who is one of the whitest and most gentlemanly kidnappers that he ever worked alongside of. So you see, Pick,” winds up Caligula, “we’ve got the law of nations on our side. We’ll cut this colonel man out of the herd, and corral him in them little mountains, and stick up his heirs and assigns for ten thousand dollars.”</p>
<p>“Well, you seldom little red-headed territorial terror,” I answers, “you can’t bluff your uncle Tecumseh Pickens! I’ll be your company in this graft. But I misdoubt if you’ve absorbed the inwardness of this Burdick Harris case, Calig; and if on any morning we get a telegram from the Secretary of State asking about the health of the scheme, I propose to acquire the most propinquitous and celeritous mule in this section and gallop diplomatically over into the neighboring and peaceful nation of Alabama.”</p>
</section>
<section id="hostages-to-momus-3" epub:type="chapter">
<h3 epub:type="z3998:roman">III</h3>
<p>Me and Caligula spent the next three days investigating the bunch of mountains into which we proposed to kidnap Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham. We finally selected an upright slice of topography covered with bushes and trees that you could only reach by a secret path that we cut out up the side of it. And the only way to reach the mountain was to follow up the bend of a branch that wound among the elevations.</p>
<p>Then I took in hand an important subdivision of the proceedings. I went up to Atlanta on the train and laid in a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar supply of the most gratifying and efficient lines of grub that money could buy. I always was an admirer of viands in their more palliative and revised stages. Hog and hominy are not only inartistic to my stomach, but they give indigestion to my moral sentiments. And I thought of Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham, president of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad, and how he would miss the luxury of his home fare as is so famous among wealthy Southerners. So I sunk half of mine and Caligula’s capital in as elegant a layout of fresh and canned provisions as Burdick Harris or any other professional kidnappee ever saw in a camp.</p>
<p>I put another hundred in a couple of cases of Bordeaux, two quarts of cognac, two hundred Havana regalias with gold bands, and a camp stove and stools and folding cots. I wanted Colonel Rockingham to be comfortable; and I hoped after he gave up the ten thousand dollars he would give me and Caligula as good a name for gentlemen and entertainers as the Greek man did the friend of his that made the United States his bill collector against Africa.</p>
<p>When the goods came down from Atlanta, we hired a wagon, moved them up on the little mountain, and established camp. And then we laid for the colonel.</p>
<p>We caught him one morning about two miles out from Mountain Valley, on his way to look after some of his burnt umber farm land. He was an elegant old gentleman, as thin and tall as a trout rod, with frazzled shirt-cuffs and specs on a black string. We explained to him, brief and easy, what we wanted; and Caligula showed him, careless, the handle of his forty-five under his coat.</p>
<p>“What?” says Colonel Rockingham. “Bandits in Perry County, Georgia! I shall see that the board of immigration and public improvements hears of this!”</p>
<p>“Be so unfoolhardy as to climb into that buggy,” says Caligula, “by order of the board of perforation and public depravity. This is a business meeting, and we’re anxious to adjourn sine qua non.”</p>
<p>We drove Colonel Rockingham over the mountain and up the side of it as far as the buggy could go. Then we tied the horse, and took our prisoner on foot up to the camp.</p>
<p>“Now, colonel,” I says to him, “we’re after the ransom, me and my partner; and no harm will come to you if the King of Mor⁠—if your friends send up the dust. In the mean time we are gentlemen the same as you. And if you give us your word not to try to escape, the freedom of the camp is yours.”</p>
<p>“I give you my word,” says the colonel.</p>
<p>“All right,” says I; “and now it’s eleven o’clock, and me and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Polk will proceed to inculcate the occasion with a few well-timed trivialities in the way of grub.”</p>
<p>“Thank you,” says the colonel; “I believe I could relish a slice of bacon and a plate of hominy.”</p>
<p>“But you won’t,” says I emphatic. “Not in this camp. We soar in higher regions than them occupied by your celebrated but repulsive dish.”</p>
<p>While the colonel read his paper, me and Caligula took off our coats and went in for a little luncheon de luxe just to show him. Caligula was a fine cook of the Western brand. He could toast a buffalo or fricassee a couple of steers as easy as a woman could make a cup of tea. He was gifted in the way of knocking together edibles when haste and muscle and quantity was to be considered. He held the record west of the Arkansas River for frying pancakes with his left hand, broiling venison cutlets with his right, and skinning a rabbit with his teeth at the same time. But I could do things en casserole and <i xml:lang="fr">à la creole</i>, and handle the oil and tobasco as gently and nicely as a French chef.</p>
<p>So at twelve o’clock we had a hot lunch ready that looked like a banquet on a Mississippi River steamboat. We spread it on the tops of two or three big boxes, opened two quarts of the red wine, set the olives and a canned oyster cocktail and a ready-made Martini by the colonel’s plate, and called him to grub.</p>
<p>Colonel Rockingham drew up his campstool, wiped off his specs, and looked at the things on the table. Then I thought he was swearing; and I felt mean because I hadn’t taken more pains with the victuals. But he wasn’t; he was asking a blessing; and me and Caligula hung our heads, and I saw a tear drop from the colonel’s eye into his cocktail.</p>
<p>I never saw a man eat with so much earnestness and application⁠—not hastily, like a grammarian, or one of the canal, but slow and appreciative, like a anaconda, or a real <i xml:lang="fr">vive bonjour</i>.</p>
<p>In an hour and a half the colonel leaned back. I brought him a pony of brandy and his black coffee, and set the box of Havana regalias on the table.</p>
<p>“Gentlemen,” says he, blowing out the smoke and trying to breathe it back again, “when we view the eternal hills and the smiling and beneficent landscape, and reflect upon the goodness of the Creator who⁠—”</p>
<p>“Excuse me, colonel,” says I, “but there’s some business to attend to now”; and I brought out paper and pen and ink and laid ’em before him. “Who do you want to send to for the money?” I asks.</p>
<p>“I reckon,” says he, after thinking a bit, “to the vice-president of our railroad, at the general offices of the Company in Edenville.”</p>
<p>“How far is it to Edenville from here?” I asked.</p>
<p>“About ten miles,” says he.</p>
<p>Then I dictated these lines, and Colonel Rockingham wrote them out:</p>
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:letter">
<p>I am kidnapped and held a prisoner by two desperate outlaws in a place which is useless to attempt to find. They demand ten thousand dollars at once for my release. The amount must be raised immediately, and these directions followed. Come alone with the money to Stony Creek, which runs out of Blacktop Mountains. Follow the bed of the creek till you come to a big flat rock on the left bank, on which is marked a cross in red chalk. Stand on the rock and wave a white flag. A guide will come to you and conduct you to where I am held. Lose no time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After the colonel had finished this, he asked permission to take on a postscript about how he was being treated, so the railroad wouldn’t feel uneasy in its bosom about him. We agreed to that. He wrote down that he had just had lunch with the two desperate ruffians; and then he set down the whole bill of fare, from cocktails to coffee. He wound up with the remark that dinner would be ready about six, and would probably be a more licentious and intemperate affair than lunch.</p>
<p>Me and Caligula read it, and decided to let it go; for we, being cooks, were amenable to praise, though it sounded out of place on a sight draft for ten thousand dollars.</p>
<p>I took the letter over to the Mountain Valley road and watched for a messenger. By and by a colored equestrian came along on horseback, riding toward Edenville. I gave him a dollar to take the letter to the railroad offices; and then I went back to camp.</p>
</section>
<section id="hostages-to-momus-4" epub:type="chapter">
<h3 epub:type="z3998:roman">IV</h3>
<p>About four o’clock in the afternoon, Caligula, who was acting as lookout, calls to me:</p>
<p>“I have to report a white shirt signalling on the starboard bow, sir.”</p>
<p>I went down the mountain and brought back a fat, red man in an alpaca coat and no collar.</p>
<p>“Gentlemen,” says Colonel Rockingham, “allow me to introduce my brother, Captain Duval C. Rockingham, vice-president of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad.”</p>
<p>“Otherwise the King of Morocco,” says I. “I reckon you don’t mind my counting the ransom, just as a business formality.”</p>
<p>“Well, no, not exactly,” says the fat man, “not when it comes. I turned that matter over to our second vice-president. I was anxious after Brother Jackson’s safetiness. I reckon he’ll be along right soon. What does that lobster salad you mentioned taste like, Brother Jackson?”</p>
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Vice-President,” says I, “you’ll oblige us by remaining here till the second <span epub:type="z3998:roman">V</span>. P. arrives. This is a private rehearsal, and we don’t want any roadside speculators selling tickets.”</p>
<p>In half an hour Caligula sings out again:</p>
<p>“Sail ho! Looks like an apron on a broomstick.”</p>
<p>I perambulated down the cliff again, and escorted up a man six foot three, with a sandy beard and no other dimension that you could notice. Thinks I to myself, if he’s got ten thousand dollars on his person it’s in one bill and folded lengthwise.</p>
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Patterson G. Coble, our second vice-president,” announces the colonel.</p>
<p>“Glad to know you, gentlemen,” says this Coble. “I came up to disseminate the tidings that Major Tallahassee Tucker, our general passenger agent, is now negotiating a peachcrate full of our railroad bonds with the Perry County Bank for a loan. My dear Colonel Rockingham, was that chicken gumbo or cracked goobers on the bill of fare in your note? Me and the conductor of fifty-six was having a dispute about it.”</p>
<p>“Another white wings on the rocks!” hollers Caligula. “If I see any more I’ll fire on ’em and swear they was torpedo-boats!”</p>
<p>The guide goes down again, and convoys into the lair a person in blue overalls carrying an amount of inebriety and a lantern. I am so sure that this is Major Tucker that I don’t even ask him until we are up above; and then I discover that it is Uncle Timothy, the yard switchman at Edenville, who is sent ahead to flag our understandings with the gossip that Judge Pendergast, the railroad’s attorney, is in the process of mortgaging Colonel Rockingham’s farming lands to make up the ransom.</p>
<p>While he is talking, two men crawl from under the bushes into camp, and Caligula, with no white flag to disinter him from his plain duty, draws his gun. But again Colonel Rockingham intervenes and introduces <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Jones and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Batts, engineer and fireman of train number forty-two.</p>
<p>“Excuse us,” says Batts, “but me and Jim have hunted squirrels all over this mounting, and we don’t need no white flag. Was that straight, colonel, about the plum pudding and pineapples and real store cigars?”</p>
<p>“Towel on a fishing-pole in the offing!” howls Caligula. “Suppose it’s the firing line of the freight conductors and brakeman.”</p>
<p>“My last trip down,” says I, wiping off my face. “If the S. &amp; E. T. wants to run an excursion up here just because we kidnapped their president, let ’em. We’ll put out our sign. ‘The Kidnapper’s Cafe and Trainmen’s Home.’ ”</p>
<p>This time I caught Major Tallahassee Tucker by his own confession, and I felt easier. I asked him into the creek, so I could drown him if he happened to be a track-walker or caboose porter. All the way up the mountain he driveled to me about asparagus on toast, a thing that his intelligence in life had skipped.</p>
<p>Up above I got his mind segregated from food and asked if he had raised the ransom.</p>
<p>“My dear sir,” says he, “I succeeded in negotiating a loan on thirty thousand dollars’ worth of the bonds of our railroad, and⁠—”</p>
<p>“Never mind just now, major,” says I. “It’s all right, then. Wait till after dinner, and we’ll settle the business. All of you gentlemen,” I continues to the crowd, “are invited to stay to dinner. We have mutually trusted one another, and the white flag is supposed to wave over the proceedings.”</p>
<p>“The correct idea,” says Caligula, who was standing by me. “Two baggage-masters and a ticket-agent dropped out of a tree while you was below the last time. Did the major man bring the money?”</p>
<p>“He says,” I answered, “that he succeeded in negotiating the loan.”</p>
<p>If any cooks ever earned ten thousand dollars in twelve hours, me and Caligula did that day. At six o’clock we spread the top of the mountain with as fine a dinner as the personnel of any railroad ever engulfed. We opened all the wine, and we concocted entrées and pièces de resistance, and stirred up little savory chef de cuisines and organized a mass of grub such as has been seldom instigated out of canned and bottled goods. The railroad gathered around it, and the wassail and diversions was intense.</p>
<p>After the feast me and Caligula, in the line of business, takes Major Tucker to one side and talks ransom. The major pulls out an agglomeration of currency about the size of the price of a town lot in the suburbs of Rabbitville, Arizona, and makes this outcry.</p>
<p>“Gentlemen,” says he, “the stock of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville railroad has depreciated some. The best I could do with thirty thousand dollars’ worth of the bonds was to secure a loan of eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents. On the farming lands of Colonel Rockingham, Judge Pendergast was able to obtain, on a ninth mortgage, the sum of fifty dollars. You will find the amount, one hundred and thirty-seven fifty, correct.”</p>
<p>“A railroad president,” said I, looking this Tucker in the eye, “and the owner of a thousand acres of land; and yet⁠—”</p>
<p>“Gentlemen,” says Tucker, “The railroad is ten miles long. There don’t any train run on it except when the crew goes out in the pines and gathers enough lightwood knots to get up steam. A long time ago, when times was good, the net earnings used to run as high as eighteen dollars a week. Colonel Rockingham’s land has been sold for taxes thirteen times. There hasn’t been a peach crop in this part of Georgia for two years. The wet spring killed the watermelons. Nobody around here has money enough to buy fertilizer; and land is so poor the corn crop failed and there wasn’t enough grass to support the rabbits. All the people have had to eat in this section for over a year is hog and hominy, and⁠—”</p>
<p>“Pick,” interrupts Caligula, mussing up his red hair, “what are you going to do with that chicken-feed?”</p>
<p>I hands the money back to Major Tucker; and then I goes over to Colonel Rockingham and slaps him on the back.</p>
<p>“Colonel,” says I, “I hope you’ve enjoyed our little joke. We don’t want to carry it too far. Kidnappers! Well, wouldn’t it tickle your uncle? My name’s Rhinegelder, and I’m a nephew of Chauncey Depew. My friend’s a second cousin of the editor of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Puck</i>. So you can see. We are down South enjoying ourselves in our humorous way. Now, there’s two quarts of cognac to open yet, and then the joke’s over.”</p>
<p>What’s the use to go into details? One or two will be enough. I remember Major Tallahassee Tucker playing on a jew’s-harp, and Caligula waltzing with his head on the watch pocket of a tall baggage-master. I hesitate to refer to the cake-walk done by me and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Patterson G. Coble with Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham between us.</p>
<p>And even on the next morning, when you wouldn’t think it possible, there was a consolation for me and Caligula. We knew that Raisuli himself never made half the hit with Burdick Harris that we did with the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad.</p>
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<title>Innocents of Broadway</title>
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<h2>INNOCENTS OF BROADWAY</h2>
<section id="innocents-of-broadway" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
<h2 epub:type="title">Innocents of Broadway</h2>
<p>“I hope some day to retire from business,” said Jeff Peters; “and when I do I don’t want anybody to be able to say that I ever got a dollar of any man’s money without giving him a quid pro rata for it. I’ve always managed to leave a customer some little gewgaw to paste in his scrapbook or stick between his Seth Thomas clock and the wall after we are through trading.</p>
<p>“There was one time I came near having to break this rule of mine and do a profligate and illaudable action, but I was saved from it by the laws and statutes of our great and profitable country.</p>
<p>“One summer me and Andy Tucker, my partner, went to New York to lay in our annual assortment of clothes and gents’ furnishings. We was always pompous and regardless dressers, finding that looks went further than anything else in our business, except maybe our knowledge of railroad schedules and an autograph photo of the President that Loeb sent us, probably by mistake. Andy wrote a nature letter once and sent it in about animals that he had seen caught in a trap lots of times. Loeb must have read it ‘triplets,’ instead of ‘trap lots,’ and sent the photo. Anyhow, it was useful to us to show people as a guarantee of good faith.</p>
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<p>“One day in the papier mâché palm room of a chloral hydrate and hops agency in a side street about eight inches off Broadway me and Andy had thrust upon us the acquaintance of a New Yorker. We had beer together until we discovered that each of us knew a man named Hellsmith, traveling for a stove factory in Duluth. This caused us to remark that the world was a very small place, and then this New Yorker busts his string and takes off his tin foil and excelsior packing and starts in giving us his Ellen Terris, beginning with the time he used to sell shoelaces to the Indians on the spot where Tammany Hall now stands.</p>
<p>“This New Yorker had made his money keeping a cigar store in Beekman street, and he hadn’t been above Fourteenth street in ten years. Moreover, he had whiskers, and the time had gone by when a true sport will do anything to a man with whiskers. No grafter except a boy who is soliciting subscribers to an illustrated weekly to win the prize air rifle, or a widow, would have the heart to tamper with the man behind with the razor. He was a typical city Reub⁠—I’d bet the man hadn’t been out of sight of a skyscraper in twenty-five years.</p>
<p>“Well, presently this metropolitan backwoodsman pulls out a roll of bills with an old blue sleeve elastic fitting tight around it and opens it up.</p>
<p>“ ‘There’s $5,000, Mr. Peters,’ says he, shoving it over the table to me, ‘saved during my fifteen years of business. Put that in your pocket and keep it for me, Mr. Peters. I’m glad to meet you gentlemen from the West, and I may take a drop too much. I want you to take care of my money for me. Now, let’s have another beer.’</p>
<p>“ ‘There’s $5,000, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says he, shoving it over the table to me, ‘saved during my fifteen years of business. Put that in your pocket and keep it for me, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters. I’m glad to meet you gentlemen from the West, and I may take a drop too much. I want you to take care of my money for me. Now, let’s have another beer.’</p>
<p>“ ‘You’d better keep this yourself,’ says I. ‘We are strangers to you, and you can’t trust everybody you meet. Put your roll back in your pocket,’ says I. ‘And you’d better run along home before some farm-hand from the Kaw River bottoms strolls in here and sells you a copper mine.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Whiskers. ‘I guess Little Old New York can take care of herself. I guess I know a man that’s on the square when I see him. I’ve always found the Western people all right. I ask you as a favor, Mr. Peters,’ says he, ‘to keep that roll in your pocket for me. I know a gentleman when I see him. And now let’s have some more beer.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Whiskers. ‘I guess Little Old New York can take care of herself. I guess I know a man that’s on the square when I see him. I’ve always found the Western people all right. I ask you as a favor, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says he, ‘to keep that roll in your pocket for me. I know a gentleman when I see him. And now let’s have some more beer.’</p>
<p>“In about ten minutes this fall of manna leans back in his chair and snores. Andy looks at me and says: ‘I reckon I’d better stay with him for five minutes or so, in case the waiter comes in.’</p>
<p>“I went out the side door and walked half a block up the street. And then I came back and sat down at the table.</p>
<p>“ ‘Andy,’ says I, ‘I can’t do it. It’s too much like swearing off taxes. I can’t go off with this man’s money without doing something to earn it like taking advantage of the Bankrupt act or leaving a bottle of eczema lotion in his pocket to make it look more like a square deal.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Well,’ says Andy, ‘it does seem kind of hard on one’s professional pride to lope off with a bearded pard’s competency, especially after he has nominated you custodian of his bundle in the sappy insouciance of his urban indiscrimination. Suppose we wake him up and see if we can formulate some commercial sophistry by which he will be enabled to give us both his money and a good excuse.’</p>
<p>“We wakes up Whiskers. He stretches himself and yawns out the hypothesis that he must have dropped off for a minute. And then he says he wouldn’t mind sitting in at a little gentleman’s game of poker. He used to play some when he attended high school in Brooklyn; and as he was out for a good time, why⁠—and so forth.</p>
<p>“Andy brights up a little at that, for it looks like it might be a solution to our financial troubles. So we all three go to our hotel further down Broadway and have the cards and chips brought up to Andy’s room. I tried once more to make this Babe in the Horticultural Gardens take his five thousand. But no.</p>
<p>“ ‘Keep that little roll for me, Mr. Peters,’ says he, ‘and oblige. I’ll ask you fer it when I want it. I guess I know when I’m among friends. A man that’s done business on Beekman street for twenty years, right in the heart of the wisest old village on earth, ought to know what he’s about. I guess I can tell a gentleman from a con man or a flimflammer when I meet him. I’ve got some odd change in my clothes⁠—enough to start the game with, I guess.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Keep that little roll for me, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says he, ‘and oblige. I’ll ask you fer it when I want it. I guess I know when I’m among friends. A man that’s done business on Beekman street for twenty years, right in the heart of the wisest old village on earth, ought to know what he’s about. I guess I can tell a gentleman from a con man or a flimflammer when I meet him. I’ve got some odd change in my clothes⁠—enough to start the game with, I guess.’</p>
<p>“He goes through his pockets and rains $20 gold certificates on the table till it looked like a $10,000 ‘Autumn Day in a Lemon Grove’ picture by Turner in the salons. Andy almost smiled.</p>
<p>“The first round that was dealt, this boulevardier slaps down his hand, claims low and jack and big casino and rakes in the pot.</p>
<p>“Andy always took a pride in his poker playing. He got up from the table and looked sadly out of the window at the street cars.</p>
<p>“ ‘Well, gentlemen,’ says the cigar man, ‘I don’t blame you for not wanting to play. I’ve forgotten the fine points of the game, I guess, it’s been so long since I indulged. Now, how long are you gentlemen going to be in the city?’</p>
<p>“I told him about a week longer. He says that’ll suit him fine. His cousin is coming over from Brooklyn that evening and they are going to see the sights of New York. His cousin, he says, is in the artificial limb and lead casket business, and hasn’t crossed the bridge in eight years. They expect to have the time of their lives, and he winds up by asking me to keep his roll of money for him till next day. I tried to make him take it, but it only insulted him to mention it.</p>
<p>“ ‘I’ll use what I’ve got in loose change,’ says he. ‘You keep the rest for me. I’ll drop in on you and Mr. Tucker to-morrow afternoon about 6 or 7,’ says he, ‘and we’ll have dinner together. Be good.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I’ll use what I’ve got in loose change,’ says he. ‘You keep the rest for me. I’ll drop in on you and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker to-morrow afternoon about 6 or 7,’ says he, ‘and we’ll have dinner together. Be good.’</p>
<p>“After Whiskers had gone Andy looked at me curious and doubtful.</p>
<p>“ ‘Well, Jeff,’ says he, ‘it looks like the ravens are trying to feed us two Elijahs so hard that if we turned ’em down again we ought to have the Audubon Society after us. It won’t do to put the crown aside too often. I know this is something like paternalism, but don’t you think Opportunity has skinned its knuckles about enough knocking at our door?’</p>
<p>“I put my feet up on the table and my hands in my pockets, which is an attitude unfavorable to frivolous thoughts.</p>
@ -40,7 +40,7 @@
<p>“ ‘Your arguments,’ says Andy, ‘are past criticism or comprehension. No, we can’t walk off with the money⁠—as things now stand. I admire your conscious way of doing business, Jeff,’ says Andy, ‘and I wouldn’t propose anything that wasn’t square in line with your theories of morality and initiative.</p>
<p>“ ‘But I’ll be away to-night and most of to-morrow Jeff,’ says Andy. ‘I’ve got some business affairs that I want to attend to. When this free greenbacks party comes in to-morrow afternoon hold him here till I arrive. We’ve all got an engagement for dinner, you know.’</p>
<p>“Well, sir, about 5 the next afternoon in trips the cigar man, with his eyes half open.</p>
<p>“ ‘Been having a glorious time, Mr. Peters,’ says he. ‘Took in all the sights. I tell you New York is the onliest only. Now if you don’t mind,’ says he, ‘I’ll lie down on that couch and doze off for about nine minutes before Mr. Tucker comes. I’m not used to being up all night. And to-morrow, if you don’t mind, Mr. Peters, I’ll take that five thousand. I met a man last night that’s got a sure winner at the racetrack to-morrow. Excuse me for being so impolite as to go to sleep, Mr. Peters.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Been having a glorious time, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says he. ‘Took in all the sights. I tell you New York is the onliest only. Now if you don’t mind,’ says he, ‘I’ll lie down on that couch and doze off for about nine minutes before <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker comes. I’m not used to being up all night. And to-morrow, if you don’t mind, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, I’ll take that five thousand. I met a man last night that’s got a sure winner at the racetrack to-morrow. Excuse me for being so impolite as to go to sleep, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters.’</p>
<p>“And so this inhabitant of the second city in the world reposes himself and begins to snore, while I sit there musing over things and wishing I was back in the West, where you could always depend on a customer fighting to keep his money hard enough to let your conscience take it from him.</p>
<p>“At half-past 5 Andy comes in and sees the sleeping form.</p>
<p>“ ‘I’ve been over to Trenton,’ says Andy, pulling a document out of his pocket. ‘I think I’ve got this matter fixed up all right, Jeff. Look at that.’</p>

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<head>
<title>Chapter 2</title>
<title>Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet</title>
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<section id="chapter-2" epub:type="chapter">
<h2>JEFF PETERS AS A PERSONAL MAGNET</h2>
<section id="jeff-peters-as-a-personal-magnet" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
<h2 epub:type="title">Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet</h2>
<p>Jeff Peters has been engaged in as many schemes for making money as there are recipes for cooking rice in Charleston, S.C.</p>
<p>Best of all I like to hear him tell of his earlier days when he sold liniments and cough cures on street corners, living hand to mouth, heart to heart with the people, throwing heads or tails with fortune for his last coin.</p>
<p>“I struck Fisher Hill, Arkansaw,” said he, “in a buckskin suit, moccasins, long hair and a thirty-carat diamond ring that I got from an actor in Texarkana. I don’t know what he ever did with the pocket knife I swapped him for it.</p>
<p>“I was Dr. Waugh-hoo, the celebrated Indian medicine man. I carried only one best bet just then, and that was Resurrection Bitters. It was made of life-giving plants and herbs accidentally discovered by Ta-qua-la, the beautiful wife of the chief of the Choctaw Nation, while gathering truck to garnish a platter of boiled dog for the annual corn dance.</p>
<p>“I was <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Waugh-hoo, the celebrated Indian medicine man. I carried only one best bet just then, and that was Resurrection Bitters. It was made of life-giving plants and herbs accidentally discovered by Ta-qua-la, the beautiful wife of the chief of the Choctaw Nation, while gathering truck to garnish a platter of boiled dog for the annual corn dance.</p>
<p>“Business hadn’t been good in the last town, so I only had five dollars. I went to the Fisher Hill druggist and he credited me for half a gross of eight-ounce bottles and corks. I had the labels and ingredients in my valise, left over from the last town. Life began to look rosy again after I got in my hotel room with the water running from the tap, and the Resurrection Bitters lining up on the table by the dozen.</p>
<p>“Fake? No, sir. There was two dollars’ worth of fluid extract of cinchona and a dime’s worth of aniline in that half-gross of bitters. I’ve gone through towns years afterwards and had folks ask for ’em again.</p>
<p>“I hired a wagon that night and commenced selling the bitters on Main Street. Fisher Hill was a low, malarial town; and a compound hypothetical pneumocardiac anti-scorbutic tonic was just what I diagnosed the crowd as needing. The bitters started off like sweetbreads-on-toast at a vegetarian dinner. I had sold two dozen at fifty cents apiece when I felt somebody pull my coat tail. I knew what that meant; so I climbed down and sneaked a five dollar bill into the hand of a man with a German silver star on his lapel.</p>
@ -20,7 +20,7 @@
<p>“ ‘I have not,’ says I. ‘I didn’t know you had a city. If I can find it to-morrow I’ll take one out if it’s necessary.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I’ll have to close you up till you do,’ says the constable.</p>
<p>“I quit selling and went back to the hotel. I was talking to the landlord about it.</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh, you won’t stand no show in Fisher Hill,’ says he. ‘Dr. Hoskins, the only doctor here, is a brother-in-law of the Mayor, and they won’t allow no fake doctor to practice in town.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh, you won’t stand no show in Fisher Hill,’ says he. ‘<abbr>Dr.</abbr> Hoskins, the only doctor here, is a brother-in-law of the Mayor, and they won’t allow no fake doctor to practice in town.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I don’t practice medicine,’ says I, ‘I’ve got a State peddler’s license, and I take out a city one wherever they demand it.’</p>
<p>“I went to the Mayor’s office the next morning and they told me he hadn’t showed up yet. They didn’t know when he’d be down. So Doc Waugh-hoo hunches down again in a hotel chair and lights a jimpson-weed regalia, and waits.</p>
<p>“By and by a young man in a blue necktie slips into the chair next to me and asks the time.</p>
@ -33,20 +33,20 @@
<p>“ ‘As man to man,’ says I, ‘I’ll go and look him over.’ So I put a bottle of Resurrection Bitters in my pocket and goes up on the hill to the mayor’s mansion, the finest house in town, with a mansard roof and two cast iron dogs on the lawn.</p>
<p>“This Mayor Banks was in bed all but his whiskers and feet. He was making internal noises that would have had everybody in San Francisco hiking for the parks. A young man was standing by the bed holding a cup of water.</p>
<p>“ ‘Doc,’ says the Mayor, ‘I’m awful sick. I’m about to die. Can’t you do nothing for me?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘I’m not a regular preordained disciple of S. Q. Lapius. I never took a course in a medical college,’ says I. ‘I’ve just come as a fellow man to see if I could be off assistance.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I’m deeply obliged,’ says he. ‘Doc Waugh-hoo, this is my nephew, Mr. Biddle. He has tried to alleviate my distress, but without success. Oh, Lordy! Ow-ow-ow!!’ he sings out.</p>
<p>“I nods at Mr. Biddle and sets down by the bed and feels the mayor’s pulse. ‘Let me see your liver⁠—your tongue, I mean,’ says I. Then I turns up the lids of his eyes and looks close that the pupils of ’em.</p>
<p>“ ‘<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Mayor,’ says I, ‘I’m not a regular preordained disciple of S. Q. Lapius. I never took a course in a medical college,’ says I. ‘I’ve just come as a fellow man to see if I could be off assistance.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I’m deeply obliged,’ says he. ‘Doc Waugh-hoo, this is my nephew, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Biddle. He has tried to alleviate my distress, but without success. Oh, Lordy! Ow-ow-ow!!’ he sings out.</p>
<p>“I nods at <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Biddle and sets down by the bed and feels the mayor’s pulse. ‘Let me see your liver⁠—your tongue, I mean,’ says I. Then I turns up the lids of his eyes and looks close that the pupils of ’em.</p>
<p>“ ‘How long have you been sick?’ I asked.</p>
<p>“ ‘I was taken down⁠—ow-ouch⁠—last night,’ says the Mayor. ‘Gimme something for it, doc, won’t you?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Mr. Fiddle,’ says I, ‘raise the window shade a bit, will you?’</p>
<p>“ ‘<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Fiddle,’ says I, ‘raise the window shade a bit, will you?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Biddle,’ says the young man. ‘Do you feel like you could eat some ham and eggs, Uncle James?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, after laying my ear to his right shoulder blade and listening, ‘you’ve got a bad attack of super-inflammation of the right clavicle of the harpsichord!’</p>
<p>“ ‘<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Mayor,’ says I, after laying my ear to his right shoulder blade and listening, ‘you’ve got a bad attack of super-inflammation of the right clavicle of the harpsichord!’</p>
<p>“ ‘Good Lord!’ says he, with a groan, ‘Can’t you rub something on it, or set it or anything?’</p>
<p>“I picks up my hat and starts for the door.</p>
<p>“ ‘You ain’t going, doc?’ says the Mayor with a howl. ‘You ain’t going away and leave me to die with this⁠—superfluity of the clapboards, are you?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Common humanity, Dr. Whoa-ha,’ says Mr. Biddle, ‘ought to prevent your deserting a fellow-human in distress.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Dr. Waugh-hoo, when you get through plowing,’ says I. And then I walks back to the bed and throws back my long hair.</p>
<p>“ ‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘there is only one hope for you. Drugs will do you no good. But there is another power higher yet, although drugs are high enough,’ says I.</p>
<p>“ ‘Common humanity, <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Whoa-ha,’ says <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Biddle, ‘ought to prevent your deserting a fellow-human in distress.’</p>
<p>“ ‘<abbr>Dr.</abbr> Waugh-hoo, when you get through plowing,’ says I. And then I walks back to the bed and throws back my long hair.</p>
<p>“ ‘<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Mayor,’ says I, ‘there is only one hope for you. Drugs will do you no good. But there is another power higher yet, although drugs are high enough,’ says I.</p>
<p>“ ‘And what is that?’ says he.</p>
<p>“ ‘Scientific demonstrations,’ says I. ‘The triumph of mind over sarsaparilla. The belief that there is no pain and sickness except what is produced when we ain’t feeling well. Declare yourself in arrears. Demonstrate.’</p>
<p>“ ‘What is this paraphernalia you speak of, Doc?’ says the Mayor. ‘You ain’t a Socialist, are you?’</p>
@ -64,29 +64,29 @@
<p>“I made a few passes with my hands.</p>
<p>“ ‘Now,’ says I, ‘the inflammation’s gone. The right lobe of the perihelion has subsided. You’re getting sleepy. You can’t hold your eyes open any longer. For the present the disease is checked. Now, you are asleep.’</p>
<p>“The Mayor shut his eyes slowly and began to snore.</p>
<p>“ ‘You observe, Mr. Tiddle,’ says I, ‘the wonders of modern science.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Biddle,’ says he, ‘When will you give uncle the rest of the treatment, Dr. Pooh-pooh?’</p>
<p>“ ‘You observe, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tiddle,’ says I, ‘the wonders of modern science.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Biddle,’ says he, ‘When will you give uncle the rest of the treatment, <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Pooh-pooh?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Waugh-hoo,’ says I. ‘I’ll come back at eleven to-morrow. When he wakes up give him eight drops of turpentine and three pounds of steak. Good morning.’</p>
<p>“The next morning I was back on time. ‘Well, Mr. Riddle,’ says I, when he opened the bedroom door, ‘and how is uncle this morning?’</p>
<p>“The next morning I was back on time. ‘Well, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Riddle,’ says I, when he opened the bedroom door, ‘and how is uncle this morning?’</p>
<p>“ ‘He seems much better,’ says the young man.</p>
<p>“The mayor’s color and pulse was fine. I gave him another treatment, and he said the last of the pain left him.</p>
<p>“ ‘Now,’ says I, ‘you’d better stay in bed for a day or two, and you’ll be all right. It’s a good thing I happened to be in Fisher Hill, Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘for all the remedies in the cornucopia that the regular schools of medicine use couldn’t have saved you. And now that error has flew and pain proved a perjurer, let’s allude to a cheerfuller subject⁠—say the fee of $250. No checks, please, I hate to write my name on the back of a check almost as bad as I do on the front.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Now,’ says I, ‘you’d better stay in bed for a day or two, and you’ll be all right. It’s a good thing I happened to be in Fisher Hill, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Mayor,’ says I, ‘for all the remedies in the cornucopia that the regular schools of medicine use couldn’t have saved you. And now that error has flew and pain proved a perjurer, let’s allude to a cheerfuller subject⁠—say the fee of $250. No checks, please, I hate to write my name on the back of a check almost as bad as I do on the front.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I’ve got the cash here,’ says the mayor, pulling a pocket book from under his pillow.</p>
<p>“He counts out five fifty-dollar notes and holds ’em in his hand.</p>
<p>“ ‘Bring the receipt,’ he says to Biddle.</p>
<p>“I signed the receipt and the mayor handed me the money. I put it in my inside pocket careful.</p>
<p>“ ‘Now do your duty, officer,’ says the mayor, grinning much unlike a sick man.</p>
<p>“Mr. Biddle lays his hand on my arm.</p>
<p>“ ‘You’re under arrest, Dr. Waugh-hoo, alias Peters,’ says he, ‘for practising medicine without authority under the State law.’</p>
<p>“<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Biddle lays his hand on my arm.</p>
<p>“ ‘You’re under arrest, <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Waugh-hoo, alias Peters,’ says he, ‘for practising medicine without authority under the State law.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Who are you?’ I asks.</p>
<p>“ ‘I’ll tell you who he is,’ says Mr. Mayor, sitting up in bed. ‘He’s a detective employed by the State Medical Society. He’s been following you over five counties. He came to me yesterday and we fixed up this scheme to catch you. I guess you won’t do any more doctoring around these parts, Mr. Fakir. What was it you said I had, doc?’ the mayor laughs, ‘compound⁠—well, it wasn’t softening of the brain, I guess, anyway.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I’ll tell you who he is,’ says <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Mayor, sitting up in bed. ‘He’s a detective employed by the State Medical Society. He’s been following you over five counties. He came to me yesterday and we fixed up this scheme to catch you. I guess you won’t do any more doctoring around these parts, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Fakir. What was it you said I had, doc?’ the mayor laughs, ‘compound⁠—well, it wasn’t softening of the brain, I guess, anyway.’</p>
<p>“ ‘A detective,’ says I.</p>
<p>“ ‘Correct,’ says Biddle. ‘I’ll have to turn you over to the sheriff.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Let’s see you do it,’ says I, and I grabs Biddle by the throat and half throws him out the window, but he pulls a gun and sticks it under my chin, and I stand still. Then he puts handcuffs on me, and takes the money out of my pocket.</p>
<p>“ ‘I witness,’ says he, ‘that they’re the same bank bills that you and I marked, Judge Banks. I’ll turn them over to the sheriff when we get to his office, and he’ll send you a receipt. They’ll have to be used as evidence in the case.’</p>
<p>“ ‘All right, Mr. Biddle,’ says the mayor. ‘And now, Doc Waugh-hoo,’ he goes on, ‘why don’t you demonstrate? Can’t you pull the cork out of your magnetism with your teeth and hocus-pocus them handcuffs off?’</p>
<p>“ ‘All right, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Biddle,’ says the mayor. ‘And now, Doc Waugh-hoo,’ he goes on, ‘why don’t you demonstrate? Can’t you pull the cork out of your magnetism with your teeth and hocus-pocus them handcuffs off?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Come on, officer,’ says I, dignified. ‘I may as well make the best of it.’ And then I turns to old Banks and rattles my chains.</p>
<p>“ ‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘the time will come soon when you’ll believe that personal magnetism is a success. And you’ll be sure that it succeeded in this case, too.’</p>
<p>“ ‘<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Mayor,’ says I, ‘the time will come soon when you’ll believe that personal magnetism is a success. And you’ll be sure that it succeeded in this case, too.’</p>
<p>“And I guess it did.</p>
<p>“When we got nearly to the gate, I says: ‘We might meet somebody now, Andy. I reckon you better take ’em off, and⁠—’ Hey? Why, of course it was Andy Tucker. That was his scheme; and that’s how we got the capital to go into business together.”</p>
</section>

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<title>Chapter 3</title>
<title>Modern Rural Sports</title>
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
<section id="chapter-3" epub:type="chapter">
<h2>MODERN RURAL SPORTS</h2>
<section id="modern-rural-sports" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
<h2 epub:type="title">Modern Rural Sports</h2>
<p>Jeff Peters must be reminded. Whenever he is called upon, pointedly, for a story, he will maintain that his life has been as devoid of incident as the longest of Trollope’s novels. But lured, he will divulge. Therefore I cast many and divers flies upon the current of his thoughts before I feel a nibble.</p>
<p>“I notice,” said I, “that the Western farmers, in spite of their prosperity, are running after their old populistic idols again.”</p>
<p>“It’s the running season,” said Jeff, “for farmers, shad, maple trees and the Connemaugh river. I know something about farmers. I thought I struck one once that had got out of the rut; but Andy Tucker proved to me I was mistaken. ‘Once a farmer, always a sucker,’ said Andy. ‘He’s the man that’s shoved into the front row among bullets, ballots and the ballet. He’s the funny-bone and gristle of the country,’ said Andy, ‘and I don’t know who we would do without him.’</p>
@ -36,15 +36,15 @@
<p>“ ‘Come in, Bunk,’ says the farmer, ‘and look at my place. It’s kind of lonesome here sometimes. I think that’s New York calling.’</p>
<p>“We went inside. The room looked like a Broadway stockbroker’s⁠—light oak desks, two ‘phones, Spanish leather upholstered chairs and couches, oil paintings in gilt frames a foot deep and a ticker hitting off the news in one corner.</p>
<p>“ ‘Hello, hello!’ says this funny farmer. ‘Is that the Regent Theatre? Yes; this is Plunkett, of Woodbine Centre. Reserve four orchestra seats for Friday evening⁠—my usual ones. Yes; Friday⁠—good-bye.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I run over to New York every two weeks to see a show,’ says the farmer, hanging up the receiver. ‘I catch the eighteen-hour flyer at Indianapolis, spend ten hours in the heyday of night on the Yappian Way, and get home in time to see the chickens go to roost forty-eight hours later. Oh, the pristine Hubbard squasherino of the cave-dwelling period is getting geared up some for the annual meeting of the Don’t-Blow-Out-the-Gas Association, don’t you think, Mr. Bunk?’</p>
<p>“ ‘I run over to New York every two weeks to see a show,’ says the farmer, hanging up the receiver. ‘I catch the eighteen-hour flyer at Indianapolis, spend ten hours in the heyday of night on the Yappian Way, and get home in time to see the chickens go to roost forty-eight hours later. Oh, the pristine Hubbard squasherino of the cave-dwelling period is getting geared up some for the annual meeting of the Don’t-Blow-Out-the-Gas Association, don’t you think, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bunk?’</p>
<p>“ ‘I seem to perceive,’ says I, ‘a kind of hiatus in the agrarian traditions in which heretofore, I have reposed confidence.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Sure, Bunk,’ says he. ‘The yellow primrose on the river’s brim is getting to look to us Reubs like a holiday edition de luxe of the Language of Flowers with deckle edges and frontispiece.’</p>
<p>“Just then the telephone calls him again.</p>
<p>“ ‘Hello, hello!’ says he. ‘Oh, that’s Perkins, at Milldale. I told you $800 was too much for that horse. Have you got him there? Good. Let me see him. Get away from the transmitter. Now make him trot in a circle. Faster. Yes, I can hear him. Keep on⁠—faster yet. … That’ll do. Now lead him up to the phone. Closer. Get his nose nearer. There. Now wait. No; I don’t want that horse. What? No; not at any price. He interferes; and he’s windbroken. Goodbye.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Now, Bunk,’ says the farmer, ‘do you begin to realize that agriculture has had a hair cut? You belong in a bygone era. Why, Tom Lawson himself knows better than to try to catch an up-to-date agriculturalist napping. It’s Saturday, the Fourteenth, on the farm, you bet. Now, look here, and see how we keep up with the day’s doings.’</p>
<p>“He shows me a machine on a table with two things for your ears like the penny-in-the-slot affairs. I puts it on and listens. A female voice starts up reading headlines of murders, accidents and other political casualities.</p>
<p>“ ‘What you hear,’ says the farmer, ‘is a synopsis of to-day’s news in the New York, Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco papers. It is wired in to our Rural News Bureau and served hot to subscribers. On this table you see the principal dailies and weeklies of the country. Also a special service of advance sheets of the monthly magazines.’</p>
<p>“I picks up one sheet and sees that it’s headed: ‘Special Advance Proofs. In July, 1909, the <i>Century</i> will say’⁠—and so forth.</p>
<p>“ ‘What you hear,’ says the farmer, ‘is a synopsis of to-day’s news in the New York, Chicago, <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis and San Francisco papers. It is wired in to our Rural News Bureau and served hot to subscribers. On this table you see the principal dailies and weeklies of the country. Also a special service of advance sheets of the monthly magazines.’</p>
<p>“I picks up one sheet and sees that it’s headed: ‘Special Advance Proofs. In July, 1909, the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Century</i> will say’⁠—and so forth.</p>
<p>“The farmer rings up somebody⁠—his manager, I reckon⁠—and tells him to let that herd of 15 Jerseys go at $600 a head; and to sow the 900-acre field in wheat; and to have 200 extra cans ready at the station for the milk trolley car. Then he passes the Henry Clays and sets out a bottle of green chartreuse, and goes over and looks at the ticker tape.</p>
<p>“ ‘Consolidated Gas up two points,’ says he. ‘Oh, very well.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Ever monkey with copper?’ I asks.</p>

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<title>Chapter 8</title>
<title>Shearing the Wolf</title>
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<h2>SHEARING THE WOLF</h2>
<section id="shearing-the-wolf" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
<h2 epub:type="title">Shearing the Wolf</h2>
<p>Jeff Peters was always eloquent when the ethics of his profession was under discussion.</p>
<p>“The only times,” said he, “that me and Andy Tucker ever had any hiatuses in our cordial intents was when we differed on the moral aspects of grafting. Andy had his standards and I had mine. I didn’t approve of all of Andy’s schemes for levying contributions from the public, and he thought I allowed my conscience to interfere too often for the financial good of the firm. We had high arguments sometimes. One word led on to another till he said I reminded him of Rockefeller.</p>
<p>“ ‘I don’t know how you mean that, Andy,’ says I, ‘but we have been friends too long for me to take offense at a taunt that you will regret when you cool off. I have yet,’ says I, ‘to shake hands with a subpœna server.’</p>
<p>“One summer me and Andy decided to rest up a spell in a fine little town in the mountains of Kentucky called Grassdale. We was supposed to be horse drovers, and good decent citizens besides, taking a summer vacation. The Grassdale people liked us, and me and Andy declared a cessation of hostilities, never so much as floating the fly leaf of a rubber concession prospectus or flashing a Brazilian diamond while we was there.</p>
<p>“One day the leading hardware merchant of Grassdale drops around to the hotel where me and Andy stopped, and smokes with us, sociable, on the side porch. We knew him pretty well from pitching quoits in the afternoons in the court house yard. He was a loud, red man, breathing hard, but fat and respectable beyond all reason.</p>
<p>“After we talk on all the notorious themes of the day, this Murkison⁠—for such was his entitlements⁠—takes a letter out of his coat pocket in a careful, careless way and hands it to us to read.</p>
<p>“ ‘Now, what do you think of that?’ says he, laughing⁠—‘a letter like that to ME!’</p>
<p>“ ‘Now, what do you think of that?’ says he, laughing⁠—‘a letter like that to <em>me</em>!’</p>
<p>“Me and Andy sees at a glance what it is; but we pretend to read it through. It was one of them old time typewritten green goods letters explaining how for $1,000 you could get $5,000 in bills that an expert couldn’t tell from the genuine; and going on to tell how they were made from plates stolen by an employee of the Treasury at Washington.</p>
<p>“ ‘Think of ’em sending a letter like that to ME!’ says Murkison again.</p>
<p>“ ‘Think of ’em sending a letter like that to <em>me</em>!’ says Murkison again.</p>
<p>“ ‘Lot’s of good men get ’em,’ says Andy. ‘If you don’t answer the first letter they let you drop. If you answer it they write again asking you to come on with your money and do business.’</p>
<p>“ ‘But think of ’em writing to ME!’ says Murkison.</p>
<p>“ ‘But think of ’em writing to <em>me</em>!’ says Murkison.</p>
<p>“A few days later he drops around again.</p>
<p>“ ‘Boys,’ says he, ‘I know you are all right or I wouldn’t confide in you. I wrote to them rascals again just for fun. They answered and told me to come on to Chicago. They said telegraph to J. Smith when I would start. When I get there I’m to wait on a certain street corner till a man in a gray suit comes along and drops a newspaper in front of me. Then I am to ask him how the water is, and he knows it’s me and I know it’s him.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Ah, yes,’ says Andy, gaping, ‘it’s the same old game. I’ve often read about it in the papers. Then he conducts you to the private abattoir in the hotel, where Mr. Jones is already waiting. They show you brand new real money and sell you all you want at five for one. You see ’em put it in a satchel for you and know it’s there. Of course it’s brown paper when you come to look at it afterward.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh, they couldn’t switch it on me,’ says Murkison. ‘I haven’t built up the best paying business in Grassdale without having witticisms about me. You say it’s real money they show you, Mr. Tucker?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Ah, yes,’ says Andy, gaping, ‘it’s the same old game. I’ve often read about it in the papers. Then he conducts you to the private abattoir in the hotel, where <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Jones is already waiting. They show you brand new real money and sell you all you want at five for one. You see ’em put it in a satchel for you and know it’s there. Of course it’s brown paper when you come to look at it afterward.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh, they couldn’t switch it on me,’ says Murkison. ‘I haven’t built up the best paying business in Grassdale without having witticisms about me. You say it’s real money they show you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker?’</p>
<p>“ ‘I’ve always⁠—I see by the papers that it always is,’ says Andy.</p>
<p>“ ‘Boys,’ says Murkison, ‘I’ve got it in my mind that them fellows can’t fool me. I think I’ll put a couple of thousand in my jeans and go up there and put it all over ’em. If Bill Murkison gets his eyes once on them bills they show him he’ll never take ’em off of ’em. They offer $5 for $1, and they’ll have to stick to the bargain if I tackle ’em. That’s the kind of trader Bill Murkison is. Yes, I jist believe I’ll drop up Chicago way and take a 5 to 1 shot on J. Smith. I guess the water’ll be fine enough.’</p>
<p>“Me and Andy tries to get this financial misquotation out of Murkison’s head, but we might as well have tried to keep the man who rolls peanuts with a toothpick from betting on Bryan’s election. No, sir; he was going to perform a public duty by catching these green goods swindlers at their own game. Maybe it would teach ’em a lesson.</p>
<p>“After Murkison left us me and Andy sat a while prepondering over our silent meditations and heresies of reason. In our idle hours we always improved our higher selves by ratiocination and mental thought.</p>
<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ says Andy after a long time, ‘quite unseldom I have seen fit to impugn your molars when you have been chewing the rag with me about your conscientious way of doing business. I may have been often wrong. But here is a case where I think we can agree. I feel that it would be wrong for us to allow Mr. Murkison to go alone to meet those Chicago green goods men. There is but one way it can end. Don’t you think we would both feel better if we was to intervene in some way and prevent the doing of this deed?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ says Andy after a long time, ‘quite unseldom I have seen fit to impugn your molars when you have been chewing the rag with me about your conscientious way of doing business. I may have been often wrong. But here is a case where I think we can agree. I feel that it would be wrong for us to allow <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Murkison to go alone to meet those Chicago green goods men. There is but one way it can end. Don’t you think we would both feel better if we was to intervene in some way and prevent the doing of this deed?’</p>
<p>“I got up and shook Andy Tucker’s hand hard and long.</p>
<p>“ ‘Andy,’ says I, ‘I may have had one or two hard thoughts about the heartlessness of your corporation, but I retract ’em now. You have a kind nucleus at the interior of your exterior after all. It does you credit. I was just thinking the same thing that you have expressed. It would not be honorable or praiseworthy,’ says I, ‘for us to let Murkison go on with this project he has taken up. If he is determined to go let us go with him and prevent this swindle from coming off.’</p>
<p>“Andy agreed with me; and I was glad to see that he was in earnest about breaking up this green goods scheme.</p>
@ -35,17 +35,17 @@
<p>“ ‘Right, Jeff,’ says Andy. ‘We’ll stick right along with Murkison if he insists on going and block this funny business. I’d hate to see any money dropped in it as bad as you would.’</p>
<p>“Well, we went to see Murkison.</p>
<p>“ ‘No, boys,’ says he. ‘I can’t consent to let the song of this Chicago siren waft by me on the summer breeze. I’ll fry some fat out of this ignis fatuus or burn a hole in the skillet. But I’d be plumb diverted to death to have you all go along with me. Maybe you could help some when it comes to cashing in the ticket to that 5 to 1 shot. Yes, I’d really take it as a pastime and regalement if you boys would go along too.’</p>
<p>“Murkison gives it out in Grassdale that he is going for a few days with Mr. Peters and Mr. Tucker to look over some iron ore property in West Virginia. He wires J. Smith that he will set foot in the spider web on a given date; and the three of us lights out for Chicago.</p>
<p>“Murkison gives it out in Grassdale that he is going for a few days with <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker to look over some iron ore property in West Virginia. He wires J. Smith that he will set foot in the spider web on a given date; and the three of us lights out for Chicago.</p>
<p>“On the way Murkison amuses himself with premonitions and advance pleasant recollections.</p>
<p>“ ‘In a gray suit,’ says he, ‘on the southwest corner of Wabash avenue and Lake street. He drops the paper, and I ask how the water is. Oh, my, my, my!’ And then he laughs all over for five minutes.</p>
<p>“Sometimes Murkison was serious and tried to talk himself out of his cogitations, whatever they was.</p>
<p>“ ‘Boys,’ says he, ‘I wouldn’t have this to get out in Grassdale for ten times a thousand dollars. It would ruin me there. But I know you all are all right. I think it’s the duty of every citizen,’ says he, ‘to try to do up these robbers that prey upon the public. I’ll show ’em whether the water’s fine. Five dollars for one⁠—that’s what J. Smith offers, and he’ll have to keep his contract if he does business with Bill Murkison.’</p>
<p>“We got into Chicago about 7 <span class="smallcaps">p.m.</span> Murkison was to meet the gray man at half past 9. We had dinner at a hotel and then went up to Murkison’s room to wait for the time to come.</p>
<p>“We got into Chicago about 7 <abbr class="time">p.m.</abbr> Murkison was to meet the gray man at half past 9. We had dinner at a hotel and then went up to Murkison’s room to wait for the time to come.</p>
<p>“ ‘Now, boys,’ says Murkison, ‘let’s get our gumption together and inoculate a plan for defeating the enemy. Suppose while I’m exchanging airy bandage with the gray capper you gents come along, by accident, you know, and holler: “Hello, Murk!” and shake hands with symptoms of surprise and familiarity. Then I take the capper aside and tell him you all are Jenkins and Brown of Grassdale, groceries and feed, good men and maybe willing to take a chance while away from home.’</p>
<p>“ ‘ “Bring ’em along,” he’ll say, of course, “if they care to invest.” Now, how does that scheme strike you?’</p>
<p>“ ‘What do you say, Jeff?’ says Andy, looking at me.</p>
<p>“ ‘Why, I’ll tell you what I say,’ says I. ‘I say let’s settle this thing right here now. I don’t see any use of wasting any more time.’ I took a nickel-plated .38 out of my pocket and clicked the cylinder around a few times.</p>
<p>“ ‘You undevout, sinful, insidious hog,’ says I to Murkison, ‘get out that two thousand and lay it on the table. Obey with velocity,’ says I, ‘for otherwise alternatives are impending. I am preferably a man of mildness, but now and then I find myself in the middle of extremities. Such men as you,’ I went on after he had laid the money out, ‘is what keeps the jails and court houses going. You come up here to rob these men of their money. Does it excuse you?’ I asks, ‘that they were trying to skin you? No, sir; you was going to rob Peter to stand off Paul. You are ten times worse,’ says I, ‘than that green goods man. You go to church at home and pretend to be a decent citizen, but you’ll come to Chicago and commit larceny from men that have built up a sound and profitable business by dealing with such contemptible scoundrels as you have tried to be to-day. How do you know,’ says I, ‘that that green goods man hasn’t a large family dependent upon his extortions? It’s you supposedly respectable citizens who are always on the lookout to get something for nothing,’ says I, ‘that support the lotteries and wild-cat mines and stock exchanges and wire tappers of this country. If it wasn’t for you they’d go out of business. The green goods man you was going to rob,’ says I, ‘studied maybe for years to learn his trade. Every turn he makes he risks his money and liberty and maybe his life. You come up here all sanctified and vanoplied with respectability and a pleasing post office address to swindle him. If he gets the money you can squeal to the police. If you get it he hocks the gray suit to buy supper and says nothing. Mr. Tucker and me sized you up,’ says I, ‘and came along to see that you got what you deserved. Hand over the money,’ says I, ‘you grass fed hypocrite.’</p>
<p>“ ‘You undevout, sinful, insidious hog,’ says I to Murkison, ‘get out that two thousand and lay it on the table. Obey with velocity,’ says I, ‘for otherwise alternatives are impending. I am preferably a man of mildness, but now and then I find myself in the middle of extremities. Such men as you,’ I went on after he had laid the money out, ‘is what keeps the jails and court houses going. You come up here to rob these men of their money. Does it excuse you?’ I asks, ‘that they were trying to skin you? No, sir; you was going to rob Peter to stand off Paul. You are ten times worse,’ says I, ‘than that green goods man. You go to church at home and pretend to be a decent citizen, but you’ll come to Chicago and commit larceny from men that have built up a sound and profitable business by dealing with such contemptible scoundrels as you have tried to be to-day. How do you know,’ says I, ‘that that green goods man hasn’t a large family dependent upon his extortions? It’s you supposedly respectable citizens who are always on the lookout to get something for nothing,’ says I, ‘that support the lotteries and wild-cat mines and stock exchanges and wire tappers of this country. If it wasn’t for you they’d go out of business. The green goods man you was going to rob,’ says I, ‘studied maybe for years to learn his trade. Every turn he makes he risks his money and liberty and maybe his life. You come up here all sanctified and vanoplied with respectability and a pleasing post office address to swindle him. If he gets the money you can squeal to the police. If you get it he hocks the gray suit to buy supper and says nothing. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker and me sized you up,’ says I, ‘and came along to see that you got what you deserved. Hand over the money,’ says I, ‘you grass fed hypocrite.’</p>
<p>“I put the two thousand, which was all in $20 bills, in my inside pocket.</p>
<p>“ ‘Now get out your watch,’ says I to Murkison. ‘No, I don’t want it,’ says I. ‘Lay it on the table and you sit in that chair till it ticks off an hour. Then you can go. If you make any noise or leave any sooner we’ll handbill you all over Grassdale. I guess your high position there is worth more than $2,000 to you.’</p>
<p>“Then me and Andy left.</p>

10
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<title>Chapter 4</title>
<title>The Chair of Philanthromathematics</title>
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<h2>THE CHAIR OF PHILANTHROMATHEMATICS</h2>
<section id="the-chair-of-philanthromathematics" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
<h2 epub:type="title">The Chair of Philanthromathematics</h2>
<p>“I see that the cause of Education has received the princely gift of more than fifty millions of dollars,” said I.</p>
<p>I was gleaning the stray items from the evening papers while Jeff Peters packed his briar pipe with plug cut.</p>
<p>“Which same,” said Jeff, “calls for a new deck, and a recitation by the entire class in philanthromathematics.”</p>
@ -41,7 +41,7 @@
<p>“ ‘Why, something to sleep in, of course,’ says I. ‘All colleges have ’em.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh, you mean pajamas,’ says Andy.</p>
<p>“ ‘I do not,’ says I. ‘I mean dromedaries.’ But I never could make Andy understand; so we never ordered ’em. Of course, I meant them long bedrooms in colleges where the scholars sleep in a row.</p>
<p>“Well, sir, the World’s University was a success. We had scholars from five States and territories, and Floresville had a boom. A new shooting gallery and a pawn shop and two more saloons started; and the boys got up a college yell that went this way:<br/></p>
<p>“Well, sir, the World’s University was a success. We had scholars from five States and territories, and Floresville had a boom. A new shooting gallery and a pawn shop and two more saloons started; and the boys got up a college yell that went this way:</p>
<p>“The scholars was a fine lot of young men, and me and Andy was as proud of ’em as if they belonged to our own family.</p>
<p>“But one day about the last of October Andy comes to me and asks if I have any idea how much money we had left in the bank. I guesses about sixteen thousand. ‘Our balance,’ says Andy, ‘is $821.62.’</p>
<p>“ ‘What!’ says I, with a kind of a yell. ‘Do you mean to tell me that them infernal clod-hopping, dough-headed, pup-faced, goose-brained, gate-stealing, rabbit-eared sons of horse thieves have soaked us for that much?’</p>
@ -65,7 +65,7 @@
<p>“ ‘We’ll be leaving on the morning train,’ says Andy. ‘You’d better get your collars and cuffs and press clippings together.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Great!’ says I. ‘I’ll be ready. But, Andy,’ says I, ‘I wish I could have met that Professor James Darnley McCorkle before we went. I had a curiosity to know that man.’</p>
<p>“ ‘That’ll be easy,’ says Andy, turning around to the faro dealer.</p>
<p>“ ‘Jim,’ says Andy, ‘shake hands with Mr. Peters.’ ”</p>
<p>“ ‘Jim,’ says Andy, ‘shake hands with <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters.’ ”</p>
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<title>Chapter 14</title>
<title>The Ethics of Pig</title>
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<h2>THE ETHICS OF PIG</h2>
<section id="the-ethics-of-pig" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
<h2 epub:type="title">The Ethics of Pig</h2>
<p>On an east-bound train I went into the smoker and found Jefferson Peters, the only man with a brain west of the Wabash River who can use his cerebrum, cerebellum, and medulla oblongata at the same time.</p>
<p>Jeff is in the line of unillegal graft. He is not to be dreaded by widows and orphans; he is a reducer of surplusage. His favorite disguise is that of the target-bird at which the spendthrift or the reckless investor may shy a few inconsequential dollars. He is readily vocalized by tobacco; so, with the aid of two thick and easy-burning brevas, I got the story of his latest Autolycan adventure.</p>
<p>“In my line of business,” said Jeff, “the hardest thing is to find an upright, trustworthy, strictly honorable partner to work a graft with. Some of the best men I ever worked with in a swindle would resort to trickery at times.</p>
<p>“So, last summer, I thinks I will go over into this section of country where I hear the serpent has not yet entered, and see if I can find a partner naturally gifted with a talent for crime, but not yet contaminated by success.</p>
<p>“I found a village that seemed to show the right kind of a layout. The inhabitants hadn’t found that Adam had been dispossessed, and were going right along naming the animals and killing snakes just as if they were in the Garden of Eden. They call this town Mount Nebo, and it’s up near the spot where Kentucky and West Virginia and North Carolina corner together. Them States don’t meet? Well, it was in that neighborhood, anyway.</p>
<p>“After putting in a week proving I wasn’t a revenue officer, I went over to the store where the rude fourflushers of the hamlet lied, to see if I could get a line on the kind of man I wanted.</p>
<p>“ ‘Gentlemen,’ says I, after we had rubbed noses and gathered ’round the dried-apple barrel. ‘I don’t suppose there’s another community in the whole world into which sin and chicanery has less extensively permeated than this. Life here, where all the women are brave and propitious and all the men honest and expedient, must, indeed, be an idol. It reminds me,’ says I, ‘of Goldstein’s beautiful ballad entitled “The Deserted Village,” which says:<br/></p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote class="med">
<p class="noindent">‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,<br/> <span class="ind2">What art can drive its charms away?</span><br/> The judge rode slowly down the lane, mother.<br/> <span class="ind2">For I’m to be Queen of the May.’</span><br/></p>
</blockquote>
<p>“ ‘Gentlemen,’ says I, after we had rubbed noses and gathered ’round the dried-apple barrel. ‘I don’t suppose there’s another community in the whole world into which sin and chicanery has less extensively permeated than this. Life here, where all the women are brave and propitious and all the men honest and expedient, must, indeed, be an idol. It reminds me,’ says I, ‘of Goldstein’s beautiful ballad entitled “The Deserted Village,” which says:</p>
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:song">
<p>
<span>‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,</span>
<br/>
<span class="i1">What art can drive its charms away?</span>
<br/>
<span>The judge rode slowly down the lane, mother.</span>
<br/>
<span class="i1">For I’m to be Queen of the May.’</span>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“ ‘Why, yes, Mr. Peters,’ says the storekeeper. ‘I reckon we air about as moral and torpid a community as there be on the mounting, according to censuses of opinion; but I reckon you ain’t ever met Rufe Tatum.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Why, yes, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says the storekeeper. ‘I reckon we air about as moral and torpid a community as there be on the mounting, according to censuses of opinion; but I reckon you ain’t ever met Rufe Tatum.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Why, no,’ says the town constable, ‘he can’t hardly have ever. That air Rufe is shore the monstrousest scalawag that has escaped hangin’ on the galluses. And that puts me in mind that I ought to have turned Rufe out of the lockup before yesterday. The thirty days he got for killin’ Yance Goodloe was up then. A day or two more won’t hurt Rufe any, though.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Shucks, now,’ says I, in the mountain idiom, ‘don’t tell me there’s a man in Mount Nebo as bad as that.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Worse,’ says the storekeeper. ‘He steals hogs.’</p>
<p>“I think I will look up this Mr. Tatum; so a day or two after the constable turned him out I got acquainted with him and invited him out on the edge of town to sit on a log and talk business.</p>
<p>“What I wanted was a partner with a natural rural make-up to play a part in some little one-act outrages that I was going to book with the Pitfall &amp; Gin circuit in some of the Western towns; and this R. Tatum was born for the role as sure as nature cast Fairbanks for the stuff that kept <i>Eliza</i> from sinking into the river.</p>
<p>“I think I will look up this <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tatum; so a day or two after the constable turned him out I got acquainted with him and invited him out on the edge of town to sit on a log and talk business.</p>
<p>“What I wanted was a partner with a natural rural make-up to play a part in some little one-act outrages that I was going to book with the Pitfall &amp; Gin circuit in some of the Western towns; and this R. Tatum was born for the role as sure as nature cast Fairbanks for the stuff that kept Eliza from sinking into the river.</p>
<p>“He was about the size of a first baseman; and he had ambiguous blue eyes like the china dog on the mantelpiece that Aunt Harriet used to play with when she was a child. His hair waved a little bit like the statue of the dinkus-thrower at the Vacation in Rome, but the color of it reminded you of the ‘Sunset in the Grand Canon, by an American Artist,’ that they hang over the stove-pipe holes in the salongs. He was the Reub, without needing a touch. You’d have known him for one, even if you’d seen him on the vaudeville stage with one cotton suspender and a straw over his ear.</p>
<p>“I told him what I wanted, and found him ready to jump at the job.</p>
<p>“ ‘Overlooking such a trivial little peccadillo as the habit of manslaughter,’ says I, ‘what have you accomplished in the way of indirect brigandage or nonactionable thriftiness that you could point to, with or without pride, as an evidence of your qualifications for the position?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Why,’ says he, in his kind of Southern system of procrastinated accents, ‘hain’t you heard tell? There ain’t any man, black or white, in the Blue Ridge that can tote off a shoat as easy as I can without bein’ heard, seen, or cotched. I can lift a shoat,’ he goes on, ‘out of a pen, from under a porch, at the trough, in the woods, day or night, anywhere or anyhow, and I guarantee nobody won’t hear a squeal. It’s all in the way you grab hold of ’em and carry ’em atterwards. Some day,’ goes on this gentle despoiler of pig-pens, ‘I hope to become reckernized as the champion shoat-stealer of the world.’</p>
<p>“ ‘It’s proper to be ambitious,’ says I; ‘and hog-stealing will do very well for Mount Nebo; but in the outside world, Mr. Tatum, it would be considered as crude a piece of business as a bear raid on Bay State Gas. However, it will do as a guarantee of good faith. We’ll go into partnership. I’ve got a thousand dollars cash capital; and with that homeward-plods atmosphere of yours we ought to be able to win out a few shares of Soon Parted, preferred, in the money market.’</p>
<p>“ ‘It’s proper to be ambitious,’ says I; ‘and hog-stealing will do very well for Mount Nebo; but in the outside world, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tatum, it would be considered as crude a piece of business as a bear raid on Bay State Gas. However, it will do as a guarantee of good faith. We’ll go into partnership. I’ve got a thousand dollars cash capital; and with that homeward-plods atmosphere of yours we ought to be able to win out a few shares of Soon Parted, preferred, in the money market.’</p>
<p>“So I attaches Rufe, and we go away from Mount Nebo down into the lowlands. And all the way I coach him for his part in the grafts I had in mind. I had idled away two months on the Florida coast, and was feeling all to the Ponce de Leon, besides having so many new schemes up my sleeve that I had to wear kimonos to hold ’em.</p>
<p>“I intended to assume a funnel shape and mow a path nine miles wide though the farming belt of the Middle West; so we headed in that direction. But when we got as far as Lexington we found Binkley Brothers’ circus there, and the blue-grass peasantry romping into town and pounding the Belgian blocks with their hand-pegged sabots as artless and arbitrary as an extra session of a Datto Bryan drama. I never pass a circus without pulling the valve-cord and coming down for a little Key West money; so I engaged a couple of rooms and board for Rufe and me at a house near the circus grounds run by a widow lady named Peevy. Then I took Rufe to a clothing store and gent’s-outfitted him. He showed up strong, as I knew he would, after he was rigged up in the ready-made rutabaga regalia. Me and old Misfitzky stuffed him into a bright blue suit with a Nile green visible plaid effect, and riveted on a fancy vest of a light Tuskegee Normal tan color, a red necktie, and the yellowest pair of shoes in town.</p>
<p>“They were the first clothes Rufe had ever worn except the gingham layette and the butternut top-dressing of his native kraal, and he looked as self-conscious as an Igorrote with a new nose-ring.</p>
<p>“That night I went down to the circus tents and opened a small shell game. Rufe was to be the capper. I gave him a roll of phony currency to bet with and kept a bunch of it in a special pocket to pay his winnings out of. No; I didn’t mistrust him; but I simply can’t manipulate the ball to lose when I see real money bet. My fingers go on a strike every time I try it.</p>
<p>“I set up my little table and began to show them how easy it was to guess which shell the little pea was under. The unlettered hinds gathered in a thick semicircle and began to nudge elbows and banter one another to bet. Then was when Rufe ought to have single-footed up and called the turn on the little joker for a few tens and fives to get them started. But, no Rufe. I’d seen him two or three times walking about and looking at the side-show pictures with his mouth full of peanut candy; but he never came nigh.</p>
<p>“The crowd piked a little; but trying to work the shells without a capper is like fishing without a bait. I closed the game with only forty-two dollars of the unearned increment, while I had been counting on yanking the yeomen for two hundred at least. I went home at eleven and went to bed. I supposed that the circus had proved too alluring for Rufe, and that he had succumbed to it, concert and all; but I meant to give him a lecture on general business principles in the morning.</p>
<p>“Just after Morpheus had got both my shoulders to the shuck mattress I hears a houseful of unbecoming and ribald noises like a youngster screeching with green-apple colic. I opens my door and calls out in the hall for the widow lady, and when she sticks her head out, I says: ‘Mrs. Peevy, ma’am, would you mind choking off that kid of yours so that honest people can get their rest?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Sir,’ says she, ‘it’s no child of mine. It’s the pig squealing that your friend Mr. Tatum brought home to his room a couple of hours ago. And if you are uncle or second cousin or brother to it, I’d appreciate your stopping its mouth, sir, yourself, if you please.’</p>
<p>“Just after Morpheus had got both my shoulders to the shuck mattress I hears a houseful of unbecoming and ribald noises like a youngster screeching with green-apple colic. I opens my door and calls out in the hall for the widow lady, and when she sticks her head out, I says: ‘<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peevy, ma’am, would you mind choking off that kid of yours so that honest people can get their rest?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Sir,’ says she, ‘it’s no child of mine. It’s the pig squealing that your friend <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tatum brought home to his room a couple of hours ago. And if you are uncle or second cousin or brother to it, I’d appreciate your stopping its mouth, sir, yourself, if you please.’</p>
<p>“I put on some of the polite outside habiliments of external society and went into Rufe’s room. He had gotten up and lit his lamp, and was pouring some milk into a tin pan on the floor for a dingy-white, half-grown, squealing pig.</p>
<p>“ ‘How is this, Rufe?’ says I. ‘You flimflammed in your part of the work to-night and put the game on crutches. And how do you explain the pig? It looks like back-sliding to me.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Now, don’t be too hard on me, Jeff,’ says he. ‘You know how long I’ve been used to stealing shoats. It’s got to be a habit with me. And to-night, when I see such a fine chance, I couldn’t help takin’ it.’</p>
@ -46,11 +52,13 @@
<p>“ ‘Why, Jeff,’ says he, ‘you ain’t in sympathy with shoats. You don’t understand ’em like I do. This here seems to me to be an animal of more than common powers of ration and intelligence. He walked half across the room on his hind legs a while ago.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Well, I’m going back to bed,’ says I. ‘See if you can impress it upon your friend’s ideas of intelligence that he’s not to make so much noise.’</p>
<p>“ ‘He was hungry,’ says Rufe. ‘He’ll go to sleep and keep quiet now.’</p>
<p>“I always get up before breakfast and read the morning paper whenever I happen to be within the radius of a Hoe cylinder or a Washington hand-press. The next morning I got up early, and found a Lexington daily on the front porch where the carrier had thrown it. The first thing I saw in it was a double-column ad. on the front page that read like this:<br/></p>
<p>“I always get up before breakfast and read the morning paper whenever I happen to be within the radius of a Hoe cylinder or a Washington hand-press. The next morning I got up early, and found a Lexington daily on the front porch where the carrier had thrown it. The first thing I saw in it was a double-column ad. on the front page that read like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote class="med">
<p>The above amount will be paid, and no questions asked, for the return, alive and uninjured, of Beppo, the famous European educated pig, that strayed or was stolen from the side-show tents of Binkley Bros.’ circus last night.<br/> <span class="ind10">Geo. B. Tapley, Business Manager.</span><br/> <span class="ind15">At the circus grounds.</span><br/></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The above amount will be paid, and no questions asked, for the return, alive and uninjured, of Beppo, the famous European educated pig, that strayed or was stolen from the side-show tents of Binkley Bros.’ circus last night.</p>
<footer>
<p class="signature">Geo. B. Tapley, Business Manager.</p>
<p>At the circus grounds.</p>
</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>“I folded up the paper flat, put it into my inside pocket, and went to Rufe’s room. He was nearly dressed, and was feeding the pig the rest of the milk and some apple-peelings.</p>
<p>“ ‘Well, well, well, good morning all,’ I says, hearty and amiable. ‘So we are up? And piggy is having his breakfast. What had you intended doing with that pig, Rufe?’</p>
@ -83,7 +91,7 @@
<p>“ ‘Neither,’ says I. ‘I’ve got Beppo, the educated hog, in a sack in that wagon. I found him rooting up the flowers in my front yard this morning. I’ll take the five thousand dollars in large bills, if it’s handy.’</p>
<p>“George B. hustles out of his tent, and asks me to follow. We went into one of the side-shows. In there was a jet black pig with a pink ribbon around his neck lying on some hay and eating carrots that a man was feeding to him.</p>
<p>“ ‘Hey, Mac,’ calls G. B. ‘Nothing wrong with the world-wide this morning, is there?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Him? No,’ says the man. ‘He’s got an appetite like a chorus girl at 1 <span class="smallcaps">a.m.</span>’</p>
<p>“ ‘Him? No,’ says the man. ‘He’s got an appetite like a chorus girl at 1 <abbr class="time">a.m.</abbr>’</p>
<p>“ ‘How’d you get this pipe?’ says Tapley to me. ‘Eating too many pork chops last night?’</p>
<p>“I pulls out the paper and shows him the ad.</p>
<p>“ ‘Fake,’ says he. ‘Don’t know anything about it. You’ve beheld with your own eyes the marvelous, world-wide porcine wonder of the four-footed kingdom eating with preternatural sagacity his matutinal meal, unstrayed and unstole. Good morning.’</p>
@ -91,8 +99,8 @@
<p>“Then I paid Uncle Ned his fifty cents, and walked down to the newspaper office. I wanted to hear it in cold syllables. I got the advertising man to his window.</p>
<p>“ ‘To decide a bet,’ says I, ‘wasn’t the man who had this ad. put in last night short and fat, with long black whiskers and a club-foot?’</p>
<p>“ ‘He was not,’ says the man. ‘He would measure about six feet by four and a half inches, with corn-silk hair, and dressed like the pansies of the conservatory.’</p>
<p>“At dinner time I went back to Mrs. Peevy’s.</p>
<p>“ ‘Shall I keep some soup hot for Mr. Tatum till he comes back?’ she asks.</p>
<p>“At dinner time I went back to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peevy’s.</p>
<p>“ ‘Shall I keep some soup hot for <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tatum till he comes back?’ she asks.</p>
<p>“ ‘If you do, ma’am,’ says I, ‘you’ll more than exhaust for firewood all the coal in the bosom of the earth and all the forests on the outside of it.’</p>
<p>“So there, you see,” said Jefferson Peters, in conclusion, “how hard it is ever to find a fair-minded and honest business-partner.”</p>
<p>“But,” I began, with the freedom of long acquaintance, “the rule should work both ways. If you had offered to divide the reward you would not have lost⁠—”</p>

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<title>The Exact Science of Matrimony</title>
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<h2>THE EXACT SCIENCE OF MATRIMONY</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">The Exact Science of Matrimony</h2>
<p>“As I have told you before,” said Jeff Peters, “I never had much confidence in the perfidiousness of woman. As partners or coeducators in the most innocent line of graft they are not trustworthy.”</p>
<p>“They deserve the compliment,” said I. “I think they are entitled to be called the honest sex.”</p>
<p>“Why shouldn’t they be?” said Jeff. “They’ve got the other sex either grafting or working overtime for ’em. They’re all right in business until they get their emotions or their hair touched up too much. Then you want to have a flat footed, heavy breathing man with sandy whiskers, five kids and a building and loan mortgage ready as an understudy to take her desk. Now there was that widow lady that me and Andy Tucker engaged to help us in that little matrimonial agency scheme we floated out in Cairo.</p>
<p>“When you’ve got enough advertising capital⁠—say a roll as big as the little end of a wagon tongue⁠—there’s money in matrimonial agencies. We had about $6,000 and we expected to double it in two months, which is about as long as a scheme like ours can be carried on without taking out a New Jersey charter.</p>
<p>“We fixed up an advertisement that read about like this:<br/></p>
<blockquote class="med">
<p>“We fixed up an advertisement that read about like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Charming widow, beautiful, home loving, 32 years, possessing $3,000 cash and owning valuable country property, would remarry. Would prefer a poor man with affectionate disposition to one with means, as she realizes that the solid virtues are oftenest to be found in the humble walks of life. No objection to elderly man or one of homely appearance if faithful and true and competent to manage property and invest money with judgment. Address, with particulars.</p>
<p class="noindent">
<span class="ind10">Lonely,</span>
<br/>
<span class="ind10">Care of Peters &amp; Tucker, agents, Cairo, Ill.</span>
<br/>
</p>
<footer>
<p>Lonely,</p>
<p class="signature">Care of Peters &amp; Tucker, agents, Cairo, Ill.</p>
</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>“ ‘So far, so pernicious,’ says I, when we had finished the literary concoction. ‘And now,’ says I, ‘where is the lady.’</p>
<p>“Andy gives me one of his looks of calm irritation.</p>
@ -28,53 +26,53 @@
<p>“ ‘Now listen,’ says I. ‘You know my rule, Andy, that in all my illegitimate inroads against the legal letter of the law the article sold must be existent, visible, producible. In that way and by a careful study of city ordinances and train schedules I have kept out of all trouble with the police that a five dollar bill and a cigar could not square. Now, to work this scheme we’ve got to be able to produce bodily a charming widow or its equivalent with or without the beauty, hereditaments and appurtenances set forth in the catalogue and writ of errors, or hereafter be held by a justice of the peace.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Well,’ says Andy, reconstructing his mind, ‘maybe it would be safer in case the post office or the peace commission should try to investigate our agency. But where,’ he says, ‘could you hope to find a widow who would waste time on a matrimonial scheme that had no matrimony in it?’</p>
<p>“I told Andy that I thought I knew of the exact party. An old friend of mine, Zeke Trotter, who used to draw soda water and teeth in a tent show, had made his wife a widow a year before by drinking some dyspepsia cure of the old doctor’s instead of the liniment that he always got boozed up on. I used to stop at their house often, and I thought we could get her to work with us.</p>
<p>“ ’Twas only sixty miles to the little town where she lived, so I jumped out on the I. C. and finds her in the same cottage with the same sunflowers and roosters standing on the washtub. Mrs. Trotter fitted our ad first rate except, maybe for beauty and age and property valuation. But she looked feasible and praiseworthy to the eye, and it was a kindness to Zeke’s memory to give her the job.</p>
<p>“ ‘Is this an honest deal you are putting on, Mr. Peters,’ she asks me when I tell her what we want.</p>
<p>“ ‘Mrs. Trotter,’ says I, ‘Andy Tucker and me have computed the calculation that 3,000 men in this broad and unfair country will endeavor to secure your fair hand and ostensible money and property through our advertisement. Out of that number something like thirty hundred will expect to give you in exchange, if they should win you, the carcass of a lazy and mercenary loafer, a failure in life, a swindler and contemptible fortune seeker.</p>
<p>“ ’Twas only sixty miles to the little town where she lived, so I jumped out on the I. C. and finds her in the same cottage with the same sunflowers and roosters standing on the washtub. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter fitted our ad first rate except, maybe for beauty and age and property valuation. But she looked feasible and praiseworthy to the eye, and it was a kindness to Zeke’s memory to give her the job.</p>
<p>“ ‘Is this an honest deal you are putting on, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ she asks me when I tell her what we want.</p>
<p>“ ‘<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter,’ says I, ‘Andy Tucker and me have computed the calculation that 3,000 men in this broad and unfair country will endeavor to secure your fair hand and ostensible money and property through our advertisement. Out of that number something like thirty hundred will expect to give you in exchange, if they should win you, the carcass of a lazy and mercenary loafer, a failure in life, a swindler and contemptible fortune seeker.</p>
<p>“ ‘Me and Andy,’ says I, ‘propose to teach these preyers upon society a lesson. It was with difficulty,’ says I, ‘that me and Andy could refrain from forming a corporation under the title of the Great Moral and Millennial Malevolent Matrimonial Agency. Does that satisfy you?’</p>
<p>“ ‘It does, Mr. Peters,’ says she. ‘I might have known you wouldn’t have gone into anything that wasn’t opprobrious. But what will my duties be? Do I have to reject personally these 3,000 ramscallions you speak of, or can I throw them out in bunches?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Your job, Mrs. Trotter,’ says I, ‘will be practically a cynosure. You will live at a quiet hotel and will have no work to do. Andy and I will attend to all the correspondence and business end of it.</p>
<p>“ ‘It does, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says she. ‘I might have known you wouldn’t have gone into anything that wasn’t opprobrious. But what will my duties be? Do I have to reject personally these 3,000 ramscallions you speak of, or can I throw them out in bunches?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Your job, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter,’ says I, ‘will be practically a cynosure. You will live at a quiet hotel and will have no work to do. Andy and I will attend to all the correspondence and business end of it.</p>
<p>“ ‘Of course,’ says I, ‘some of the more ardent and impetuous suitors who can raise the railroad fare may come to Cairo to personally press their suit or whatever fraction of a suit they may be wearing. In that case you will be probably put to the inconvenience of kicking them out face to face. We will pay you $25 per week and hotel expenses.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Give me five minutes,’ says Mrs. Trotter, ‘to get my powder rag and leave the front door key with a neighbor and you can let my salary begin.’</p>
<p>“So I conveys Mrs. Trotter to Cairo and establishes her in a family hotel far enough away from mine and Andy’s quarters to be unsuspicious and available, and I tell Andy.</p>
<p>“ ‘Give me five minutes,’ says <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter, ‘to get my powder rag and leave the front door key with a neighbor and you can let my salary begin.’</p>
<p>“So I conveys <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter to Cairo and establishes her in a family hotel far enough away from mine and Andy’s quarters to be unsuspicious and available, and I tell Andy.</p>
<p>“ ‘Great,’ says Andy. ‘And now that your conscience is appeased as to the tangibility and proximity of the bait, and leaving mutton aside, suppose we revenoo a noo fish.’</p>
<p>“So, we began to insert our advertisement in newspapers covering the country far and wide. One ad was all we used. We couldn’t have used more without hiring so many clerks and marcelled paraphernalia that the sound of the gum chewing would have disturbed the Postmaster-General.</p>
<p>“We placed $2,000 in a bank to Mrs. Trotter’s credit and gave her the book to show in case anybody might question the honesty and good faith of the agency. I knew Mrs. Trotter was square and reliable and it was safe to leave it in her name.</p>
<p>“We placed $2,000 in a bank to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter’s credit and gave her the book to show in case anybody might question the honesty and good faith of the agency. I knew <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter was square and reliable and it was safe to leave it in her name.</p>
<p>“With that one ad Andy and me put in twelve hours a day answering letters.</p>
<p>“About one hundred a day was what came in. I never knew there was so many large hearted but indigent men in the country who were willing to acquire a charming widow and assume the burden of investing her money.</p>
<p>“Most of them admitted that they ran principally to whiskers and lost jobs and were misunderstood by the world, but all of ’em were sure that they were so chock full of affection and manly qualities that the widow would be making the bargain of her life to get ’em.</p>
<p>“Every applicant got a reply from Peters &amp; Tucker informing him that the widow had been deeply impressed by his straightforward and interesting letter and requesting them to write again; stating more particulars; and enclosing photograph if convenient. Peters &amp; Tucker also informed the applicant that their fee for handing over the second letter to their fair client would be $2, enclosed therewith.</p>
<p>“There you see the simple beauty of the scheme. About 90 per cent. of them domestic foreign noblemen raised the price somehow and sent it in. That was all there was to it. Except that me and Andy complained an amount about being put to the trouble of slicing open them envelopes, and taking the money out.</p>
<p>“Some few clients called in person. We sent ’em to Mrs. Trotter and she did the rest; except for three or four who came back to strike us for carfare. After the letters began to get in from the r.f.d. districts Andy and me were taking in about $200 a day.</p>
<p>“Some few clients called in person. We sent ’em to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter and she did the rest; except for three or four who came back to strike us for carfare. After the letters began to get in from the r.f.d. districts Andy and me were taking in about $200 a day.</p>
<p>“One afternoon when we were busiest and I was stuffing the two and ones into cigar boxes and Andy was whistling ‘No Wedding Bells for Her’ a small slick man drops in and runs his eye over the walls like he was on the trail of a lost Gainesborough painting or two. As soon as I saw him I felt a glow of pride, because we were running our business on the level.</p>
<p>“ ‘I see you have quite a large mail to-day,’ says the man.</p>
<p>“I reached and got my hat.</p>
<p>“ ‘Come on,’ says I. ‘We’ve been expecting you. I’ll show you the goods. How was Teddy when you left Washington?’</p>
<p>“I took him down to the Riverview Hotel and had him shake hands with Mrs. Trotter. Then I showed him her bank book with the $2,000 to her credit.</p>
<p>“I took him down to the Riverview Hotel and had him shake hands with <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter. Then I showed him her bank book with the $2,000 to her credit.</p>
<p>“ ‘It seems to be all right,’ says the Secret Service.</p>
<p>“ ‘It is,’ says I. ‘And if you’re not a married man I’ll leave you to talk a while with the lady. We won’t mention the two dollars.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Thanks,’ says he. ‘If I wasn’t, I might. Good day, Mrs. Peters.’</p>
<p>“Toward the end of three months we had taken in something over $5,000, and we saw it was time to quit. We had a good many complaints made to us; and Mrs. Trotter seemed to be tired of the job. A good many suitors had been calling to see her, and she didn’t seem to like that.</p>
<p>“So we decides to pull out, and I goes down to Mrs. Trotter’s hotel to pay her last week’s salary and say farewell and get her check for the $2,000.</p>
<p>“ ‘Thanks,’ says he. ‘If I wasn’t, I might. Good day, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peters.’</p>
<p>“Toward the end of three months we had taken in something over $5,000, and we saw it was time to quit. We had a good many complaints made to us; and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter seemed to be tired of the job. A good many suitors had been calling to see her, and she didn’t seem to like that.</p>
<p>“So we decides to pull out, and I goes down to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter’s hotel to pay her last week’s salary and say farewell and get her check for the $2,000.</p>
<p>“When I got there I found her crying like a kid that don’t want to go to school.</p>
<p>“ ‘Now, now,’ says I, ‘what’s it all about? Somebody sassed you or you getting homesick?’</p>
<p>“ ‘No, Mr. Peters,’ says she. ‘I’ll tell you. You was always a friend of Zeke’s, and I don’t mind. Mr. Peters, I’m in love. I just love a man so hard I can’t bear not to get him. He’s just the ideal I’ve always had in mind.’</p>
<p>“ ‘No, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says she. ‘I’ll tell you. You was always a friend of Zeke’s, and I don’t mind. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, I’m in love. I just love a man so hard I can’t bear not to get him. He’s just the ideal I’ve always had in mind.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Then take him,’ says I. ‘That is, if it’s a mutual case. Does he return the sentiment according to the specifications and painfulness you have described?’</p>
<p>“ ‘He does,’ says she. ‘But he’s one of the gentlemen that’s been coming to see me about the advertisement and he won’t marry me unless I give him the $2,000. His name is William Wilkinson.’ And then she goes off again in the agitations and hysterics of romance.</p>
<p>“ ‘Mrs. Trotter,’ says I, ‘there’s no man more sympathizing with a woman’s affections than I am. Besides, you was once the life partner of one of my best friends. If it was left to me I’d say take this $2,000 and the man of your choice and be happy.</p>
<p>“ ‘<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter,’ says I, ‘there’s no man more sympathizing with a woman’s affections than I am. Besides, you was once the life partner of one of my best friends. If it was left to me I’d say take this $2,000 and the man of your choice and be happy.</p>
<p>“ ‘We could afford to do that, because we have cleaned up over $5,000 from these suckers that wanted to marry you. But,’ says I, ‘Andy Tucker is to be consulted.</p>
<p>“ ‘He is a good man, but keen in business. He is my equal partner financially. I will talk to Andy,’ says I, ‘and see what can be done.’</p>
<p>“I goes back to our hotel and lays the case before Andy.</p>
<p>“ ‘I was expecting something like this all the time,’ says Andy. ‘You can’t trust a woman to stick by you in any scheme that involves her emotions and preferences.’</p>
<p>“ ‘It’s a sad thing, Andy,’ says I, ‘to think that we’ve been the cause of the breaking of a woman’s heart.’</p>
<p>“ ‘It is,’ says Andy, ‘and I tell you what I’m willing to do, Jeff. You’ve always been a man of a soft and generous heart and disposition. Perhaps I’ve been too hard and worldly and suspicious. For once I’ll meet you half way. Go to Mrs. Trotter and tell her to draw the $2,000 from the bank and give it to this man she’s infatuated with and be happy.’</p>
<p>“I jumps up and shakes Andy’s hand for five minutes, and then I goes back to Mrs. Trotter and tells her, and she cries as hard for joy as she did for sorrow.</p>
<p>“ ‘It is,’ says Andy, ‘and I tell you what I’m willing to do, Jeff. You’ve always been a man of a soft and generous heart and disposition. Perhaps I’ve been too hard and worldly and suspicious. For once I’ll meet you half way. Go to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter and tell her to draw the $2,000 from the bank and give it to this man she’s infatuated with and be happy.’</p>
<p>“I jumps up and shakes Andy’s hand for five minutes, and then I goes back to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter and tells her, and she cries as hard for joy as she did for sorrow.</p>
<p>“Two days afterward me and Andy packed up to go.</p>
<p>“ ‘Wouldn’t you like to go down and meet Mrs. Trotter once before we leave?’ I asks him. ‘She’d like mightily to know you and express her encomiums and gratitude.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Wouldn’t you like to go down and meet <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter once before we leave?’ I asks him. ‘She’d like mightily to know you and express her encomiums and gratitude.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Why, I guess not,’ says Andy. ‘I guess we’d better hurry and catch that train.’</p>
<p>“I was strapping our capital around me in a memory belt like we always carried it, when Andy pulls a roll of large bills out of his pocket and asks me to put ’em with the rest.</p>
<p>“ ‘What’s this?’ says I.</p>
<p>“ ‘It’s Mrs. Trotter’s two thousand,’ says Andy.</p>
<p>“ ‘It’s <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter’s two thousand,’ says Andy.</p>
<p>“ ‘How do you come to have it?’ I asks.</p>
<p>“ ‘She gave it to me,’ says Andy. ‘I’ve been calling on her three evenings a week for more than a month.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Then are you William Wilkinson?’ says I.</p>

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<title>Chapter 5</title>
<title>The Hand That Riles the World</title>
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<h2>THE HAND THAT RILES THE WORLD</h2>
<section id="the-hand-that-riles-the-world" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
<h2 epub:type="title">The Hand That Riles the World</h2>
<p>“Many of our great men,” said I (apropos of many things), “have declared that they owe their success to the aid and encouragement of some brilliant woman.”</p>
<p>“I know,” said Jeff Peters. “I’ve read in history and mythology about Joan of Arc and Mme. Yale and Mrs. Caudle and Eve and other noted females of the past. But, in my opinion, the woman of to-day is of little use in politics or business. What’s she best in, anyway?⁠—men make the best cooks, milliners, nurses, housekeepers, stenographers, clerks, hairdressers and launderers. About the only job left that a woman can beat a man in is female impersonator in vaudeville.”</p>
<p>“I know,” said Jeff Peters. “I’ve read in history and mythology about Joan of Arc and <abbr>Mme.</abbr> Yale and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Caudle and Eve and other noted females of the past. But, in my opinion, the woman of to-day is of little use in politics or business. What’s she best in, anyway?⁠—men make the best cooks, milliners, nurses, housekeepers, stenographers, clerks, hairdressers and launderers. About the only job left that a woman can beat a man in is female impersonator in vaudeville.”</p>
<p>“I would have thought,” said I, “that occasionally, anyhow, you would have found the wit and intuition of woman valuable to you in your lines of⁠—er⁠—business.”</p>
<p>“Now, wouldn’t you,” said Jeff, with an emphatic nod⁠—“wouldn’t you have imagined that? But a woman is an absolutely unreliable partner in any straight swindle. She’s liable to turn honest on you when you are depending upon her the most. I tried ’em once.</p>
<p>“Bill Humble, an old friend of mine in the Territories, conceived the illusion that he wanted to be appointed United States Marshall. At that time me and Andy was doing a square, legitimate business of selling walking canes. If you unscrewed the head of one and turned it up to your mouth a half pint of good rye whiskey would go trickling down your throat to reward you for your act of intelligence. The deputies was annoying me and Andy some, and when Bill spoke to me about his officious aspirations, I saw how the appointment as Marshall might help along the firm of Peters &amp; Tucker.</p>
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<p>“ ‘I do,’ says I, ‘and I have never regretted it. I am not one,’ says I, ‘who would cheapen education by making it free. Tell me,’ says I, ‘which is of the most value to mankind, literature or horse racing?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Why⁠—er⁠—, playing the po⁠—I mean, of course, the poets and the great writers have got the call, of course,’ says Bill.</p>
<p>“ ‘Exactly,’ says I. ‘Then why do the master minds of finance and philanthropy,’ says I, ‘charge us $2 to get into a race-track and let us into a library free? Is that distilling into the masses,’ says I, ‘a correct estimate of the relative value of the two means of self-culture and disorder?’</p>
<p>“ ‘You are arguing outside of my faculties of sense and rhetoric,’ says Bill. ‘What I wanted you to do is to go to Washington and dig out this appointment for me. I haven’t no ideas of cultivation and intrigue. I’m a plain citizen and I need the job. I’ve killed seven men,’ says Bill; ‘I’ve got nine children; I’ve been a good Republican ever since the first of May; I can’t read nor write, and I see no reason why I ain’t illegible for the office. And I think your partner, Mr. Tucker,’ goes on Bill, ‘is also a man of sufficient ingratiation and connected system of mental delinquency to assist you in securing the appointment. I will give you preliminary,’ says Bill, ‘$1,000 for drinks, bribes and carfare in Washington. If you land the job I will pay you $1,000 more, cash down, and guarantee you impunity in boot-legging whiskey for twelve months. Are you patriotic to the West enough to help me put this thing through the Whitewashed Wigwam of the Great Father of the most eastern flag station of the Pennsylvania Railroad?’ says Bill.</p>
<p>“ ‘You are arguing outside of my faculties of sense and rhetoric,’ says Bill. ‘What I wanted you to do is to go to Washington and dig out this appointment for me. I haven’t no ideas of cultivation and intrigue. I’m a plain citizen and I need the job. I’ve killed seven men,’ says Bill; ‘I’ve got nine children; I’ve been a good Republican ever since the first of May; I can’t read nor write, and I see no reason why I ain’t illegible for the office. And I think your partner, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker,’ goes on Bill, ‘is also a man of sufficient ingratiation and connected system of mental delinquency to assist you in securing the appointment. I will give you preliminary,’ says Bill, ‘$1,000 for drinks, bribes and carfare in Washington. If you land the job I will pay you $1,000 more, cash down, and guarantee you impunity in boot-legging whiskey for twelve months. Are you patriotic to the West enough to help me put this thing through the Whitewashed Wigwam of the Great Father of the most eastern flag station of the Pennsylvania Railroad?’ says Bill.</p>
<p>“Well, I talked to Andy about it, and he liked the idea immense. Andy was a man of an involved nature. He was never content to plod along, as I was, selling to the peasantry some little tool like a combination steak beater, shoe horn, marcel waver, monkey wrench, nail file, potato masher and Multum in Parvo tuning fork. Andy had the artistic temper, which is not to be judged as a preacher’s or a moral man’s is by purely commercial deflections. So we accepted Bill’s offer, and strikes out for Washington.</p>
<p>“Says I to Andy, when we get located at a hotel on South Dakota Avenue, G.S.S.W. ‘Now Andy, for the first time in our lives we’ve got to do a real dishonest act. Lobbying is something we’ve never been used to; but we’ve got to scandalize ourselves for Bill Humble’s sake. In a straight and legitimate business,’ says I, ‘we could afford to introduce a little foul play and chicanery, but in a disorderly and heinous piece of malpractice like this it seems to me that the straightforward and aboveboard way is the best. I propose,’ says I, ‘that we hand over $500 of this money to the chairman of the national campaign committee, get a receipt, lay the receipt on the President’s desk and tell him about Bill. The President is a man who would appreciate a candidate who went about getting office that way instead of pulling wires.’</p>
<p>“Andy agreed with me, but after we talked the scheme over with the hotel clerk we give that plan up. He told us that there was only one way to get an appointment in Washington, and that was through a lady lobbyist. He gave us the address of one he recommended, a Mrs. Avery, who he said was high up in sociable and diplomatic rings and circles.</p>
<p>“Andy agreed with me, but after we talked the scheme over with the hotel clerk we give that plan up. He told us that there was only one way to get an appointment in Washington, and that was through a lady lobbyist. He gave us the address of one he recommended, a <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Avery, who he said was high up in sociable and diplomatic rings and circles.</p>
<p>“The next morning at 10 o’clock me and Andy called at her hotel, and was shown up to her reception room.</p>
<p>“This Mrs. Avery was a solace and a balm to the eyesight. She had hair the color of the back of a twenty dollar gold certificate, blue eyes and a system of beauty that would make the girl on the cover of a July magazine look like a cook on a Monongahela coal barge.</p>
<p>“This <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Avery was a solace and a balm to the eyesight. She had hair the color of the back of a twenty dollar gold certificate, blue eyes and a system of beauty that would make the girl on the cover of a July magazine look like a cook on a Monongahela coal barge.</p>
<p>“She had on a low necked dress covered with silver spangles, and diamond rings and ear bobs. Her arms was bare; and she was using a desk telephone with one hand, and drinking tea with the other.</p>
<p>“ ‘Well, boys,’ says she after a bit, ‘what is it?’</p>
<p>“I told her in as few words as possible what we wanted for Bill, and the price we could pay.</p>
<p>“ ‘Those western appointments,’ says she, ‘are easy. Le’me see, now,’ says she, ‘who could put that through for us. No use fooling with the Territorial delegates. I guess,’ says she, ‘that Senator Sniper would be about the man. He’s from somewheres in the West. Let’s see how he stands on my private menu card.’ She takes some papers out of a pigeon-hole with the letter ‘S’ over it.</p>
<p>“ ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘he’s marked with a star; that means “ready to serve.” Now, let’s see. “Age 55; married twice; Presbyterian, likes blondes, Tolstoi, poker and stewed terrapin; sentimental at third bottle of wine.” Yes,’ she goes on, ‘I am sure I can have your friend, Mr. Bummer, appointed Minister to Brazil.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘he’s marked with a star; that means “ready to serve.” Now, let’s see. “Age 55; married twice; Presbyterian, likes blondes, Tolstoi, poker and stewed terrapin; sentimental at third bottle of wine.” Yes,’ she goes on, ‘I am sure I can have your friend, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bummer, appointed Minister to Brazil.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Humble,’ says I. ‘And United States Marshal was the berth.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh, yes,’ says Mrs. Avery. ‘I have so many deals of this sort I sometimes get them confused. Give me all the memoranda you have of the case, Mr. Peters, and come back in four days. I think it can be arranged by then.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh, yes,’ says <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Avery. ‘I have so many deals of this sort I sometimes get them confused. Give me all the memoranda you have of the case, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, and come back in four days. I think it can be arranged by then.’</p>
<p>“So me and Andy goes back to our hotel and waits. Andy walks up and down and chews the left end of his mustache.</p>
<p>“ ‘A woman of high intellect and perfect beauty is a rare thing, Jeff,’ says he.</p>
<p>“ ‘As rare,’ says I, ‘as an omelet made from the eggs of the fabulous bird known as the epidermis,’ says I.</p>
<p>“ ‘A woman like that,’ says Andy, ‘ought to lead a man to the highest positions of opulence and fame.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I misdoubt,’ says I, ‘if any woman ever helped a man to secure a job any more than to have his meals ready promptly and spread a report that the other candidate’s wife had once been a shoplifter. They are no more adapted for business and politics,’ says I, ‘than Algernon Charles Swinburne is to be floor manager at one of Chuck Connor’s annual balls. I know,’ says I to Andy, ‘that sometimes a woman seems to step out into the kalsomine light as the charge d’affaires of her man’s political job. But how does it come out? Say, they have a neat little berth somewhere as foreign consul of record to Afghanistan or lockkeeper on the Delaware and Raritan Canal. One day this man finds his wife putting on her overshoes and three months supply of bird seed into the canary’s cage. “Sioux Falls?” he asks with a kind of hopeful light in his eye. “No, Arthur,” says she, “Washington. We’re wasted here,” says she. “You ought to be Toady Extraordinary to the Court of St. Bridget or Head Porter of the Island of Porto Rico. I’m going to see about it.”</p>
<p>“ ‘I misdoubt,’ says I, ‘if any woman ever helped a man to secure a job any more than to have his meals ready promptly and spread a report that the other candidate’s wife had once been a shoplifter. They are no more adapted for business and politics,’ says I, ‘than Algernon Charles Swinburne is to be floor manager at one of Chuck Connor’s annual balls. I know,’ says I to Andy, ‘that sometimes a woman seems to step out into the kalsomine light as the charge d’affaires of her man’s political job. But how does it come out? Say, they have a neat little berth somewhere as foreign consul of record to Afghanistan or lockkeeper on the Delaware and Raritan Canal. One day this man finds his wife putting on her overshoes and three months supply of bird seed into the canary’s cage. “Sioux Falls?” he asks with a kind of hopeful light in his eye. “No, Arthur,” says she, “Washington. We’re wasted here,” says she. “You ought to be Toady Extraordinary to the Court of <abbr>St.</abbr> Bridget or Head Porter of the Island of Porto Rico. I’m going to see about it.”</p>
<p>“ ‘Then this lady,’ I says to Andy, ‘moves against the authorities at Washington with her baggage and munitions, consisting of five dozen indiscriminating letters written to her by a member of the Cabinet when she was 15; a letter of introduction from King Leopold to the Smithsonian Institution, and a pink silk costume with canary colored spats.</p>
<p>“ ‘Well and then what?’ I goes. ‘She has the letters printed in the evening papers that match her costume, she lectures at an informal tea given in the palm room of the B. &amp; O. Depot and then calls on the President. The ninth Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Labor, the first aide-de-camp of the Blue Room and an unidentified colored man are waiting there to grasp her by the hands⁠—and feet. They carry her out to S.W. B. street and leave her on a cellar door. That ends it. The next time we hear of her she is writing postcards to the Chinese Minister asking him to get Arthur a job in a tea store.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Then,’ says Andy, ‘you don’t think Mrs. Avery will land the Marshalship for Bill?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Then,’ says Andy, ‘you don’t think <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Avery will land the Marshalship for Bill?’</p>
<p>“ ‘I do not,’ says I. ‘I do not wish to be a septic, but I doubt if she can do as well as you and me could have done.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I don’t agree with you,’ says Andy. ‘I’ll bet you she does. I’m proud of having a higher opinion of the talent and the powers of negotiation of ladies.’</p>
<p>“We was back at Mrs. Avery’s hotel at the time she appointed. She was looking pretty and fine enough, as far as that went, to make any man let her name every officer in the country. But I hadn’t much faith in looks, so I was certainly surprised when she pulls out a document with the great seal of the United States on it, and ‘William Henry Humble’ in a fine, big hand on the back.</p>
<p>“ ‘You might have had it the next day, boys,’ says Mrs. Avery, smiling. ‘I hadn’t the slightest trouble in getting it,’ says she. ‘I just asked for it, that’s all. Now, I’d like to talk to you a while,’ she goes on, ‘but I’m awfully busy, and I know you’ll excuse me. I’ve got an Ambassadorship, two Consulates and a dozen other minor applications to look after. I can hardly find time to sleep at all. You’ll give my compliments to Mr. Humble when you get home, of course.’</p>
<p>“We was back at <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Avery’s hotel at the time she appointed. She was looking pretty and fine enough, as far as that went, to make any man let her name every officer in the country. But I hadn’t much faith in looks, so I was certainly surprised when she pulls out a document with the great seal of the United States on it, and ‘William Henry Humble’ in a fine, big hand on the back.</p>
<p>“ ‘You might have had it the next day, boys,’ says <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Avery, smiling. ‘I hadn’t the slightest trouble in getting it,’ says she. ‘I just asked for it, that’s all. Now, I’d like to talk to you a while,’ she goes on, ‘but I’m awfully busy, and I know you’ll excuse me. I’ve got an Ambassadorship, two Consulates and a dozen other minor applications to look after. I can hardly find time to sleep at all. You’ll give my compliments to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Humble when you get home, of course.’</p>
<p>“Well, I handed her the $500, which she pitched into her desk drawer without counting. I put Bill’s appointment in my pocket and me and Andy made our adieus.</p>
<p>“We started back for the Territory the same day. We wired Bill: ‘Job landed; get the tall glasses ready,’ and we felt pretty good.</p>
<p>“Andy joshed me all the way about how little I knew about women.</p>

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<h2>THE MAN HIGHER UP</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">The Man Higher Up</h2>
<p>Across our two dishes of spaghetti, in a corner of Provenzano’s restaurant, Jeff Peters was explaining to me the three kinds of graft.</p>
<p>Every winter Jeff comes to New York to eat spaghetti, to watch the shipping in East River from the depths of his chinchilla overcoat, and to lay in a supply of Chicago-made clothing at one of the Fulton street stores. During the other three seasons he may be found further west⁠—his range is from Spokane to Tampa. In his profession he takes a pride which he supports and defends with a serious and unique philosophy of ethics. His profession is no new one. He is an incorporated, uncapitalized, unlimited asylum for the reception of the restless and unwise dollars of his fellowmen.</p>
<p>In the wilderness of stone in which Jeff seeks his annual lonely holiday he is glad to palaver of his many adventures, as a boy will whistle after sundown in a wood. Wherefore, I mark on my calendar the time of his coming, and open a question of privilege at Provenzano’s concerning the little wine-stained table in the corner between the rakish rubber plant and the framed palazzio della something on the wall.</p>
<p>“There are two kinds of graft,” said Jeff, “that ought to be wiped out by law. I mean Wall Street speculation, and burglary.”</p>
<p>“Nearly everybody will agree with you as to one of them,” said I, with a laugh.</p>
<p>“Well, burglary ought to be wiped out, too,” said Jeff; and I wondered whether the laugh had been redundant.</p>
<p>“About three months ago,” said Jeff, “it was my privilege to become familiar with a sample of each of the aforesaid branches of illegitimate art. I was <i>sine qua grata</i> with a member of the housebreakers’ union and one of the John D. Napoleons of finance at the same time.”</p>
<p>“About three months ago,” said Jeff, “it was my privilege to become familiar with a sample of each of the aforesaid branches of illegitimate art. I was <i xml:lang="la">sine qua grata</i> with a member of the housebreakers’ union and one of the John D. Napoleons of finance at the same time.”</p>
<p>“Interesting combination,” said I, with a yawn. “Did I tell you I bagged a duck and a ground-squirrel at one shot last week over in the Ramapos?” I knew well how to draw Jeff’s stories.</p>
<p>“Let me tell you first about these barnacles that clog the wheels of society by poisoning the springs of rectitude with their upas-like eye,” said Jeff, with the pure gleam of the muck-raker in his own.</p>
<p>“As I said, three months ago I got into bad company. There are two times in a man’s life when he does this⁠—when he’s dead broke, and when he’s rich.</p>
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<p>“Bill Bassett felt in all of them, and looked disgusted.</p>
<p>“ ‘Not even a watch,’ he says. ‘Ain’t you ashamed of yourself, you whited sculpture? Going about dressed like a head-waiter, and financed like a Count! You haven’t even got carfare. What did you do with your transfer?’</p>
<p>“The man speaks up and says he has no assets or valuables of any sort. But Bassett takes his hand-satchel and opens it. Out comes some collars and socks and a half a page of a newspaper clipped out. Bill reads the clipping careful, and holds out his hand to the held-up party.</p>
<p>“ ‘Brother,’ says he, ‘greetings! Accept the apologies of friends. I am Bill Bassett, the burglar. Mr. Peters, you must make the acquaintance of Mr. Alfred E. Ricks. Shake hands. Mr. Peters,’ says Bill, ‘stands about halfway between me and you, Mr. Ricks, in the line of havoc and corruption. He always gives something for the money he gets. I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Ricks⁠—you and Mr. Peters. This is the first time I ever attended a full gathering of the National Synod of Sharks⁠—housebreaking, swindling, and financiering all represented. Please examine Mr. Rick’s credentials, Mr. Peters.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Brother,’ says he, ‘greetings! Accept the apologies of friends. I am Bill Bassett, the burglar. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, you must make the acquaintance of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Alfred E. Ricks. Shake hands. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says Bill, ‘stands about halfway between me and you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ricks, in the line of havoc and corruption. He always gives something for the money he gets. I’m glad to meet you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ricks⁠—you and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters. This is the first time I ever attended a full gathering of the National Synod of Sharks⁠—housebreaking, swindling, and financiering all represented. Please examine <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Rick’s credentials, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters.’</p>
<p>“The piece of newspaper that Bill Bassett handed me had a good picture of this Ricks on it. It was a Chicago paper, and it had obloquies of Ricks in every paragraph. By reading it over I harvested the intelligence that said alleged Ricks had laid off all that portion of the State of Florida that lies under water into town lots and sold ’em to alleged innocent investors from his magnificently furnished offices in Chicago. After he had taken in a hundred thousand or so dollars one of these fussy purchasers that are always making trouble (I’ve had ’em actually try gold watches I’ve sold ’em with acid) took a cheap excursion down to the land where it is always just before supper to look at his lot and see if it didn’t need a new paling or two on the fence, and market a few lemons in time for the Christmas present trade. He hires a surveyor to find his lot for him. They run the line out and find the flourishing town of Paradise Hollow, so advertised, to be about 40 rods and 16 poles S., 27 degrees E. of the middle of Lake Okeechobee. This man’s lot was under thirty-six feet of water, and, besides, had been preempted so long by the alligators and gars that his title looked fishy.</p>
<p>“Naturally, the man goes back to Chicago and makes it as hot for Alfred E. Ricks as the morning after a prediction of snow by the weather bureau. Ricks defied the allegation, but he couldn’t deny the alligators. One morning the papers came out with a column about it, and Ricks come out by the fire-escape. It seems the alleged authorities had beat him to the safe-deposit box where he kept his winnings, and Ricks has to westward ho! with only feetwear and a dozen 15-and-a-half English pokes in his shopping bag. He happened to have some mileage left in his book, and that took him as far as the town in the wilderness where he was spilled out on me and Bill Bassett as Elijah III. with not a raven in sight for any of us.</p>
<p>“Naturally, the man goes back to Chicago and makes it as hot for Alfred E. Ricks as the morning after a prediction of snow by the weather bureau. Ricks defied the allegation, but he couldn’t deny the alligators. One morning the papers came out with a column about it, and Ricks come out by the fire-escape. It seems the alleged authorities had beat him to the safe-deposit box where he kept his winnings, and Ricks has to westward ho! with only feetwear and a dozen 15-and-a-half English pokes in his shopping bag. He happened to have some mileage left in his book, and that took him as far as the town in the wilderness where he was spilled out on me and Bill Bassett as Elijah <span epub:type="z3998:roman">III</span> with not a raven in sight for any of us.</p>
<p>“Then this Alfred E. Ricks lets out a squeak that he is hungry, too, and denies the hypothesis that he is good for the value, let alone the price, of a meal. And so, there was the three of us, representing, if we had a mind to draw syllogisms and parabolas, labor and trade and capital. Now, when trade has no capital there isn’t a dicker to be made. And when capital has no money there’s a stagnation in steak and onions. That put it up to the man with the jimmy.</p>
<p>“ ‘Brother bushrangers,’ says Bill Bassett, ‘never yet, in trouble, did I desert a pal. Hard by, in yon wood, I seem to see unfurnished lodgings. Let us go there and wait till dark.’</p>
<p>“There was an old, deserted cabin in the grove, and we three took possession of it. After dark Bill Bassett tells us to wait, and goes out for half an hour. He comes back with a armful of bread and spareribs and pies.</p>
<p>“ ‘Panhandled ’em at a farmhouse on Washita Avenue,’ says he. ‘Eat, drink and be leary.’</p>
<p>“The full moon was coming up bright, so we sat on the floor of the cabin and ate in the light of it. And this Bill Bassett begins to brag.</p>
<p>“ ‘Sometimes,’ says he, with his mouth full of country produce, ‘I lose all patience with you people that think you are higher up in the profession than I am. Now, what could either of you have done in the present emergency to set us on our feet again? Could you do it, Ricksy?’</p>
<p>“ ‘I must confess, Mr. Bassett,’ says Ricks, speaking nearly inaudible out of a slice of pie, ‘that at this immediate juncture I could not, perhaps, promote an enterprise to relieve the situation. Large operations, such as I direct, naturally require careful preparation in advance. I⁠—’</p>
<p>“ ‘I must confess, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bassett,’ says Ricks, speaking nearly inaudible out of a slice of pie, ‘that at this immediate juncture I could not, perhaps, promote an enterprise to relieve the situation. Large operations, such as I direct, naturally require careful preparation in advance. I⁠—’</p>
<p>“ ‘I know, Ricksy,’ breaks in Bill Bassett. ‘You needn’t finish. You need $500 to make the first payment on a blond typewriter, and four roomsful of quartered oak furniture. And you need $500 more for advertising contracts. And you need two weeks’ time for the fish to begin to bite. Your line of relief would be about as useful in an emergency as advocating municipal ownership to cure a man suffocated by eighty-cent gas. And your graft ain’t much swifter, Brother Peters,’ he winds up.</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘I haven’t seen you turn anything into gold with your wand yet, Mr. Good Fairy. ‘Most anybody could rub the magic ring for a little left-over victuals.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘I haven’t seen you turn anything into gold with your wand yet, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Good Fairy. ‘Most anybody could rub the magic ring for a little left-over victuals.’</p>
<p>“ ‘That was only getting the pumpkin ready,’ says Bassett, braggy and cheerful. ‘The coach and six’ll drive up to the door before you know it, Miss Cinderella. Maybe you’ve got some scheme under your sleeve-holders that will give us a start.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Son,’ says I, ‘I’m fifteen years older than you are, and young enough yet to take out an endowment policy. I’ve been broke before. We can see the lights of that town not half a mile away. I learned under Montague Silver, the greatest street man that ever spoke from a wagon. There are hundreds of men walking those streets this moment with grease spots on their clothes. Give me a gasoline lamp, a dry-goods box, and a two-dollar bar of white castile soap, cut into little⁠—’</p>
<p>“ ‘Where’s your two dollars?’ snickered Bill Bassett into my discourse. There was no use arguing with that burglar.</p>
<p>“ ‘No,’ he goes on; ‘you’re both babes-in-the-wood. Finance has closed the mahogany desk, and trade has put the shutters up. Both of you look to labor to start the wheels going. All right. You admit it. To-night I’ll show you what Bill Bassett can do.’</p>
<p>“Bassett tells me and Ricks not to leave the cabin till he comes back, even if it’s daylight, and then he starts off toward town, whistling gay.</p>
<p>“This Alfred E. Ricks pulls off his shoes and his coat, lays a silk handkerchief over his hat, and lays down on the floor.</p>
<p>“ ‘I think I will endeavor to secure a little slumber,’ he squeaks. ‘The day has been fatiguing. Good-night, my dear Mr. Peters.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I think I will endeavor to secure a little slumber,’ he squeaks. ‘The day has been fatiguing. Good-night, my dear <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters.’</p>
<p>“ ‘My regards to Morpheus,’ says I. ‘I think I’ll sit up a while.’</p>
<p>“About two o’clock, as near as I could guess by my watch in Peavine, home comes our laboring man and kicks up Ricks, and calls us to the streak of bright moonlight shining in the cabin door. Then he spreads out five packages of one thousand dollars each on the floor, and begins to cackle over the nest-egg like a hen.</p>
<p>“ ‘I’ll tell you a few things about that town,’ says he. ‘It’s named Rocky Springs, and they’re building a Masonic temple, and it looks like the Democratic candidate for mayor is going to get soaked by a Pop, and Judge Tucker’s wife, who has been down with pleurisy, is getting some better. I had a talk on these liliputian thesises before I could get a siphon in the fountain of knowledge that I was after. And there’s a bank there called the Lumberman’s Fidelity and Plowman’s Savings Institution. It closed for business yesterday with $23,000 cash on hand. It will open this morning with $18,000⁠—all silver⁠—that’s the reason I didn’t bring more. There you are, trade and capital. Now, will you be bad?’</p>
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<p>“ ‘Trade, how much?’ he says to me.</p>
<p>“ ‘Put your money up, Labor,’ says I. ‘I never yet drew upon honest toil for its hard-earned pittance. The dollars I get are surplus ones that are burning the pockets of damfools and greenhorns. When I stand on a street corner and sell a solid gold diamond ring to a yap for $3.00, I make just $2.60. And I know he’s going to give it to a girl in return for all the benefits accruing from a $125.00 ring. His profits are $122.00. Which of us is the biggest fakir?’</p>
<p>“ ‘And when you sell a poor woman a pinch of sand for fifty cents to keep her lamp from exploding,’ says Bassett, ‘what do you figure her gross earnings to be, with sand at forty cents a ton?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Listen,’ says I. ‘I instruct her to keep her lamp clean and well filled. If she does that it can’t burst. And with the sand in it she knows it can’t, and she don’t worry. It’s a kind of Industrial Christian Science. She pays fifty cents, and gets both Rockefeller and Mrs. Eddy on the job. It ain’t everybody that can let the gold-dust twins do their work.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Listen,’ says I. ‘I instruct her to keep her lamp clean and well filled. If she does that it can’t burst. And with the sand in it she knows it can’t, and she don’t worry. It’s a kind of Industrial Christian Science. She pays fifty cents, and gets both Rockefeller and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Eddy on the job. It ain’t everybody that can let the gold-dust twins do their work.’</p>
<p>“Alfred E. Ricks all but licks the dust off of Bill Bassett’s shoes.</p>
<p>“ ‘My dear young friend,’ says he, ‘I will never forget your generosity. Heaven will reward you. But let me implore you to turn from your ways of violence and crime.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Mousie,’ says Bill, ‘the hole in the wainscoting for yours. Your dogmas and inculcations sound to me like the last words of a bicycle pump. What has your high moral, elevator-service system of pillage brought you to? Penuriousness and want. Even Brother Peters, who insists upon contaminating the art of robbery with theories of commerce and trade, admitted he was on the lift. Both of you live by the gilded rule. Brother Peters,’ says Bill, ‘you’d better choose a slice of this embalmed currency. You’re welcome.’</p>
<p>“I told Bill Bassett once more to put his money in his pocket. I never had the respect for burglary that some people have. I always gave something for the money I took, even if it was only some little trifle for a souvenir to remind ’em not to get caught again.</p>
<p>“And then Alfred E. Ricks grovels at Bill’s feet again, and bids us adieu. He says he will have a team at a farmhouse, and drive to the station below, and take the train for Denver. It salubrified the atmosphere when that lamentable boll-worm took his departure. He was a disgrace to every non-industrial profession in the country. With all his big schemes and fine offices he had wound up unable even to get an honest meal except by the kindness of a strange and maybe unscrupulous burglar. I was glad to see him go, though I felt a little sorry for him, now that he was ruined forever. What could such a man do without a big capital to work with? Why, Alfred E. Ricks, as we left him, was as helpless as turtle on its back. He couldn’t have worked a scheme to beat a little girl out of a penny slate-pencil.</p>
<p>“When me and Bill Bassett was left alone I did a little sleight-of-mind turn in my head with a trade secret at the end of it. Thinks I, I’ll show this Mr. Burglar Man the difference between business and labor. He had hurt some of my professional self-adulation by casting his Persians upon commerce and trade.</p>
<p>“ ‘I won’t take any of your money as a gift, Mr. Bassett,’ says I to him, ‘but if you’ll pay my expenses as a travelling companion until we get out of the danger zone of the immoral deficit you have caused in this town’s finances to-night, I’ll be obliged.’</p>
<p>“When me and Bill Bassett was left alone I did a little sleight-of-mind turn in my head with a trade secret at the end of it. Thinks I, I’ll show this <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Burglar Man the difference between business and labor. He had hurt some of my professional self-adulation by casting his Persians upon commerce and trade.</p>
<p>“ ‘I won’t take any of your money as a gift, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bassett,’ says I to him, ‘but if you’ll pay my expenses as a travelling companion until we get out of the danger zone of the immoral deficit you have caused in this town’s finances to-night, I’ll be obliged.’</p>
<p>“Bill Bassett agreed to that, and we hiked westward as soon as we could catch a safe train.</p>
<p>“When we got to a town in Arizona called Los Perros I suggested that we once more try our luck on terra-cotta. That was the home of Montague Silver, my old instructor, now retired from business. I knew Monty would stake me to web money if I could show him a fly buzzing ’round the locality. Bill Bassett said all towns looked alike to him as he worked mainly in the dark. So we got off the train in Los Perros, a fine little town in the silver region.</p>
<p>“I had an elegant little sure thing in the way of a commercial slungshot that I intended to hit Bassett behind the ear with. I wasn’t going to take his money while he was asleep, but I was going to leave him with a lottery ticket that would represent in experience to him $4,755⁠—I think that was the amount he had when we got off the train. But the first time I hinted to him about an investment, he turns on me and disencumbers himself of the following terms and expressions.</p>
<p>“ ‘Brother Peters,’ says he, ‘it ain’t a bad idea to go into an enterprise of some kind, as you suggest. I think I will. But if I do it will be such a cold proposition that nobody but Robert E. Peary and Charlie Fairbanks will be able to sit on the board of directors.’</p>
<p>“ ‘I thought you might want to turn your money over,’ says I.</p>
<p>“ ‘I do,’ says he, ‘frequently. I can’t sleep on one side all night. I’ll tell you, Brother Peters,’ says he, ‘I’m going to start a poker room. I don’t seem to care for the humdrum in swindling, such as peddling egg-beaters and working off breakfast food on Barnum and Bailey for sawdust to strew in their circus rings. But the gambling business,’ says he, ‘from the profitable side of the table is a good compromise between swiping silver spoons and selling penwipers at a Waldorf-Astoria charity bazar.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Then,’ says I, ‘Mr. Bassett, you don’t care to talk over my little business proposition?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Then,’ says I, ‘<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bassett, you don’t care to talk over my little business proposition?’</p>
<p>“ ‘Why,’ says he, ‘do you know, you can’t get a Pasteur institute to start up within fifty miles of where I live. I bite so seldom.’</p>
<p>“So, Bassett rents a room over a saloon and looks around for some furniture and chromos. The same night I went to Monty Silver’s house, and he let me have $200 on my prospects. Then I went to the only store in Los Perros that sold playing cards and bought every deck in the house. The next morning when the store opened I was there bringing all the cards back with me. I said that my partner that was going to back me in the game had changed his mind; and I wanted to sell the cards back again. The storekeeper took ’em at half price.</p>
<p>“Yes, I was seventy-five dollars loser up to that time. But while I had the cards that night I marked every one in every deck. That was labor. And then trade and commerce had their innings, and the bread I had cast upon the waters began to come back in the form of cottage pudding with wine sauce.</p>
<p>“Of course I was among the first to buy chips at Bill Bassett’s game. He had bought the only cards there was to be had in town; and I knew the back of every one of them better than I know the back of my head when the barber shows me my haircut in the two mirrors.</p>
<p>“When the game closed I had the five thousand and a few odd dollars, and all Bill Bassett had was the wanderlust and a black cat he had bought for a mascot. Bill shook hands with me when I left.</p>
<p>“ ‘Brother Peters,’ says he, ‘I have no business being in business. I was preordained to labor. When a No. 1 burglar tries to make a James out of his jimmy he perpetrates an improfundity. You have a well-oiled and efficacious system of luck at cards,’ says he. ‘Peace go with you.’ And I never afterward sees Bill Bassett again.”</p>
<p>“ ‘Brother Peters,’ says he, ‘I have no business being in business. I was preordained to labor. When a <abbr>No.</abbr> 1 burglar tries to make a James out of his jimmy he perpetrates an improfundity. You have a well-oiled and efficacious system of luck at cards,’ says he. ‘Peace go with you.’ And I never afterward sees Bill Bassett again.”</p>
<p>“Well, Jeff,” said I, when the Autolycan adventurer seemed to have divulged the gist of his tale, “I hope you took care of the money. That would be a respecta⁠—that is a considerable working capital if you should choose some day to settle down to some sort of regular business.”</p>
<p>“Me?” said Jeff, virtuously. “You can bet I’ve taken care of that five thousand.”</p>
<p>He tapped his coat over the region of his chest exultantly.</p>

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<title>Chapter 1</title>
<title>The Octopus Marooned</title>
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<h2>THE OCTOPUS MAROONED</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">The Octopus Marooned</h2>
<p>“A trust is its weakest point,” said Jeff Peters.</p>
<p>“That,” said I, “sounds like one of those unintelligible remarks such as, ‘Why is a policeman?’ ”</p>
<p>“It is not,” said Jeff. “There are no relations between a trust and a policeman. My remark was an epitogram⁠—an axis⁠—a kind of mulct’em in parvo. What it means is that a trust is like an egg, and it is not like an egg. If you want to break an egg you have to do it from the outside. The only way to break up a trust is from the inside. Keep sitting on it until it hatches. Look at the brood of young colleges and libraries that’s chirping and peeping all over the country. Yes, sir, every trust bears in its own bosom the seeds of its destruction like a rooster that crows near a Georgia colored Methodist camp meeting, or a Republican announcing himself a candidate for governor of Texas.”</p>
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<p>“Behind one end of the bar sits Jefferson Peters, octopus, with a sixshooter on each side of him, ready to make change or corpses as the case may be. There are three bartenders; and on the wall is a ten foot sign reading: ‘All Drinks One Dollar.’ Andy sits on the safe in his neat blue suit and gold-banded cigar, on the lookout for emergencies. The town marshal is there with two deputies to keep order, having been promised free drinks by the trust.</p>
<p>“Well, sir, it took Bird City just ten minutes to realize that it was in a cage. We expected trouble; but there wasn’t any. The citizens saw that we had ’em. The nearest railroad was thirty miles away; and it would be two weeks at least before the river would be fordable. So they began to cuss, amiable, and throw down dollars on the bar till it sounded like a selection on the xylophone.</p>
<p>“There was about 1,500 grown-up adults in Bird City that had arrived at years of indiscretion; and the majority of ’em required from three to twenty drinks a day to make life endurable. The Blue Snake was the only place where they could get ’em till the flood subsided. It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.</p>
<p>“About ten o’clock the silver dollars dropping on the bar slowed down to playing two-steps and marches instead of jigs. But I looked out the window and saw a hundred or two of our customers standing in line at Bird City Savings and Loan Co., and I knew they were borrowing more money to be sucked in by the clammy tendrils of the octopus.</p>
<p>“About ten o’clock the silver dollars dropping on the bar slowed down to playing two-steps and marches instead of jigs. But I looked out the window and saw a hundred or two of our customers standing in line at Bird City Savings and Loan <abbr>Co.</abbr>, and I knew they were borrowing more money to be sucked in by the clammy tendrils of the octopus.</p>
<p>“At the fashionable hour of noon everybody went home to dinner. We told the bartenders to take advantage of the lull, and do the same. Then me and Andy counted the receipts. We had taken in $1,300. We calculated that if Bird City would only remain an island for two weeks the trust would be able to endow the Chicago University with a new dormitory of padded cells for the faculty, and present every worthy poor man in Texas with a farm, provided he furnished the site for it.</p>
<p>“Andy was especial inroaded by self-esteem at our success, the rudiments of the scheme having originated in his own surmises and premonitions. He got off the safe and lit the biggest cigar in the house.</p>
<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ says he, ‘I don’t suppose that anywhere in the world you could find three cormorants with brighter ideas about down-treading the proletariat than the firm of Peters, Satan and Tucker, incorporated. We have sure handed the small consumer a giant blow in the sole apoplectic region. No?’</p>
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<p>“ ‘It could do no worse,’ says I.</p>
<p>“ ‘From my earliest recollections,’ says he, ‘alcohol seemed to stimulate my sense of recitation and rhetoric. Why, in Bryan’s second campaign,’ says Andy, ‘they used to give me three gin rickeys and I’d speak two hours longer than Billy himself could on the silver question. Finally, they persuaded me to take the gold cure.’</p>
<p>“ ‘If you’ve got to get rid of your excess verbiage,’ says I, ‘why not go out on the river bank and speak a piece? It seems to me there was an old spell-binder named Cantharides that used to go and disincorporate himself of his windy numbers along the seashore.’</p>
<p>“ ‘No,’ says Andy, ‘I must have an audience. I feel like if I once turned loose people would begin to call Senator Beveridge the Grand Young Sphinx of the Wabash. I’ve got to get an audience together, Jeff, and get this oral distension assuaged or it may turn in on me and I’d go about feeling like a deckle-edge edition de luxe of Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth.’</p>
<p>“ ‘No,’ says Andy, ‘I must have an audience. I feel like if I once turned loose people would begin to call Senator Beveridge the Grand Young Sphinx of the Wabash. I’ve got to get an audience together, Jeff, and get this oral distension assuaged or it may turn in on me and I’d go about feeling like a deckle-edge edition de luxe of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> E. D. E. N. Southworth.’</p>
<p>“ ‘On what special subject of the theorems and topics does your desire for vocality seem to be connected with?’ I asks.</p>
<p>“ ‘I ain’t particular,’ says Andy. ‘I am equally good and varicose on all subjects. I can take up the matter of Russian immigration, or the poetry of John W. Keats, or the tariff, or Kabyle literature, or drainage, and make my audience weep, cry, sob and shed tears by turns.’</p>
<p>“ ‘Well, Andy,’ says I, ‘if you are bound to get rid of this accumulation of vernacular suppose you go out in town and work it on some indulgent citizen. Me and the boys will take care of the business. Everybody will be through dinner pretty soon, and salt pork and beans makes a man pretty thirsty. We ought to take in $1,500 more by midnight.’</p>

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<a href="text/imprint.xhtml">Imprint</a>
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<a href="text/chapter-1.xhtml"><span epub:type="z3998:roman">I</span>: CHAPTER_TITLE</a>
<a href="text/a-midsummer-masquerade.xhtml">A Midsummer Masquerade</a>
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<a href="text/a-tempered-wind.xhtml">A Tempered Wind</a>
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<a href="text/conscience-in-art.xhtml">Conscience in Art</a>
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<a href="text/hostages-to-momus.xhtml">Hostages to Momus</a>
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<a href="text/hostages-to-momus.xhtml#hostages-to-momus-1" epub:type="z3998:roman">I</a>
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<a href="text/hostages-to-momus.xhtml#hostages-to-momus-2" epub:type="z3998:roman">II</a>
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<a href="text/hostages-to-momus.xhtml#hostages-to-momus-3" epub:type="z3998:roman">III</a>
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<a href="text/hostages-to-momus.xhtml#hostages-to-momus-4" epub:type="z3998:roman">IV</a>
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<a href="text/innocents-of-broadway.xhtml">Innocents of Broadway</a>
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<a href="text/jeff-peters-as-a-personal-magnet.xhtml">Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet</a>
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<a href="text/modern-rural-sports.xhtml">Modern Rural Sports</a>
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<a href="text/shearing-the-wolf.xhtml">Shearing the Wolf</a>
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<a href="text/the-chair-of-philanthromathematics.xhtml">The Chair of Philanthromathematics</a>
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<a href="text/the-ethics-of-pig.xhtml">The Ethics of Pig</a>
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<a href="text/the-exact-science-of-matrimony.xhtml">The Exact Science of Matrimony</a>
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<a href="text/the-hand-that-riles-the-world.xhtml">The Hand That Riles the World</a>
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<a href="text/the-man-higher-up.xhtml">The Man Higher Up</a>
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<a href="text/the-octopus-marooned.xhtml">The Octopus Marooned</a>
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<a href="text/colophon.xhtml">Colophon</a>
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<a href="text/imprint.xhtml" epub:type="frontmatter imprint">Imprint</a>
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<a href="text/chapter-1.xhtml" epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">WORK_TITLE</a>
<a href="text/a-midsummer-masquerade.xhtml" epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">The Gentle Grafter</a>
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<a href="text/colophon.xhtml" epub:type="backmatter colophon">Colophon</a>